Where Did All The Bands Go?

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Helping the next generation of talent to build a global fanbase

Where Did All The Bands Go?

This month, Adam Levine of Maroon 5 caused a ripple when he was chatting to Apple Music's, Zane Lowe. Whilst referring to all the bands about in 2002 when they released their first album, he questioned, "where did all the bands go? I feel like they're a dying breed." After clarifying he meant bands, "in the pop limelight", it still managed to spark a mix of bemusement and outrage from some fellow artists.

Maroon 5's Adam Levine - photo Mauricio Santana

Though his remarks may have smarted somewhat, it can't be denied, he has a point! In the early 00's new bands were a dime a dozen, filling arenas and regularly collecting platinum discs. New TV talent shows such as Pop Idol and X Factor filled Saturday nights with girl groups and boy bands, but the trend is shifting. According to Dorian Lynskey in the Guardian, currently, there are nine groups in the UK Top 100 and only one in the Top 40. Two are the Killers and Fleetwood Mac, with songs 17 and 44 years old respectively, while the others are the last UK pop group standing (Little Mix), two four-man bands (Glass Animals, Kings of Leon), two dance groups (Rudimental, Clean Bandit) and two rap units (D-Block Europe, Bad Boy Chiller Crew). There are duos and trios, but made up of solo artists guesting with each other. In Spotify’s Top 50 most-played songs globally right now, there are only three groups (BTS, the Neighbourhood, and the Internet Money rap collective), and only six of the 42 artists on the latest Radio 1 playlist are bands: Wolf Alice, Haim, Royal Blood, Architects, London Grammar and the Snuts.

Of course, radio and streaming are dominated by pop, rap and dance music but festival lineups don’t point to a golden age of bands, either. Of those that have emerged in the past decade, only half a dozen have headlined either Coachella, Reading/Leeds, Latitude, Download, Wireless or the main two stages at Glastonbury. That’s The 1975, Haim, alt-J, Rudimental, Bastille and Tame Impala, and the last of those is effectively a solo project. Only one band, the Lathums, appeared on the BBC’s annual tastemaking Sound of … longlist this year, which is not unusual: bands haven’t been in the majority since 2013. The album charts are still regularly topped by bands thanks to loyal fanbases who still buy physical formats – such as Mogwai, Architects and Kings of Leon in recent weeks – but not since 2016 has one hung on for a second week. So what happened?

With even the largest, well known bands struggling to get into the Top 20 in the streaming world, could one theory be, solo artists are cheaper and easier to handle for the record labels? Apparently not, according to Dirty Hit label's, Jamie Osborne. His independent label is responsible for among others, Wolf Alice and The 1975, but he is still desperate to find the next band he can sign and develop. However, he's not finding it easy! The problem is, he says, there aren’t that many around. “It’s more likely now that a kid will make music in isolation because of technology. When I first met the 1975, they were all friends meeting in a room to make noise. So much is done in bedrooms these days, so you’re more likely to be by yourself.”

Ben Mortimer, co-president of Polydor Records, says that cost is more of an issue for artists than for labels. “If you’re young and inspired to become a musician, you face a choice. If you go the band route, you need to find bandmates with a similar vision, you need expensive instruments and equipment, and you need to get out on the road to hone your craft. On the other hand, you could download Ableton [production software], shut your bedroom door and get creating straight away. Culture is shaped by technology.” So if the expenses are too high to even start a band, then rehearsal space and travel costs just add to the negatives. Does that mean bands and touring will only be for the rich, middle-class kids?

“Social media has filled the hole, creating individual stars who are seen as more ‘authentic’ than anything the retro talent-show format could offer,” says Hannah Rose Ewens, author of Fangirls, a study of contemporary fandom. "Social media is built for individual self-expression. Platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter – and even the portrait orientation of a smartphone screen – give an advantage to single voices and faces while making group celebrity less legible.

Hannah Rose Ewens with her book 'Fangirls'

The challenge posed by all pop cultural trends is to work out whether or not it is a permanent structural shift or just another phase. The right group at the right time, whether it is the Strokes or the Spice Girls, can change everything. In the short term, the pandemic has made it impossible for new bands to form and threatens the survival of the regional venue circuit on which they depend, while Brexit has thrown up expensive new obstacles for touring bands. Yet Jamie Oborne remains optimistic. “I’m excited about the wave of creativity that’s going to follow this period that we’ve just lived through,” he says. “I feel this hankering in youth culture for real experience and connection. I’m still quite the romantic when it comes to music. Look at Fontaines DC. I see a picture of them and wish I was in a band. It’s the same thing as walking down the street with your friends and feeling like you’re part of something. Anything’s possible.”

