Continuing the Midas chart banning story, previously blogged here, Andrew Dubber, who’s post on the subject has generated quite the debate, interviews their manager, David Kuczora, on the 4Talent site, explaining exactly what they did and why.
“We came up with the idea of taking some mobile phone SIM cards to gigs, pre-loaded with credit, so that fans who wanted buy the track but didn’t have enough credit on their phone could snap in a SIM card with enough credit on to purchase the tracks available. They could hand over a fiver, text the various codes depending on what tracks they wanted, and not worry about the credit on their phone.”
There’s also a small but damning criticism of the Official Chart Company’s behaviour:
“But fair or not, the decision is final. The OCC, part-owned by the BPI (who represent the interests of the major record labels), has complete discretionary power, and there seems to be no way to challenge that.”
Midas’s management thought they were coming up with a clever new way to allow fans to make impulse purchases of a band’s music as a souvenir of a good night out. In doing so, they inadvertently provided the music industry establishment with an excuse to exclude one of those bothersome ‘unsigned’ acts from a mechanism that reinforces their continued dominance.
There’s also, I just found out, longer version of the interview on Dubber’s blog including a photo of Kuczora and his rather frightening hair.
Seems to be a fascinating debate growing! I didn’t realise such excitment happened in Birmingham! The longer piece on Andrew’s site is quite in depth, and it’s really interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes that we members of the public never usually get to see.
Oh, it’s dead exciting here in Birmingham!
That’s a good point you make about this stuff going more public that it used to. I think that’s a knock-on effect of the music industry becoming more a level playing field where people like Andrew and myself, who have no vested interests in keeping things closed off, are able and willing to report these details.
I had a quick search of NME.com and couldn’t find anything about Midas. Now they might not consider it newsworthy and they have every right not to report the situation but I doubt they’d be too happy about laying into an organisation that’s run by their main advertisers. I’d be happy to be proved wrong on this of course.
It’s all so political. Well some people seem to be picking up on it. Forget the NME, why haven’t the Birmingham rags run a story on this yet? Where’s Midlands Today? Talk about lazy journalism!
I wonder if they consider it news? It’s pretty much established that the singles charts don’t mean anything to anyone outside the industry anymore.
Still, the story was broken by Adrian Goldberg at The Stirrer and he’s been known to write for The Mail so something might happen there.
It’s not news because there is no news. Band tried to hype the chart, got caught out, end of story. Fair play for trying but that should be the end of it.
The chart rules are always changing and they always move to change them to close these loopholes.
According to Music Week magazine they have tried to wheel out the lawyers and make a big media song and dance about it but noone’s biting as this kind of thing happens all the time.
It’s just a bit sad that they’re going around blaming everyone’s scapegoat “the big record labels” but it’s not as if they’re interested.
“According to Music Week magazine”
Amusingly we’ll have to take your word for that as they keep they articles behind a paywall. And while I don’t want to turn into a conspiracy arse, whose side do you think Music Week are going to take on a given issue? They’re all about the status quo, surely.
Isn’t it interesting that Music Week editor Martin Talbot announced last week that his new job is – guess what – Managing Director of the Offical UK Charts Company???
Hmmm….
So he is.
You can’t make this shit up!
In today’s Birmingham Post, an OCC spokeswoman states that the sales in question DID come from “SIM cards sold to fans by the band.”
The OCC does not accuse Midas of attempting to hype the charts, but instead states their decision was made on the basis that they had “no sight of the original transaction.”
So Music Week are the problem now? Yet their manager was more than happy to do an interview with them a few weeks earlier.
Don’t blame Music Week because Midas clearly attempted to fake their own popularity and got caught. The excuses given by the manager are terrible and every industry message board I’ve been on has ripped them to shreds.