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Star_Song_Age_Less 
Forum Senior Member 
Joined: December 08 2014 Location: MA Status: Offline Points: 367 |
 Topic: Please Self-Release Me, Let Me GoPosted: February 24 2015 at 09:57 |
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(I edited the above quote a lot so it wouldn't be so long, I think I got who said what right, but correct me if I am wrong). The nice thing about self-releasing if you still do it through a promoter like Tunecore or CDBaby is that your music really does get out into the internet ether on all platforms without you having to spend ridiculous amounts of time on submissions yourself. I've started thinking of them as first-step-labels. For me, self-release is not intended to be a finishing point but it has to be my starting point. I hold a job, am married, have a kid, don't make a whole lot of money, but if I do manage to make a living wage on music I would much rather do that than what my job is now. Currently, however, I have to spend the time on the job so that I have the money to pay for the studio time, and the CD printing, and promotional materials. Oh, and the cost to have your stuff on Tunecore and CDBaby in the first place. And then there's paying for an artist to actually design your album art, etc. If you self release and manage to be relatively successful with it, it is still possible to be signed to a label. I'm really not sure how anyone manages to cut through the noise and be signed to a label before they've released anything. Live shows? |
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Star_Song_Age_Less
Forum Senior Member
Joined: December 08 2014 Location: MA Status: Offline Points: 367 |
Posted: February 22 2015 at 13:36 |
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Depressing, eh? "We can only grow the way the wind blows.... We can
only bow to the here and now or be broken down blow by blow." Rush
wisdom... I'm not particularly wise, I think I'll end up taking the 2nd
option and eventually run out of steam.
Then again, if Beck can win album of the year over Beyonce maybe we all do still have some hope that someone will listen to our music. I was just at a show last night (Mary Fahl, not prog but what a voice) and heard two different horror stories about working with labels. This was at a place in Cambridge, MA called Club Passim which is a non-profit arts organization. Their entire purpose is to promote the arts, with live shows of some sort every single night, some days, and open mic once a week. Spent some time chatting with people there and I was struck by how intimate the setting was. Looking at the list of performers on their calendar, it's mostly folksy stuff, but there's no limit to what type of music you could do. I'm thinking that the way to get people to hear your stuff is to play it live and actually interact with people to promote the music itself. The down side to that of course is that you have to play live, which is not something I enjoy. Some people seem like they thrive on that, but I don't. It's making the music itself that's rewarding to me. That's partially why more hands-offish things like CDBaby appeal to me. |
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Dean
Special Collaborator 
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 19 2015 at 19:14 |
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Thank you Jamie. Those figures show that the estimates I have been making regarding self-released artists and Bandcamp are grossly conservative. Here we can see that 20% of the albums account for over 95% of the total sales as opposed the 80% used in my calculatons.
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Star_Song_Age_Less
Forum Senior Member
Joined: December 08 2014 Location: MA Status: Offline Points: 367 |
Posted: February 19 2015 at 15:16 |
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I've been spending weeks reading up on costs, marketing and sales, and came upon this: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2013/10/16/the-most-important-thing-you-will-read-all-day/ Some staggering statistics in there: “In the recorded music industry in 2011, more than 800,000 unique album titles together sold more than 330 million copies (including both physical and digital copies)… For instance, 513,000 titles – 58% of all unique titles – each sold fewer than 10 copies, accounting for only 0.5 percent of sales. 13 titles selling 1,000,000 copies or more/23,287,000 copies sold/7% 387 titles selling 100,000-999,999 copies/93,992,000 copies sold/28% 4,229 titles selling 10,000-99,999 copies/114,949,000 copies sold/35% 21,042 titles selling 1,000-9,999 copies/61,493,000 copies sold/19% 87,986 titles selling 100-999 copies/27,032,000 copies sold/8% 251,566 titles selling 10-99 copies/8,261,000 copies sold/2% 513,146 titles selling fewer than 10 copies/1,558,000 copies sold/0.5%” I knew the odds of making any money off an album were low, but I did not realize quite how extreme the dichotomy was. But the thing that really astounded me about these numbers is that it appears as if the major labels aren't even doing much of anything for the vast majority of their clients. Only 400 albums even made it past 100,000 copies? I'm not sure I'd want to let a major label take basically all of my royalties in order for them to then not deliver on their end of the bargain. CDBaby, Tunecore, and Bandcamp take a much smaller cut and even if you can sell ten copies on it, apparently you're doing better than more than 500,000 other folks! I'm really still waffling all over the place, but my mind is boggled by these numbers. The "nice to own" factor is something I was considering for Kickstarter rewards - a bunch of bonus tracks for those who pledge a higher amount. |
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 17 2015 at 06:42 |
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More on the "nice to own" factor - vinyl one-offs.
