Songwriters work in the shadows, knocking out tunes to order – sometimes in a matter of hours. The songwriters who work for Jay-Z, Adele, Florence and more tell Alexis Petridis how they do it – and why times are getting tough

This article titled “Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters” was written by Alexis Petridis, for The Guardian on Tuesday 17th May 2011 20.30 UTC Two years ago, Al “Shux” Shuckburgh found himself catapulted straight into songwriting’s premier league. The Londoner hadn’t expected much from the track he’d produced and co-written at a songwriting session with American tunesmiths Angela Hunte and Jane’t Sewell-Ulepic, about how homesick the pair were for Brooklyn. Later, Hunte sent it to Jay-Z‘s label, Roc Nation, but received a frosty response. Then EMI’s head of publishing overheard it at a barbecue, and decided it would be perfect for Jay-Z. The following night, the rapper wrote his own lyrics, recorded them, and then excitedly told Alicia Keys he had “a song that was going to be the anthem of New York” and asked her to perform on it. Back in London, Shuckburgh wasn’t even allowed to hear the track. “Well,” he says, “I could have heard it if I’d flown out to New York. But they were being so careful about anything leaking. At that point, I didn’t really have a track record, they didn’t really know who I was, so they didn’t know if they could trust me.” In fact, the first time he heard Empire State of Mind was when The Blueprint 3, the Jay-Z album it appeared on, finally leaked online. “It was very weird. I remember listening to it in my studio thinking, ‘Is this for real?’” Shuckburgh sounds more sanguine than might be expected for a man who was actively prevented from hearing a song he co-wrote. Perhaps the subsequent effect of Empire State of Mind on his bank balance and status has eased his pain. The track shifted 4m legal downloads and spent five weeks at No 1 in America, making it Jay-Z’s first US chart-topper. “It’s not like everything’s easy now,” says Shuckburgh. “But everything’s easier.“ Maybe that’s just how professional songwriters tend to be: whatever other attributes the job may require, a giant ego and a sense of preciousness aren’t really among them. This may be why songwriting tends to attract so many former performers, who have either tired of the limelight or watched it fade, and are now making some pragmatic decisions about their futures. Among the more improbable credits on recent hits were the three songs on Beyoncé‘s last album co-written by Ian Dench, formerly the guitarist of 1990s British indie dance band EMF (big hit: Unbelievable); then there’s She-Wolf by Shakira, partly the work of Sam Endicott, moonlighting from his day job as frontman of New York-based the Bravery. The washing machine technique “It’s the kind of job where the best thing you can be is invisible,” says Shuckburgh’s former mentor Eg White. “The very idea of a professional songwriter gets in the way of the singer.” White should know. He began his career as a performer – in boyband Brother Beyond and then in the critically acclaimed Eg and Alice, makers of glossy adult pop. He then went on to become one of Britain’s most successful songwriters for hire. He’s been responsible, or at least partly responsible, for Will Young‘s Leave Right Now, James Morrison‘s You Give Me Something, Adele‘s Chasing Pavements and Florence and the Machine‘s Hurricane Drunk. Tomorrow, as they have been doing for half a century, the Ivor Novello awards will turn a brief spotlight on to the shadowy world of professional songwriters, those people who ply their trade in studios and writing sessions, half-hidden from view, despite being the backbone of the music industry. Up for songwriting awards this year are the composers of such inescapable hits as Tinie Tempah‘s Pass Out, Katy B‘s Katy on a Mission and Plan B‘s She Said. As pop and R&B dominate the charts again (indie bands tend to write their own songs, or if they don’t, they keep quiet about it), the songwriter-for-hire is back in demand. At the top of the UK singles chart sits Bruno Mars, whose songwriting credits include Travie McCoy’s Billionaire and Cee-Lo Green‘s Fuck You. These songwriters do something that seems to go against every romantic notion we have about artistic creativity: they write songs to order (and apparently the current craving among UK labels is for songs that sound like Mumford and Sons, or Florence and the Machine). White, himself the winner of two Ivor Novello awards, is prevailed upon to meet an artist, form a bond, and come up with something chart-topping in the space of a day. “Sometimes less,” he says cheerfully. “Sometimes I get two hours. Someone comes over at three, we have a cup of tea, chew the cud for a bit, go: ‘All right, shall we write a song?’ And by six, they’ve gone home and we’ve fucking done it. Chasing Pavements, that took two or three hours.” Enormously affable, White seems to love every aspect of the process, even being forced to make friends with artists he’s never met before. “You immediately stop observing the niceties of gentle human contact between strangers,” he says, adding that he subscribes to “the washing machine theory” of songwriting. “I tend to play a few records and discuss them: what we need is the beat from that one, the fragility of that one. We try to keep it open, but we talk about the ways it might have precedents in different genres, smash them all together and get something different. If you just put one thing in the washing machine, you’re going to get one thing out; but if you put two or three colours in, who knows what colour’s going to emerge? Pop music is built out of pop music.” This is not an approach adopted by everyone. Jim Duguid, co-author of five songs on the debut album by Paolo Nutini, says: “Some record companies will give you a list of five songs and say, ‘We want something like this.’ But that’s like someone turning up with a BMW, giving you a load of parts and saying, ‘Can you build something like that for me?’ It’ll kind of look like it, but it won’t be right.” Duguid, who was drummer and songwriter with the old band Speedway – of which Nutini was a huge fan, doesn’t care much for knocking out a collaboration in a couple of hours, either. “I try to avoid that like the plague. A lot of industry people think, ‘Yeah, we’ll throw you together and you’ll write a hit in a day.’ But we did that in Speedway and it’s not the way the best music comes out. I like more of a social occasion, maybe three days of chatting and listening to music, then getting a couple of ideas together that reflect that.” The one thing professional songwriters seem to agree on is that times are getting tough. “Having had some success,” says Duguid, “it still shocks me how little money there is in it. I’m lucky in the sense that Paolo is one of the few artists who still sells physical CDs, and there’s money in that. With downloads – at one pence a download between three songwriters – you’ve got to be shifting a heck of a lot of records. The real money’s in getting your song on an advert or on television, but that’s getting harder, because everyone’s trying to do it.” A glorious bloody nose It’s a situation that is changing the nature of recording, says White: “Nobody wants album tracks any more, they just want singles. Before, you weren’t just chasing the money and the radio play – you could do something you really wanted to do, and had thus far been thwarted. Nobody wants the beautiful slow song that ends up as track 11 on an album but that everyone who buys the album will end up loving best of all. It’s down to iPod playing, cherry-picking, downloading. Fifteen years ago, you would hope that albums would outsell singles two to one. Now, I hear stories about Taio Cruz selling 13m downloads and 300,000 albums. And it’s not just him. Katy Perry: massive singles sales, small album sales. For publishing companies, that’s not a disaster – 13m singles is fantastic. But it’s a disaster for record companies and it’s a human disaster. The album is no longer the way people define themselves: there isn’t enough meat in there.” For a moment, White’s ebullience seems to desert him. Then he mentions Adele’s LP 21, which has just spent its 15th week at No 1 in the UK, and suddenly he perks up: he has a song on that. “Oh, that’s a glorious bloody nose to the music industry. Short-termist arses. Start fucking making music with your hearts! The record industry was saying no one was buying records any more, and then someone makes a very stoical, honest, beautiful record and people are buying it in shedloads. Because it’s nutritious.” Anyway, he says, album tracks or not, it’s a great job. “I’ve had Matt Cardle in today. We’ve both been making a fuck of a lot of noise, turning the guitars up really loud.” Matt Cardle off The X-Factor? Loud guitars? Noise? Really? “Yeah,” White chuckles. “Songwriting really is great fun.”

