Tags: Digital Marketplace
19Apr2010
Industry Footbullet of the Day: Internet Radio
Last week, this handy infographic began to make the rounds. It purported to show how many copies of music in varying formats an artist would need to sell to make the equivalent of the USA's minimum wage. Many artists and labels made a public display of sweaty hand-wringing in response to these giant pink blobs.
It's unclear where this infographic came from (the site listed as a source comes up with a 404 page), but a link at the bottom goes to this spreadsheet where the raw numbers are listed and sourced.
Many people are debunking this graphic (including in the comments of the original gizmodo article) with the claim that with a few exceptions, musicians never made a living wage off recorded music. This is true - if you're not Mick Jagger, your royalties probably didn't buy a goddamned thing, much less provide you with a living wage.
In fact, one of my favorite reads of the last year was this blog entry by Tim Quirk. Who is Tim Quirk? Back in the 1990s, he was in a band you might have caught on MTV's 120 Minutes called Too Much Joy. These days he works at Rhapsody, the online music service. And back in December, he posted about Too Much Joy's latest royalty statement from Warner, which not only has him owing Warner Music $395,000 a couple of decades later, but also states he's made a grand total of $62.47 off digital royalties.
The money shot? Too Much Joy's indie albums, which the band controls, have made about $12,000 off digital royalties. Their major label records? $62.47.
But beyond this, there's one important column missing. Radio. As in, AM, FM, got-a-big-tower-and-call-sign radio. Radio has no column in this table because terrestrial radio is completely exempt from paying performance royalties: the size of the big pink blob representing how many times your music would have to be played on terresterial radio to make minimum wage would be larger than Planet Earth.
Streaming internet radio's royalties might be absurdly low, but for terrestrial radio they don't exist at all. You could take over a radio station and force the staff at gunpoint to play your souled-up disco cover of "Can't Turn Around" for hours on end and you wouldn't see one penny from it. A fraction of a penny isn't much at all; yet even this purely theoretical sum is more than the billion dollar terrestrial radio has paid in performance royalties.
That's what's kind of irritating about it. The point of this graphic is to show that, hey, burning your own CDs will make you more than internet radio, but fails to mention that those gigantic pink circles represent a revenue stream that until the internet came around did not exist at all. People made billions in terrestrial radio, and they did so entirely on the backs of these same artists. Internet radio - as small as the sum may be - is paying something. It represents something new and experimental, but if this graphic is indicative in any way of the industry's sentiments, it's already been written off as worthless.
10Mar2010
(Ableton) Masturbation and You
So you're a youngblood, you're living in the city. You play a weekly residency and some gigs here and there. You're not the first guy on the flyer but you're not the last. You've played some big clubs, more often in the smaller room of a large venue, and you've been invited to some cities and even had people pay to bring you there.
You usually open up for the big name DJ and you think it's about time that some of them start opening up for you.
So you fire up BitTorrent, find a copy of Ableton Live, Google your way through cracking the copy protection and get ready to launch the next phase in your career. It's not very intuitive at first, but after working with it for a few weeks you're able to put together some sounds that aren't altogether displeasing. You don't have a vocalist, you can't afford a band and your engineer is your roommate Clarence who used to do the sound at raves.
Listening to the finished product, it's not much of a "song" - but really who cares? Nobody makes any money off records in House Music anymore anyway. It's all promotion, baby! And you looked through Beatport and saw these guys who throw out dozens of these instrumental beat tracks a year. They're big names and they have fans and when you opened for them last month at Le Club, it didn't seem that attaching their name to unmitigated shit did their careers much harm.
So you post it up and wait for the marquee gigs to roll in. Your friends (you've been in the game for awhile now, so you've got lots of those) say it's the greatest fucking track since they first heard "Phreaky Muthafucka" on a big system. Or that's what they say, because the last four times you went to see them, they told you apologetically that your 6 minute piece of McHouse Music didn't fit with the "vibe" on the floor. It's "jackin'" but the crowd was more "laid back". You nod your veteran (some say "legendary" but you - humbly - wouldn't go that far) head, because man, you know the psychic connection between a DJ and his audience. It's tight like that, bro.
