Drowned in Sound is 25 today: Big lessons from the past and a new era unfurls

0:09How should we start this podcast? I'd like to introduce Emma Wilkes, Drowning Sounds' newest staff writer, music journalist from all over the place whose writing I like so much and was very glad when she agreed to start writing for us. um you've probably heard emma on our dispatch from glastonbury and from redding and today she's actually at home not at a gig how you doing today emma for a change i am at home not at a gig not on a field sat at my sat on my kitchen table but uh anyway thank you thank you again for having me i'm doing i'm doing pretty well thanks how are you on this uh slightly gray monday afternoon well it's monday now when people hear this it'll be thursday and drannan sounds will have turned 25 which is kind of what this episode is going to be about and it's gonna be a bit different to normal I thought I've been asking people the same questions and I thought it'd be good to talk through some of the questions I've been asking people which is to say I don't actually know how I am I realized the other day that one of the questions I find hardest to answer is how are you?

1:20Which I think dovetails with my Neuro Spicy brain of how do I feel? Do I feel dehydrated? That's not the question you asked me. Do I feel distracted? Do I feel overwhelmed by the state of the world? Do I feel the thing that I was just watching? And it's like the, my passion and enthusiasm for music, I think also comes from that, which is probably why Drowning Sound started and how it grew to be the thing that it was. So it's only in recent years I've discovered why my brain brains the way it does. There's probably a few things for us to cover in this episode but I thought given that the Instagram post has gone crazy and given that you've been trying to do it for a while, before we get into what the new mission statement's about and before we you quiz me on some of the questions I've been quizzing other people with and I quiz you back, what happened last week when you met jeremy corbyn that's such a weird sentence that's allowed to to hear because you know i'm here i'm here usually asking bands what we can expect from the next album and then suddenly here i was interviewing the former leader of the opposition which i've been actually trying to make happen for i think i was discussing this with um with that Sam from the Peace and Justice Project who put all this together.

2:44I was discussing with him and we realised that it must have been about two years ever since he started the Music for the Many campaign that we've been trying to do this because it just fascinated me in that he went from being the leader of the opposition to championing the arts, championing grassroots music venues at a time where it didn't really feel like there were many sort of big parliamentary voices speaking out about that. And I was like, I have to go and see what this is about and why this matters to him in conjunction with their new festival, Bulletproof, which is going to be taking place in East London next June as like a little platform for artists to perform and use their platforms and speak out without any sort of corporate interest trying to silence them.

3:34uh so i was at the grassroots for gaza fundraising gig which took place at the shacklewell arms on the 22nd of september and for some reason there i there i was sat with sat with the jeremy corbin in the green room uh talking about grassroots music and it sort of clicked to me that actually of course it matters to him because it intersects with so many other things that he talks about whether that's to do with class whether that's to do with equal opportunity whether that's to do with expanding coverage of the arts for in schools um getting uh pupils to have equal opportunities wherever they come from and you know that was it was a pretty surreal moment given that i'm used to interviewing bands and here i am with a politician but we had a really we uh obviously we did we did we did have a good chat i did get some interesting things from him and what what uh was absolutely beyond my expectations was just how much traction it would end up having on social media app as it stands we've had over 7 000 likes we were literally just been in in our group chat watching the numbers go up and up and up thinking are we going to get to 1 000 it'd be really really good if it gets we get to 1 000 and now we're at 7 000 yeah because we've got a bit of a neglected instagram account which we over the last few months have been giving a bit more love and uh as anyone any musician knows it's quite hard even if you've got lots of followers like we've got 10 000 on there just getting more than one percent of them to engage in something and uh seeing that post spread and people engage with it and people kept sharing there's a one frame on it that's been shared to i think four or five hundred people's stories um with him talking about music arts and culture um all needs or not need not be just the preserve of the rich and the wealthy in the middle classes and the music is for everyone which goes very much hand in glove with his music for the masses name for what they've been working on and this new project doesn't it yeah they've been putting on some absolutely brilliant gigs they've put on stuff with lambrini girls and anola gay i think that was one of the events they put on i think snakes might have been involved with something that he and he did an event with zand at the lead mill who was the first artist they ever wrote an artist bio for um and i was looking at thinking guys they've got good they've got good taste they've got some good stuff going on so that was always obviously something that uh spoke to me in quite a big way I guess the thing that's strange for you and for me as well like Jeremy was not just leader of the opposition he was leader of the Labour Party he's been this figure of hope in politics people on the left for quite some time and I guess since Tony Benn has kind of stepped into this rare space of being someone that goes to speak at Glastonbury to tens of thousands of people and not all politicians are capable of doing that and I guess being younger like Jeremy Corbyn probably would have been maybe one of the first political leaders you would have seen and like when being conscious of what Westminster politics would that be fair or not?

