Thomas Dolby rose to fame in the early ‘80s, exploding onto the scene with his particular brand of electronic pop. He is most widely recognized for his hit single, “She Blinded Me With Science,” off of his first album, The Golden Age of Wireless. After years in the music business Mr. Dolby took a fifteen-year hiatus from the music business in order to pursue other endeavors. In that time, he had a great deal of involvement in the move towards downloadable music, and developing audio software for cellular phones through his startup company, Beatnik, Inc. In the year 2007 Mr. Dolby was a guest speaker at the National Association of Recording Merchandisers Conference in Chicago, Illinois. He was interviewed by Kevin Day, the founder of Rocket Science Music. The following is a dialogue from the aforementioned conference between Thomas Dolby and Kevin Day.

KD: What is the fan relationship for an artist?

TD: Well—a fan relationship is essential to everything and I think we tend to forget that. As a musician, when I sit down to write a song, what I have in my head is the moment when I’m going to actually get in front of an audience and sing that song to them, and this drives everything. It drives the voice sequences I pick. It drives the lyrics. I’m thinking theatrically. I have this picture in my head of a stage with an empty spotlight. I’m going to walk into that spotlight and start singing this song. How does it sound? This is what is driving me when I’m writing a song. In the old days when I started out—when I was a teenager—I had a dream of doing this in front of an audience. I came to the grim realization that before the audience would ever get to that moment I first had to overcome this obstacle course of the music industry, which I knew very little about. But I knew that, and this carried on even after I started to become well known. Now the whole process of getting my song in front of a fan is kind of tempered with the fact that first I had to impress the A&R domain, then the marketing department, then the radio programmers, then the retailers, and only then, if I overcame that obstacle course, did the public actually get to listen to my song and judge it for themselves. If they liked the song, I only got to really hear about it like weeks, or even months, and several quarters later. I guess what I’m saying is, the artist-fan relationship is very sort of distilled and insulated when I started out, other then at live shows where it’s face-to-face. But the recording part of it—it’s very hard to overcome this obstacle course. What I love about these days is that, that relationship with the artist and the fan is so much closer. And the experience of having come back to it now, the second time around, is one where the same fans that I’m blogging to, that I’m chatting with on my forum, are the ones showing up to the gigs, and they’ll come and introduce themselves. I just feel a lot closer. And I also feel that when I write a new song now, I can hit a button if I want, and the fans will listen to it and hear it. The process today, that relationship, is much more healthy for me than it ever was.

KD: I understand and I think that’s something that we’ve all talked about as a group. Is there a more distinct or pointed message that can be delivered to the room about what’s missing in that fan relationship within the existing infrastructure of the labels today?

TD: I think that many artists are focused primarily on their music, and it’s hard for them to get their heads around the other aspects of being a professional musician, which are now coming into play now that self-publishing is possible. The stuff that I’m talking about, keeping a Web site, keeping a blog, keeping up with fan lists, in-band marketing, understanding who your fans are, how they found about you, and so on, is more than most artists can handle, more than many managers can handle. In a way, what’s required from an intermediary is help with that. As an artist that’s been signed to a label, I’d like to be offered the services of somebody that can help me set that stuff up, and can explain to me what it means—like a spike in the web stats—who really sort of translates those fan interactions into terms that I will understand, that will inform the music that I am making. I’d like to have those services provided to me by a label, or something like that.

KD: So the ability to understand, dissect, and execute based on that information is the key?

TD: Right. That information belongs to me. Obviously, I’m not a typical artist. I can’t speak for all artists, but the fact is that, that loyalty and that, that love that comes from the fans, is something that belongs to the artist. There was a sense in the old days when I started out that, that was not my property; that was the record company’s property. That was the crown jewels, and they would occasionally feed me snippets of that on a need-to-know basis. So I think that something that has changed, and had to change, is a sense that, that artist-fan relationship is very precious, and it’s something that any intermediaries need to enhance rather than need to take ownership of.

KD: That’s incredible, and I think that’s really key to what we’re seeing—the change running through what we all grew up with here today. It’s interesting, you touched on something I wanted to expand on just a little bit—what the business looked like from your perspective when you did start in the early ‘80s. As a young artist, it’s probably fair to say you had some pretty explosive success, and I’m interested in comparing what that looked like yesterday to what that looks like today in terms of the model of business and your direct relationship to it.

