Cannons and Clouds video

Cannons and Clouds, a band I've been producing for the last year or so was recently featured in a documentary for Universal Audio that was filmed at Broken Radio this month. Check it...

10 reasons Why the album is not dead

I was just reading New Music Strategies (one of my favorite blogs written by the very astute Andrew Dubber) in which he asked "Is the album dead?"...

I think there are several reasons that the album is not dead. Here goes my top ten.

1. Reviewers and bloggers are critical to generating attention about an artist. It is much easier to get someone to review or talk about an album than it is to get them to talk about a collection of singles or a video you just released. It gives context.
2. For some artists, it is actually a lot more financially wise to record
   a cluster of songs in a studio to save on setup costs and time. Hiring
   and rehearsing musicians for only one song doesn't cost much less than
   hiring them to record 3 or 4 songs. And you will often catch a break on
   cost when it's a whole album involved. It may be a bigger pill to
   swallow at first, but albums have a far longer shelf life than a
   single.
   
   
3. An album also defines a certainly level of credibility and
   seriousness for an artist. If you go to the trouble of pressing 1000
   cd's it means you take your work seriously enough to go to the expense
   of recording that many songs and to then have them duplicated. That
   doesn't mean it's good, but in a very crowded marketplace full of
   infinite product, a physical one stands out a little further than a
   purely digital one (sometimes at least)
4. 4. It's much easier to get airplay on college radio and specialty formats when you have a
   CD. Not many radio people want to download a song to play it on the
   air.
   
5. It's much easier to tour around an album for a variety of reasons. It
   gives you something to sell at the merch table. Download cards don't
   sell quite as well and not too many fans really want an artist to sign
   the disposable download card.
   
6. It gives the artist an organizing principle for marketing efforts. This
   can be hugely important. It's like creating a brand for a specified
   time period. You can create a line of merchandise that relates to the
   album. A website. A storyline using flickr regarding the making of.
7. While people may hit shuffle all they want, the option exists for the
   listener to enjoy an album in the order that the artist intended. That
   shows that an album can have many purposes for the listener / fan /
   consumer too. It's more versatile than a single or an EP with only 4
   songs on it.
   
8. The album can be viewed as a work of art. It's a collection of work
   that will be defined, however loosely by some sort of theme that helps
   define what an artist is (or is not) trying to be.
9. The artwork, posters, postcards, and physical marketing materials
   generated by an album are important to fans of a band. They allow
   people to badge themselves with a particular time in the life cycle of
   an artist. That's not as likely to stick with a single or even a digital only release
10. Lastly, perhaps most importantly, there are segments of the music
    buying public that simply prefer buying albums. These are the people
    that LOVE music. They don't go buy the latest top 10 hits. They obsess
    over all kinds of new music and talk about it with friends. An album is
    still a rallying point for this type of music fan. And this type of
    music fan will recommend their new favorite ALBUM to their friends in a
    way that people who dance to the latest hit single do not. It's
    demographic that is hugely important to the launching of new artists
    and it's not filled with just old people. Even teenagers like albums.
    This demographic may not sell platinum, but they do help discover and
    launch the careers of many talented artists.
    
    
    
    Just because digital is an easy way for people to get music does not
    mean that it's the only way, nor is it the only way that serious music
    lovers will want to get their music. For these people who often shape
    the taste of what music is discovered, the album is still king.
    

Vote for Super Adventure Club on the Deli Magazine's Band of the Month poll!

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We're very excited to be nominated for Band of the Month. The Deli Magazine is one of our favorite local blogs and they were the first to write about us anywhere. (Thanks Rachel!)




So be a good citizen of the interwebs and do your duty! VOTE FOR SUPER ADVENTURE CLUB!

The Hits Keep on Coming

The ability to sell your music online and distribute it widely without the help of a label is a rallying point for many independent and do it yourself artists.

A lot of artists and online label start-ups all seem to say the same thing: "Now that distribution costs are practically zero and the cost of making a record is practically nothing, major labels will wither away and have no reason to exist, all thanks to the glorious rise of the internet." Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Nevermind that making a good record still costs money...I could go on for days about that...

But my curiosity was piqued when I read a recent Harvard Business study that confirmed something rather obvious: people still gravitate towards hits. Audiences might be able to buy all the tiny bits along the long tail, but they don't necessarily want to. And just because you CAN put your music up on a website, doesn't mean anyone will want to buy it or listen to it. Most people who buy entertainment, buy things that their friends have bought and that are relevant to popular culture.

