Musician’s Notebook

Yes, that picture is of a weasel.

Why?

EMI, the music industry giant, wants to drop their funding for the music industry’s trade bodies, including the RIAA.

Well, I never liked those guys anyway. So why are they weasels?

If we can reform the industry, we need to reform trade bodies and create an industry regulated by those who truly care about the artist.

In the industrial age, it was unions that first gave workers freedom from the most horrendous of situations.

The RIAA and other music industry trade groups purport to be looking out for the needs of the artist. They really look out for the executives in those overpriced black leather chairs.

But a reform of the industry requires that when the trade groups are reformed to enforce fairness and justice, the corporations of the industry are still eating at the same table.

All the corporations eat at this table. When they push in their seats and leave, it takes away yet another opportunity to initiate some reforms in one fell swoop. It means multiple strategies for each corporation for the same goal, instead of just using trade groups to achieve that one goal at once.

EMI will still be as corrupt as always and as self-serving as the trade groups it is leaving behind. This does not indicate any kind of good change for the future. Certainly doesn’t mean they will take an interest in good music at last, either.

A reform of this scale might seem to gargantuan to be true, but if anyone can do it, I think I know just the guys.

PS. Got a band with some tunes and want to get them out there? Read the latest in our Band Blogging series: Make Subscriptions Prominent.

Your ability to contact your audience is paramount to your success.

Mailing lists, for instance, have been the crux of many band’s campaigns from garage band to hit-maker in the past.

When it comes to your blog, the best thing you can do is have readers subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, either in a reader or by email.

The first step, of course, is to make subscription a prominent choice. Keep an RSS button in the header. Or put a FeedBurner email subscription form in the sidebar. When you put that form in your sidebar make sure it will appear above the fold (the top part of a website that can be seen without scrolling down - anything that you can see only after scrolling is below the fold).

Getting those email addresses is simply too important to your success.

You should also refer to the ability to subscribe in your posts. Some blogs use tag lines at the end of each blog post that say “Enjoy this post? Subscribe today” or something similar - the bottom of this post even has one.

Make it prominent, make it clear and make it easy.

If you have a 5-step process before your reader can subscribe, you’ll probably lose them after the second step. Make it as simple as putting an email address into a form and confirming from the email account, or just clicking an RSS button that instantly opens your feed.

Making it easy to subscribe is perhaps the easiest yet most effective thing you can do for your blog.

Get your fans coming back for more and make subscriptions prominent.

Last time on Band Blogging: Podcast Your Tunes.

Last time on Band Blogging we spoke about keeping the conversation going on your blog; this time we’ll talk about using podcasts to promote your music.

I came up with the tuneback concept for my own band which has worked exceptionally well. The premise is that each week, we spend an hour, and an hour only, writing, recording and publishing a new song.

This has gained us many friends and listeners online, as well as secured us coverage in respectable and popular media outlets such as the Sydney Morning Herald.

Technically, this is just like a podcast. You can take the concept further and make a show of it, discussing the development process of the song and its roots in inspiration, before or after playing the song itself.

Podcast Directories

The next step, after you’ve got your regular song (or show) together is to submit it to various podcast directories for exposure, such as the iTunes podcast directory (here’s how) or PodcastAlley.

Isolating yourself from the rest of the web community is a bad idea when it comes to blogging and podcasting, so get the show in as many different directories as possible.

On that note…

Don’t Be Afraid To Network

You can find other blogging musicians whose work you enjoy and do shows together, or even start a podcast network and support and promote each other’s podcasts.

Blogging is one arena where you should adopt the viewpoint: collaboration, not competition. Blogging is truly about relationships and connections, and embracing this can only benefit everything you do online.

Simply Another Medium

There are so many ways a musician can draw attention to their music; band art, blog posts, street teams and the like are all mediums to direct someone’s attention and put it on the music itself. Podcasting is just another way of doing this - of course, like radio, the medium is more suited to the purpose simply because it’s an audio medium.

