The vinyl lounge has been used for a variety of music related events, including Classic Album Sundays and recently three music industry debates that hosted the likes of Huw Stevens and Paul Latham of Live Nation.

For enquiries about The Old Vinyl Factory please contact life@theoldvinylfactory.com

The FAC presents our very first Copyright Seminar.

Michael Simkins LLP law firm will be hosting the Artist Only evening event on 3rd April.
Amanda Harcourt will give a short entertaining talk about copyright, possibly one of the driest topics out there, yet she presents it in a smart and fascinating way.
There will be a chance to talk directly to Amanda and ask questions, as well as FAC board members Sandie Shaw and Rumer.

Networking will follow with drinks provided by Michael Simkins LLP.

MANAGERS and LABELS – please feel free to send this invite to your artists. RSVP to info@thefac.org

The plans, which took four years to navigate EC and UK Law, were published this week and signify a big boost for session musicians, a massive windfall for large record labels but a mixed bag for featured artists.

Controversially the right to renegotiate contracts after 50 years has been deemed unnecessary for inclusion by the IPO. This extension was meant to benefit featured artists in their old age and the omission will leave countless creative artists earning pennies from the sales of their work whilst record labels reap large windfall profits.

The FAC and MMF welcome the main features of the proposed new law which are:

• A Use It or Lose It clause (which still needs improvement).
• A clean slate provision that means featured artists will receive income without deductions after 50 years whatever their contracts say.
• A fund for session musicians (non-featured performers) whose creativity embellished many classic recordings. The money will come from 20% of the income generated by the sales and use of recorded music in the extension period.

Brian Message Music Managers Forum (MMF) Chair said “To be clear we are not looking to further enrich artists who have become worldwide megastars who have had the means to renegotiate their contracts over the years. We are talking about artists who in their teens made some of the classic music of the 60’s, who have influenced generations since and who need some income during the last years of their lives.”

In 2008 after EC Commissioner Charlie McCreevy had started the process of extending the term of Copyright for sound recordings from 50 to 95 years, UK Culture Minister Andy Burnham said:

“We want the industry to come back with good, workable ideas as to how a proposal on copyright extension might be framed that directly and predominantly benefits performers – both session and featured musicians”.

The Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) and MMF are now calling upon rights holders to introduce minimum royalties (without any deductions) for featured artists in the extended copyright term. It could mean the change in share of income of a 79p download moving from 1p for the featured artist to 9.4p whilst a record company income would fall from 46p to 37.6p. Click here to see an example of term economics.

Mark Kelly and Crispin Hunt co-CEO’s of the FAC said “We want artists to be sitting at the table not on the menu. Hopefully a decent royalty will mean artists will be able to eat a meal as well.”

A particular highlight of the night was Francis Keeling’s slapdown of windowing album releases on digital streaming services; a view echoed by the FAC, which can lead to alienating fans and encouraging piracy.

The full panel blog can be read below….

The night was divided into key themes for the panel to discuss, interspersed with video contributions from other industry figures, used as talking points.

The first question: how are we going to be consuming music in 2013? Keeling was first to field it. “We can all see the massive transition to mobile,” he said.

“I think tablet is going to have an enormous impact actually, just as a far more portable device giving you that improved experience, to find music, to build playlists… You’ve got the ability to listen, but at the same time to be curating, and building. The tablet can give you a much more immersive experience of music.”

Keeling said Universal is preparing its business for this, and gauging what consumer demand will be via tablets and apps. “Consumers will subscribe to certain services, but I think often their consumption will be through third-party apps.” Keeling cited SpotOn Radio as a good example: an app that requires users to have a Spotify subscription, but which delivers personal radio features beyond the main service.

Over to Karen Piper. “It’s going to be interesting to see what iTunes do to address streaming,” she said. “Everybody’s going to shift to suit the market that’s emerging. iTunes and Spotify aren’t going to go away, they’re just going to amend what they offer. Spotify have just done that with the social 2.0 – there was a need there for curation, and that’s what they’ve done.

Purdham pointed to the idea of people being “surrounded by technology” in 2013, having just bought his 81 year-old father-in-law an iPad. ”I think you’ve got to be a little bit careful. There’s going to be so much technology around, the ability to play music is there. Whether they do or not, that’s the next big step we have to take… It’s the mass-market we really have to address.”

