Slashdot Mirror
Promoting Musical Artists in the Post-RIAA Music World?
Mattcelt asks: "While we're all discussing the eventual demise of the RIAA and the triumph of the MP3, what should a small independent music publishing company do to sell a new artist to the public? My publishing company recently ran a $4,000 advertising campaign on a local radio station (107.9 the Link in Charlotte, NC). Despite reaching an average audience of more than 10,000 during peak times, we netted *0* sales. That's right, absolutely nothing. I've made the entire album available in MP3 format on the Ephelian Records website to facilitate adoption, and I know some people have downloaded the songs, but I can't figure out why no one has pre-ordered the CD. How does an indie artist make a living when gig prices for unknown artists will barely cover the gas money and CDs won't sell? Are we really wrong about the availability of MP3s affecting music sales?"
I've made the entire album available in MP3 format on the Ephelian Records website to facilitate adoption, and I know some people have downloaded the songs, but I can't figure out why no one has pre-ordered the CD.
Er, dude...
Sorry to be so harsh, but as someone who has sent good money to indie artists just because I liked the MP3s I downloaded for free, if the talent is there, the dollars will follow (well, some at least).
You could've hired me.
Not sure, but how many people preorder anything except what they know is going to be hard to get when it first comes out, like software, consols & games, and certain books.
Unless the band is extreamly hot and popular in the region, why would anyone bother to preorder, when they can just pick it up whenever it comes out, if they want the CD?
Well, I don't know the answer for other bands, but it seems like getting linked on Slashdot is a good approach.
Solution to blink tags: wrap them in another blink tag, with a javascript delay loop, so they cancel each other out
How does an indie artist make a living when gig prices for unknown artists will barely cover the gas money and CDs won't sell?
Get a job.
You put up MP3s of your CD on the web, of an indie band, and then expect people to buy your CD?
Not to sound like a troll, but I fail to see your logic. The point of having a few mp3s is to give them a sample of what the rest sounds like. (Or in the RIAA's case, the few good songs on a CD). Also, my experience with indie bands is, well, that they suck. My cousin was part of one, and it wasn't what I would consider remotely stellar.
I buy CDs for music that I downloaded the MP3s of and found good, but that music has all been Good music.
I've made the entire album available in MP3 format on the Ephelian Records website to facilitate adoption, and I know some people have downloaded the songs, but I can't figure out why no one has pre-ordered the CD.
.nfo describe the release, a .sfv that verifies the checksums, and all packaged in a nice RAR file. Now put it on Kazaa, and share it on "release" priority on eMule on the eDonkey network.
I suggest you encode it in pristine ogg VBR @ 320kbps. Also, include scans of the album cover and back, a nice
Oh, did you ask how to make money off it? Err, nevermind...
Well, one way to make sales would be to post on slashdot mentioning that you might be wavering on your belief that MP3 sharing may not be all it's cracked up to be... Ahh, I see, you're way ahead of me!
"Post-RIAA world"? Quickly, quarentine Cliff - he has Jon Katz disease!
(Actually, this being Memorial Day, I must admit I actually miss JK sometimes..)
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I would ask this: Is your album available in stores, or only via on-line ordering? If it is only available on-line, how easy to remember is the URL?
Consider where people listen to the radio - I would say mostly in their cars. Now, here I am, driving along, and on comes your ad. First of all, my ad filter wetware comes online - I hit the button to skip to a new station, or I blank out what is going on.
OK, so let's say your ad plays a snippet of the music in question, and I listen to it and say "Huh, that's kinda cool. Who is this?" Then your ad says "That was a sample of Scab - Now the Puss Flows Freely, available for download and purchase at www.fbq39x34.com/~tqxir/49912/pxj36.asp". Now, even if you said that slowly enough I could copy it, I'm not going to whip out a pen and paper and copy that while weaving through downtown traffic.
That's part of why the RIAA is still pertainent in this world. If all I can remember is the group name (and maybe not even that all that well) and if the group is in Worst Buy, I can find it. But if I have to find them online, and if all I have is some common words that don't lend themselves to Googling....
Last but not least: how does your website handle orders? Do you hid things behind layers of Flash and Javascript? Do you work only with Exploiter? Do you not accept credit cards?
