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Fight Like Apes split, blame streaming.


Lemonade

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Stick a fork in us, we’re done. 

We’ve been quiet for a while now. We’ve had a lot of thinking and talking to do. 
We’d be here all year if we started listing the people we wanted to thank, so we’ll just do that in our own time. 

You’ll see us all again under different musical guises but, these 3 shows will be Fight Like Apes’ last. We want to call it a day while we’re all still pals and are proud of what we’ve done. 

And we are very, very proud. 

It’s a deadly time in so many ways to be in a band; you can have so much control over your work if you’re clever; you can release it how and when you like and in our opinion, right now,  Ireland is the healthiest it’s ever been in terms of talent and diversity. 

But, there are massive challenges for a lot of bands, mostly financial, that make this a tough job and sadly, those obstacles have become too big for us. 

I think we all know that we're going to hear announcements like this more often. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that we can’t keep producing records if you keep not paying for them. Bands are having to sell beautiful albums for €2.99, labels can’t give you as much support since they’re losing income too and our alternative radio stations* are practically non existent now, meaning so many wonderful bands will not get a chance to get played on radio as they’ll be competing with huge pop acts. 

Please buy your music in independent record stores or directly from the band. 

Don’t fool yourself in to thinking that your £10 subscription to Deezer and Spotify helps us at all. It does not. Look how many bands are on there and do the maths. 

Please go to gigs. Please buy merch. 

Thanks to all you entirely crazy, wonderful people who have supported us and danced and screamed with us over the past 10 years. We could never thank you enough. 

I still can’t believe some of the amazing things we’ve done together and how far we came.

_______________________________
If you want to come see us here’s how:

November 24th, The Roisin Dubh, Galway
( Free show! )

November 25th, Connollys of Leap, Cork
( Ticket link : https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/fight-like-apes-tickets-28910746822 )

December 9th - back to where we had a our very first gig 10 years ago - Whelans, Dublin.
( Ticket link: https://goo.gl/mbZoMH )
_______________________________

If anyone needs to get in touch over anything, you can PM us here or mail us on fightlikeapes@gmail.com

FLA out. 

-MK, Jamie, Conor, Pete-

*RIP TXFM. We absolutely adore you and everything you’ve done for music in Ireland.

 

 

 

 

 

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I think it is unfair to suggest the Fight Like Apes are blaming streaming, they are blaming the lack of revenue from streaming. Therefore the end user of the product is not at fault, more the arsehole corporations that choose to keep all the profits for themselves. Fuck the record companies, parasitic cunts.

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55 minutes ago, Hakuba Mountain Wizards said:

I think it is unfair to suggest the Fight Like Apes are blaming streaming, they are blaming the lack of revenue from streaming. Therefore the end user of the product is not at fault, more the arsehole corporations that choose to keep all the profits for themselves. Fuck the record companies, parasitic cunts.

Fair point. I've had a Spotify subscription for a few years and if anything I feel even more guilty now than I did  when I used to download albums for free. Now I'm legitimately fucking the artists instead of underhandedly. FLA are a band that I really like, that I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of times, yet I've never bought any of their music, only Spotify. One solitary gig ticket is the only recompense they've ever gotten from me for making three great albums that I listen to frequently. I feel a cunt for contributing to this situation but what can I do? I'm considering cancelling my Spotify subscription and going back to buying music fairly but the amount of money it saves me... I dunno. 8 quid for an album from Google Play isn't unreasonable by any stretch, but I listen to a lot of music. 

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I think it was a cracked video, but i saw somewhere that spotify is actually in a massive amount of debt. they're not hoarding money. the problem is that the payments go to the record companies first, who then divvy it up at their own discretion. meaning spotify give money to the record companies, who then keep most of it for themselves and pay next to nothing (they could pay nothing if they wanted to) to the bands.

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3 hours ago, Jaaakkkeee said:

I think it was a cracked video, but i saw somewhere that spotify is actually in a massive amount of debt. they're not hoarding money. the problem is that the payments go to the record companies first, who then divvy it up at their own discretion. meaning spotify give money to the record companies, who then keep most of it for themselves and pay next to nothing (they could pay nothing if they wanted to) to the bands.

I know it's proportional but you have to have fuckloads of plays before Spotify even look at paying you, then they pay your record label sweet FA, which kind of leaves a percentage of sweet FA for the artist.

That's how it works for me. So please, but my shit (preferably direct from the label) over streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer or whatever.

Having said that, I'm just happy if you go and listen to my shit at all :) 

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It's pretty well known that the streaming business model is hugely flawed. Spotify won't make money for a number of years because of the deals they have with the labels. Their model is like a gym membership - gyms want to sell as many memberships as possible, but if everyone goes to the gym at the same time, they have no way of maintaining the gym, cleaning up after everyone, buying new equipment, etc so they count on people buying a membership and not turning up. Works well for gyms, but not for music streaming. The more people listen to music on their platform, the more they have to give away to the labels.

That's why you're starting to see concert tickets, merch, etc cropping into these types of products. They need more revenue streams with better margins.

So weirdly, one way you can help the problem is to use spotfiy as much as possible.

The labels royalty distribution is another issue. They're so stuck in their ways it's insane. Instead of e.g. Beggars looking to nurture interesting/niche musical talent, all they need is one or two Adeles who rake in so much from physical sales, digital sales, youtube views, tickets, streaming etc that they really have no need to diversify. Most labels have a few workhorses like Adele whose upside far outweighs the amount of effort needed to recoup as much money on lots of different artists.

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