My CDs have arrived and the EP is out!

I am very excited that today my CDs for 'Beyond The Glass Sky' have arrived! They look great. 

I created the artwork myself, using one of my pictures and combining it with layers of royalty free stock images found on the internet.

This is what they look like:

I have written a newsletter using mailchimp.com and sent it to my subscribers. This time I remembered to add all the subscribers I have on my ReverbNation list, which counted over 400 email addresses, so now my list of subscribers has grown significantly. It's interesting to see in the future if this makes a difference, because my original subscribers all came from people signing up at gigs or from Bandcamp sales, while ReverbNation is more of a social website for musicians, driven by a 'follow for follow', 'like for like' policy.

The EP is now available on Bandcamp and I can now also fulfil my pre-orders.

Since I'm on the subject of publishing, I would like to describe how I do it and talk a bit about the main platforms I use.

Bandcamp is the main platform I use to sell my music, and the only place people can buy my CDs in hard copy. In addition, I put my music in digital form on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon, but these don't accept submissions from individuals, so the submission would need to go through a service such as TuneCore or CdBaby. Even ReverbNation offers now this feature. Last year, when I released my first EP, 'Monsters', I did some research into companies offering publishing services and decided to go through DistroKid. This online distributor sends music to the main online retailers, for a yearly fee.

This answer on the DistroKid FAQ page for the question: 'How is DistroKid better than TuneCore?' seems relevant in helping you understand my choice:

'Both services upload your music to stores and give you 100% of your royalties.

DistroKid is a lot less expensive, and has a better user interface. 

TuneCore charges $49.99 per year per album. $29.99 for the first year.

DistroKid charges $19.99 per year and lets you upload unlimited songs and albums.' (Distrokid.com)


DistroKid's yearly fee was particularly useful for me, as I wanted to be able to release as many singles as I wanted without worrying about money.

Bandcamp is similar, in the sense that one can publish an unlimited number of albums or singles, but the company keeps 15% of the sales. The great feature of Bandcamp though is that it supports pay-what-you-wish, meaning that an artist can set a minimum price for their album, but the buyers can pay more if they want to.

Here is an excerpt from an article comparing Spotify to Bandcamp, which refers to the pay-what-you-wish function on Bandcamp:

'Jason Shanley, an independent artist who records as Cinchel, says he went through TuneCore, a third-party distributor, to get his music on Spotify. TuneCore, however, requires a yearly subscription, the cheapest of which starts at $9.99 per year, not including other fees for setup. Other than the lag time, he says the payout was too low. "I’m losing too much money with an account there. I think I made $2 from it this year or something.” 

Instead, Shanley opts to put most of his discography on Bandcamp. Even though he prices most of his albums at $1 or free, Shanley points to Bandcamp’s name-your-price model as an opportunity for profit from enthusiastic fans. "Maybe about 25% of buyers paid more than the minimum,” he estimates.

"I think there’s a psychology where if you don’t charge anything for it, people don’t think it’s worth anything," he says "But there’s a point where if you charge too much for it, then they don’t feel like it’s justifying that much of a cost.”

Josh Brechner, also an independent artist, notes that Bandcamp helps artists in giving their albums an optimal price. He says Bandcamp recommends charging around $4 for a five-track album. "But they’ll pay more if they like it,” says Brechner, who records under the moniker Visager. "In a way, that’s sort of like, ‘We believe in you.’

My personal experience confirmed the above, as I repeatedly had buyers pay a much higher price than the minimum. In fact, for 'Beyond The Glass Sky', from selling 2 CDs on Bandcamp (one for £100, one for £30 - with a set minimum price of £7.99) I managed to cover the production costs of the 50 CDs I printed. 

This seems to confirm some of the opinions I read in books and articles (such as Amanda Palmer's 'The Art of Asking', Kusek's 'The Future of Music', Kevin Kelly's '1000 True Fans' (http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans) and gives me hope that it is possible in the digital age, with a lot of work, not necessarily music-related, to make a living relying on a small number of dedicated fans.

EP-related work: Summer Breeze video

In the past few days I've been working on a video for one of the songs on the EP, 'Summer Breeze', as part of my promotion strategies.
I know it's a strange time (beginning of November) to be promoting a song about summer, but I'm trying to sell it as a nostalgic track, the longing for summer feeling one has when it gets cold outside.
I was meant to have a proper promotional video for another song, 'Fall in Love', combining footage of me singing with clips from a short film a friend agreed to let me use, but he changed his mind and now,  even though the video has been edited, I cannot use it.

Here is a short excerpt of what it would have looked like:


It's been a while since I have decided to publish at least a video every month. Looking at all the popular Youtube channels, it seems like a key factor in achieving and maintaining popularity is to constantly create content and put it out there. A Youtube channel such as https://www.youtube.com/user/DanielaSings (Daniela Andrade) updates with a new performance video every month, while Tiffany Alvord, another Youtube singer (https://www.youtube.com/user/TiffanyAlvord) posts 3 to 5 videos a months, which can be a mixture of music videos, vloggs (video-blog) and lyric videos.

