Please Self-Release Me, Let Me Go

Edited by Dean - February 11 2010 at 18:36

Dean wrote: No great albums will ever be discovered by word-of-mouth promotion since will only carry the message so far, like ripples on a pond the message will dissipate and weaken the further it travels from the source. Social networking is transitory and fleeting, it simply does not have the persistence or long-term stability to grow anything more than a one-hit wonder with a half-life recorded in weeks not years.

Dean wrote: Was maudlin of the Well an unknown before then? Was Part The Second their first release? Didn Kayo Dot keep them "in the public eye" between their 3rd album and this one? Sorry, this was not a word-of-mouth success.

It's good to discuss things in theory but if we do have a real case let's not waste it even if it's not perfectly adequate to the theory. Of course it's not a perfect flip-chart example but flip charts do not always match reality either.
I've seen promotion for Part The Second over the internet and it was all word of mouth. I got the news from PA and tried the album because I usually try free downloads promoted on PA. Then I recommended the album to my friend Maria, who already knew the band due to word of mouth as can be seen here: http://caffeineandmusic.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/maudlin-of-the-well/ She blogged about Part The Second too. http://caffeineandmusic.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/part-the-second/
Of course Maudlin Of The Well and Kayo Dot are not completely unknown bands but as Kayo Dot drawn less than 100 people to their concert in London I can say they should be considered in our discussion even if not complying 100% to the pure self-release scenario.

Dean wrote:   I've owned computers since 1978 and disaster recovery is in my job-description. 2003 is recent history - your PC is probably running Windows XP - that's still current (just) - what about PCs running 311, OS2 or CP/M-86? Can you still access those? What happens to your data when Microsoft depricates FAT32 hard-drives or IDE? If your PC dies in the next five years you'll be hard pushed to find anything that will take a PATA drive - and I'm talking about recovering data in 30 to 40 years time. Technology is moving quicker than data.

I know nothing else than that if I have to upgrade something in order to keep my data then I will. Why keep me out of this equation?

There is indeed much to be said for charging a price - at some point in the exchange - for what you're offering.  I believe it was the Joker who said "Never do anything you do well for free."  He was right, and there's something fundamental about how people judge things upfront that is reflected in its cost.  A free sample is one thing but to habitually give away your work suggests, rightly or wrongly, a lack of confidence and exclusivity.  People expect to pay for something good, and they will.

