Certain music bloggers can be a competitive bunch sometimes, always trying to outdo each other, wanting to be the quickest to post about the latest buzz band, working up a sweat about how many hits they’re getting as they proclaim how they’ve fallen in love with the next new artist that they probably won’t be listening to at all in six weeks, let alone six months. The blogging world is a pretty inward, naval gazing scene at times. Yet here’s the deal - 99.999% of people couldn’t give a flying fig about music blogs. All they care about is if they like a song or not, not who discovered it first or who got the track the most listens on Bandcamp or Soundcloud and certainly not how many hits the blog gets. It's only bloggers who care about hit counts, unique visitors and average length of time spent on the site. No one else outside of the music industry gives two monkeys.
Which brings us to The Good Natured aka Sarah McIntosh. To the blogging world The Good Natured is no longer a new artist, the hype / buzz period being well and truly over. Hell, we first featured her on Breaking More Waves back in March 2009. Yet to most of the world she is new. In fact the vast majority of the public have yet to hear of her. In an unscientific test Breaking More Waves asked 36 people if they’d heard of The Good Natured. 35 hadn’t and 1 thought it was a type of organic salad. That person was right incidentally.
It’s for this reason that today we’re featuring her current single Skeleton. It’s been out there online and on radio for listening for a while already, but today was the official release date of the song and there’s still a huge amount of work to be done. Just a few thousand plays on music blogs aren’t going to propel The Good Natured to a bigger audience and the sad reality-check fact is that with a record deal in place a bigger audience is required for the deal to be sustained.
So, if you’ve not heard Skeleton yet, spend a few minutes here, press play and if you like what reaches your ears when it finishes then go to iTunes and buy the track, especially as The Good Natured is also giving you this rather fresh and super-hot remix by Grum for free download below.
The Good Natured - SkeletonThe Good Natured - Skeleton (Grum Remix)
5 comments:
DIDN'T READ WORDS. JUST SPENT REVIEW WORRYING THAT YOU GET MORE TRAFFIC THAN ME. CAPS LOCK LEFT ON.
That was possibly my favourite comment ever. Well 2nd or 3rd favourite anyway.
If you read this WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T READ OR CLICK THROUGH TO http://www.anewbandaday.com/ as then he may well get more traffic than me :)
Interesting comments.
A bit misled in terms of a record deal and how it works - things build, artists build, it's a slow and steady ship that gets there in the end. Rush releases never work but creating a real, solid and sustainable fanbase HAS to take time. That's the nature of it. Lots of artists take a long time to clock up the amount of hits to really make a difference to their status.
Anywho, it's good you feature such great artists. This one here, I'm sure is going to go on and make real waves in the future.
John agree about the build but unfortunately these days major labels are much less patient than they were years back.
It's a sad fact but some artists are dropped before they even get a chance to put their album out. An example of this would be Skint and Demoralised who we featured a number of times on the blog a couple of years back. He signed a deal with Mercury, the singles didn't perform as well as Mercury expected and he was dropped from the label, unable to release the album that the record company had already funded the recording of.
It's in this context that this piece is written. Not every artist these days gets the opportunity to create that sustainable fan base you talk of. Fingers crossed The Good Natured gets time to find her audience.
John - These days majors labels are risk-averse and more likely to look for a financial return from the start.
Have a look at this on the Guardian website which gives an idea how labels work these days.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/24/the-hoosiers-bumpy-ride
Most of the 'building' of an artist is done before major labels get involved. As Breaking More Waves alludes to, the groundwork has been done over the last few years by blogs, management, playing live shows etc with the majors only taking a sniff when they think there's the real chance of a financial return. Even a band like Elbow who have grown gradually were dropped by their first label, but were lucky to get another deal.
There are some bands that get to build a slower career but there are a lot less of them now. Indie labels are more likely to give an artist time to grow and develop fans.
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