Bryn Schurman: Hi this is Bryn Schurman from the Eleventh Hour and I\u2019m here with “h” a.k.a. Steve Hogarth from Marillion. <\/p>\n
h: Hello there, mate. Where are you, Bryn?<\/p>\n
B: We\u2019re in the Florida Keys.<\/p>\n
h: The Florida Keys… lovely. You lucky bugger.<\/p>\n
B: (laughs)<\/p>\n
h: Well, I\u2019m in Stuttgart in the rain, next to a railway line<\/p>\n
B: Cheery.<\/p>\n
h: (laughs) Yeah, it\u2019s not beautiful<\/p>\n
B: First of all, would you like to take a few minutes to talk about the new album Somewhere Else?<\/p>\n
h: Sure, ask me a question.<\/p>\n
B: How many songs are on it? I\u2019m sorry, I haven\u2019t heard it yet.<\/p>\n
h: Ahhhhhhhhhhh… Well maybe you should listen to it and then call me back.<\/p>\n
B: (imitates hanging up) No, um…<\/p>\n
(awkard silence)<\/p>\n
B: Well, do you have any tour plans for North America?<\/p>\n
h: Not in the offering. No, nothing this year.<\/p>\n
(awkard silence)<\/p>\n
h: This is not going well, is it? (laughs)<\/p>\n
B: Ahhhhhhh… Ok.<\/p>\n
h: Can we talk when you\u2019ve heard the record? There\u2019s not a lot of point in talking about a record you haven\u2019t heard<\/p>\n
B: Well, I\u2019ve got a couple questions about the internet and stuff like that, if you don\u2019t mind, or if you want me to call back afterwards, I can.<\/p>\n
h: I don\u2019t mind. We can talk about internet if you want, but I\u2019d rather talk to you about the record we\u2019ve just made.<\/p>\n
B: What\u2019s your take on social networking sites like MySpace?<\/p>\n
h: I don\u2019t really have a take on it. I know it\u2019s everywhere now. My kids seem to live on it when they get in from school. I suppose anything that gets people together from all over the world is good and all, so anything that allows people to disseminate information about what excites them is a good thing. If kids are discovering new music, they can get together with their friends or they can spread the word around the world that they get excited by something. That\u2019s a good thing, because it actually makes everything more real and it takes away the power from the media to decide what is and isn\u2019t supposed to be a “good thing”.<\/p>\n
It makes everything more real. I think the record companies and the media at large have had too much control over what should and shouldn\u2019t be popular over the last thirty years or so, and I think the advent of MySpace in the advent of the Internet generally means that people can get excited about real things and they can spread their real excitement to other real people instead of there being that agenda of someone having paid someone some money, or spent an awful lot of money to put a video on MTV or something. So ultimately, it\u2019s gotta be a good thing for music.<\/p>\n
B: What\u2019s your take on file sharing: outright thievery from the artists, or a way to reach new fans?<\/p>\n
h: I\u2019m all for it, personally. I also think that it\u2019s an inevitable development, and I think that\u2019s where the future\u2019s going. I think it\u2019s going to become increasingly difficult to encode media in general, and to stop people from sharing it. I think ultimately, everybody\u2019s going to have to bow to it.<\/p>\n
From my point of view as an artist, it will mean that music will ultimately become free, I think, or very nearly free. I don\u2019t personally see that as a problem, because again, if you make a piece of music which, for whatever reason, really excites people and touches people, they are going to spread that word themselves. If they can attach your album to an e-mail and send it to all their friends, then the Internet represents a medium for good things to spread like wildfire, whilst at the same time leaving bad things or things that aren\u2019t very good dead in the water, which I think has got to be good for music.<\/p>\n
Artists like myself will always be able to make a living, providing they\u2019re making good and interesting work and there are a sufficient number of people excited by it, because if the music spreads across the world like wildfire, then of course the tours will become bigger. The gigs we play will become bigger. People will be happy to see us play. Also, and more importantly, if you end up with a fan base that believes in you personally as an artist, and in the art that you create, the music you create, or whatever, then you can always go to the fans that you have and ask them to buy your next record before you even record it.<\/p>\n
I can go to the 60,000 people we have in our database at the moment, and I can send them an e-mail and say “OK, we\u2019ve just written a great album and we are going to go and record it once we have a million dollars in the bank, so send us something.” If you\u2019re rich send us a hundred dollars if you want to see this album exist. If you can\u2019t afford it, if you\u2019re a college student, you\u2019ve got nothing, don\u2019t send us anything, but listen up and check out our website. When we\u2019ve got a million dollars, we\u2019ll start recording and not until. Once we recorded and mixed the album, we\u2019ll upload it to the Internet, and it\u2019s free for everyone, forever.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no reason why an artist can\u2019t do that. It just means that they have to get into the mindset of being paid for music that they haven\u2019t made yet instead of the music that they\u2019ve made in the past, in the old days. What you\u2019ve got to remember is that the major record labels always took most of the money and gave some tiny fraction of the selling price of each album to their artists.<\/p>\n
So, this whole thing about artists losing out to the Internet, in my opinion, is rubbish. It\u2019s the music business which is losing out.<\/p>\n
B: How did you come to the idea of the Front Row Club?<\/p>\n
h: Well, really that\u2019s just a consequence of the passion of our own fan base and the fans coming to us. They were bootlegging us very heavily. They turn up with little cassette machines in their pockets during the shows – they still do; I still see people holding up machines in the audience now – and we thought, instead of these awful, scratchy, horrible recordings that people are making of us by holding a couple of little mics in the air or having a cassette machine in their pocket, why don\u2019t we offer the really hard-core fans just the stereo mix out of the mixing desk – you know, that\u2019s going to the PA each night – and make that available to the people that really want it. We are talking about the real real hard-core, because at least it will sound great, and if they want some sort of record of some of the shows that they\u2019ve attended, why not record those and make them available?<\/p>\n
It was an idea that Robert Fripp from King Crimson first had, where he would even invite members of the audience to send their bootlegs to him. He would clean them up a little bit, sonically, and make them available and sell them. So he was effectively putting himself in a position that he had a product he could sell that he didn\u2019t even record, which is always quite good.<\/p>\n
So the Front Row Club kind of developed from that, where we thought: “Well, if we ask people just to subscribe annually to the Front Row Club, that gives them a certain amount of credits, and they can choose which live shows they want to have.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bryn Schurman: Hi this is Bryn Schurman from the Eleventh Hour and I\u2019m here with “h” a.k.a. Steve Hogarth from Marillion. h: Hello there, mate. Where are you, Bryn? B: We\u2019re in the Florida Keys. h: The Florida Keys… lovely. You lucky bugger. B: (laughs) h: Well, I\u2019m in Stuttgart in the rain, next to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":21,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-20","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brynschurman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brynschurman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brynschurman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brynschurman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brynschurman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/brynschurman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brynschurman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brynschurman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}