An interview for Record of the Day

RotD Media Spotlight

Explanation: The Media Spotlight feature provides a platform for journalists, programmers and other music media people to tell RotD readers about themselves. The questions deal both with music and the rest of life, and both serious and more flippant responses are welcome. You do not have to answer all the questions below, but we’d encourage you to answer as many as possible.

Name: Sean Adams

Company and Role: Drowned in Sound.com – Founder and returning Editor

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First journalism/music-related job: Started my first email fanzine/proto-blog in 1998 – “The Last Resort” whilst working in a record store and promoting gigs when not sleeping.

The last music I purchased was: PiL – Metal Box

The music that’s exciting me at the moment is: Friendly Fires, Crystal Castles, Cut Copy, Panic At The Disco, and forthcoming records from Patrick Wolf, Jamie T, and Deftones.

A recent trend which I’ve been enjoying is: gothic pop

A trend I have less time for is: the ghetto-ization of any music which either isn’t new-new-NEW and/or didn’t sell half a million of their debut being viewed as washed up. So many great bands are lost in the canyon between introducing features and cover features. I mean bands like dEUS, Elbow, The Field and The Stills, for starters... One of the most frustrating things about running the label was not just believing in the bands but knowing how much love there was for instance for Metric. Can’t decide what was more painful, hearing how they fell in the middle ground or knowing how few people were willing to stick their neck out without seeing mid-week sales (based on less than 1 percent of the population buying bit of plastic?!), seeing coverage elsewhere or without knowing the marketing spend.

The best thing about doing my job is: getting to enthuse about bands I love to people who’ll listen and seeing the likes of Muse, Kaiser Chiefs, Bat for Lashes, Feist, etc, find fans and then go from nowhere to everywhere.

How have recent changes in the media world affected what I do:
The internet has now become a legitimate form of media, especially when we can now reach half a million people per month. The number of exclusives we can demand has risen proportionately with our reach.

I predict that in five year’s time: people will think of MP3s as ‘quaint’.

Is there anyone else working in the industry who you particularly admire? Trent Reznor, for entrepreneurial and artistic gumption.

One thing you don’t know about me is: I was once the face of an adoption campaign (well more of a silhouette really…)

Best piece of advice I have ever been given…. Anthony H. Wilson to me at In The City, it was something like: “stick to your guns, even though people will hate you for having guns in the first place.”

If I didn’t do this job, I’d… be doing it as a hobby.

This will appear in their weekly PDF magazine, available to subscribers of recordoftheday.com