TD: To start out with, the early ‘80s are pretty much a blur, as I’m sure they are for most of you. As memory serves, I will try to explain. When I started out, there was this sense that the mainstream music industry was locked into TV and radio and retail stores, and so on. It was this magical thing that I’d drive down Sunset Strip and I’d see Tower Records, and there’s a floor to ceiling portrait of someone. As a young artist, you believe—I should be there. That should be me up there. All that really needs to happen is the audience needs to hear my music and they’ll fall in love with it, and then before I know it I’m going to be up there on Tower Records. I imagine artists starting out have the same belief. They have a very different set of things to deal with compared to somebody from my era. I think for the most part it’s good because now, and I don’t want to spin my wheels here, if you’re an artist at seventeen today, and you believe in what you’re doing, and you believe that the public is going to fall in love with you, you can see all of these different routes that you can go where you’re in control of yourself—and not only in terms of ownership. You’re not depending on somebody else. I think that’s very helpful.

KD: That’s absolutely true. You see that more and more. Is there some sort of anecdotal, personal information you can show us from your personal experience from the early ‘80s?

TD: I’ve got an interesting perspective on it where, coming back to it, because I took fifteen years off—during that time I’m now no longer totally inept when it comes to business, looking at spreadsheets, and so on, so I have a different view of it at this point in time. Over the last year I’ve done about sixty-five shows while I’ve been on the road, which has been a lot of fun. During that time I’ve recorded a live album, which I put out myself. I pressed it at Discmakers, and I sell it through CD Baby, and I had INgrooves do the digital distribution for me to get it on iTunes, and so on. On a daily basis I’ve been watching the progress of that. I’ve gone back and compared that to the experience that I had the first time around, and I’ve also touched base with my old manager, Andy Fergusen, in England. I was so unaware of what was going on back then, and I made a lot of comparisons. In 1982 versus 2007, there’s just a few simple facts about this. The first thing was that, in terms of sales in those days, it was two to three weeks before my manager or myself had any indication of how sales were actually doing.

Today, I get those on a daily basis. In fact, I could set it up if I want on CD Baby so that I get an e-mail every time there’s a single sale of a CD. Royalties statements I would get quarterly: I get them now weekly, and I get a check or a direct deposit to my account from CD Baby on a weekly basis on my sales. The delay in payment would be three to twelve months at the start of that, twelve months being from international affiliates and so on, overseas sales. Now, there’s a delay of a maximum of two days.

Who is the buyer? Who are the people planning to buy these records? When I was starting out, I believed that my record company had no idea who was buying the records. They just believed that, you know, if the last album was gold, then we could count on seven- or eight-hundred-thousand this time around, and the same seven- or eight-hundred thousand fans are just going to come out of the woodwork and buy this record because they did the last time around. Who are they? I don’t know. Who cares? How do we get to them? We take the back page of Billboard. We take a 30-second ad. What percentage of people that see that ad are going to be interested in this album? 1, 2 percent? That’s where a lot of the money was going. It was spent on marketing. There was very little sense of the record company with the eyes on demographic points. The ownership of the stuff, you know the label still owns a load of the opportunities, whereas now I own them myself, and that is very significant. The royalty rate—back in those days, I was getting 12 percent on 90 percent. Today, I’m getting about 80 percent on 100 percent. What does that translate to? On iTunes, every time you buy one of my songs, I get about sixty-five cents on that. If you buy one of my old EMI songs on iTunes, I get about five cents. I’m not just the bass player on that song; I’m the artist, the producer, and so on. I get five cents on one of those EMI songs.

KD: I think you were the bass player as well.

TD: I was the bass player. And I don’t quite understand the economy of that. In fact, they recently offered to re-release my old albums and offered the same deal as I am getting currently. And I don’t really understand the economy of that. If you look at all of these things, it is possible, economically, to make and release CD’s on this basis, and to do all of this admirably on this basis. It really seems to me that it shouldn’t be [limited to] little start-up companies like CD Baby or INgrooves to make this happen, that the majors should have the ability to make this happen as well. They’ve got the vaster resources available. This is what you’re up against if you’re a major label these days. You have to be able to match all of this stuff on the right hand side, or else why stay in business?

