The current debates around gender bias in live music, specifically festival lineups, are important but I think people are focused too closely on big names and headliners. We’d learn a ton more by looking at smaller stages and events aimed at ’emerging artists’. I’ve done two quick bits of number crunching in that area, at The Great Escape and BBC Introducing, to see how they shape up…

I just learnt about some cutting-edge new research data from the charity industry that I think is highly translatable to arts crowdfunding (and activism too). I think it’s worth sharing, despite (or because of) my skepticism about crowdfunding platforms.

The other day I went to a Skype round-table at local sustainability branding and comms agency NEO, hosted by my friend Charlie Peverett. The interview was with Tom Crompton, pioneering writer on “values and change” in the charity business. Working inside WWF for the past five years (though not for much longer), Tom has been one of the main drivers behind Common Cause ideas. We watched his TEDx talk, then got Tom on the line to discuss his recent data work on fundraising appeals, published as No Cause Is An Island.

This report is a big eye-opener with (I think) implications far beyond charity appeals.

I want to summarise the results, transposing them from charity fundraising to arts crowdfunding. I think that’s fair, given the close similarities between the two. But to be clear: the conclusions themselves aren’t my opinions; they’re drawn from this academically rigorous research data in Tom’s report and his own summary during the Skype chat:

(1) If you fundraise based on giving people rewards for supporting you (“Donate to my album and I’ll send you a free MP3 and bake you a cake” or “Support this touring theatre show because it will benefit the economy in your area”) you make your donors less likely to donate, in the long-term. Not just to your project – but to projects generally. That’s regardless of whether your project’s specific targets are met or not.

(2) But if you fundraise based on the intrinsic social value of your project (“Donate to my new album and you’re supporting the composition of beautiful music”, or “Support this touring theatre project so people all over the place can see this important play”) your donors become more likely to donate more, in the long-term. AND they become more likely to support other projects in the future.

Now almost all arts fundraising (as modern charity appeals) combine both of these approaches. We appeal on the basis of “support the arts” social value AND at the same time offer a t-shirt. So here’s where the data gets very inconvenient:

(3) If you mix options (1) and (2) you get as poor results as if you only used option (1). In order to score the benefits of option (2) you have to use it alone.

Wow. So, the moment I start promising rewards, it’s proven by data that I start squishing the value of asking for support in the first place. Or put upside down; if we all had the nerve to just ask for donations because we’re worth it and our art is beautiful, the world would donate more, forever. Made me think of Roger McGough’s poem about everyone making love on the bus because the world is about to end – so it never does.

(4) By the way, that’s not on a project-by-project (or even really an artist-by-artist) basis, it’s all of us, all the time! We ALL need to roll back on offering reward and roll forward the notions of the intrinsic good we do with our art making and the result would be an exponential explosion of giving.

It’s apparently proving very tough to translate these results into action within the charity sector. To an overwhelming degree fundraising is now powered by a conventional (and highly structured) set of corporate-styled marketing models, which require (and can deliver) immediate, fast, very targeted results. The very idea of rolling back a load of tools that are deemed immediately effective, for some nebulous long-term goal (even when it’s backed up by such convincing, important data) is simply too much for most organisations locked into established tropes.

I loved this research. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll know I’m already a music crowdfunding skeptic and particularly ambivalent about the third-party platforms “helping” artists raise money from their friends and fans for a percentage. But throughout this roundtable, this shift of focus from extrinsic reward to intrinsic worth, from fiscal gain to human value contribution, kept chiming with me. Weird analogy warning. It’s like how evil is big, bangy and loud, where goodness is quiet and unostentatious and continuing.

Anyway, optimistically, I wonder if such a shift isn’t already happening organically within at least the music industry crowdfunding world: what started as every artist offering as many gimmicky rewards as possible on Pledge and Kickstarter (that I reacted strongly against) has moved osmotically towards a more stable “pre-order and support my work” model.

Which also highlights how subtle a thing it is: it’s not just in what you offer, it’s in the language you use to offer stuff. The implication of the report is that the ‘rewards’ should be low key and mentioned as a bi-product, while the intrinsic worth of the donation is the core ‘sell’.

Don’t ask people to give you cash because they’ll get stuff. Ask people to give you cash because it’s the right thing to do. And again. And again.

The way Crompton portrayed this potential shift was almost as if we could move towards a tipping point of critical mass: if enough of us approached our fundraising in this way, then more and more people would become willing to donate more and more, until a fixed point where suddenly we all live happily ever after. If only.

ALBUMS
Second amazing year in a row for albums. I’m not sure my #1 albums from 2011 and 2012 would’ve even made it inside the top 5 this year. Through 2014 I wrote down the records I loved (more than just ‘liked’) and it came to more than 60.

By the way I wrote a bit on my Top 10 for Chimeo.

1. Shellac – Dude Incredible (Tough & Go)
2. Splintered Man – Splintered Man (self-release)
3. Tom Williams & The Boat – Easy Fantastic (Wire Boat / Moshi Moshi)
4. The War On Drugs – Lost In The Dream (Secretly Canadian)
5. Jess Morgan – Langa Langa (self-release)
6. Swans – To Be Kind (Mute)
7. Mogwai – Rave Tapes (Rock Action)
8. Owl John – Owl John (Atlantic)
9. Taylor Swift – 1989 (Big Machine)
10. Xcerts – There Is Only You (Raygun Music)
11. Withered Hand – New Gods (Fortuna Pop!)
12. St Vincent – St Vincent (Loma Vista / Republic)
13. Sleaford Mods – Divide and Exit (Harbinger Sound)
14. Against Me! – Transgender Dysphoria Blues (Xtra Mile)
15. Kate Tempest – Everybody Down (Big Dada)
16. Simone Felice – Strangers (Team Love)
17. Retrospective Soundtrack Players – It’s A Wonderful Christmas Carol (Xtra Mile)
18. Luke Sital Singh – The Fire Inside (Raygun Music / Parlophone)
19. Mark McCabe – A Good Way To Bury Bad News (Shield Records)
20. Rumour Cubes – Appearances Of Collections (self-release)

Honourable mentions: Mono, Oxygen Thief, Future Islands, Manics, Ed Harcourt, Wild Beasts, Carnivores, Paolo Nutini, Sophie Ellis Bextor.