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Spotify is notorious amongst musicians for only paying a fraction of the royalties that other online music sites pay to bands. But it’s popular with music fans for allowing them to listen to almost anything on demand. Now they are being forced to bring in new restrictions

This article titled “Spotify to halve free music allowance” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th April 2011 09.31 UTC Spotify is to cut back the amount of free listening available to users from 20 to 10 hours.

From 1 May, the music streaming service will reduce by half the amount of free music available to its six million users in the UK and Europe.

Under the new restrictions, non-subscribers will only be allowed to listen to an individual track a maximum of five times. New users will be moved on to the restricted model within six months; it will apply to existing users from 1 May.

Since its 2008 launch, Spotify’s free offering has proved popular enough to tempt more than 1 million people to become paying customers.

Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder, announced the changes in a blogpost on the company’s website on Thursday.

“Making Spotify available to millions across Europe has seen the service become incredibly popular. People are listening to more music and from a wider range of artists than ever before, and are giving up on piracy, which is exactly what we hoped would happen,” he said.

“So it’s vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward.”

Ek said that the changes would mainly affect heavier users of the service, and that users would still be able to listen to around 200 tracks or 20 albums for free each month.

The move will no doubt rankle with some music fans, who had grown used to Spotify’s free streaming service being “too good to be true“.

The first commenter on Spotify’s official blogpost lamented: “So long Spotify. It was nice knowing you. Guess I’ll go back to pirating music again then.”