6:48I think I was conscious of politics a little bit before that I think my first going way way back I think my first proper memories of politics vaguely was the 2010 general election. And I heard people talking about the Conservative Party. I didn't know anything about them. I knew who the Prime Minister was, but I didn't know anything about what the parties represented. I think the properly galvanising moment for me beyond the 2015 election was Brexit, obviously, because that was happening when I was in school. um i might make you feel quite old here as as some other listeners here but i was not old enough to vote for brexit by a little bit of a margin well you you are almost the same age as drowning sound which i'm drowning sound years old yeah and which i think dovetails neatly i didn't mean to segue like that but into like our new mission and like where we're headed um by the time this comes out we would have published the new mission statement which thank you to the bunch of people which fed back on the initial draft it was very helpful um but it's not just a set of values or a new strapline or anything like that i think it's been a while coming to really pull together a lot more of who i am and what my mission is and like what i think dronin sound can be and what it can become and it's not just writing three out of ten reviews of bad records and similarly it's not just endlessly recommending music because as great as that is most artists have got far more to say as we've seen this summer people really want to speak up for human rights issues they care about they want to call out genocides they want to speak up against the climate crisis they want to like really defend grassroots venues and change the culture we live in and I think it's preemptive but perfectly so that Jeremy Corbyn was interviewed last week because the way that music and politics overlaps and fits together and is part of the same conversations has that was how I got into music and I think that's how drowning sounds place in music needs to kind of be and continue and there's this one line in our mission statement about music is upstream from politics because there's this awful website in America called Breitbart started a while ago but most people would probably recognize Steve Bannon the kind of henchman in the background of Donald Trump for a while and their slogan was politics is upstream no politics is downstream from culture no culture i've got it the wrong way around i'm gonna have to like fact check myself should have had that in basically i've done the inverse with drowning sound and part of the reason why the culture wars have been such a big thing is that the conservative right and the far right in america and around the world so the heritage foundation who wrote project 2025 and lots of like lee anderson from the reform party all these people have figured out that you can pick on culture and things like sam smith being eligible for the brit awards because they didn't have gendered categories because sam's non-binary like became this big uproar from your kind of reform mps that men are men and women are women and all that nonsense and like the the kind of turfy crew also would that could then get involved get involved about it and i think that music didn't know how to respond and that to me was quite a big wake-up call um the music can speak up and speak loudly but it's rare that we really really see music being empowered and it not just being oh there's a version of something a bit like live eight let's play a concert and have some people speak it and i feel like year round that those things should happen and i got into music journalism through reading hunter s thompson bits that were published in rolling stone so it's like the the clues already already always been there the call's always been coming from inside the house i just haven't been listening to it and i think that your interview is the perfect example of things that we can do jot dots that we can join conversations that we can be involved in and bring music into or bring music closer to a lot of these bigger conversations so did that make sense yes no that absolutely makes sense and i think firstly it's important on one hand to actually ask these questions of politicians um because obviously you know that's going to be that is going to be an issue that impacts their constituencies and also as as i said earlier it does intersect with a variety of other things you know culture is so reflective of the mood of the nation uh in so many different ways and it's just becoming increasingly impossible to completely divorce music from politics especially in times like these especially when things feel so fraught when people have turned to music for an answer to find community to find catharsis at the same time i think the way that you sort of described your story there was actually very interesting to me because i think for me it was the other way around and i think for a lot of other people it can be the other way around the music being your gateway into politics and discovering the existence of various issues and what people might be able to do about them I think the example that I always sort of refer back to a system of a down because I think it's only because I know that band and only because I have contacts in that of that band but I know vaguely like anything about the Armenian genocide at all and I think that that might even be the moment for like somebody coming up in politics now like teenagers maybe now discovering hardcore or something like that may well hear about Palestine and genocide and the genocide and everything like that through music I wonder if that might have happened to me if I've been born like five ten years later um even as somebody who didn't kind of wishes I had a better understanding of everything like that um when I was younger because I didn't really hear much about I think I didn't really hear much about the entire scenario until I went to university and there was I think there was an occupation in the student union building for something related to it but the details are still like a little bit fuzzy but nonetheless as I approach my the the end of my fifth year in journalism my uh so-called journalversary which is the uh anniversary my first published piece is next week and one of the things that I do actually sort of wish is that I'd actually taken in more relating to news and relating to politics when I was starting because having that in the background, you can't necessarily separate them.

14:11When you're writing about music, you're not necessarily just writing about music because you can be touching on so many other different things, whether that's topical related to the news, related to wider social issues in the background, especially when it comes into the things that bands are talking about and the things that bands are speaking up for. So absolutely music being upstream of politics is such an important thing to be keeping in mind. And I think it can I think it can actually be it should they shouldn't be separate because actually there can be a very sort of a rich symbiotic relationship.