What does all this mean for artists? “I think it’s a fantastically exciting time for artists,” said Hunt, who besides his FAC role is a songwriter and artist. “New bands have got so many ways to build up a fanbase… One of the things I’d like to see is that artists are included in the discussions and debates that are going on with our future and our work,” he said.

“Artists have always been at the forefront. We were the first ones to start setting up websites and flogging stuff ourselves. It’s now very important that the industry deals with us transparently, and then we’ll be able to get behind it… It’s very important that we can carry on creating, and we don’t just get lost in a sea of 1m genius songs on SoundCloud that will drown us all!”

And Cohen, who said we’re moving more and more towards the idea of having “our playlists anywhere with us”, ready to be played through whatever screen and/or speakers are in the environments we find ourselves.

Cohen thinks the more music is available to listen to, the more valuable it will make the live experience. “It’s becoming more and more a unique, sacred and valued experience,” he said, before adding that people will use different platforms to listen to music depending on their age and preferences. “My children who are 11 and 9 listen to all their music through YouTube,” said Cohen.

A lot is resting on mobile’s shoulders in 2013 from a music perspective. Can it bear the weight? Piper pointed out thatapps need to be “particularly compelling before someone is going to invest in that. I’ve seen a million apps that aren’t… You need to give a reason why people will download it.”

More positively, she said a recent app from Columbia has seen “enormous” click-throughs to buy the artist’s album – more than the label expected – which bodes well when these apps are done right.

Keeling talked about some of the problems with mobile music – “carriers aren’t being hugely helpful in this area in terms of providing good, low-cost billing systems for music services” – while also noting that mobile advertising is still relatively difficult, in terms of making significant revenues from it to support a music service.

“That’s one of the nice things about mobile,” said Hunt. “You can’t get bombarded with adverts. And also in the same way it’s not so easy to access things like pirate sites, so hopefully people will start to use proper services to access stuff.”

He also expressed the hope that improved devices and networks will also bump up the audio quality of digital music, praising Neil Young – “the old fucker that he is, being a pioneer!” – for his attempts to develop a higher-fidelity music downloads service called Pono. Hunt hoped people will get “sick of listening to nasty chinkly-chinkly MP3s” and pay for better quality music to go with their expensive headphones.

Conversation turned to streaming services, and the controversies around the way their payouts make their way into the pockets of artists. Or not. Hunt said he streams from Spotify, but criticised the lack of transparency around its payouts again.

“It does make me sick when I get the PRS statements and I’m trying to feed my poor children [said with mock-sobs] and there are 80,000 streams of something and it’s made me one pound!” he said.

“As the digital environment opens up, it’s got to become more transparent: the way that these new deals are done. Because new and groundbreaking innovations spring out of nowhere the entire time. Artists have to be included in that, or we won’t be able to make art any more.”

Universal’s Keeling responded, pointing that iTunes has been around for more than a decade and is still expanding globally, while Spotify has launched in 15 countries after four years. ”The point being it takes time, fot services to grow and change consumers’ behaviour,” he said, pointing also to the “massive potential” of Google Play and Microsoft’s Xbox Music, which both launched this year.

The panel moved on to bright spots for 2013. Hunt cited the industry’s Global Repertoire Database as a “fantastic possibility”, while also predicting that as licensing is made easier through one-stop shop type services “the entire culture of the internet would change, because at the moment it’s so complicated.”

However, he said he personally (as in, not FAC’s official view necessarily) would like to see government involvement in ensuring these kinds of licensing initiatives work properly. “If it’s left just in the hands of the industry to regulate themselves, they won’t.”

Keeling said the industry needs to keep licensing “as aggressively and pro-actively as possible”, although he admitted that it’s getting more complicated due to the sheer breadth of services and service types that are now out there.

“I don’t think it changes the structure of labels continuing to invest in artists and creating a fantastic wealth of talent to encourage consumers to adopt these services,” he said.

“There’s a tremendous amount of baggage that we’ve all got to let go and move on from,” he added. “You hear more and more yesteryear arguments about the relationships between labels, managers, artists and publishers. We are going to kick ourselves in a few years [if the industry doesn't move on from this and focus on new licensing models].”