Ask yourself this: if I wanted to buy that album, how many impediments are in my way?
www.eFax.com are spammers
how about making part of the albums available, like this brilliant guy over here , and sell full cds cheap (what with viral marketing cutting overheads n all)?
i have been thinking about this quite a lot lately, since i'm kinda guilty of copying a lot of indie-music from friends without buying the cds: even though i could never afford even half price on every cd i've copied, i'm still paying for, lets say every tenth album.
i'm not sure if this is a working model, but i listen to more music nowdays, and in the end i pay more for music today than i did four five years ago - and i'm buying from indie-labels rather than big-biz.
when it comes to money; do gigs for money (and if you get 20'000 downloads, chances are people would pay more in order to see you perform) - the traditional route with ads n stuff is too expensive to manage for a small biz.
oh! and don't forget nifty t-shirts! never underestimate the power of nice t-shirts. and sweatshirts.
f64 : making crack remarks since the invention of crack
...and take some of those gigs that barely cover gas and food, just to get your music out there for people to listen to. Most of the indie "success stories" (Big Head Todd & the Monsters, Ani DiFranco, etc.) based their reputations on their live performances, with album sales being just another means of helping to support that primary occupation.
You can't just throw your music at people who've never heard or seen the band before, and expect them to gladly fork over $10-20 on the chance that it could be good. Until you have some "known" artists, (i.e., they can attract a crowd on the basis of their name and rep for their shows) the label itself isn't going to be a good promotional vehicle. Once one or two of your artists have started to attract some attention, though, the label's name can be an attractor for new talent, and for listeners looking for more of that kind of music.
It can be done -- my father has been making a living as an independent musician for a number of years, and after establishing a sizeable local following for his live shows, has managed to self-publish and sell out several 1000-unit batches of his recent CDs. However, it took at least 3-4 years of low-paid live shows, interviews and solo accoustic sets on local radio stations, etc., before he was able to do so.
The music sucks? Just a shot in the dark, there. I just checked out one mp3 posted on your site and it was pretty bad - much worse than the kind of dreck that usually makes it to the Top 40 playlists, in fact. But, there IS a market for just about anything, so let's think about some other possibilities.
What was the nature of your 'advertisement' on the radio? Was it a sample of some songs? Or was it just "we have good music - come here to buy it"?
Did you advertise the right kind of music to the right radio audience?
Are your prices out of line?
Are your CDs available in stores? Many people don't buy stuff online, and if it can't be found in a 'real store', they're not gonna buy it.
Do you even know what your target audience is LIKE?
Just some thoughts.
Did you consider that maybe your music might suck? Maybe your marketing the wrong crowd. Get a better manager maybe (or at least ask some of them if you suck), and try and get a deal with a bigger record company.
No.
Big record companies spend millions on advertising and promotion, all done by experienced professionals. And they still sometimes lay an egg. Spending a few thousand dollars is no guarantee of anything.
If you want to make a place for your music, there's no substitute for the simple hard work of developing your art, finding your audience, and gradually making a place for yourself. This doesn't always work out, and it takes time and effort in any case. But there's no magic shortcuts.
At the same time, you've got overworked, long intros (leave that for the live album 20 years down the road), several insturmentals (which almost never do well - how many of James Taylors insturmentals can you recall?), and a singer that sounds like he's been training in high school chorus for the solo for the spring musical. Yes, I can say that, as I've had albums that flopped, and I sound nasal and grating.
Plus, having listened to the first half of all the songs, none of them really caught my attention and stood out. Sorry - it's *hard* to push albums. Live gigs? Sure - even I can fill a local venue. Selling albums across the country? You're competing with thousands of other bands, mostly comprised of veteran performers who are band-mate swapping every year or so, hoping to mesh with somebody for that next great hit. Plus loads of semi-successful or career artists like Throwing Muses and Men Without Hats, both of whom just released new albums and are trying to push their own stuff in the exact same way you are - with pre-built in name recognition.
To sum it up - making music is easy. Making good music is hard. Selling your music is the hardest thing of all and involves some amount of luck. There are bands that gave up, only to have their album suddenly take off two years after they gave all the copies away at live performances.