Back in the 1950s you could get one-off record made by going to a studio where they would cut your track direct to blank. There were even fairground-recording booths where you could cut an, admittedly low-quality, disc direct to 7" single to record a message to your loved ones. [ref: A Brief History of the Voice-O-Graph] Now-a-days things are a little more sophisticated, but the prospect of producing one-off vinyl albums is still a realisable aim. Like CD-on-Demand, there are companies who will produce very low-volume (one or more)... at a price. For a 12" 33rpm vinyl featuring two 20-minute tracks in a plain card sleeve that works out at £100 each. Now, obviously £100 is a lot of money for one album compared to the £14 each if you had 100 made, but that £100 would be your total outlay compared to £1,400. Of course, if you want a printed label and a nice gatefold sleeve then the price starts to rise considerably, but for a one-off you could do that yourself on the kitchen table with an A4 printer, some sheet card and a Prit Stick™. (I'd actually recommend a stonger glue than Prit, Uhu makes a stronger stick that will stick wood). If you don't have access to an A3 printer then your local printshop can do that for a few quid. As a one-off vanity product, £100 is not that prohibitive, in fact it's quite attractive, especially if you can convince your nearest-and-dearest that one of my albums cut to vinyl would make a well received and highly treasured gift the next time they ask you what you would like for your impending birthday... ...convincing others to spend five times the price of the latest Steven Wilson album on a copy of your album is another matter, but as our favourite recording artists have shown, put sufficient "value-added" into the packaging and we'll buy practically anything at any price. For the self-released one-off artist this value-added has the advantage of being unique, lovingly handcrafted and even personalised to the person who is prepared to spend that kind of money on buying your album, much better than the cheap, mass-produced old tat that Pink Floyd sold with the Immersion editions... you could even throw in half-a-dozen CDRs of outtakes and live recordings into the box with the vinyl album for very little extra cost to yourself. Just a thought.
 Edited by Dean - February 17 2015 at 06:59 |
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 16 2015 at 10:13 |
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Heed the doomsayer:
...and your videos, music, blogs, archives... |
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 13 2015 at 11:19 |
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I've been looking into the "nice to own" factor.
For low-volume runs CDR is the cheaper solution for the self-released artist, (you are looking at something like £200 for 100 CDRs in clear jewel case with 4-page booklet or £2.00 each), but glass-pressed CD and vinyl in low volume isn't as prohibitive as you would at first imagine and there are plenty of businesses out there who offer this service to the aspiring artist. From my perspective vinyl is nicer to own than CD and CDs are nicer to own than downloads. So I have looked into how much it would cost to have a low volume run (100 units) of an album on 12" vinyl and on standard jewel-case CD and the results are surprising...
So once you get into the 200-300 sales bracket everything starts to look more reasonable. Any band that is gigging regularly should be able to sell 250 albums without much difficulty (though perhaps I should say: without too much difficulty, it never ceased to amuse me that it was easier to sell band t-shirts at gigs than albums). If you are not a gigging artist and only sell over the internet then selling that many may be more of a challenge, but Bandcamp is the huge success and "young prog" is doing well so if you can't then it is your fault, right? If bands can sell a download on Bandcamp for £7.00 then selling a glass pressed CD for the same price is going to be a doddle... sure trying to sell a vinyl copy for £14 is not so easy, but if you're a Bandcamp success and have over 250 listeners then you can also sell them at £7.00 and make a tiny profit... Let's be honest and realistic here. These numbers are trifling. Seriously, they are pitiful quantities of albums for piffling amounts of money. Even 1000 copies is a measly amount of sales, no one can make a living from selling 1000 copies of an album, it won't even cover the expense of recording and promoting it. A moderately successful band signed to a small Indie label would be looking to shift 10 or 20 times that number, especially if they were touring regularly. My reverse-engineering of Bandcamp's statistics suggests that very, very few artists sell 1000 copies of their album. My calculations give an estimate of less than 4000 artists out of all those who have signed-up to Bandcamp sell 1000 or more copies of their albums, that's less than 0.4%. Of course as small as the costs are, even for 100-off glass-pressed CDs, it's not chump change, then neither is the cost of a Les Paul Classic, a Marshal head and cab, a Korg PAX3, a Mackie 16-channel mixer, ProTools and all its plug-ins, or studio-quality condenser microphone. For the professional and the aspiring artist alike, this is not a cheap pastime. So these numbers are still essentially vanity-press numbers. Any self-released artist who is only interested in low-volume production of a just few CDs is left with CD-on-demand services being offered by such people as Amazon (CreateSpace). Being a realist and a non-gigging amateur/hobbyist CD-on-demand is the most cost-effective solution for me as it costs me nothing, the problem is it is very expensive for anyone who wants to buy your stuff, and that is off-putting to say the least. Edited by Dean - February 13 2015 at 11:45 |
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jayem
Forum Senior Member
Joined: June 21 2006 Location: Switzerland Status: Offline Points: 995 |
Posted: February 12 2015 at 18:11 |
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Now Dean, you won't keep all of your CDs home as bookends or like a pile of bricks will you ? Even if I don't play it as often as mp3's, I should get a souvenir from this somptous thread, at the core of 201x PA talks. PM to follow...
