TRASHFUTURE - The Black Hand of Streaming feat. Franz Ferdinand

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

It’s been a big seven days for Trashfuture: we moved in to our new basement office in East London for starters, and this week Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) sat down with Alex Kapranos @alkapranos) and Bob Hardy (@B0bHardy) from Franz Ferdinand (a band you might have heard of) to discuss streaming’s effect on artists, why they believe in the welfare state, the dangerous effects of austerity on creative arts, and -- of course -- some discussion of our favourite billionaire idiots. A huge thank you to Bob and Alex for being such gracious and patient guests, considering this is easily one of the worst podcasts ever to exist. If you’re as big of a Franz Ferdinand fan as us, you should definitely buy their new album ‘Always Ascending’ directly from Domino Records: https://franzferdinand.dominomart.com/ Also, remember that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview Don’t forget that you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. You can also purchase useful kitchen implements from our socialist cookware sponsor, Vremi (https://vremi.com/).

I came back to my flat today to find a friend of mine who was just sort of standing there. And he's very, very excited because he has an idea to make what he thinks is going to be $60,000 or so with minimal investment over the next year, taking advantage of an apparent price arbitrage between French bulldogs in the United Kingdom and Canada, because he saw one advertised on gumtree for 500 pounds and a friend of his who breeds them on a farm in New Zealand can sell them for $5,000 each. And so I asked him, what are you going to do with this? And he says, well, I'm going to buy it. Say it's my pet. Fly back to Vancouver. And my parents have just cleaned out the garage, so I assume they'll be okay dealing with this.

So I'm wondering, is there something wrong with this dog that he's purchasing though? Think about that. It's like, is he not getting a great deal because this dog is massively defective? Is he about to become the owner of like the lineage of bad, badly bred bulldog like the omen dog? Is he about to buy a Hobbesburg French bulldog? Absolutely. An Austrian bulldog. And so I thought I was like, do is is there are there any licenses involved in doing this? And he is like, I have no idea. All I know is that you pay about two thousand dollars for one to come stud for you. And then, you know, you they can't give birth naturally. So you need to give him a C section. And then which I'll just do in my garage because I'm a normal person. I've got

a garage. That's most of what you need. Sounds expensive. I mean, I mean, I think what's he going to do with the dog? Why is he going to sell it in New Zealand? Well, he's going to sell it in Canada based on New Zealand prices. Where are you listening to more research here? Find out the Canadian prices. It might be $500 for a dog over there. Yeah, you might he might end up basically just losing money on a cockamamie scheme. He's actually just not done enough research on Canada and he thinks New Zealand is part of Canada. That's it. No, no. It's that he essentially is going to spend thousands of pounds on a cockamamie scheme to start a clandestine dog breeding ring out of his parents garage while living here, but he will become an expert on dog handling fees across

international flights for the entirety of the Commonwealth because and that's the thing is you've got to spend money to make money right. Okay, also an expert on C sections that I catch that right. You've got it for a French bull bulldog to give birth. It has to be heads, maybe yeah C section. Yeah, wow, but he's saying he's sure that they're going to sell for $5,000 each and he's going to get seven dogs per. But I mean, haven't you ever been to Vancouver people just offering dog C sections everywhere you go on the street? You want a bulldog? Hey, I got you. I got a scalpel with access to the Vancouver, the Brooklyn, Italian, American bit of Vancouver where they do a dog C is just like my mama used to do in the old country. They banned the dog

trade in Brooklyn. They had to move somewhere. They went to Vancouver when they banned the dog trade in Brooklyn. Everybody's got to get in the wax. Tony, I'm going to give you a taste of this action on the dog C sections. Alright, we've been running this thing with these guys out of out of Dover. Okay. Anyway, so by the logic of late stage capitalism, he's going to be a billionaire in a couple of months. Build an app. Oh, yeah, you need an app. Hello again. Once again, I'm never going to do the intro right. I think I think that's part of the show now. Welcome to the podcast about how the future is trash unless we institute. We don't

know. We don't say a fully automated luxury gay space communism. You haven't said what we said, what I've not been saying for the last year because I never said it right. I never once said it right. I never once said the intro to our own show correctly. Now make money from that being said, we we're here tonight to record a show with two special guests. We have Riley introduce them. Oh, dude, do you mind? I'm a host now. Apparently, do you mind if I do the thing that I do every episode? Yes. So we have we have our special guests here tonight. We have Alice Kepranos from Franz Ferdinand and as well Bob Hardy from Franz Ferdinand. Hey, what a coincidence. We just took off their blindfolds and now they've realized they're together.

Everyone, I guess I'm not the main guy anymore. People, I actually know who they are on our podcast for you. You've been re-served Riley. It doesn't matter anymore. Okay, do you do you want to do all the research and reading all like the leftist essays on shit and understand what like the correct takes are? I'm just going to get on gumtree and find someone to do that while I'm arbitraging dog prices. I'm just going to hire a dog to do it. Yeah, French Bulldogs are actually good at that shit. Really bad at giving birth, but excellent at reading up on leftist doctrine. So we got we got some good we got some good shit for you today.

We've got some we've got some of our normal our normal sort of, you know, peddling crap that we're going to talk through as we usually do about how, you know, basically most major industries are more or less bad. And then we're going to sort of go a little bit more into the ways in which the music industry has been, let's say, changed by the, not just by the advent of streaming, but by the guess, the way it sort of has sort of emphasized some of the shit about it that was already bad and invented new bad stuff for us all to enjoy more or less. If you've got a free and open garage, you don't need to be making music. You can be making money from dog, Caesarean sections. Look, here's the thing. When there's

a massive arbitrage available in French Bulldog prices across different national borders, the fools go into the French Bulldog business. The wise men go into the dog C-section business. So that being said, Riley, you have some interesting information about our favorite, our favorite billionaire villain. No, no, this is our second or third. Well, there's different billionaire villain. Two billionaire villains, two billionaire villains in this one. It's hard to keep track, to be honest. We've been bringing back some old standby segments a little bit. We've done a couple of products in the last few weeks. This is a Silicon Valley reinvented something section, because this is the most ideologically loaded Silicon Valley

reinvented something section I think we've ever done in the past ever. The stakes are high. Eric Schmidt has a new startup plan called the one billion wage gain challenge. Now, I'm going to read this short section and then it sounds gym related and then because this is a very, very regular podcast that's sort of very just started down the middle and makes a lot of sense. My co-hosts and the main elements of the band, Franz Ferdinand, are going to guess more or less what it is that they're doing. Our goal writes Schmidt's, well, or Schmidt's publicist to be fair. None of these ghouls probably even remember how to write. Our goal is to help fuel a movement that results in meaningful

wage gains for workers across the country. Much like the concept of a one billion dollar unicorn startup in Silicon Valley, this is a one billion dollar unicorn to grow the middle class. We'll source new existing ideas, highlight promising examples, we'll encourage the workforce to field sorry, excuse me. We'll encourage the workforce to explore innovative approaches and call in players from other fields to address this challenge. What have they invented? Rather, what is this context inventing? They've misspelled the word union as unicorn. Out the gate is true. I was reading about this earlier. They're talking about increasing wages for low and middle income workers by $10,000 a year. This guy, what's

he worth like 15 billion or something like that? Yeah, some nonsense amount. Yeah, $10,000 a year is absolutely nothing to him. He's basically describing the concept of a union and those big tech organizations, everything that they can over the year is to suppress worker representation. So the whole thing is a little bit perverse from my perspective. What is the unicorn? Is that an accepted term in Silicon Valley? What does that mean? I don't know. I've heard it. People like Mark Zuckerberg described as unicorns because apparently they just have this singular ability to generate profit and a massive horn on their head. Yeah, it's that they hunted for, for, for there's this, the sexual prowess that their bones provide