The funny thing is that your friends all love it, but no one else does. Or at least the sales suggest that this is the case. But it's not that bad for a first effort. For the next release, you'll budget free drink tickets to Clarence, who in addition to being your engineer and roommate also has a cracked copy of Photoshop and can do some flashy artwork. Something with a chick, like an Effen Vodka ad. And you already have your next 14 releases completed. You've really got the hang of jerking off Ableton now, and your loops are so mental, your beats so crunchy, so chunky, so funky, that you kick yourself for not getting in on this racket years ago.
Flash forward a couple of years. You've now got 20 releases on your label, which in a spark of enlightenment you decided to call DeepSoulGasm Records. You've made new friends, and now you trade gigs with these guys in other cities. They remix your records, you remix theirs and you both praise each other like you're giving an oration at a fucking funeral.
You keep thinking that you're just ONE record from really breaking through. On Twitter and Facebook, you're constantly hitting up the big boys with your tracks, hoping to wind up on some comp record from OM or Agave or whatever. Sometimes they throw you a bone and say it's "nice", which, with your years of hard-earned marketing savvy, you now put on all of your releases as:
"Nice."
-- Some Big Name Guy
And yet, when you look at it, nothing's really changed. The gigs you've gotten barely account for the massive timesink of sending a quota of 50,000 private messages a month on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to "promote" yourself. Your releases barely make a dent. Some publishing company (whatever the fuck that is) is sending you threatening letters about a 6 second sample off a disco record you found at a flea market. They don't get it: you're just trying to PROMOTE them. And fuck, it's not like you made more than a hundred bucks on any of these pieces of shit anyway.
For one month, you miss a release date (it's for your highly-anticipated opus called "FUCK ON THE DANCEFLOOR NAKED LIKE YOUR MOMMA SAID TO"). Surprisingly, nobody seems to notice. You read a site called House Music Daily and some fucking dork is criticizing "Ableton Masturbation" like he invented the term (holy shit, it looks like he did!) and you think, "That's not me. I've got a hundred quotes from legendary people saying it's 'nice' and 'great beat' and 'loved the energy!'"
But it IS you. YOU'RE the douche ruining this. Let's be charitable: most people's first attempts at something - whether it's building a birdfeeder or making music - sucks. It's terrible. But in the Good Ole Days, when this music was somewhat popular, there was a barrier to entry which prevented the Anti-Hero of our story from shoving his bullshit into the marketplace. Would he be willing to spend several hundred or several thousand dollars pressing vinyl in quantities large enough to stock the key dance music shops in the United States, plus promo copies to Big Name DJs who will say it's "nice"? Not unless he thought he could make it back, or come damn close.
Ultimately though - and this is the main point right here - those records shoved off this mortal coil into closets, attics or the trash, where bad music goes to die (and die quietly). They weren't preserved forever on a site, on someone's harddrive, and most importantly in the memory of those 50,000 people you spammed every month to promote this quick-and-dirty spit-lubed fit of Ableton Masturbation. It's an unwritten rule that self-promotion involves putting your best foot forward. Probably half of all releases every month (and that's a conservative estimate) are the equivalent of FedExing someone a box of dogshit.
Maybe you're really gifted and have a great song ready to burst forth after a few years of seasoning. Unfortunately, your name is now associated with the musical equivalent of a ricecake: totally lacking in substance, weight and good taste. And it's not even a heartfelt piece of garbage. You did it in 30 minutes. Anyone who knows music also knows this. DeepSoulGasm Records has anything but soul. It exists to shove crappy loops into a crappy market to make someone famous.
I sometimes wonder if this hasn't already happened - the final act of this era of McHouse Music and Ableton Masturbation, where anyone who ever had the misguided notion that "Hey, I could do that too!" went ahead and did (and had his friends proclaim it the best fucking record in the history of percussion). I have no doubt that sheer persistence and will can make someone a name, and repetition and effort can make even the unskilled competent craftsmen. But when they finally release their hit - when they finally got all their ducks in a row and wrote a real song, with real hooks, and real feeling rather than slamming some beats together in an afternoon and pushing it on to Beatport - will anyone notice? Will anyone other than their BFFs still care? Or will the promo sheet still be littered with big name DJs saying it's "nice"?
I Beat It shirt from cottonfactory; Happy Bunny from lovehappybunny.com.