14:43And we're not at a time where we can afford really to be saying that music should stay out of politics. And that is a point of view that has actually never made sense to me either. but also music needs politics like some of the bits that you've shared in the newsletter recently it's like grassroots venues and the the fan-led review of live music which we're hopefully gonna have a role in over the next few months the music fans voice survey which i was part of pushing out into the world which 8 000 music fans took 15 minutes or more to fill in it was a hefty thing but it's provided people with an ability to speak to government and advocate for music and so much of the out of control corporate world like live nation and ticket master like that needs legislation we do need a ticket regulator like the outrage people felt seeing their the demand for oasis tickets do the like uber price hike meaning that the dynamic pricing came in on a ticket that yes of course there was demand the band haven't played for years why are you suddenly trying to charge me three times as much for a ticket that I've sat in a queue for that I did not expect to pay three times the amount for that's just corporate greed and I think that we're seeing private equity buy up festivals and not because they want to make they want to change culture and they just want to make profit from it and we see we're going to see like a lot more artists halfway down the bill not even making enough to cover their costs to play at the event whilst big offshore investment firms make bigger profits and with gender inequality which we talked about on the podcast last week it's like these are issues which people need to talk about and issues that need societal change not just change in the music industry and the idea that music can help and change itself in the face of some of the biggest like investment banks and corporations in the world like we're up against spotify and meta and elon musk buying twitter and tiktok's about to be taken over by um the richest man on earth whose name the guy from oracle gary is it ellison i want to say gary that's not his first name this is called all rich people gary that maybe that'll make it easier first there was karen's then there was gary's you never know maybe maybe that'll catch on yeah um which i guess is all to say that there's a lot that music journalism as a bridge to audiences between the artist and the audience and between the audience and creating wider movements i'm really hoping that we can be a key component in and some of that is going to be doing resources some of that is going to be creating space for artists to speak some of that's going to be bringing people together some of that's going to be the literal campaigning so if you haven't read it yet it will be up on drowning sound by the time this podcast goes out so have a little read so Emma do you want to start asking me the annoying questions i've been asking the guests on this podcast i think while we're on this subject i think it makes sense for us to revisit a question from season two of the podcast which is how in this day and age do we define journalism so there's been so many amazing answers from guests on the podcast about this like i think yancey quoted the it's the first line of history or the first first draft of history sorry i should get those quotes right if i'm going to pull them out my head and for me i think i struggled for a while to realize i was a journalist and not i used to just always talk about myself as a music blogger or a music critic thinking journalism's a serious thing that requires research and facts and stats and qualifications and knowing what you're doing and yes I do know what I'm doing now I think um and I think that there's there's various different elements that make up journalism and I think with music journalism it's difficult because reporting on new releases or interviewing an artist is different to reporting from a war zone or I spoke to Julia McFarlane in an episode kind of just like what do you do when you go to Lebanon or Gaza or she was doing reporting for the BBC and like that to me is journalism and it's something that I deeply respect and revere and I've grown up obsessed with magazines like I've bought more magazines in my life than records easily like the I mean partly that's because I don't own that many.

19:54I literally can see a pile of magazines I've got here to take to a meeting in a few weeks. And the idea that journalism is just people regurgitating stories from elsewhere really distressed me and upset me. And at one point, I just stopped drowning sound doing news. I was like, we're just copying stories from elsewhere. We're not doing original reporting. Like all we're doing is copying and pasting the Glastonbury lineup and saying Glastonbury's lineup revealed it's like yes it is reporting but it's not original it wasn't were we adding to it um I remember in the early days people criticized Drowning Sound because our news had opinion in it and jokes and silliness and the we went beyond just puns in the headline um it would be like I don't know Deftones announced new album and then like 10 guesses as to what the album's going to sound like.

20:52I mean, I fell out with one of the worst musicians, Ryan Adams, when I did a news story about his book. And I made a joke saying, I wonder if it's up there with Bukowski. Like it wasn't really a joke, but he took it as me calling him an alcoholic and he'd been sober and he just like wrote this rant about me on the internet, which I think that was the first day after I'd made 21 people redundant and started running the website on my own and uh got into a beef with uh ryan adams which was quite funny in about 2008 or 9 or so just after we'd launched the quietest and um the backing that we had kind of fell away so i guess in answer to your question which is also my question which is a meta way of answering a question very meta i think journalism is a way of making sense of the world with facts and bringing them to an audience in a way that translates complex topics in a way that we can all understand and puts the context around them in order to engage people in a topic and I think it's got various shifts and uses and ways in which it ways in which journalism is journalism in ways that it's not and I think that there are some incredible journalists who are also content creators there were also some content creators who think they're journalists and are definitely not um there were also some campaigners who are also journalists and there were also some journalists who are more like campaigners for an ideology so i think that in the blurring i think we need some clarity and that's what journalism does it brings clarity there's there's a lot of different intersections here especially when i was sort of trying to find my way in journalism myself and i I was looking at all these different journalism resources and it felt like I was at a weird intersection as a member of the music industry and a journalist.

22:50Sometimes I felt like more pushed into like a music industry sort of position and a journalism position, like looking for resources and looking for pitch call-outs that didn't necessarily seem to be as much for music journalists. And that was quite like a funny position to be in. And it's a weird time for me to have entered this as well, especially since I entered this field during the pandemic because I was at university my first year of university was cut short rather and I just needed something to do because I would have gone I would have become probably angrier and bitter anyway even though obviously I was 19 at the time and it would be quite hard for uh for you'd like to think it'd be quite hard for a 19 year old to be bitter as such but I was very bitter by the time I was 19 don't worry I was thinking maybe maybe i was i went through cynical phases but anyway can i can i throw the question back to you what will be your short answer i was about to go there but yeah no you throw it back at me if you like what is journalism what is journalism i think i boiled it down to a couple of things and i think they relate to each other i think the first of those is asking questions i think journalism is fundamentally about questions whether you're answering what somebody wants to know or whether you're in conjunction with that.

