wire to the ear

Here’s a great video visit to Daptone Records studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Co-founders Neal Sugarman and Gabriel Roth show you around their music making fun house. If you ever wished you could find new soul records produced the way they used to be this is the place to check.

Everything at Daptone is analog except their one single digital piece: a CD player! Incredibly they even edit without computers using good old fashion razor blades and tape. I really like how they floated a floor for a sound proof room using tires and used clothes.

Visit Daptone Records: click here

When MP3 sales and distribution took off many artists broke the chain between themselves and greedy record labels. All a band needs is music, a little artwork and initiative to get their music onto iTunes, Amazon or Beatport. But what about your fans who still want Compact Discs? In the past you would have to manufacture a minimum of 100+ units. After spending about at least $300 (eg. Discmakers Short-Run) you would still have to deal with fulfillment to your customers (shipping, tax, returns).

Createspace which is owned by Amazon.com has launched a print on demand (POD) service for CDs. You sign up at Createspace.com, send them your music (snail mail only), artwork, set the price for the CD and viola it’s for sale at Amazon.com. Of course Amazon takes a cut: $4.95 fixed charge per CD and either 15% of the total price if you sell the CD via your own E-store or 45% if it sells from Amazon.com. So for example, if I send Createspace an album/CD and want it to sell for $21.95 and someone buys the CD at Amazon.com I will receive: $4.95 $7.11.

You will make less net profit than if you manufactured and sold your own CDs and more profit than you would by any major label record deal. A key advantage is if it turns out that only five people buy your CD you don’t loose the money you spent manufacturing 100 copies. If it turns out you have a lot more fans than you thought and you get 3000 people buying your CD you don’t have worry about getting more manufactured and then running to the post office a few hundred times!

Createspace allows you to buy copies for yourself at the wholesale price of $4.95. If you want more than 50 units the price per unit goes down.

So what are the disadvantages? As of today Createspace only gets your album on Amazon.com not any of their international sites such as Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr. Your international fans will have to buy the CD as an import. This is a big issue for me as more of my fans are based in Europe. Createspace discs are burned onto CD-Rs. The back of the CD maybe tinted Green or Blue. I am not 100% sure about this so I emailed Createspace to find out. I will update this post with whatever answer they give me. Does it matter?

You could argue that record stores won’t stock POD (print to order) CDs but let’s face some facts here: Soon there won’t be any brick and mortar record stores!

A nice aside is you can opt into MP3 sales and your album will appear in the Amazon MP3 section. Lastly, I would like to get a bit liberal on you and point out that manufacturing only what we need will help save the earth. What better reason do you need?

Update: I heard back from Createspace concerning the backside color of the CD-Rs. Here’s what they said: “Thank yo for contacting us regarding our products and services. The backs of the CDs are silver and blue.  We are working on producing a uniform product that consists of silver back only, however at this time we are producing both types.” - CreateSpace Member Services

photo credit: Silus Grok

Inside Digital Media is a series of interviews by Phil Leigh. I like his content because it’s a view of net media with a heavy business swing. This week he interviews Tim Westergren the founder of Pandora and Chris Wallace of The Super Group.

Sales of recorded music in the United States are nowabout 30% lower than when Shawn Fanning introduced Napster in 1999. Sales in the physical form (e.g. CDs) are down by nearly half. There is little doubt that the Internet has been a “game changer” for the record label business.

In this audio program we explore a couple of ways that the Internet can add revenues. One is already generating more money for the industry and promoting new artists. The second appears to be an idea whose time has come. - insidedigitalmedia.com

To listen to the interviews: click here

photo credit: eszter

Brian “Botkiller” from Albuquerque, New Mexico shares his thoughts on playing live. I agree with what he says concerning doing your own share of promotion. Even if your playing an event with 10 other hot acts and you you know it will be packed you want 50 of your own superfans front and center. Remember crowds follow the lead of the people near the stage!

I talk about working with promoters and clubs and promoting your shows. - brianbotkiller

He’s also correct to mention that the person who books you is probably not the only individual who you need to deal with. Getting to know a few people who work at the venue early on could save your if anything goes wrong at 2AM.

I noticed he kicks off the video by mentioning he just bought a house. Congrats to Brian but later in the video he mentions sometimes he only gets $10 for a gig! He must be in one hard working band! Maybe he has a day job? Something about his “vlog” videos crack me up but I respect him for going for it.

brianbotkiller.fwank.net

Yes my friends, above is a playlist I found on imeem. It was posted by Attchort and it’s titled, “USSR 1980-1990’s”. I can see why imeem is so popular now! The past nights I’ve been spending more and more time there and I found a serious amount of great music.

I set up my own artist profile so if your signed up there feel free to friend me: www.imeem.com/thehorrorist I’m still setting up my profile so it’s sparse at the moment.

So what about your own music on imeem? Well if your a known independent artist chances are you will find some of your music on imeem in violation of your copyright. Fans have most likely have uploaded entire songs of yours. Don’t get upset as this is just a good sign people like you. So what to do? Imeem suggests register at imeem then head over to Snocap (who they now own), sign up there and register all your songs. Once all your music is registered at Snocap you can choose where Snocap allows your music to be sold. When I say “sold” in reference to imeem I mean paid a share of imeem’s ad revenue each time the full song has been streamed. I read the Snocap Terms of Service and it’s non-exclusive.

As a registed artist with SNOCAP, you can control which songs you want to be streamed at full-length to everyone on imeem. imeem uses a filtering technology to check whether you have permited full streaming for these songs. If you did not register your songs in SNOCAP, your song could be claimed by another artist/label or misidentified.