16Feb2010
How Hot is My Track? Rating the Promo Services
Are you still using sendspace as a promotional tool? Unless it's personalized, as part of a larger campaign or sent specifically to a few key DJs or buds (for whom sending a track "just to you" has a personal touch that is indeed a stroke of genius), there are better options for getting music in the hands of the people who play it.
These days, any DJ or music writer spends hours every week clicking links and being sucked into the abyss of promo pages. It's actually frightening to think how much time someone like Louie Vega or Kenny Dope spends just sorting through the hundreds or thousands of tracks sent every month with a corresponding promo page for each (though by the time you get to that level, you probably have someone at least doing the initial clicking for you).
Considering how many promos are being sent out these days, the reaction to a label's promo page and the service they use probably has a lot more to do with their music catching on than anyone cares to admit.
Though I know it shouldn't be this way, I've often found myself just moving on to the next flagged email when a promo page doesn't let me do what I want to do or proves to be too irritating to bother. Seven minute instrumental Ableton masturbation from someone I've never heard of? Most people, I think, are nice and will give that a fair hearing unless you make it too complicated for them to bother trying.
There are four primary services in use today among House Music labels that I get sent to every month. I'm the king of cheap, I don't believe there's any product or service on this planet that you can't do for cheaper, but unless pop-up ads for mortgages and erectile dysfunction are concepts what you want people to associate with your music, you could do with spending a few bucks and maybe learning a little more about which of the DJs that say A++++++ WILL PLAY AGAIN are actually even listening to it.
I hated it at first. I'll freely admit that. But like the Boof character in a 1980s Michael J. Fox coming-of-age comedy, Fatdrop decided to hang around long enough for me to decide that I love her. This is the gold standard of promo services. Their reporting for the label is robust, and while their pages allow for some customization, your DJs know exactly what they have to do to listen to and download music. Fatdrop's widespread use has made their interface so familiar that most people can sleepwalk through the process. If everyone used Fatdrop, my life would be 10x easier.
Labels and PR firms run the show at Fatdrop: the service itself is invisible except for a generic "fatdrop.co.uk/promo" in the URL, which completely eliminates the somewhat antiquated model of the DJ pool. Labels have to add DJs directly to grant access; for the labels, this means total control over who is seeing their product.
Most labels require that you leave feedback, favorite a track and give it a star rating to download tracks. This may seem cumbersome if you have hundreds of promos to sort through, but really, it's not that much to ask. Much of it winds up being useless platitudes anyway but if you're getting free tracks, I think most people agree then 30 seconds of your time is a small price to pay. (Some DJs apparently give "five stars will play!!!!" ratings to everything, no matter what it sounds like, which is sheer comedy when the label uses it for sales promotions. Laurent Garnier's nice guy endorsement of everything he's sent was an inside joke among labels for a long time, but it seems someone else has noticed it too.)
Cost: £50 set-up, £35/month for 2gb of bandwith and 5gb storage. Additional bandwith is £6/gb. By today's conversion rate, that's about $78 set up and $54/month.
Info: fatdrop.co.uk.
I have no idea how I was signed up for Release Promo. Supposedly, it uses the model of the old DJ pool, in which labels supply the music for free and DJs are charged $59/month, but with a 3 month minimum (basically, $177 to start).
Unfortunately, the interface is clunky and out of the internet circa 1998. Incredibly, just to preview tracks, Release Promo forces you to download an m3u file and load the songs in iTunes rather than simply using a flash-based player to preview the tracks in the browser. Flash players are everywhere - there are even free varieties which can basically be adapted to any sort of service known to man, with whatever skin you'd like to use. Previewing tracks is of paramount importance when you have little to no familiarity with the label or artists. And you want me to download something just to do that? Thanks but no thanks.
Cost: Free to labels, $177 for a 3 month membership for DJs. They apparently have a "total" package in which labels can pay to blast out their music as well, which is probably how I was added.
Info: releasepromo.com
Label Worx more or less a cheaper alternative to Fatdrop. The service is not terribly different (though putting the feedback form at the bottom means that many people will miss it), with the opportunity to preview and label control on whether or not feedback is required. Really the only substantial difference between Label-Worx and Fatdrop, at least from my end, is a slightly negative one: a little ticker keeps track of how many times you've downloaded a song vs. how many times the label will allow you to do so. I've no idea why this is even on there: with simple IP tracking, the label can easily find out if you've downloaded it from your computer and phone or given it out to 10,000 of your closest friends and deal with your pirating ass accordingly.
