The wind chime is not the most likely percussive instrument in a hip-hop track — nor a likely melodic component, for that matter. It is slight, and prone to inaccuracy, and has all the swagger of a mid-nap pixie-dust sprite. But in the hands of Third Person Lurkin, a characteristically old-school member of the roster at the Bulgarian netlabel Dusted Wax, the chime serves multiple purposes. (It also, truth be told, may be a tiny bell and not a chime, but the effect is the same.) It initially appears in the track “Over Forgotten Places,” off the Cloud Mirror album, as an accent, one sound among many. Even when it initially repeats, it seems more like a flourish than a building block. But as the track proceeds, that’s exactly what it is: the key enabler of swing in the track, a swing that’s as fragile as a dust-laden cobweb in an afternoon breeze, but a swing nonetheless (MP3). In its own way, it is just as much a sonic irritant as once were the sirens that bled through Bomb Squad productions for Public Enemy, but here it’s an irritant along the lines of near-subaural “mosquito” tones that are used to shoo teens from convenience stores.

Get the full album for free download at dustedwax.org; there’s some beautiful echoed horn in the track “Sun Domes.” More from Third Person Lurkin, who’s based in England, at thirdpersonlurkin.bandcamp.com.

The Avant Music Festival, a 5-night event being held at The Wild Project in NYC between Friday, Feb 10th and Saturday the 18th, promises to be a compelling series of shows of music in the vein of avant-garde. Along with music by living composers Randy Gibson (whom you are about to hear from), Eve Beglarian (Songs From The River and Elsewhere) and Jenny Olivia Johnson (After School Vespers), there is a performance of Schoenberg‘s ground-breaking work Pierrot Lunaire and a 2-part show on Saturday the 11th celebrating the 100th Birthday of John Cage at 4 PM and 8 PM respectively (This concert, by the way, features Vicky Chow performing the great Sonatas and Interludes on prepared piano). Randy, who is one of the curators of the event, spoke briefly about the festival as well as himself.

CM: How did you get started and what brought you to the world of contemporary music?

RG: I began playing percussion when I was very young, and the Marimba became my main instrument for many years. Of course, with percussion, you’re almost immediately exposed to contemporary music because there’s very little written before the 20th century, especially as a soloist. I was playing a lot of modern Japanese music that had been written for Keiko Abe, and I had been exposed to Steve Reich a bit, working up Marimba Phase… It wasn’t, though, until I heard Cage’s Ryoanji that I began writing music. The listening experience was revolutionary for me and changed my whole concept of what music could be. I began writing almost immediately after hearing it for the first time, and just completely delved into Cage’s conceptual world.

CM: Who were the people that helped shape your identity as an artist?

RG: John Cage was the first one, for sure. Early on my works were sort of Cage rip-offs, experiments with chance, extended techniques, space=time, that sort of thing. As I began to develop an identity of my own, I grew extremely interested in the Minimalists. With the music I write, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with rhythm, I think because of my history with percussion. Early on I would work with extremely slow tempos, or overlapping rhythmic cells like those found in Riley’s or Reich’s work. When I moved to New York, I contacted the people I most respected, and, as fate would have it, began studying with La Monte Young.

This is when everything changed for me. Little tendencies that had existed in my work (static notes, sine waves, glacial tempos, &c.) were all suddenly free to grow and live their own lives. Since 2005, I’ve been studying raga performance with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and that has had a truly profound influence as well. The work I’ve been doing the last few years draws heavily on both the extreme sine-wave compositions using prime numbers pioneered by Young, and the rich, codified raga tradition, but it also harkens back to those early experiment with chance and rhythmic cells. I often use delay lines now to both create denser textures and to subvert rhythm.

CM: When and how did the Avant Music Festival get started?