Purdham agreed, and talked about a shift in the difficulties in licensing over the last five years from “impossible to… merely difficult!”, but also said it’s important to think about the potential benefits of taking digital music more into the mainstream.

“The internet is about scale,” he said. “Walk down the streets, there are more people who don’t stream music today, or who don’t listen to it, than there are who do. That’s what we’ve got to unleash, so my mum can push a button and listen to Frank Sinatra, my daughter can push a button and listen to Kings of Leon, and my son… Well, God knows what he wants to listen to!”

Hunt addressed a comment about artists sometimes being misinformed when they speak out on digital issues. “They are often extremely misinformed, you’re right, but that’s kind of our job,” he said: more transparency would certainly help them be better informed.

Hunt segued into a discussion about the “new boss” – internet companies – versus the old boss of the record labels and publishers, noting that “at least the old boss pays us… Kim Dotcom has five Rolls Royces, whereas Lucian Grainge has only one!” He also coined a new term – “freehadists” – for people online who criticise artists who speak out on issues like copyright and piracy.

“When Lily Allen started speaking out on piracy, I was backing her and trying to support her, but she got these huge tirades from the freehadists,” said Hunt.

Next up: a discussion of direct-to-consumer marketing and distribution. “You’re dealing with humans at the other end of it:if you’re putting out shoddy product, nobody’s going to be interested, and if you’ve got no fans, nobody’s going to be interested,” she said. “If you don’t have an audience or you don’t have something good to sell beyond what they can buy on Amazon, you shouldn’t invest in D2C for that project.”

Keeling said that D2C has always been important for bands and fans. “In a world where we’ve got such declining shelf-space, and where digital services move you away from a relationship between the fans and artists in some sense, D2C does become more important,” he said.

Cohen talked about a London startup called BuddyBounce, which helps artists track their fans and superfans activities across various social networks, and reward them. “You’re going to take that notion of D2C and expand it,” he said. “We’ll be able to see all kinds of different activity and reward all kinds of different activity across platforms.”

Hunt said he thinks D2C is “incredibly important for new artists… It’s the way they now build a fanbase. It’s essential for new artists. Also, I’ve got friends who run a company called AWAL who put out Portishead’s last record. So for artists who’ve got a large fanbase and want to keep their career going, they can go somewhere like that.”

What can the music industry learn from other entertainment and media industries, like books, film and TV? For example, should the film industry’s windowing system – where films go to cinemas, then DVD, then eventually to streaming services like Netflix – be mirrored for albums and streaming music services?

Keeling didn’t mince his words: “Us trying to implement windowing in our business is a complete disaster, it’s the wrong thing to do, and can only alienate the fanbases“. However, he praised the way TV companies invest themselves in technology and platforms, citing Sky and HBO as examples.

“In publishing, in a world where newspapers and magazines have so traditionally made so much money from advertising, and the publishing world is still vastly ad-funded, we’ve got to look at that market, learn, understand how they’ve done it and how we integrate advertising into our product… Advertising is not something we should be afraid of. We should embrace it, and use it to fund a lot of what we’re doing.”

Conversation turned to Pandora, which is campaigning for a reduction in the rates that it pays for music on its platform, due to its business struggling to turn a profit under its current obligations. Purdham said it was baffling that a company doing hundreds of millions of revenues is finding it so hard, but Hunt had a pithy suggestion: “Maybe they’ve got a crap model and it doesn’t work!”

Cohen said that while the music industry has experimented with windows “there’s no  understanding of how windows on television or why they work“, but said he’d also like to see more nimble release strategies – citing the publication of an e-book called ‘Why Romney Lost’ the morning after the recent presidential election as one possible inspiration.

The final prepared question on the night: what will Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon do in 2013, and what does that mean for the music business and artists?

“The indicator is actually how much do we bring to those companies?” said Keeling. So the industry has had a longstanding relationship with Apple and Amazon in that regard. “As we move more towards an ad-funded consumption of music environment, then Facebook and Google get far more out of music… that the brings them far more closer to everything we’re doing.”

Piper said that from a marketing perspective, Facebook is “the ultimate tool for reaching your audience, if you know how to use it”. And while Google+ isn’t massive yet, “I do think they have some interesting tools to use. They’re really pushing it at the moment, and they will continue to do so next year. They’ve really got their hooks in on that in the UK.”