24:12It's about asking questions of bigger things. Sometimes it's asking questions of artists, phenomena, systems, and then trying to make sense of the answers. But at the same time, when doing that, it's also about telling stories because that is how we function as human beings. It's like a few years ago, I read the Will Storpe book, The Science of Storytelling, and he explains in incredible detail just how how we basically almost live through story we construct so much of what we know we construct ourselves through story we construct what we know about life through story and journalism obviously plays a huge part in that and I suppose you end up writing a different sort of story in a way with journalism as well you're kind of creating in a narrative I suppose it's like that quote about the first being the first draft of history and that really spoke to me because sometimes I do feel in my job like I'm chronicling things in a way and you know the things that are written now are going to be looked back on and you can see what is that and you can make sense of what was happening in music and in politics and in the world at a particular period of time and you can sort of start to look at it with hindsight and group it and sort of see what can we call this movement yeah because like in a weird way like indie sleaze has had a reverse history written over it and it's like something i'm probably gonna do some coverage on in at some point and like often find it interesting when there's like hairstyles and fashion styles which actually are down to the economics of the moment or like i'm sure that the mullet has become big because it was one of the only haircuts people could cut themselves during lockdown and like Like when you actually like look at the aesthetics and then the sonics and the kind of everything else that goes around it.

26:02Like it's interesting. I don't I meant to use the word accountability, but I don't know whether it's a journalist job to hold people accountable. But I think it is their job to surface truths that power doesn't want surfaced. And I think that the being a journalist isn't being the friend in the conduit all the time. And I think with music journalism, PR people especially found it very odd when we were trying to hold people accountable or try to ask tough questions. Like, I think it was Raz who interviewed, I think it was Papa Roach. And they have a song about self-harm and they kicked us out of the interview because we wanted to ask a question about it.

26:49it was Casey Chaos from what band was he in I want to say I want to say Coal Chamber but it wasn't it was one of those other the um there was like all these we got kicked out of some interviews for asking people questions they didn't want to answer and like like the PR people were really annoyed at us because and it was like we're a bunch of music fans but we want to we want to ask those tough questions like there's a whole bunch of people I'd want to interview but I probably couldn't ask them about the things I want to talk to them about um like isn't it dave groell makes you sign an nda before doing an interview sorry if you have signed it i'm not asking you the question um but because you can't the first rule of an nda is you can't talk about an nda but i think like he doesn't talk about nirvana and he doesn't talk about certain other things and it's like it's odd that music journalism is kind of in that place and we're now seeing politicians and being interviewed by influencers and there was a video essay i think i shared with you at the weekend which i'm not expecting you to have watched checks it was about 40 minutes long but it was very much about how um celebrity reporting is now celebrities not being held accountable it's often them being interviewed by their co-star or them doing like the hot ones and not actually being asked questions and being framed as a human being because the levity and the like the missed follow-up questions on some of the big biggest podcasts in the world when someone says something that's quite revelatory and someone's like you've just completely missed a huge story because you've not thought about asking the follow-up so i think i'm very much in the same boat as you is that asking questions and being curious um but not purient and i think a lot of people think journalism is purience because of the sun and the kind of other rags in this country that think it's about raking the things up about people that they don't want.

28:52Hi there, it's Emma here. I'm gatecrashing the podcast to quickly tell you about the Drowned in Sound newsletter. Every Wednesday, I invite myself into your inbox, with permission, of course, to share opinion writing and resources, tell you about cool things that you should be involved in within the world of music, activism, etc. I also bring track of the week and a little bit of hopeful news for you because we all know that the news cycle can be grim at the best of times. Drowned in Sound newsletter every Wednesday in your inbox. Sign up now. Let's go for the slight sort of change maker angle when it comes to the$450 million that Spotify gave Joe Rogan, what would you do with that money?

29:41I've liked asking this question because it takes some of the guests by surprise because we're talking about all the things they're trying to address and trying to fix. And I think the first time I asked it, it just came off the top of my head and I was like, right, I'm keeping that. That's a great question because it got a really good answer. I think that was in the first episode of season three, which was earlier this year with Matt from Youth Music. I was just listening to him talk, thinking about all the projects they were trying to make happen, all the studio projects, all of the pathways for working class people to get into music.

30:15And then just thinking, wow, Spotify gave all that money to Joe Rogan instead. And what did Joe Rogan do with it? Turned out climate deniers, had Donald Trump on the week before the US election. It's like, I don't think there's many things you could say that that podcast is done that's good for the world i mean sure it is people must enjoy it and they must get something from it and if people are listening to that podcast instead of like going up and going out and being people up maybe it's a good thing but the uh i'm like whereabouts is the line of libel there like it's just my opinion it's my review of the podcast um not necessarily of its listeners um yeah so how would i spend it i think that music's biggest challenge right now is connecting people who love music with artists it's never been easier to do it but it's never been harder and the depth of connection that people have and the like if you're trying to promote a gig in Liverpool tomorrow night and you've still got 100 tickets left you might try and go to the Liverpool Echo but does that reach music fans in Liverpool?