apparently. Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's the belief. It's, I think it's, it's innocent. It is a fundamentally sort of liberal belief that sort of the people who are the tech billionaires are sort of magically special and intelligent and so I think we need to hold it a little closer though. That's so arrogant. And it's this idea that sort of it's, well, we, we need more Schmitts, we need more Zuckerbergs, we need more Elon Musk's, which we'll get more of your friend with the dogs. We need more of my friend with the dogs in order to grow, to order to grow our economy and get out of this slump and really bring prosperity to everyone. I mean, but I mean, I don't sound like a broken record,

but like the idea that there's a slump, if there's a wage growth slump, it's because there's too many people like Eric Schmidt with billions of dollars on hand and not enough people who can spend money on things they need because their wages haven't grown in 10 years or 20 years. That's exactly it. I mean, the thing I'd say too is just like, you have that here in the UK, you have it in the US and it's just sort of like, what is it about Google that apparently, even though they claim to hire the smartest people, they can't seem to figure out the idea like, well, maybe, I don't know, you, you shouldn't find ways to exclude your workers from benefits. You shouldn't, you know, have half your workforce that isn't tech, tech people, be contractors who get nothing. You know,

you shouldn't contribute to these things that basically like, you know, make sure that housing is so expensive that people literally have no disposable income. But like, apparently, no, you need a unicorn to solve the problem. The problem with Google is they lack the fundamental resources to come up with great ideas. And the most fundamental resource of all that they lack is garage space. The more of that you have, the better the ideas you come up with. It's like, it's like, it's like, and how are you? How are unicorns born? Is that VSC section as well? I presume it must be like with that horn. It's going to cause a lot of damage on the way out. Those guys double team it. The guy is doing the French Bulldogs. They

do unicorns as well. Eric Schmidt has put money on it. I mean, he's ready to help. I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't know, but I don't think Ask Jeeves got a lot of lunch breaks. Yeah, thank you. But it's the thing is they've, they've basically seen this as a kind of, they've seen the sort of the problem of low productivity and low wage growth as a sort of technical problem that with, with, with the, with the application of just enough cleverness, enough smarts, we'll be able to sort of overcome it and then everyone can benefit together. It's pretty simple. You just pay people more. Well, that's pretty radical that Bob Hardy. I'm not sure. You can make that an app.

Hold your horses with those crazy ideas. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing. Anytime that, that the labor market has been disrupted by tech, think about what it's done. It's created Amazon fulfillment centers. It's created sort of precarious Uber drivers and delivery riders. It's, it's sort of, it's, it's fiverred jobs where sort of once you could be a copywriter, now you're someone selling sort of 15 minutes a time of copywriting on fiverr, like, like all, all the, every, every time it disrupts, it disrupts in favor of capital. Do you know what gives me like a really uneasy feeling when I hear about this story? It's, it's the way it's presented by him and his group of unicorns or whatever they are,

as if it's a new situation, as if it's a new problem that they need to find a new solution to, but it's not. It's, it's the age old problem, which is people who are in a position of power, abuse that power and take advantage of, of, of people who don't have power and, and yeah, they have no representation. That's the heart of the problem. I can't remember. I'm a bit behind with the various tech companies, but what's Google's tax states at the moment? Are they registered? I'm sure they have a headquarters in Ireland and they're sitting on a comically large pile of cash that you just have to put in warehouses. You know, it's like, it's, it's, it's look, it's, it's identity politics for billionaire douchebags.

Well, the point out too is it, I mean, there was a guy, I can't remember his name, but he was one of the co-founders of Amazon and I think he's cashed out at one of these points. He's not like Jeff Bezos. He's not still involved, but he's a billionaire and he made the point that he's like, I like to think of myself as a decently, you know, modest person, but I'll probably buy three or four pairs of, of trousers per year. However, I am not going to buy 30,000 pairs of trousers per year that workers would buy if they had money to buy them. It's like, there's no way that someone like me with billions of dollars is going to be able to, you know, service the equivalent of workers with disposable income. And so like, the solution is right there in their hands, it's just, but it

just, it doesn't, it doesn't ring true to people who, because they're not going to spend the money they have to keep you in the bank to make more money. That's what the comedian Kevin Bridges, his, that was his idea was to, to kickstart the economy, just make the doll like a thousand pounds a week because people will spend it, you know, straight into the economy. You know, the only way we're going to convince someone like, like, because there's a certain kind of underheaded like Tory MP that's very easily swayed by like an app. I mean, like Liz Truss or Matt Hancock or whatever, like just real pinheads. Apparently they love apps. And, and this trust would love the French Bulldog thing. She'd be like, this man is an entrepreneur. He's pioneering,

he's in Beijing, selling dogs for meat. Okay. So what I'm saying, what I'm saying, what I'm saying, I mean, she wants to strike trade deals. What I'm saying is what we need to do is, as I think the real solution to this is just, okay, the app is called U N I N onion United Nations. It's nations. And, and, and, and basically what it does is it allows workers to swipe right on whether or not they'll want to continue working that day, but it allows them to do it together on the basis of aggregating all the right swipes and there's a vote. It's a great idea. Yeah. And so, and then, you know, they can, they can message each other on, uh, S T R I K R. And then, yeah, exactly. And then then they maybe they'll be able to sort of collectively bargain

and take all the vowels out of it. We'll call an app. And then then maybe that they can finally get enough money to buy all those pants or buy stupid friends French Bulldog idea. And also what you could have the app feeding some kind of news feed. So as the workers get the vote gets towards towards striking, it affects the stock price and the stock price starts going down. So then, you know, it actually affects the people who own the company and then they have to like listen to the workers. What's really astonishing is that they actually first created this app in like mills in the 18th century. They didn't even need a musical form, right? Yeah. Yeah. That was the analog form of the app. It's the first app that was built in a punch card,

is obvious solution to a glaring political, non-technical problem. Right. Yeah. These problems are, they were solved ages ago, right? Yeah. Yeah. We've solved them. It's just, you know, thatcher unsolved. But come now, Riley, I have been told that the unions were the cause of all the problems in the seventies and we had to get rid of them because that solved it. And now wage growth is stagnant and literally the only country in the European Union with the worst wage growth in the United Kingdom is Greece. Uh, also a famous success story of neoliberal economics. Oh, yeah. I know. Absolutely. You see, actually, you think that we need to stop doing neoliberal economics, but I, much like the Tory party and Sam Gema, my response is, what if we didn't?

Well, then what if then we could then we just turn to our heroes like Eric Schmidt or Elon Musk to solve our problems for us? Are you, are you seguin? I might be seguin. You never know. Hang on. Before we do, I've actually, I've actually got an idea. So I've recently come into an empty garage. Okay. Wait, did you also come into the French Bulldog inside it? Because that might be a problem. I did not do that. Jesus Christ. Oh, wow. You've kind of you've pushed me aside there. That's I had to think about that for a second. And what does the world need? Woven fabrics. Now I've invented a kind of a kind of weaving machine. I'm not sure what I'm going to call it yet. And it's powered by is this amazing thing where if you boil water,

it creates a kind of vapor and you can use it to drive turbines and movement. And then what I'm going to do is get small boys to climb into it and remove the broken parts from the machine. It's going to be very dangerous, but it's going to revolutionize the economy. So I mean, you spinning Jenny. Yeah. What you've essentially invented is a very young apprenticeship program that's going to get kids the skills they need to succeed in tomorrow's economy. Exactly. So just replacing boom parts with that in mind. Let's talk about the incredible efficiency of the economy, which was apparently moved by an order of magnitude on the basis of a weed joke. So Elon Musk, we're going to have to cast our minds, our minds back into