Edited by jayem - February 13 2015 at 06:11 |
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 12 2015 at 10:53 |
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I'm struggling to see what relevance any of that has other than to illustrate that you continue to misunderstand the purpose of this Blog and the points I am making.
Yes, the some of studios were basic back then by today's standard, and yes, they were staffed by stuffy old men in suits who were more used to recording jazz and classical for film & tv soundtracks and jingles for commercials. So what? However with regard to Genesis and Foxtrot: Trident was also owned, built and operated by someone from the pop business (Norman Sheffield and his brother Barry) and by comparison to a lot of them, it was advanced for its time, which is why The Beatles, Elton John, Queen and a host of others recorded there. Yet, what does the standard of the studio or the attitude of the recording engineers have to do with anything? By today's standards, Abbey Road in 1973 was primitive and still staffed by men in white shirts who wore ties to work and kept their ball-point pens in plastic pocket-protectors in their top pockets, yet we still hold up Dark Side Of The Moon as the standard to which all other albums should be measured. With modern technology self-released artists ARE capable of all the things that I am saying they SHOULD be doing. If you want to be compared with professional artists then produce the goods to the best of your ability with the marvelous wonders that modern technology lays at your fingertips. I certainly am not addressing my points towards the self-released artists who are producing good products, I am talking to, (and about), those who are not or who could do better if they would only try. If, as you seem to believe, that every (relatively) successful self-released artist is already doing this then what you arguing about? Edited by Dean - February 12 2015 at 10:54 |
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Komandant Shamal
Forum Senior Member
Joined: February 02 2015 Location: Yugoslavia Status: Offline Points: 954 |
Posted: February 12 2015 at 06:32 |
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London's studios are legendary without a doubt, but in the early days of prog, in these studios were employed people who were not know yet how to record the prog tracks in the right way. See that part of Peter Banks interview bellow*
By the way, that tailwind for early prog bands - and prog rock in general - were not the open-minded record companies nor good fellows who sat there and looking for gifted young & progressive musicians although they did not know yet to record them nice. The tailwind for early prog bands were such a big things like freeing middle-class British youth of Victorian discipline the early 60s, The Beatles, the British Invasion, Jimi Hendrix, Catcher in the Rye, Frank Zappa, psychedelic movement, LSD, hashish, the Summer of Love, '68, Stanley Kubrick, Miles Davis, Woodstock, landing a man on the Moon if you like...