Let me know if your blogging band has started up a podcast of their own!

It’s been quite a while since we last discussed the topic of band blogging. We’ve talked about the software you should use to set up your blog and how to plan for releases of music through your blog.

We’ve also talked about emailing the people who leave comments on your blog.

This post is about a related practice, keeping comment threads active. We email those who comment on our blogs to develop loyalty and relationships, but we keep comments active for another reason:

Social proof is formed by perception.

A glaring “0 Comments” on every blog post is very bad. See, there’s something called social proof and in essence this means that, since people are generally scared of the unknown, they wait for others to get involved before taking an interest of their own.

In other words: if nobody else is commenting, people assume you suck. Then, they leave.

If you keep comments active, your social proof is proof indeed.

People start to take an interest; if others are getting so actively involved, it must be good, right? So they download your tunes, leave their own comment of gratification, and then happily hand over their email address for your mailing list.

Well, that is, if you have all the other elements of your site - such as eye tracking - in place.

Keeping the conversation going

Social proof for marketing purposes isn’t the only reason for getting involved in the comments and replying to your listeners. Developing relationships with your listeners also builds strong loyalty, especially as they begin to perceive that relationship as friendship.

This builds an extremely loyal Core Audience, which is absolutely vital to getting your music out there. Word of mouth is the most effective may of building your brand, and Core Audience is the group of people that starts that word of mouth motor.

To summarize, what you need to start doing on your band blog:

• Encourage people to comment
• Reply to comments, whether they are positive or negative
• Don’t censor, but do keep spam and abusive content in the bin - keep the environment pleasant
• Don’t dominate the comments - if you’re the only one commenting on your own posts, it actually has the opposite effect on your social proof

As always, if you have any questions or comments, I’m more than happy to read and reply to them.

See what I did just there?

I recently had a lengthy discussion with someone about converting original studio songs for acoustic sets, especially songs that are designed for rock and metal bands and those using lead lines on an electric guitar. The person I was talking with is particularly religious and plays in his church band, and he’s often quite disappointed with the way the wall-of-sound arrangements of the megachurches are converted for his church’s smaller band.

Bottom line is, they take the chords and strum ‘em.

Of course, as he said, this makes for a really boring sound and any interest the melodies of lead instruments provided is lost in translation.

What makes a great original-to-acoustic conversion?

Straight conversions don’t work, it’s as simple as that. If you boil a song down just to the chords that can be played on an acoustic guitar, the end result is a sound that could be the basis of hundreds of popular songs, seeing as there are only so many chords and chord combinations.

These “straight conversions” are boring, lifeless and unimaginative. They are clones of an original song, except everything that made it unique and interesting is stripped away. And from what I know, churches are the biggest offender of the dull “straight conversion” (of course).

The key is to remember that an acoustic song and a rock song, despite having the same basis, are by their nature completely different and that means striving to replicate a sound is not only impossible, but stupid.

You need to be creating a new sound. It’s got to sound similar to the original, but you have creative license and can stretch in new directions. Have you heard Korn’s Freak on a Leash plugged-in and then unplugged? On the weekend I visited my parents and showed my dad, also a musician and the man who got me started down this path, listened to the unplugged version first, and then the studio version. He said that he was actually disappointed when it came to the original song.

Why?

Because Korn did not set out to replicate Freak on a Leash like they did with a few other songs on that album (Twisted Transistor, Coming Undone, for the interested). They took old material and used it to explore fresh new ground, building up the excitement in a sound that still boggles my mind.

The Original Freak on a Leash Recording

The Unplugged Freak on a Leash Recording

You must adapt a song to the medium, and fully embrace what that medium means. When you play a song exactly as you wrote it for electric guitars on an acoustic guitar, it doesn’t sound like an acoustic song; it just sounds odd. When you’ve done a good conversion it should embrace and suit the acoustic genre and sound like it was always a part of it.

Don’t neglect the important of a good acoustic conversion, because once you have a solid repertoire, acoustic sets are a great way to get to know old songs more intimately.