hallowed antiquity for this to work right now. Remember early August. I know that might be difficult because it probably feels like a 20 fucking years ago more distant than the fall of Rome at this point. Yes. Yeah. Because everything just there's a lot happening very frequently. And so early August is another world for me. But Elon Musk tweeted and I remember because I was actually on the train to Edinburgh writing an article for the independent about how he's a very specific kind of dumb guy. He went and did something very smart, didn't he? Yes. He tweeted, I am taking Tesla private at $420 a share funding secured. We all remember this, correct? Yes, sir. Yeah. We all remember this great little use of online. Now, most people

thought this was just Elon Musk being his usual dumbass epic bacon self, feeling like ho ho weed joke. But it so much more spun off of it because Tesla short sellers lost more than $800 million after Musk tweeted this and he earned more than $851 million immediately after tweeting this admittedly cryptic weird sentence. It also bears mention, I think that Tesla is one of those companies that people should be selling short because like invariably they're not going to meet their goals. But there's this cult of personality surrounding Elon Musk that seems to drive its price up if you care about stock prices. And as such, like there are people constantly betting against it. And the fact that anyone might dare bet against Elon Musk's baby

drives him bananas. And so like the opportunity, even if it ultimately ends up causing bigger problems for him down the road, the ability to shame anyone who dares bet against his baby is such a powerful force for him that of course he has to do the thing that he did. I'm just fantasizing about the idea of Elon Musk having a baby that's involved in some kind of like baby boxing ring and I can bet against it. I don't know what goes down in South Africa, but I wouldn't I wouldn't bet against that being true. So essentially the twist in this story, of course, comes when Stephen Piken, co-director of enforcement for the SEC, a guy who was presumably born in a blue suit and like with a 401k, could have been a gray suit. Let's be fair,

said the news conference. We allege that Musk arrived at the price of $420 by assuming a 20% premium of what Tesla's then existing share price was then rounding up to 420 because of the significance of that number in marijuana culture and his belief that his girlfriend would be amused by it. I think that's funny. Yeah, I think I like someone seeing a joke through like a weak joke, but making it as far as possible. Taking a weak joke to the point of financial fraud. A weak joke to making nearly a billion dollars, you know, accidentally. I've never made that much money off a joke. I'm going to put it out there. He's a better comedian than me by that metric. I mean, if you're going to go with the sort of irrational neo-liberal consistency

of measuring everything by its dollar value, then yes, Elon Musk is a better comedian than you. He's the world's best comedian. I see. You might be. Yeah. I mean, how long did it take? I mean, yeah, absolutely. That's a lot of money for one joke, which should go to show that neo-liberalism is pretty fucking stupid. I mean, I definitely look at that and I see efficiency when I think about like a weird joke that costs nearly a billion dollars. Yeah. Old jokes should be judged by the bottom line, surely. What am I music? What I love there is like the subtle shade of the guy saying in the belief that his girlfriend would find it amusing. And like the implication is like, not only is he getting absolutely owned for financial fraud here, but that his girlfriend

wasn't even amused by it. Like the SEC investigate and she's like, no, she was not significant. Elon Musk has ended up being fined 20 million dollars, which is not much for a billionaire, but it's not nothing over basically doing something that amounts to like a horny dad trying to make a joke to hate on his daughter's friend. Well, I mean, I guess the thing with Elon Musk is just that you see this take place and you're like, here's someone for whom the internet was a mistake. Like you might have just been able to sell his electric cars and make money and do whatever. Had he not gotten so hung up in this idea of sort of like, everything has to be an internet joke. And it's sad because I mean, you may have heard the story

about like the Tesla models, literally the Model S, the Model 3, the Model X, the Model Y, spelling out sexy, because he thinks that's funny. He's a fucking idiot, but he thinks it's funny. And once again, it's like, if you could just have gone back to 2004 and cut off the internet for him, he might be a normal, it might be a normal company now. Next year's line of testers are actually going to spell out boobies if you hold them upside down. I love as well how like as part of the settlement, he might not only have to pay the $20 million, but he might also have to have all of his public announcements supervised. I don't know what that means. Like who is going to be the supervising, but I love the idea that people who are in the public eye and who have

figures of great influence might need to be supervised. If they are, if they're somehow considered to be like dangerous in there, they're tweeting. That would have been normal. You know, you know, you have a good response person. Can you think of any other figures in the public eye who would be great if they were supervised or nothing coming to mind? No, no, no, no, no, like with a new good button. I want to get bold and some interband conflict here. That's when she stopped drinking. Are you familiar with the Elon Musk origin story, which is apparently nonsense, but I love it. I wish it was real. He came from the planet Krypton. He got his first bit of cash because he was running a website in the 90s, which was a corn

fan site, and he developed a mathematical proof that the bass players' baselines were, was the 90%, 99% probability they were ripped off the incidental music on Seinfeld. And so corn, the corn's management paid him $2 million to delete the article and he never, having never mentioned again. Holy shit. So I don't think it's true. That's great. That's great anyway. But what's especially great about that is you don't know how much that plays into the mythology of this entire podcast, because we regularly reference both corn and Seinfeld. I also, it also really releases, I love the idea that a band would have $2 million to like build some guy in the 90s. I mean, yeah, no, I mean, every,

I mean, I can't say, no, I know a lot of Freakin' Elise. That's a corn song. Yeah. Freakin' Elise was very popular. I have a slap funky bass line. They didn't want any further investigation into the fact that Freakin' Elise. Yeah. I mean, my favorite parts of Seinfeld were where George would say something like, I don't know. I just don't like that kind of woman, Jerry, and then corn would come in. Just play Got the Life and Crash Buries on stage. The reason why they paid him off was they didn't want him to make any further analysis into the fact that Freakin' Elise was in fact a song about all the money they illegally made from

breeding French bulldogs in Canada. That's not a French bulldog. That's a French Canadian bulldog. It's eating chips and gravy for Christ's sake. The deal's gone south. Everyone's pulled a gun in each other. It's like that. It's like the part of the movie Heat, wherever it just gets fucked up. But no, what this, what I think this tells us, right, is that, again, this much like the Eric Schmidt thing, the idea that all of these unicorn billionaires are especially clever, especially intelligent, and are going to be the people who save our civilization, is a complete fucking sham. Because how are we unearthed? We're going to believe that this

shameless idiot, who's no longer even allowed to control his own Twitter, but is somehow still allowed to control one of the vastest hordes of resources in human history, is somehow going to save the world or make us a multi-planetary species, or even end our dependence on fossil fuels, when he's more likely to fly a group of colonists to Mars, and when they unfreeze and open their preserved food stores, it just plays a rick-roll video, right? It's utter garbage. Do you think something's happened in his personal life in the last like year or so? Because more and more, it just seems like he's tweeting these mad things, like that submarine thing with the kids in Indonesia, he was trapped. What's going on here? I'm a bit worried for him.

Well, he invited Azalea Banks over to, or Grimes invited Azalea Banks over. She was tweeting, saying that, well, they, yeah. Can I do some weird threesome shit? Just crack down, Azalea. Apparently, that the whole 420 price target thing was like a thing he cooked up well on acid. Like, it basically didn't strike you as what a billionaire CEO who's trying to invent a space rocket is going to be doing. But it fits in with all my theories about like entrepreneurs in general. It seems like such a dumb thing to do. And that's my theory, but entrepreneurs in general, that they're just really dumb and super cocky. That's how they do things. They're so cocky.

