DIGITAL CONVERSION THERAPY

How streaming makes middle-aged music-making fun

Good day everyone, and welcome to the first article from Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, on Substack. Thanks for subscribing if you did already, thank you especially to those who became paid subscribers on faith alone. This article is full feature-length, and it’s been posted at the start of a weekend with the hope that you can read it at leisure on a laptop rather than a phone. I invite you to share wherever appropriate if you like it. The article has hyperlinks to my friends’ music, which I hope you get a chance to follow and enjoy. And if you do, please consider supporting either myself with a paid Substack subscription - for which you will receive bonus materials, ranging from extended/exclusive podcasts to archived interviews and manuscripts and book excerpts - or the other artists referenced in this article. Cheers!

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In 2022, I started making music again. Specifically, I got back into a recording studio with my best friend for the first time since 1984 when, right on the brink of major-label failure, we quit the band that I had formed at school and which he had later joined. Thirty-eight years after that tearful night, it was all smiles as we went into an upscale garden shed in East Sussex, England, where he lives, along with a rhythm section he’d assembled, and recorded two songs, one by each of us. That process was a blast, and when we released the songs online, as The Dear Boys, the reaction was more than we could have hoped for. So much so that we went back into the studio this spring and recorded two more. (The first to make it to market, as of July 14, is ‘Blink Of An I.’)

And somewhere in the midst of this flurry of activity, my best friend (let’s call him Pagey, everyone else does) said to me, “You know, we should have been doing this years ago.”

He had a point. After all, each of us had continued playing music over the decades. Pagey, in a string of locally based bands of varying renown and (dis)repute, occasionally getting to record (and release), rarely daring to dream. Me, upon moving from London to New York City, first by unexpectedly becoming a successful dancefloor dee jay, which led to recording a soundtrack for a club novel I wrote and published; later – once living in the Catskills – by assembling a covers band art project that came together once a year to play the hits of exactly 45 years earlier; and more recently, with a role as a show director at our Rock Academy, which suits my life-long passion for the minutia of music, and which forced me to take my instrument playing seriously again.

Myself with Pagey in Apocalypse, December 1981, the month the joined the band.

And so, I am understandably given to echo Pagey’s question. Why did we not do this years ago? It’s not like living on different continents proved an insurmountable problem to recording once we put our minds to it.

This question became more pertinent when I met up with some of my other closest friends this spring on one of my all-too occasional trips back to the UK. Looking around our table at a central London pub that night, I realized that just about all of us are doing the same thing: recording and releasing music with an energy unrivaled since our youth, assuming we were even doing it back then.

I was left with two possible explanations. One is that, to quote the new Dear Boys single, “as life passes by in the blink of an eye” we feel a sudden urge to address all those creative endeavors we had put aside for decades (often due to parenting) while we still have the time left. And there is truth to that.

Onstage together with one of Tony Page’s many subsequent bands, D414, New Year’s Eve 1986.

But it can’t be the only truth, and the other commonality is the one central to this  article. Namely, the ease with which we can now distribute the music. The reason I didn’t want to record music with my best friend ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, I realize now, is that I couldn’t see what we would do with it. We’d had and lost our chance to be pop/rock stars. Vinyl was dead. CDs were no fun: I’d seen too many friends struggle to put together albums and then struggle even more to sell them at gigs. I knew why the best of those friends persisted: as songwriters, it was in their blood, they had to get their art out there the same way I feel about my articles and posts. All the same, having stopped writing songs a long time back, I had no urge to join them. Put simply, I didn’t record music all these years  because I couldn’t see the point of  it.

That was until streaming came along.

The two Tonys together in the studio as The Dear Boys, March 2022.

Now, I could detour here into all the reasons that streaming is both bad for music as an art form and for musicians as an income stream, alongside all the reasons that streaming is great for consumers. But you know as much, and you’ve read it all before. What I want to talk about instead is why digital/streaming has completely revitalized the possibilities for those of us making music on the margins, and how we seem so much happier with our creativity – and our lives - as a result.

Take the latest Dear Boys’ single. Putting aside the process of studio recording – a physically inclusive but financially expensive process – then once we have an approved master file on hard disc, and an accompanying artwork (i.e. a single square image), I head over to the website of our “distro,” Soundrop. Following an admittedly time-consuming process of ensuring that all information entered is correct and meets specifications, I pay a fee – it’s all of 99 cents - and set a release date, knowing that the finished recording will show up that desired morning on every platform that can legally accept it, including some I have never been on (TikTok, I hear you’re the belle of the ball), and several that I have never otherwise heard of (Qobuz, Anghami anyone?).