Berklee has long been known for providing great content online and off for musicians regarding all the aspects of music creation, production and business, but just the other day it joined the ranks of the many new blog networks that have been launching of late with Berklee Music Blogs.

My perusal of their offering has looked quite promising and there’s been a pretty decent amount of quality content available throughout the network, such as this article for those of you who wish, for some reason, to try your luck with the traditional music industry and support the standing hegemony (we all know my opinion is to work directly with publishers, distributors and the like and cut out the middleman).

The blog network is staffed by music industry professionals, professors and educators from Berklee, and others and apparently covers music business, production, songwriting, music theory (yes, it actually is good for you!) and performance skills.

I have particularly enjoyed the advice of Erik Hawkins on production, remixing, Reason and Pro Tools, and not just because it seems he uses a Mac. For instance, this article on using reverb is great and has some fantastic pointers on the use of the effect, that may come as a happy surprise for those of you who wish all those plugins on each track would stop slowing down your grandma-configured computer.

I suggest you go take a look at the network and judge for yourself - but at the least, it’s great to see the fairly sparse musician’s niche in the blogosphere filling out a bit more!

Blogged with Flock

Bands on major record labels are frequently on long tours; one year, eighteen months, sometimes even more, of constant globe trotting while the executives lean back in their big stuffy chairs at home and enjoy the green smell of cash, cash, cash.

It’s true that when you’re getting your band off the ground, a hard-slogging tour will get you off the ground and develop a nation-wide fan base.

It’s true that those hard-slogging tours keep established bands in business.

But isn’t there a smarter way to do it?

Here’s where the record labels have all their thinking mixed up: long tours mean more money, right? Wrong!

These horrifically long tours can (and almost always do) cause a variety of problems that mean that all parties concerned will be losing out on money in the long run.

• Health concerns and physical exhaustion
• Musical and creative burnout
• Band tension and subsequent break-ups
• Family tension and subsequent break-ups
• Self-medication as a coping mechanism; drug and alcohol addictions are just one example

When the band is suffering from the listed issues caused by excessive touring, money should be the last concern of anyone involved with the band; helping them fix their problems, their health, repair their families and bands, and kick addictions should be the first order of business.

But we know that money is always the first order of business for the record companies; they don’t really care about the wellbeing of artists.

And while we’re looking at this from the company’s point of view, shouldn’t it be obvious that excessive touring leads to loss rather than profit? Well, no, because these people barely passed business school (if at all) and don’t have the smallest bit of foresight. A sustained brand like the Rolling Stones is sure to bring in more money over time than a one-hit wonder, no matter how big that hit is.

My band’s policy documents have a very important clause in them.

When my band’s manager asked me to form some policies that I and the other band members would like to see included, the first that came to mind and I subsequently included went something like this:

We will never, ever tour so excessively that we alienate each other, our families, or ourselves, or cause serious damage to our lives in any other way.

This is a policy we make binding between ourselves and with any companies we deal with. If a person or company doesn’t like this clause, we go elsewhere.

A band can still do a hard-slog tour and form a following, but it has to be done in such a way that the band, and the band’s families, can handle it. That means frequent breaks, and not on the other side of the world, but at home.

I have a wife and a son. If I could not take them with me, the most I’d ever stay out on the road for would be a month (and even that would be excruciatingly painful). However, I do have plans in place to allow me to take them with me at minimal cost. We’ll talk about how to do this another time.

Make reasonable touring and tour breaks a matter of band policy, and never back down from band policy when dealing with external forces, especially record companies.

I really should not be supporting stereotypes regarding drummers, or making jokes about them. One of my best friends is a drummer and I’ll probably receive a clobbering for that. That’s partly why it was hard to resist.

But on to the news:

Gibson is bringing out a robotic guitar.

And while it will not fight in the war between guitarists and drummers, it will tune your guitar.

As in, for you. Automatically.

All you have to do is flick a switch that tells the guitar which tuning to use, and it’ll do it all on its own.