More details soon…

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Thousands log on worldwide to the Osprey webcam to watch the oldest breeding osprey keep vigil beside a Scottish loch.

This article titled “Osprey webcam thrills bird lovers as Lady of the Loch awaits mate” was written by Tracy McVeigh, for The Observer on Saturday 2nd April 2011 23.14 UTC Inside a wooden hide at the edge of a Perthshire loch, there is a flurry of excitement and a crackling of waterproof clothing. Binoculars are raised and whispered instructions exchanged. But hopes quickly fade as the alarm proves a false one. The bird that has swooped into sight is not the one they’d been waiting for. “She is taking a defensive stand; it’s not Him,” said seasonal ranger Anna Cheshier. “Look, she’s seeing him off. It’s just an interloper trying his luck.” There is a palpable feeling of disappointment in the hide, where half a dozen people sit glued to the goings-on on a platform of sticks less than 200 yards away, 60 feet up a Scots pine tree. Inside the nearby visitor centre, many more are watching the action in real time on two large HD television screens. More than 100,000 people have already viewed the webcam. The object of all the attention is Lady, the osprey, who stands in her giant nest and looks out to the blue skies. Having confounded the experts by not only living to the age of 26, against the eight years’ lifespan the bird was thought to have, but also by producing 48 fledglings, she is now waiting for Him – a 10-year-old male with whom she mated last year. He is due to land any day after a 3,000-mile migration back from west Africa. Ospreys mate for life so, if he has survived, he should be on his way. But if he doesn’t get here within the next few days, Lady is likely to presume him dead and move on to another male. In her lifetime, she has already outlived two mates. “The interest is huge,” said Cheshier, 25, from the Scottish Wildlife Trust‘s Loch of the Lowes nature reservation outside Dunkeld, an hour’s drive north of Edinburgh. “Lady is a star attraction and also very important. She has been coming back to her nest here for 19 years, but last year she was very ill and we all thought she was going to die, so no one imagined she’d be back this year.” Lady survived her near-death illness and arrived back from her African winter late last Monday night. She is not chipped or ringed, so it wasn’t until later, when the cameras got a look in her eyes, that the rangers were sure the remarkable raptor had returned. “She has a unique defect in the iris of her right eye – it looks like a lightning bolt,” said Cheshier. “It was amazing to see her come back; she is bucking every trend, rewriting the books.” Since her return, Lady has been helping herself to the loch’s supplies of perch and trout, even visiting the nearby Tay to catch herself a salmon, tidying up the nest, and waiting. Meanwhile, she is being closely watched by experts and fans. On the branches around her are positioned discreet cameras trained on the nest, one for day and one for night, and two microphones that pick up every ruffle of her feathers and her occasional piercing hawk cry. Live pictures are being eagerly watched around the world. Last year 33,000 people viewed the webcam online, but this year 120,000 have viewed the Lady of the Loch. “We will have the computer on all day in the background, just having a look every now and again,” said Jenny Hillier, up from Southampton with her husband, Pete, on a short break to see the bird. “We followed her on the webcam last year and the year before, but assumed she’d be dead. It’s amazing she’s back.” Pete Hillier has been writing about their trip on a wildlife blog to envious bird lovers around the country. “It’s quite something to see her – I think it’s the age of her, and the fact you can see her so close up here, that makes her so special,” he said. Colin and Dorothy Wilson from Dunfermline, Fife, are rooting for Lady, taking a detour from their spring break to make a pilgrimage to the nest. “We were here last June to see her and then we heard she hadn’t been so well, so we were astonished that she was back, and we had to come. It makes such a difference to be able to see wildlife like this,” said Dorothy. Two other diehard osprey fans, Alan Barraclough, 77, and Hazel Studham, 74, have come up from Cumbria to see Lady. “She’s a very special bird; we didn’t think she’d make it through the winter. I hope her beau turns up,” said Studham. Smaller than an eagle, larger than a hawk, the osprey disappeared as a species from the UK in 1916, when the last pair was killed by egg and bird hunters such as Victorian collector William Dunbar, who guiltily wrote to a friend that their obsessions “had finally done for the osprey”. Even when they returned in the 1950s to recolonise old haunts, their small numbers remained under threat, especially from postwar pesticides such as DDT. But now the osprey’s tenacity gives real encouragment to environmentalists. Roy Dennis, a conservation veteran and honorary director of the Highland Foundation for Wildlife, said Lady’s return was an astonishing feat. “It’s a real emblem, the osprey. People can see it [while they are] having a picnic on the side of a loch and you’ll see one dive in, so it’s very visible, distinct and identifiable, unlike a lot of birds. “It’s a great ambassador. But the reason osprey came back is that the habitat and the food supply are still here. It’s the persecution of the species, the shooting, that has stopped. With some of our other birds, it will be harder as their habitat is going. If Scotland isn’t becoming entirely the nature reserve of the UK, then it’s certainly its lungs – the successes with sea and white-tailed eagles, red grouse are great, but we need to do more for conservation, encouraged by these successes.” But as Dunkeld’s aged raptor enchants wildlife lovers around the world, Dennis thinks Lady may have a wait ahead of her. “I was out checking on osprey nests near me today and of 12 only two birds had returned. The weather hasn’t been so good and the closest of the tracked males is still in Spain, so it’s early days,” he said. “It could be another three or four days.”   Find the webcam at swt.org.uk/wildlife/webcams/loch-of-lowes2/