Purdham said from a financial point of view, Apple remains. “Facebook is the one that has potentially more to offer if it gets its act together, but it hasn’t yet,” he said. “Just the fact if you took Google away tomorrow, the industry would probably suffer the most, if you dropped a bomb on them and people could no longer do the searches, use YouTube and so on.”

Hunt: “I think Apple are doing the most for music,” he said, citing their devices and the iTunes service. Google? It’s fair to say he was less keen.

“Google do the least in that they’re an incredibly good search service, but I don’t think they’ve got any sympathy for the music industry whatsoever. In the universal sphere of things they don’t give a damn about how much we’re selling, or the needs of our lobby. Amazon is Amazon: it’s the new Woolies really. And Facebook is in interesting: they’ve lulled us into it so we’re all dependent, and they’re going to slowly find ways to advertise new things they’ll do well out of, and new clever things that we as an industry will be able to use.”

Cohen noted there haven’t really been any commerce success stories on Facebook so far, while Amazon and Google both “wanna own the transaction stack for m-commerce”, which will give them more of a role to play as music gets even more mobile and tablet-focused.

The panel fielded a question about music as utility, bundled into, say, people’s broadband or mobile tariffs with the telco sucking up the cost. “We’ve had that conversation. I think it’s complete bullshit!” said Keeling. “The idea of bundling music… I think the idea of giving consumers free experience is vital. We want consumers to change behaviour, and therefore carriers’ ability to encourage that is important.”

So, Universal likes the idea of ISPs and operators promoting trials and partnering with digital services. “You’re kinda forcing the consumer into one product or service, and you’re also actively encouraging breakage… What we wanna do is give consumers a great experience and then ultimately encourage them to pay: take up a service.”

There was also discussion about how long CDs will live on – “The thing you often forget is you’re in a bubble. There’s a lot of people in the world who still buy CDs. They’re the mass-market,” said Piper. “Not everyone has an iPad sitting at home listening to Spotify” – while Purdham talked about we7′s new owner Tesco’s sale of CDs in its stores, and warned against killing the CD off prematurely.

“People are getting fearful of buying CDs, as they think it might be the uncool thing to do,” he said. “Yet they’re not digital yet. If we push them away from the things they’re happy to use and consume, and don’t get them into the digital world, we lose them.”

December 11th, Stuart Dredge, Music Ally

AIF Launch Charter To Combat Ticket Profiteering

• Signatories include Radiohead, Bestival, Orbital, and Secret Garden Party
• Calls for secondary ticket sellers to ‘cease and desist selling tickets’ for supporter’s events

In a move to keep festival tickets at a price accessible and affordable to fans, Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) have made a stand against touts and the secondary ticketing market in a charter that calls them ‘bad for fans and bad for live entertainment’.

The charter (found below), which sets out a position against secondary ticketing and demands withdrawal from signatory’s events, can claim support from over 55 industry veterans, artists, promoters and festivals. AIF is calling on the industry to rise up and lend their support to the charter alongside the likes of Radiohead, Secret Garden Party, Bestival, Orbital, Gotye, Portishead, Coda Agency, Hospital Records, Ninja Tune, WeGotTickets, Field Day Festival, Nozstock Festival, In The Woods and WOMAD.

The Charter is part of a wider strategy to address secondary ticketing, a growing problem of for both the live industry and for gig goers across the UK.  Eloquently exposed to the public in the recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme, the secondary ticketing market has been attempting to cloak and legitimise touting, whilst undermining much of the live sector’s attempts to offer quality entertainment at reasonable prices.

This subject is being taken very seriously by all parts of the live music industry. The Fan Fair Alliance, is soon to go public with strong views on the subject, and is fully supported by AIF.

Said Rob da Bank, Bestival and AIF Co-founder “The whole secondary ticketing situation does make me really angry, mostly because I just don’t feel many of the people paying vastly inflated prices actually understand the mechanics behind it, and secondly because the people profiting are doing so driven by pure greed.

“ For me music has never been about money and there’s a sharp divide between those in the music business purely for profit and those who are in it for the love of music. The festivals who say they’ve sold out while blatantly putting hundreds or thousands of tickets on a secondary seller are just plain dishonest.” 

