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Saturday 26 March 2011

This too shall pass

Many good things have happened for me in the last few years (You might not guess this from the lyrical content of my songs, but it's true), one of the main ones being my being picked up by Soup Records.

Thanks primarily, I think, to a bit of a funny gig where I ended up being sandwiched between two nu-metal bands, I got invited down to sleepsafe to play some demos.

I've not exactly been prolific since then, recording one EP and one album, but it can be pretty tricky trying to balance the studio with a full time job that has, at times, been very demanding.
But I am very pleased with what we've wrought; I think we've managed to capture the in the recordings the sounds I had in my head. And that, after all, is what we're trying to achieve.

So it's a great shame that Soup Records will shortly be no more.
I am afraid that I shit you not.

The studio carries on life as a commerical entity, as do the promotion and live sound engineering parts of the massive conglomerate (or Andy as we liked to call him ;¬) ) but the label is no more.

In the end we were just never able to buy the kind of advertising required to make the commercial production of CDs a success. We didn't sell enough CDs, so we couldn't buy the ad-space, so we couldn't buy the reviews, so we couldn't sell enough CDs...

The music business, as I have mentioned before, is changing. There is a future there, but it's not going to work like it did in the past, and a business model based on shifting physical units is no longer viable at the small scale.
For the record, this has fuck-all to do with "piracy". Just thought I should I get that out of the way.

Things move on, I'm still writing music, I'll figure out a way to keep recording music, but it won't be on the scale and quality of the last few years - that's beyond my budget, hopefully you'll keep listening to my music and between us we'll all keep enjoying all kinds of music because that's what human beings do.

So raise a glass to the late, great Soup Records, cheers!