VLOG SCRIPT S2E2 – 11.01.26
Welcome back to the vlog after a hiatus of a couple of years. I’ve missed doing them as much as many of your comments have suggested you’ve missed watching them.
There’s a couple of reasons why I stopped them. Both of which because of Crow Hill, that thing up there.
Firstly in order to save on rent we set the business up in our home. Having cameras on left right and centre to capture candid stuff going on seemed like an invasion too far. I welcome all three of my kids into our family business, and the only people who have the right to put their likeness online is them not me. AND because we were setting up crow hill, and what an insanely uphill trek that has been. It’s a time soak, especially when you do it wrong like I did.
Lat year was a really really tough year. It started with je realising that in all but in public admission to you and dare I say it the people I work with, we’d done it all wrong. We’d set up a sample company. Not my intention at all. In order to rectify this we had to shut down, build the website from scratch, re-design all of our GUIs so the entire ethos was cohesive and scalable. But most of all take a good look at the value and importance of this channel and whether we were happy to turn it into a simple marketing outlet. We weren’t I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear.
I think we’re slowly re-establishing ourselves as a place to come if you like sound and music and you’re interested in making either. A place where we pay everyone who works at Crow Hill by selling some of the sounds we make to people who can afford them and want them. Or indeed our merch, and you never know we may look into forms of sponsorship from like-minded companies to help us soon too. `There are no plans for subscription as yet you may be pleased to hear.
Having a business with all the costs and responsibilities attached is insanely stressful, I’m a father of three and I have huge responsibilities there, and I have responsibilities to my clients as a mildly successful film and TV composer. So on top of that, having a business which was literally not making a cent, was an insane stress. But we got there.
To where we are today, with a lot further to go, but with an exciting year ahead, and I feel an even stronger conviction that Crow Hill has a valuable place or hole to fill in this world and one which I will enjoying filling with greater enthusiasm now I feel we’re on the right track.
The other bit of last year was the thing. The AI thing. Whilst I put a happy face on it, it DID keep me up at night. It did make me feel, well what’s the point. It did make me feel, is sampling gonna be like thatching was to tiled roofing. I’ve come to the conclusion that AI offers us an amazing opportunity to redefine the true value of music, of sounds, of ideas, invention, experimentation but most importantly expression… and I think that proof may, in some instances be at the behest of our tech bros wanting to create a new epoch for mankind where we all sit around eating processed food popping pills and shagging robots.
I’ll be brief but my general thought is that music is a form of expression and communication that sits largely outside the linguistic realm. It is argued that music and song came long before language. It certain transcends language barriers and its by comparison, huge limitations therein. Therefore to apply a technological model, from a source code, that of language, that is inferior and less fundamental in its grounding, double the frequency to get an octave halve a heartbeat to go halftime. Etc etc, well it is like someone said, it’s like breeding thoroughbred horses in the vain hope one day they’ll become a Japanese bullet train.
My conclusion is that I’m certain that AI music is gonna be bad news for bad music. No doubt, and with no offence, there will be some casualties off this. The days of buying a house in Hampstead off the spoils of your latest drone album are gone I fear.
I’ve lived through a couple of musical revolutions. The arrival of digital recording, home recording, the mp3 and the internet. All biggies. None of these made our lives any easier. Nor I feel had a net loss in jobs to do within the industry. The jobs changed, and moved. And none of them did anything to topple the incredibly poor distribution of wealth we have always, and I mean always…. The good old days never happened kids, most musicians alive at any time were always very low down on the earnings ladder. Turns out, save for a minute few…. spending your formative years doing scales and not building up a livestock, property or stock portfolio doesn’t make for fame and riches after all. The poor Prices Law writ large distribution remained as I suspect it always will.
In all the revolutions I mention these so-called labour saving, or perceivably job loss inducing bits of new tech did nothing but increase the expectations, demands of our pay masters. Increased the scope of our work, the points of contact with our industry. We’ve come a long way from the sole outlet for music being the pub or the church. It battered down class divisions and boundaries erected by snobby institutions help bent on making money out of sharing knowledge that they somehow declared dominion over.
But the job that got me through the door of the industry castle in 1996, drum programming, paid me £500 a day. It is a job that has got progressively easier to do, because of technology, this means I suspect the rate a drum programmer is paid today is still £500 quid a day. Some 30 years later,
What technology has afforded me is the bridge between traditional learning, skills, qualifications and the huge cost of a formal higher education. I got out into the workplace a full decade before I would have, and ventured forth free from student debt. Compared to if I was trying to truly carve my way in the old way, conservatoire, apprentiships, slowly gaining access to expensive forms of expression , equipment, studios, musicians, and all the time consuming activities that brought those skills together together. By coming into the market place earlier, by using the technological bridge, I had my earning potential spread slightly thinner over a longer time span. This I know was really difficult for the composers who had learned the traditional way to stomach. The appearance of my peers and I drove market values down. Which is never nice to experience considering the hard work and patience you’ve given something, only to have it replaced by a quantisation grid and a computer printer and a ginger haired comprehensive educated chancers like me.
I think the same thing will happen today. AI will enable people to achieve more instantaneous results, quicker and more easily. So the market rate for what we do NOW will naturally plummet, and for a few people unwilling to diversify, I think this may prove problematic. How we diversify? I don’t know, I’ll still aside and let the next generation determine that.
BUT, and it’s a big BUT. And this is where I think we have a place. The further we take people away from the essence of what brought music to its insanely complex and multifaceted entity it is today. Humans coming together and expressing themselves. And all the weird and wonderful ways we have of doing that from scraping some horse hair across some cat gut to putting a bunch of magnets in front of a bunch of grumpy strangers in order to capture complex changes in air pressure. The further we get away from that, the more we will need a bridge back to it. AND THAT is where I think we can help.
Up here is a large space that I’m hoping to buy to house Crow Hill, my own business, piano book and possibly some other creatives who want to share a space. The idea is to be a sonic workshop. Somewhere where people come together, to work together, learn together, invent together and express together. WHICH IS WHY I’m making this vlog again. There is the correct amount of jeopardy to present an interesting account of building something that houses the old and the new the experienced and the experimental in the face of a technology that if the inventors had their way, would wipe out any need for us to do this anymore. So there is a good chance we will fail and people may find me grinding coffee or delivering food to their door before the decade is ours. BUT I want people to discover that music well…. It’s not, and I truly believe this. It’s not about just organising noise, in a way that has proven to be pleasurable to us musical beings. It’s not about using the infinite number of notes, rests and clefs, or magnetic pulses, binary ones and 0s, to fashion into an infinite collection of substandard cover versions that don’t quite work as well as their component parts. For me it is what it is that music means to us humans…. It’s not our score for life, it is life, an expression of it, a part of it. The listening, the singing along, the making and the making better over thousands of hours of trying. Music is love, and love is life, and I think if we want to live we shouldn’t lose the pathway, the bridge back to where it all came from. There is still much to learn from the giants shoulders that we sit on. Instead of robbing their graves, ndigging up their bones and making them into soup.