On the negative side, radio play in 1982, I got lost. I got zero. TV exposure. Lost, zero. Retail process. Lost, zero. I put that stuff in red, but this is not to beat up on the record companies. This is really to point out for an artist working in self-publishing on this basis. All of the admin stuff, all of the logistical stuff, is now so easy that it should be possible for a major company to do it that well. And it’s cheap. There’s no excuse for that. What I don’t have is all of this stuff here in red, because it really seems to me like the idea of getting on the radio again, and getting on TV again, that seems kind of like an old boy’s club. It seems like a [tightly] sealed box. What I don’t quite get is how you get from the self-publishing area to that deep, mainstream exposure. In terms of what I need, working through myself, I would like people to pitch to me a good way to do all of this stuff that’s in black. When it comes to radio play and TV and so on…

KD: Those are the services that you require in the current model?

TD: Exactly. And that’s something where your company, Rocket Science for example, fills a very vital cap. In other words, I don’t know how to build a bridge back to the mainstream distribution exposure that I used to get as a major label artist.

KD: Understood. Just to touch on your slide, and some of the key elements in the slide as it relates to the early ‘80s, and to today. Let’s talk about what the album cycle means to you in the context of 2007. As an artist, do you still feel that your best creative energy is put towards a traditional album release cycle—touring, release, marketing, touring, release, marketing, however that works? Are there any other options available to you? Can you elaborate?

TD: I like the fact that music is now no longer one single thing—you know, a single album. You can do an EP. You can do a digital-only single. You can get a song in a movie, and if it becomes popular you can release it. All of that has become a lot more flexible, which I like very much. As an artist, I don’t tend to write songs in convenient batches of twelve or thirteen. I might write three this month and then nothing again until July—and then suddenly the floodgates open. I would like to be spontaneous about releases. If I write a couple of great songs this month, maybe there’s a way to get them in a TV show, or something like that. I like to think outside the box in terms of the album cycle. I always resented the fact that the quantity needed for a disc really dictated my whole lifestyle. It meant that I needed this many months to write the songs. I needed this many months to go in the studio, then a pause before it could come out, and then I’d go on the road to promote with touring, interviews, and things like that—and then it’s back to the drawing board. The painful thing was that there’s this window of time where this thing has to catch fire, or else it’s back to square one. I’d be told that the marketing department had this two-week window where they were focused on my record—and it had to catch fire during that time. I’m sitting by the telephone, hoping it’s going to ring, hoping this is really taking off—but if the indications aren’t good, that suddenly changes my whole year. Suddenly, it means that I’m not touring in the U.S., Asia. I’m going to be back to the drawing board. I need a new set of twelve songs, and I’m going to start the whole cycle over again.

TD: I think there is a value in an album, in taking a snapshot of an artists’ material at a particular point in time, but I also want to be spontaneous. For example, a couple of months ago, I went and played at South by Southwest. I brought a horn section with me and we jammed. We recorded it, and it sounded really good. There were five or six songs that I actually digged. It’s possible to do that these days, which is great. What makes this hard to do is this—Number one, the manufacturing costs physically for an EP are the same for me as they would be for a full album. I’d like to sell that 5-song EP on CD Baby for maybe $8.95, something like that. CD Baby takes $4 anyway, and the manufacturing costs at this point are something like $1.70, $1.80 anyway. I’ve suddenly got basic costs at $5.80 against a sale of $8.95. That’s a $3 margin. That’s just $10 or $12 on full CD. That works against us. That would work in favor of a digital-only release, but still like everybody else—70 to 80 percent of my fans are buying a physical CD over a digital release, so I’ve got to do it, even if the margins are very small.

KD: Does that surprise you as an artist, specifically the type of artist you are, [catering to] an older demographic that’s more technologically savvy? Are you surprised at where your business comes from in physical verses digital?