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Arianna Huffington’s sale of her website The Huffington Post to AOL shows there’s still money to be made from content aggregators if you know what you’re doing.

This article titled “Aggregators: if we can’t beat them, let’s join them” was written by Dan Sabbagh, for The Guardian on Monday 28th March 2011 06.00 UTC Arianna Huffington’s sale of the website that bears her name has not been without controversy; there are plenty who say she made a fortune from the sale to AOL on the back of aggregating other people’s content and exploiting bloggers who contributed for no pay and none of the highly rated equity. It is easy, of course, to argue that it isn’t fair, and, in addition, that life isn’t fair either. But it is also worth bearing in mind that this is the nature of the internet too. Facebook, for example, isn’t offering to share the advertising revenue it generates with the half a billion people who supply profiles (although come to think of it, income from one’s own site might be somewhat disappointing). Why should it? The skill is corralling so many people in one place, not in writing a Facebook profile. Whatever next? ITV paying viewers to watch the final of Dancing on Ice so they can get more advertising revenue? It’s not like there is any skill in watching telly after all. Meanwhile, the open nature of so much web content means that traditional boundaries of authorial ownership – they’re my words not yours – have been pretty much erased. It’s so easy, for example, to scrape a blog’s RSS feed and post the headline and teaser on another site. Newspapers, meanwhile, cheerfully copy tweets wholesale (one of mine on the merits of Rebecca Ferguson once made the Sunday Mirror) – while in the era of the live blog it has become not just possible, but increasingly common for media organisations to cite tweets from reporters employed by rivals. Think about it like that for a second and the scenario looks scary if you are part of an established news organisation – there is nothing to stop two blokes in a bedroom with BBC News and al-Jazeera on, and a fast eye for what else is popping up online, from coming up with their own “Libya live blog”. On this thinking, all that is preventing professional news sites being ripped off is copyright law, which is meant to stop other people copying and pasting sizeable quantities of text. Mind you, there are plenty of celebrity news sites that come perilously close to nicking whatever they see in the morning’s tabloids and running it as their own. Huffington – visiting the Guardian last week – also argued that there is a distinction to be made between professional journalists and bloggers. This isn’t necessarily a distinction of quality (because there are so many good bloggers out there) – rather the difference is between those who are paid to report professionally, and bloggers who are not. A handful of bloggers, of course, generate enough money to make the jump into full-time writing, but most can’t. Which is also the other reason why there aren’t two blokes in every third bedroom running their own Libya live blog – there isn’t enough money for a regular supply of biscuits and whatever else daily life requires. In truth, come to think of it, even those who write for traditional newspapers wouldn’t be able to make a living on the pay-per-click model. As Matt Wells notes in the cover feature, live blogs with no single author account for 9% of traffic to guardian.co.uk in March. The hit-driven nature of internet content means that a handful of stories and subjects dominate rankings, and by implication dominate online revenues. Paying writers on the basis of the traffic they get would turn a newspaper into a record company, where a handful of the artists are rich, and the rest become social workers in three years’ time. Aggregation, in short, is necessary to survive all round. Before the internet, there were generations of newspaper interviewees who were never paid for their contribution. Now the game is different – about providing destinations for people to share and discover news and content. And if Arianna Huffington was good at that, then it is wise not to complain, but probably to try and copy her.

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I managed to get a mediawiki installation up and running on the city escapes domain with Servage web host in the end, and once working it does seem to be fairly robust as far as non-US web hosting services are concerned. Version: This wiki is powered by MediaWiki, copyright (C) 2001-2007 Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Lee Daniel Crocker, Tim Starling, Erik Möller, Gabriel Wicke, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Niklas Laxström, Domas Mituzas, Rob Church and others. MediaWiki is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. MediaWiki is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. or read it online

MediaWiki: 1.11.1 PHP: 5.2.42-servage10 (apache2handler) MySQL: 5.0.75

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