Hello and welcome to a new week of music industry insight and advice here on the official blog of Haulix. We have a lot of great content planned for the days ahead, including the interview you’ll read following the paragraphs below. If you have a suggestions for a future installment of this series, or if you have any questions regarding our services, please do not hesitate to email james@haulix.com. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
Life has this hilarious tendency to do whatever it wants regardless of your plans or intentions, and while that can often be a frightening prospect it can also be one of the most exciting. For Dan Salter, life changed forever on a wet evening in London back in 2008. It was there he and his friends first had the idea to launch a music zine that told the world about all the obscure bands they had grown to love and admire, and in the years that followed Dan would discover a calling in life that has brought him international acclaim.
I had not spoken with Dan Salter prior to setting up this feature, but his work with Echoes & Dust is something that has been on my radar for a number of years. He’s always been a great writer with a unique perspective on life and it only makes sense that he eventually found his way to leading the editorial team at his site. His story is certainly one-of-a-kind, and it’s an honor to share it with you this afternoon.
If you would like to stay up-to-date with everything Dan and his team of contributors have going on, make sure you bookmark and frequent Echoes & Dust. Additional questions and comments can be left at the end of this post.
H: State your name, job title, and the publication you currently write for:
D: Dan Salter, Editor in Chief & founder of Echoes & Dust.
H: Let’s start at the beginning. Do you remember the first time you recognized your love for music?
D: My parents were both huge music fans (Mum saw the Stones in Hyde Park in 69 & went to the first Glastonbury) so music has always been a part of my life. I grew up listening to all the classic bands of the 60s & 70s, Zeppelin, Stones, Floyd, Hendrix, Joplin etc but also Roxy Music, The Police, Blondie and the like. They took me & my brother to festivals from an early age so lets face it, my fate was always sealed!
H: What was the first album you purchased with your own money? Do you still own it today?
D: Haha, it was a vinyl copy of Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms. I was about 14 & yes, it’s still kicking around somewhere.
H: Are you a journalist professionally, or do you write about music as a hobby?
D: it’s purely a hobby, I have a day job too & so do all the fantastic guys who give up their free time to write for us.
H: Journalism is an interesting path for anyone to choose in life. What lead you to becoming a writer?
D: I’ve always had a penchant for words, I was a voracious reader as a kid and a lyricist in bands when I was younger but becoming a ‘music writer’ was something that grew out of the frustration of a small group of friends that found there weren’t any website dedicated to the kind of obscure indie music we liked. One day we decided to stop moaning about it & start one ourselves, thus E&D was born and overnight I’d become a music journalist & editor!
H: Who or what inspires you as a writer?
D: That’s a hugely tough question to answer with words. The easiest thing would be to take you on a tour of my music collection & shout ‘THIS’ and ‘THIS’ at you. It’s that moment when you hear something for the first time & it makes your soul resonate, it’s that feeling when something hits you out of the blue & you know it’s going to be your new favourite thing. That’s what I live for & that’s what makes me want to write about it, I want other people to share that feeling.
H: When people ask you about your site, how do you explain the coverage offered?
D: We have a phrase on the team that we feel fits perfectly; wilfully obscure. Our approach has always been to go out of our way to cover things that don’t get much column inches elsewhere, to face away from the crowd & highlight musicians doing the same. We like music that challenges & provokes. That probably sounds massively pretentious! In less high falutin terms, we cover a broad range of genres, everything from post rock, math rock, ambient electronica, dream pop, the whole church of metal, space rock, glitch; you get the picture.
H: I noticed the story of the site’s origin involves a group of friends deciding to work together. How many contributors do you have at this point? What do you look for in new recruits?
D: Yes, originally there were 5 of us that got the site up & running but sadly life commitments mean that I’m the only one left from that original crew contributing on a regular basis. We have something like 50 writers now but their level on contribution ranges from smashing out 2 or 3 reviews a week to people who only write that in a year. All we generally ask of people is to have a passion for the music & the time to write about it, although the ability to string a sentence together is a bonus! We’ve been very lucky, over the years we’ve managed to find a bunch of very talented, dedicated people who get a kick out of writing about music & believe in what were doing. Without their contributions & the help of Sander, Ben & Hannah (Metal, Features & Live editors respectively) I wouldn’t been able to sustain this for 5 years.
