Rock and Roll McDonald's

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Revisiting old friends (and blogs)

One thing I find interesting is revisiting old songs and playing them either in a different way, or with a different instrument, or both. It's a test of the strength of a song if you can bend and stretch and pull and it holds up, even in a completely different form.

Especially when you go from a full-band configuration to a solo voice + single instrument configuration, the challenge becomes trying to find the right bits of the music in the song to imply, without it sounding like someone came in and somehow muted the instrumental track. It certainly puts more challenge into plowing through material that is years old -- I think it's a really great exercise and often I'll do it as a kind of warm-up/drill; take a guitar-driven song and play it on the piano, or vice versa, and see if you can make it work. The difficulty is avoiding the same tricks you inevitably get in the habit of defaulting to.

This Saturday Sean and I will be doing just that as we play a bunch of HD songs as just piano and solo voice, at the Largo small room in Los Angeles. We did a few shows like this last year on the East Coast (as well as one opening for They Might Be Giants last fall) and while it's a lot more nerve-wracking since I don't have the rest of the band to fall back on, the challenge makes it much more interesting. 

In other news, I'm going through the filtering/review process of assorted bits/pieces/ideas for the next batch of music. I hesitate to say "album" since it's not clear if there really are going to be albums anymore by the time we finish. But yes, new material.

(Oh yeah, it's been what, two and a half years since I last posted something? Sorry for the long, uh, hiatus. I'll try to post more regularly from now on.)

A couple decades too late for Pete Townshend

I was at Costco a few days ago and noticed you can now buy a real honest-to-God grand piano there now. It's true. New Kawais. You'll find them about five feet from the gourmet cheese fridge, part of the bulk meats section.

And I just noticed that Costco.com offers the Gibson ES-335 along with other Gibson guitars ('61 SG reissue anyone?). I wonder if you can only buy them in the "family size" 10-pack or "assorted varities" set?

"You've just become more of a teenager than me"

I finally put up a profile on MySpace. Yes, a little late to the party, and no, I'm not quite exactly sure why...but why not?

As my friend Harr put it, "you've just become more of a teenager than me!" (for the record, Harr is like 12 years old and a certified boy genius(tm)). Curious? You can find me here (the band's myspace page is here due to a squatter). I can't quite figure out how exactly it's different than, say, friendster, except I do like the music sharing aspect of it; and certainly being able to stream your music without having to worry about bandwidth or servers or any such thing is a huge win. But whatever, maybe I'll "get it" after a while....

Ahead of schedule

Total album downloads so far:  100,595.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've crossed the 100,000 mark.

At the end of the day, what's left?

This I read the other day with great interest. Basically it's about Cordless, a new record label that's being run by Jac Holzman, who started Elektra records back in the day. It's part of Warner Music group, as I understand.

There's a couple interesting things about Cordless. The first is that they allow the artists to keep their masters, which is pretty unusual. The second, and more curious aspect, is that there are no physical products -- it's intended to be a digital-only. So no CDs, no physical distribution network. The third is that they aren't going to be releasing full-length "albums" (basically collection of 10+ songs); instead they will be releasing three songs at a time, more frequently. Fourth, the traditional big record-label advance is nowhere to be seen -- the advance is able to recover some of the recording costs, but not much more. There is no tour support, since the idea of the label is to promote the artists solely online.

Which leads us to the question: Well then, what exactly does the label add?

Webhosting and distribution are pretty easy and cheap to get (and getting cheaper all the time). Capitalization? For most bands, any money to help with recording -- especially if you're just getting started -- is welcome. But besides that? Not very much, maybe a little marketing knowledge, but at this scale it's unlikely that they'd be spending tons of money promoting any band. Being with an established name is definitely a big advantage nowadays, since with so may acts clamoring for attention, any differentiator will help. And certainly just having a third party that helps move things along and does some of the work (as I can attest) can ensure things get done on the days when you'd rather just slack off.

However, all that aside, there is one substantive thing that a label can (and a long time ago, far away, used to) provide -- and that is guidance and coaching. Perspective, wisdom, and insight into an artist's latent talents, and the ability to help draw these out -- this is an extremely rare and valuable skill which only a few people can do. A&R guys were supposed to do this, but all I've ever seen in A&R roles are a bunch of glorified scouts who only know how to say "I don't hear the songs" and play the construct-a-band-from-other-bands game.

Enter the naysayers

Jupiter Research analyst David Card leads the predictable dismissals of our album release plan:

Who Needs Record Labels?

Just about everybody. If they want to make a living, that is. Let alone be a rock star. Pretty good story in the Journal that shows it ain't easy for a band to make it doing the online thing: 92,000 free downloads converted to 600 oniline payers, and a few thousand CD and merchandise sales. And the band, Harvey Danger, doesn't really want to tour. Good luck.

It's almost as if Mr. Card doesn't know what the realities are in the industry from a band/artist standpoint, or even looked into what the typical conversion rates are for free-distribution models (it's around 1%). And again, the short-term thinking -- what is it with these guys?

People will often fixate on the low conversion percentages, but what matters in the end is not the percentage, but the absolute number, since our marginal costs of distribution are so low.