Incidently, I *assume* you're performing, pushing your stuff with at least two gigs a week. If you're not, you're not doing the work. Regardless if you make it this time around, constant gigging vastly improves your ability to perform, and if that's what you want to do in life, you have to work at it.
Incidently, while I ripped apart the *album*, you've got some decent songs. I'd sit and have dinner with you performing somewhere. And that's where 98% of all artists will spend almost all their careers. That's the music biz.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
your music has to be good. I'm not going to pay for music that sucks. The future of music advertising I think is in non-conventional methods. I highly suggest you get a third party to make a meme out of one of your songs. I found out about an awesome dude Master Zap http://www.z4p.com after hearing one of his songs in an anime music video. I found out about Tatu because Gabe from Penny Arcade told me about it. Just making a website with mp3s and advertising isn't enough. Your music actually has to be good and has to have an association in peoples minds with something else that's cool. Car commercials work well.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
People can and do travel this way. Good musicians don't starve. If you can't make a living by busking you're not good enough to be a professional musician. Be honest with yourself, could you survive like I've described above. I know several people who have done it, not all of them play music as a profession, but all of them could if they chose to. If you can't survive like that then don't give up the day job.
You say that gigging barely covers the costs, but every story I've heard about a succesful band almost always contains a variation on the following quote:
"...they built up a a dedicated following through a hard schedule of concerts..."
Unless you're groomed beforehand by the big labels, that seems to be the way to raise your profile and make some sales: hard work.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Firstly, take any advice from me with a grain of salt, I'm not a successful indie artist... I'm just an indie artist. Firstly, you've done something good. You're on slashdot. You have managed to get free marketing in a venue where people "get" the idea of sampling a product before purchasing it, and many see the value in paying for a product they already have for free. This is a good thing.
However, for a pre-order scenario to work you really need to add value to pre-ordering it. You can do this by giving it away before selling, but the only ones who will bite are the ones who only want to listen to your music on a manufactured CD delivered at some point in the future, or wish to contribute based solely on the music they already have for free. So far, from your account of the situation, this number is zero. Now, if you relase a few of the tracks and make it so the rest aren't made available until a certain number of pre-sales are placed, then you're getting somewhere. Put some documentation on the web as far as how close you are to your goals. If you make it less expensive to purchase the CD on a pre-order, that helps too. I have 2 CD singles with mixes completed, the current plan is to release one outright and not release the second until sales of the first and pre-sales from the second will cover my costs.
Another plan for my music is to see if there's any chance in hell I can get it covered on slashdot. Perhaps your $4000 wasn't wasted, it just got funneled into sales in a way contrary to your expectations.
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First find a radio station about music, not assholes in the mouring. Second preorder is not the way to go, from the time of order you should have the disks in the mail within 3 days, deleverd in two weeks If you are going to go with the preorders you should have High bitrate MP3 or OGG(or flac) files on a secure FTP sever, for your paying custermers to listen to until the disk arive. try 95.7 next time. goodluck
Digital music distribution will only take off once we ditch the CD format. In a post RIAA world (may that day come!), the only way to ensure that piracy of music will stop (and i dont care what you tell me, it IS stealing. youre getting music that you didnt pay for, period.), is to distribute the music in a DRM enabled format..and i mean DRM enabled, not DRM castrated..fair use is the key. When people move away from physical CD based distribution, and we all use solid state/HDD based players, or whatever the technology is at the time, then it will be fair. BUT, there are flaws in this that will still leave customers angry, fustrated, and ripped off. thats corporate greed...the whole music/copyright problem will never go away, unless we are either tied under a yoke of draconian measures (just look at the US...peoples rights are slipping away right from under them...corporate greed has infested politics and now law), or the music industry changes to use digital music the right way. its only a matter of time untill we move away from CD and to fully digital storage, playing, distribution etc. we can do that now with iPods and the equivalent. I just hope Apple ports iTunes to windows and linux (please!), and the iStore music store before microsoft does. Id rather see the money flow to Apple than microsoft. Then again, if Apple were in microsofts place, would they behave any different. Greed comes with power.
That your music sucks? Just because you recorded it (no mater how hard you think you worked and no matter how good you think it is) doesn't mean anyone else likes it.
