Jack Garratt won the BBC Sound of 2016 poll less than a fortnight ago, but behind the scenes, the lobbying by record labels on behalf of the acts they want to win the 2017 poll is already swinging into action. Since the BBC launched the Sound of … poll in 2003, it has become a flagpole event for launching and breaking new acts, a convenient cavalry charge at a time when the album market started to go into freefall.With the record industry keen to turn any lifeline it is handed into a whip with which to direct the market, it didn’t take long for it to become virtually a monopoly, shaped and directed by the incredible marketing weight and promotional expenditure of a handful of labels.
From its earliest days, Sound of … has been criticised as a cordoned-off VIP room for the major labels. Indeed, only one act on an independent label has ever won it – Adele in 2008, when signed to XL Recordings. EMI, when it still existed and before it was carved up between Universal and Warner, managed to win once in 2006 with Corinne Bailey Rae. Warner also managed to win once in 2009 with Little Boots. Sony has never had an act win.
Acts signed to Universal and its imprints, however, have won it 11 times in the past 14 years. Universal’s signings have triumphed every single year since 2010. Rather than it being a syndicate for the majors, it’s increasingly looking like a cartel for Universal – the biggest and most profitable record label in the world – and its sub-labels. There is no suggestion that there’s anything corrupt going on; simply that the results of the poll reflect the fact that those with the biggest marketing budgets can make their acts much more visible, and therefore much more likely to win. But the result has been that the BBC’s poll is less a promoter of talent than a promoter of commerce.
“It is presented as a certainty,” says one independent publicist, speaking anonymously, who long ago stopped putting forward acts for consideration. “I find the whole thing monumentally fucking depressing.”
Another independent publicist, speaking off the record, remembers feeling that a few leftfield acts were starting to make the longlist at the turn of the decade, which inspired them to consider pushing one of their acts for the Sound of 2011 poll. “As soon as I started to pitch to people, I realised the decisions had already started to be made,” they say.
Why are publicists so important to the process? Because journalists make up the majority of the 144 voters. Although the panel includes a selection of the BBC’s most respected new music presenters and producers, the majority of the pundits are from newspapers, magazines, blogs and commercial radio and TV. “We hope to represent a huge spectrum of music from across the world, covering a diverse range of musical styles and backgrounds,” the BBC’s website says. “When selecting the pundits, the BBC is looking for the most genuine and passionate music fans, whose day-job also involves showcasing the best new music to a wider audience. None of them work full-time for record labels, management or PR, and none of them can make money directly from the success of the artists. None of the pundits are paid for taking part.”
No one makes money, no one is paid. And the pundits do not, as the BBC takes care to stress, vote from a list of predetermined acts. But most of the voters are besieged by new music all year round: it’s only natural, if unfortunate, that the acts they remember, come voting time, are the ones who have been thrust upon them with the greatest frequency. Simply, these are the names that get remembered.
“I would imagine that the vast majority of people who are voting are not the people who will spend ages on Bandcamp buying music and investigating what else is being recommended around those artists,” says one writer who still votes each year, even if they know they are throwing a sponge at a tornado. “There were a few years where I thought: ‘Fuck this – I don’t want to do it.’ I hated the way it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
At the turn of this decade, the PR machines began roaring to life around six months before voting took place, to get the preferred names into the right minds. Today, it is a year in advance. Having a publicist devote this much time to pushing forward an anointed act is not cheap. Which prices out the small acts who would gain the most from an award that is meant to reward musical promise rather than – as with the Brits critics’ choice award (also won this year by Garratt) – highlight the act most likely to be successful over the following year.
“If someone wanted my undivided time to launch a new act over the course of a year, it would cost about 10 grand,” says the head of one small independent PR firm. “If you were talking to one of the big PR firms, they’d probably charge two grand a month. Major labels are the only ones who have the money to bankroll something like that.”
Add in similar costs for a TV and radio plugger, to get the music aired in public and make voters feel that said act really is the kind of label priority worth voting for, and the same again for an online marketing team to make things appear “viral” and “organic”, and you will be lucky to get much change out of £100,000. Labels say that the cost of developing and launching a new mainstream pop act today can be anywhere between £500,000 and £1m. With winning the tastemaker polls seen as the blue chip moment in a launch campaign, it’s clear why an increasing number of chips from a decreasing number of bettors are being stacked on the side of the BBC’s roulette wheel. It’s not that the BBC decided to create a poll that required this level of expenditure, but that the major labels have, in effect, turned it into one.
“With Jack Garratt, there was a lot of excitement around him at the Great Escape festival in Brighton last May,” explains a publicist about when it became obvious who was being positioned as the frontrunner for January’s big reveal. “The way they build things is to release a track or a video to create a buzz, and then get the artist to play the showcase festivals. Then, after the Sound … poll, the story is launched into the public consciousness that he is this humble, nice guy who started out busking.”
For a label to see anything back from the PR cost of pushing an act, the act would need to both win the poll (mainstream media outlets are not concerned with offering much coverage to the runners-up) and then sell an extra 100,000 albums. Given that most new acts today struggle to reach anything approaching those sales figures, the stakes are far too high for most to even dare compete. Bear in mind, too, that for many indie labels, the significantly lower costs of mounting a campaign for even the Mercury prize are still too high. But the more of them that duck out of the race, the more the poll is at risk of becoming little more than a satellite marketing division of Universal.
How can this be resolved? Maybe the solution lies in taking a Logan’s Run approach to the voting process, whereby anyone over the age of 30 is automatically retired from the panel, and voting rights are handed back to those most enthusiastic about the music and least concerned with backing a winner. As it stands, the poll is more of a coronation than a competition.
Despite being given a week to comment for this piece, the BBC has put no one forward. Perhaps there is a realisation there, too, that Sound of … might just as well be renamed Spend of ….