Music progress update

I have started a Google spreadsheet with potential promotional strategies divided in several categories, such as Youtube channels, SoundCloud promoters, online radios and blogs for which I could submit my music for consideration.
At the moment I have spent most of my time searching for Youtube channels which might want to post my music. This article that I came across recently explains very well why Youtube promoters are such a great tool for promoting new music and how the process works.

   Sample page of my spreadsheet

The whole document (in progress) can be accessed at:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13rs_x0dh2BA4cj56M7wp2HH0_djURErhfi2YicqXLPU/edit#gid=1724424929

Other news related to my progress with music are that I recorded a new performance video for 'Cosmic Latte':

The piano was recorded with a pair of Neumann KM184s placed under the hood of the piano and spaced out, to pick up the two main “clusters” of strings (the thinner strings for the high notes, located at the widest part of the piano, and the thick, low strings which reach to the end of the tail). These microphones provide a detailed, close, brilliant sound when placed here. I also used a pair of Schoeps CMC5Us with omnidirectional capsules, pointed at the tail end of the piano facing in. This combination really brings out the low end, and also provides a more ambient perspective. On its own, it’s actually quite muddy, but when mixed in a little can add body to the sound. Lastly, a pair of AKG C414s set to cardioid were used as room mics. These were placed in a near-coincident configuration (ORTF) to provide an accurate image of the piano. They were placed around three meters from the piano, and when mixed in gave control over the front-back perspective by introducing the natural reverb of studio 1.

I am aiming to finish mixing the recording and editing the video early January; the finished video will be the monthly video for January, included in the monthly newsletter that I send out to my fans.

Speaking of the newsletter, last weekend, I have also performed a gig at the Omnibus in London, after which I passed around a notebook where people could sign up, in exchange for a free download of my first EP, 'Monsters'; I managed to get 21 new email addresses for my mailing list.

Overall, I feel like I had a productive week and I feel like I am on right track with my musical endeavours.

Credibility measured in ‘likes’, ‘plays’ and ‘views’

If musicians want to attract the interest of intermediaries (managers, A&R's, festivals, radio, etc) they need to create a ‘buzz’ around them, which in turn, presents them as subjects of value. Nowadays, with the rise of social media, the most common way of measuring 'value' is the amount of online followers, Facebook ‘likes’, Youtube views, Soundcloud plays, etc. Online following shows to potential gatekeepers (such as record labels) the commercial viability of the act, but also appeals to audiences as a mark of credibility; in an age where hundreds of digital EPs are released every week, it is hard to filter the good acts. The number of Youtube views, for example, acts as a previous validation and will attract new viewers, who will likely choose to click on the video with a million views, rather than the one with just a thousand. Of course, quality work is not necessarily popular, and popular doesn’t necessarily mean quality, but this has always happened, if we look at the opposition between mainstream and niche music. 

Online popularity works both ways: one can have lots of views because they’re popular, and one can become popular because they have lots of views. A simple Google search reveals a big number of companies selling likes, subscribers, plays and even comments, against a small fee.  ytview.com offers 1000 views for only $2, and 100 comments for $15. The website boasts ‘100% Satisfaction Guaranteed’, next to a caricatured version of PSY dancing ‘Gagnam Style’ (PSY’s video was the first ever to reach a billion views on YouTube). buildmyviews.org offers packages of as many as 100,000 views for $129, while encouraging its customers to ‘Gain YouTube views, gain respect!’ 

YouTube regularly checks if views are genuine, as buying views is against its terms and condition, so there is always the risk of video deletion. As Youtube has been owned by Google since 2006, they offer their own way of promotion, through Google Adwords for video. 

The issue of Soundcloud fake plays is even more acute, since Soundcloud doesn’t seem to take any action against fake plays buyers. These can be easily spotted, through the discrepancy between the high number of plays and the lack of comments, or between plays and lack of Twitter and Facebook following. An interesting article on 5 Magazine, a website featuring news and reviews from the world of house music, exposes the case of a Soundcloud artist who inflated the plays of a track by 20.000 views and as a result got featured on multiple blogs and websites, such as Beatport or Traxsource, generating real traffic and real followers (Matthew, 2013).