They think they're amazing. They think they're so amazing. They call themselves bloody unicorns, whatever the hell that means. And like, and they do like, and I know my sister used to go out with a guy who was a trader. Like he used to sell oil and he was a bit of a, I mean, I'm, he might be listening to this. I don't know. But anyway, Ross, like, like, I'm sure you won't listen to this, Alex. You're a bit of a daft guy. But like, and, and he used to do well when he would just make cocky, stupid decisions. And that seems to be the way that entrepreneurs succeed. Yeah, exactly. It's just self-belief. And also taking, I don't know if you guys ever play chess, but like sometimes like, if you play chess against somebody who is, you know, complete,

doesn't have much experience, but if they do like really mad, unpredictable moves, they can completely destroy you. Same in poker or something like that, because they're behaving, you know, like in a way that you can't predict. And yeah, I think some of the most successful entrepreneurs are likely. I think that's probably the best business conclusion that's ever been come to on this podcast. That's definitely super true about poker life. Definitely played poker with people who are so bad at poker that they're bluffing and they don't know they're bluffing. And that is like the most powerful position ever. That is basically Donald Trump's president. He's bluffing and he doesn't know he's bluffing,

right? Yeah. It's just all, all of these idiots just stumbled dick first into enormous power. And they're why they all got in common. They're white men. Right. Yeah. Wait a minute. I'm going to look around. I'm going to say Riley. I mean, the idea of cocky and not knowing where you are is like, wait a minute. Are you a entrepreneur? You just might be an entrepreneur. Well, it's a little bit of a blue collar comedy. Here's your entrepreneur sign. It's union. Here's your desk. Right. So I think that's that's that's that's Elon. He's paying a lot of money. He's has to stop posting. But what I find perverse is all when you're telling that story is like, he's got to pay a fine of $20 million, right? Yeah. How much did he

make from the the 420 tweet? For more than that, apparently. It's a rounding error. Right. Right. Yeah. Oh my God. That's crazy. Like, you know, he's, yeah, that's a pretty good profit margin. I'm not very good at business, but I can tell that's a good profit margin. I wish like every time I did a dumb tweet, I made that much money. Like, you know, the tweets you're ashamed of, they got like three likes and zero retweets. And then you just like, but I have made like $840 million. So I did tweet. I shitted on my doodoo ass, but I do now own a house. So, you know, swings and roundabouts. That is that is the update from our our big, beautiful, dumb, wet, raw water enema boys

in Silicon Valley, inventor of the electric samurai sword. But we also want to talk about Silicon Valley in a different sense in the way that a particular startup, but a number of startups in general have affected the music industry. And if I am segwaying, hopefully not too early, Riley, you've been rocking the segway man. I'm a segway man. Do what I gotta do. Dude, are you disrupting? I am. I'm a text disruptor. I'm trying to put you off your game. Are you disrupting my rhythm? It is simply following the official NATO segway process. I have a YouTube video. You have to pay for subscribing to it. So now one thing out. You guys, you guys, you guys played a couple of songs in your time. Sure. Yeah, you know a couple of

a couple of one to you're there. So obviously we're here to talk about the darts of pleasure. Oh, yeah, right back. You guys, you guys have basically been musicians for a while. You were you've been musicians sort of before the advent of say not for the advent of streaming necessarily, but before streaming was the main way people consume music. Streaming is a legitimate way to listen to music. It was just at the beginning of like digital consumption really. It was it was a legal downloading when we were when we first started, but it wasn't officially that was a big thing. Oh, shit. I have to apologize to you guys. I think I downloaded your first. I did actually buy your album after I downloaded it. So you're welcome.

I was like, yeah, that that time, like what were we talking like 2004 ish, 2003. I was on our first record came out. I remember in the build up to the release of our album, like I loved all that stuff because it was amazing because you could get your hands on all of this music that was so difficult to find. Like throughout my whole my teenage years, my musically formative years, it was you would spend six months trying to find. I remember spending six months trying to find the only fun in town by Joseph Kay. It was really hard. And then audio galaxy came along and suddenly you could download it. I was going to say instantly, you could download it in about 14 hours. Did that go on to make to be disappointing ultimately?

Because of the instant nature of music because you didn't have the yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. No, no, of course, because like when I finally got the only fun in town, oh my God, the sense of reward was astonishing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had literally spent six months hunting for it when I got my hand. It felt really, really special. And of course, I listened to all the songs that I didn't particularly like on that record and made sure I liked them. Everybody should do with every artist record. Eat the vegetables on the record. Eat the damn vegetables. You've got to like this. The line why was great because not only did you have stuff like that, but then you also had stuff

like weird nine minute audio clips of like someone like doing Homer Simpson arguing with a weirdly racist voiceover of Osama bin Laden. You know, that was the kind of stuff you could find on Limewire. Or I was going to say, you find clips of the Japanese game show where you do a tongue twister and if you get it wrong, a catapult whips you in the nuts. She's not good over audio. I feel like you guys use Limewire better than we did. But you were saying that you were excited to like what release your album on Limewire. I mean, because it's quite a compliment. If like something leaks, people want to hear it. Do you remember our old guitarist Limewire? It was on public. There was a public.

Yeah. I don't like that. I wonder sometimes if that both expands like your listener base, but then also reduces the amount of money like in the sense that on one hand, someone who connects to like Limewire or Napster or WinMX in Australia or Argentina or somewhere is able to have access to a thing they wouldn't be able to get through normal distribution, but then also like they're not paying royalties. Like they're not buying. Yeah. The whole thing shifted like that though. I mean, like, you know, people have stopped buying records, but now theoretically, more people should kind of go to gigs. I guess that's that is the experience now of being a music fan is kind of more and going to the live show.

And also in that period, when all of this file sharing thing first started off, you kind of forget that it wasn't the general population that was downloading music. It was a few people who were pretty tech savvy. It was younger people. You know, my parents wouldn't have been doing it. People in their 30s wouldn't have really been doing it. It was people who knew how to like set this stuff up on their computer and do it. And most people were still buying CDs at that point. And I remember at that time, thinking like, this is this weird period in history where we've got lawlessness. It's like the Wild West. We've got a lawless period and it's going to revert to like the old model

before too long. And it hasn't quite worked out like that. You get kids nowadays, I think, who was I talking to recently? Like someone, a friend of ours who teaches kids and she was saying that they don't understand the concept that you can buy music. It's like, that's like, you know, 14, 15 year old kids like, we're doing buy music. Well, when I was when I was at last weekend, I was I was hanging out with some of the IPPR people who are, in fact, one of the previous guests on our show, Matt Lawrence. And they're talking a lot, they were talking a lot about almost exactly what you were saying, Alex, this idea that there was a Wild West and anarchy of the digital commons in music

that was going to revert to the, to some, either the old model or some other model of some kind. And that the sort of the business model of, you might say the platform capitalists has been one of, or he would say was enclosure and then rent seeking. And so what you have, what you get is, yes, there was a decentralized, unowned sort of method of music transmission that was admittedly imperfect, but where we were seeing increased returns on say, like live shows and so on. But that sort of the advent of streaming services like Spotify has now sort of re-enclosed. Because I have a statistic here, that those Spotify's economics are sort of complicated and opaque. For each individual stream of a song, the average rights holder will receive 0.27 pence.

So about a, about, you know, a third of a penny, or much less in some cases, depending on how much they've been able to negotiate. But that holder is then split among the record label producers, artists and songwriters. And so actually being a musician or a songwriter and getting money on Spotify is harder than, well, harder than ever. I mean, the other, the other statistic I have, and I'll sort of throw it back to everyone, is that if we all remember all about that bass, that bass, no travel. That was a bang. Who can't remember it? Yeah.

A bouncy pop song. It was played 178 million times in the year of its release. And yet Kevin Kaddish. That's 178 million times too many, isn't it really? That's... Oh, damn. Damn, dude. I didn't know you were so edgy. Have you been listening to cool stuff like Disturbed? Hell yeah. Down with the thing. Have you been writing for the spectator? Well, who weren't listening? I've been line wiring a lot of stuff.