Additionally, you can host the tracks on your own server and just use Label-Worx's tracking system for an even cheaper rate.
Cost: £7.50 for hosting and tracking; £5 for tracking only. It roughly works out to $12 for the complete package or $8 for just the tracking.
Info: label-worx.com/promomanager
AheadPR recently redesigned their promo interface and for the life of me I can't figure out. It's easy enough to preview tracks - the flash player here is sleek and cool - but the feedback section is located way down at the bottom of the page and it's not entirely clear where the download option comes from or if one is even provided. I say this having used the service and filled out feedback saying, hey, maybe I'm a mental cripple but I can't figure this one out. Nobody got back to me, probably because the info was sent to the label and AheadPR never saw it.
Cost: AheadPR provides basic information on their website (£400 for their "bundle offer" on the high end, £200 on the low end), but no information is provided that I could find on what this means outside of general audience divisions into Tastemakers and International Press and Radio). To get more detailed info (is this yearly? quarterly? are there additional bandwith charges? how easily can I track it?) you apparently have to fill out a form.
Info: aheadpr.com
06Jan2010
Things a 12 Year Old Can Do (But House Music Labels Can't)
We publish a music magazine. Though the industry has changed quite a bit over the years, over the transom submissions are still the lifeblood of any music rag. You want to write about what's new, what's interesting, what's groundbreaking or just what's good to groove to.
Just about all music submissions these days are MP3s. Digital files were supposed to make things easier, yet I spent about 3 hours on Tuesday hunting down artist and label info for releases we've gotten in the last two weeks. Despite repeated complaints from DJs and reviewers, many labels still fail to embed ID3 information in their tracks.
Here we are in 2010, a decade into the MP3 revolution that replaced vinyl, CD and cassette tapes, and people still can't get this.
This is something that my 12 year old niece knows how to do, but apparently a great number of House Music labels do not. Since I'm the helpful sort, here's a breakdown of things that my 12 year old niece knows how to do (with an explanation of how to do them!)
ID3 tags are tiny little bits of information that allow iTunes or some other digital media player to display track information, such as the title, the artist, and even what the artwork looks like. It's pretty nifty, and it takes no time or technical knowledge (I know this because I add it to every single mix and every single radio show published by 5 Magazine, which is upwards of 100 sets of ID3 tags per year).
Why should you include them? Well, you've surely come across something that looks like this before:
Now if you're sending your music out, presumably you want people to play it. Presumably you want people making thousands of dollars for playing in front of thousands of people to play it. But do you have any idea how many tracks, say, Louie Vega gets in a day? a week? Hundreds. Do you really think he's going to waste his time hunting down the track information that you might have included in an email but not embedded in the track? (Many people make this mistake. People save tracks. They don't save emails. Or you shouldn't expect them to.) Maybe Louie's a really nice guy and he will, but why would you make it hard for him to play your music? Doesn't that defeat the entire point?
HOW TO DO IT: Just about every digital audio workstation (DAW) that can export tracks as MP3s allows you to embed detailed ID3 tags in the file. You can even do it in iTunes by clicking on any track, selecting "Get Info..." and typing it in:
This takes less than two minutes, even if you're typing with one finger.
The other day I remarked to someone that big-name House producers and DJs often submit tiny, thumbnail-sized headshots to major magazines and publications while my 12 year old niece has a Flickr account with thousands of high rez photos with her friends making kissy faces and peace signs in oversized sunglasses.
You might be one of those people that's just happy being a guy behind the console and doesn't care if people write about you (or, I guess, if your records sell). In that case, by all means, skip this one. But if you run a record label, you do some sort of marketing. If that sounds like you, you need:
- High Resolution Photos. If the photo is so huge that it doesn't fit on your monitor, then it's high resolution.
- Interesting Photos. The headphone shot might be cliched but hey, if you're a DJ, your options are limited. A shot of you looking dreamy in the midst of urban decay is cool but a headphone and peace sign shot is better than nothing.
- Professional Photos. If the photos aren't professional, they should at least be clean and look pretty decent. More people are going to see these in print than you will probably ever meet. That photo, to many people, is what you look like. You should probably make it count.
