Hi guys,
So I know I've failed with just about every monthly series that I'm doing. All you need to know is things are going well and I will be having more of a professional blog soon. Given that I will, I'm going to use this as more of a twitlonger. That cool?
So, here's the top five things I've learned about myself as a musician while reading a ton of articles, or some other stuff. I don't know how else to write these
1. I view my band stuff less as a gig and more as each project of it's own
I think the only way I'll be sad with Demo Disease is if nothing ever gets done. I do a lot of media composition lately, so I'm use to a project dying. That's A-OK with me. I view it less as an entity. The CD's will be there - The only thing that won't is live shows itself, and I think that's okay.
2. Triple AAA is something I might shy away from
I didn't know this one for certain, but apparently in a lot of triple A, you don't own the rights to the music you write. This bothers me for several reasons as an artist. I think the main thing is CD's - You know how much more game soundtracks should be physical copies? I mean hey, CD's will probably be cool again in 20 years. That way, I can hoard a bunch of them and sell them!
Though seriously, gotta love that convention selling. And royalties. Royalties are never bad.
Though,
2.5B.
I should do more research on how publishing soundtracks on Steam goes. Billy and I dug up a bunch of homework about publishing on Steam before, and I've dug up crowdfunding (which may be relevant soon), so those are already two things.
3. Freemium can work but needs to be more of a personal thing
There's a lot of interesting articles about free prices, but the one piece I took away from it is that it needs to be a personal thing to some degree - When I see stuff online, my thought is generally "How can I get that as cheap as possible?" - Why? As much as I love companies like BandCamp and want to support the work they do every now and then, I want to support the artists as much as I can directly.
Don't get me started on iTunes. Just don't. If you like music instead of the concept of having everything on one device though, please buy on not iTunes.
The stuff I was reading about open mic nights and whatnot? It felt like it works more in the way of a setting where you can make this work, but when you've at least given the listener something (not just music - something they can latch to emotionally)
...also it's harder to hoard CD's than to hoard .mp3's on hard-drives.
4. Merch actually isn't so bad if you know where to look. Same thing I found out with CD prices a few months ago.
...this may or may not have relevance on may 7th.
5. Don't be a Wal-Mart composer. Ever. Just please don't.
Yes, we can start trying to offer low prices, but eventually "No" is going to need to be an answer. I use to do stuff fore basically as free as possible (recording samples for people, taking requests, etc) but recently I've had to say no to someone else and I doing a project that we started with composition and I've also said "no without pay" to another thing. My prices are still pretty low (I don't discuss my rates publicly until a project is finished, and in cases, I will opt out of directly saying).
Even if you don't want to make this a living, if you're doing music, selling yourself short can be good. Too short? Not worth your time. Ever.