H: I noticed there is little-to-no news offered on Echoes And Dust. Was this always the case?
D: More or less. It’s something we’ve considered from time to time but on a basic time & resource to benefit calculation it doesn’t stack up for us. There are plenty of sites that offer news & we see little point in adding to the cacophony as it would mean we couldn’t do some of the other stuff we do. Anything that we do want to give our readers ‘news’ on we tend to run through our Facebook page rather than the site.
H: There is an ever-growing amount of competition for attention in the music blog arena. How do you marketing Echoes and Dust?
D: We don’t really ‘market’ the site. We’ve never paid for advertising or anything like that. Most of our growth has come as a direct result in the growth of both the quantity and, I hope, the quality of our output. We have something of a symbiotic relationship with the bands, labels and PRs for the music we cover & hope that they spread the word about us as we spread it about them. It seems to work.
H: From what I can tell there is no paid advertising on the site. Do you have any plans to monetize moving forward? If so, how?
D: Again this is something we’ve discussed ad nauseum between the team. For the moment we’ve decided against it. The running costs of the site a relatively low and something I don’t mind paying as it allows me to do all this cool stuff so it’s not an issue right now. If we get to a size where the traffic means that costs rise then we’ll have another think but for now we’re happy as we are.
H: Your site seems to have a local focus, but you’ve undoubtedly begun to build an international audience. How do you balance catering to both demographics?
D: By not really thinking about location too much. We live in a globalised digital environment (kill me now!) where physical location is almost meaningless. We have writers all over the world from Melbourne to Johannesburg to Rome to Edinburgh & so on & we get submissions from an even wider range of places (we covered a metal band from Andorra the other day) so we just try & judge things on the merits of the music & not where it’s from. These days we get nearly as much traffic from overseas, especially the US, as we do from the UK.
H: What is your ultimate career goal?
D: Oh god, i feel like I’m a job interview now & I never have an answer for this then! As well as running E&D my partner Hannah & I run Cognitive Dissonance which is an umbrella for a small record label, a little bit of PR and a business building websites and Hannah plays in Rumour Cubes, who have just started recording their 2nd album, but we’re realistic enough to know unless we’re lucky none of this will let us give up our day jobs so just having a job that pays the bills & gives us enough free time to be involved in music in some small way is enough for now.
H: When it comes to receiving music for review and feature consideration, which services do you prefer and why?
D: Haha, is this the bit where I’m meant to big up Haulix?! 😉 honestly though, digitally delivery systems like Haulix have made this job so much easier. I’d say 95% of sub,is ions are delivered to us digitally in some fashion now & we prefer it that way. Makes it much easier to distribute to the writers. In fact it’s got to the point where sending us something physical is actually detrimental to something’s chances of getting covered. That’s not to say we’re not advocates of physical products though, digital is just easier for reviewing.
H: If you could change one thing about the music industry, what would it be?
D: Again with the huge questions! Just one thing? Almost impossible! The industry is at a really interesting point of flux at the moment & know one can really know where it’s going to go, although there are plenty of theories. So, if there was just one thing I could change it would be to see that musicians & artists get fairly paid for the art they create. At the moment we’re a long way from that.
H: You talk a lot about the future. Before we let you go, can you tell us a bit about what you have planned in the months ahead?
D: Obviously we’re coming up to the end of 2013 now & by our reckoning it’s been a pretty stellar year for music, so we’ll be having plenty of activity around that with some interesting interviews & features on people that have really impressed us this year. One thing we’re just putting together now, and something we’re very proud of doing, is a new feature strand called Musical Therapy in which we are going to explore the relationships between music and mental health, We’re getting contributions from across the spectrum of artists, writers & fans and getting them to share their views on how music has helped them, or otherwise, with mental health issues. Ultimately we want to shine a light on how prevalent these problems are in the creative sector & perhaps, if we’re lucky, remove some of the stigma attached to something that a lot off pepole suffer.
