Toasting a new taste for music?
Scottish record label Song, By Toad is at the forefront of a novel approach that lets music fans choose between a classic 12” vinyl and track download codes on a pack of beers. By Alan Morrison
I’M caught in a quandary like a muso Homer Simpson. Beer or records? A beautifully produced slab of 12” vinyl? Or a four-pack of microbrewerycrafted drink? Granted, the latter comes with download codes on each bottle, so I’d get eight songs and the amber liquid for the same price as the record. But that’s the dilemma: do I want the 12” tangible object to keep for posterity or the virtual reality of digital tracks plus the momentary pleasure of a decent drink? It’s enough to put the d’oh in do-re-me.
Each year record companies come up with inspired ways to push their product on the annual Record Store Day, which this year falls on April 20. But few manage to combine good tunes and a marketable gimmick with such a clever concept as the one Edinburgh label Song, By Toad has devised for 2013. For £12, music fans now have the choice of buying an eight- track split album (limited to 250 copies on clear red vinyl) featuring two songs each by Le Thug, Magic Eye, Plastic Animals and Zed Penguin or a four-pack of Barney’s beer, brewed at Summerhall and again limited to 250, featuring download codes for another eight songs by the same four bands. As they make their decision, label boss Matthew Young hopes an inner debate will ensue over the true value of music and the nature of its consumption.
So what better plan of action than to head to Song, By Toad’s Stock- bridge headquarters to sup Barney’s brew in the very room where the music was recorded while Young mulls over four state-of-the-industry topics? Beer: Le Thug Lager (“Light-straw coloured, smooth and a light, fruity zing”) Band: “Le Thug are a Glasgow band who are obviously big fans of The Jesus And Mary Chain. They’ve got this really fuzzy sound but Clio, the singer, has a crystal-clear voice and there’s a fashion at the moment for very reverby, very buried vocals.” Banter: “This release came about by pure accident, because Barney’s did custom beer for us at the Song, By Toad Christmas party. That made us think we should try to release a single on a bottle of beer, because a single just disappears these days – you can barely even sell them. They go up as a free download or YouTube video, and people just use them as publicity. It seemed like a nice opportunity to take something a bit ephemeral and pair it with a physical object.
“When we recorded these songs, we realised some are so long that even if we chose the three shortest they wouldn’t fit on one record. So we had to use two by each band, and then had half the recording session left over. We didn’t want to waste them or give them away, so that’s when the idea came together – to release some songs on beer, like we’d been talking about at Christmas.” Beer: PlasticAnimalsIPA(“Light-straw coloured, assertive bitterness, erupting with US-style hop character”) Band: “Plastic Animals do what they describe as ‘atmospheric punk sludge rock’. It’s indie rock, it’s got a heavy 90s influence, but it’s still quite shimmery and shoegazy and not so aggressive.” Banter: “There are lots of ephemeral things you can buy, but with beer, most of the time people remember the good time they had, not even the beer itself. So you’ve got this intangible pleasure of music still wedded to tangible objects like CDs and vinyl; then you’ve got this very obvious physical pleasure of food and drink, and yet it’s something that you put in you and it’s gone. What is the actual satisfaction that people are deriving from these things?
“I’m not one of those vinyl fanatics who says the sound is so much better; if you get a really high quality digital file, there’ll be more information on it than you can get on vinyl and it doesn’t have surface crackle. You can’t objectively say vinyl is better but, like tape distortion, it’s a form of worseness that we love. I just like playing records.” Beer: Magic Eye Red Rye (“A coppercoloured ale with a crisp, toffee apple and fruity taste”)