By following conversations on Black Hat Forum (a forum dedicated to less orthodox SEO techniques) and seeing how these fake likes/play sellers communicate, how strategies and bots (software that can perform automatically simple human tasks, such as liking or following pages) are developed and tested, how Facebook fan pages are bought and sold, it became clear to me how buying views and followers is a real industry. This raises question marks towards the validity of this symbolic capital: in a world where careers are propelled on the basis of already existing popularity, if filters are flawed, who remains a gatekeeper of taste? It appears that even e-zines, or music blogs tend to feature music that already has gained some online following. On the other hand, these practices remind of a modern type of payola. With google Adwords for video, buying exposure is legal and real, but, accordingly, it’s more costly. To gain the hundreds of millions of views on a music video of superstars like Beyoncé, Rihanna or Taylor Swift, one would need to invest a huge amount. It would seem that, even in the online environment, record labels still have the monopoly on creating and maintaining superstars. Otherwise, how is it possible that new singles from popular artists reach millions of views in few days, when people are not even aware that a new promotional video has been released? Labels pay for promotion to get the ball rolling; grassroots marketing spreads the word, but only after the initial push, which is achieved with lots of money invested in Youtube promotion.

The research I've done on this subject made it apparent that in order to gain more fans or have a better chance of a positive answer when submitting for airplay/festivals/etc, I need more Youtube views! but for more Youtube views I need more fans and more exposure - it's a vicious circle. I have decided  on two strategies to deal with the issue: 1) to try out Google Adwords for video; if it works well, I am considering saving a considerable amount of money (a minimum of £1000) and put it all in the promotion of one video 2) I will do some research into submitting tracks for promotion on dedicated Youtube channels.

References:

Matthew, T. (2013). How to Become a SoundCloud Superstar, One Fake Fan at a Time. Available at: http://5chicago.com/features/how-to-become-a-fake-soundcloud-superstar/ (Accessed 26.11.2015)

http://www.blackhatworld.com

The tension between music and business for independent musicians: a survey

In an attempt to find out how musicians in the UK perceive the tension between the music and the business side, after my previous post I have created a survey with several question I thought would be interesting for both myself and the people filling the survey, mostly musicians.

I have posted the survey on several Facebook groups, such as 'UK Bands, Promoters, Gigs', and, to my surprise, I received plenty of answers in less than 24 hours!

My survey has been filled by 92 musicians! Some of them showed interest in further discussing the issues and even sent me personal messages on Facebook.

Here are the questions and answers:

1. Please choose the option that best represents you.

2. Do you intend to pursue a career in music for a living or is music just a hobby?

3. Are you or have you ever been signed to a record label?

4. Please rank these in order of importance you believe they have in order to achieve success in a music career.

5. Please tick all the platforms that you use or have used in relation to your music:

6. Please tick all that apply to you:

7. Do you feel like these non-creative tasks take up too much time that you could've otherwise used to write/rehearse/improve your music-making? Would you prefer someone else took care of them so that you can dedicate more of your time to music?

\

In addition to this question, respondents could were given a blank space where they could leave comments. The comments ranged from: 

'If music is your primary career, the business side of it is a must. How many bands or artists do you know where their music was mediocre, but had a great image, stage presence, direction, networking skills etc? Being percieved as 'good' is all about your audience's frame of mind. Getting them to think you're good is way more important, in my opinion, than actually being good, to start up your music career.'

and

'I feel much more in control of my own music when doing it'

to

'We're not marketers. We're musicians.

or

'The totally/mainly original troubadours I know definitely have to spend too much time on business.'

8. If you were to choose between: being signed with a major label which would take care of all non-creative aspects for you (finances, legal and copyright, booking&management, distribution, promotion, recording and production, etc.), at the cost of losing creative control over your music and/or image, what would you do?

The survey results show that indeed, musicians under the independent model spend quite a large amount of time doing non-creative tasks related to their music careers; a correlation can be noticed between earning a living solely off music and bigger number of hours spent on the business and production side (see Tables 1 and 2). The multi-skilling is also common in the majority of musicians: 62% record their own music, 80% maintain relationships with their fans via social media, 87% book their own gigs. 55% feel like these non-creative tasks take up too much time, which they would rather spend perfecting their music.

