MUSIC GEAR & TECHNOLOGY GUIDE: ISSUE 27, NOVEMBER 2012 MUSIC GEAR & TECHNOLOGY GUIDE
THE HOLDING PATTERN Your Tunes The Holding Pattern CEO and Founder Nick Arnold
Allowing musicians to digitally sell their work while also collecting licensing revenue and, perhaps most importantly, retaining control over the destiny of their music, The Holding Pattern might just be the future of independent musicians. JENNIFER PETERSON-WARD gets the lowdown from CEO and founder Nick Arnold. Having waded through the uncertain waters of the music industry for the last 15 years, Nick Arnold knows a thing or two about the industry. “I’ve been a musician for the last 15 years and I’ve been signed to EMI publishing in LA also as a film composer for the last 10 years, so I’ve written music for a bunch of films and TV, and I found I had a lot of music left over – on the shelf so to speak – and wasn’t doing anything with it,” he explains. “I thought, if I was just one in a hundred thousand in this country or more, I would imagine that’s a lot of music people aren’t getting their hands on, aren’t discovering or aren’t getting exposed to.” After ruminating on this thought for several months, the proactive musician eventually came up with the idea for brand new Australianowned online market place for independent and emerging artists to promote, license and sell music. “It’s a brand new music platform that brings together independent artists, creatives and fans under the one umbrella,” Arnold explains. “What we’re trying to do is bring together, for the first time, the creatives and the production companies looking to source music from film, radio and public broadcast and also providing that community exposure for independent artists
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to raise their profile; and within that creating a really clean innovative music platform for people to find new music they would never have heard of before. I wanted to create this platform that would be easy to use, that musicians could choose at what price to sell their music – they earn 80 per cent of all their sales – and also that music fans get to discover this new music through a cool, innovative search engine.” Although the platform is currently exclusively digital, Arnold is keen to diversify and incorporate hard-copy publishing in future years. “We definitely want to go down the road of encapsulating all types of publishing. I’m a big vinyl fan myself, but right now we’re still a fledgling company so to speak, and want I want to do is to make sure that all music isn’t lost. If you are a hard copy fan and you still love looking through looking lyric sheets and smelling the paper and looking at the artwork, the beautiful romance that’s there when you listen to the music, that’s still going to be brought in, in coming months. The next part of what is going to happen is going to be incorporating that creative side and bringing the illustrators and artists to pitch their work to bands that might need artwork for an album, single or for merchandise. We’re trying to incorporate that all into the digital world we all live in now.”
While the functionality of The Holding Pattern has been drawing comparisons with iTunes and Spotify, Arnold is keen to point out The Holding Pattern is an entirely different beast, particularly when it comes to the service offered to musicians. “What we listen to through platforms or iTunes, that’s about five to 10 per cent of music that’s out there. I’m not trying to be anti-anyone it’s just that there’s simply more music out there. Also, more importantly, it’s for the artists to not get lost in large libraries of music like iTunes and Spotify and hoping to get found. Independent artists, what they need the most is obviously promotion and, without being too obvious, cash as well – but it’s through exposure that you get cash. As Arnold attests, The Holding Pattern also offers music lovers an alternative way to discover what might be their new favourite band through an easy-touse visual search engine. “It helps people walk through a 3D world of floating genres and helps you educate the user in terms of what else is out there – so if you like rock you might like indie rock, if you like indie rock you might like blues. It’s this visual kind of rabbit hole, never coming to an end,” he explains. “I’m just trying to offer a viable alternative for users to find and explore
new music. What I’m trying to do is create this independent community where you’ll find it’s truly independent and new and it’s probably something you haven’t heard before. Whether you like rock or you like jazz or you like hip hop, you’re going to find something in The Holding Pattern you love and that’s kind of exciting for a music lover as well as it is for an artist.” Having recently caught the eye of UK distributor Ditto Music and renowned music distributor MGM, it’s not hard to predict the buzz surrounding The Holding Pattern is only going to get bigger. “We’re so stoked to have MGM on board because not only are they really nice guys but because they’ve also been stalwarts of Australian independent music. It’s a really massive coup for us because MGM are the biggest independent Australian music distributor and for them to support us and endorse us is massive. I think can see that too and understand what we’re trying to do. Unfortunately the state of the music industry at the moment is such that a lot of platforms out there are just going to the top of the cake rather than getting to the nice juicy part of the cake.” _JENNIFER PETERSON-WARD
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