Hmmm, first time I've ever listened to this promo CD, distributed with MusicWeek. I suspect that, if there was any reason beyond happenstance that I included it in the catalogue of my collection, it was so that I could be rude about Yorkshire Forward and their vacuous regional chest-beating.
I'll get round to that in a moment. But first I have to acknowledge that the CD was a whole lot better than I expected. I doubt I'll give it a second listen — it wasn't that good — but I enjoyed more than many a promotional sampler (recent case in point). There are only a couple of dire tracks, and most promos have a much higher stinker rate.
As I think I've done at least once before, I decided to see how big an audience each of the acts had acquired about three and a half years after this CD came out, so here are their tallies of plays on Last.fm.
| Yes Boss | 18,007 | "I haven't yet made my mark, but I know my lines are razor sharp" — except that one. |
| The Cherokees | 2,815 | |
| Jade | 231,304 | There are, however, 16 artists called Jade, and none of them are clearly from Yorkshire, so it's very unclear how many plays this Yorkshire Jade has had. |
| The Favours | 5,217 | |
| Stoney | 73,528 | |
| [sub]NOVA | 1,324 | |
| 2020 Sound System | 2,798 | If they ever made the big time, I think Vince Clarke might make a polite enquiry concerning the royalties for the synth lines in this song |
| Kat Frankie | 49,840 | Kat is apparently an Australian, now based in Berlin, so I guess we have to assume she passed through Yorkshire a few years ago |
| Four Day Hombre | 36,286 | I remember meeting their label manager — decent bloke — and I thought they had featured on Music Arcades before, but now I can't find it. Maybe I'm mixing them up with someone else |
| Ubernoise | 336 | Yep, one of the dire ones. Though very memorable, and worse tracks have become hits. |
| Kava Kava | 13,977 |
Play counts are a tricky measure to get your head round, so to help give you some kind of handle on those figures, 1,000 plays is equivalent to 40 people playing an album, with 12-13 tracks, twice. Alternatively it could be 4 people — the members of the band — playing it 20 times each. (For comparison, hip-but-still-slightly underground bands with two albums behind them, like These New Puritans and Fuck Buttons have between 2 and 3 million plays; The Magnetic Fields have 20 million; The Beatles have 260 million; and top of the pile, Alasdair Roberts has 300,000.) So it doesn't look like any of these Yorkshire hopefuls have had their hopes of becoming famous realised. And yet, their stuff is mostly pretty good.
Just goes to show my dad was right when he warned me off a career in music as we sat in front of Top of the Pops 35 years ago, "The margin in quality between astonishing success and total failure," he told me, "is tiny — and often unrelated to musical talent."
After all, these are the acts that got the promotional breaks. Not just this CD. With funding from the regional development agency, Yorkshire Forward (whose money comes from taxpayers in the end), someone had a good time schmoozing this stuff around at Midem in Cannes. More money went towards a website to accompany the release, which is still there after many of the acts have disbanded. Inevitably, the site uses Flash and scores very poorly on accessibility.
What is it about these Non-Departmental Public Bodies that makes them so clueless about commissioning websites? Below is an email I wrote ten years ago when Yorkshire Forward launched the first version of their site. There were plenty of people complaining, but seven years later they hadn't learnt. They're being abolished soon. Sad.
| Buy via Discogs.com | Discogs entry for this album |
At 5:27 pm +0100 18/4/00, M**** B***** wrote:
On 18 Apr 00, at 17:15, C**** C***** wrote:
> I think it's disgusting that the government funds totally inaccessible > sites like this — they clearly don't give a damn about people with > disabilities (but perhaps it not really discriminatory… do they give > a damn about anyone…?).
Go on... say what you're _really_ thinking ;-)
I assume this site (http://www.yorkshire-on.net) is the same one I had some fun rubbishing a couple of months ago before it was launched - see http://www.syspace.co.uk/nuf/lists/snuf-l/2000.m2/0231.html et seq - I guess P** T****** can confirm this?
I find it all quite funny in sick kind of way. Note how this 'portal' only links to the organisations that Yorkshire Forward is confident will toady up to it to try and get a shareout from the purse that YF has its hands on.
I registered with the Virtual Business Club part of the site, 'the biggest networking area in the region' it says (you have to register twice with independent usernames and passwords, so be patient), and accessed their WebBoard: princely sum of 1 message there (reproduced below for a laugh!) in the public conferences (plus 12 in private ones for the politburo). I accessed the stats for the biggest users, and only 5 people have accessed it more than once - no prizes for guessing that this includes YF and BT staff - plus assorted Business Link types.
OK, I know it's early days, but what does it say about an organisation that claims to be 'the biggest networking area' at this stage?
It says that these people are more pumped up with insubstantial hot air than the flakiest dot com out there - the only difference being that the gullible investors this time are taxpayers. The gap between who pays and who, if anyone, gets called to account for how money is spent is just enormous (even more so than with the vast private pension funds).
Just to correct one thing from M**** & C****'s postings: Yorkshire Forward is _not_ really the government. It's not really, well, *anything*, in fact. Which I guess is why they flail about doing vanity publishing, just to let us know that they're here, and... er, yep, that's it: they're here. Or there. In, errrr, where was it now? Ah yes, Yorkshire.
It would be soooo nice if there were a clear policy statement from
the Government about [web] accessibility. If they can't be bothered
to take the lead, what incentive is there for anyone else to make an
effort?
I understand all the 'proper' .gov.uk sites do have a mandate to make sure their sites are compliant with W3C accessibility guidelines. I've only tested one of them, and it failed (but only just).
Cheers, david
And now here's that _one_ message so far on the Virtual Business Club conference - shall we post them a link to the archive of this discussion?
Topic: BT Welcomes Feedback (1 of 1), Read 18 times Conf: Yorkshire on Net From: Anonymous Date: Thursday, April 06, 2000 09:24 PM
This web site has been put together as a partnership between Yorkshire Forward and BT.
We welcome your feedback on the look and feel, ease of use and other aspects of the web site.
Please post your comments in this forum by pressing the "reply" button.
Thanks,
The BT Team
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