31:35Maybe not. You would maybe try and go to the host of BBC Introducing in Liverpool because it's one of the only local radio music shows. Would that reach the average, I don't know, person that owns to beat a band record and a deftones t-shirt and loves phoebe bridges um and you want them to come to your show because that's kind of music you make somewhere in between all that you wouldn't be able to do it and like so how do you sell the last hundred tickets which is the difference between the promoter losing money the artist gets paid more on a show selling out more people there means more merch sold means more drinks sold which means a healthier eco like profitable and kind of like no one losing money because if a promoter loses money on 10 shows there probably can't be a promoter anymore which means next time you go to liverpool you probably have to go with one of the big major gig promoters or a venue that's much smaller and it's not down to the fact that you don't have an audience there so i think that if i had that money and if i had taylor swift's money and if I had like the money that Daniel Ek has just spent on AI war drones I would be spending it on building a new platform that connects music fans and audiences not just super fan relationships not just director fan sales not just flogging NFTs which seems to be where hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent over the last decade like not building something with algorithms building something so human beings can connect.

33:12If I love something and I'm passionate about it and you trust my music taste, it should be easy for me to go, there is this incredible artist, like Eka Vandal is playing in your town, please go see her. She was incredible at Reading. Like I should be able to say mannequin pussies t-shirt I'm wearing today, like they are touring near you, you should go see them. Or when you're about to queue up music for an hour you should be able to click in and go okay there's these 10 people I trust what are they all listening to at the moment make me a playlist of stuff they're all recommending and I think that similarly you should then be able to click right I want to watch something on Netflix tonight what are the 50 people I follow online and trust recommending on Netflix be able to click a button and kind of go here's just a feed of that not I need to endlessly scroll through stupid memes and disinformation and misinformation and the ability for us to connect and communicate as human beings has never been easier and it's never been harder and I think there are huge problems for grassroots music in the infrastructure we've lost and much of that infrastructure was media and I think that out of my mission my drowning sounds to try and become that that meeting point of multiple fans with multiple tastes to trust a few recommendations a week and find some new things to love and things like the neptune prize like the idea of that is very much here's just like 15 records one of them you might like if you've heard three of them maybe you'll trust the other recommendations and i'm not doing the give a shorter answer to the next question am i but i think i think that there's a lot there's a big gap in the conversation about the crisis in grassroots music i guess is what i want to say and that is that running a grassroots media organization being a content creator being a podcaster there is not funding out there and so it makes it harder to grow an audience for what i'm doing but it also makes it harder to spend the time researching new bands to check out to invest in teams of people to have their eyes and ears out for really exceptional stuff and that at the same time is the exact place where the artists I've managed when they've been on tour I would want to be able to go look we've got a tour coming up can we do something with you can you mention on the end of the podcast that we've got tour dates and you would hope through that social media posts all the other things they would connect to an audience and we're not seeing there's not like an arts council grant i don't think i can get for media there's not the equivalent of music venues trust for media organizations and there definitely feels like a big gap in understanding the audiences and reaching people it should not just be grants being spent on youtube adverts and instagram adverts because that money is not flowing back into music it's not funding the journalists of the future who might be the managers of the future or the content video documentary makers it's not funding anything that builds infrastructure, resource, audiences, training, all the things that we need.

36:49So I guess my long answer and the short version of it is we need to be funding media. And social media and media to me are the same thing. And I think that's why the community has always felt as much part of and sound as the editorial and the community is often fed into the editorial and in some ways change the ideals and the kind of who we are as an organization I think over the last few years has definitely come from some of the most moving and powerful mental health conversations I've been involved in or seen really thoughtful conversations around complex topics with politics and like those are people who found us because they wanted to chat about a new reuben record or they wanted to um discuss discovering phoebe bridges or whatever reason they started posting on the forums top five dubstep songs was one big reason why a lot of people joined the forums because it was the top result for dubstep on the internet at one point um anyway that was a very long answer to your question emma which is also my question which i'm keeping the meta circle going oh do you do you have a plan of how you would spend it or should should i not throw you on the spot like that oh no i've got a plan um sorted already i did make some notes i was very organized for a change and uh i think there is a little bit of overlap with what um that you what you have just talked about and uh i think it's really important to start to understand music media as a form of infrastructure as part of a wider ecosystem and that very much spoke to me as well because I've had so many conversations with people who work in music media about their frustrations related to budget constraints and the way that publications get run on a shoestring when actually that wasn't always the case and actually we do deserve to have publications whether they are whether they are heritage titles or newer organizations everybody actually deserves to have that level of budget especially when it gets to the point where more people can be paid for doing this because there's so much out there this is like it's almost like the one career that people can do for no money and then people will do not strictly as a is as a in a sort of a weird intersection of both hobby and work but people also very much deserve to be remunerated for it but i think that's a point that you've already sort of touched on and i had sort of two other ideas um i don't know how far 450 million dollars goes so i'm just going to pretend that it's an infinite amount of money um and obviously first thing i think i would do would involve grassroots music venues you can you can take you can use that money to take a bunch of grassroots music venues into community ownership which was something another the music venue trust has talked a lot about when it comes to safeguarding venues future when it comes to length of time they have on their lease i mean they can't be evicted by a predatory landlord who might want to kick them out so they can put shops in there or demolish the building more often than not to build luxury flats that nobody can afford um and so that's something that is something that i would definitely do the other idea that i had related more to artists and the challenges that artists go through and i think i've if i'm not mistaken maybe chapel ron has already talked about this uh in the context of providing through especially potentially through labels or through other organizations increasing mental health support for artists at any stage of their career whether they've blown up on tiktok and they don't know how to digest the success or they are going through some other meteoric rise or they're being worn down and burned out by a really sort of intensive touring cycle and within that as well I think one very very big area that would need dressing I think that should definitely be a lot of resources for is addiction support because we all as we all know addiction has been obviously renowned in the music industry widespread endemic even and I think that also both those things can also relate to people sometimes not just in the music industry itself but before they come into it I know plenty of stories for people who have ended up struggling with their mental health even before blowing up in a big way in the music industry or people who were addicts before they came into the music industry and often there can be a certain type of person that gets into music and connects very strongly with music who might be potentially more vulnerable anyway so i think there's quite a lot that's going that's going on there and there was then there was something universal did a few years ago where they tried to build in that infrastructure for artists and like i know there's the organization Music Minds Matter, which is sort of doing that.