Don’t throw your guitar in the bin or pawn shop just yet; there will be a limited release before the public release next year. In the meantime, there’s a nice picture for you to look at.

My father has been using the same tuner for the last twenty five years or something crazy like that. Maybe he was holding out for this thing.

Gibson have been making great guitars for many decades, including the Les Paul which is played by many well-respected and talented guitarists, such as Slash from Guns N’ Roses and Greg Cameron from Midnight.Haulkerton (jeezuz, that was a shameless plug).

What does the Gibson Robotic Guitar mean for musicians?

It means that you won’t instantly the flick the “Amateur” switch on in your audience’s mind when you tune your guitar as your tongue fumbles around a long, boring introduction to the next song. Just friggin’ play already!

The music industry really is used to getting things its own way!

Kind of like a bratty two year old… if it were armed to the brim with greed, corrupt lawyers and a complete lack of conscience.

One such “entertainment company” just started making demands of the mobile phone industry.

And as if bullying musicians and artists into bankruptcy (both financially and in terms of an intellectual property catalogue) and persecuting their customers at every opportunity was not enough!

Warner’s chief just used a bunch of euphemisms to say that the mobile phone industry had better sell more music through their phones or Apple and Google would take the lion’s share of those earnings.

What he really means is that if the mobile phone industry doesn’t improve its music offerings they’ll be very pissed for not giving Warner as much money as they want, and they’d have no reason to tell Apple and Google to stop asking for a reasonable rate of royalties because “none of the other companies are getting that much” - right?

And then, of course, for not pouring more cash down the greed-hole, they’d sue resistant companies the first chance they got (you used a copyrighted sample in your ad without realizing? Bang!).

Okay, maybe I’m being a tad melodramatic, but the bullyish way these mobsters are dealing with other industries isn’t going to earn them any friends.

All the major label artists are leaving the record companies as soon as they get the chance, and I think that soon enough those independent artists will be the first choice of the phone companies when they feel like ‘improving their music offerings’ on their networks.

I don’t blame them. I sure like watching the Sopranos… but I wouldn’t crack a business deal with that kind of business!

There are five rock and metal musicians who I listen to on a regular basis when I need inspiration for my own music. I listen to these guys for recreation, but usually I spend hours at a time analyzing their music and what makes it really work. I want to understand how they created sounds, moods, and atmospheres, how they create a soundscape that just won’t leave your mind, or how they create intense, bursting build-ups to important parts of the song. I pick apart each song until I feel I have an understanding of how they made it such a great tune (attention to detail really counts here!). Here are the rock and metal artists that I listen to for these purposes - we’ll look at artists from other genres who I do this with another time.

1. Guns N’ Roses

These guys are the guys that introduced me to hard rock when I was 13 years old. I still remember the first time an older friend sat down and showed me their material; the first song I ever heard was Don’t Cry which just epitomizes fantastic evocation of emotion in music, and after that, Locomotive, which is such a diverse tune with fantastic vocal variance even if it’s not one of their most popular songs.

Appetite For Destruction is a masterpiece in my own opinion and if you can break this one down, you learn how to create unceasing energy in your songs. Of course, a big part of this is having that energy in you to begin with, but it’s so important for grabbing attention.

2. Alice in Chains

I hate it when rockers and metalheads make music devoid of melody for the sake of sounding hard. Even Dimmu Borgir manages to blend a huge amount of melody into their breakneck-pace songs. Alice in Chains were masters of heavy melody, and Layne Staley in particular had a voice that could make the heaviest of heavy songs melt away with vocal melodies that you could swear were stuck to the side of your head like a two year old playing with jello. Check out Junkhead and I Stay Away for some songs that will blow you away.

3. Korn

Korn don’t always have the best reputation in the metal community; they’re too “mainstream” for these cool kids. I love my metal, but I still have respect for Korn because despite their commercial success, their creative vision has still expanded in various directions. Their latest untitled effort is full of songs with such an experimental nature that I think some of the aforementioned boneheads are so mainstream they don’t realize it; pretty ironic for a community that prides itself on its counter-culturalism.

