J&B asks on another thread…

JK you said you spent very little on promotion at UK which sounds pretty cool
but if you were running a label today, would you hire a plugger and PR person
or will you keep it all in-house?

Sadly my answer is that of a 70 year old, no longer a part of the active music industry, which many may consider a good thing. I really don't know how to break a record these days. A few years ago I suggested a route for Alex Day and it worked - getting the track to No4 on the 2011 Christmas singles chart. But even since then the media has changed radically. And we failed dismally in our main goal then - to get mainstream radio and TV exposure for the hit. I found, to my horror, that programmers cared so little for the music that they had switched off their computers and, not having anticipated such success, could not have programmed the track even if they had been around or had wanted to.

Whether outside pluggers or PRs are any good, whether you can break through online internet sources any more, whether press makes any difference… I suspect enthusiasm for music has waned so much, and superficiality now goes so deeply into the human character, that entirely new ways and sounds are required. Then I see the success of Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran and it looks like the good old ways still work.

Quite depressing when you think of it. Does anyone else have any ideas? How would you break your 'hit' today?

More "different" than depressing. In the days of UK Records and before most people in the music industry were just as inept as they are today. There were a few who cared and had imagination (just heard from one of them, my old friend Clive Davis). I'm sure there are some new ones today - like Pharell, Jay Z, Kanye, Bruno Mars - and, over here, Cowell and Richard Russell. Different ways, different music but no worse or better. I didn't like Gangnam Style but it sold millions. I do rather like some of both Adele and Sam Smith - they broke and sold. Ditto Ed Sheeran. It can still be done.