I've been line wiring down with the sickness and old jackass movies. On the Italian man who went to Malta, you know, stuff like that. Pretty cool. Kevin Kaddish, a Grammy nominated music producer who co-wrote the song that was streamed 178 million times in its first year, received only $5,600 total. But he could use that money to go to the Dignitas Clinic, so it's not all bad. It's funny. I know that... I was aware of Spotify being in the news recently as well, because an employee called Hong Perez is suing Spotify for basically old school sexist behaviour.

She is in charge of one of the territories, has been doing really well, but the bosses were taking male-only teams out to go to strip clubs and do old-fashioned chauvinist kind of stuff. And when I was reading this story, I was thinking, this is the kind of behaviour you would expect from a company in the 1950s. Like it feels really dated. It's kind of crazy that this kind of stuff is still going on in a company. And then I thought, yeah, it's kind of appropriate, because if you look at what has happened after this period of anarchy, companies like Spotify have reverted the music industry to the royalty rates that you would find in the 1950s. And it's sheer exploitation,

it's sheer exploitation of the artists and the people that work for these companies as well. And in the 1950s, it was just a bunch of wise guys taking advantage of musicians. Then over the years, various court cases happened and musicians eventually got some rights. All that seems to been completely wiped because the old model has disappeared. And now we have this model where it's a free-for-all and guys like this guy are making 5,600 a year, whatever. The old model was based on sort of, you might say like, clear ownership and excludability, which don't get me wrong, is bad. But this new, but it was something that sort of, you might say like, the labor movement of the time, whether it was sort of musicians or even like

guys who were employed by pizza restaurants delivering pizzas or whatever, all of these labor movements were able to effectively organize against that model and then sort of demand more rights, more pay, and a bigger section of production. They were able to create a bottleneck in a sense. But the thing about it is with this distribution model is that there is not yet a means by which people can create a bottleneck to stop them from being able to distribute it. So it's like, if people who work in the music industry, if artists wanted to not perform or they wanted to strike or they wanted to not sign to a certain label, that's a different thing than it is now where regardless of how you're getting music out, basically everything is almost completely free

for the listener. So like if it's on SoundCloud or if it's on Spotify or if it's anywhere, basically it strikes me and incorrect me if I'm wrong here. The only sort of solid way to make money where it's not going to be basically rendered brutally efficient is by selling merchandise at shows or show tickets at venues. I don't know if that's been your experience or not. Yeah. I presume that models like Spotify and YouTube are generating a hell of a lot of income. I read the Spotify v. Yet to Turn a Profit. I don't know. Did anyone else read that? A lot of the platform companies do this is they will sort of make themselves a loss every year so they never have to pay any tax. So they're still making all of their owners and investors

shed loads. It would make sense because what are you spending a month, like 10 or 15 pounds a month or whatever, 10 pounds a month at premium membership? That's like even if buying like one record a month, like for everyone who's on it, buying a record a month, that's a lot of record. But all of that, very little of that money is going to the artist. In fact, the vast majority of it is either going to investors in Spotify. That's why it's true. Or it's going to 1950s style business practice. It's also going back to the old guys as well because when Spotify first appeared, it seemed like a threat to the old school music industry and the way that the old school record labels dealt with this was to buy out Spotify.

And the major shareholders in Spotify are actually the old model, the old record companies. Just goes to show that solidarity among capitalists comes first and foremost. Market disruption, really? If you scratch market disruption a little bit, really, it just seems like capital replacing labor. So I'm very interesting. How have you seen that change over the course of your career, considering your first big album, your first album came out in what, O4 wasn't it or later? Yeah, O4. The same as most artists, you don't really make any money from selling music anymore, like you say.

One thing I've really noticed changing massively is the artists make their revenue from what do you call it? Sinks. Yeah, placement. Like, you know, like I see music in used in television, soundtracks for films and for advertising. Video games big as well. Yeah, video games are huge. And it's become something which is completely accepted now, that you have this sort of commercial marriage between music or creativity and artistic endeavor in a way that just would not have been accepted by most of these artists 20 years earlier. When I first started, you know, I'm 46 now, so I was first playing in bands over 25 years ago. And at that time, the idea of like selling your

music, like selling out to allow your music to be used in television or a film, never mind an advert was completely appalling and completely repellent. Whereas today, it's just, well, there's no other choice if you want to pay your overinflated rent. Well, so actually what you said about music appearing in advertising reminded me of my favorite ever band appearing in advertising, which was if we can cast our minds back to 2015, right? I can't. No, I'm out of RAM. I'll set the scene for you. No Brexit, right? No, no Trump, right? But all about that bass was in the charts. Okay, that's the period we're in here. Now, Clean Bandit, the words, the world's blandest band, Cambridge University's finest Clean Bandit, right? They were on an advert for a phone which was never a

commercial success called the fucking Microsoft Cortana. Was it like Nathan Barley's phone from the Hornet? It basically was. It basically went so Microsoft bought out the Nokia Lumix phones, which is like Nokia's smartphones, which no one ever bought. And they made it like Windows phone and into and then they had this like Cortana thing, which was supposed to be like a rival to Siri. But like Siri's shit, like who uses Siri? But Microsoft were like, no, we're going to make our own even shittier version of Siri, which even less people named after the AI from Halo that goes crazy and is the villain of the fifth game. Classic. And so what happened was Clean Bandit are on this are on this fucking advert where they're talking to Microsoft shitty Siri and

laughing at its jokes. And there's like this moment where they say something like, yeah, we're going to, can you can you play music for our fans? And she's like, of course I can. And then they're like, something like, can you dance? And then it goes, when I'm on vibrate mode, that's me dancing really fast. And then they all go like, and then one of them goes, you make me laugh Cortana. And then if you like, if you pause it just there, you can just see the moment as they all realize that their credibility is entirely gone. They've received some money. They're basically never. YouTube that later. Are you blaming Clean Bandit for the failure of the phone? I think so. The phone for the failure of Clean Bandit. I don't know.

Anybody who's excited about this phone, I don't trust thereby. I will not buy this phone. Clean Bandit can't do anything without Jess Glyn. Do you know what that story reminds me of? It reminds me of an experience that we had around about the time of our second album. So we were still on Domino, which is an independent label in the UK, but in America, we kind of did a deal through Domino that was going through Epic, which are part of Sony, a big major label. And they, while we were recording the second album, we're putting lots and lots of pressure on us to do this team up with Best Buy. And Best Buy is, you know, for non-American listeners, it's like, I don't know, it's like the equivalent of

Curry. Curry's, but also combined with, I don't know, W.H. Smiths. It's amazing. Yeah, yeah. Basically, we fell out with the label so badly because they wanted us to be part of this advertising campaign where an employee from Best Buy would put out their hand, they would say, hey, if you come to Best Buy, you can get any music you want, you can even get, and they would put out their hand and we would be standing as miniature versions of ourselves on their hand so you can even get Franz Ferdinand. And the executives from Sony Epic couldn't understand why we might not want to be part of such a campaign. Because we're not small enough. We can't help it!

