01.08
Thought we might enter the Glastonbury Competition this year. In the past, i’ve sent a CD to an address along with a full detailed bit of promo material for their use. This year the’ve decided to dumb it down and let the readers of Q magazine (important music magazine) to look after it all. Sure, industry people choose their faves but then the usual popularity contest of crappy bands wagers on.
Featured bands consist of those with a large friend base and those with small time management deals who have people willing to run a risk and pay a man at Q to bung their artists into the featured sections.
as for providing information on your material… well, turns out Pop-Songs are the only thing allowed as you have a 5MB limit to what you can upload. Our music is made for bass, which lo-quality MP3s are not. Moreover, you’re limited to a pop-song length track. fair enough, they have to listen to thousands, but why bother if you’re just gonna choose another averagely sounding indie rock outfit to play… I hope im wrong, i really do, but last years glasto lineup was well shit and for that, im worried its just not getting better… All i can say, is that i hope ATP doesnt get any bigger so i can have at least one decent hi calibre UK music festival to go to… and its dry.
END RANT
Matt/Z
As a technical aside, if you encode your mp3s using lame from the command line you can use the –highpass and –lowpass parameters to manually choose which frequencies are more important in your final file. Doing this enables an mp3 to be better optimised for bassey sounds. That’s the theory anyway…never tried it myself.
Jahnold
All agreed – they’ve completely dumbed-down the whole process and the acts that I’ve heard on the Q Mag page really are mediocre at best.
Hey, its the way of the nanny state, PC, flat pack indy X-factor country we live in.
Bands are ditching the UK in favour of Europe for better crowds, more money and the chance to progress.
The UK has seriously screwed its music industry and I for one won’t be attending Glasto to see a procession of blue-rinsed musicians and indy bands droning on about how they can’t pull chicks.