ARTIST RESEARCH - Record Label, Managers, Producers

RECORD LABEL: Nude Records

It was the best of both worlds, the worldwide distribution was handled by a major label, however inside the UK Nude Records was indie.

However, they did have some disagreements, such as insisting a track that they thought would be more commercially successful be a single, or that the band appear in a video even though Suede felt they wanted to be more abstract and have a video without them appearing in it.

With Bloodsports: Warner Bros.

CURRENT: Suede Ltd. 
Owned by Warner Bros
So they are still linked to the Big Three

Ed Buller, the producer of their first three albums, and then their most recent two, shows this is a producer they feel comfortable with and trust as well. He was also back for the single Attitude, which was seen as an improvement just before they broke up.

They do not have a YouTube Channel with Vevo.

INDUSTRY RESEARCH - Major vs Independent Labels

From The Balance Music Careers:

Two articles detailing the pros and cons of major and indie record label deals.

MAJOR

THE PROS

1. Money: Deep, deep pockets have to be at the top of any major label "pros" list. Even with major-label music sales declining and the industry as a whole struggling to keep up with changes in the way people purchase and listen to music, major labels still have a huge financial advantage over just about every indie label. When your label has a lot of money, that means they'll be able to spend a lot of money promoting your record - which is exactly what you want. It also means they may be able to offer you a large advance and invest a lot in recording, touring, video shoots and other opportunities for you. 

   Connections: Money helps open a lot of doors, and when a major label comes knocking, most media outlets are ready to let them in. Additionally, most major labels have been in the business for decades and have long established connections that help you reach your music career goals. 

   Size: Alas, size CAN matter when it comes to record labels. Major labels are behind the vast majority of music sold, and this scale of operations can bring many advantages. First, they can get the best deals on manufacturing, advertising, and other expenses since they do business in such enormous bulk (they have way more purchasing power than indie labels). Second, because of all of the artists on their roster, they can pull some pretty big strings in the media. Here's a VERY common scenario: a major label may call up a big music magazine and say, "hey, if you want to interview (insert mega-selling artist), we suggest you review/feature (insert brand new, unknown label signing)." This is great for you, if you're that new label signing, because you get instant press in all of the top spots, giving you maximum exposure overnight.

THE CONS

1. Big Pond, Small Fish: A lot of major labels tend to sign a lot of musicians and throw out a lot of music, just to see what will stick. As a new signing, except in very special circumstances, you're likely to find yourself fighting for attention from the label. If your music doesn't start sticking - read: selling - pronto - then you can find yourself with a record out that isn't getting much promotion and a label that doesn't return your phone calls. 

   Continuity: A big part of avoiding the aforementioned "big pond, small fish" syndrome is having a big fan at the label. Usually, this is the person who signed you. However, turn over at a major label can be pretty high - especially in this day and age - and you run a high risk of waking up one day to find out that the person who loved your music is no longer working at the label. The new person who takes over your album may not be such a big fan, and suddenly, no one is too interested in making your album a priority. You can include a "key man" clause in your contract to try to avoid this, but often the bargaining power is against you when you sign a major label deal, so scoring this set up is not guaranteed. 

   Artist Unfriendly Deals: Not every major label deal is unfriendly to the artist, but many of them are set up so that if a cashier accidentally gives you an extra dollar in change, you have to pay the label 50 cents. OK, that's an exaggeration, but many major labels want to sign artist for multi-album deals that offer them very little flexibility and that hand over a lot of creative control to the label. They know all of the loopholes, they want a piece of everything, and they have better lawyers than you. 

   The Passion Question: Many dedicated music lovers work on the major label side of the music industry. However, not everyone who works at major labels loves music. You'll find a higher concentration of people who are in the business strictly for the money in major labels than you will at indie labels, and that often ends up rubbing musicians the wrong way.

INDIE

THE PROS

• Respect for Your Music: Indie labels generally have the freedom to work with whomever they like. There's no pressure like you'd find at major labels to sacrifice your tastes in favor of seeking chart success. When you get signed to an indie label, in almost every instance it's because the label is a huge fan of your music; that translates into dedication because they believe in what you're doing.

• Close Working Relationships: Because indie labels have smaller staffs and tighter rosters, it's easier for musicians to develop a close relationship with the people working on their record. Although it's not always the case that artists can pick up the phone and get an immediate answer, the odds of closer communication are great than they are with a major label.

• Artist-Friendly Deals: Some larger indie labels have relatively complex contracts, but smaller indies often do business on little more than a handshake and a profit split agreement. You seldom find indie labels demanding any measure of creative control over their artists, and most indies don't lock their artists into long-term, multi-album contracts.