RG: We did a performance of a piece of mine (Doleo Æternus) at The Wild Project in the fall of 2009, and just fell in love with the venue. Since it’s used primarily for theatre projects, they luckily had two weeks free that next February, and Megan Schubert and I decided to put on a festival. That first one was pretty cobbled together, and a little bit insanely ambitious. Since then we’ve really honed in on what we want to present, which is composer-driven evenings of work where an audience can really get into the mind and ethos of the particular composer.

CM: Can you talk about your two works that will be presented on Friday the 10th and Saturday the 18th?

RG: The piece that came to define my contribution to the Avant Music Festival is Apparitions of The Four Pillars. Since beginning writing this work for the first festival in 2010, I haven’t written anything else. All of my work now examines facets of this very small series of tuning concepts built around stacks of identical pure harmonic intervallic relationships over a single fundamental (a 72hz D).

Circular Trance Surrounding The Second Pillar with The Highest Seventh Primal Cirrus, The Utmost Fundamental, and The Ekmeles Ending from Apparitions of The Four Pillars, the work that opens the festival this year, on Friday February 10th, is a sort of choral-raga journey into the seventh harmonic. It draws a lot on my raga studies, bringing these techniques, to a somewhat traditional choral setting. The singers, from the remarkable Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble (who commissioned the piece) are accompanied by Sine Waves built out of the harmonic series and the septimal pitches they must sing. It’s really very traditional in form, with a long alap introduction followed by a bandish with all its associated parts, but it’s all amplified and presented in a very ritualistic way with video, lighting, and incense that speaks to my ongoing interest in the ritual aspects of musical performance.

The piece that closes the festival (Saturday, February 18th) is something I’m really excited about, it’s be far the most ambitious, bonkers thing I’ve written. The trombonist William Lang, who I’ve worked with for a few years now, will premiere a new three hour solo trombone composition entitled The Third Pillar in Primal Imperfect Palindrome with The Souvenir of The Second Pillar, The Floating Cirrus over the Pumping Slush, and The Highest Moving Chordal Motif from Apparitions of The Four Pillars. This piece examines the pure 9:8 relationship and all its constituent parts. It’s going to be a truly mindbending experience. The Sine Waves for this composition move through a few different areas, examining first the stack of 9:8 intervals, then associated prime-numbered harmonics, and finally the extremes of range presenting high pitched primal sine waves over extremely low trombone tones. It’s a rich and enveloping tapestry, and the video artist I work with, Oscar Henriquez, has created a really stunning new video that will accompany it.

CM: What is it about the new music festivals that make them important to the audience?

RG: I think a festival like ours really presents an unusual opportunity for an audience to really deeply hear an artist’s work. It’s not often that a composer gets to present a whole evening of their work, and I hope that presenting the festival the way we do, where each composer is given free reign over a night, can lead to deeper and more focused interest in an artist’s work. We include the full programming of the whole festival in the printed program, and it’s our hope that, if you’re attending one night, something that one of the other composers is doing can spark a new interest, and the concentration of all this music into such a short time frame I think makes it more and more possible for an audience to discover something new.

CM: The highlights of course are the works by John Cage for his 100th birthday and the performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which is also seeing its 100th year. Would you say these two composers continue to have such a lasting effect on today’s music?

RG: Absolutely! I think you find very direct examples of this lasting influence all over the place. Interestingly enough the first things that come to mind are in “pop” music – an album like Aphex Twin’s Drukqs with all its prepared piano samples, or a few years ago Björk singing Pierrot Lunaire. I think in the classical world the influence has maybe become a bit more subtle over time, but just look at how much is being done for Cage’s centennial, and you can tell it’s still there, strong. I think as a performer, or as a composer perfoming, Cage is absolutely vital. It opens your ears to new sounds, and new possibilities, and if you can really accept the true ethos of his chance operations, you learn to embrace the unexpected, and that’s what the most fun.