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12
Mar

Barack Obama - His Tracks of 2020

Recently released via Instagram, Barack Obama - Tracks of 2020, the annual eclectic collection of music that accompanied his, and his family's day to day. In 2015, President Barack Obama was declared the only President you could reliably trust to DJ a party. An elder of the Hip-Hop Generation and still younger than Chuck D, he helped endorse American made music for the 21st Century. That year, he gave us a kind of 'Desert Island Discs' of the tracks which had got him to, and through two presidential terms. The list was in most part, exactly what you would expect from an educated man in his 50's. However, there were some interesting additions, including Bob Dylan's - 'Maggie's Farm', credited as the track to get him into the right mindset for the political season and the country track by Brad Paisley - 'Welcome to the Future', with Obama declaring himself accepting of the indelible impact country music has had on the USA. Since then, Obama has created an annual listing of his favourite tracks. For his tracks of 2020, he has 'fessed up to having help from his daughter Sasha, and together they have created another interesting collection of old and new. A few of Obama's tracks of 2020, have already been put in the 'Best of' spotlight by many music bloggers. Tracks like Dua Lipa’s - 'Levitating' [ft. DaBaby], Waxahatchee’s - 'Can’t Do Much' and Phoebe Bridgers’ - 'Kyoto'. Added into the mix is a little bit of country, with the next generation of Nashville stars, Ruston Kelly’s - 'Brave' and Chris Stapleton’s - 'Starting Over', plus some old school legends, including the President's go-to, Bob Dylan with 'Goodbye Jimmy Reed'. With over 34m followers on Instagram, it makes this list quite an appealing one to find your name on. Listen to Barack Obama's soundtrack for 2020, below. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX5gYucl3g9Ad?utm_source=embed_v2&go=1&play=1&nd=1

06
Jun

My grandfather was killed by a rubbish truck.

Jeeni has returned to Crowdcube to raise more funds for helping new talent. Jeeni founding director Mel Croucher says, “I admit we’re ahead of our original schedule, but there’s still so much more to do. We need to scale our online platform globally now and build our mass artist showcases. Then we can hit all our targets, and give our new artists the recognition they deserve.” If you want to see our pitch click HERE. Mel has been writing the best-loved column in top-selling tech magazines for over 30 years. Now he’s agreed to share his work with all our members. He’s a video games pioneer and musician, and to to find out more about Mel check out his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Croucher. Here’s one of Mel’s latest! One bright Autumn morning, my grandfather was killed by a rubbish truck. He got run over crossing the road on his regular walk to work. He was 84. And I am comforted to know that he loved his work as much as he loved his walk. As for me, I have yet to reach that ripe old age but I am still working most hours, most days. It's not so much that I love my work, more that I don't know what else to do. When I was younger, so much younger than today, I was promised a sci-fi world where all labour would be performed by robots, leaving us humans to enjoy a more meaningful existence. Before my grandfather was born, Karl Marx wrote that in a mechanised society workers would be freed from the monotony of work to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, criticise after dinner.” My grandfather certainly never saw such a sci-fi world or Marxist society, and I'm still waiting for it. But the way things are going I may not have to wait much longer for robots to take over the tedium of work. Judging by their behaviour, I suspect that most telemarketers, receptionists, estate agents and bar tenders were replaced by robots ages ago. And for drivers, machine operators and manual workers, it can only be only a matter of time. The first robot aircraft pilot took to the skies then navigated flawlessly and landed safely way back in 1947. Robots have been successfully conducting complex heart surgery since 2004. Artificial intelligence has already reached the cognitive power of a nine year-old human, in which case it is qualified to run for President of the USA in November. But do we really need political leaders to tell us how best to fill our waking hours? If we can develop all these technological wonders then we should be smart enough to work it out for ourselves. Our waking hours are dominated by work, whether we are in work or not. Strikers are depicted as troublemakers. Artists are depicted as idle. The poor are depicted as scroungers. The state cajoles the unemployed, the sick and the disabled to get off their arses and work. We are educated with the goal of work in mind, then having worked all our lives we are grudgingly handed back a mingy pension which we paid for in the first place. The idealised worker works in order to pay the childminder, the Deliveroo driver, the dog walker, the baker, the brewer, the app maker, because the idealised worker has no time left for such things. The idealised worker is too busy working to do any of these things for herself. For huge numbers of us the significance of the old certainties of community, religion, politics, and even family, have all fallen away to be replaced by work. For huge numbers of us work is how we give our lives meaning, while at the same time work has become more precarious, more impersonal, more stressful, and the app-driven gig economy is a perfect example of this. Yet everybody knows that automation is already capable of doing most manual jobs of work, and now artificial intelligence is predicted as achieving the capability of taking over most desk-bound jobs too. Since the pandemic, the entire framework of work is falling apart. But as a species we are not hardwired to work for a living. We never have been. We were lied to by those who said we must work, either to deserve a mythological afterlife, or protect an artificial realm, or for supposed honour, or someone else's glory, or for tokens of currency that can only be spent at the store owned by the company that issues those tokens in the first place. But of course all of those motivations are a con. And an obvious con at that. So here's the thing. Now we have cheap reliable technology, let's get all the robots to do as much of the muscle work as they can, and let's get all the artificial intelligences to do as much of the brain work as they can. Then let's redistribute the remaining working hours evenly to we the people, and in return pay ourselves some of that fabricated stuff called money so we can buy good food and decent shelter. By my reckoning six hours a day, three days a week will do nicely to pick up the slack left by the robots. Work needn't be useless. Work includes child-rearing, caring for the elderly and protecting the vulnerable. It also includes growing food, dreaming up new businesses and fixing the tap. And work includes creating music and dance and poetry and streaming it on Jeeni.com. It is self-evident that all valid work is worth the same valid reward. This is not a Marxist idea, or even a socialist proposal. It's the Tories who bang on about work being such a good thing and everyone pulling their weight, and I completely agree with them. Margaret Thatcher, that champion of work culture, said, “The heresies of one period become the orthodoxies of the next.” Yes indeedy, so bring on the robots and the electronic brains. If work is such a good thing then let everyone have a go for a few hours a week for a universal payment. And don't worry about how the payment is distributed, the accounts have all been reckoned by computers for years. Click HERE to visit or return to jeeni.com