THE CONS

• Money: While money is the top reason to sign with a major label, it definitely tops the list of negatives for indies. While some indie labels are sitting pretty financially, most small operations are just trying to stay afloat. That means they usually don't have the coffers to fund an all out media blitz like the majors and they often have to get creative with promotion ideas. They also can't afford big advances, fancy packaging, large recording budgets, tour support and other pretty perks a major can charm you with. With indie labels, you'll usually have to remain financially invested in your own music career.

• Disorganization: Not every indie label is disorganized, but the informal nature of operations at many smaller indie labels means some elements can get a tad bit confusing. For you as an artist, you might find that sometimes details may slip through the crack, or it may be hard to figure out processes that aren't quite formalized, like accounting, for instance.

• Size: The size factor is on the "pro" list for signing with a major labor. Although the intimate size of indie labels have their upside in terms of closer and more accessible relationships, there is also a downside. They don't have the purchasing power of major labels, and with a small roster, they have fewer strings to pull with the press.

ARTIST RESEARCH - Genre

Genres they are associated with:

• Britpop
• Alt rock (alternate rock)
• Indie rock (Independent rock)
• Glam rock/Glam pop
• Electronic rock (late 90s/early 00s)
• Art rock

GLAM ROCK

• Sample of a Shock + Awe, a book on glam rock by Simon Reynolds.

BRITPOP

Linked to Cool Britannia (Bowie mocked it in this interview with Jeremy Paxman)

They are forever associated with the term, as can be seen for example in the YouTube description of this interview with them about their reunion:

*TBA*

WatchMojo's Top 10 Britpop Anthems.

Other images connected with Britpop.

This article has a strong opinion on that:

In the 90s many were bigger, but few were better than Suede at their best, led by the dynamic duo of "glamly androgynous Dickensian whippet" Brett Anderson and "Danger High Voltage" whirlwind guitarist Bernard Butler. Just don't call 'em Britpop.

Another comment on YouTube:

Lengthier article:

The mainstream media are currently engaged in a collective misty-eyed throwback to the 'glory days' of the mid 90s. Luke Turner, who was a teenager at the time, argues that the current canonisation of Britpop is as musically and socially conservative as 1960s nostalgia