Today''s best of young prog bands do not have such a tailwind, they are releasing their fantastic debuts in other conditions that are, let's say, "different" (lol), and that their work would be respected nothing less than great work by the prog rock bands in late 60s / early 70s. *
-In 1967, The Syn went to record the track 'Grounded' at The Marquee studios for the B-side of a single. How different was The Marquee Studios from other studios you worked at, such as Advision, Decca and Trident? Marquee studio was quite basic. I recorded there a few times with other bands as well, it was behind The Marquee Club and it was not much disconnected to The Marquee, I mean there was no window or anything but it was owned by The Marquee and I think it was just four tracks studio. You know, when once Yes recorded at Advision later, that was more stage-of the arts" recording. But certainly the studio that Decca used was nothing fantastic, I don't remember it being particularly great. But then, I didn't know much about studios, I mean, then it was very rare to be in a studio and if you were in a studio the whole idea of any kind of rock band, they wanted to get you in there and out of there very quickly, so you didn't have time to hang around, they wouldn't let you stay for the mixing. So often, they wouldn't let you come into the control room to hear what you've had done. Somebody would just say over a loud speaker: 'That's fine'. 'Can I hear it?', 'No, no, no. Let's go into the next song'. And it was always very authoritarian and of course all that changed. In my early days, still being pretty young, it was kind of intimidating cause there would be the engineer and his assistant behind the glass window and they wouldn't speak to you, they would just tell you 'Can you do it again?' or 'Can you now leave?'. Seems a bit... they were like the old guys! -I believe it was a similar situation when you first recorded with Yes. Eddie (Offord), we used to call him "Fast Eddie" 'cause he was always rushing around. Ah, no, no, no, no. That was making the first Yes album, in other Advision studio, the original Advision studio was in Bond St., in West End London. There was an engineer, I think called Gerald or Gerard, and we used to call him "the weasel", 'cause he was a little guy and he knew nothing whatsoever about how to record a rock band. And he kept saying: 'Can you turn it down? It's too loud, it's too loud!'. And he was totally unenthusiastic and uninterested in what Yes were trying to do. He took no interest whatsoever. And all he kept doing was turning everything down, you know, because we were always asking him to put the headphones mix out loud. I know it was a really kind of amateurish situation. I think halfway through making the album, I think Bill (Bruford) sometime realized that he could have a separated mix in his headphones! He didn't know that! And we had problems trying to get a Hammond organ to sound O.K. and we spent two or three days with this hired Hammond organ. The sound was horrible and it sounded like a fairground, you know it sounded like something of the merry-go-round, you know. And we were told to make an album and we were trying our best. This guy Gerrard wasn't helpful at all and the guy producing the album, I forgot his name... Link: |
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Atavachron
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: September 30 2006 Location: Pearland Status: Online Points: 65240 |
Posted: February 12 2015 at 06:21 |
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^ All the better
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"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -- John F. Kennedy
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 12 2015 at 06:18 |
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I think the other key element is time. As I have noted elsewhere, Genesis were not Charisma's flagship act back then (that would have been VdGG and Lindisfarne) so their studio time would have been limited. Hackett commented in an interview on BBC Breakfast TV last year that the albums he recorded with Genesis were done quickly during the short breaks between extensive tours, mistakes were left in that they didn't have the time to re-record. You cannot conclude from that that they were rushed albums, but they weren't as perfect as Genesis would have liked them to be.
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Finnforest
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: February 03 2007 Location: The Heartland Status: Offline Points: 16913 |
Posted: February 12 2015 at 06:09 |
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I enjoy the strange sound of Nursery Cryme and appreciate what you guys were saying about the sometimes overly perfected modern sheen. As with buildings I guess. In cities full of glass, steel, and pvc, I really miss aged brick and stone.
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 12 2015 at 05:01 |
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Yes it would be really tragic. But it never happened so "what if" games are meaningless. The tapes were not destroyed and I believe that was because the production "sound" was exactly what they (Genesis and John Anthony) wanted it to sound like. Nursery Cryme was their third album and it was the eleventh album that John Anthony had produced for Charisma Records. They were not naive beginners who did not know their way around a studio. Trident was the most advanced studio in the UK at the time and a lot of great, well-produced albums came out of there before and after Nursery Cryme, many of them (such as At Least We Can Do Is Wave At Each Other and Rare Bird) were produced by John Anthony. I suspect that they were trying to reproduce the density and intensity of their live performances as shown on the later Genesis Live budget album that was released three years later.