Korn wrap their songs in so many layers of sonic goodness it’s not funny. I have listened Hollow Life to hundreds of times and I’m still picking up layers that I was sure weren’t there before. If you listen to Freak on a Leash from their recent Unplugged album and analyze it, you’ll learn a lot about making an original studio song with a hard rock edge into an amazingly beautiful acoustic piece. Tip: it’s not about taking the chords and strumming them on an acoustic guitar.

4. Bon Jovi

I love this guy’s voice (if you hadn’t noticed by my obsession with the way a band’s singer sounds, I’m a singer myself). I mean, I really love it. When I first decided to sing after playing guitar, bass and keyboard for years, something I’d wanted to do since I began with music but never thought I could, I put Bon Jovi’s Crossroad (Best of) album on and sang the whole thing, every night, for a month. I still struggle with Always, but the challenge is a learning experience, right?

Bon Jovi, to me, is a great example of retaining your own sound while making music that is commercially viable. And as long as you don’t give up on your creative vision, there’s nothing wrong with commercially viable music; everyone has to eat, and despite what most people think, that includes musicians.

5. Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath sounds like cliched 70s metal today, but that’s because they sparked a new wave of music. They were the revolutionizers. To me, listening to this band is a way of reminding myself why I make music; not only because it’s my first love in life, but because I want my music to change people, to help them, to communicate a message. Black Sabbath communicated a lot of things, but the most important thing is: they sparked a new wave of music. They were an essential part of defining the type of music rockers and metalheads would listen to for generations. It makes it seem possible.

Not only that, Black Sabbath were masters of the hook. Even slow, haunting, minimalist songs like Black Sabbath itself stick in my mind for days after I hear them.

So there you have it; the five rock/metal bands that I listen to for inspiration on a nearly daily basis. By careful analysis of an artist’s tracks, you can figure out what works and what doesn’t. Now go and compare the studio version of Freak on a Leash with the Unplugged version, and come back and tell me what makes the acoustic version so much more powerful!

Tags: musicians, guns n roses, alice in chains, korn, bon jovi, black sabbath

comScore has released figures detailing the Radiohead choose-your-own-price experiment that was featured on practically every blog in the world recently.

62% of customers paid

And this, dear reader, means that a whopping 38% of customers didn’t. The question is: is 62% a large or small number in this experiment? That depends: by expectation, I think 62% is very small and I would’ve expected something more like 80-90%.

Of course, the album has been downloaded hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times by peer-to-peer, so the accurate figure of total distribution is probably much closer to my earlier prediction.

By expectation that number might be small, but is it really? Hell no. You don’t expect to walk into a bookstore and walk out again with a book without paying. You don’t expect to hire a lawyer for free. And it just so happens that musicians are serious professionals with a job to do and families to feed. The musician’s job is no less important than the lawyer’s job in society.

So why the #%*! are we getting shortchanged?

Many of us provide free songs for download these days, and yet our so-called fans and admirers think nothing about taking for free those things that we do ask something in return for.

The level of respect for musicians between the classical period and today has fallen to a dramatic low. This is thanks to the music industry’s strategy to perpetrate such an image of us upon the public; why? So they could get away with the ridiculous “payments” that they award musicians today (even with a hit record, most musicians are still in debt when working with the current industry).

But it backfired.

It was a plan that should have backfired, too, and it did; the music industry has been having a nervous breakdown for the last few years over piracy figures. Only, it didn’t just backfire on the perpetrators - it backfired on us.

Yup, we’re all in  the same camp on this one. The public no longer respects the duty and role musicians and other artists fulfill in society. They don’t see the need to pay us for our work, just like the industry didn’t when it started ripping us off decades ago.

And that is why out of all Radiohead’s fans, only 38% didn’t steal from the band, and just because they offered the choice doesn’t make it right.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: radiohead, download, music, digital music

Greg Sandoval at CNET News has an interesting article, When rockers cut ties from labels, up that talks about Trent Reznor’s recent decisions regarding the music industry and his place in it.