SONGS
These are my favourites regardless of genre.

1. Sia – Chandelier
2. Decemberists – Make You Better
3. Grasscut – Beacon
4. Ten Walls – Walking With Elephants
5. Flyte – Light Me Up
6. War On Drugs – Suffering
7. Swan Steps – I’ll Be The Line
8. Emily Barker’s upcoming film theme song (can’t remember the title)
9. Holly Herndon – Chorus
10. Ezra Furman – Ferguson, Burning!

Honourable mentions: Tom Williams & The Boat, Taylor Swift, Pepe Belmonte, Neneh Cherry & Robyn.

Midnight Campfire’s Song Of The Year 2014
10. Billy The Kid – Riverbank (Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, Xtra Mile)
9. Jon Boden – If You Want To See The General (Songs For The Voiceless, Haystack)
8. Kelly Oliver – Diamond Girl (This Land, Folkstock)
7. Darren Hayman – May Day 1894 (Chants For Socialists, WIAIWYA)
6. Co Pilgrim – I Know Love (Plumes, Battle Recordings)
5. Kings Of The South Seas – Eight Bells (Kings Of The South Seas, D.Wink)
4. O’Hooley & Tidow – Summat’s Brewin’ (The Hum, No Masters Co-op)
3. Splintered Man – Dartford Tunnel (Splintered Man, self-release)
2. Grasscut – Beacon (Lo Recordings)
1. Decemberists – Make You Better (What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World, Capitol)

GIGS SEEN
1. Ezra Furman & The Boyfriends – Brighthelm Centre, Brighton (Great Escape)
2. Tom Robinson Band performs Power In The Darkness – Bush Hall, London
3. Future Islands – Digital, Brighton (Great Escape)
4. St Vincent – Winter Garden, Eastbourne
5. Carter USM final show (last 45 minutes) – Brixton Academy
6. Connect_icut, Meatbreak and Steve Gisby – Prince Albert, Brighton
7. Smallgang – The Lexington, London
8. Luke Sital Singh, first three songs – Greenbelt Festival
9. MJ Hibbett – Hibbettfest
10. Sinead O’Connor – Greenbelt Festival
11. Steven James Adams – Truck Festival and The Lexington
12. Depeche Choad – Tunnels, Aberdeen
13. Emily Barker with Gill Sandell – in Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart and Deventer
14. Darren Hayman, Occupation #10 The Singles Night – Vortex Jazz Club, London
15. Oxygen Thief (full band) – Thekla, Bristol

Honourable mentions: Vina Portae and Co-Pilgrim in Oliver’s Swiss Cottage, Samantha Whates short set for Daylight’s birthday, Jon Gomm, Thee Faction & TV Smith at Orgreave Anniversary Concert, Negative Pegasus in Mrs Fitzherberts, Brighton, Ellen Cox, Christy DeHaven, Gill Sandell with Anna Jenkins, Mark McCabe, Swan Steps, Sarah Blackwood (Dubstar) & the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra.

GIGS PLAYED
This year I played 104 shows. As usual I work out the “best” gigs list not based on how well I (we) perform, nor the ‘success’ of the event but purely based on how much I enjoyed being onstage at that show, for whatever reason. Although 2013 had a greater variety of gigs, overall I enjoyed 2014 quite a lot more – and this is a Hoodrats-heavy list because we fucking rocked.

1. The Lexington, London – Hoodrats headline
2. Truck Festival Veterans Stage – Hoodrats headline
3. Fabrik, Hamburg – solo set supporting Emily Barker
4. Isle Of Man Prison – acoustic set for women prisoners
5. De Roma, Antwerp – Hoodrats show supporting Tom Robinson
6. Wedfest, Suffolk – solo set at Sophie & Blaine’s wedding festival
7. Port St Mary Town Hall, Isle Of Man – solo set supporting Jon Gomm
8. Die Backerie, Innsbruck – solo show with Mark McCabe
9. Dome Studio, Brighton – Hoodrats headline
10. Thekla, Bristol – Hoodrats headline
11. Milla, Munich / Keller Klub, Stuttgart – solo set supporting Emily Barker
12. Star Of Kings, Kings Cross – short solo set for Science Showoff
13. Union Chapel, Hoodrats quiet show for Daylight Music
14. Book Yer Ane Fest VIII, Dundee – short Hoodrats set
15. St John’s Primary School, Isle Of Man – solo workshop set for year 6

Honourable mentions: Aberdeen Tunnels with Hoodrats, songwriters circle with Martin Joseph at Greenbelt Festival, Swiss house concert on the tour with Mark and Ellen, Carter USM aftershow for the occasion and Orgreave concert at the Buffalo Bars.

GIGS ON SMALL SCREENS
1. Savages ‘Fuckers’ video shot live at the Forum
2. Future Islands on Letterman
3. Shellac at Phoenix Festival 1994 on YouTube
4. Kiah Victoria house show for Sofar NYC, shot on phone by Rhodri Marsden
5. Olly’s student video at Falmouth University
6. Young Musician of the Year Percussion Final
7. Jack White’s RSD gig / super-fast single manufacture
8. Swan Steps first three songs on YouTube
9. Alex Allmont’s Lego generative music automata
10. Kiran Leonard at 6Music Festival

Honourable mentions: Mogwai at Glastonbury, Taylor Swift does Vance Joy’s ‘Riptide’ in the Live Lounge, Chvrches at Glastonbury, PINS at 6Music Festival, The National at 6Music Festival, Ellie Goulding at Coachella, Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls at Coachella, Drenge at Reading Festival.