I mean no offense by any of this... hopefully you'll take it constructively.
First, I listened to the ad on the website... I'd assume it was produced by the station itself and frankly, it's horrible. It generates no excitement and it isn't catchy enough to stick out of the crowd of other ads. In short, few people even heard the ad. I did radio work for many years and I think you were screwed by the station production people. That ad could have been formatted in a dozen other ways and had more impact.
Second, you're advertising on the wrong station. "The Link" looks like a hot AC station and your music just doesn't fit into that demographic. Have you tried a college station? Send them a gratis CD and see if they play it.
Find a station that plays something similar... I'd call it easy listening or maybe even jazz if I had to put it in a genre, but maybe you know better where you want to head with it. Once you've found your station, toss out some teaser ads and see what gets caught in the net.
Good luck!
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
"... I can't figure out why no one has pre-ordered the CD"
You're asking people to pre-order a CD? You're asking regular, average, CD-buying people to preorder a CD?
Average Joe does not preorder anything from an unknown entity, much less for music that they've heard maybe 5 or 10 times in their life. Pre-orders work for groups that have dedicated following, who are willing to say, "Here's my money now - you can pay me with product later." You are trying to go backwards and develop a following by having non-followers preorder a CD.
I wouldn't do it, myself, unless I felt passionate about the music, and I doubt your music causes much feeling in me at all, nevermind passion. Even if I really liked the music I would say, "Well, I'll visit infrequently over the next few months - if they have anything they can ship tomorrow then I might buy it." But since the MP3s are freely available, I might not even check back.
Going back to your original question:
what should a small independent music publishing company do to sell a new artist to the public?
I suspect, but don't know, that a publishing company will have to take a hit on a few albums before the artist takes off. Like a web site it takes years, not months, to gather enough followers to make ends meet, without breaking a profit. Some artists biff, some make it big, but you have to hold onto them, develop them, produce two or more EXCELLENT polished albums, get some regular airplay on several stations, and put some blood, sweat, and tears into your work.
How about this:
Quick, easy/cheap, profitable.
Pick two. The RIAA does quick and profitable by pouring money into it. You will never be able to compete on their field, so don't try.
-Adam
In the past I've found out about music in many different ways: MP3.com (Electrostatic), news articles (Kyoko Date), anime (Sharon Apple), soundtracks (Craig Armstrong), free samples on the InterWeb (Delerium), radio, TV, friends, etc. Recently I haven't found any musical acts worth following-up, mostly because I don't really know where to look. And I don't know where to look because I'm not trying particularly -- while I'd like some new stuff on my iPod, I'm spending money on DVDs at the moment.
Maybe you want to consider recording some live events and editing up yourself a DVD...
is this a plant by the RIAA to make us think we need them?
.. be sure your name shows up in the little alternative newspapers and such. Put up stickers and shit. Figure out how to get all the hipsters to know your name and drop it when chatting with their hipster pals. It doesn't matter if you're singing gospel music or you play folk music or you use a laptop to make techno, there's a "scene" were you need to make a buzz.
.. viral marketing anyone?
.. Yeah, just like EVERY OTHER MUSICIAN .. and lose the glossy promo pictures.
.. you get the point.. there's a lot of work involved. For $4000 some musicians could've come up with a lot of cool stuff to promote themselves!
so many things wrong with this..
1) I listen to the radio to LISTEN TO SOMETHING. If you're talking about something else I can listen to, and it costs money, I'm going to tune it right out. Would you put an ad for bottled water on a Coke can?
2) People are up to their armpits in music. Your music won't "sell itself" (*especially* to the 107.9 audience). I haven't listened to your music but I'd imagine it sounds a lot like a whole bunch of other music I've heard. You gotta have a "story" and a "personality". You gotta PLAY LOTS OF GIGS.. at least for a few years. Create a buzz in the underground version of whatever music scene you're into
Just remember this: no matter how much you love your music and how much you put into it, the audio waveform itself is just a commodity.
Unfortunately you've already left a bad taste in my mouth (I live in Charlotte) so I probably will associate "Matthew O'Reilly" with "guy on slashdot", rather than "guy with cool tunes" from now on. Oops!