From the article:

Attention to detail is of vital importance to musicians forging careers independently and online. The messages customers receive when purchases are confirmed really are important details to consider.

Why? In this case, because that confirmation message can really make a difference in the loyalty of a fan and the longevity of that fan’s loyalty depending on how well the message is written. What does it do to create a sense of connection with the customer? We all know that fewer repeat customers bring in more profits than twice the amount of one-time customers.

It’s important for musicians to pay attention to each and every detail when working on their promotional materials and mechanisms. Even more important than the content of a purchase confirmation message are the details of the band’s mailing list, as mailing lists provide the band with a tool more indispensable than any other tool (except maybe a shiny new Mac Pro with Logic Pro installed): freely given permission to make contact with an interested, targeted audience any time they want.

This kind of power shouldn’t be abused, of course, and abusing it means that the mailing list will dwindle.

What kind of details are we talking about? Positioning of the subscription form on the website (one of the keys is prominence, but eye tracking should be taken into account), the process that one goes through to subscribe (double opt-in is good and gives subscribers confidence in you), the aesthetics of the process, again, the confirmation email, and the ease with which someone can unsubscribe (believe it or not, this is very important, especially if you ever want to get them back again).

From album inserts to posters to websites to blog posts to conversations, the details are so important to ensuring your long term success.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: trentreznor, mailing list, online purchases, musician’s marketing

It’s not every day that an international superstar quits music only days before tickets to an international gig go on sale, but that’s what Meat Loaf did in the middle of a performance two days ago. He stopped in the middle of one of his hits to declare that it was his final performance.

“This is my last ever gig. Thanks for 30 years, I can’t do this any more,” he declared in the middle of Paradise by the Dashboard Light.

Meat Loaf was reportedly slurring his words, so could it be alcoholism, or is the man just fed up with the abuse that the record industry perpetrates on artists for the sake of their own deep pockets?

This iconic artist has taken a beating from the Music Mafia over the years. After having success only at a regional level, the industry was already stealing creative control from him:

With the publicity generated from Hair, Meat Loaf was invited to record with Motown. They suggested he do a duet with Stoney Murphy, to which he agreed. The Motown production team in charge of the album wrote and selected the songs while Meat Loaf and Stoney came in only to lay down their vocals. Excerpted from Wikipedia.

We all know that the industry is constantly forcing signed artists to sing along to the lyrics and music of hired songwriters; this just goes to show that their mafia techniques have been around for many decades, and even then they weren’t afraid to pressure an artist who had barely started making a name for himself.

I’d put my money on interpreting “I can’t do this any more” as meaning “I can’t be abused by the industry any more” - and that’s why he’s quitting music.

It’s important that musicians know their copyrights, especially when dealing with the industry. Knowing things like this allows artists, with the help of an able intellectual property lawyer, to negotiate with businesses so that the artist in question doesn’t sign a slave labor contract and both parties end up with an equitable deal; this allows artists to do what they like within the realm of that equity, even if the industry doesn’t like it (just because it’s fair, doesn’t mean they will).

Take Meat Loaf’s abuse as a lesson: learn your copyrights now, and be smart when dealing with people who will use deception to take advantage of you.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: meatloaf, music industry, music mafia, copyright, intellectual property, bat out of hell

Jason Parker of ATOMIC Guitarist has posted 5 Difficult Guitar Soloing Exercises for you lead guitar buffs who want to improve your craft. They do look like quite a challenge, but a few hours, days, and weeks with those and you’ll be forcing Malmsteen into retirement. Jason has some more shredding focused articles on this site as well.

I’m often asked this question by non-shredders: isn’t shredding and any super-fast playing unemotional and therefore not effective musical communication? The answer is: no, the technique is not, as far as it used as technique and not message. When the speed becomes the message it loses anything real to say and any emotional attraction that an awesome hit song should create.