2012 Avant Music Festival Preview from Avant Media on Vimeo.

2012 Avant Music Festival

Feb 10, 11, 15, 17, and 18 at 8 PM (also Feb 10 at 4 PM with a composer roundtable at 5:30 PM)

Wild Project

195 East 3rd Street

New York, NY 10009

p. 212.228.1195

f. 212.228.1154

info@thewildproject.com

Click here for schedule and tickets for the Avant Music Festival

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

… Then I spent the rest of my childhood years waking up in the middle of the night with a book half open on my chest, and I still do it. I read between two and four every night. I sleep and by the time I get to two o’clock now I have to read. I read for two hours and after I sleep for another two hours, then I get up and work two hours.

FJO: That’s extraordinary.

BR: It’s a crazy life. Augusta’s even worse. She gets up at three in the morning or four, when I’m still reading. I hope this is not too trivial for you.

- Bernard Rands interviewed by Frank J. Oteri for New Music Box

and

As if exploring that exhibit a Constable and Turner show at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts wasn’t overwhelming and exhausting enough, we plunged ahead to examine the museum’s famous collections of Oriental and Asia art, Persian fourteenth – to sixteenth-century paintings and manuscripts, and Egyptian tombs and statues. Our sense were reeling from all this magnificence; and I can’t explain how we had the energy and persistence to take it all in – all in one day. To confirm how truly crazy I was – and perhaps still am – my diary recounts that after that museum visit, I copied quite a bit of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms into one of my notebooks – that is, before dining at O Sole Mio, one of our favorite Italian restaurants in Boston, then catching a show at the Casino Burlesque, and then heading out to the Totem Pool a dance hall – all in one day!

- from Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty Gunther's autobiography

So, what time did you get up? and what did you accomplish today? Reading stuff like this, I feel very lazy indeed.

More about Gunther’s book soon. And, this will explain the post title.

Lured by the siren song of modular synthesis and DIY electronics, but not sure how to navigate the piles of requisite knowledge – or uncertain what the trip down this rabbit hole might have in store?

, Tom Whitwell’s Music Thing was a beloved daily read, as that site and this one were among the early blog-format destinations for music tech. Tom moved on – something about a major day-gig at a paper called The Times, perhaps named after the font? – but that makes us all the more delighted to get a dispatch from him. In this guest column for CDM, he introduces one project, a brilliant FM radio sequencer, but also helps us catch up on reading on modular synthesis and electronics dating back to the origins of the technology. And he has a realistic look at what this will do to your life – all inspired by “pure enthusiasm,” as he puts it, “this is fun, you should try it.”

Since buying a Eurorack modular synth a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time building DIY synth modules and reading about synths and the people who build them. (See reading list, below, if you’d like to do the same.)

The hardest part of DIY electronics is starting out. My first step was building a few guitar pedal kits and learning by reading the Beavis Audio site. Other people start with noisemaker kits like the Atari Punk Console or circuit bending. They all lead in the same direction — down a very deep rabbit hole. 

There’s a lot to buy – a kind of infrastructure you need before doing anything – soldering kit, a multimeter, and a stock of components. None of it costs much, but it’s hard and disconcerting to buy. Online megastores like Farnell or Mouser will stock 50 versions of every component. Get the part number wrong, and you accidentally order capacitors as small as grains of sand, or as large as golfballs. Smaller stores – in the UK, I use http://www.bitsbox.co.uk/ - are easier because they only stock common hobby-friendly parts. 

After making a few guitar pedals, I moved onto synth modules. They’re a great DIY platform. The infrastructure is all there, in terms of power supply, case, inputs, and outputs. Parts are cheap, there’s a healthy and helpful community, and a nice learning curve, from basic utility modules to mind-bendingly complex frequency shifters and vocoders. 