Back in 1995 I was Britpop's target market, and I ought to be right in the middle of the mod t-shirt bullseye of this current raid on the memory banks. I had become, as young white men from England who avidly read the NME are wont to, a rather conservative teenager when it came to my music taste, buying into the limited narrative that I was offered by the music press. Until Britpop, my listening tastes were fairly broad, taking in anything from The KLF to chart pop, early Prodigy and rave, Soundgarden, Leonard Cohen, Boney M and the Top Gun soundtrack. Britpop's narrow aesthetic, and that of the media that lauded it, ruined all that, turning me into the kind of wally who'd list the 'right' bands on their school ruler. It took me years to recover, and it was only really the rise of detestable lad culture as a core aspect of Britpop that helped wean me off the stuff.This is why I find the current media storm around Britpop's anniversary so troubling. It's a celebration of the very conservative, a backward glance to something that was already backwards-looking. It's not twee, exactly, but it is very Keep Calm And Carry On, it is very cosy, it is very mod, parochial, flag-wavy - "Yanks go home" mag covers, and so on. Indeed, a Google image search of the term 'Britpop' occupies the overlapping point of the Venn diagram between Oasis' fanbase, UKIP's youth wing, and a crap London souvenir stall. I'm not denigrating the entire movement, or even my own teenage self, or anyone else who lived through the time and loved the music. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here: the bath of Britpop was, after all, an entirely dubious concept in the first place, and one largely invented by a lazy media. There were some great albums released back then, just as there are great albums released in any given year, and may of them stand up outside this spurious scene. I've written extensively on Suede in the past, at first because I felt their reputation was in such dire straits before their reunion that they deserved to be able to make their point, and more recently because their new material - in the form of last year's Bloodsports album - proves they're still capable of writing music as good as the stuff that made them accidentally invent Britpop in the first place. An aside: before you all start clamouring, yes The Quietus will be running anniversary features on some of them, but always looking to find new insights and angles, and never at the expense of our coverage of new music.The likes of Suede's Dog Man Star and Pulp's Different Class will forever rank among my all-time favourites. The latter is arguably more relevant today then when it was released - see the incredible class fury of the wonderful, vicious 'I Spy'. Pulp were one of the most political groups ever to get to the top of the charts, something that's often overlooked. Parklife? No thanks - it's smug and complacent, aside from the ballads, and you should never trust a band whose best songs are their ballads. We could go on.Memory of your teenage years is always unreliable, and we certainly don't need the mediator of the British media's rose-tinted spectacles to convince us that the greatest years of your life were when you'd just done your GCSEs, were still living at home, couldn't drink, and found negotiations with sexually attractive people as intractable as the Israel-Palestine conflict. Imagine it! One suspects that, exactly as was the case with the 1960s, a few people who did have what they thought was a marvellous time (a bleeding nose underneath a table at the Groucho with Keith Allen and Alex James, perhaps) are now in the position to call the shots and dictate the narrative of what we are all told to remember. At some point we must break this cycle, this endless fetishising of both the past and youthful memory of it - a habit that the Baby Boomers (as I wrote here) are most guilty of, of course. Perhaps with 2013's Britpopathon, this is actually happening. Mine is not the only dissenting voice - take, for one example, Quietus writer Nick Southall, who presents a very different take on things, from the perspective of a teenager living in rural Devon. What's interesting about the reaction of so many of my generation to this wave of Britpop guff is how mortified so many of us are with it. This is the first 'Golden Age' to be remembered by a generation who, in their late teens, discovered the internet, and who by now are engaged in and comfortable with social media. The fracturing of music since the mid-1990s means that we're all a few steps ahead of the mainstream newspapers, magazines and radio stations, and I've seen and participated in a lot of very heated debates and threads on Facebook about the whole thing over the past week or so. Some of the participants have been journalists who were working at the time and have a very different take on events from the 'everyone pissed at the Good Mixer' narrative that we're always being fed. Perhaps the tired hagiography of a few hot months twenty-odd years ago isn't necessarily striking the kind of chord that BBC 6 Music presumably hope will be represented in RAJAR figures in a few months' time.I hope so, because Britpop nostalgia, like 60s nostalgia, like any nostalgia, is by its very nature something that halts progress, that stymies creativity and evolution, oftentimes exactly when it's most needed. Much as I might wish Jarvis Cocker would have a bit of a break from being a National Treasure, and come back with a Pulp album as biting in its politics and pop as those he made in the 90s, I'd rather hear that from a new artist in the charts. As ever with the celebration of Golden Ages, the true casualty is not the slightly embarrassed older listener who is, after all, perfectly capable of switching off, but the younger artist and music fan who is not getting exposure, who is being denied a contemporary culture of their own, and who, worst of all, is being told tough luck, the best things are already in the past. You missed out. Given the appalling situation with education in our country, increasing inequality, a bleak job market and a ludicrous housing situation, Britain's youth do not need to be fed with the lie that everything was better when Lammo and Whiley were on Radio One and you could pick up a Kula Shaker single for 99p*. Part of being a music critic ought to be about disassociating your ears from the obscurant hormone rush of discovering and falling in love with music for the first time as a teenager. Those of us who have the means and the capacity to write owe it to them not to patronisingly hold up our own past lives as somehow superior to theirs, being lived and struggled through right now. After Elastica left the stage on July 6th 1995 my then girlfriend and I took the train home. We somehow ended up climbing over the fence into the local park where, fumbling and awkward, we had sex on the grass, next to the swings. I saw stars, but they were just the ones through the trees in the clear summer sky. We went home in silence. Do you remember the first time? Me? I can't remember a worse time.

Negative opinion piece by The Guardian:

If you look at those groups on Select's Britpop cover, what united them was not a slavish devotion to anything, but their peculiarly quirky representations of Britishness. Suede's was the easiest to caricature, all council flats, bad drugs and transgressive sex. 

Opinions on how the second album Dog Man Star, particular the lead single We Are The Pigs, was a rejection of Britpop, an allegic reaction Placebo would say:

From Pitchfork's Top 200 1990s Tracks

From a Guardian Top 10 Suede songs review by Ben Hewitt:

Suede were Britpop. Not just a mere cog in it but the oil that first greased the machine. They were the ones who, before they even released a single, were hailed by Melody Maker as Britain’s best new band; the ones who the music press, desperate for a something new they could own, backed to do it for Blighty and stick one on the Yanks. And yet Suede hated Britpop: the crass Carry-On humour, the cartoon laddism, the brutish and boozy boorishness – it left them cold. Such isolation fed into their second album Dog Man Star, a darkly extravagant masterpiece that stood against everything the movement they helped spawn had become. Just compare, for example, any of Oasis’s hymns to living big dreams in the big city and having it large with We Are the Pigs, in which London is turned into a thuggish dystopian playground, or a sexier version of Threads.

The "Dark Side" of Britpop:

http://www.wow247.co.uk/2015/11/06/dark-side-of-britpop/

IN CONCLUSION, 
high art vs pop culture? Philipp Tagg's axiom

Switching between pop and art music?