In our efforts to bring artists and labels access to new and innovative ways to promote, control, and earn more from their music, SNOCAP has partnered with imeem. Artists and labels who stream their music on imeem will earn income by sharing some of imeem’s advertising revenue.

The SNOCAP technology will automatically identify tracks uploaded by our users and determine if the artist/label of the song permitted the full stream.- Imeem.com

I would like some feedback if anyone is signed up with Snocap and/or is using imeem. I know Snocap has had a bad reputation in the past. I wonder if I am missing something in the TOS. I have yet to sign up myself and am looking for a bit more info. What do you think?

I’m curious if you keep and maintain public profiles for your music on social networks other than MySpace. Last.fm? Imeem? Bebo, Fairlitzer? What about Pandora or The Hype Machine? Do you upload your full songs so services can stream them without compensation? Is it worth the promotion to you?

I bring it up because yesterday I got pretty frustrated using the new Last.fm. Once accepted as a label you get access to a part of the site called the Music Manager. You can upload and manage your tracks there. After I uploaded a new release I added in the album cover. The album art showed up in the Music Manager. However, it never show up in the general public area on Last.fm. I tried about 10 times, re-uploading the same album cover. Eventually I hit the help forums. Sure enough this is a known problem. How could image uploading be broken for more than two weeks? How could they not disable the uploader or put a note on the page so I didn’t waste forty minutes on this crap?

Another other thing I really don’t like about Last.fm is that you don’t have any comment control on your own artist pages. People can log on and rail you and it’s there forever. They could at least implement a comment voting system so nasty comments get greyed out using Ajax or something.

What finally ended my session yesterday on Last.fm was the events section. I wanted to add in a few upcoming live shows I have. I head to: last.fm/music/The+Horrorist/+events because that’s where the shows for The Horrorist are listed. I search for a button that says “Add Event”. Nothing! Nada! After twenty minutes of searching I find the only place to add a new event is if I go to last.fm/events. How frustrating.

Maintaining a your image and uploading fresh content on every site is impossible. Which sites deserve attention? I will always keep my own website on my own server but clearly the hearts, minds and ears are in lots of places. Do you simply cover the sites which have the most users? No matter how lame they are?

If you go to Alexa.com you can enter in the a few sites and see a comparison of how many users each site has over a time period (thanks Vergel for the tip). You maybe surprised that for example Imeem has so many users. MySpace still trumps them all by far though.

As more sites start to pay royalties for streaming and incorparate there own download stores the lines between iTunes, Beatport, Amazon and the social network sites will become blurred.

Is your head starting to hurt too?

Michael C. Donaldson an entertainment lawyer based in LA takes questions from Seesmic members about fair use, copyright, satire and parodies. Have you ever wondered if you play copyrighted music behind you while you chat in a video and then post that video on YouTube if your breaking the law? Or is that considered fair use? What if you take a photo which has a Creative Commons license attached to it that states you can not use the photo for commercial purpose and post it to your blog that has Google AdSense on it? Is that ok? Well all those answers and much more is in this superb Q&A session.

One thing to note… you have to use the Right Arrow in the video player comments section and scroll to the right most video. Watch from left to right this way you see the Q&A in sequence. Mr. Donaldson is the one with the answers. He’s in the screengrab to the right… look for him. Highly recommended viewing!

For even more info check out this PDF Mr. Donaldson co-wrote called “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video”: click here

For those of you getting this post in a RSS reader the video is here: http://seesmic.com/v/tyvYB2Sy44

A Documentary By Michael Greene. In October of 2006, a small mom and pop record store in Southern New Jersey named Full Circle Records announced that it was going out of business and that the liquidation sale would continue until mid December. Ironically, at approximately the same time, Tower Records, the iconic juggernaut of the music retail market, made the same announcement. Something has happened to the music retail world and it seemed to have happened overnight. …Or did it? The Final Days Of Full Circle Records is a fascinating documentary that provides valuable insight into the rise and fall of the record store industry and subculture which may change the way you think about music, music retail, and the art of collecting music forever.

via bestfreedocumentaries.blogspot.com

A service I use often is TinyURL. It takes any long web address and makes a permanent short version of it. It’s very useful for a service like Twitter where each message you type is constrained to 140 characters. It’s also a nice thing to do when your emailing someone a URL from Expedia or Amazon where sometimes URLs can extend three or more lines long.

This morning I discovered tinySONG.com. You search for a song and then it gives you a small URL for it. When your friend clicks it the song opens at Grooveshark.com and plays. Here’s an example:

This one is dedicated to George Bush:
http://tinysong.com/CWm

Of course this is a way for Grooveshark to get people using their music service but as you see there is no sign in or anything happening before your song plays so it’s an enjoyable experience.

As I type this blog post Im looking at the Grooveshark website and you know what? It’s an interesting site and music model. It seems tinySONG has worked in getting my eyes focused over there. As a user you can get credits for free music by making recommendations and has a label you can earn royalties. Have you used Grooveshark? What you think of it?

So go ahead… post some TinySong urls in the comments.

Do you remember my post about Twitter titled “Use Twitter as a promotion tool for your music.“? Here’s another reason to sign up. Amazon.com has created a user profile on the service and each day they they post a link to a few great MP3 deals.

6/18 Daily Deal #2: Daft Punk’s Musique Vol 1. Yesterday’s price $9.49, today’s price $2.99.

Another example of a music related service on Twitter is sidelinemag. There you can find mini updates to all things EBM and Goth. Don’t forget to follow me too: thingstocome

Are there any music/pro-audio companies or people you follow on Twitter?