Get up here! Get up here! I know everybody's small. Fuck me, that is subcoded. That does seem to be indicative of a previous age with regard to how doing adverts was perceived for musicians. Maybe I was old fashioned then, I don't know. But now, while the scripting of the ad, not withstanding, being in an ad wouldn't be taken necessarily, taken the same, I don't know, I think it might be perceived as crass, but it

wouldn't be completely credibility killing the way that it was 20 years ago. In fact, because I think about capitalism and creativity and the fact of creative industries a lot, I've pulled in a couple of essays that I like. One of these is an essay called Capitalism, Creativity, and the Crisis in the Music Industry. It's from 2012, but it said something I think is really quite telling about successive crises that have plagued creative arts. Essentially, it's that an apple or a Spotify doesn't care who you're listening to, they merely care sort of that you're streaming, that you're paying. They've already really invested in the infrastructure, and there's very little need for them to pay musicians much at all,

with so much back catalog to exploit, and so much music basically available for free. They don't even need to promote popular acts because people sort of self-organize over those infrastructures. They really don't need to do anything but sit on rights and charge rent. But then, it was sort of believed that, well, that's fine, we're not making money on streaming because we're making money on touring. But then, as of 2011, no major music festival in the UK was making more in excess of its corporate sponsorship than what it received. And so, it essentially, we got to a point where music was largely become an adjunct of the advertising industry. And so, all of these stories of sort of clashing in and out and selling in and out

became irrelevant because the business model fundamentally changed. Because basically, whether you're listening to the Velvet Underground or Crazy Frog, you're still making money for Spotify. It really doesn't matter what you're listening to. Well, I've listened to a lot of Franz Ferdinand's new album, By Magnazider, and I have to say, it doesn't reflect that theme at all. Hey, Milo, when did you get that giant for a coat? It was from a legal dog business. That's quite interesting about how you're saying there about the fact that there's such a huge back catalogue available constantly. And now, you know, you have your phone in your pocket and you've

pretty much got access to the history of 20th century music just in your pocket. Do you think that dampens people's appetite for new music? It being complete, because you don't have to go and hunt it anymore. Like 20 years ago, when you were saying, well, why do you need to listen to Clean Bandit when you can hear the doors? Yeah. Well, but I mean, that is a question that has played Clean Bandit's career. You know, you have to listen to Clean Bandit when you can go outside. We can even remember, though, there is that you can almost go too far the other way and fall into the nostalgia trap. Because if you remember, what was the dumbest thing anyone's ever sent into space? Answer, Elon Musk's Tesla thread Tesla with David Bowie playing on it,

which is exactly what like a lame dad would do. That seems like years ago. Was that like last year? It was last year or two years ago. Where was like in May, but like it feels as though a century has passed since then. It was the 20th of April, wasn't it? Hitler's birthday. We've only got his word for it. They actually did it. It was June 9th. Was it? Oh, but no, but Hitler was born on the 20th of April. I thought you were quibbling about Hitler's birthday. I never. He's not a real Hitler head like me, but it's that

you can. It's easy to kind of say that it's all that the access sort of stymies innovation because people go nostalgic or it's easy to say the access fosters innovation because we're not restricting because yeah, we're not. We're not restricting influences anymore. I mean, I think I often say I think really you could almost can't guess one way or the other, but what I really think is true is that like a lot of like the fact that we have access to like the entire music catalog of the 20th century at more or less any point in our pockets is a great thing. It's a shame that it couldn't be the same creative commons that it started out as I think or that the mechanism by which it's available has to constantly seek the bottom

line to the point that it basically makes the circumstances that most of those works were created in impossible for a modern creative artist. I mean, I remember this is maybe years ago, but I remember somebody saying like, oh yeah, for a regular indie band to be successful, they need about $100,000 in investment. It's like, well, that kind of takes away from the concept of being an indie band if you need that much money. And it's like, whereas you hear stories about people in the 70s or in the early 80s being able to go from playing in pubs to being signed with basically a very, very small amount of money because that space existed. Well, what are you hearing these figures from? Like the 100,000 pounds of dollars? Who's putting

that money forward? I think that was, it may have just been like kind of an estimate that journalists put out or something where people were talking about like the amount of money, like doing math on a napkin about like how much it would cost for gear and touring and that kind of recording an album. That sounds about right. I mean, yeah, you got to record an album, then, you know, you're promoting it, you know, all that kind of stuff. That's, I mean, I understand. But that's not just coming from the band? No, the label are doing it. The label investing in a band, you need to be a proven, you need to be a provable investment, which means they need to do this research on you more and more because capital,

because the returns on capital are dropping. So every expenditure of capital is more and more precious. So it's less and less appetite for risk and more and more appetite for a sure thing. We've got to make sure that it all adds up. I mean, you know, you've got all your money, you know, that as Bob said that you spend on, you know, the producing the album and then the promoting stuff. And you get to a point where you've got, you know, about $80,000 spent on an album, right? Then you've got to leave, you know, another $15,000, $20,000 left aside for delicious, refreshing, Magnazider, which is the only thing that helps us make a great tune. I want to get into, I want to get into the economics of being a sort of a banding.

But first, I wanted to say that the newest way in which you might say brands have sort of turned the music industry into an adjunct of marketing is via sort of Spotify playlists. Now these are these are the things where it would be like chilled workout or my favorite. When I'm in bed, enjoying a refreshing pint of Magnazider or or or or Magnaz afternoon, exactly, you know, of this kind of, you know, the the playlist we're talking about, you know, hip hop beats to study down to to the point where now multinational companies can pay for Spotify pages and then put up their own playlists that show what it's like to be unilever or whatever. And I actually have found these Spotify guidelines for brands who want to make a brand

playlist and some of them are banal and some of them are horrifying, which makes them perfect for our era. I was just thinking about what it would be like to be unilever and the answer is very confusing because that's a company that makes like bleach and ice cream. A nightmarish combination of things. We hire those three brothers, Larry Curley in mode or run the Lord logistics of our bleach factory and our ice cream factory. They won't fuck up any of the deliveries, of course. On the subject of factories, when I back, this is just a Russian story. What when I was living in when I was living in Russia, so a mate of mine is a comedian.

He's from Mateshi and a guy who was like a city. It's like the Watford of Moscow. And basically there's a beer factory in Mateshi and a guy he knows who worked at the factory told him that the guys who worked at the factory got in trouble for two things, which was pissing in the massive vat that they make the beer in. It's a good thing to get someone in trouble for and also and also drinking loads of the beer that they were making, but they pissed in the beer first. All these Russian dudes who just like was so gung-ho that they were like, yeah, fuck this, we'll piss in the beer. But then, but we also do want to drink the merchandise. So fuck it. We'll drink the beer that we've pissed in.

That's entrepreneur behavior right there. Playlist. Okay, well that doesn't happen. The Magnus Sider factory. So here are the five the five tips. The first one is pretty banal. The more tracks you have in your playlist, the better put at least 20 on so people get a sense of who you are. Again, we're using a personal pronoun for a brand. They're all tubular bells. Don't have a single artist beer in your playlist more than once. If you have a reason to believe a specific artist may have or be a problem for your brand, it's probably smart to stay away from them. So Gigi Allen, sorry, that reminds me of the time

when I think it was the Tory party conference in like 2010 when David Cameron came on stage to some song by Keen and then Keen got wind of it and did this press release saying that David Cameron was a cunt. Wait, that took a press release? Yeah, so well, you know, so I really like the idea of a brand just completely issuing that and just be like, no, like we might be Gillette shaving cream, but like we want to put body counts cop killer on our playlist. It's just gonna happen. It's beardy man on our playlist because we fear nothing. If you want to be, if you're a brand that wants to be the most rational ever, you put down with the sickness on there and everyone just knows how smart you are. So the other, the other,

now here's where it gets a little bit weird. I mean, it was weird already. Here's where it gets weirder. Keep your playlist editorial in nature. Don't try to make it a commercial for your product. Just do like other Spotify users do. Show the world what kind of music your brand likes to listen to while partying, driving or enjoying a cup of coffee. Wow. How many cups of coffee does you know leave a drink a day? The idea of someone having a playlist specifically for when they're drinking coffee and then like they're just like they're having, they're having a sip and then there's disturbs down when the sickness comes and they spit out. They're like, no, this isn't my Arabica playlist. It's it's it's just it's the whole like thing where it's like it's like all

all of the shit posting brands like Wendy's or whatever. It's like, yeah, they're all your friends now and it's like you can't tell the difference between your human friends and your brand friends. Yeah, they all have personalities. It's weird, isn't it? I thought this just was a place where I bought like a razor and some deodorant and maybe filled up on petrol or whatever it is. When I went to business school, accidentally, so a bit of background for you guys. I went to business school kind of as a joke where like so basically like the only work at State University for another year without having to do a masters, which would have cost me a lot of money and they wouldn't have let me do it, was basically to do do a masters and sorry, no, to do this business