^

Dean wrote: Part 2 - There Goes My Everything   With everybody and their auntie releasing music without the restrictions imposed by financial limitations what becomes popular and what receives widest recognition is purely at the whim of the buyer. Of course those buyer can still be manipulated, the question now is by whom and for what ends.   Already we are seeing the rise of corporate download sites like iTunes and Amazon, when the "market" is awash with millions of self-release albums those businesses are going to start wielding their power more and will dictate who sells and who doesn't, and from that, who they list and who they don't. Because while it may appear that selling a million downloads is the same whether for a thousand artists or a million, it is not. There is less overhead costs involved in paying a thousand artists than a million (it's a thousand times cheaper to be exact), so it is still in their best financial interests to have a few really big selling downloads than lots of poor selling ones - there is simply more profit in it that way.   Free-issue is not the solution here, nor is it a bypass of the problem. Unlike free audio-streams which removes the cost and replaces it with the true value of what is on offer, (assuming that a proportion of steam listeners are converted into download buyers), free-releases removes any viable consumer feedback (an essential part of "public performance") so the count of the number of downloads is not a measure of the worth. Similarly since the artist has no direct way of knowing whether the download was enjoyed or discarded it is also valueless. (and no - cost, worth and value are not the same thing). If all an artist is interested in is the respect, consideration and approval of their "public" then there has to be a way of gauging that or the exercise is pointless.   The other issue with free-releases is the use of one-click hosting sites like Rapidshare and YouSendIt that provide the infrastructure to support self-release downloads. All these sites are commercial, either funded by membership revenue or by advertising sales and you don't get anything for nothing, even in the internet. As much as the artist tries to run away from big business, while there is money to be made the artist is a prime target for exploitation and they will get exploited. And let's face it, by giving the files to download for nothing the artist is already allowing themselves to be exploited. At the moment the adverts are essentially passive - the "buyer" can block or ignore them, but if the advertisers are not getting a return for their money then they will go elsewhere and the one-clicks will change their business model to recover their costs and losses - one possible solution is that the adverts will cease to be passive.   While there appears to be no room for the major labels in this vision of tomorrow, don't write off the big boys just yet. They will change, and they will enter the "self-release" market, just as they entered the Indie market (how many Indie labels are truly independent?), and when they do they will sweep away all the cottage-industry small fry [in truth the big-boys invented self-release 40 years ago - Apple Corps, Swan Song, Purple, Manticore, Threshold - while being "vanity" labels for major artists on major labels, they were also essentially corporately funded self-release labels]. There is simply too much money at stake for them to roll-over and play dead, once the learn they cannot beat the new system, they will adapt to it and regardless of the noble ideals of a few artists, there will be plenty more who will happily take the corporate dollar.   No great albums will ever be discovered by word-of-mouth promotion since will only carry the message so far, like ripples on a pond the message will dissipate and weaken the further it travels from the source. Social networking is transitory and fleeting, it simply does not have the persistence or long-term stability to grow anything more than a one-hit wonder with a half-life recorded in weeks not years. In fact nothing on the internet has any longevity - nothing stored on your hard-drive on your PC has any longevity, nothing you can transfer to CDR will survive more than a few years - the electronic world is a dynamic medium that needs to be constantly refreshed or it vanishes. Vinyl has a longer shelf-life than any electronic recording and look how rare and obscure some of that material has become in 30 years - for the internet that figure could be as low as 3 years and for some self-released albums, 3 days...   If a song, piece of music or album has any measure of greatness then it deserves to be remembered long into the future and as the future stands at the moment I can't see how that works.

we should of kept vinyl pressings. It was a great format. Why did we change?

harmonium.ro wrote: Dean wrote:   I've owned computers since 1978 and disaster recovery is in my job-description. 2003 is recent history - your PC is probably running Windows XP - that's still current (just) - what about PCs running 311, OS2 or CP/M-86? Can you still access those? What happens to your data when Microsoft depricates FAT32 hard-drives or IDE? If your PC dies in the next five years you'll be hard pushed to find anything that will take a PATA drive - and I'm talking about recovering data in 30 to 40 years time. Technology is moving quicker than data. I know nothing else than that if I have to upgrade something in order to keep my data then I will. Why keep me out of this equation?

...and that is basically my point - you have to do something. Just sitting back and assuming this data will last for ever is a mistake.

Edited by Dean - February 12 2010 at 04:07

stefolof wrote: Atavachron wrote: There is indeed much to be said for charging a price - at some point in the exchange - for what you're offering.  I believe it was the Joker who said "Never do anything you do well for free."  He was right, and there's something fundamental about how people judge things upfront that is reflected in its cost.  A free sample is one thing but to habitually give away your work suggests, rightly or wrongly, a lack of confidence and exclusivity. People expect to pay for something good, and they will. Agree to some extent, but there's more to it nowadays. Example: I can't charge money for the air that you breathe even if it's good clean air (not yet at least). Why? Because it is plentiful and requires no human labor. Digital distribution does the same thing to music (and other information). It makes it plentiful and requires no human labor (once infrastructure is set up) and people just seem less keen on paying for that. One theory is that even though there was a lot of labor involved in making the music in the first place, consumers become alienated towards this process because there is no physical product to relate to the work.

I hear you, plus musicians - like writers, painters - are notoriously bad businesspeople (myself included) and seem content if their music is owned by anyone, let alone if they were paid for it





Edited by Atavachron - February 12 2010 at 04:11

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Edited by stefolof - August 26 2015 at 04:58

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Edited by stefolof - August 26 2015 at 04:57