HOW TO DO IT: You can set up a photoshoot with a qualified professional for less than 1 hour and not much more than $100. Granted, they're not going to hold your hand and dress you up like the Queen of England like it's for the cover of Vanity Fair, but the supply of photographers looking for clients far outstrips demand. You can get some really good work done for not much money.
This is a long-standing pet peeve of mine. YouTube is the greatest jukebox in existence, capable of playing songs I don't own and just want to hear once or twice, as well as tracking down obscure mixes and building hype (or extending markets) for new tracks that aren't for sale yet. We have a little script that looks for YouTube videos of tracks we review and I'll add artist-produced videos that provide a "behind the scenes" peek at new releases (to see what I mean, check out Terry Hunter's channel here.)
If you think hearing music doesn't lead to sales, you must have never tried on a pair of shoes before buying them. There is so little risk to putting your music on YouTube that it's asinine to argue otherwise. The kind of loser that's going to rip the audio and try to play it at a gig is not, under any circumstances, ever going to buy anything. You're not losing anything - unless you don't put up one at all.
As a bonus - and this is what the hardheads in the industry don't get about this -- YouTube content is pumped out everywhere. It's embedded on sites like this one. It's embedded on last.fm and facebook and forums. It costs you the same whether one person views it on YouTube or if 1,000,000 view it on some Tasmanian or Sudanese blog. It's piped to every single corner of the internet for the same price: free.
HOW TO DO IT: Create an account on YouTube, which takes about 2 minutes and requires an email address. If you're really serious about this, you can join the YouTube partner's program and actually make a small bit of scratch from ads played every time your videos are played. Most importantly, you can direct viewers to where they can buy what they're listening to or your website where you can throw other swag or gig info at them.
(And please: don't truncate the video. As much as you might imagine your fanbase as living, breathing credit cards, they're not dumb and they're not going to bother with your 2:30 clip when they can hear the full song elsewhere. Music is an experience. Nobody who makes this stuff can tell me they believe otherwise.)
It's become blindingly obvious (and I'll have more to say on this another time) that the business model for dance music is dead. Dead. Radio won't fix it. Shutting down The Pirate Bay or Rapidshare won't do it. Marketing music exclusively at DJs - a small segment of any artist's fanbase - no longer makes sense. More to the point, though, there's no reason why you should be ignoring 90% of your fanbase who love your music, adore your sets and pay money to see you strut your stuff. Blasting your music to all of them costs the same: free.
There are dozens of streaming sites. None of them make any money but all of them have a tremendously large music base. I recently interviewed Mark de Clive-Lowe who not only participates on these sites but also shoots short videos of his work in the studio and even streams it when he's on the road. Hell, here's an old post in which we embedded a stream that DJ Spinna and DJ Jazzy Jeff broadcast live from a gig in Paris. (Requirements: a laptop with a webcam and internet connection.) Lars Behrenroth goes through his promos on ustream. You might not want to lifecast every moment of your life and contribute to the reality TV culture that's just eating America's soul at this point, but we're not really talking about that here. Just turn it off when you've got to go to the can.
HOW TO DO IT: Each of these sites have their own sign-up policies. For ustream, livestream and other streaming video sites, sign-up is free though there are some minor restrictions for unpaid members (max viewer limitations for livestream, though this really doesn't matter as you're starting out).
And that's enough for a day, isn't it?
09Dec2009
The Cold, Harsh Reality of the Music Business of the Future
Summary: It doesn't exist.
Two days ago, Apple purchased popular music streaming sight LaLa (it's a rule these days that any technology that aims to be popular must have a name close to the sound a baby makes throwing up on itself). Socialmediatards fell into a frenzy that this meant that Apple was going to launch a free streaming version of iTunes. Now there are indications that this isn't even close to the truth. Apple is a notoriously secretive company, but it appears they purchased LaLa for the right to employ a couple of their engineers. They've done this many times before, either to secure access to a certain component or simply to expand their devious little hive mind for a product launching way, way down the road.
Lala was only the latest music streaming company to get swallowed up by a gigantic corporation. Back in August, MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch, not "Tom") purchased iLike. And just yesterday, MySpace consummated its black widow ingestion of iMeem.
