Sean Adams speaks at City University
On 15 February, Sean Adams – founder of DrownedinSound.com (DiS) – came into City University to give a talk on his personal experiences with the internet and music industry, and where he thinks this is going in the future. He also spoke about how the press would change because of these advances.
DiS is a website carrying music reviews and features. It started life as an email fanzine, finally getting its own web space in 2000. It was begun as a way for users to discuss bands they felt were ignored by the mainstream music press at the time, such as Muse and Biffy Clyro.
Still at the relatively young age of 27, Sean has seen things from many different perspectives within the music industry, but has a lot of scope for its transgression in the 21st century.
Sean put a lot of the site’s success down to the reason that many other sites around at the time, which were usually spin-offs from print magazines (the NME, for example), just copy-and-pasted press releases as news and really didn’t go into feature writing or reviewing. Because DiS also added the capacity to post comments on articles very early on, writers could be held to account and there was a closing of the distance between “fans” and “writers”. Because of this, a community atmosphere built up quickly, and when the forum was started this strengthened it. He says although it was a subconscious decision, it was probably the reason DiS became popular – people had something to come back for.
Originally, it cost £100 a year to maintain the website – practically unheard of nowadays, when people who want to voice their opinions can just sign up for a freely hosted blog – and was run out of Sean’s bedroom. By 2003 the site had 50,000 readers, a bank loan, and a handful of advertisers. He had quit work to run the site full time, and has since moved from Weymouth to London, has an office space, and around 30 writers in the UK and five more around the world.
Sean said he found it frustrating that around the 2002-03 time that if he had started a print magazine he could have sold a lot more advertising. It was an interesting point he made that whereas larger companies in the music industry began to advertise on the internet 2-3 years ago, smaller ones didn’t begin to do this until very recently.
Soon he went back to work at a booking agency, and saw a different side of the industry. Because of this job, he began to put on small bands himself – his first show being Bloc Party and Razorlight at the Dublin Castle.
In 2003, Sean realised there were a lot of bands he liked not being picked up by labels, and he didn’t understand why. In the spirit of DiS, he began a label, DiS Recordings, affiliated with the website. It was concerned with putting out singles of bands they liked. To date, they have put out several bands who went on to much bigger things or are well on their way, such as Kaiser Chiefs, Metric and Blood Red Shoes. Because of the label, he found investors in the form of Silentway Ltd., a management company whose customers include Simply Red.
Sean says they run the label in a way that it should really be done, but many labels are too lazy to implement. They would look through to find reviews of similar bands in other music magazines, and where these bands had got positive reviews they sent the journalist a copy of the record with a note saying: “You like this other band, so therefore we think you will like this.” It was very much tailored to make sure the bands got good press.
In October 2007, the website announced that it had begun a joint venture with Sky. As part of this, Sean and his team will be launching five new websites. These include what he described as a “positive women’s magazine”, and a new rock website which will be “filling in the gaps” between other music publications such as Rock Sound and Kerrang!
Speaking about established music magazines and their unimpressive websites, Sean said that the problem was in the thinking of the magazine. He said that they were so interested to just sell the paper magazine that they had totally overlooked the way that the internet can build up a fanbase. Through an interactive, interesting website, he said, the site becomes integral to the reader’s tastes. Because of this, they want to read about the kind of bands that the website features, and this could be utilised by magazines by putting more interesting, relevant content on their websites.
At the end of the lecture, he went off on a tangent about music downloads and the direct effect of the internet on artists and music distribution. He said that the fact that the government has made downloading illegal altogether, they can’t get to the root of the problem and people will continue to distribute music amongst themselves. However, he said, if low-quality music downloading was legal, then people would want to go and buy good quality versions after hearing tracks.
He also raised the point that people still want to buy CDs – if only for the packaging they come in. A recent example of this was when the band Wilco was dropped by its label Warner Brothers, but then 700,000 people downloaded their album. The band was re-signed, and surprised the label by selling a further 600,000 copies. They later won a Grammy for the album artwork.
He concluded the lecture by saying that artists were getting more savvy to the internet, and that he thought it was definitely a good thing when it came to the press. Now the playing field has been levelled, and the music media is being held more accountable than ever by its readers.
