To celebrate said achievements we’re delighted to invite you to have a look at the entire album and buy it, should it tickle your fancy… the goodies are just a click away.

By all accounts, their new album Eulogy For The Damned is their best yet. We’re proud to have contributed!

Talk to anybody who knows anything about anything and that’s what it boils down to. Gigs. Bands need to tour.

With impeccable logic he had decided to set up an agency. It would be ready by summer. Judging by his previous efforts, there was little reason to doubt the man.

Have a look at the map, not only of the world, but of your own county. There are plenty of pubs out there to play. How many have you filled this week?

Another meeting was with a big Chinese label whose previous client was an English major label, recently sold. They ended their presentation with this unforgettable line: “So, we don’t have a catalogue anymore because our client was sold. We don’t have any records to sell. Have you got any?”

I was looking, with the eye of my mind, at an unfathomable vastness of opportunity…

A Korean company active in the field of K-pop (which stands for a particular brand of pop performed by Korean artists) said their 10 A&Rs go through 100 songs every week to find the right singles for their artists. I guess they release a fair few of them as a constant stream of music. Shortened versions of the songs are sold as ringtones. It’s fast moving stuff.

If we are lacking anything, I bet it’s the willingness to go out to them there hills and find the money that grows on them there trees.

I’ve never been to a telecoms industry do, but I have been to many music biz bashes over the years. You gotta laugh at the irony of people with broke ass record labels drinking £10 bottles of Kronenburg (v.e.r.y. slowly) in posh hotels…

A veteran music biz dude noted that in conventions past there used to be music blaring out from everywhere. This year you were lucky to bump into any.

It’s fact that in “music business” the word “music” comes before “business”.

However, most of what you see when you’re out there are digital-platform-solution companies with incredibly complicated and cool sounding mission statements, all trying to make you think that there is a digital solution to what is essentially an artistic problem.

Namely, it takes an awful lot of talent and expertise to make great music and great records.

On a personal level, why should I give a sh*t about how many million songs you can manage with your new digital content management system, when I can count the records that I really, really like on two hands?!

On a wider level, surely a bit more attention on quality over quantity would be a good thing, would it not?

Next year The Animal Farm stand (our first ever) is going to be massive. We’ll have live farm animals. The catering will be stupendous, we won’t run out of booze. The waitresses will be hotter than any you’ve seen. There will be a gig every hour on the hour. The sound system will be gigantic.

It will drown out every fucker trying to sell me a digital solution to a problem I don’t have. I know which party I’d want to be at. The one where there’s music.

He started working for his uncle’s indie label while at Uni. Learned the tricks of the trade working across everything the label did. Uncle passed, he bought the company, taking an enormous personal risk. Also set up a publishing company. Made some cool new signings and had international hits. Sold it all to one of the majors and went to work for them. That major merged with another. He was made redundant, so he set up a new independent company. Worked like a dog. Eventually merged it with one of the remaining majors and got the top job there.

30 years in the making.

Meanwhile, Mat was deep in conversation with an American tech geek who was in town talking about his new platform that monitors stats across the web better than anything else. The geek was amazed to find out that in our business “the guys who create all the content” (artists) are, according to him, so “f***ing lazy”.

He had Silicon Valley investors on his side and, presumably, on his back. Mat says the guy was a little bit insane, but he made his point with beer assisted vigour. Mat swears that he was foaming at the mouth slightly when he shouted:

“Do you have any idea how f***ing hard those guys in the Valley work? The hours they put in???!!! And then I look at these artists and I go: what the hell is wrong with you? Get in the f***ing van and f***ing tour!”

Good point well made.

One such seminar at Midem was opened by some American lady who wasted no time to lambast the old model where “artists had no control over their destiny and labels controlled everything” blah blah blah.

I struggled to stay with it because I really don’t see the point in discussing what was, especially with people ill-informed about what it was, and who clearly have no plausible alternative as to what it should be.

For the record, in my artist career I was never told by a label, major or indie, to do this or that. They sent the money to our bank account and we made the record. That was a pretty good deal, any way you look at it.

Anyways, I bumped into a very old acquaintance, from back in the day when I was a young upstart badgering a booking agent to book us some gigs. This agent had moved on and had a great gig as the head of music licensing at Google.

He asked me what I thought of the DIY model, if it can ever be done. I said, probably not, just because of the sheer workload involved, but it’s a great way for an artist to get started.

As we’re all cogs in wheels surrounded by other wheels, links in a long and complicated chain, wheels rotating in sync along with other wheels, it’s fucking obvious that no one wheel can do it all on its own, let alone get it all its way. You have to do something that fits in with what the wheel next to you has to do, so that it can fit in with the next wheel. And so on.

This talk of the DIY model where the artist is in control…. as if any of us are in control of anything…. we’re here just to fart around, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.

The new model? I’m happy to entertain the thought of losing the word “copyright”. But I’m extremely unhappy with any model that denies our right to make money from the fruits of our artistic and intellectual labour.

The right to make money. Let’s get that one sorted out and I’m happy to call the new model by whatever name you desire. You can call me Betty. But only at weekends.

We won’t solve it without legislation, either. Speaking of which, we had dinner with some lawyers who spoke about just what a mess our complicated copyright laws are in and how it complicates the way forward. They felt that a dialogue with emerging markets like China and Brazil is the key. They said that now is the time to go and tell them how it should be done. Mat asked them if they had considered that the Chinese and the Brazilians might not give a sh*t about what a bunch of pompous UK/US lawyers – present company excluded – have to say about the matter. It’s entirely possible that the other lot will do the talking and we in the west do the listening.

In a subsequent meeting a Chinese woman was pitching some new digital platform to me. She asked me not to bother her with a million questions on who owns what and what right is where, because in her market these things don’t exist. She was clearly exasperated by comments made by the previous people she’d been pitching to. She asked me to just accept that some money will be made and that both parties walk away with half of whatever it is.

Yup, that falls in the vicinity of the ballpark of my idea of the right to make money.

The right to make great music is another thing. We are lucky to have fantastic artists who do just that. The Manic Shine in an acoustic session at The Animal Farm performing their song Legs.

We met a big shot American manager. A big shot is someone of whose artists Linkin Park are not the most successful. He said that during every Midem he takes 3 meetings with people he doesn’t know. He wanted to meet us because we look like an interesting company, he said. Awesome.

A very enjoyable and hugely educational conversation boiled down to one astute observation, made by the manager once he had listened to what we do and how we got to where we are now. Said the man: “So… you’ve learned to make records efficiently and cheaply.”

I guess everybody with a laptop makes recordings efficiently and cheaply these days, but not everyone is able to make records… you dig?

Here’s one we made earlier, for the stoner rockers Orange Goblin. It’s pleasing to read that the first thing the reviewer notices is the production.

The full review is at The Obelisk.

1. How are you, what have you been up to lately?
I’m doing just finesome thank you. Mostly just been longboarding and writing new songs for my band.

2. How would you describe your style?
HYBRID!

3. What equipment and software do you use?
Logic Pro Studio 8, M-Audio Fast Track Pro, M-Audio Key Studio, Wesley Flying V Guitar, Tanglewood Bass, NJD Dynamic Mic, Beats by Dr. Dre Studio Headphones.

4. Your best achievement in the remixing field?
Being in the top 100 out of 2000+ entries in a Linkin Park remix contest.

5. How did you find remixing iremembertapes.? Any greetings you want to send to the band?
Remixing the iremembertapes track was a lot of fun! So thank you for the opportunity, and to the band, keep making great music!