These were more or less the cream of the crop as far as music streaming sites went. Pandora, Spotify and a few others are still out there, but as they say in the newspaper business: two incidents is a coincidence, three makes a trend. And the trend here should freak everyone the fuck out.
Do you know what Apple paid for LaLa? Rumor has it, about $17 million dollars. Sounds like a lot of money until you realize that LaLa had about $14 million in cash in the bank, which makes the actual price around $3 million.
That's all that's left from the estimated $35 million Lala received from investors (including Warner Music). And that gives LaLa a return on investment of -50%, which makes the real estate industry look damn lucrative right about now.
Back in August, iLike was sold to MySpace for $20 million. And iMeem - probably the most popular of all streaming sites - was picked up for somewhere around $1 million.
These sites have millions of users between them. Why are these services going so cheap?
Because they're losing money, and a lot of it.
LaLa was in the red about half a million bucks a month, meaning they could float for maybe a little more than a year before going broke. iMeem nearly went out of business over the summer because it was (and presumably still is) drastically far behind on its payments to music industry labels for licensing their fees. The price here might very well just be a deal to cover iMeem's outstanding debt.
This is another dirty little secret of the "Music 2.0" that web gurus at conferences and workshops and seminars like to shove down your throat. Nobody is making money at it. Streaming is all great but it's just another promotional tool, not a goldmine. And there are quite enough promotional tools already that don't make any money.
The reason why nobody talks about this - or rarely does, anyway - is that most of the writing about these companies is from tech-oriented sites and publications. They're writing from the perspective of users, not musicians (and certainly not as investors). They love a service and declare it a success - and it is, as far as pleasing many people goes.
Walking around and stuffing envelopes full of money into the hands of strangers is successful as well, but, like music streaming sites, is not really a growth industry.
This profound disconnection between users on the one hand and content producers and investors on the other has led to some surreal episodes in the wake of the new ownership of these sites taking over. There was a bit of an uproar when the first thing MySpace did after taking over iMeem today was to shut off access to iMeem's API, which developers can use to spray a site's content around like a firehose.
Developers immediately freaked the fuck out - many had built websites around those APIs (presumably with as solid a business plan as iMeem had in the first place, which is to say none at all.)
Lee Martin, developer of twt.fm (a "mash up" of iMeem and Twitter, presumably pronounced TWATFOOM!) cried foul as his service built upon iMeem's API went dark:
If this is MySpace's idea of how to run a successful music tech company, they have truly lost their way. Imeem was leagues ahead of their competition (MySpace, iLike, and Lala) in terms of technology and openness. They represented the music business of the future. Now they are a forced hyperlink to a cold, un-innovative, MySpace landing page (http://myspace.com/imeem) making false promises and giving no guidance or help for the developer community they just destroyed.
In truth, Rupert Murdoch is sick of MySpace losing money. Every day, every user is costing iMeem money. Rupert's hand-picked minions at MySpace undoubtedly read the writing on the wall and put a stop to bleeding bales of money for neat little hacks that nearly led iMeem to shut down before Rupert picked up the company for a song.
Martin is right, though: iMeem truly was the music business of the future. No future.
28Sep2009
Getting Your Music Heard (Part 214,523,403)
Six months ago in this space, I wrote that "The freedom brought about by the decline of vinyl and the high production costs associated with producing it hasn't led to better music - just more of it."
The signs of the music apocalypse are becoming increasingly apparent. A year ago, 5 Magazine received maybe 40 promos a month. We now receive well over 200. At least half of these are EPs containing three or more distinct tracks (and at least half of those sound like Eric Cartman singing "She Works Hard for the Money" with a disco beat, but anyway...). In other words, the amount of music flowing down the pipe every month has multiplied about seven-fold in the course of a year.
And of those 200 promos, we might print reviews of maybe 20. You can see where I'm going with this, yes?
If you've gone ahead and started your own digital label in this climate, you've got my best wishes and sincere gratitude for getting into the arena in what was a horrible environment even before the great glut fell upon us. I can only assume that you're doing something you believe in. The world needs more people like that.
There's a very big difference, however, between making good music and getting it heard.