And what do I get in return for my 99 cent fee? I get to let people know we have music out without asking them to buy it from me on CD or vinyl at a gig that I’m not playing. I get to know that people can find it without having to go to a store that doesn’t stock it. I get to know that other people might stumble upon it through the streaming platforms’ algorithms. I get to link it conveniently on social media – and similarly, to all my radio and press contacts equally content to be active on the margins.

I also maintain control – of ownership and, depending on platform, presentation. It is hopefully not coincidental that Spotify, the biggest streaming outlet, offers the only truly friendly separate artist access, from where I can upload profile images, write a bio, create and share playlists (we just did one called Part Time Punks), and sell merch and announce concerts, not that we have any. (Apple’s artist account demands profile images be centrally framed, unadulterated photos of the actual musicians. Screw you. We’re filed under “punk” anyway.)

Dear Apple Music, aka ‘The Man’. This is our logo: take it or leave it.

Separately, we run an account on Bandcamp. Unlike the streaming platforms’ subscription model, Bandcamp serves essentially as a shop window and agent for its artists, passing on an average 82% of every sale, of which there was $188 million worth last year. On Bandcamp, we can choose how many free listens you get, set our own price for digital downloads, sell any merch in a more convenient fashion, and interact directly with our “followers.” (There were 25 at last count, but hey, who’s counting?)

The digital possibilities extend further. I had an idea for a video for ‘Blink Of An I’ based on some “shorts” that a friend was posting. She agreed to make a “long” and the result is a one-shot video that fits the song perfectly, if entirely metaphorically. Sure, I had to spend some time on my computer editing it, and more time getting it uploaded correctly to YouTube, but the whole process was free, and there it now sits, open to the world – and getting views. (You can add to those views below.)

But don’t just take my word for it. What about those friends I met with recently in London. What were their reasons for the sudden middle-aged rush of creativity? I wrote three of them (one is also my lone cousin), and they each responded almost immediately, and in detail, as if they had been staying up at night waiting for the opportunity.

“I had done lots of home recording down the years and just shared it with friends,” wrote Steve Gamble (aka Wyatt Riot), who I’ve known since the heady days of The Jam and our brief subsequent belief that Wham! were a worthy successor.¹ “Then along came Soundcloud. I uploaded a bunch of songs. One started getting hundreds of plays in Nashville. It was exciting. You didn't need a record company and radio plays anymore.”

Wyatt Riot scores around 20,000 streams a year on Spotify, which is significantly not nothing. Steve earns just £80 ($100) or so from that, which is statistically so close to nothing it’s insulting. Still, he finds it hard to complain. “I make music because I love making music. The fact that I can make it for free now balances out the fact that I basically give it away. My music is very political so it's first and foremost about reaching an audience and changing people's minds or reinforcing them. If I can do that it's way more important than making money. A few quid would be nice though.”

My cousin Paul Harmer I have always known to be an exceptionally talented musician, frustratingly hiding that talent under a bushel while enjoying a successful career as a professional photographer. For the first four decades of his life, he even avoided playing on a stage: “I was deeply suspicious because I thought it an exercise in pure ego,” he confesses. Still, circumstances eventually found him performing with friends (and spouse) on Sunday evenings at a local restaurant where he discovered that, as I would have happily told him but he had to learn for himself, “Ego is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe we need people telling us we’re good at something? Maybe we need a bit of adulation.”

If he has found it, it’s in his collaboration with a songwriting friend (The) Alexander Meadows, whose occasionally droll songs under that name have found a decent audience, via Spotify, in Scandinavia. Paul supplied instrumentation for the first two releases and recently wrestled the production process from Al as well - for good reason, as you’ll hear if you compare earlier recordings with the new, vastly more mature ‘London Clay.’

“I take pleasure in the process of recording,” Paul says. “And Al takes pleasure in the craft of writing. I wouldn’t be bothered if anyone ever heard those recordings again, but creating them and learning new skills even at my advanced age, is a rewarding pastime.”

As with every act quoted here except my own, Al and Paul record at home. “Being able to release music for nothing (or very nearly nothing) has definitely been an incentive for us to actually do something, to get on with it. If we were pressing CD’s we’d probably want to get our money back, which changes the proposition, and we’d have to wait until we had an album’s worth. I like the pressure of having to turn something around by a certain date because Al wants to release something every few weeks, I like the idea of creating artwork, I like learning new skills in Logic which I probably wouldn’t do if I was just tinkering. The streaming platforms have for us at least been a creative catalyst.”

