Tuesday 24 April 2007

Business has been a bit static for a while: busy, but static. Lots of adminstrative trivia have been too tedious to write about here, but this week things began to come together again. Or in some cases fall apart.

A recording project which was coming up soon is now in doubt, as the record company is reconsidering its finances. For some time now in the classical music industry it's been usual for the artists not to get paid by the recording company: our colleagues in the pop music industry have been used to this for a long time of course. The only discs we made where the record company paid the session fees were Mungrel Stuff and, amazingly, The Red Red Rose, and that was good fortune on our part I think. Now companies are thinking twice about paying even for the technical production costs (some budget labels already don't), leaving them only with the tab for manufacturing and distribution. And now in these download days, manufacturing is not the core activity it once was. So what is a record label now?

Anyway,  the artists' fees are usually the first to be taken off the balance sheet. Or as 10cc put it 'art for art's sake, money for God's sake'. Usually, we've raised the cash ourselves in order to get paid (or in the case of Spring Any Day Now, we just decided not to get paid), but at least in most cases we've held on to the copyright in the recording. There is a limit to how much of yourself you can give away .

But another, unexpected, recording project has appeared on the horizon ...

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I got my voting papers for the elections today. In the ballot for my constituency MSP, there's only one candidate that isn't called Bill.