Posts by Simon Grigg
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Tony Peak of the Vandals and Newtones, who was super-cool.
Circa 1980 it was the best record store in the country. We used to go to work Chch into North Island tours just to go there! Tony used the university's academic exception to import restrictions to bring in punk, reggae and indie vinyl, as, at the time, importing music was just about impossible unless you managed to score one of the very rare, and quite limited, import licenses. Memories of Muldoonism.....
You young fellas don't know how lucky you are
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Sorry Simon but if it was "Massive" in the 20s then in the 60s it became exponentially "Super Massive" Surely you see that?
I mean, how can you say I'm incorrect? Can you point me at some actual numbers?I did Steve....the sales of White Christmas for a start. This is hardly controversial stuff. The sales of Sinatra in the 40s are the stuff of legend. Sorry, but to claim that the recording and publishing industries didn't really exist before he 1960s is just complete nonsense. You are absolutely incorrect. Yes the industries grew in the 60s and more in the 70s and 80s but that does not make your original statement correct.
I was wrong about Bing's White Christmas..it seems it's still number one..at 50 million singles during the 40s. His total sales were in excess of 500 million records..almost all in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
Ben Selvin sold 5 million copies of Dardenella in the 1920s. No-one knows how many records Rudy Vallee sold but it was in the many millions. And there were very many more like that. People like Vernon Dalhart. Or Caruso who's first million seller was in 1907!. Glenn Miller is reputed to have sold 200 million records.
There are a bunch of books of this topic but I'd recommend this or this, or, especially, this which is quite comprehensive.
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@Robin,
that seems to be a global phenomena. I was in Hong Kong last week and the mighty, ninety year old, HMV chain is now about 70% DVD. That said, the CDs were retailing for an average of about NZ$15 so it was tempting (and I succumbed) . -
But the advent of the recording industry becoming a big money spinner did not happen until the sixties, previous to this, owning a record player was still a luxury and we just listened to the radio.....
.......The fact is that the music recording/publishing industry has only been in existence for around fifty years,
Sorry but that's just incorrect. Perhaps in New Zealand but most certainly not in much of the rest of the world. Sales of recorded works in the US, Asia and Europe throughout the 20th century have been massive since the 1920s, and there was a correlation with the rise of the recording industry and the radio industry in that decade. White Christmas, as recorded by Bing Crosby was until Hey Jude, the biggest selling single of all time...in the mid 40s. It's still number 3 I think after Hey Jude and Live Aid.
People like Louis Jordan, Duke Ellington, Crosby, Sinatra, the early rockers, Louis Armstrong, just in America, sold vast numbers of records, many many millions, and the associated publishing industry (heard of folks like Foster, or the Gershwins or Berlin, or Ivor Novello) was too a multi million dollar industry, which, as I said earlier, goes back the the 18th century. There are very few companies operating worldwide with histories as long as many of the music publishers.
Payola, which you link to, is as old as that industry.
Most of the major record labels were publically listed entities going back to the pre-WW1 era, and Congress in the US thought enough of labels like Decca (now part of Universal) to insist that the UK parent gift it to the US management in return for Lend Lease.
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not for my wallet it wouldn't. I spent SO much in there last time I was in Sydney. And I never got near the comics....
Luckily I get to go to cities (Bangkok, Jakarta, Kl & Singapore) that have very large branches fairly often, and, yes, it's a dauntingly expensive thing..as well as overweight baggage. I love that on-floor computer that prints out a map of where the book is.
Went to a bookshop in Shanghai that was five or six very dense floors..all in Chinese. It gave me a buzz to be surrounded by so many editions of all sorts of things but I was limited to the coffee table editions because of the language barriers.
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The only place in Wellington with a small but excellent vinyl rap selection was 'Soul Mine' in Kilbirnie.
Ah....Mr Tony Murdoch, who used to be in a killer band called Marching Orders. Grant and I mused over him back here..
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but it's the solidly profitable overseas operations that are getting sold?
To be honest though, Borders isn't a shadow of it's past. When it arrived in Auckland it was fantastic, but since then it's depth of stock has slipped year by year.
NZ has some wonderful smaller bookstores but has a big gaping hole when it comes to the large comprehensive variety, of the sort that most cities the size of Auckland have elsewhere.
A branch of Kinokuniya would be a wonderful addition.
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My understanding (which comes from reading Simon Napier-Bell's book Black Vinyl White Powder) is that until the late 50s/early 60s a record company would buy the rights to a song
I'd take anything you read in Napier-Bell's books with a grain of something, as amusing as they are.
But you are misunderstanding the situation. Prior to advent of the writer / artist (and The Beatles get credit but that misses Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and a bunch more) publishers would push their songs at companies (they still do for the non-writing artists) and often an artist would be (very strongly) advised record a song that was owned by a publisher that was in the same group as the label, as a preference, but labels themselves didn't buy the publishing rights to songs as such as a rule. If the writer had no deal he might be signed to an an associated publisher as a condition of getting the song recorded, or if the artist was big enough then they would often insist on a cut of the publishing (Elvis is a good example..it was a condition of recording).
And music publsihers released albums, usually via their associated labels, of people doing their songs.
Music publishing is a fairly complex business, with a thousand variations on deals and there is a factor called Controlled Composition too in the US where the record company pays a higher publishing rate to a song allied to them than someone independent...something that is probably illegal in much of the world and absolutely unethical but still in contracts.
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With all respect to Grant, I looked at the bands as political parties years ago, on some long lost post on my blog and decided, to my mind at least, that there was something very Dire Straits about the National Party. That was, of course during the Brash days, but the analogy is even stronger now with the grey shoed blandness of it's current leader.
Real Groovy.. the days I spent with Kerry and Kirk Gee in the late 1980s and early 1990s talking shit and trawling through boxes of new US hip hop and house 12's, often at very great end expense to myself
I took Gilles Peterson in there in 1994 and he bought 600 bits of vinyl..some for himself and some for resale in Japan...
Or as others said, rummaging through the cheapo bins (where the best stuff was often found) and getting things like a bunch of early Fingers Inc singles on Trax for $1, dozens of early US indies disco and post punk 12s, and the score of scores, a white label Sugarhill test pressing of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel..for 50c.
But it's the incidental people I really feel for..people like Grant McCallum, James and Michael Monroe who'd been there for decades. They were, as much as anyone, the spirit of Real Groovy. Very sad...
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My understanding of the argument made by Mark Kneebone above is that filesharing will (if the copyright enforcement powers sought by the industry aren't granted) undermine the economics of the recording industry and drive them out of business
And home taping is killing music....
I have a great deal of sympathy with Mark's position. He's right, the impact is severe, but it's also happily overstated by the industry as a whole. There are a multitude of reasons for the downturn in sales of recorded music and this is just one of them.
@Don....
absolutely agree with your last paragraph, and I can't help that feel that is simply the industry not learning anything from the Napster lesson, or the RIAA lawsuits, and doing it to themselves once again.