The moment we have been waiting for has arrived, when we can get excited about Dry Cleaning. Yet I find myself worrying about Dry Cleaning too, so it’s a mixed bag really. I am not talking about the anticipation of emerging from lockdown or the pleasures of having someone else do your laundry once again. I am of course, referring to the recent release of Dry Cleaning’s debut album New Long Leg.
To me it’s more than just your average album release. It’s a new album with a band that really has something going for them. Surrounding the laconic spoken word delivery of Florence Shaw (here is a name you might come to know - more later) is a tightly-wound trio of drum, bass, guitar; peddling away in a style that isn’t revolutionary but climbs inside your ears nonetheless. Because of how Dry Cleaning brings these elements together, there is no danger of them making music that drops into the background. Rather the opposite in fact - put them on and you’ll find everything else drops into the background, while the nagging riffs and Florence’s seemingly random diatribe arrests you.
It’s what bands are meant to do and that’s what has got me worried.
Dry Cleaning is in good company. The current crop of guitar-led bands are doing similarly remarkable things. It’s fantastic to witness the comeback of bands after years and years of dominance of solo artists. I mean, what was the last band you can name that keeps hifalutin company with Drake, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, J Balvin, Billie Eilish and that lot? (if you just said BTS, you know too much and therefore you also know that’s not my point).
It might have been Coldplay. And Coldplay is a hangover from the age of bands (i.e. the 20th Century). They broke through in the year 2000 and that, I don’t need to tell you, is over two decades ago. Yet in the intervening period, everything has changed in the music industry, the outcome being (to cut a long story short) that bands are no longer really viable. I don’t need to tell you this - bands themselves will. In a recent interview Joff Oddie, guitarist with UK indie rock band Wolf Alice, told The Times, “A band is a rubbish business model”.
Joff’s not wrong. Spotify recently revealed that circa. 8,000 artists with catalogues on the platform generated $100,000 in royalties in 2020 (this is equivalent to a nose-bleeding 36,000,000 million streams - not beyond a band with the status of Wolf Alice. But here’s the rub: that $100k is shared between the band, its label and publisher. As a four-piece band on a 50:50 royalty split deal with a label and on even pay, each member would receive just under $10,000. If the band has a manager, they would also take a fifth, so maybe more like $8,000. If those members shared songwriting duties as well this would increase, maybe back up towards $10,000. That’s not much of a salary for a hard working band member on the level of 36 million streams.
It’s barely enough to pay for your own washing let alone the dry cleaning.
In a normal year, a band would be able to considerably multiply those earnings (perhaps by 5X?) through touring, but 2020 and 2021 are not normal years. A band of that status could sell enough vinyl records to earn roughly the same amount again, so a best case scenario would be annual earnings approaching $25,000 for each band member. To quote another member of Wolf Alice, this time from a few years back, this isn’t exactly the days of “Here’s £10m and a big bag of gak. Go off and do your worst...”
Of course there have been a few bands that have broken through into the higher echelons of the streaming world - Glass Animals, Imagine Dragons and The 1975 are good examples - but these have relied upon making a particular brand of music that works in the streaming world (as in ear candy, and not short on 80s references to boot).
So earnings are a problem, but a bigger problem is getting established in the first place. It’s hard enough to get one million streams, never mind 36 million. And even if the viability threshold can be crossed one year, to sustain that success year after year is almost impossible.
It doesn’t end there of course. Most bands are struggling to get representation from labels and publishers, since bands have not been the hot thing to sign. In these days of the attention economy, music fans find it easier to identify with solo artists. For years - perhaps since the dawn of Coldplay, we’ve struggled to know the names or personalities of anyone in the band other than the lead singer. Contrast that to the 70s, 80s and 90s when band members were individually adored and popular in their own right - enough to form spin off bands, solo careers and best-selling memoirs.
So come on. Let’s give it up for bands. Labels - if you are struggling to find new bands to sign, why not encourage them by way of a stipend - not an advance that’s recoupable against royalties, but a guaranteed living wage. In fact, we could go further. A service like Bandcamp could step up to its name, and help fund bands in particular. In these days of industry data, it is becoming possible to ‘de-risk’ those huge A&R investments with predictive analysis that can reveal a glimpse into a bands future potential earnings. Bands might be paid a salary based on that kind of data.
Reading the recent interview with Dry Cleaning in the superb ‘new bands’ magazine So Young, it seems the band is most excited about the upcoming opportunity to get back onto the live scene - something that applies to the vast majority of artists but resonates even more with guitar-drum-bass combos, I suppose. The good news is that bands are back, so when the time comes get back out there and support your local guitar bands folks.
Dry cleaning is the insidious guitar riffing of Tom Dowse, hooky bass of Lewis Maynard, unfussy drumming of Nick Buxton and the laconic, seemingly random spoken word delivery of Florence Shaw. The band leads on Riff Raff vol. 6.