07
Mar

Julience - ‘Love Lies Cold’ Single Review

Julience’s continues his one-man effort in keeping rock alive with this impactful hard rock ballad, ‘Love Lies Cold’. Hailing from The Netherlands, Julience moved to Manchester to pursue his dream in music where he has been harking back to the golden age of rock ever since. This single is the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter's second single and Jeeni is excited to be able to feature Julience’s fantastic throw-back tracks on our rock and guitar channels as they release. Check out Jeeni’s rock channel here, https://jeeni.com/channel/all-channels/rock/. And check out Julience’s Jeeni showcase here, https://jeeni.com/showcase/julience/?view=about. Rock music is very robust; time and time again, it has come so close to disappearing only to revive itself and evolve to fit better into modern music climates. The difference with Julience is that he refuses to dilute the music he loves to conform to fit anything other than himself. Even in the infancy of his discography, he’s gained recognition and respect for keeping an older form of rock alive in the present day. Julience has been featured on over 30 playlists on streaming platforms with titles like ‘Punk Goes Pop’, ‘Retro Now Rock’ and ‘Rock ‘n Roll isn’t Dead’. The only modernisation Julience grants himself is the clarity and up-to-date standard in his production and performances. Something specific that separates Julience from other modern rock groups is his truly guitar-centric compositions. It can sometimes feel as though the art of the guitar solo is slowly getting lost and becoming something of an artifact but Julience’s electric interjections teased from the very beginning eventually come to fruition as a finger-tapping, string-bending celebration of musicianship that ties the entire piece up. Among the rock n roll hall of fame legends that Julience clearly looks up to, specific inspirations that come to mind from 'Love Lies Cold’ include Billy Idol, Guns N’ Roses and most notably, Iron Maiden. This 80s era is where rock was at its most mainstream and so Julience’s decision to honour that time is a lot of fun. It’s also so satisfying to see him fill in a market for those that weren't quite ready to say goodbye to those days. Check out ‘Love Lies Cold’ here: https://jeeni.com/love-lies-cold-julience/. How can Jeeni support artists like Julience? JEENI is a multi-channel platform for original entertainment on demand. We’re a direct service between creatives and the global audience. album review album review album review • We give creatives, independent artists and performers a showcase for their talent and services. And they keep 100% of everything they make. • We empower our audience and reward them every step of the way. • We promise to treat our members ethically, fairly, honestly and with respect. • Access to artist liaison and a supportive marketing team.

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