41:38And like, you see, it feels like those are the things where profits from streaming, streaming in particular, working on a campaign is so stressful. You're like the playbook that might have worked on a campaign six months ago doesn't work anymore. So you have to change how you do stuff. You're reliant on the randomness of the editorial team at Spotify putting you on playlists. Like no one really knows which playlist to pitch for at Apple. and I'm sure there are people that really know and like you can but there's no like pitching tool and like all these different things where the stress of putting a release out of going and doing loads of in stores radio bits like do you know what sort of audience the thing you've got like is it was it worth the two hours three hours of your time to go do it like it's so stressful working on a record campaign and often it's a two-week window and some people are trying to get in the top 40 so they're trying to like drive sales and like it's just so stressful and so much of like an artist maybe doesn't put a record out for four or five years and everything's changed like some people with big audiences on twitter that that's no longer a platform that they can reach anybody on like there's so like it is so stressful and i love well i don't love the fact I admire how eloquently people like self-esteem have talked up for the kind of mental health problems that come from being an artist and being present online and kind of speaking up about your music I think that's something that I think we should think about how we can do more Australian Sounds but also like basic Noro Do Virgin like briefings before you do an interview like this is what we're going to do this is what you can expect like do you need anything before we begin like the and even if someone doesn't isn't neurodivergent or doesn't know that they are sometimes these things can make a world of difference i've definitely felt it easier to do interviews when people have given me this these are three of the things i'd like you to think about before we talk or this is a little bit about who my audience are so you know who you're speaking to and not just speaking to the host and um yeah all of like for autistic people sending them a picture of the door and the entrance like so that when they arrive they know where they're going like when you when you come in we're on the third floor not not even sharing some people don't even share the address and they expect you to google it and yeah go to the right office and oh gosh yes no that's as relatable as somebody with adhd who stays in uh who stays in various hotels and airbnbs trying to find it and trying to get the right door and actually be able to get the door open and stuff like that but uh just to jump in with what you said as well and to briefly uh briefly rewind is that the way that you're talking about um working on a record campaign it made me think as well of a lot of people behind the scenes who are also going through that stress without being like product product product managers at label or publicists especially I know that lots of publicists have said they sometimes feel like they've what they do is they'll do a lot of work and then not really get a lot of thanks for it and the thing that's kind of one of the very illuminating things for me when I come into the music industry is seeing the level of how hard people work obviously on things they really really care about but also just how hard they have to work and the level of exertion they sort of have to put themselves through to be able to achieve a certain objective we're all grinding hard especially on a global campaign when you've got people wanting to check in from the la office at like 10 a.m la time which is like nine or ten o 'clock off top of my head depending on summertime um in the uk and it's like that's that's a big ask for someone who's maybe went to a breakfast meeting to still be online at kind of 11 o 'clock at night talking to a different team about the same project or like saturday mornings when like all these bot accounts can upload songs to your profile and like having to like chase someone down to like and also the midweeks coming out on a saturday afternoon i think now like because of the new music friday like a lot of people find out whereabouts they are in the chart on a saturday morning so they then end up like booking more adverts because the chart position is doing well or not doing well or like there's so much like phone calls at 10 o 'clock at night about stuff and like I've definitely experienced the bizarreness of being I got chased on New Year's Day at 8 a.m when I worked somewhere and I was like what about something that I scheduled up just hadn't published quite I think it was publishing at like 8 30 in the morning they're like there's nothing out about this thing and i'm like it's it's 8 a.m on new year's day like i don't think i'd even been to bed at that point in time um so yeah there's definitely stress levels in the music industry that are probably a bit off the charts right i'm aware about we're about 50 minutes in how many more questions have we got should we do them quick um yes i think there's only i think there's only two more really um um so this i said should i said should we do them quick when it's actually been me doing all the rambling so yeah so first one first one then we've only got two more left um an album from the last 25 years that more people should hear is dot dot dot i'm gonna save this one and i'm gonna do it as a video on instagram so people should follow us on instagram to find out what my little buried treasure is because i have 10 in my head right now and uh i know it's a hot it's hard isn't it because you have 25 years and hundreds probably thousands of albums being released in that time i was there trying to think of my own answer to this question there was one that i did sort of had it have in my head but there were others as well and i was like oh there's so many contenders for this which which direction do i go in you could go with something really new something really old yeah it's a very good i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna save it i think you should too and we should publish them on instagram okay and and probably in the newsletter too if people haven't signed up and they're listening that's at drowningsound.org um that's our little plug for the newsletter which you can also go read emma's great interview jeremy corbyn from last week too um yeah so last question so let's talk about your thoughts fears hopes predictions general wanderings anything under that banner of what music is going to be like in 2050 so the answers to this question is not meant to be like a rorschach test but i noticed when i phrased the question differently lots of people went towards the negative rather than the positive um and i started like you just did then i think when i sent the question over to you i think i put the like hopes and fears element in not to reference keen but um i think that for me what to envisage music being like in 2050 i fear that we will have