TD: I was quite surprised, really. I feel that in many ways a CD is not a great product. I felt for many years that the CD product that we’ve been selling for a couple of decades is kind of—whacked out. You’re in your car, driving home, and you hear a song on the radio, which is not back announced, it is part of a batch of five songs. Somebody, somewhere is hoping that the next time I’m in a record store chain, I’ll remember that one song, and I’ll make my way to the “D” section—to the “D” isle—and I’m willing to pay $15 or $20 for an album which has that one song on it. Then, it’s going to take me twenty minutes to even get this thing out of its polywrap. It’s not a very good product. I never knew why we didn’t either insist that radio stations back announce their songs, or have a technology to, like they do in the UK, and have a reader on the radio of what the song is. The point of purchase seems so far removed from the moment where the audience gets the warm fuzzies from the song. It’s like a million miles away from the point of sale, so it’s not a very good product. I thought, as you said, that my demographic would be more inclined to do digital downloading. It turns out that my statistics are basically the same as the industry average. My theory about this, from reading the feedback from my Web site and so on, is people just want the physical copy. I have a very cult audience, a very loyal fan base, that really only feel they own the album when they own the physical copy.

KD: I want to touch for a minute, as we had spoken about your perspective as an artist at the beginning of your career, but sort of what you’re doing today, as it relates to your current career. You have an amazing story of transformation from an artist to an inventor, and then back to an artist. That’s worth touching on for a moment, specifically about Beatnik, Inc., and how it relates to your current business models.

TD: We really went through a lot of twists and turns. We were completely wrapped up in the dot-com bubble, like many other dot-coms. We sort of navigated our way out of it, because in about 1999 we did a deal with NOKIA to be the audio player in mass-market phones. Since then, we’ve shifted every NOKIA phone, and most of the other major manufacturers, so Beatnik is actually in about 750-million phones at this point. Basically, these days it’s the mp3 player in your phone. If your phone then rings while you’re listening to an mp3, it will switch over to the ringtone, and then you’ll answer the phone. The audio mixer is what operates the ringtone player. It will adapt to any codecs, which is m4a, mp3, etc. Manufacturers license this audio mixing software from Beatnik and they integrate it in with their own operating system. It’s pretty much uncontested right now. The only other way to go is to dedicate an audio chip to a company like Yamaha, but that costs several dollars a unit, whereas the Beatnik engine only costs $1.

KD: That’s an amazing niche you’ve developed. Is there a direct correlation to Beatnik, the software, your vision, what you created, and how that relates to you as an artist? Is there a connection there for you?

TD: It’s sort of interesting. With Beatnik, if you look at the history of the company—have you ever seen the Wayback Machine? The Wayback Machine, if you don’t know, took a snap shot of popular Web sites over the years. You can look up your Web site—you can go back to, let’s say 1996, and you can remind yourself of the way your Web site was. When I do that with Beatnik, it’s kind of sad, because the further back you go, the more imaginative and creative and stylish it gets. Over the years it became more of a grand opera. That is actually in proportion to its financial stability and profitability. We started out and it was like a playground for me early on for interactive music, and it became successful over time as we got more pragmatic.

KD: That’s interesting. We covered a lot of ground here today. We talked about your vision as an artist and how you relate to your fans, your development as an artist in the early ‘80s, how yesterday compared to the model of today, a little about your business background and all. Tell us about the future. What is your vision for Thomas, as an artist?

TD: In the last year for me, since I started playing live, it’s been an opportunity to experiment with the new model. When I quit the business in the early ‘90s, I was frustrated, because I saw these new technologies around the corner—digital distribution, home recording, and so on—but it still seemed too soon for that model to become a reality at that point in time. During the intervening years, when I was in Silicon Valley, it’s like the technologies and the business models started to catch up. In the last year it’s been an opportunity to play with some of the new models. This is pretty much a blueprint for moving forward. I’m going to start making new music now. I’m working on a set of new songs. I’ve actually gone back to England to do some writing and recording. I’ll carry on producing, probably, and working as a keyboard player. I hope to do new music that is—significant. I don’t really want to end up one of those names that sprawls across late-night “Best of the ‘80s” cable TV ads. I’m usually one of the in-between ones that’s actually playing. My ambition is to do new music and to write a new chapter.

KD: With your amazing career, is commercial success still important to you?

TD: Put it this way. I actually find it more gratifying now. With the whole closed-artist and tighter artist-fan relationship, I actually find it a bit more gratifying. It was fine enough to do the whole pop star thing, but in a lot of ways as an artist, I feel more gratification now that I have more of a sense of priorities. I’d just like a couple more zeroes on the end of the units.