There are a number of guides - some good, some bad - on how to start and market your own digital label. I won't write another one here - I'm not qualified, and actually can't think of more than a half-dozen people on the entire planet who are (opinions = assholes, etc.) Everyone seems to enjoy dispensing advice on the subject and there's no shortage of rejects from the music industry selling you ebooks on how to GET FAMOUS NOW!
Instead, I can tell you the things that make me grab a track or press play instead of putting them in the slush pile for later consideration. Considering that I've written probably a few hundred reviews (and decided to write a few dozen feature stories based entirely on promos I've received), this could be useful if you're thinking of starting a label or if you already have one but would like to tighten up marketing.
The most important rule, which I think you can apply to everything nowadays, is: Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
With production costs so low for a digital release, there's a temptation to do all kinds of things that would have been prohibitively expensive with vinyl. This is what's lead to the tremendous glut of filler material. And unfortunately, a lot of really good music is getting buried - not just by the glut of other releases in the market, but by the label itself which hasn't taken these words to heart.
THE REMIX GLUT
Just because you can release 12 remixes with a single, doesn't mean you should. In the old days, including a big-name remixer on a single meant shipping more units to distributors and stores. Obviously, you're not dealing with physical units when you're selling MP3s, but having a Johnny Fiasco or Mike Dunn or Louie Vega remix your track is definitely going to get it heard. Period. Stop reading now because if you've got Fiasco or Dunn or Vega remixing your shit, you really don't need to read anything from me.
That hasn't changed. Nor has the value of remixing a track for different markets, particularly with how fragmented the House scene is.
So remixes are good. And like everything else, you can carry it too far.
If you're including remixes just because they're from your friend, you've committed the fundamental mistake of thinking of yourself instead of your market. There's no reason why you can't release more remixes down the line. One of the cool developments of the digital marketplace is the extended remix collection, released months or even a year after the original single. It can add months to a track's lifespan. But those are already hit singles when the next batch of remixes hit the market - you can say that the market demanded more, and the label filled that demand with additional remixes.
But if you're taking a decent song and tacking 8 or 9 remixes onto it right out of the gate, and the remixers aren't named Fiasco, Dunn or Vega, you're not really doing yourself any favors.
You might think that it can't hurt. It can. People just aren't going to give the same sustained attention to an 11 track package of remixes by unknown names than they are to a tight 5 or 6 track package. Blame it on shortened attention spans, the fast pace of the world or just human nature.
Attention, like money, is finite. Having to slog through a number of uninspired and unnecessary remixes uses it up rather quickly.
The Catalog Glut
Just because you can release 75 tracks a year doesn't mean you should. I've yet to hear of any artist in any genre who could write five great songs in a month. And if you're really an artist, "great" should be what you're aspiring to.
Let me give you an example. Terry Hunter is one of the most prolific producers in House Music today. His independent T's Box Records puts out one quality release every month. Sometimes it's by Terry, sometimes it's by another artist - in addition to his own work, he's released tracks by Jazzy Jeff and Leonard Part Sixx, and his own tracks usually feature a different vocalist from previous ones.
Now, aside from richly produced tracks (which are properly arranged songs, with proper vocals), Terry probably has thousands of beat tracks lying around. Someone could steal the man's harddrive and probably have enough material in there for years of new releases.
Terry could very easily release them all, sell a few of each of them and in the short term scoop up enough money to buy a solid gold jacuzzi. He's doesn't, though, and I think the commonsense reason why he doesn't is that it would (a.) oversaturate the market and (b.) diminish the reputation for quality that people now associate with T's Box Records. Sure, he could cash in now, but he'd pay later.
Be like Terry (and don't forget the bling).
Now that's Terry Hunter - a producer who has built a reputation for decades, and a DJ that can headline any night in any town in damn near any city with a scene in the world. Your average producer probably doesn't even have that opportunity. And oversaturating the market when you're relatively unknown is commercial suicide.
Every now and then someone does it, and I can almost put a number on how long it will take for them to burn out, discouraged and demoralized (if you're curious: about five months). This will be someone that isn't even terribly well known locally, but pumps out four or five tracks a month regardless of the poor reception. In most cases, they're pretty young and enamored with the instant feedback of someone (maybe someone just being nice) saying how much they love it.
But the balance sheet doesn't lie, and no one can feed their family based on positive feedback on myspace. You need sales, not bumps on a message board.