FILM
I still haven’t seen a whole bunch of the important films of 2014, so this Top 10 feels very sketchy. STILL need to watch CitizenFour (where’s that vanished to?), Under The Skin, Boyhood, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Wind Rises or Princess Kaguya, and many others. In September Jen and Jon got me Duke Of York’s membership for my birthday, so I’ve already started seeing more films. 2015 will be a film-heavy year…

1. Blue Ruin
2. The Lego Movie (3D)
3. The Punk Singer
4. 20,000 Days On Earth
5. We Are The Best!
6. Dirty Wars
7. 20 Feet From Stardom
8. All Is Lost
9. The Lady In Number Six
10. The Hunger Games 2

TELEVISION
1. Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle season 3
2. Louie season 4
3. High Maintenance web series
4. The Walking Dead season 4 esp episodes 6 &7
5. The Fall
6. The Bridge season 2
7. The Good Wife
8. Dolphins: Spy In The Pod
9. The Trip To Italy
10. Hinterland season 1

Honourable mentions: Colbert RIP!, The Newsroom start of season 3, Game Of Thrones, Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, House Of Cards season 2, Ian Hislop’s Olden Days, Girls, Bob’s Burgers, Broad City, Sacred Monuments, PMQs, W1A, True Detective season 1, Louis CK on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Get Coffee,

ART
After a slow start, 2014 became my favourite year for exhibitions for half a decade; I got blown away several times, especially doing an art break to Amsterdam, plus Rifa taking me to Matisse, and on tour in Germany.

1. Kunst Frühling, Bremen
2. Matisse – The Cut Outs at Tate Modern
3. The New Sublime at Phoenix Gallery, Brighton
4. Permanent collection at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
5. Yinka Shonibare ‘The British Library’ at Brighton Museum for House 2014
6. Mick Stephenson – People Like Us at Freedom Festival’s Long Walk To Freedom, Hull
7. Rembrandt at Reijsmuseum, Amsterdam
8. War Stories at Brighton Museum
9. Louise Ashcroft introduces her work, both times at YCIAYAID
10. east London graffiti guided tour for my birthday
11. Shardcore’s Hipsterbait bot / ‘me amongst the apes’ portrait
12. Permanent collection at Stederlijk Gallery, Amsterdam
13. Curtis James – Makers at Brighton Photo Biennale
14. rediscovering Raphael, permanent collection at the V&A
15. artists’ crazy golf course at Templehof Fields, Berlin
16. 20 Painters at Phoenix Gallery, Brighton
17. Felix Vallotten at the Van Gogh Museum
18. Hummingbirds by Jake Wood Evans at Ink_D
19. Alex Allmont’s Lego generative music automata on YouTube
20. Jameel Prize 3 at the V&A (Arabic calligraphy-based art)

Honourable mention: Digital Revolution at the Barbican which was very fun but very shallow.

BOOKS
1. Paul Kingsnorth – The Wake
2. Robert Macfarlane – The Old Ways
3. Ben Myers – Beastings
4. J B Morrison – The Extra Ordinary Wotsit Of Frank Derrick
5. Marcus O’Dair – Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography Of Robert Wyatt
6. Thomas Piketty – Capital in the 21st Century
7. Koethi Zan – The Never List
8. Dave Eggers – The Circle
9. Patrick Barkham – Badgerlands
10. V A Fearon – The Girl With The Treasure Chest

Not new but I loved: Vicky Coren’s For Richer For Poorer, Alan Johnson’s This Boy and Ian F. Svenonius’ Super-Natural Strategies for Making A Rock’n’roll Group given to me by Billy Reeves.

ESSAYS / BLOG ENTRIES
New category alert! Perhaps this is why I read fewer books this year, because I found myself reading a far greater number of essays and articles, in particular driven by them getting reviewed or recommended on podcasts. Maybe that’s how my cultural consumption rolls nowadays, as I move from music radio to spoken radio, my follow-ups shift accordingly…
1. Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic – The Case For Reparation
2. Paul Mason – what happens next in a world without framework?
3. Arch Druid’s Report
4. Frank Rich‘s New York magazine interview with Chris Rock
5. Dougald Hine for FSCONS on Full Commonism
6. Stewart Lee interviews Julian Cope in Quietus
7. Emily Bazelon in NYT on the rise of the post-clinic abortion
7. Birguslatro in Carcinisation – The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth
8. Paul Blest in The Runout’s on fan slacktivism killing punk
9. Nat Kane on The Babadook and designing with, not at
10. Jody Rosen in NYT T magazine on The Knowledge

Also: rediscovering Orwell’s classic essays

THEATRE / SPOKEN / NON MUSIC PERFORMANCE
1. Dave Douglass remembers the Battle of Orgreave at the Buffalo Bars
2. Acrojou – ‘The Wheel House’ at Freedom Festival, Hull
3. Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Improving Reality
4. Caroline Lucas at She Says Brighton
5. Jacques Peretti potted history of consumerism at TEDxBrighton
6. Hofesh Schecter – ‘Sun’ at The Dome, Brighton
7. Deanna Rodger poetry at TEDxBrighton
8. Elise Bramich drinks her first glass of milk
9. Charlotte Young fictional talk for Science Showoff
10. Nadia El-Imam (Edgeryders) at Improving Reality
11. Sam Roddick throws out her planned talk at TEDxBrighton
12. Robin Ince at the Three & Ten
13. Mark Kermode & Simon Mayo at the Duke Of York’s
14. George Egg making hotel breakfast at Latitude Festival
15. Susan Schuppli at Improving Reality

Honourable mentions: Honor Harger and Justin Pickard at Clearleft’s Connections #1, Charlotte Y’s Gormley talk, Bec Hill at Science Showoff, Elise B at Science Showoff, Joanna Neary at the Three & Ten.

SPOKEN WORD AUDIO
1. Slate Culturefest conversation about art vs behaviour and Woody Allen
2. Radiolab: Happy Birthday Bobbie K – Robert Krulwich’s alligator story
3. Slate Gabfest – 4 Sep, Will Dobson on the state of the world
4. This American Life: The Secret Recordings Of Carmen Segarra
5. Raja Shehadeh’s Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4
6. Wittertainment
7. In Our Time: The Philosophy Of Solitude
8. Vinay Gupta talks to Bitcoiners about the future
9. Serial
10. This American Life: Good Guys

Honourable mentions: Mary Beard: Oh Do Shut Up Dear! London Review of Books writer lecture, Slate: The Gist with Mike Pesca, Slate Gabfest and Culturefest generally, Charlie Peverett at Dare Conference and Frank Turner at Cambridge Union.

EATING OUT
1. The Bush, Ovington, Hampshire, gastro-pub taster menu
2. Terre A Terre, Brighton, vegetarian
3. Stach deli, Amsterdam, deli snacks and hot chocolate
4. Tippling House Aberdeen, dinner and Andy’s immense cocktail
5. catered dinner at De Roma, Antwerp
6. Tiffin Tin, north London, Indian takeaway
7. Bento, Camden, sushi and bento
8. The Logierait Inn, between Pitlochry and Aberfeldy, band dinner
9. Agile Rabbit, Brixton Village, hipster pizza
10. Stederlijk Gallery Restaurant, Amsterdam, burger with hint of Japan
11. Lounge, Brixton traffic light cocktail goat’s cheese slada etc.
12. Burgersheewuiss Café catering, Deventer, vegetables and potato thing
13. Patchwork Café, Port St Mary, Isle Of Man, simple café food
14. Thai in Frankfurt was great, can’t remember the place
15. Horse & Groom, Alresford, Hampshire, red soup and chips (!)

Honourable mentions for Northern Lights, Ramsey’s hippie home cooked food, Velo Café, Brighton and Pancake Corner, Amsterdam.

DRINKING
1. corpse reviver #2 by Andy Stewart in Aberdeen
2. omfg Japanese whiskey, can’t remember which one
3. Benj Murray’s martini
4. Venezuelan rum courtesy Digger Barnes in Hamburg
5. absinthe night in Jena, Germany
6. traffic light cocktail in Brixton Lounge

I’ve had this maybe amazing idea whizzing around my head, involving Airbnb, to use its website structure to help loads of people, at no cost to the company and with universal benefit to society. I also thought of how to coerce them into doing it. I can’t find a flaw.

Please feel free to comment and please share this blog entry if you like the idea. Let’s make the ‘sharing economy’ live up to the tag.

10 Paid Nights, One Free Night.

Over the past three years Airbnb has grown hugely, exponentially, worldwide. If you don’t know it, Airbnb offers a website for people anywhere to rent out their spare rooms on an informal, short-term ‘holiday let’ basis. The system is kept clean and fair by a TripAdvisor-style open comment/rating facility, so people who rent out rooms are judged by those who’ve stayed with them. Like Tripadvisor and SpareRoom, Airbnb is having nothing short of a revolutionary effect; radically changing our lifestyles. We love Airbnb – for example we find it significantly more reliable than booking conventional hotels via Laterooms.com. We’ve stayed all over the place and met fascinating, lovely people.

So here’s what I want Airbnb to do (at first in the UK but with potential global roll-out). I think this could be a fantastic, enormous social benefit, while costing Airbnb almost nothing to implement. In fact it will benefit the company in long-term reputation and help to bring this new kind of informal web-connected marketplace model into the heart of our cultural mainstream. But also, in case Airbnb is unwilling to try it, I reckon the UK government has leverage to coerce.

The idea.

10 paid nights, one free night. Airbnb makes people renting their rooms out offer respite accommodation for carers and digs for touring artists. Anyone letting out a room for money gets 10 nights as normal, then they have to donate one night in that same room for free. This is regardless of room price. The room is offered with exactly the same description and conditions as normal. People renting out their rooms must sign up to either (or both) of two schemes:

Scheme #1 provides respite breaks for full-time carers. Carers are ‘approved’ by the charities working in that field and once they’re accredited, can book Airbnb rooms for free, as and when they need, up to a certain total (perhaps 50 nights per year). The charities do what they normally do (provide respite care in their absence and other support mechanisms) but no longer need to fund the accommodation, for carers to get a break. There is no cap on the number of full-time carers who can register; as long as they qualify, they’re on the list.

Scheme #2 provides digs for touring performing artists of all kinds (theatre groups, actors, musicians, comedians, perhaps even writers on retreat). This requires a slightly more convoluted structure, accredited through the Arts Council. Rather than individual artists being accredited ad infinitum (which would be open to abuse) ACE accredits specific touring shows and projects (or perhaps artists for a specified ‘travelling work period’, such as two months). The artists then book through Airbnb in the normal way. (Perhaps there’s a rule whereby artists cannot opt into accommodation and at the same time get other public funding, so you either join the accommodation scheme, saving those costs, or you apply for funding in the normal way. Accommodation is a major cost of any tour – the biggest cost by far for small-scale touring. A whole swathe of working artists who don’t want the layers of complexity and uncertainty involved in applying for formal ACE funding would still sign up and benefit hugely from this simpler in-kind opportunity. But I digress…)

If people renting out their rooms want to offer more than one free night, that’s fine. Doing this builds up credit – so if they give away four free nights in a row, they have 40 paid nights before needing to donate again. A whole two weeks given free = another 140 paid nights before needing to re-up.

These new service users feed back on rooms they’ve stayed in, in exactly the same way as paying customers, in fact not distinguished from them unless they state it themselves. This beautifully blurs the line between people paying to stay and people who’ve been donated a room because they’re fulfilling a crucial social function. It gives them an equal voice.

And ideally, eventually, this becomes the standard Airbnb model: one free night for every 10 paid nights.

