Today has been awesome! What you see on the left is a thumbnail of the waveform representing the first two tracks off the new album project. Clicking on it will show you the whole thing. Note the spikes, the beautiful turgid transients. Those are the very transients usually lacking from commercial music these days. Reclaim your volume control! When listening to these tracks I enjoy a distinct sense of Oomph. I will go so far as to describe the music as punchy.
Pugilistic Audio. A left hook of sound injected into your cochlea.
Not only have these tracks been a true pleasure to write (using the new “Composers On Pork” method ala Greg Bacon) the resulting pieces have been chock full of dynamics changes, wide chasm-like dynamic changes. This is not for listening on the subway using ipod headphones. You won’t hear half of it over the ambient noise. No no. This album is going to want you to have headphones, or at least a relatively quiet room. The loud parts are very loud and the quiet parts are very quiet. Of course that sort of kills the whole “listen to it in your car” if you drive a rattle-wagon like we do…
Assertion: I’m more happy with my music now than ever before. Why? Because I’m no longer concerned with selling it (the music.)
What came before
Early in my music-making career I wanted to be “a star” or at least wildly successful, grinding lesser artists beneath my jackbooted heel, recreating scenes from “Caligula” backstage, and buying my parents that nice house on the lake. Such a great dream!
Reality time: I’m not that motivated, nor do I wear jackboots. I do however make music and to date I’ve been putting a piece or two online from time to time, then taking them down, then toying with the idea of distribution of an *actual* compact disk but never quite getting there. What stopped me?
Lawyers.
I’ve seen “deals” that new artists get. There’s a new book published every week on “making it” in the music business. Every document is typeset in some font called “Flyspeck 3.” Nothing sucks the drive out of me like trying to understand old-school licensing and distribution. There I was, plinking away not really doing much. My output was low. Months would go by without me looking at my music. The mechanics of doing “the business” killed my motivation to create.
What we have now
Hel-lo interwebz! I guess I should thank all those music pirates. The traditional music industry monetization models are in ruins. Somewhere along the line I started to realize that it’s statistically unlikely I’m going to become a star the old way. So what shall I do about it? I would love to make a living from my music. Do I think I ever will? Probably not. Do I have a low-risk way to find out?
Yes and so do you.
Here’s the recipe:
I make music. My way. My (non) style. No need to “target the demographic.”
Give it away.
C…
Whoah whoah whoah. Come again?
Really. Give it away. In this brave new world perfect copies of digital goods are trivial to make and distribute. The value in my music is no longer based on the scarcity of a plastic bit-encoded disk. The music industry has fought to keep the value there for 10+ years and lost. It’s over. Give it up. Litigation doesn’t work. Distribution monopoly doesn’t work. Campaigns to shame consumers for copying DOESN’T WORK.
So (says the artist) how do I make a living? Well (says I) is that why you make music? To make a living?
Well yes and no, (says the artist) I make music because I have to. It’s inside me. I also want to make a living doing something I love: music.
Ok (says I) then unless you want to have a day job while letting the music out, you’d better consider how to get your fans to support you. How do I do that? Why would they do that?
Back to the recipe:
Make music.
Give it away.
Create a digital presence.
Connect with fans.
Learn what your fans really value.
Deliver that thing as a sideline to giving away the music.
It’s being done and you don’t have to be a rockstar with a huge fanbase to do it. If you have zero fans right now, you could still do this, it’ll just take you more time. Given the number of humans on the planet, there is a %99.999 chance that you have some fans out there. You just have to find them. The internet is your tool.
Let me just say this, now that I’ve “digitally distributed” my music, I spend about 20 minutes each night answering an email or two or seeking out a niche online community of people who might enjoy my music. I introduce myself, and just try to make friends. I’m not selling these people anything. I already gave it away. Now at this point I’m just trying to connect with people and make great music…
…and that is a lot more fun.
I started thinking about all this after seeing a video that I’ll embed here for you. It’s ~30 minutes long and you should consider getting a drink, putting your phone on vibrate and watching the whole thing. I’m off to work on some new music. Enjoy!
I used to be an “audio-phile” in that I had friends with too much money and really nice stereos. I can certainly appreciate a well recorded piece of music these days, though I’m not quite such the zealot I once was. That said, I purchased an album a year or so ago and was annoyed because there was a lot of very obvious clipping (static/noise/crackling) during most if not all of the tracks. The album had been poorly mastered. It sounded awful.
Mastering is the process where the final mix of a song or record is taken and “massaged” into something that producers/artists think will sound great when played on almost any hardware (car stereo, radio, PC speakers, super-duper stereo loudspeakers…whatever.) Mastering engineers can be paid major-ching for working the mastering mojo. The process has been around for years and years and it does/can make great recordings sound incredible and mediocre ones sound good.
The problem is that our brains and ears often tell us that louder is better. If you hear two songs on the radio that have relatively equal “musical quality” (say two pop songs) but one has been made a few decibels louder on average by the mastering process, your ears will tell you that the louder one sounds better. This is where the problem started. Record producers and artists starting asking that their music be mastered “hotter” and louder. Well there’s a terrible price to be paid when you over compress a piece of music.
Watch this excellent video on the price your music pays from being “squashed” by the mastering process.
I myself have been guilty of over-compressing my music in an attempt to make it compete with other music, equally mangled. Well no more! From here on out the phrase of the day will be “high dynamic range” because my music revolves around telling a story and who wants to listen to a story when it’s just being shouted at them?
Check out http://turnmeup.org for more information or to get involved, and remember when you listen to my music, turn it up!
Sometimes making music is frustrating.