school thing. And so I went to business school and one of the things one of the many useless things they taught me was about this notion called brand personality, which is the idea of literally creating a personality for your brand so that people think it's their friend. Like this is an actual thing. Yeah, and it doesn't even work. It's just dumb. It's so funny. Here's the evidence, right? Can you give us give us the tips on what they were? So basically just like making it seem it's effective like putting a leather jacket on a brand. That's basically what they're doing because the rule in business school was like everything they think is either like completely insane or so mind numbingly obvious that a 10 year old could tell it to you like to be like either

like nurse man guys. What we're going to do is we're just going to completely reverse the market by building cucumbers out of sand or it's like do you know that if you raise the price of a product some people will perceive it as higher quality. It's like like how did you just say that sentence? I was like the last time a brand did this like that I sort of remember they did it successfully was the the Rick and Morty sauce like with the McDonald's that you on sauce McDonald's became associated with the Rick and Morty cartoon and then a bunch of nerds sort of tore each other to pieces battle royale style to get the sauce that the genius scientist likes like it's I'm interested though like so say if your music appeared on a brand's playlist like I mean what what sort of

reaction does that generate though because like obviously once it's on Spotify it seems that they have absolute license to do that if they wanted to yeah I guess it's nothing we can do to stop that really is this completely out of like how often does this happen are there a lot of brands playlist I don't I'm going to I'm going to look into this we should see it we should we should see if you have like this year's all brands would you want to hear the playlist I don't I forgot what my favorite brands are now who just like personality you on the need more personality yeah so I mean the only brand I want to see our podcast on is of course a supreme I want to see myself on the supreme play rest for me the socialist cookware company

the accidentally socialist cook more company which will advertise towards the end of the show doc toilet cleaner has a playlist it's just every france ferdan and album you they did not finished they didn't follow the advice to keep it to about 20 songs they're repeating an artist at all I love the idea that a brand would like somehow like choose songs that related to the brand like like just purely songs about cleaning whatever it reminds me of sandy shore when she went on desert island discs she did the most amazing troll of the program I mean I'm presuming like from from my cynical perspective I presume it was a troll it might just be naivety I don't know but she went on and every song that she chose

related to either being on a beach on a desert island observing or something to do and it was like wow yeah yeah kind of amazing yeah yeah so I'm sure appearing on a lot of puppet companies play that's a really niche sandy shore joke yeah I got it yeah any sandy shore joke is a niche sandy shore joke but that one especially that would that would make about as much sense as like a sort of early 20th century Serbian radical group having their Spotify playlist the seriados nothing but transfer it raise your black hands now so the fifth piece of advice is again slightly also quite sinister take advantage of the relationships you've already have if you've just hired an artist to

be your new spokesperson a playlist might be a great opportunity to show the world how much your brand loves the artist the use of the word love there really fucking squicks me out wow yeah yeah how much can you love a brand how much marketing department love an artist yeah I mean a marketing department is there to perform a function in an account instead of perform a clerical function in a capitalist economy which is to create demand for oven cleaner or whatever like on the basis of like how much they love a certain kind of you know like sound cloud rap and you know how much the you they can be aspirational lifestyle related I do like the idea of like the most far out sound cloud rappers eventually becoming like the brand spokesman

for something like toilet duck it's like is your toilet like a mess like to cashy six nine we'll clean it up your oven been talking sweet on chief kief on instagram what is what this is effectively is like joel golby articles becoming real life it's like yeah but like if tesla was a person what music would it listen to though and then like going through like this is like actually them doing it to themselves no if tesla was if tesla was a person it would be homer simpson in the car trying to explain grand funk railroad to like barth's friends you all are fucking phyllis no we don't know anything about sandy shore stop watching the simpsons in like 2000 like sane people this was homer palooza this wasn't or this was a prime year's episode sorry rally we're not

devotees like you so one of the but one of the the take kind of we've talked a lot about sort of the other one of some of the only ways to sort of succeed in music is either to become like a hyper star or to sort of you know align with brands or whatever um and one of the art one of the reactions that keeps coming up with this is oh well you shouldn't want money you should feel lucky that you're making a living doing art again another another essay that I like quite a bit was from um recently problematic magazine jackabin um a 2015 article that i've read numerous times by miranda cambell a canadian culture professor uh and the article is called culture isn't free he says uh that celebrated british author for example rupert thompson recently

recently spoke about the crushing effect of the great recession on the ability of writers to make a living from their craft at 60 he's no longer able to afford an office space to write in instead decided to turn to a tiny corner of his attic an area so small he cannot stand up into a workspace i have no private income no no rich spouse no inheritance no pension there's no safety net at all he said yet still online commenters debated the merit of giving tomsen any sympathy some suggested that tomsen should be grateful that he's doing something that he loves that he owns a home that he's able to convert his attic into a tiny workspace others suggested that expecting to write all day and survive financially it was foolhardy to begin with which is the crushing

effect of neoliberalism on on the creation of art where there is this idea that because art is creatively satisfying we must almost devote ourselves to the cult of suffering for work yeah it also brings us back to the idea that the art is measured by the bottom line like you know like like successful artists aren't necessarily artists who create a lot of money it's a successful artist from my perspective is somebody who makes good art and that isn't necessarily an artist who generates a lot of money isn't necessarily an artist who generates enough money to survive in the contemporary climate and also if we look at the states i see a big disparity between united kingdom in europe and the in the us because most artists aren't superstars they aren't hypers you know hypers

stars whatever and something i see from a lot of our contemporaries over there is they can't afford health care i mean i can that is shocking that's that's basic survival the sheer number of bands would like will reunite to do a benefit concert because like a friend's kid is sick and they have no health care right i mean i remember the dismemberment plan was a band i really followed in the u.s and they broke up for about five or six years but they got back together for that sole purpose you keep hearing these things over and over again whereas i remember you ironically dismemberment something they couldn't afford whereas i remember in an interview you did with drowned in sound alex you mentioned that like the nhs and dss were like hugely important to you as

an artist because it created the ability to have a certain security as opposed to if you were like just living out in the world with nothing you know if you get sick or you you run out of resources you can't keep creating art i mean even uh not as in terms of an artist as well like if it wasn't for the nhs i probably would have died like like from things that happened to me earlier i had orbital cellulite when i was 15 my parents probably couldn't have afforded like expensive health care so i would have died from that asthma had several asthma attacks nhs took care of me and what's weird is like i never questioned it at the time at all it was just what was there and it's what you expected because that's how it should be that's how it should be you should just expect it to be

there because it is the principle of a civilized society that we look after people and we care for people and it's well it's not just a privilege of those who can afford it no absolutely i think it's it's an interesting point about like where we've got this one of the few things i actually get annoyed about um because being somebody works in creative arts myself um how like a lot of people who have like what we might quote unquote call an actual job get very childish about people in like performing arts and stuff because they review it as like not a proper job purely on the basis that like it seems like something that isn't soul crushing and to them that is what work has become because that's the economy we live in where if you do something that doesn't make you miserable it's

not a job and like the actual like because it's not that they actually do anything like they most are just sitting in an office doing actually less than i do all day because they just have to be in a place and they probably do like two hours of actual work all day but they are just located like between 8 a.m and 6 p.m in a place in a fancy outfit as Riley once said and that but like they have to get up early in the morning they don't see they don't do anything they like and it's like that misery quotient for which they get paid but then the weird thing is like so i kind of understand the churlishness from their side because fine i might be i might like translate my bitterness about my horrible job in that way also if i did one because i can i know how miserable those jobs are