So here’s how we coerce Airbnb into doing it. Airbnb has grown so fast it is now valued in the £billions, if you can believe it, it’s already a significant proportion of the value of the world’s entire holiday accommodation industry. The mainstream hotel business is terrified and lobbying fiercely (particularly in the USA at the moment) to have governments clamp down. In particular they’re building concern that because it’s informal and based on thousands of individuals doing small, cash-in-hand transactions, the people who make money from it won’t declare their earnings as tax. Also, they don’t jump through any of the bureaucratic, or health-and-safety hoops that commercial hotel or B&B businesses have to navigate. So there’s the fear that people renting rooms through Airbnb will have their data passed to the state, or that the site might get made liable and shut down.

Meanwhile, historically, the British Government (specifically HMRC, regardless of which party is in power) has been bloody shit at collecting huge amounts of owed tax from massive multi-national companies, for no discernible reason except they’re chummy with the bosses. They have so much leverage in this area that goes to waste, it’s sick. Yet because Airbnb helps many non-rich people earn small amounts of extra money that may be taxable, likelihood is, Government (especially the current gimp coalition) will consider going after it aggressively.

What if, instead of getting lobbied into the courts to grab Airbnb’s data, the Government just takes the firm’s UK bosses out for dinner and quietly says to them: donate one room in 10 and we’ll leave you alone?

I don’t mean for a moment that people using Airbnb will avoid owed tax; they’re still totally liable. It’s just, well, HMRC has happily sat down for posh lunches and made informal bespoke arrangements to pay almost no tax at all, with big fat bastards like Vodafone, Amazon, Starbucks and that tiny little bastard Ecclestone. Why can’t they use their weight to do something good for a change? Imagine, this could be a shining light, a morally beautiful example of the government’s tax powers directly encouraging a social good, without even letting anyone off paying what is owed.

Or maybe, to get ahead of this possibility and earn huge, lasting public goodwill in one fell swoop, Airbnb will just do it off their own backs. Use the UK as a beta trial, to see how viable it is...

Even the website bolt-on required is simple; doesn’t get in the way of any transactional mechanisms. And of course, Airbnb can offset costs of the web-build. Or perhaps the web developers will do it pro bono because they’re hip like that. More broadly, I can even imagine a bold move like this from one market-leading company having a permanent, paradigm shifting positive effect across the entire ‘sharing economy’, creating a presumptive good-spirited norm that the service being offered also requires a charitable, community-led element. Surely that would be incredible and forever undercut the negative perceptions coming out of more traditional industries.

And that’s it. Airbnb gets ‘persuaded’ to go for 10 paid nights, one free night. Donated to carers needing respite, or touring artists needing digs. It’s so simple, it feels perfect.

What do you think? Beautiful but impossible? Does it have any holes? Feel free to jump in with a comment if you have one. And if you like it, please share this argument because – who knows – maybe the Arts Council and carer charities will just build their own rival system. Or even better, Airbnb will just decide to do it anyway, out of the kindness of their hearts.

The morning after, my manager phones me. “What the fuck did you say to Ed Harcourt?”

“Nothing? I don’t think we spoke, maybe he said hello? Why?”

“Chris, you’re an idiot, he was sat in the hotel lounge explaining to everyone what a rude cunt you are. You’ve done yourself no favours. For God’s sake.”

Hotel lounge. I’m remembering the last train home heaving with Croydon drunks and someone kicking my guitar.

“Sarge, I honestly don’t remember a conversation. You had me there from midday til midnight to play two songs with no food or money while everyone else swanned in and out, I was pretty fucking tired and pissed off at the end, maybe I was a dick but not in a proper personal dick sort of way, just in a me-being-a-dick sort of way and you know it was a fucking rubbish night, for that lineup it should’ve been rammed, Hitchcock and Stewart Lee and a half full room and some Plum Promotions arse and no atmosphere and you pretending to spin discs on your laptop, not even a real CD player and we turned down supporting fucking Decemberists at the Water Rats for that? Fucking Decemberists, they’re going to be huge!”

(Calmly) “No they’re not, Chris. You did the right gig. And you’ve got to be nicer next time.”

Last weekend we went to Collider at the Science Museum, the exhibition about CERN, the LHC and the discovery of the Higgs Boson. It is £10 for an adult, gets drastically undermined by its introductory film – and I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed coming out of a major exhibition. 

Is this what mainstream science-based curation is like?

Collider opens with a video introduction given by scientists inside a mocked up lecture theatre. It’s not clear if these are real staff members, or actors playing caricature. The lead is a Yaffle-ish cliché, over-enunciating like a first time local newsreader, giving us a kind of smug, self-absorbed monologue about peripheral, mostly meaningless stuff. Of course, if he’s a real CERN scientist I feel bad for dissing his delivery – but this whole section is desperate distraction rather than rich content. It feels like a hundred idiots tweaked the brief. It feels like a multi-agency fluff – where directors and editors entirely fail to establish target audience, or decide what needs saying, or oversee their presenters to be simple and economic. Actually, it feels as if the sole aim is not to explain the Higgs Boson or LHC at all, rather to ram home the point that scientists are interesting people with human lives. This is Cowellian distopic nightmare writ large and shoved worryingly deep into our science and innovation establishment. Emotive (and silly) personal life nonsense and generic “Whoa! how excited we are!” replaces any sense of authority or faith in the richness of what these experiments may mean. One scientist tells us she’s doing it all for the memory of her humble schoolteacher father – and her script reads exactly like one of those moments on X Factor when they force-grow audience empathy. My gears grind. We’re in a presentation to relentlessly tell us how important it all is, rather than showing us.

Also, they use the phrase ‘money shot’. How on earth did that get past an editorial team? “Mum, what does ‘money shot’ mean?”

There’s one teasing footage moment of Peter Higgs and some actual findings – less than three seconds – before we skim away again, uneducated and unmoved. Far more time is spent on an inane, irritating joke involving Brian Cox, who appears faced away from us, while a scientist calls him ‘new boy’ and demands a cup of tea from “what was your name again?” “Brian”. Meaningful look to camera.