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 12 2015 at 04:41 |
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 Thank you Rob. I too was an eager-releaser, as I said in the release blurb for my debut album: "It will neither make me rich nor famous, but that was never the intention. In all honesty, all I want is for people to hear the 'Wake'. If they do and like it, then all the better." And people did comment on it, so I took those criticisms constructively and used them to make better albums. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, they are only wrong if you don't learn something from them. Whenever I open this thread after long periods of inactivity and see the "arguments" I got into with Micha over it I do wonder what happened to him. It took a lot to convince him that I was arguing for self-released artists, not against them. I think a lot of the problem came from the fact that I was not interested in having the Cacophony of Light project added to the PA and he saw that as opposition to all self-released artists, especially those from other forum members. From the brief glimpses of his music that I heard I was impressed by what he was producing, it's a shame that it never materialised as an album (at least not to my knowledge). |
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Komandant Shamal
Forum Senior Member
Joined: February 02 2015 Location: Yugoslavia Status: Offline Points: 954 |
Posted: February 12 2015 at 02:49 |
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Nursery Cryme is a great example. What if someone destroyed Nursery Cryme tapes because the quality of recording was tragic and due to very poor sound that the Nursery Crime had never been released? Nursery Cryme (btw Foxtrot original LP sound is just slightly better and pleasant moody sound of the original Trespass LP was actually due to randomness) would never been released if someone in early 70s was "the perfectionist" who believed that at the outset that everything has to be shipshape. Maybe Genesis as a young band would have not survived that checking by "the perfectionist" with an abnormal anxiety about the quality of recording? That would be a real tragic. |
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Epignosis
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: December 30 2007 Location: Raeford, NC Status: Offline Points: 32524 |
Posted: February 11 2015 at 21:58 |
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Once upon a time, I saw self-releasing as the opportunity to get my creative output out "there." Even now, I'm not sure where "there" is, but a lot of us saw that opportunity. I suspect that many of us felt that this platform excused us from seeking out "best practices." And so what, right? We weren't looking for a label. We weren't looking for widespread recognition. We just wanted to be heard. We wanted someone to say, "I heard your song and here is what it meant to me."
For most of us, that hasn't changed. So I don't think we were looking to get noticed with the prospect of making a fortune and touring (I wasn't- I already had a kid. Now I have three...Didn't stop me from doing a few bars, ha!). But the Internet offered us the chance to encourage one another without the fear of rejection. After I released Still the Waters, I had several people asking me to perform on their homebrew albums. At the time, I thought this was neat, even if I was not a confident picker or keyboardist. I was just glad to be asked. I felt like I was a part of something. A part of a community. These guys knew what I was about! And these projects fell through one by one. There isn't a single thing out there that I am on as a result of these sessions...that I know of. A shame. Some of the compositions were good. J.Locke, if you remember him? He had some amazing material. I worked on many of his pieces. Now? Nothing. Bandcamp wasn't around when Dean made this thread. For now I plan to release exclusively on it because I like their business model. But I follow my late grandpa's advice and I take my time and not rush things. A self-released artist has NO DEADLINE. None. Take advantage of that. I am. When you're young and doing your first album, you're eager. Eager for satisfaction and eager for feedback. I was. And there ain't a damn thing wrong with that- just don't get mad when you get criticized for the things you could have done better. Just nod, say yes sir, and then... ...Learn. -Epignosis |
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Epignosis
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: December 30 2007 Location: Raeford, NC Status: Offline Points: 32524 |
Posted: February 11 2015 at 21:18 |
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I agree. |
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 11 2015 at 21:05 |
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...well something similar anyway.
I look at it this way: If you want your albums to sit in someone's record collection alongside releases by Pink Floyd and Porcupine Tree then be prepared to be held to the same standards. I said: "Is it as good as a professional produced product? No it isn't." I was not talking about whether the music was as good in terms of composition and playing, just the production of the final product. Aside from the final mastering, which I cannot do as I have neither the skill nor the equipment, the production of the music can be considered to be comparable to a professional recording. The packaging, however, is not. This is the best I can do with my A4 inkjet printer and CDR burner:  (They are fairly costly in paper and ink to make; if I were to charge by the hour for the time spent in making them they would be prohibitively expensive to produce) ...and this is what I can do if I get Amazon to do the printing and CD duping for me:  While they look superficially the same as a "professionally produced product" in these photographs, once you hold them in your hands you can easily tell they are not (even the Amazon manufactured items). For a start, they are both CDR not glass-pressed. If I was sure I could sell 500+ copies then glass-pressed would be cost effective, but I can't. Like it or not, I'm stuck in the world of CDR. Is this a bad thing? ... yes it is, CDR has a limited shelf-life due to the dyes used, there is no guarantee that these will still play in 10 years time. Now, does any of that make the music sound any better? Of course it doesn't. What it does make is something that is nice to own. I'm a materialist - I like owning nice things. No one can ever say a download is nice to own.
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jayem
Forum Senior Member
Joined: June 21 2006 Location: Switzerland Status: Offline Points: 995 |
Posted: February 11 2015 at 18:09 |
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Let's assume that, as similar mindsets animate both Dean and you, he'd post the same answer. Thank you...
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Please Self-Release Me, Let Me Go
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Epignosis wrote: