Robbie On The RadioRobbie France Online, All the Time, Broadcasting From the Balcony

Music is more global now than ever before. And that’s down to one thing…the internet.

With the net, it’s possible for a record company to release to the entire world it’s product and within 80 seconds get feedback from critics, fans and retailers alike. There’s a strange word nowadays…retailer. I can not remember the last time I walked into a record store and bought a CD. In the old days I would take the hike over the mountain to Cartagena and visit Alfonso at Carrots CD store, (quite often he’d be waiting with new releases for me), to buy the new album by Travis or Coldplay. Now I buy all my music on Amazon.com! ‘One Click Shopper’ is my mantra now and has been for the last 4 years or so.

I am often asked ‘what’s the biggest band you’ve been in?’ and to this day I still don’t rightly know…but I’ve a sneaky suspicion it’s Alphaville. A German band, they have been around for decades, still going strong, but have been relatively quiet in the UK. Someone said to me the other day, ‘Alphaville? One Hit Wonders!’ much to my surprise. But because they only had two hits in the UK, (’Big In Japan’ & ‘Forever Young’), the listener in the UK assumed that was their career in total. Whereby now you could investigate on the net and discover the dozens of albums & singles sold all over the world to a massive audience and that’s before the net was even a glint in a computer programmer’s eye. Millions & millions of records they’ve sold. So many hits it’s hard to put together a setlist for gigs. Depending on which country we were in would dictate the songs. However if the lads had arrived on the scene now…what a difference!

The video released on YouTube on a Tuesday, the download chart announced Wednesday, the amount of hits on MySpace & Facebook or Twitter calculated by Thursday and quite possibly you will have a hit around the world in less than a week! The power of the net seems to just keep increasing almost weekly.

Of course the music trade has had to adapt, as has the music loving public. But boy are they adapting! It’s a brave new world for us all. However it’s a fantastic world of different acts and styles of music delivered without fuss on to our computers every day. The days of the trek to the record store are well and truly over!

See you next month…keep listening!

Robbie x

This article was originally published in the November Edition of Beachcomber Magazine.