The price that comes with liberation: less time left for music-making

In 2010 Amanda Hocking, a young author, started publishing teenage-aimed novels on Amazon. 20 months later, she had sold over 900,000 copies and became a ‘Kindle millionaire’. All this happened after receiving countless rejections from traditional publishers. 

It’s easy to draw a parallel between the music industry and the world of book publishing. In both fields, a similar dematerialisation of the product correlated with a shrinking physical market can be observed (music retailers and bookshops), as digital formats are gaining ground. Record labels and book publishing houses are the traditional gatekeepers which can now be bypassed using technology and the internet. Both books and music are available to sell as digital copies at very small prices compared to their physical counterparts (£0.79 a single on iTunes, $0.99 the price of Hocking’s first book). Regardless of their cheap prices, self-published e-books and digital music are profitable because of the non-existent cost of reproduction.

However, after becoming a millionaire, Amanda Hocking decided to go down the traditional route and sign a deal with a publishing house. 

'I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation' (Morrison, 2012).

It is exactly how independent musicians have to function nowadays: like micro full-time corporations. Even Amanda Palmer, who allegedly loves interacting with fans and managing her career, admits to getting tired sometimes:

'Oh no, I do get exhausted […] Sometimes I think there’s this alternate reality where I don’t care as much about all the business and promotion and I actually spend my brain power on creating things.'

In his journal article on the risk and freedom of independent musicians in Toronto, Hracs (2012) finds that the need to balance creative tasks with the business side puts a great strain on independent musicians, requiring them to spread their energy and time across a range of workspaces. As one musicians that he interviews puts it:

'It is a full-time job but only about 10 percent actually involves music. The rest of it is the marketing and the looking for work' (Hracs 2012, p. 458)

In her study about musicians and the use of social media, Baym finds that the musicians interviewed mentioned nearly 40 different social media platforms through which they interacted with audiences, and observes that such a wide array of platforms is hard to master and maintain ‘even for those who devote their lives to studying social media, let alone those who would rather write and play music’. One musician she interviews voices his discontent:

'Am I going to read some […] small print about Facebook, you know, who can view this and that and try and figure it out in my brain or would I rather practice my guitar and become a better musician? I would rather practice my guitar and become a better musician (Baym, p. 309).'

Even 16 years ago, Todd Rundgren had difficulties juggling the music and the business side:

TallGuy246 asks: Has it been difficult for you to juggle your various jobs in Patronet such as CEO, marketing, sales representative, producer and musician?

Todd_Rundgren_99: What gives you that idea? Lol. Yes it is difficult juggling those jobs. One of the things we are working on this month is getting me some help.

Todd_Rundgren_99: That should free me up to concentrate on music, hopefully. (oocities.org, 2009)

It can be argued that dealing with the business side can distract from the main aim of a musician of making music; pushing this even further, it is worth noticing the danger that the current changes in the music industry could lead to a reversal of values, where musicians with less talent, but better entrepreneurial skills become more successful, and those who spend more time crafting their art and are not tech savvy will be left behind. 

References:

Baym, Nancy K. (2012) 'Fans Or Friends?: Seeing Social Media Audiences As Musicians Do'. Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 7.1 pp.216-315. Available at: http://www.participations.org/Volume%209/Issue%202/17%20Baym.pdf (Accessed: 18.11.2015)

Hracs, B. (2012) 'A Creative Industry In Transition: The Rise Of Digitally Driven Independent Music Production’ in Growth Change 43.3 (2012): pp.442-461. Available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2257.2012.00593.x/pdf (Accessed 18.11.2015)

Hracs, B. (2011) Risk And Freedom For Independent Musicians In Toronto. University of Toronto, 2011. Available at: http://martinprosperity.org/papers/Hracs%20%282011%29%20Risk%20and%20Freedom.pdf (Accessed: 29.10.2015)

Morrison, E. (2012). Why social media isn't the magic bullet for self-epublished authors. [online] the Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/30/tweet-about-cats-just-write (Accessed 29.11. 2015).

Oocities.org, (2009). Forgotten But Not Gone - ZDNet Chat. Available at: http://www.oocities.org/hodja451/archive/pages/zdchat.html (Accessed: 29.11.2015)

Vagabondagepress.com, (2016).Interview with Amanda Palmer by Fawn Neun. Available at: http://www.vagabondagepress.com/90601/V2I1IN1.html (Accessed 18.11.2015)

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.