Finally from that London crowd, to John Taylor, who I first knocked about with in our old neighbourhood at age 11 or so; we must have lost contact around the time John says he “never got further than the demo cassette stage.” His re-entry into the music-making process was entirely due to the Covid pandemic. “The original idea was purely to keep myself occupied doing something I enjoyed while we couldn’t do anything else,” he says. “I sent the first few songs to a handful of select friends then realised by October that I had enough for an album. Although it was never my intention I put them all on a small run of 50 CDs and gave about 20 copies to friends as unexpected/unwanted Xmas presents.”

To John’s surprise, the majority of those friends explained that they no longer owned a home CD player, and why wasn’t the music on the likes of Spotify? “I mulled it over for a couple of months and then bit the bullet. If the process hadn’t been so cheap and easy to do I probably wouldn’t have seriously considered it for more than 10 mins.”

But to paraphrase those words by the Desperate Bicycles from a self-pressed 45 back in 1977, it was cheap, it was easy, and so he did go and he did it. A mutual friend then shared it with me on Spotify, and now here John and I are, reconnected and enjoying each other’s marginally grown-up company.. John’s music, under the nom de plume of Gaslight Messiah, is suitably lo-fi bedroom punk for the digital age, with a passion for its lyrical subject matter that cuts to the core. I love getting a new Gaslight Messiah track up top of my weekly Release Radar – and I love that Spotify knows enough about me and my tastes to put my mates’ releases higher than the star acts. (It did the same recently with both Alexander Meadows and Wyatt Riot.)

And because I don’t want this debut Substack post to come across too British when I actually live in the States, I’m going to quote a similar story to John’s from my new friend Dan Epstein’s recent Substack article on how age ain’t “Nothin’ But A Number.”

 “After writing songs and playing in bands for years — which I found an enormously fulfilling, if not exactly pocket-filling, pursuit,” he wrote, “I allowed a combination of personal pressures and songwriter’s block to convince me that I had nothing left to offer in that realm. It was only during the first year of the Covid pandemic that I finally started teaching myself how to use GarageBand, and to actually start writing songs again after a self-imposed silence of over two decades.” (Alone of these accounts, Dan does not have parenthood to offer as an excuse for that silence, which suggests that life gets in the way regardless.)

For now, Dan has eschewed the commercial streaming sites, satisfying himself with a presence on Bandcamp, where he resides as The Corinthian Columns. (While the oldest of his uploads are conventional songs, I prefer the more recent instrumentals cut in a funky 70s cop show style.) The satisfaction of songwriting, recording and soft releasing his music has even encouraged him to start performing again, albeit it as just himself with an acoustic guitar.

The Dear Boys is not a live performing proposition – for now, we get those thrills from being all together in a physical studio. (Clearly on a roll, I now have another project, Hudson Palace, that has performed a couple of low-key events and which does record at home. Tony Page gets to perform live with his band The Spiffing Good Eggs) For me, it is all about getting the music out there into the world. I love the comparative ease of the digital/streaming process, and I am all the more grateful for it having witnessed the hassles Pagey experienced pressing our debut Dear Boys single as a bona fide 7” single in a limited edition run of just 50. So while, as my mate Steve/Wyatt Riot notes of his unremunerated success online, “a few quid would be nice,” being underpaid is arguably better than being out of pocket, which my Dear Boys partner remains from aforementioned 7” venture. (You can still get a copy from Bandcamp, through image link below. 50% of all proceeds split between Razom For Ukraine and Friends Of The Earth.)

It’s a lot of work. But it’s work that keeps us young at heart, out of trouble and in the mix, metaphor intended. As my cousin Paul concluded, “Even if nobody finds the music, we’ve been able to complete a whole production process with no pressures and there is a sense of achievement in that.”

But then, from Paul, the conscious afterthought, the return of the ego, and the possibility that there is always the chance of being ‘found’ regardless. “…And I do secretly like the idea of being discovered and touring Finland, chased by middle-aged women in snow boots.”

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Coming soon: the double AA-side to this initial A-side post, in which I venerate vinyl. You can have it both ways.

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Have you recently come back to making music after an absence? What do you like and dislike about the digital/streaming process if so? Please feel free to post in the comments.

1. Yes, that is me interviewing George and Andrew in the Wham! documentary (from The Tube, Nov 1983). Now, please stop asking!