Flying Vinyl is more than a company that dishes out boxes of 7 inch records every month. It's a revolution. A revolution that isn't digital, that won't be digital, and won't stop till the romance of record stores and physical music is reignited. Whilst streaming platforms like Spotify have made music more accessible, they have somewhat saturated the music industry and exploited many bands who now struggle to make a living off their art. Flying Vinyl promotes physical music, but also promotes the best new bands around in vintage fashion, creating a community of top quality bands and vinyl loving geeks in the process. It's a pretty special company, community, family, whatever you want to call it. So we had a chat with the man in charge, Craig Evans, to gain a better insight. Here's what he had to say.
1) So, first could you tell us a bit about what FV is for those who maybe don't know & then why you began FV in the first place?
Sure, we’re a record community and every month we send people in our community 5 exclusively pressed 7” records from the best new bands around. It’s a great way to discover new music on the best format going and for us it’s also a chance to get some great new bands onto vinyl.
2) When did your love affair with vinyl begin?
So I’m not old enough to have ever consumed vinyl back in the day. I’m old enough to remember buying CDs as a kid but like most people who are of this next wave of people collecting vinyl I personally bought a 7” single off a band I liked. It was just so beautiful and I loved the band and wanted to own it as this piece of art if nothing else. Then I just had to listen to it and played it on my parents beaten up old turntable in their loft and the rest is history. I think that’s why it’s important to be getting records into young people’s hands, cause ultimately they’ll get hooked like I did and suddenly digital music won’t be enough anymore. From there I just started buying anything I liked; albums from new bands, singles at gigs, battered old copies of records that I loved, RSD releases that sort of thing. It’s funny to think about because my apartments filled with stuff that we’ve produced now.
3) Could you talk us through what a regular day involves at FV?
Yeah sure. No day is ever the same and you spend your day doing lots of different things. So it might be a few hours sat with our creative director working on packaging designs, a few hours listening to music with our artist manager, working on logistical planning, creating social media content, working on Spotlight. It’s really varied and there’s lots of different parts of the business which I like. The only job I’ve ever actually had I worked at for about a year and did the same thing day in day out, it properly drove me crazy so I like how varied things are with Flying Vinyl. You also have to spend a lot of time problem-solving. Problems are ultimately inevitable in any business so you get used to working on solving issues and making things efficient.
4) On the packaging, there was a quote from Hunter S. Thompson, why did you choose to put this quote on there, is that idea part of FV's mentality so to speak?
Ah yeah that quote from Hunter S on the music industry, we really liked that. We put different quotes on the boxes that kind of reflect what the company is all about. It’s meant to be a bit tongue and cheek but it does fit with our ethos. Before Flying Vinyl myself and my business partner had known each other for a while and we used to joke about the ‘pimps and thieves’ in the music industry, it’s a bit like the Wild West sometimes so it just felt like the right thing to print on one of the boxes. We’ve always tried to stand for something as a company and not see ourselves as part of that huge corporate machine so I don’t think there’s a quote that better sums up what we’re about.
5) What advice have you got for people trying to get into the music industry, not necessarily in bands but in media, promotion, etc.
I think first off you have to ask yourself what your reasoning for wanting to work in music is. It’s an incredibly fashionable place to work when you’re stood at the side of the stage watching bands you’re working with at a festival and all of that, but the bottom line is that this is 3% of what you actually do day-to-day. It’s a tough business in which for the most part the core fiscal value of the product we sell has come very close to zero, so if you’re in it for the wrong reason, you won’t last.
The other thing I’d say is because of what music actually yields now the amount of money knocking about really isn’t enough to support thousands of PR people, thousands of journalists, thousands of digital people. My best advise would be to analyse what you can do that genuinely progresses art, helps better art get made and gets more people listening to that art. If you’re not adding something new and different that progresses art you have to ask yourself what the point of trying is. It probably sounds quite cynical to say that but the people who make impact are those that move things forward.
The plus side is that where there’s problems there’s also solutions that can be created and honestly no one has a fucking clue what they’re doing, everyone’s just winging it so dive in and build things that help to resolve those problems. Good places to start at the moment are the ticket-touting situation, VR and how that’ll affect content, using blockchain to better control artist publishing, data mining from streaming, think bigger than working on something that everyone else is already working on.
6) What's been the most rewarding thing you've experienced since starting FV?The whole process is rewarding. We’re coming up to our 200th independent release and I still fucking can’t get my head around what an achievement that is. I’m so proud of what we’ve done here and these records we’re creating will live forever. I think the rewarding part is taking a band that no one’s heard of, putting their music onto vinyl, getting to share it with people all over the world and then hearing the stories about how that music affected the band and the listeners. We had a band get in touch a while ago who’d just got back from doing a mini-tour in Canada as part of Canadian Music Week because the head of programming there was an FV customers… it’s things like that you hear so much and it’s just crazy to think that’s what this thing that was started in a bedroom has gone onto achieve. It’s the fact that you end up impacting people’s lives which is strange as well, I know so many people who are working together, living together and even sleeping together because they met through Flying Vinyl or Flying Vinyl festival or some event we’ve put on… it’s hilarious to think what everyone had been doing if we hadn’t bothered.