KD: This is a tough question, and an obvious question I’m going to ask you. What is the next three to five years for the business as you see it—physical versus digital, and your role in it?

TD: I think it’s an adjustment, really. Enough has been said about the old model—obviously that’s gone away—but I think new types of intermediaries are important. I sometimes think about actors. Bette Davis was signed to MGM for twelve pictures, or whatever. The only way she was going to make the movie is if she went through the studio. These days, a top star gets her own movie [deal] constructed, and the whole package is built around that star of yours, and an agent takes 10 percent, so it’s a big shift in the balance of power. I think the same thing is happening for artists. I think now, with a more friction-free ability to create and distribute music itself, it’s going to mean that the intermediary companies are going to enhance that relationship. It’s great to be in the middle of all of that. I think it’s tough to blame all sorts of people, or the legacy and the baggage of the old model, but I think that the mainstream industry is fortunately branching out into new areas. I think it’s a very exciting time. Outside of the industry, obviously there’s a lot of sub-stories there. If you’re a music fan, or an artist starting out, this is the best time I’ve ever seen—it’s very exciting. I think the results you’re going to see are going to start to unfold as kids that are now in high school, now in college, start to make music that is really unfettered by all of the obstacles of my generation.

KD: That’s a great answer. We talked on the phone several times in preparing for this, and you had one phrase I wanted to touch on briefly that I thought was worth repeating, and I have since used in several conversations. You, as an artist in your early days, saw yourself as a passive observer in your career, and your desire was to be an active participant. Is that fair?

TD: I think it’s very fair.

KD: Do you see that transition today of control—from an artist—in the ability to touch fans inside and outside of the model? Do you think that’s a fair assessment?

TD: I think it’s fair for the artist’s organization. I think not all artists are willing to go into the business cycle, but I think within the artist’s organization, you have a potential with the manager, and more power is coming to them, in ultimately creating more opportunities.

KD: That’s a great answer as well. Because we hadn’t met, we had only spoken on the phone, I spent some time last night finding some information about you—and I don’t even know if you’re going to be comfortable talking about this—there was a very public online sort of feud between you and a celebrity. Are you comfortable bringing that up?

TD: Yeah. I’ll just tell that story briefly. A few months ago, a fan wrote to me on my Web site and said, “Have you seen this MySpace page where somebody sampled you, a rapper of some sort?” This is the kind of stuff that happens on MySpace, and it’s usually low-funded. I went there thinking that it would be Mobb Deep, because I gave them a license to take a sample from “Science.”

KD: It wasn’t though, was it?

TD: It wasn’t. It was actually somebody called, K-Fed. I’m not very “with it.” I don’t really keep up with celebrities and gossip, or anything, but this turned out to be none other than Kevin Federline, Mr. Britney Spears—the ex-Mr. Britney Spears. I went to his MySpace page and I listened to it, you know, with an open mind—and it was crap. The lyrics were ragging on the haters—so I told him to stop it. I didn’t know how to get this stopped. It had already gotten half-a-million downloads, and you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. I went and talked to a lawyer, which I don’t do unless I absolutely have to, and he said, “No problem. I’ll write you a cease and desist letter. Just get an address of this K-Fed character, and we’ll send it to him and stop him.” The problem is how do you get a street address of Mr. and Mrs. Britney Spears? Do you get a map of the stars? I came up with this brilliant idea. I went to his MySpace page and I actually applied to become a friend of K-Fed on MySpace. I don’t know if he reads the headers to his emails, but twenty-four hours later I get a reply back—I am now a friend of K-Fed. Step two is to take the cease and desist letter and post it in the comments section of his page. I thought it would be a rather revolutionary act, but unfortunately that didn’t work either, because it turns out that there’s some kind of filter on there where words above one syllable get taken out—so that didn’t work either. I got my comeback in the end because it inspired me to write a song, which I’m going to put out as a single on iTunes in a couple of months. I have K-Fed to thank for the inspiration for that song.

KD: Ladies and gentlemen, I think we’re going to wrap up today—if you could take a moment to thank Mr. Dolby for his comments. Once again, thank you, Thomas, for being here.

For more information about Thomas Dolby or Kevin Day's Rocket Science,
please visit their official website's at:
http://www.thomasdolby.com
http://www.myrocketscience.com/