In a year, I’ve built:

• a super-simple, chiptuney oscillator


• a tiny spring reverb driver


• a stupidly-complicated and blinkenlights-covered Arduino-powered Euclidean beat sequencer


• a very useful Arduino MIDI clock


• and a simple but handy 8-step sequencer (see video, below)

For this project, I was inspired by this quote from Don Buchla, the legend of west coast synthesis: 

“My studio at that time was ten feet wide. It was so crowded in there we hauled the workbench out on the sidewalk on good days and set up my oscilloscope and worked out there. John Cage came by and for voltage control I had hooked up my keyboard to an FM module that I’d built, a little module that was an FM receiver and I could play stations on it because I had one of the first varactor tuned FMs. Cage, as you can imagine, was just enormously interested in the fact that I could tune each key to a station and then proceeded to play the radio” ( Source  PDF )

Thirty years later, Don released the 272e module (see Matrixsynth on the announcement), a $1250, four-channel polyphonic FM Tuner. There’s also the ADDAC102, a very fancy stereo €270 Eurorack module see Synthtopia, with a video . I wanted something quick, cheap and easy that would let me follow in Don and John’s footsteps. After a lot of searching and a few dead ends, I found the wonderful video demo, below, of a battery-powered FM sequencer based on a €15 radio kit from Germany. 

Projects like this follow a predictable curve. There’s a burst of experimental excitement at the start; receiving the crucial part, building the circuit on breadboard and realizing that — YES! — it’s going to work. 

Then comes a period of frustration and tedium. Re-buying a crucial part you blew up. Fiddling with the circuit so it responds just how you want it. Transferring the breadboard layout to a piece of perfboard, or designing a PCB and waiting for it to be made in China. If you’re using an Arduino or other programmable controller, there’s a long period of writing code, battling feature creep, debugging. 

During this period, you have to really, really want the thing you’re making, dreaming of how cool it will be, how much fun you’ll have playing it and telling everyone about it. 

Tom's FM radio-sequencing module project, in all its glory.

Building music gear is more multidisciplinary than you might imagine. The interface and the feel is as important as the functionality. My Euclidean sequencer is a cool-looking thing, with a big LED matrix. It’s really useful – turning trains of pulses into Afro-Latin rhythms. But it’s fiddly and annoying to use. The FM Radio module could be 50% smaller – and size is important in any modular synth – but this time I wanted good big knobs for fine tuning the signals and control voltages. 

So, as the project continues, you’ll spend time designing a front panel, deciding how many knobs you need, removing ones you’ll never use. And along the way, you’re learning. This time round, I wanted to get the control just right – precise, stable tuning so that stations would stay locked. That meant experimentation and asking for help on the MuffWiggler forum . I also spent ages reading ham radio sites, trying to work out how to make a voltage-controlled Shortwave radio (I gave up). 

Eventually, the lacquer is dry on the panel, the parts are all in, debugging is complete and the module is working. The result: either elation and fun, or almost immediate maker’s remorse. It’s bad enough spending money on a piece of music gear that you never love. It’s really annoying spending time building one that you can’t then flip on eBay. 

So far, this FM module is pure fun, an injection of random audio in the heart of the system. Every time I turn it on, something else comes out – pirate dubstep stations, Turkish music, news reports and Bryan Adams. You can filter it, sequence it, use it as a noise source, or let it modulate oscillators or open filters. Listen:

Radio sequencer 2 by MusicThing

Photos of the module:

Reading List

Great online resources for learning about modular synths and the first golden age of experimental electronic music include: 

Ubuweb’s electronic music resources section 

Also at Ubuweb, several editions of Electronic Music Review, a beautifully-designed but short-lived journal boasting Robert Moog as Technical Editor. 

The Red Bull Music Academy includes long, detailed interviews with Don Buchla, Tom Oberheim, Peter Zinovieff of EMS, Robert Moog and Morton Subotnik.

Synapse magazine was a mid-70s journal of electronic music, where you’d find DIY projects from people like Serge Tcherepnin

Vasulka is a huge and rather poorly-organised archive of documents, interviews and transcripts, containing some gems.

Source Magazine was, back in California in 1967, a plush avant-garde journal. Many editions came with 10″ vinyl records, pages printed on transparencies or fur. John Cage was a guest editor, and the magazine carried experimental scores from composers like Steve Reich. Original copies sell for $500+, but the articles and scores have been collected in a book: 

Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 Amazon

What’s Next?

