You’ve heard it all already. The music business is dying. Most of the big record labels are already dead. Meanwhile the smaller ones stagger along blindly, losing money and losing faith. Yet we keep on making new music – more than ever, in fact.
Studio time and recording equipment has never been more attainable, whilst music sales have never been farther from reach. It’s quite the quandary for everyone involved in the game.
I could make all sorts of sociological and economic arguments as to why the record business is failing, but I’d depress myself almost as much as ArtsHub’s readers.
Instead, I’ll try and do something positive. I’m going to assume that you’ve already made a great sounding record and give a little advice as to how you might go about releasing it into the “marketplace”. In fact, because I hate terms like “maketplace” so much, I’ll instead focus on how you can let your record out into the world in a manner that is artistically and practically satisfying. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll break it down into seven steps:
1.Determine who your audience is
You need to be realistic here. It’d be convenient (and lucrative) if your audience was made up of 14-25 year olds that live with their parents and have money to splash around on non-essential items like cds, downloads concert tickets and cover charges. Fact is, if your music is any good, this is probably not your audience.
Ok, so that last bit might be just my personal bias, but the point remains. Be honest about who your audience is, even if it’s 60+ retirees. Get over the idea that your music “appeals to everybody” – it doesn’t. No music does.
2.Find out where your audience gets their music. Then meet them there.
The ‘places’ I’m talking about here are most likely to be online. I don’t just mean iTunes (that would be too easy), I mean online music magazines, the online versions of daily papers, blogs, facebook groups and forums. You need to do detective work and find out where similar artists to you are being discovered and heralded. Once you’ve found these places, you need to send copies (probably physical copies, sadly) to the tastemakers, journalists or bloggers behind them.
3. Give it away, now
No point being uptight about this (I’ve tried, it doesn’t work). You need to let people hear (or even own) your music for free. There are many ways to do this – you can upload songs to streaming services, offer free downloads from your website or give away free cds at gigs. There’s a lot of new music out there today, so hardly anyone’s going to buy yours ‘sight unseen’. You need to get them hooked on it first – therefore you’ve got to give it away.
4. Think about distro
These days, you don’t NEED to have your CD in stores. Let’s face it, recorded music retailers are either closing down or cutting back on the amount of cds they stock. If you feel that for some reason physical retail sales will work for you (ie. you have a massive marketing budget and Triple J are tripping over themselves to play your first single) then buy a copy of the Australian Music Industry Directory and approach the independent distributors. They’ll get back to you quickly and, if they do want to work with you, they’ll cut you a reasonable deal.
A second option is to ask selected stores to take copies of your CD on consignment. This works best with independent stores, but can be a really worthwhile exercise, particularly if you are likely to get community radio or ABC airplay. You can direct your fans, friends and families to buy from these stores, thus supporting the small independents. Woohoo!
If you feel physical distribution is not a necessity then there are many ways to make your music available online. Bandcamp, Tunecore, CD Baby and Reverb Nation are but a few. Each has its pros and cons, but all of them get your music out there and available through iTunes, Spotify, Amazon etc.
5. Make videos
It’s a long time since video was first accused of killing the radio star, but now the prosecution’s case is irrefutable. These days you simply must have videos to be…errr…heard. They needn’t be expensive to produce – they can even be low quality webcam-style live clips that go ‘direct-to-youtube’ – but they need to be clever or entertaining (or preferably both). There’s no guarantee that your videos will go viral (unless they involve a cute kitten – which they shouldn’t) but you should try and make all your visual content interesting enough for fans to want to share. On a computer, audio-visual content beats audio-only content hands down, mainly because it’s better at holding the attention of today’s time and attention-poor music consumers.
6. Have great photos, great artwork and a great website.
OK so I’m squeezing three steps into one here, but mainly because the thought process behind each should be essentially the same. A picture tells a thousand words (I’ve even heard of bands being booked for shows based on their websites and photos alone, without the booker even hearing any music). Your Facebook page is not a ‘proper website’, stock images aren’t ‘artwork’ and your iPhone does not a publicity shot taketh. You need to pay professionals to create these aspects of your image, even if those professionals are friends. Remember they are also artists trying to make a living.
7. Be a great publicist. Or hire one.
Being a great publicist means buying music industry contact lists, emailing and calling radio stations (or marching into their offices if you can get an appointment with the music programmer) and harassing print and online media outlets for reviews and features. It means pressing hundreds of copies of your record to give away to tastemakers, or potential tastemakers. It means talking up your own music to complete strangers which, if you’re anything like me, is akin to cutting your own hair or removing your own wisdom teeth.
Some people are great at this and feel no shame whatsoever. I have a kind of grudging admiration for those guys. But if that’s not you, research the publicists that represent the music you like – then send them some music and show them your photos and website. If they like what you do and feel they can help, they’ll tailor a quote. It might not be cheap – but it’s dirty work.
Releasing a record independently is a huge commitment, but if you do it right it can be immensely satisfying. I’ve done it personally, and I’ve also released records through labels – there’s pros and cons to each, though the latter does let you focus more on being an artist and less on being a marketeer. But no matter which way you go, credibility and artistic integrity should always remain the priority. That way you might just release something that will stand the test of time.