Tags: guitar, shredding, soloing

Or does your band have any promotional items at all?

Artists need to ask themselves the questions:

As far as the public is concerned, who am I as an artist? What do I want people to think of me as and perceive me as?

And then…

Do my marketing materials really reflect this perception? Will they form it, or create an opposing perception?

These important questions are what my good friend and colleague NDK Creative Artist’s latest article over at the Free Articulator discusses.

“Marketing is first and foremost a Perception-thing; it’s about image in the PR sense,” he opens with. He then follows with a crash course on how to use promotional items to form a certain perception. It’s a good article, and an important one, to all artists worldwide.

You can read this piece after you click here.

What does promotional items mean when it comes to a band?

Remember that no matter who you have designing promotional items for your band, you’ll need the copyrights to those items when they’re done. Of course, you’ll need to negotiate some terms and conditions; they’ll want attribution and perhaps a payment of royalties from the sales of merchandise and other material that their work is sold on. You’ll want the copyrights in their entirety, as well as the master files (Photoshop PSD files for instance) so the work can be adapted for a variety of uses.

Forget this last step, and watch the wolves tear you apart as soon as you start seeing success.

Tags: marketing, musician’s marketing, promotion, promotional items, band marketing, copyright, intellectual property

This blog is for all the musicians in the world who are striving to forge a long-term career. Today, I listened to some of the tunes of California band Monsters Are Not Myths and I must say, I really enjoyed their sound. Here’s a band that’s forging a following both locally and online. As I’ve said before: the Internet is a means of marketing and product distribution that completely changes the playing field of the music industry.

I spoke with singer and keyboard player Evan Hamilton via Skype. He tells me that the band is in a transitional period in terms of their sound, and their future releases will have more of a blues and folk feel to them. I look forward to hearing the differences between their local classic “What’s The Use” and their new material.

Clicking on the album art to the right will take you to CDBaby where their first release is available for download. You can hear many of the band’s songs on their site and MySpace page free of charge, so if you enjoy their music, do the right thing and help this band grow.

Check out the band’s Website, but they have uploaded even more songs to their MySpace page.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: independentbands, independent music, musician’s marketing, free music

Nancy Prager, a copyright lawyer and writer whose articles I am a frequent reader of, has had some great commentary on the Radiohead “controversy” in the past couple of weeks (as well as the emerging “controversy” regarding Reznor and Saul Williams).

Prager’s conclusion on the whole thing:

“While In Rainbows may be a musical work for the ages, it wouldbe inappropriate to use Radiohead as the poster child of bands pursuingalternative paths if its journey leads them back to the major labels.”

I believe her to be correct. Free music downloads are a friggin’ great way for musicians to start building an audience. I’ve done it myself for most of this year. By the time I’d published the third tuneback, I was building buzz and had a few major publications, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, interviewing me and even releasing my songs on their site.

That’s not bad growth for three hours work (the tuneback concept imposes a rule of one hour spent writing and recording a song).

But building a career? You can’t do that by releasing free music forever, and in an age where - as Nancy says - some don’t even want to pay $1 to obtain the album and go over to the file sharing sites, you might want to wait until the ass-end of your career before you start giving fans entire albums for free.

Radiohead can afford to do this. They are sitting on more money than George W. Bush is sitting on stupidity. But if you are reading that, chances are you’re not sitting on that much cash. If you are, my email address can be found in the right sidebar (I have a bad case of starving artist syndrome). If you don’t charge for independently released albums you won’t be able to make any income from your songs. On the other hand, the tuneback is a minimal time and effort investment for building audience. There’s a balance when it comes to freebies.

The scary part is that Radiohead and Saul Williams are setting a dangerous precedent. Pubs already pay insulting rates to bands because they know they can get a cover band in for free. The problem of piracy has begun to plague album sales in the same way. This can only make it worse.

Or maybe, NDK was right when he proposed that Radiohead were really asking their fans: given the opportunity to steal from us, will you?

Tags: radiohead, in rainbows, saul williams, trent reznor, free music