I have several videos filmed ready to be edited, but they are all for tracks which will be on my future album. Right now I am promoting the EP, so I have to publish a video for a song on the EP.
'Lotus Flower' already has a video on Youtube, 'Cosmic Latte' has a video scheduled to be filmed at the end of the month at University of Surrey, 'Fall in Love' can't be used, with 'Let Go' I'm not quite happy. This only leaves 'Summer Breeze' as the video for this month.

Video editing took me 2 days, with a break and then another day for colour grading. I edit in Final Cut Pro X on my Macbook and use only the effects available within the software. As a future objective, it would be useful to look through the variety of plugins available for Final Cut and try out some of them, especially for the slow motion effect (Twixtor seems to be very well regarded on the internet, but I haven't tried it yet).

The video was put together from short clips of my summer holiday in Mallorca, this September. Not only I feel like it fits the song very well, but I think it's nice that I'll be able to look back and have some memories connected to it.


Before publishing the video, I had to design an eye-catching thumbnail for the video; I have noticed that videos tend to have more views since I've started using custom thumbnails for them. This feature is only visible though if your channel has the status of Youtube partner, which mine has had for a while. I am also trying out a new format for the title. Usually I do 'artist name hyphen song name'. This time I'll be using double dash and see if it makes any difference.
I have drafted a newsletter on mailchimp.com which I will be sending out tonight.

For the next video I will record myself playing piano and singing my song off the EP called 'Cosmic Latte' at University of Surrey. Since it's the university I graduated from this summer, I am used to the facilities there and I love their beautifully sounding Steinway piano in studio 1.

Musicians building a brand and finding a niche: Steam Powered Giraffe and the steampunk subculture

When the major labels developed the star system (in which the revenue was provided by a small number of artists, affecting choices regarding which artists should be released and promoted to the public) lots of musicians on the roster did not benefit from the amount  of exposure the stars did. The model certainly did not favour niche musicians (Anderton, 2013, p. 5). Nowadays, the Internet enables people with common interests from all over the world to gather in a virtual place, giving a chance to niche musicians to reach their specific audiences. Wall and Dubber (2010) observed, with application to the niche of jazz music, the surprising amount of attention accorded to this genre online, compared to the small amount of time dedicated to it in mainstream media. This comes to support the democratic nature of online activity for both musicians and music consumers.

Steam Powered Giraffe are an American band who combine music with theatricals and mime to create a performance associated with the steampunk culture. There are a number of other self-proclaimed steampunk bands, such as Abney Park, Vernian Process and The Cog is Dead. Although they label themselves ‘steampunk’, their music tends to be mutually divergent and lack the stylistic coherence of other subcultural genres such as goth or punk (Ferguson, 2001, pg. 67). They have in common the aesthetics of steampunk subculture, the fashion, preoccupation with creating personas, and the DIY ethos. 

Even though the music in itself does not have anything particularly ‘steampunk’ in it, it is the branding and association with an online community that allowed Steam Powered Giraffe to gather an audience. If an artist combines talent, imagination and brand with good social and networking skills and manages to find his or her niche, the amount of support they receive might prove surprising. This is also recognised by Kusek (2005, p.28) who argues that success in the an overcrowded music landscape can be reached ‘if and when musicians can define their niche, they differentiate themselves and reach people who are interested in their uniqueness’.

Steam Powered Giraffe Logo (www.steampoweredgiraffe.com)

Steam Powered Giraffe have an elaborate brand, maintained both in performances and online,
involving the creation of personas with a complex fictional backstory (the band members pretend to be automatons created in 1896), elaborate make-up, steampunk clothing and a fitting logo. This brand is extended to a whole fictional universe, reflected in the band’s merchandise, a comic containing fictional adventures of the robots and a card game based on the same characters. These are all created by the band members, who also run the website; the band’s sound engineer is considered part of the band and appears frequently in the band’s webcomic stories and video blogs - yet another example of musicians understanding the importance of being self-sufficient.

The band’s Facebook page shows continuous engagement with their fans - from sharing live streams of rehearsals to the ‘Fan Art Fridays’ - a weekly updated Facebook album containing fan art. They also post pictures and videos of the band offstage, such as videos of them doing their make-up; this does not ruin their personas, but adds authenticity and familiarity, creating the illusion of intimacy referred to above (p.35). The band runs a pay-what-you-wish website subscription, which offers extra material and allows the fans to become ‘Engineer-eteers’ and support the maintenance of the ‘robots’. Music is released through iTunes and TuneCore and physical CDs can be ordered on the website; the website store also contains various merchandise based on the band’s concept and artwork.

Steam Powered Giraffe is a great example of an independent band employing entrepreneurial skills to target, build and maintain an audience. In the age of internet, reaching out to people is easier than ever; the difficult the job for a musician is to find their niche audience and to create a distinguishable identity. 

References:

Anderton, C., Dubber, A, and James, M (2013) Understanding The Music Industries. London: Sage Publications.

Steam Powered Giraffe, (2012). Steam Powered Giraffe - Honeybee. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojYK6CW8gdw (Accessed 1.11.2015).

Wall, T., and Dubber, A. (2010) Experimenting With Fandom, Live Music, And The Internet: Applying Insights From Music Fan Culture To New Media Production". Journal of New Music Research 39.2 (2010): 159-169.