Dan Silver, (Value Added Talent , representing Orbital & Alabama 3) states “As representatives of the Artists and acting as their officially appointed ambassadors to their fans, VAT will continue to resist strongly the efforts by unconnected 3^rd parties to profit from ticket sales as middlemen, and will always seek to sell to fans at the lowest possible transaction charges – which we would like to stress are not shared in any way with the creators of value, the Artists themselves.”

To sign up to the industry charter email Emmy at emmy@aiforg.com or call +44(0)208 994 5599.

For fans looking to exchange tickets ethically for events such as Bestival, Eden Sessions or Secret Garden Party, AIF and Sandbag’s Ticket Trust offers a forum in which to buy and sell tickets – this adheres to the same 10% cap campaigned for by Sharon Hodgson’s Sale of Tickets (Sporting and Cultural Events) Bill. Radiohead has also added its support for Ticket Trust advising fans to exchange tickets on the site for their UK tour.

The Fair Ticketing Charter

We the undersigned believe that the growth of ticket-touting online – so-called ‘secondary ticketing’ – is bad for fans and bad for live entertainment.

Ticket touting means real fans are deprived of the opportunity to attend events and see artists they love while speculators cash in.

We believe there are strong arguments for legislation to curb the activities of unofficial ticket-sellers.

Until such legislation is enacted we believe the entire Live Entertainment Industry should further increase its efforts to protect fans.

We affirm that we will be transparent with the pricing and distribution of tickets for events that we control.

We restate our commitment to adopting ticketing processes and technologies which ensure tickets reach the hands of real fans rather than touts.

We call on secondary ticket sellers to cease and desist selling tickets for events we control.

We call on consumers to boycott ticket touts.

Signatories:

13 Artists

Association of Independent Festivals

Association of Festival Organisers

Chambers Management (promoter of comedy talent and mgr. of Jimmy Carr, Frankie Boyle and Jack Whitehall)

Coda Agency

Dawson Breed Music

Featured Artists Coalition (Sandie Shaw, Crispin Hunt, Mark Kelly, Ed O’Brien, Fran Healy, Nick Mason, Dave Rowntree, Lucy Pullin, Kate Nash, Annie Lennox, Hal Ritson, Master Shortie, Howard Jones, Rumer and Chris Difford)

Gotye

Graphite Media

Hospital Records

John Fairs

JCF Management

Ninja Tune

Portishead

Radiohead

Sandbag

Value Added Talent

Wildlife Entertainment (rep. Arctic Monkeys, Miles Kane)

We Got Tickets

XRay Touring

The charter can also be viewed at www.aiforg.com

Fran’s initial statement can be read below:

Thank you for inviting me to this select committee. I am thrilled to be given the opportunity to represent my industry at the highest level and hope I can be of some assistance in your enquiry.

My name is Fran Healy. I sing in the UK band Travis and I am a board member of the Featured Artists Coalition. Travis have been releasing records since our first self released 10 inch vinyl single in 1996. We were signed to an indie label called Independiente for 12 years, over which time we have toured the world, sold around 10 million albums, saw our singles and albums top the sales and airplay charts. As well as winning Brit awards for best album and best band, I was awarded an Ivor Novello award for songwriter of the year. I’m proud to be a British musical export. As a board member of the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), I’m active in representing featured artists (artists who have signed record deals) providing a voice at the table, at a time when our industry is in transition. 

I wanted to write this as an addition to what I will be talking about in the event I don’t manage to say everything I want to say. 

Before I start I’d like you to listen not as a Member of Parliament but as a fan of music. Everyone is a fan of music. It soundtracks our lives from cradle, through teenagehood, weddings and funerals. We love it.

 With that in mind, I see our industry in incredibly simple terms. 

 At the heart of our business is the relationship between the artist and the fan. 

There are 4 main businesses which have flourished from this special relationship. The music publishing business, the record business, the merchandise business and the live music business. 

I feel this has to be overstated because people sometimes think “the record business” is “the music business” when in fact it makes up only 25% of music business revenues. It’s an easy mistake to make and is sometimes even made by the record business. 

 So in order to help our industry become bigger and better in the 21st century we need to look at it in broad daylight, for what it actually is: four businesses revolving round a very special relationship; that of the fan and the artist.