7) How do you feel the dominance of streaming services has changed the music industry & the way we consume music?
I think this is somewhere I have mixed feelings. From a consumer point of view this technology is unfathomable… It’s basically like when I was a kid and Napster launched, only it’s legal, you don’t have to wait for music to download and the songs are all perfect instead of having stuff that was pirated off the radio. It’s undoubtedly giving young people a much broader palette with what they listen to - I remember when Bowie died and you’ve got all these 15 year old kids crying and I remember saying to a mate of mine ‘at 15 I didn’t even know what the fuck Bowie was’. You stuck to one genre and listened to new stuff and that was it. Now you can listen to everything, because you don’t have to risk spending money on something you’ll hate. Albums used to have two decent tracks on them and a load of filler and you can’t do that anymore. It’s changing the entire fabric of the creative process.
The downside is obviously that the amount of money coming back to artists is laughable and it basically might as well be nothing it’s so little, in my opinion. That’s the bit that I’m uncomfortable with, it’s hard for artists to be artists when there’s such a lack of funding. I know bands with millions of streams on Spotify and they work in cafes and bars struggling to pay rent. Those two things don’t stack up well. I also think (and I’m guilty of this as well) it’s created a sense of disposability in something that’s so special. It used to be more cherished and now we’re able to just playlist things, listen repeatedly for a week and then disregard it like it’s nothing. That’s what’s so different and so nice about vinyl, is that it goes in the completely opposite direction. It reminds you what the true value of these songs are, it connects you with it on a much deeper level.
8) You've also curated the Flying Vinyl festival, how great is it to bring all the alumni together for a day of live music? Are there plans for one this year?
Flying Vinyl Festivals’ great. It’s always a bit mad and very humbling when you’ve got ten great bands on a stage and a packed venue. Again, it always creates these surreal ‘what have we created’ kinda moments. Looking back now on the first festival as well, we had Swim Deep, Black Honey, The Amazons, Yonaka and The Magic Gang on one line up. It’s so funny, can you imagine that show now… You couldn’t see that line-up anywhere.
This year we’ve really struggled with finding music venues in London that fit the kind of thing that we’re trying to do, that are located well, that have capacity for around a thousand people and are technically setup well enough to put on ten bands. We don’t really ever want to do anything that we’re not 100% proud of as we have been the last two festivals so decided that we’d look to hold off until April 19 and do something then in a setting we’re really proud of.
9) Say in 10 years time, where would you like FV to be, what new projects would you like to have begun, what do you want to achieve?
So, we recently launched a new product called Spotlight at the start of the year. Each month we work with a different band to collaboratively make a photo-journal that’s all about their journey and their lives and stuff and it comes with a 7” record from the band in the back. We’ve already done ones with The Amazons, Dream Wife, Our Girl, Ten Tonnes, Island and Nova Twins If you fancy taking a look you can find it at www.flyingvinyl.co.uk/
In terms of other things, I don’t think of us as a vinyl company. I don’t think of us as a physical music retailers. I think of us as a music distribution company that connects people who properly care about music with stuff they’re going to love. So my aim is to keep growing what we’re doing across multiple formats and variations. Next year’s going to be a big year for us.
10) Finally, could we have a quick word on what you thought of Kasabian's recent claims about new bands not being good enough? Which of the bands you've worked with are good enough to headline?
God, I could talk all day about that. I think it’s a load of bollocks to be honest. Firstly, I’ve gotta say, the media has somewhat exaggerated what they said to make it sound much more aggressive but I do think they need to pull their heads out of their own arses if they think the reason they’re headlining festivals is purely based on the talent of their band.
There’s so many variables involved in a band getting to Kasabian’s level and you’ve got to remember that when they broke it was like; get on a label, get radio airplay, get a few pieces in magazines etc etc. There were a few tastemakers and the listener had much less choice. Now you’ve got way more noise and way less big tastemakers.
They have a responsibility to support the next generation of art, not sit there and say that kind of thing. The real reason that the same headliners are appearing again and again is because all these festivals are huge corporate money-making machines that want to sell tickets. So they’re in competition to book ‘sure-thing’ acts that are perceptually bigger than their rivals. What we really need is some of these festivals to stop pandering to what people think they want and have a voice, a bit like newspapers taking an editorial stance.
Someone needs to basically say; come to our festival not because Ed Sheeran is headlining it but because you’ll see some amazing bands you might not have heard of. If you deliver on that, those people will be back the next year. At the moment we just have a pool of ‘ticket selling’ stadium-ready bands that circulate around the major festivals and that’s pretty shitty.
In terms of who’s good enough to headline, I think it’s about where they’re at in their career. Most of the bands we’re working with aren’t ready to headline Glasto because they’re on their first album or even first EP. You really need bands that are at least through their second album campaign and have had at least two commercially successful albums, so yeah, for me I’d like to see Wolf Alice, Slaves, Royal Blood, The 1975 headlining these festivals, I think they’re all ready (I know some of these bands are already) but yeah… overall… take a fucking stance man and bring up the next wave.
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