In the 90s they were aiming for the charts, with the third studio album, Coming Up, they were going down a more pop music route.

GENRE RESEARCH #5 - Difference between alternative and indie

Institutions and Audiences Book

Mainstream, Independent and Alternative. You can be independent put still target your media products/texts to a mainstream/commercial audience.

From this article:

...is there actually any validity to a separation between the two? Well, yes and no.
Alternative and indie, at their roots, stand more for vague ideas and beliefs than any kind of specific musical styles of sounds, and truly the only real difference is the location of the artist: alternative was the preferred nomenclature of American artists while indie came straight from the British Isles.

 BRITISH INDIE

Yes, indie is at heart the English expression. In the U.K., indie started out simply as the trade term for records released on independent record labels. In the wake of punkrock in the late 1970s, the do-it-yourself ethos had flowered in England. With labels like Rough Trade, Factory, Mute and Cherry Red all growing in stature, the UK Indie Chart began chronicling the best-selling independently-released singles in 1980.
Yet at some point, the simple classification changed. Many point to the iconic cassette compilation "C86," which was given away with an edition of the English weekly "NME" in 1986. The "album" sought to chronicle a burgeoning English guitar-pop underground called either "cutie" or "shambling" at the time. As these descriptive names suggest, these bands played a twee, amateurish form of home-made music drawing deeply from sunny '60s acts like The Byrds and the Velvet Underground.
Rough Trade recording artists The Smiths were the biggest band in the U.K. at that time. Known as a proudly indie band whose obvious debt to The Byrds contrasted their frontman Morrissey's Oscar Wilde rakish wit, The Smiths unsurprisingly released "C86" to great critical acclaim.
Featuring bands like The Pastels, The Shop Assistants, and Primal Scream, C86became a huge hit, then a buzz-word, then a catch-all.
Sometime thereafter, indie meant being synonymous with this particular style, this particular cassette. Stylistically, this meant a retro-phonic, largely sexless form of music with jangly guitars and the vague taint of nostalgia. Indie no longer referred to the factual realities of record distribution. Indie was somewhere between a state of mind and a singular guitar tone. 

After a quarter-century of sexually-frustrated, bookish boys and block-fringed girls playing proudly indie music labels, you'd think it would've made indie a definable style, if not a singular sound. Yet, as I originally said, this depends on which side of the pond you're on. 

In America, indie often means twee, meek, Anglophilic; and it always means retrophonic. To be indie is to do so without distortion, without aggression. And, given the state of modern American radio, this almost by nature makes indie acts underground bands. In fact, aside from The Shins, I can't think of anyone with a true indie-pop sound who's made a run on the American charts.

Yet, back in England — birthplace of the word — "indie" has come to mean something else entirely. No longer a term used, often proudly, to describe bands with a down-to-earth attitude and do-it-yourself beliefs, indie has come to be shorthand for the direst form of non-rock.
In Britain, these days indie is routinely used as a catch-all to describe an ever-growing succession of impossibly bland, laddish bands playing inoffensive, melancholy ballad-rock. Their kings are Coldplay and Snow Patrol, two outfits of indistinct, fresh-faced fellows who've made a mint by playing soft, jangly songs free from tension and edge and polished up to a modern-FM-radio sheen. But Coldplay and Snow Patrol are the ones you know, the ones who made it outside the British Isles. If you've heard of The Fratellis, The Kooks or Razorlight, you likely live in the United Kingdom. 

applied to Suede:

In a 1995, base player Mat Osman said:

We're just a pop band really. We're not kinda like a cult band, or an alternative band or anything, we just make sort of pop records, records that people like. Nothing very complicated.

...

ARTIST RESEARCH - Timeline

A timeline:

• 1989 - Brett Anderson and Justine Frischmann meet at University College in London and become a couple, and together with Mat Osman they form the core of a band.
• 1993 - Debut studio album released, Suede. 
• 1994 - Second studio album, Dog Man Star.
• 1994 - Bernard Butler leaves 
• 1996 - Third studio album, Coming Up. More commercial direction and success.
• 1997 - First compilation album, Sci-Fi Lullabies.
• 1999 - Fourth studio album, Head Music.
• 2002 - Fifth studio album, A New Morning. Critical and commercial disappointment.
• 2003 - Second compilation album, Singles. Includes new single, is seen as an improvement, critics say it
• 2003 - Band split
• 2004 - See You In The Next Life..., Fan club release.
• 2004 - Anderson and Butler form The Tears
• 2006 - The Tears disbands, Anderson carries on with his solo career and Butler becomes a producer.
• 2010 - After performing at a concert against cancer, they are overwhelmed by the reaction of the audience and decide to come back together
• 2010 - A third compilation album to mark their reunion, The Best Of Suede. 
• 2013 - Their sixth studio album, Bloodsports.
• 2016 - Seventh and latest studio album, Night Thoughts. Many critics call it the best album since Dog Man Star, has the same concept album theme with dark tones

GENRE RESEARCH #4 - What Is Indie?