Secondly, if the heart of our business is this relationship between the fan and artist, then the brains of our business are creatives. If we look at the history of the UK music industry, it is riddled with these incredible maverick businessmen and women in each of the four businesses who took it to the next level – Brian Epstein, Chris Blackwell, Richard Branson, Jeff Travis, Martin Mills, Bob Geldof to name a few – all creative and all of whom were massive music fans. Again we return to this idea of fan and artist at the core of the music industry. Just this time, fans who love it so much they started a business, probably because they realised how powerful that bond was.

Thirdly, I want to talk about education. I went to the largest comprehensive school in Europe, Holyrood Secondary School in Glasgow. It’s a great school but I remember the struggle the art and music department had in securing the next year’s budget. Art and music were viewed as fluff, decoration at best. In speaking to art and music teachers today, it feels like it has gotten worse. It seems crazy when the pen in your hand, the carpet under your feet, the building you sit in, the cup you drink from, the computer you surf with, the bed you lie in (I could go on), but all of this was designed and created. Even on a scientific level, an education in art aids the thought process behind great discoveries. I spoke to Professor Anne Glover CBE, the Chief Scientific Adviser at the European Commission last week and she said that an education in art went hand in hand with science.

Creativity is a bedrock subject which you find not just in the art and music business but in every industry that exists. Supporting creativity at secondary school level will not just help our music business, but other businesses too. The 2012 Olympics are a great example of what investment in a specific area can do.

Lastly, I want to say from a business point of view that I believe it would be helpful if there were other sources of funding available to our business, not just the usual suspects e.g. record industry and publishers. A problem in current tax incentivised schemes is that they will only fund businesses if it is based on a royalty format. Again potential investors don’t understand our business. They only see 25% of our business – the record business. We are willing and able to go into long term partnerships which deal with all 4 parts of our business and would help support artists and develop new ones.

In summary:

The future of our industry is bright but we have to think creatively and refocus on the artist and fan. 

We have to scotch and redefine views which have gathered over decades about the idea of creativity and see it not as this thing to be put in a box over there with art supplies and musical instruments but rather see it as the thread which runs through all industry. That an artist isn’t just some person standing at an easel, or strutting around a stage or writing a novel. Art is about challenge and discovery. Scientists, engineers, mathematicians and the most successful industries have artistic creative thinkers at their core. Apple, Google.

So it’s of vital importance this creativity is nurtured and invested in from school onwards.

To see the complete session, please view the entire video here, which includes the previous panel with Jo Dipple and Andy Heath of UK Music, Geoff Taylor of the BPI and Alison Wenham of AIM.

Kylie Minogue presented the prestigious Peter Grant Award to her long-time manager Terry Blamey at the Artist and Manager Awards 2012, held at The Troxy.

Sam Eldridge of UROK Management was made Manager of the Year for his work with The Mystery Jets, Tribes, Dear Prudence, Tom O’Dell and Plan B – the latter co-managed with his veteran music-man father Roy – while DJ Zane Lowe was named Industry Champion for his tireless promotion of new music.

Plan B himself crowned a year of fissiparous artistic endeavour by scooping Artist of the Year, presented by Mancunian punk-poet legend John Cooper-Clarke, with Amanda Palmer joining the show via an internet video link from Boston in the USA to receive the Industry Pioneer award from Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) Board member Hal Ritson.

Awards sponsor Spotify introduced a new £10,000 grant for an up and coming artist and manager partnership to further their career. Music Managers Forum (MMF) Chairman Brian Message presented the cheque to Pale Seas and their manager Danny Blackman.

The Breakthrough Artist award was picked up by Marco Ferrero, manager of Madeon, on behalf of his act – who Popjustice described as an “actual genius” – while Breakthrough Manager was won by Ben Howard’s manager Owain Davies.

The annual event is co-organised by the FAC and MMF and the sold out crowd was entertained by Tribes and MSMR.

Dave Rowntree (FAC and Blur) said: “These awards acknowledge the importance of collaborative partnerships between artists and their managers, and celebrate the success those relationships have brought.

“Everyone who was given an accolade last night, from Terry Blamey and Sam Eldridge to household names like Zane Lowe and Plan B, has had a significant, positive impact on the music industry over the past 12 months.

“We’re delighted that Spotify has provided a £10,000 grant to help further artists’ careers, and we look forward to seeing the fantastic Pale Seas and their manager Danny Blackman benefit from this.”