49:19a labor crisis so bad that making music is not something that people can do i think that we'll have entire economies bankrupt by the climate crisis i think that we all had so much consolidation of corporate power that a lot of people are just on like global strike for decades um and not maybe decades because i don't think that would work but i think that music will be a lot less important to people if we carry on on the path we're on. Asif Kapadia's 2073 really documents kind of like where we could end up and I think that I fear that music would just be a luxury of the super rich and the rest of us might scrabble around and maybe get 10 minutes of listening to some old thing.

50:15I hope the music will be almost as important as food and water, that people would have understood the therapeutic value of music, the communal value of music, that people that take over the new overlords of power who hopefully understand the value of music and culture really put it up there with medicine and that we tell people you can work a four-day work week um and you could spend a day of that making culture or visiting culture or going to a gig like if you want to go to a show on a wednesday night you can take thursday morning off um and that's good because you've gone out and you've contributed to the economy but also you've contributed to the betterment of your own mental health um i hope that the value of music is understood and the artists making work are really connected to their audiences and remunerated but i actually think that if you are an oligarch you should pay more and if you're not you should pay less and we should have wage related tickets and streaming and the corporations could step in and cover the costs for some people if i buy a mobile phone it should come with music like nokia used to do like why should i spend all that money on a device and then have to pay for the music like apple should be paying because i'm going to use the device to consume music same with my internet connection same with my laptop like all of these things should be contributing to music but there is a lot i agree with there and briefly had the fear of god struck into me there i mean as if i don't have it already but yes that's something that very much spoke to me was the concern about music coming that would preserve the super rich would be a fairly unpleasant full circle moment given that is how it used to be as uh as jeremy corwin was talking to me about in relation to classical music but that would put us in the same position that we would that we would be in after like 200 years which is not a cycle that I hope we end up in and there is obviously so much that remains unknown we don't know what that music is going to sound we don't know what people are going to be singing about because you know 25 years of history has not yet unfolded and that will inevitably shape how music is going to sound um but and the other thing that sort of struck me as well is that you maybe don't know how music is going to sound in the 2050s because if obviously we've been learning that a lot of what shapes music is the 20-year cycle things from the 2000s circling around now in the 90s it was the 70s in the 80s it was the 60s etc etc um so we'll have to wait to see what music gets made in the 2030s to see what music sounds like in 2050 yeah if you want if you want if you want to be rich in 2050 then you need to be the coolest thing there was in 2030 or maybe 20 or maybe or maybe 2025 or maybe maybe it'd be the coolest thing in the 2010s because i mean i was literally thinking about this the other day how much culture how vibrant culture wasn't how much was happening in the year 2013 i'm pretty sure there was some there might be a bbc sounds documentary about it that I swore I heard an advert for.