but the weird thing for me is when like i mean i'm a comedian so when i look at other comedians who like therefore become ashamed about ever making any money from anything that they do and so like if you go to almost any pro comedy night in london that's not like a professional comedy club or whatever that's being run kind of by people like me there's often like a collection of money at the end but it's always for charity it's never like let's just pay the comedians because this is their job it's always like oh no obviously you wouldn't pay comedians because they're just like idiot clowns this money has to go to like some worthy cause i'm like charity's fine but like what's wrong with just paying comedians why are we so bad it's definitely true for art for for

musicians as well like like when musicians are sort of like at a lower level when they're first starting out and playing gigs always has to do charity gigs never and very rarely gigs that actually pay them or even worse and like what's his first started about 20 years ago so like maybe slightly less but as these pay to play gigs you know where a promoter gets the bands to put forward a sum of money so that they sell a certain amount of tickets in order for the thing to happen rather than the promoter having faith which is what you will see in other european countries where you have promoters who just have faith in the artistic merit of the act that they're promoting which is what you should be doing as a promoter anyway if you want to put this band on you should

see that there is some artistic worth otherwise you just shouldn't be putting them on in the first place that's what a lot of comedies like in the us now it's exactly the same phenomenon yeah it's that these things aren't it's like in generally i think is that the these things aren't valued because i think there is even though they are valuable they are not the way our economy is organized does not sufficiently value them even though they may sort of make a lot of people's lives better and in fact they may make they they may make quite a few more people's lives better now that more people have access to them more readily and yet it's almost a paradox where the more people have gotten more access to more of it the less and less and less it's valued

even though it is again just an increasing part of like what keeps all these terrible office people alive you know i mean it's why we make podcasts for people who have long commutes who want to listen to something that like doesn't make them want to die but at the same time it's like but that's why we make an anti-capitalist podcast you don't hate mondays you just hate capitalism i just realized actually most people listening to me ranting about that the only difference between them and the people i'm ranting about is they just they've realized that their job is miserable but i think one of the things is like this this environment where where we sort of imagine that it's a privilege to make art it's not just a kind of work you can do

i think it's exacerbated in a country where you have a residualized social safety net right like before sort of blairism a band could be on the dole for a bit while they worked up a catalog that definitely happened for me like i wouldn't be you know i in the position i am now if i hadn't been for the dole in my 19 in my 20s in my 20 i was on the dole for for long periods and it's funny when people talk about that and there's often this presumption that it that it's somehow like a what is a privilege but like you were somehow spoiled because you were on the door for that i wasn't like like living in luxury i was subsisting at that time and it's not something that people necessarily want to do it's it's not like the most glorious lifestyle you can have no

no you you you can just about survive and get by and that's fine but it gives you the freedom with which to explore your ideas and your creativity and work it out and i still have this theory that it generally pays for itself like millions of times over with the artists who do go through that and then contribute from the taxes that they make in the long run well they're effectively invested in you haven't they it's like yeah i remember there's just a kind of a curiosity of music that the canadian band the unicorns recorded an album that i really enjoyed with a canadian government grant is it worth a billion dollars yes exactly it's worth a billion dollars no they put out an album i want to say no three or a four where they had gotten like a ten thousand canadian

dollar grant to record an album and they was like well we got an artist grant we're going to use this to go to the studio and record and it's like to an american you're just like how does such a fucking thing exist because the idea of the government giving a band money to record an album just like is so incomprehensible in the world that we live in so it's just like to think wow art doesn't have to be hard you don't have to be miserable to create this like which is what you just described like even if it's not living in the life of luxury it at least puts you in a position to accomplish the thing that you're setting out to accomplish yeah back in canada we funded our first album by a breed in french bulldogs

no i love that i love that idea and i feel it's something that is disappearing from the united kingdom as well like we've seen it with the conservative government over the last few years our arts funding has been cut there's a band that we know from holland called rats on rafts we're doing uh some shows in in japan later this year and they're coming to come over to join us and they're receiving funding from the dutch government to go over to japan to play some shows and i love that idea i love that idea that the holland is so proud of their cultural output that they want to put it out into the world and say look listen to this thing that we made this is our identity this is part of who we are look rest of the world this is a this is a great thing and it's sad to

see it disappearing it's the dutch government just panicked at like fuck the only dutch thing people in japan have heard of is arming van buren we had to do something about it it's at least the thing it's like bought by the sheer ledger logic of capitalism by the sort of the rote sort of calculate the bean counting the sort of exactitude it can only ever reduce and refine it can only ever find the one thing the french bulldog plan that's the most profitable thing to do it can never value something intrinsically it can only value it instrumentally dutch music is actually worth more in japan so it's really it's a clever scheme there's a vacant garage in japan they've got a they've got a guitar a shitload of clogs and a ton of edam that's fucking rock such fans born

by c-section yeah this is the this is the thing though and this is again why i i always sort of like to end and end with a little bit of hope like what john mcdonnell was saying was he's going to they want to reimagine the british welfare state so it's no longer a safety net that catches you if you fuck up it's a foundation you can kind of build the kind of life you have reason to value on and that's kind of where they're that what that's where they're at and that's where i'd like to see us get back to yeah universal basic income fuck yeah that's our patreon baby that's how it works so sign up for that basic income for irony podcasters an income on which even the neediest among us can afford a refreshing pint of magnecite which even the neediest among

us can invest in a kaka may me scheme to clandestinely have a dog nursery in your parents garage prospering dogs with dutch rock bands as many i think uh i think that that that brings it nicely round full circle um just to remind everyone though that uh we've chosen instead to have elon musk be rich enough to make weed jokes that cost him more than anyone will ever see in their lifetime instead of having a you know a thriving art scene for everyone elon musk weed joke you could found a thousand bands albums but uh those weed jokes are just so good and so dad like the weed jokes definitely the weed jokes just the perfect sort of horny dad situation anyway okay guys um if our listeners want to find you somewhere on the on the internet is there somewhere they can do

that um yes you can google france ferdenand do it be careful to avoid the art chuk france ferdenand band okay yeah um yeah everyone's pretty good we also have twitter accounts and instagram and instagrams what are your what's your twitter handle i think it's all party but i think there's a zero instead of a oh and maybe it's a space i don't know look for the blue tick very hacker review and alex where can we find you yeah i'm on twitter and instagram uh al capranos and uh the band has just a france ferdenand account i think there's an underscore between france and ferdenand it's going to be obvious which one yeah yeah well one's gonna one's gonna be a dead duke one's gonna be you guys one's just gonna be he doesn't tweet as much as he did like 110 years ago loads of selfies

of a guy in an open top model t for looking at grenades surprise one's just gonna be a guy whose parents are havesburg enthusiast you know there's gonna be a lot of them you can also find us uh you can find us on patreon uh we have a patreon uh that you can subscribe to uh we have a second bonus episode a week for those of you who would like to listen to it um but an office in white chapel in which we edit those second bonuses apparently thanks to the office it pays better than writing officially we also uh we also have as ever our strategic long-term alliance with remi so you know what if you're uh if you're if you're boiling uh if you're boiling a stew out of um out out of the rich then you know it's not socialism if it's not remi and finally you

can commodify well second to finally you can commodify your descent with a t-shirt from little comrade you can get any line from the show you want you've got some suggestions or you can do as some listeners have done and just gotten our tweets put on them or just some shit we said in the pub once i don't know why they do that but they do and we appreciate it they do and we appreciate it i will retweet anyone who gets a t-shirt with a refreshing pint of magna's cider on the front you heard it you heard it here first folks do it and you're finally yeah and finally uh thank you to uh the provider of our theme song jin sang you can find him on the accursed spotify uh he is very good i do recommend you listen to his chill wave tracks bob and alex thank you very much for

coming on thanks guys thank you so much it's been an absolute pleasure