An interesting article (rant?) called “Please Buy My Record: The Futility Of Flogging Music” points out a lot of the unpleasant realities that are all too familiar to us (and probably every other band at our level). That is, sales seem disproportionately low compared with response, press, and notoriety. Enthusiasm for our music, which appears, at least to me, sincere, does not translate to dollars. I’ve spoken with numerous other bands and I don’t think this is an unusual story at all. The article makes a lot of excellent statements about these issues, most of which I 100% agree with.
We’re examining our future plans and strategies right now, but I don’t think we’ll ever make another album in the traditional sense (as we did with our first two records). I do think we’ll keep making music and I think we may just give it all away. We’ve looked at trimming our production and recording costs down as close to zero as we can. We’re very fortunate right now that we have our bassist Matt doing a lot of our engineering and production work so that we don’t have to outsource much. I try to do as much of our other promotional, web, and communicative work as I can. We do continue to enlist the very valuable services of Green Light Go for publicity work, but I don’t think we’ll be able to afford some of the promotional luxuries we’ve had in the past including both strong short-term radio and video campaigns.
More to come on this as we figure out where we’re headed. We’ll soon have improved final mixes of our 4 Ash Wednesday Themes available for free download. We’ll also be releasing our latest single “Winged Bicycle” for free download as part of the Consequence of Sound Anniversary Online Compilation. We may even someday release our back catalog for free download. I am still a little reluctant to do this because we still have enough of a back stock of CDs that I don’t wish to discourage the continuing sales and I also don’t want anyone who has purchased our albums to feel like they were shortchanged in any way.
Anyway, read the article. It’s sort of cynical, but interesting…
http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/please-buy-my-record-the-futility-of-flogging-music.html
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The Motion Sick Blog – https://blog.mikeandsophia.com/