53:41And that was a really fascinating thing to me because there was a lot of comebacks. There was a lot of huge cultural moments. There was a lot of talk at that period of time. So, you know, those things might circle back around again. Maybe in 40 years, maybe 40 years on, people will be going nuts over random access memories like Daft Punk, for example. Huge in 2013, huge in 2053. We'll have to wait and see. And I think that's the thing. Like, we don't know how people will be consuming music because if you've got smart glasses, you won't necessarily like and I think we'll have those and they'll be they'll be gone by 2050 like I don't think spatial listening is going to give people the listening experience they want but I think the idea that music is a soundtrack to things and a skate pod like I think could be really interesting I also think that we still haven't found a better way of enjoying music than going to a small room and hear people playing a very loud guitar and I don't think we'll ever lose that and I think that that's like one of the topics we're going to cover in the next few weeks and the there's something about music's hour to touch our emotions and like to like the way in which I love so much ambient music because it's so beautiful but at the same time it's like a a mist of calm descending like I wonder if our needs for music will change because at the moment music is sort of a background soundtrack for people and I wonder if if music's like an implant in you it might know what you need more than you know what you need and the choice paralysis that comes from trying to remember the music you like when you're typing it in like if an algorithm could be more attuned to I can tell that you're starting to feel melancholic and nostalgic so I'm going to play you something nostalgic that you loved when you were 17 and then I'm going to follow it up with something new that sounds a little bit like it that I think you'll really love and like that's what a great radio host would do or a great friend and an algorithm can't do that and i don't think that's what where ai should be but if it is going to be central and like the idea of having an implant from elon musk is possibly the scariest thought i've had all day yeah i don't think i want to contemplate that any further but let's face it if elon musk was to do that he would not be thinking about music because i do not feel like he would be thinking about culture in that way he does not have the benevolence to think about culture in that way because he is he does not seem necessarily like he's capable of it i'm going to sort of take a more hopeful stance here because i am someone who is a little bit allergic to pessimism and does not really want to stare into the abyss because i think we do enough of that societally anyway but i would like to hope that i think humans will absolutely still be making music um i mean we have we have been doing that as far back as probably when we were probably bashing on sticks and making drums and stuff like that but i think it will still sort of triumph over ai and i've always kind of been out of that faith because i don't i i'm i do firmly believe people don't want ai music and i don't think they ever will um because human connection exactly that's exactly it um i don't think people people want it something that feels soulless and derivative i mean some some people like humans can do that anyway but it's not going to be solace and derivative in the same way as ai would be solace and derivative and without that emotional core then what are we what are we doing it for exactly i would like to say thank you for stepping in to to kind of shape this episode um but i think that for anyone that got to the end I think we should let them know that we're working on quite a few different things over the next six months to a year to celebrate 25 years of Drowning Sound.

57:51This podcast was not the celebration, as lovely as it was. I'm sure hearing me ramble at length about topics that I thought about but not thought about what I was going to say. I think that, yeah, I'm very much a no notes person. I did think about writing notes. I did obviously send you the questions to refresh my memory. And then I was like, yeah, I should probably think about that. And then had a whole, yeah, my brain's been thinking about it while I was asleep or something. But yeah, I've got some quite ambitious plans and we'll be revealing a bit more over the next few weeks and months. I think we've got some really good editorial lined up.

58:38We've got some interesting podcasts lined up. You're off to the Youth Music Awards to do a red carpet special. We've got another politician coming up in a really special conversation coming from Swoon Festival. I always hesitate to say whether I said that correctly. SWN, the Welsh word for noise, for coming from Cardiff. we've got a series of bits coming from Amsterdam Dance Event, A-D-E, I'm sure the E stands for event and that will have some quite big names on it. I have got some nostalgia friendly disc favourites from the past, I'm going to do a couple of episodes about probably touching on Indie Sleaze and how it never existed with people who've been erroneously filed under that.

59:34I still have interview requests out with very predictable people that I've wanted to interview for most of the last 25 years. I have still never met Bjork, even though she's admitted in reading Drowning Sound. I have no idea whether I'll get an interview with Bjork because she is quite elusive. I still dream of interviewing Trent Reznor again because we had a great chat about the social network soundtrack. and I think he is one of the most thoughtful kind of inventive visionary artists in the world and also makes some of my favorite music so why wouldn't I want to interview him again um so yes there's I've put lots of requests out for some bigger conversations over the next six months um was there anything I forgot to say Emma not that I told you what I was going to say in advance i cannot read your mind i mean maybe i'll learn that to do that eventually but for now i can't but you've got you've got some fun newsletter ideas coming up as well haven't you i do have fun newsletter ideas you know there's always something there's always something rattling around in there i will always have things to say inevitably and if you've read anything that i have done so far in my uh short tenure so far then thank you so much and if we haven't been acquaintance before hello well you've met me you've met me now you've heard me talk so how are you going to top interviewing jeremy corbyn though um the joke that i'm making i'm actually going to say it out loud just see just to see if we can throw it into the ether just for manifestation sake um the joke that i've made to people is i have made the joke about taking zara sultana to a hardcore show um zara sultana if you're listening um yeah it's like she'd be great i really loved there was a piece in huck magazine where she talked about her love of bts um and she dj's well she won't be djing at labor conference this year as she's no longer a member of no the labor party but yeah she's like apparently big music fan um yeah we're gonna then then what do you do like you just have to keep setting the bar like it's like do you take aoc to an lcd show perhaps they just keep it going i'm gonna leave that one in the minds and the imaginations of our listeners um thank you so much for your time and thank you for joining the team because it's exciting we have a team now it's not just me we have a team yes no i'm so excited to be here as and I've got to do the weekly thank you to Josh Craggs for editing this because thanks Josh neither of us want to sit here and stare at our own faces and listen to our own voices editing stuff which going back to the mental health bit is one of the things the reasons why the podcast became less consistent was literally me just not wanting to sit down and spend my Sunday watching myself on screen and editing videos for YouTube and listening to my own voice although you might think I like the sound of my own voice based on how much I've spoken throughout this episode I'm a podcaster I meant to ramble and chat and that's Adam Buxtonism almost with a gap in the middle I have been Sean Adams you have been Emma Wilkes this has been the Journal Sound Podcast and you have been you thank you for listening, bye

1:03:04Thank you.