3) PRE-ORDER???? I'm sorry, pre-ordering a CD is like pre-ordering a head of lettuce from the supermarket. Forget about it. Have the damn thing ready to sell. AT YOUR GIGS!
4) Don't put your CD on your website for download. That costs you money with no return. Just put 1-2 songs or snippets up there. Let your fans swap it at their own expense
5) Lose the crap promo page with the cliches: "It sort of defies words and seems to evoke something different for every person."
Put some stuff on your site that makes people want to read it. Like some funny stuff or essays about what inspires you.
6) You have any musician friends? What do they do? Do they play live? Are any more successful than you? Can you get in some of their gigs (for free), just so you can show your name and face around town?
Blah blah
Good luck man. I tried this once in the pre-MP3 era and failed miserably cuz my band didn't have the time and energy to play live often.
Ads aren't the only way to make money. You need to play gigs, even if playing gigs means not eating like a rock star, or driving the best car. You can't get exposure unless you play. Bands are seldom made overnight, and many bands (smashmouth comes to mind) play for years *10-20 is not unheard of* before making it big. Be patient, the RIAA isn't the cause of *ALL* the worlds problems.... yet.
They had professionally made CD's minted with a nice silk screen on them. In quantities of 400+ they get them done for about a buck a CD. Then they sell them for a dollar at their gigs. They also give some of them away through audience participation like who can answer trivia about the band. Many half drunk people will shell out a buck for a CD especially when they just paid $2.50 for a beer.
Now you say, well how do they make money on that deal? They don't expect to make money from CD sales. But by getting their music out there and getting the audience familiar with their songs they have been picking up a following which makes them more desirable to the club owners. I'm sure you know that original bands typically don't get paid much but they are now getting more than most local cover bands.
As an indie I'm sure you are aware that even bands signed to huge labels usually lose money on CD sales and only come out ahead by touring. Well this is the same system but on a much smaller sale. And having lots of people familiar with your group also helps win those battle of the bands competitions which gives you free publicity.
So basically I think your assumption that you want to make money by selling CD's is flawed. The established system doesn't work that way and the new model won't either. Sell the band not the CD. Make your money on door receipts and if the band is good then eventually you can make a little on CDs and Tshirts later.
Live Shows. Playing live is the best way to promote yourself if you're not being pushed by one of the RIAA (or to a lesser extent a successful indy) labels. It always has been, and chances are it always will be. If you're good then you'll grow a fanbase who are the best at spreading the word. MP3 (and a website) are nice to have once you've got something established -- they allow your fanbase to keep tabs on what you're up to -- but a career can not be built on MP3s, webpages or
radio promotions alone.
Go out and play... a lot.
Except that Ani DiFranco sucks.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Since you're blogging away on Slashdot, I'm guessing that you have a 'day job', and hence, are not one who could wander the world as a travelling minstrel.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Exactly, Cap. Hard frikkin work. As a gigging musician for more than 5 years, I have spent some months playing 6 - 8 shows all over the northeast. Sometimes it was New York on a Friday, Boston on Saturday and New Hampshire on Sunday for a total net of: NOTHING! You have to bust your ass as a touring act to build up a dedicated following. And usually, the grueling schedule and anti-climax of playing to near empty rooms your first time in a new market will weed out the artists not cut out for it. In any event, it's a new game these days. But one thing holds true: if you're selling something, make it the best damn thing on the market, otherwise no one will care about you at all. That goes for your music, your merchandise and your performance. There ARE still ways to make money as a musician ... just use your f'n head. And don't trust Lawyers. ;)
*AppleTRON*
Plenty of musicians have dayjobs and love playing music.
In addition to the other comments people here have made, people seem to be skirting one big issue.
I'm sorry to have to say this, because he's probably a very nice guy but your singer is flat. Totally, completely, almost painfully flat. This wouldn't be as bad but his voice is also too loud on most (though not all) of the MP3's. Re-balancing the songs would be a good start, but quite frankly as I listen to "Reluctance" in the background (one of the few well-equalized songs in the bunch) it does not seem to break any new musical ground. Piano-heavy light pop jazz enjoyed much success in years past, and the progressions and melodies in the MP3's feel almost representative of what came in the late 80's / early 90's. Add into that a generalized lack of bridges and other techniques to spice up the vanilla dish and the music you have made available, quite frankly, doesn't taste very good to this listener. I'm sure an anonymous coward will use more colorful terms.