And then one scientist makes this joke, with the clear implication that we’re meant to laugh with him, not at him: “My wife says I spend more time with the LHC than her. But I can get another wife.”

Gobsmacking. The scriptwriting is criminal. Imagine how much more powerful this film could’ve been if someone (yeah perhaps Cox, since they’ve paid him to show up anyway!) did the following simple steps: (1) explained the problems they wanted to solve, questions they wanted to answer in the first place (which don’t get a mention). (2) showed us clips of CERN at work and play, (3) then clips of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs and maybe some Peter Higgs himself (that can be our emotional kicker). Finally (4) summing up (as simply as possible) what it all means. It’s, er, not rocket science. By god, an actual history lesson.

Collider’s opening salvo is sexist, badly put together and dumb, its compromised cheapness rendered obvious by the huge screen size. It fatally injures the rest of the exhibition, which without it (and without the entry fee) might’ve been perhaps mostly harmless. We need to suspend skeptism and, fundamentally, maintain interest in these scientists’ achievement in order to enjoy being briefly and vaguely immersed in their world. Instead we walk through the rest of Collider filled with the exact wrong responses. Sarcastic and flaw-spotting. Disengaged. There’s a high quality surround CG film that takes us ‘inside’ the LHC itself, whooshing around us on a huge screen, yet with no components or processes adequately explained. There are further scientist narratives which are much better; talking about individual aspects of CERN’s work. There’s the evocative recreation of an office space and corridor, which – again – aims to entirely prioritise the humanising of the staff, ahead of any explanation of what they do.

If Collider is this weak, it has a further problem: how vastly rich the experience is to simply walk through the rest of the Science Museum to get there. If you’re remotely engaged with, or interested in science, or if you have children who are interested in science, please visit the Science Museum, it’s a wonderful, overwhelming place. I found more of Prof. Cox’s trademark “Wonder!” in a single projected display showing vividly how many satellites there really are orbiting Earth (answer: a shitload, looking at it makes Gravity a ton more plausible) than the entire Collider walk-through. So please don’t spend the extra money to visit Collider. If they’re contributing to the Cowellising of culture like this, we’ll only encourage them if it’s successful. Instead, we can find other ways to discover and share the joys of the LHC and the stories of the scientists who built and used it. An hour on Youtube will probably do the job vastly better.

It’s that time again. I think this year has been exceptional for all strands of culture and I’m well pleased with how much I got to check out (especially films and books), compared to the last 2-3 years. So here we go, 2013 in culture…

My third Pecha Kucha talk was given (as were both previous ones) for the Brighton Digital Festival edition of PKN Brighton. I love the format but this time it ran away from me…

This article was originally published in Louder Than War magazine.

A great number of UK music artists I admire now use crowd-funding platforms like PledgeMusic or Indiegogo to raise cash from fans, to fund albums, videos, or touring. It’s very quickly been normalised in the music industry, to the point that you’ll almost never hear a bad word spoken about these platforms. Unusually, they’re popular with mainstream upcoming artists, the companies around them and also fully independent, self-described DIY or underground artists.

But something in me finds them disconcerting. I admit I’ve not once contributed money to an artist’s Pledge campaign. Each time I hear about one, even when I adore the artist, my heart sinks. Yet people clearly feel it works and there are a pile of happy (on the surface at least) customers. It’s a perfectly legitimate way to fund music in the new online paradigm.

So, what’s my beef?

As hugely successful US crowd-funding company Kickstarter launches in the UK; for the first time offering a serious competitor to PledgeMusic, it’s worth considering the case against, if only to enable a debate when the narrative is so blandly positive. Full disclosure: I’ve never tried it myself. Xtra Mile Recordings did run a successful Pledge campaign to replace stock (including my albums) destroyed in the depot fire (after the London riots) but I have no personal experience of running one. Trying to figure out why I’m not into them, here’s what I’ve come up with:

The emperor’s new clothes. Wasn’t half the point of going online to get rid of third parties? Instead it’s a messy battle. We binned major labels but got trapped in the price-controlled, tax dodging chaos of Amazon and iTunes, even when Bandcamp gave us a cleaner alternative. Then along came this whole new generation of third parties, jumping in ahead of the distributors to get their share, before the music’s even made. And because the process is automated, artists and punters alike seem blind to an obvious truth; at a basic fundamental level, web-based platforms are the same old villains wearing a hipper jacket. Yet again they find a thing that artists (wrongly) believe they can’t do alone, then slide in between artist and audience by offering that thing as a service, in order to cream off profit.

I’m convinced almost any artist with a moderate fan-base can crowd-fund just as easily, with less commitment, more control and a greater overall ROI (return on investment), just by having conversations with the right people. What is it about these formal frameworks that let the artist off the hook of asking personally for support, when it’s usually the exact same people who end up contributing anyway? You want someone’s money, fucking go and ask them. Write a letter. It feels as if everyone’s playing at grown-ups by using a third party website as a dressing-up box.

That’s too much money. For running a largely passive, artist-driven web-based platform (nothing more complex than Flickr, Instagram, Facebook or a hundred other free sites) with a simple financial processing structure bolted on, these companies charge 15% of revenue – and are less than transparent to funders, who are often only vaguely aware that there’s a percentage taken at all. And that’s a lot. That’s what a music manager or booking agent took in the old days, for doing a massive load of work to bring in income. Artists have spent 100 years deeply resenting – and regularly sacking or suing – managers and agents on the same percentage they now happily give to strangers for letting them sit on their web servers for a bit.