In the opening of this three-part documentary, presenter Mark Radcliffe asks what is indie and names three possibilities:

1. Is it a genre of music generally accepted to involve noisy guitars?
2. Is it a business model, smaller companies not beholden to major corperations?
3. Is it a state of mind.

One thing he said was clear was:

the sense of rebellion.

40 years ago, the major companies hat complete control of the labels.

Tbc....


Koop defines it as this:

A genre of alternative rock that primarily exists in the indie underground music scene. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with indie music as a whole, though more specifically implies that the music meets the criteria of being rock, as opposed to indie pop or other possible matchups. These criteria vary from an emphasis on rock instrumentation (electric guitars, bass guitar, live drums, and vocals) to more abstract (and debatable) rockist constructions of authenticity.

Indie Landfill:

https://www.webcitation.org/5yVEm0WX1?url=http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/does-the-world-need-another-indie-band-870520.html

Four bands help bring it into commercial success: The Strokes, The Hives, The White Stripes, The Vines

his is there definition of alternative:

Coined in the early 1980s, the term "alternative rock" or "alternative music" was used to describe music that didn't fit into mainstream genres of the time. Alternative styles include indie, post-punk, hardcore punk, gothic rock, college rock and new wave bands.

To do:
*Ask music teacher at school, and if possible old music teacher Mr.Riley*

MUSIC VIDEO THEORY #6 - Dan Miller

(Click here for source)

Floating somewhere between advertisement, video art and short film, the genre is a little tricky to pin down.

Dan Miller challenges that the track dominates the video, so goes against Vernallis's theory:

YouTube views do not necessarily translate into song sales. We should ask ourselves: are all Music Videos made to advertise a song? Music Video is much more than just an advertisement for a popular song – the way we define Music Video has not kept pace with the genre‟s evolution. 

He states we shouldn't ignore:

The abstraction, motion graphics and experimental nature of many music videos - both old and new.

Goes on to link the history of the development of the music video:

*To be added*

The decline of the monopoly of MTV due to digital disruption. (link to Exam Q1a Digital Technology, this gives me more freedom, I am part of the rise of the independent producers)

There has always been a tenuous relationship between Music Videos and record companies. The record company argument is typically “why should we fund something we can‟t directly make any money from?”.... Most unfortunately for the record companies, technological change has brought a solution to their problem they may not like. Better and cheaper home computers, software, sound and video equipment have seen a rise in independent producers who can now create professional-looking and sounding songs and Music Videos without record company money. (That's me!!!!!) 

Software and internet sites like iTunes, launched in 2001 and YouTube, 2005, have had a democratising effect on the digital media industry (MIT, 2010). Music Videos can now turn a profit themselves through advertising-supported models. Severing contracts with record companies, bands such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails can “finally have a direct relationship with the audience as [they] see fit and appropriate” (Reznor, 2007). Damian Kulash Jr., lead singer of the band Ok Go, highlights that music revenue models are changing and that a large portion of that band‟s income is now generated through sponsorship and advertising in the creation and online viewing of the music videos themselves – as opposed to song sales (2011). In fact, Ok Go „ditched their label‟ after a stoush with them over YouTube embedding rights (Nosowitz, 2010). 

In contrast to the Cambridge definition, it could be argued that some Music Videos are not designed to advertise a song, but to stand as works of art in their own right. As YouTube continues to champion viral media in the form of videos designed to promote themselves, the internet may be killing the TV star and the MTV era may be over. 

That last sentence was a reference to the ironic coincidence(?) that the first music video aired by MTV was "Video Killed The Radio Star", in that case music was being threatened by a visual disruption., and now TV is being threatened by the online digital disruption.

DISTRIBUTION - Fundraising Platforms

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

• In their current point in career Suede do not need to raise money in these ways to fund visual output

For indie bands a very useful asset are online fundraising platforms.

PLEDGEMUSIC
A direct-to-fan music platform
The band The Fat White Family made use of this to fund their tour at a festival.

Some more examples (full list here):

Several egs where the label is PledgeMusic itself, another example of convergence

...

KICKSTARTER
Has been used for films, such as the film sequel for the TV series Veronica Mars, and the Warp documentary All Tomorrow's Parties.