“I believe that curation is an art form,” says Ministry Of Sound’s CEO Lohan Presencer, following the launch of a new music service/radio app hybrid – Ministry Of Sound Live – by the dance music mega-brand. It’s not the only bold claim from Presencer, who adds that he hopes the new project will shape “the next generation of radio experience”.
While not exactly a streaming service itself (there’s no on-demand option), the announcement nonetheless took many by surprise last week due to the fact that Presencer has hardly held back when it has come to streaming and digital services in the recent past. In September 2013, Ministry Of Sound sued Spotify for copyright infringement after allegedly refusing to remove user playlists based on Ministry Of Sound compilations. “It’s not appropriate for someone to just cut and paste them,” Presencer said at the time. “That was resolved 18 months ago,” Presencer says now, confirming that the two companies later settled the case out of court.
Skip to September of this year and Presencer was again seen to be at odds with a streaming service, this time Apple Music, withdrawing the company’s back-catalogue from the platform due to its “non-negotiable” licensing agreement and calling on latest newcomer to the market to “reward curators”. “Music services who espouse the value of curation, and their support of independent labels, need to put their money where their mouth is,” he told Music Ally. “We’ve established ourself as the best in the world at selecting dance music, whether it be in our club, on our label or on our compilations. Surely that has a value, and is not something that comes for free?”
So why has Ministry Of Sound joined a market that clearly has so many flaws? Asked whether the app is a direct response to the Spotify court case, a way of digitalising their own playlist before rivals do, Presencer replies negatively: “Not at all, it’s a very natural evolution of our business.” Ministry Of Sound compilations, he points out, have over the years have shifted over 60 million copies, managing to reach virtually every tier of dance fan, from novices seeking an introduction to fanatics interested in a certain niche. It’s this USP that Presencer says the company has relied upon for Ministry Of Sound Live: “We’ve got 20 years of experience in pulling together fantastic and popular compilation albums… Curation is clearly valued by people, anybody can put a playlist together but it takes a skill, that could result in 10s of millions of people consuming those playlists, that goes beyond what one’s personal taste is and comes down to knowing how to programme music. I think radio does that very well and record compilers and compilation people also do that very well and we’re combining the two very effectively in Ministry of Sound Live.”
With so much music at fans’ disposal these days, Presencer says that rather than more choice music listeners are instead seeking guidance and recommendations. “I think they call it the tyranny of choice don’t they? For most people, when you go onto a music service and your faced with all of the music of the world – that can be very intimidating,” Presencer begins. “Unless you know exactly what you want to go and find, you want somebody to help you navigate your way around that, and actually that’s something that Ministry of Sound have always done.”
PressCuration, Presencer suggests, has always been intrinsic to dance culture. “Dance music, when it first emerged at the end of the ‘80s, was quite a difficult genre of music to find your way around – unless you knew exactly what you wanted to listen to or you had a DJ to help you find the way. Ministry of Sound, when we started releasing compilations in the early 1990s, helped programme music and helped people to discover new dance music – we gave people the nightclub experience in a box… people really trust us to give them music in the way that they want to receive it and in a way that they understand it. We give them hits, new music and take them on a journey – and that’s what we’re trying to do with Ministry of Sound Live.”
Ministry Of Sound Live may be similar to Apple Music in its value of curation, but its payment plan will be different Presencer says: “We pay them the same wage that radio does, because this is a linear broadcasting platform, you can’t skip music, jump tracks or tell it the tracks you want to listen to – you have to sit back and listen to the music that we’ve programmed for your leisure.”
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With music venues in danger the country over, Presencer is adamant that the service won’t be a replacement for its flagship nightclub in south London either. “Nothing can replace listening in the main room of our club at 3 o’clock in the morning when the DJ drops a tune and it all goes off” Instead the two will go hand-in-hand: “Hopefully, [the app] will give people a glimpse of what that [club] experience is like, and many more of them will come and try it out. I think it is part of the future – I think people want to consume and have experiences as and when they’re going on. We built all the technology into our nightclub, so that people come home on a Friday or Saturday night and if they can’t come to Ministry of Sound, they can pop it on their app or TV and join us live either on audio or video stream from our nightclub, and that’s a really exciting thing to be able to do.” The app, then, is “a natural evolution of what we’ve always done as a business, and it’s a great thing to do for our listeners and consumers and hopefully will be enjoyable for them and part of their music consumption”.
That’s not to say that venues aren’t still at danger, no matter how much they expand and diversify. Commenting on the closure of The Coronet, one of Ministry Of Sound’s neighbours in Elephant and Castle, Presencer adds: “It’s not just Elephant and Castle, it’s the whole of the UK and London in particular, there’s a need for more housing as more and more people flock to the city. Residential doesn’t sit well with music venues, and unless we can introduce laws that protect music venues, more and more of them will come under threat, either from developers taking their sites, or new residents moving in, in close proximity, and complaining about the noise”. Music venues and night clubs “should be protected”, he says, urging the government to act. “It’s a long road and it’s been a long road so far and I’m sure the fight will continue.”