Treats for funders are embarrassing and a total arsehole to get done. Money is teased out of devoted fans with offers of rewards, exclusive content, private attention, all sorts. But these bring the wrong kind of closeness; too big a sense of a personal debt owed; often placing artists in uncomfortable situations. Trying to record music with 25 funders sitting in the control room as part of a treat day is a joke. A cause of this over-reach is also malevolent: the ever-increasing sense of urgency (becoming terror later) as the deadline looms, because ‘success’ is so important it erodes any objective sense of what is realistic or achievable. Which brings me to:

Something not even made yet is already a failure. On Kickstarter 56% of projects fail to make target and get zero. Unpack that stat and it’s pretty concerning: these creative people didn’t undertake Kickstarter lightly in the first place, they made a plan, shot a video, offered their fanbase all the bonuses in the world and still failed to hit target. That’s a whole lot of effort and commitment gone to define themselves as a big fat loser, for financial reasons rather than artistic judgement. I wonder what the damage done is, in real terms.

This is innately biased (of course) against inarticulate, disorganised and working class artists (whose wider communities and support bases tend to have fewer financial resources). I also reckon, although this is tenuous, that the system leans in favour of technically innovative, science-based, gimmicky, design or technical projects over pure art, because the former can be more easily explained, ahead of actually doing it.

New album releases go on forever. First the artist talks up the new album before even starting to make it. Then they endlessly document the process. Then it’s done and first they release it exclusively to funders. Then they do other posh formats separately, in order to send them out to other funders. Finally they release the album to everyone else. It’s been weeks since those first people got hold of it and someone immediately file-shared it. We’re bored now.

Finally, my biggest, most esoteric dissent speaks to broader issues about fundraising campaigns in general. These platforms rely on everyone turning a blind eye to a truth: that a very few devoted followers will fund almost everything. When artists draw resource from their audience, a very select core number of individual funders (relatively wealthy and truly devoted) will underwrite the whole ballgame. This is already true of the wider music industry: If we started analyzing the tiny contingency of people propping up our entire business, we’d be aghast. In crowd-funding, success or failure depends on whether the artist has those particular followers. I say this without specific data to back me up – however it is based on first hand experience not in the music world, nor business, but in the third sector (charity industry). In language and structure, arts crowd-funding campaigns far more closely resemble charity appeals than other kinds of business fundraising, right down to the ideas around ‘donating’ in return for special rewards. A charity industry ‘universal truth’ is that at least 80% of money comes from fewer than 20% of donors. Successful crowd-funding campaigns will always have exclusive, very high value rewards for much larger amounts, where ‘selling’ only a handful of them underwrites a massive proportion of the campaign. It’s an identical approach.

Honestly, so many artists I know who’ve crowd-funded would back me up here: because of this principle, the success or failure of a project is less down to the size of audience, or how hard the artist works the campaign across the breadth of their fan-base; it’s more down to whether they’re lucky enough to have a small core of very devoted and relatively wealthy fans, and/or some rewards of high value to offer those fans.

I believe, far too often, the artist becomes slave to the campaign, rather than the other way around. You would be astonished the number of artists out there who, even after publicly successful target-smashing campaigns, will later quietly express a range of regrets that they wouldn’t want their generous audience to know about. They look back and regret what they offered; regret the time wasted honoring those offers; regret how panicky they got about a ludicrous arbitrary definition of ‘success’; regret how the balance in their relationship with supporters shifted; regret not finding the funds elsewhere, so they could be more flexible about what it was they were making.

And these are the ones who won.

Now, I’m not really bothered; from all angles it’s just people making choices. I guess I just feel a bit sorry for them all, that they couldn’t try other ways first. And phew, I didn’t even mention Amanda Palmer.

ps. thanks to music fan and Words With Friends opponent Matt Rhodes for emailing me a question about recorded music pricing, which triggered this article – sorry I haven’t actually answered your questions at all, Matt, I’ll get to them.

I knew Kim Gavin’s Closing Ceremony would be the antithesis of the crazy-beautiful joy that Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce brought to the opening night: I knew it would be predictable and mainstream. But that was fine, we’d have a laugh, enjoy the music acts we like and I honestly thought it would still be funny after three hours. Witnessing the pop stars and lickspittles trying to equal Boyle’s heady brew. Art is subjective, after all.

I was mistaken: it was a numbing, disheartening disaster. The biggest floating turd we ever did whiff; reducing, demeaning and re-squishing Britain, at the very moment we’d felt shifted long-term for the better by these liberating Olympic Games. In one fattened pig of a gong-show, Gavin forced us back into clunky shackles that Boyle and Boyce briefly, tantalisingly freed us from, only a month ago. Far worse than just being bad, what unfolded was – I think – proper fucking dangerous. You know that phrase: the banality of evil. So.

There’d been rumblings that Danny Boyle didn’t put enough Churchill in. Our war leader, fast deposed in peacetime, wasn’t given enough of a strident voice for organisers’ tastes. Because obviously we need thoughts of conflict and top-down triumphalism, not co-operation and shared effort, to show us off to the world on the eve of a big sports pageant. Dur. Anyway, Kim Gavin kicked off by correcting that error, with admirable actor Tim Spall bellowing something from The Tempest, stretched over a noisy background canvas in awful parroting rasp, reprised in broader strokes from his performance in The King’s Speech. Not a fresh moment then; instead lifted from someone else’s casting and someone else’s process.

This flags up clearly what was about to happen for fucking hours: piles of stuff presented as unique, weighty or historical that was actually just re-staged ubiquity; hackney carriaged bits and bobs, flung up-and-out on stadium scale, nothing new added. Constantly disappointing, the show repeatedly heralded musical legends who weren’t there; Bowie, Bush, they didn’t appear, just backing tracks over a tannoy. Desperately a commentator tells us Kate Bush re-recorded her vocal part for the ceremony. Why even bother, though?

Another outing for Emeli Sandé. In the Opening Ceremony she performed too but it wasn’t so much about her, then, as what she was singing: The Meaning had little to do with her domestic fame or career path. This time it was the opposite: entirely about Sandé as a PR machined product – and she went on for ages. I have to believe both Adele and Leona turned down Gavin, for Emeli to have got this length of slot; I’ve forgotten anything about the song except the totally Adele-ish solo piano accompaniment. Foghorn Florence was too edgy to appear, or too smart.