In short, MP3's are a good way to give people a sample of your music. But if that doesn't leave a positive impression, your sales will not go up.
This is one artist. If you are serious about becoming a real distribution company, you need a network of artists, and a network of friends in high places. This artist needs some work, but that should be up to the artist to work on. He's probably a great live act, but recorded he needs a lot of work (is he singing in the right octave?). Instead of trying to squeeze water from this stone, promote other acts of yours, or go out looking for talent. There are lots of great indie artists out there, but that doesn't mean most indie artists are great. You have to do a lot of digging to find the good ones. Get digging.
The ______ Agenda
My reccomendation would be to post it to a highly-trafficed internet site and use sympathetic keywords like 'End of RIAA' and 'independant publisher'. Try to make it look like a real story rather then just an ad, and watch the money come rolling in!
Cynically, this probably IS a paid placement, folks. Welcome to the New Slashdot.
--Dan
First off, sorry for the /.'ing on emprecords.com - 500+ megs of traffic in a matter of hours takes its toll. :-) I will soon have sample tracks available on amazon.com; sorry for the wait.
/. - it is one of the best ways to get real feedback. And I see some good possibilities here as well.
Now, to answer the questions:
One radio commercial to 10,000 people is hardly likely to. I don't see how that's relevant though. The question is whether or not P2P hurts sales. It's not whether or not paid advertising helps sales.
Well, it was more like 44 radio commercials... Twelve of which were during peak afternoon driving times (@$250/apiece) on the #1-rated show during in this marker during that time period. Average listening audience is projected between 9,800 and 13,500 or so for those times.
She's an apologist.
As far as Janis Ian goes, perhaps she is an apologist, perhaps not. But I was approaching this from my own viewpoint - that I have downloaded many mp3's in my time, and never in my life did I buy more than when I was able to sample new music while Napster was alive. I spent more in a single month during that time period than I have in total since Napster shut down.
Copyright infringement is another issue entirely. I don't think anybody can go after people who trade my music for free - and I don't want them to. Perhaps it is naïve of me to try to increase my brand recognition and increase my income by selling CDs at the same time, but I'm not 100% convinced either way right now.
The question is whether or not P2P reduces sales, not whether or not it eliminates them. To use the bottled water analogy, would bottled water companies make more or less money if we couldn't get water from our faucets? It seems to me that the only answer that makes sense is that they would make more money.
Let's put this mp3 business in perspective. 1) Trading mp3s is a good way to increase brand recognition; if the songs are good, people will turn other people on to them. Pretty much any marketing book published in the past 50 years will tell you that brand recognition is an important part of sales. 2) No form of music listening is going to have a 1:1 relationship with sales. Radio ads, mp3's, live shows, MTV, etc. will all increase public awareness, and therefore, according to marketing theory, sales. However, no music anywhere is good enough that every person will want to buy it the first time they hear it. 3) I subscribe to the Richard P. Feynman school of disclosure: the more information people have, the better their decisions will be. The people who buy my CD after hearing the mp3's will be doing so because they want to support the artist and the music.
So, as you say, the real question, the piece I haven't been able to figure out yet, is how much (if any) the free mp3s are hurting my business. The only way I can say for sure that it is is by knowing that people who would have bought the CD "sight unseen" did not because a) they listened to it an didn't like it enough to purchase it, b) don't put it as a priority in their budget, or c) didn't like it. All three are very real possibilities. And that's why I came to you guys here at
On an up note, even though I haven't seen a flood in the way of sales yet (though there have been some orders since I wrote this ask slashdot), the brand recognition I've received has been very good. I am currently scouting management firms in the area, and an agent at a very large management firm with an office here in Charlotte heard my ads on the radio and was very interested in meeting me. And it has been very good for local retail sales, where business (like Borders) have increased their initial orders from me based on my advertising. Mp3's or not, I think this is going somewhere, even if it's not the overnight sucess I would have liked.
