Woven Wheat Whispers Shuts Down
July 10th, 2008 | music
Woven Wheat Whispers, a music download service for broadly-defined folk music, appears to have shut itself down while I’ve been away. I discovered them via the excellent double CD of "dark folk," JOHN BARLEYCORN REBORN. There was all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff on that site, and not all of it fit the classic definition of British folk (a bloke with a pewter tankard hanging off his belt and his little finger stuck in his ear). Co-founder Mark Coyle, commenting on Mudcat, doesn’t have the expected explanation for an indie music download service closing:
We didn’t have to close WWW, it was paying it’s way and no money was lost. It was just a decision about the future taken calmly at a point where we had time to think… It was meant to be fun and would have turned into slog at some point in the near future.
As for the site closing, it’s not an issue about downloads per se. sales were soaring last year, but as the catalogue got bigger it got more daunting to search around it. There was a huge amount of traditional, folk-rock, Ceilidh, nautical folk that people here probably didn’t realise sat alongside the other material. But if people aren’t looking then there’s little we can do…
Folk music fans often seem to follow artists they already know. As has been observed there are lots of factors. However don’t think the site was a failure, we achieved what we aimed to do. It’s just that taking it on further required a step change it wasn’t worth making.
We could have continued and would have done alright, but with Myspace starting to sell downloads, Amazon coming in and iTunes level of market dominance, there was little point. Even CDBaby now sell downloads alongside the CD. Exiting in a positive way seemed the best thing to do at the right time.
WWW didn’t collapse, we have all the money needed. It was a decision taken about how far to push what was a small home operation delivered in my spare time.
I know that’s a hefty set of quotes, but I wanted to capture exactly what’s happening. And I find it kind of interesting. Coyle seems to be saying that, to continue along its growth curve and fulfil its mandate to introduce interesting new musics to new audiences, it would have become a full-time job — and he wasn’t up for that. Especially with MySpace, shiTunes, Amazon and even CDBaby looming over him. He just quit while he was happy.
Someone at the top of the thread does say:
sales for May this year, for example, were considerably lower than sales for the
same month a year ago, despite there being an increase in the number of users
and a stronger catalogue
and while one assumes he’s affiliated with the site in some way, it goes against Coyle’s claim, and in any case could be partly explained away by the retail index being down all over. Online sales aren’t immune to petrol and food costing more than they did a year ago.
What’s interesting to me is that there’s a suggestion that Coyle was actually a little too effective with his part-time job. He created a community, a service, and a retail operation that paid its own costs, proved it could work, and only shut it down because taking on the bigger paid-download space was going to be a full-time job. That is, in its way, kind of heartening.
I imagine there’s a lot of people out there right now who have been wondering if they can put a successful online face on their scene, their music, their community, and actually grind out some space between the corporate monoliths. Woven Wheat Whispers says you can.
Now, of course, I have to find somewhere else to buy the Shibboleth albums I don’t yet have, and to track the work of Sedayne and Clive Powell.
is the award-winning creator of graphic novels such as 
Comments are closed.