The most powerful weapon in the marketing arsenal is perceived success. If you can sell your album to a lot of people, then you can sell more albums to a lot of people. Conversely, if no one has heard of you and a potential buyer doesn't believe that anyone else they trust likes you, they are unlikely to spend money on your music.

Why do people like hits so much?

I think it has a lot do with culture. People congregate around a small number of ideas. These may vary locally and within subcultures, but to have conversations, we all need to be talking about the same thing. Teenagers in high school don't define their cliques by how unique each person's taste is, they all love a certain band together. People like to talk about the same TV show they watched, the same movies and the same books. We may not like them all, but we all have an opinion and these items become part of popular culture.


SO, the next question is, what makes a hit?

There's more than one music business

I don't really care much for super-pop. I can identify a few artists from this genre of music to make it easier to understand what I'm talking about...
Usher, Kelis, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, Jay-Z... etc.
I looked at the top 50 songs on imeem last week and did not recognize any of them, but I recognized the names of the artists. Most of them were signing high profile branding agreements or 360 deals with mammoth corporations in the last few months

CD sales for this type of music have gone monumentally down the toilet.

Meanwhile, I have several new bands that I have discovered over the last year or so while reading the top 100 albums chart of eMusic.
This would include,
The National, Andrew Bird, Chris Letcher, Cold War Kids, Spoon, Thomas Dybdahl and a great many other artists that you may or may not be familiar with.

The point is, that I think these artists are not losing millions of dollars (they probably didn't have them to begin with) and they are most likely making more money from their music than ever before. And they are selling ALBUMS. They are selling collections of songs to customers like me because I don't really buy singles. The album is not a dead format. The CD is not a dead format. At least not for independent songwriters who write from the heart and take the time (or have the luck) to make really great sounding records.

What I Wish Someone Would Do for Artists Online

This should probably be a more thoughtful post than what I have time to write... but that's the whole point of this post anyway.

I have a band that I really love to work with. Playing music, writing, performing, recording... it's all great fun and I love being an artist and creator again.

What I don't love is dealing with promotion and maintaining a presence on at least 15 different sites.

So here's what I'm wishing for...

A service that would have a real person evaluate the type of music my band makes, that can then put the music in the appropriate social networks, and perhaps more importantly, tell me what blogs to contact. That's step one.

Step two would be a timely way to help me update all these sites, let blogs know about my latest happenings and keep them current.

I enjoy writing things and can email and so forth. But to put a blog up on the 5 or 6 blog sites the band has (plus this one, plus my own web site, etc) is time consuming. It would be great if I could just have someone email me and say "Please write a 1 paragraph description of what's going on with your band last week and the upcoming month." Please attach a new photo as well.

I would reply to the email and then it would be parsed out to imeem, iLike, facebook, myspace, garageband, secondlife and whatever else needs to be serviced.

Because it feels like my biggest obstacles are
1. prioritizing my time to know what's important to get out in the world (show updates, emails to fans?)
2. Prioritizing the places to put this information.
3. Taking the time to do all this.

If somebody could help me figure out what's effective (in terms of what I need to create) and then where it goes (in terms of where I need to publish it) then I could probably hire somebody else or automate the last bit.

Some Useful Blogs about Online Music Marketing

There are so many music blogs out there that it can be difficult to
keep up with all of it. As with finding new music, finding good blogs
is often a result of what's recommended from people you know. Here's a
thread of the top 5 blogs that I've been reading that I think are
insightful and relevant to selling music online.

1.
NewMusicStrategies.com - Philosophy of selling music online by a
Birmingham (UK) professor named Andrew Dubber. Download his ebook, it
is incredibly important. He also has a couple of sister sites that he
started: MusicThinkTank.com and NewMusicIdeas, which are both good.

2.
SethGodin.com - A general online marketing blog, but he often makes
direct comments about the music business. This is the #1 marketing blog
online.

3. KnowTheMusicBusiness.com - Sometimes an aggregate of other blogs, but well culled and good writing.

4. Coolfer.com - Music Business news about artists, labels, tech startups. Some good editorial content.

5. Digital Music News - A daily feed of what's going on in the online music business world.


Anybody have other ones that are useful?