I used Fat Chuck's Music (which was featured here on /. a few weeks ago) for the ordering pages
/. users who run a successful business
without using any microsoft products. I was visiting CDBaby long before I knew about that)
I'm not sure that was the best choice. You may want to consider using a much better established site (e.g. one with over 36,000 artists) and a proven track record for sales; i.e. one that has already given $3 million dollars of sales profit to indie bands. They also make it very easy to find indie artists who sound like your favorite bands. That saves having to wade through piles and piles of stuff that's questionable quality.
FWIW, I went to the Fat Chuck's site after it was linked here, and there was nothing there to listen to. I haven't been back there since. In contrast, I've been to CD Baby several times since then and have found several great bands. (And no, I'm not just plugging CDBaby because they are
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
I know one one to boost album sales:
sing in tune. I listened to the 1st track. Dreadful pitch and tone. And what's with the fake English accent? This is just a loser that recorded at home and thinks he has talent. Go back to the corporate life you sing about.
1. Write good music ...
2. Play it well live
3. Build up a fan base
4. Sell stuff (CDs, t-shirts, tickets...)
5.
6. Profit!
Try looking at these guys. They're doing alright. Not quite to the Metallica, Creed, Brittney Speares level of riches yet, but they definitely hold their own for a small town with more local acts than it knows what to do with.
-Ab
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
The album is called Snapshots, by someone named Matthew O'Reilly, someone I haven't heard of before now. The MP3s can be found at this link.
First off, a hint for the original submitter: You don't need full-bitrate MP3s for a preview. 56Kib/s would have done, and would have been a lot faster to download. Further, it would also encourage people to buy the album if they liked it, just to get something they could get a higher bitrate from.
Tracks:
Now, for the record, the number of albums I have that feature banjo music number approximately zero. I'm not completely sure---there are some suspicious sounds in some of Mannheim Steamroller's stuff that I actually think is a harpsichord, but it's hard to be sure. Thing is, banjo music doesn't do all that much for me.
That said, it's hard not to smile when a banjo starts playing---but it's not necessarily a smile born of fondness.
Fortunately, a piano starts in soon, along with what presumably is the artist's voice rendering a sort of Billy Joel Piano Manesque musician's ballad. Unfortunately (even with the arrival of percussion later on), the artist's voice isn't enough to save this piece. Specifically, his vocal talents are unclear. There are the minor flaws that you expect from a musician early in his or her career, but the bottom line is that this guy needs some training.
I hate to sound like Simon Cowell here, but let's be honest here. The voice is nasal; this comes through even on the long notes when he should be opening up. Any tone that he has is lost in the back of his throat and nose, and never manages to actually get out of the front of his face. This is true throughout the song, occasionally punctuated by loss of pitch and timbre control.
The voice makes the song difficult to listen completely through, and also makes the lyrics difficult to understand in places. But the lyrics I can understand aren't especially strong, and while the tune isn't bad, it's not very catchy. Well, no, that's not entirely true: it's catchy for a few measures, and then it changes its mind. For example, the bit that ends with "Music's horn and I know that I can't stay" [I know that's not right, but that's what it sounds like he's saying] is quite nice, but then it decides to be briefly something else with an awkward meter and mangled melody, and never quite manages to get catchy again.
Then there's the pointless meandering interlude in the middle of the song. Some ideas are merely bad, but others need to be taken out back and beaten soundly for a while. This is one of the latter. This yabble takes up a good 30% of the track before it gets briefly back to the catchy part, and then showcases some of the guy's long notes and bad falsetto.
This is not a great track. It's amateurish. It's the sort of music I used to hear from inflated egos in a small-town high school.
This is not to say that there's not potential here. With some work, he'd be a passable tenor, and might actually sell a few CDs, but this particular CD already has a serious black mark on it. Even if I bought this CD, I'd reburn it without this track. This should not be the first track you have people listen to.
Beyond that, this just isn't a good piece. The instrumentation is harsh, the percussion actually detracts, and the piece has some si
Personally I make all my bands music available on the web. We get cd orders by mail and sell merch at all of our shows. I think the mp3 is a good promotional tool. How else is someone in California going to find out and listen to a local band out of the midwest?!?! http://www.faultland.com