Gavin couldn’t get Oasis to reform; instead relying on Liam’s Beady Eye to karaoke ancient song Wonderwall. And what the fuck has happened to Liam’s voice? Once perhaps the greatest sneering, louche roar this country has produced – a rich, northern counterpoint to Johnny Rotten – yet now I guess ravaged by cocaine,  inactivity, far too much soft cheese, it’s a horrible whining dither. Like when The Fast Show one week swapped Jazz Club for Indie Club (ha, there’s a boring, outdated 90s reference for you) it was a disinterested parody of ‘alternative’.

I reckon George Michael’s live auto-tune was still on as he spoke between his two songs, so his voice glitched out as if he’d breathed helium.

And the most audaciously lazy bit of all: the entire audio track of the opening section then replayed as backing soundtrack to the athletes arriving and partying. Gavin couldn’t even be bothered to pick some different tunes to play out over the PA. Even the shittest amateur wedding DJ wouldn’t pull that stunt. So cheapskate, one almost expected the Spotify adverts to interrupt halfway through.

Such relentless, vacuous prioritising of burger van iconography over real-life performance (or talent) is summed up by Russell Brand’s song’n’dance number. I like Brand but he is a stand-up comedian, television presenter and sometimes a useful cultural commentator. None of these are here, instead we rely on his hyperdriven celebrity itself to carry something that is patently (and self-knowingly, since he played it for laughs) drivel. Now I’m getting carried away slagging it off but there is a more important thing needs highlighting about this show, with a direct comparison:

From the Opening Ceremony, take Atkinson-as-Bean’s comic bit around Sir Simon Rattle conducting Chariots Of Fire. Whether or not you enjoy Bean, this was an undercutting and re-humanising of an epic ‘classic’ piece of music that – without fundamentally lessening its power (it was subsequently used throughout the Olympics) – took it to a previously unseen, interesting, funny place. THAT is how to treat an icon. It was Gerard Hoffnung-esque, de-mythologised the orchestra and took itself lightly without deadening itself. Meanwhile, there was Akram Khan’s powerful Indian dance in near silence, linked to Emile Sande singing Abide With Me in tribute to fallen comrades. Here, crucially, the ethnicity, or ‘exoticism’ of the dance is not the point of the dance, rather it is presented as part of a bigger ‘us’, while the emotion in the dance is its strength and focus.

Compare those two sections to their near parallel in the Closing Ceremony; where Eric Idle flounces through Python smash Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life before being interrupted by, again, some Indian dancers, who befuddle and confuse him, throw dust on him, leave him distracted. On a quality level; again nothing new or rare. Performances of this song take place every night somewhere across the UK as part of Spamalot. On a political level, it no way captured any of the subversive silliness of the original from Life Of Brian. All reference to the film’s edgy content exorcised, of course.

But far worse, this routine was entirely about the otherness and exoticism of the Indian dance juxtaposed against Idle’s familiarity; this was the dancers’ sole point; to be alien where previously there was comfort. This is deeply malignant. Idle’s uncomfortable adversity was cultural diversity, because that is how this ruinous establishment needs us to feel about multi-culturalism, even as we pay lip service to difference. We already saw clearly – for example in far-right Tory arsewipe Aiden Burley’s “multi-cultural crap” tweet and a Daily Mail piece so bursting with racism even they re-edited it – how Boyle’s opening work was drastically radical by comparison: ethnicity and background properly enmeshed and un-highlighted.

Kim gave a similar bashing to gender, sensitivity perhaps heightened by how the past three weeks has been an extraordinary Olympic Games for women; with significant, real steps taken. The ‘fashion biz’ segment in the Closing Ceremony was an unfathomably regressive bit of choreographed objectification. It felt deliberate, as if designed to rein in any aspiration or hopes that briefly glimpsed light this past month. Huge photos of girls in posh frocks. Superstar models appear, celebrified, apeing their runway work on flatbeds. It wasn’t a fashion show in itself, or a true celebration of design (which would’ve told us something about design). It was more like the revenge of the owner of the commodified clothes-horse: as if womankind needed to be ritually re-objectified, after a short respite month of being valued in a better way. Ramming back home the wider truths of rape culture and wealth-based costumery idealism.

Appalling on both fronts: politically (not party-politically but in its representation of us as a people, a nation, to the world) and culturally, through its sheer, gobsmacking lack of material. Kim Gavin’s ceremony contained not a single new or unexpected idea. Not one! Just relentless looping of overly-seen bits from other big recent shows, produced by the same hegemony. The Who perform. Tick. Brian May does a big guitar solo. Tick. Ed Sheeran. Tick. There is no content and no meaning here whatsoever.

They were perfectly within their rights to produce a poor show – or rather, a show I personally didn’t enjoy: one person’s piece of crap is another person’s fun party. But what they weren’t within their rights to do was claw back the goodness. They stole our rapture and they put John Lennon’s dead face onto commodified conventionalism. Kim Gavin is the perfect example of an endemic disease in the modern British arts industry: a hugely powerful establishment creative director who is not actually a creative person, or if he was, long ago outsourced it for status and pies. His show was not cookery but mere assemblage – a Lego house built from bricks we all saw already, outdated values and the co-opting and commodifying of grace. And not even an interestingly shaped whole.

What Boyle’s Opening Ceremony had done was open up the doors; a box of delights; the best of what we are and what we can be in Great Britain, how we built this motherfucker. Showing us our truthful crazy-beautiful spirit and heralding in two weeks of sport in such a way that we felt something could be reclaimed and changed. We repaid him by being the best athletes, volunteers and audience in history.

What Gavin’s Closing Ceremony has done is to throw Britain back in the box and slam it shut; fiercely and unquestioningly placing current hegemonies back in charge; re-infantilising and re-exoticising all that Boyle had tried to unlock for us; a revenge for the otherness and the hierachy and the celebrity-for-its-own-sake, just as these bullshit Cowellian things had seemed to be proven unneeded. It was a boot on our face. I wonder how we’ll repay him.