The Album Glut
I'm continually mystified by young, up-and-coming artists still working on their name who release full albums without much of a business plan. Everyone these days is releasing an album. It's like how after Star Wars, every director felt he had a trilogy in him just waiting to get out. But I'm here to tell you: Just because you have 12 tracks you're happy with doesn't mean you should release an album.
Jay-J, Fred Everything and Miguel Migs have all released albums in the past year, and we've written feature stories on all of them. That's because before an album hits the streets, they have a full release schedule already planned. They know which singles will be released, in what order, and have a general idea who is doing the remixes, if they're not already in the can. Sure, they can change things up down the line, but they're not simply throwing 12 tracks together and chucking it out there as basically a super extended play EP. And they'll be touring in support of that album for probably over a year.
In short, they have a business plan. An album is something that you build toward, after your reputation is somewhat established and you're ready to take it to the next level.
I've received endless "albums" however which are basically 12 track EPs, from people relatively unknown locally and completely unknown nationally. There not only won't be a tour, but I don't think they could get many people to attend an album release party. The quality of the music is sort of irrelevant to the argument here, but it's almost uniformly true that the majority of these albums are also made up of instrumental, sample-heavy tracks rather than songs.
(I'm not saying this to be cruel. Everyone starts somewhere. But in the past, a young blood with some good-not-great music didn't have the opportunity to press a full record of mostly mediocre tracks unless he was rich and didn't care about seeing a return on his investment. Today, there are far too many people selling themselves and their music short by doing this, and I don't think any of their buddies or people bumping their music on myspace have the balls to tell them.)
And as it is with the remix glut, so it is with the album glut. Reviewing an album is no problem when there are 12 great songs. It's a chore when you're staring in the face of 12 "jazzy" instrumentals that have clean high hats and not much else. In the middle of those 12 may be one gem, a good track that stands out - or would have if you hadn't surrounded it with 11 mediocre bits of filler.
"Music for Losers" is from the fabulous lpcoverlover.com. Photo of Terry Hunter and Andre Hatchett by Czarina Mirani, 5 Magazine.
Because the World Needs More Digital Labels
Over at soundrevolt.com is an article outlining 10 steps to establishing a digital label. Just like in Spinal Tap, this list should have gone to 11, and that cherished 11th step would have been: "Ask yourself: are you really doing anything different than anyone else?" Everyone I speak to is irritated by the suffocating glut of material released these days. The freedom brought about by the decline of vinyl and the high production costs associated with producing it hasn't lead to better music - just more of it.
What's most interesting about the listicle is what's only implied, down in step #10, in regard to the economics of digital labels. And it explains why so much of the music being released today is, in the words of Edward G. Robinson, "tasteless, odorless crud":
10. Draw up the balance. Let's begin at profits. If you manage to fall into Beatport, then 80% of your profit will flow from there. A good track should easily reach 100 downloads, which will generate the store income on the level of $150-$200, out of which Beatport collects 40% (Juno takes 50%). That means $90-120 goes to your pocket. If you put up 5 numbers a month, then you can expect a profit of $500-600. Obviously you will share the profit among yourself and the authors of the music, which is usually 50-50, which means that there is still $250-300 on the label's bank account, but don't forget there are still unpaid bills on your desk. Pay the copywriting, sound mastering, web hosting fees, not to mention taxes and health insurance (let's hope your dad runs a business).
You read that right, and based on conversations with producers who are taking full advantage of the digital sphere, these numbers are legit. A good track these days will reach about 100 downloads, requiring producers to release a barrage of half-finished or rather defective tracks that never would have seen the light of day when labels were restricted by the burdensome production costs of vinyl. Some of the producers I've talked to seem slightly embarassed by that fact - no one, after all, wants to make an impression based on a product they shoved out the door to make a measly hundred bucks.
Based on these numbers, is it any surprise that fewer and fewer producers seem to be making the jump to "superstar" level these days? Those who have worked in record stores know that there used to be fans that would buy anything with certain producers' names on it. They weren't blind or undiscriminating fans - you just knew that anything they released had a certain threshold of quality else it never would have seen the light of day. But when the producer drops his standards, and the label is run by the same producer, is there really any wonder that so much generic crap is circulating around out there - and fans of this music put a lower and lower value on it?
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