Ultimately, in our case, the final evaluation comes down to this: are we better off doing this than attempting a traditional let's-find-a-label route? A near-sold-through first pressing and recouping almost half our expenses with scant distribution, little promotion, and no touring, after four years of inactivity (and within seven weeks, no less), would incline me to say yes. But the answer will be more definitive in six months or so, after we give people time to digest and listen to the album.

current download count: 96,170

Get your nerd on

I'll be attending the Seattle Mindcamp tomorrow. If you're going and see me there, say hi.

It's been a busy month

Sorry about the lack of updates. Things have been busy, and hopefully I'll be better about updating this on a regular basis from now on. In that vein, Erik and I have been working on the details of what I suppose I'll refer to as the "tracking blog" for how things are going with the band on the free album front, since, while I'd like to think that everyone who reads this is interested in my personal welfare, I realize most of you are interested in how our whole new-album-as-a-free-download release plan is going.

Speaking of which, I suppose, the lack of updates, explanations, or any sort of recent news results in articles like this one, from Coolfer :

...the moral of the story is this: Giving away music — especially an entire album — gets a little buzz, gets the attention of Boing Boing and may get a few blog links here and there, but it’s still not the cornerstone of a good business plan. It helps people cherry pick those two or three good tracks, though, and it elicits a lot of “Free stuff! Free stuff!” cheers all across the Internet.

Well, hold on now. It's a little curious that people are already doing post-mortems on our little experiment a little more than a month after the album's release. But perhaps it's only a reflection of the increasingly short-term thinking that's become the norm.

One of the key underlying ideas in our strategy is that our timeframe for success is much longer than typical. Because we don't need to maintain the overhead that a label does, because it costs us nothing (save a monthly server bill) to maintain our "distribution network" (aka the Internet), it doesn't hurt us if it takes 9, 12, 18 months to make back our costs.

Second, in order to fail you need to define success. Most labels define success in terms of albums sold, or more generally, profits made. For most artists, however, profit (money) constitutes only a small part of success. Reaching a large, appreciative audience is equally -- if not more -- important. Talk to any band that's gotten a fat bidding war deal, but then had their finished album canned after months of label wrangling, and see how successful they feel. Sure, there's money in the bank, but it's a  miserable experience.

We've spent almost no money on promotion (in fact, we were so late getting CDs back from manufacturing that album reviews are only now coming out), and yet in a little over a month the entire album has been downloaded over 92,000 times (that we've been able to track). Will all of those people become fans? No. Will a large number of them listen and delete? Absolutely. But some percentage will (and have) gone from "never heard of you" to "real fan." And any artist knows that it's the real fans that are your lifeblood, that will sustain you over the long haul -- two, three albums from now.

The goal of this model is not to make outsized returns on investment. It's meant to harness the advantages of digital distribution to an artist's advantage, to try and increase independence, reach, and yes, even profitability (I'll get to this in a future post). It's still entirely possible the plan will fail miserably. But it's far too soon to tell.

Crazy times

The last several days have been pretty amazing.

Last Tuesday we released the album for direct download on our website. On Wednesday our online distribution plan got picked up by isohunt.com and fazed.com, and we saw traffic jump noticeably. On Thursday night Cory Doctorow posted it to BoingBoing, and traffic jumped even higher. By this time we were noticing referrals from all over the world and referrers from many non-English sites.

Sunday night around midnight it made Slashdot, and Monday afternoon it made Fark -- the combined effect sent traffic through the roof. By Monday night we had recorded 32,152 downloads of the album within 24 hours, bringing our total, since Sept. 20 (when it was first released to Bittorrent) to 51,128 copies downloaded. (As of 45 minutes ago, there have been 62,269 downloads of the album, with more copies being constantly downloaded every minute -- 53 people are downloading it now as I write this.)

Consider that, during our best week in 1998 when "Flagpole Sitta" was absolutely saturating radio and MTV, that our weekly sales peaked somewhere around 27,000 copies per week. Granted, sales and downloads are far, far different things. But consider what it would take to promote and distribute 32,000 copies of a CD all over the world, in 24 hours.

Now note that not only was our cost of distribution (traditionally the most expensive and time-consuming component of getting your music to an audience) minimal, but the access cost to this globally scalable distribution network was almost zero. That's what the Internet gives us. It's an incredibly powerful resource, and to not explore alternative ways of doing things using its strengths is foolish.

With that in mind, I think I'm going to start a separate weblog (along with Erik, who has been very capably handling the nuts-and-bolts of our backend -- which, by the way, held up perfectly fine despite getting Slashdot'd and Fark'd) specifically document how our experiment is going, as it's going. One thing that's been surprising (and gratifying) is the number of people who are rooting for us to succeed with this, and the number of people that are keenly interested in our results. Whether it succeeds or fails I can't predict, but what we can do is report our progress for the world to see so that others can draw from the lessons we learn.

More details on this will be forthcoming, I'll probably have it hosted on typepad and up by the end of the weekend.

-j.

P.S. If you know what I'm talking about, check out what the bittorrent swarm looked like on Monday. Crazy!