Tom is already on to the next build since he finished up the radio sequencer. This time, it’s a shift register sequencer. A what?

A 16-step random sequencer, something between the Wiard Noise Ring, the CGS Gated Comparator and Nav’s BITSY.

It takes random noise to fill up 4 x 4 step 4015 shift registers, shifted by a clock input. The shift registers are looped – either after 8 or 16 steps. 8 of the steps are fed into a DAC0800 analog/digital converter, which produces a 0-8 volt output.

See also the prototype:

There are many examples of the benefits of working in harmony with nature. When first venturing out beyond home a child is taught to walk with traffic. A carpenter achieves a cleaner result by going with the grain rather than against it. In sports a team succeeds by taking advantage of what the defense gives them, and there are countless other examples that express why it is better to work with the flow rather than push against it.  For the past ten years the recorded music industry has ignored this strategy, and stubbornly clung to a business model that is no longer in harmony with they way people consume music by predominantly releasing albums in a single song economy.  

According to Nielsen Soundscan, in 2011 there were 1.374 billion digital transactions last year. Of those only 103 million or 7.5 % were for albums. This means that approximately 1 out of 14 times a consumer went to buy music online last year they were purchased an album. First with Napster and MP3s, then iTunes and the iPod, and now with streaming services like Spotify and Turntable.fm—the music consumer has repeatedly demonstrated that they prefer single songs to albums. Despite this fact, nearly 77,000 albums were released last year.

Rather than change strategy to work with this reality, most people in the industry just complained that it wasn’t fair, and continued the status quo.  I believe there are several reasons for this.  The first reason is that labels believe they can make more money selling albums. The second, is that marketing and sales processes were built for the album system and that makes it difficult to change. The last reason is because artists believe they are supposed to make albums either as a musical statement or as validation of their professional status.

This essay will attempt to prove that all three of those reasons are not necessarily true, and that selling single songs can be better promotionally, artistically and financially for artists and labels.

Layout of the Song Based Release Strategy

There are three key rules to the successful execution of the song based release strategy.

1. Every song is given a reasonable amount of time to stand on its own.


2. Every song receives its own unique marketing plan.


3. No song is available before it is promoted.

After that there are limitless ways to release the music. An artist can release a song every week, every month, every day, or every third Monday. It doesn’t even have to be uniform.  It really doesn’t matter how the music is released, as long as the philosophy that every song is important in its own way is embraced.

Why this strategy works promotionally

Not only do consumers prefer music in a single format, but the outlets for music promotion are all focused on single songs as well.  Some of these formats are:

Radio: The bread and butter of radio is singles. Album Oriented Radio died when radio started hiring consultants in the 1970’s.

Blogs: Blog posts are usually about one or two songs.  The biggest aggregator of blogs, The Hype Machine, focuses on songs instead of albums.

Club Promotion: By definition the DJ at a club or bar will provide a steady mix of songs. It is quite the rarity to hear a whole album played in a club with the exception of a listening party.

Synchs for Commercials and TV: For reasons of time, cost, and artistic expression, individual songs are usually featured as synchs rather than albums.

Music Videos: Music videos are primarily made for one song. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are few and far between.

The two promotional avenues that focus on the whole album are preview streams, which have the drawback of lasting for only one or two weeks, and album reviews. Album reviews have come to mean less and less each year as newspapers and magazines cut space and syndicated their copy.  They have also lost their main purpose of previewing an album when consumers can decide for themselves whether they like an artists on streaming sites. The editor in chief of Spin Magazine recently cited that exact sentiment as justification for why Spin would be relegating the majority of their album reviews to 140-character tweets.

In addition to working in harmony with the promotion outlets currently available for music, there are several other benefits of the song-based release strategy in terms of marketing.

The first is always having new assets to promote to the media.  One thing that occurred because of the digital age is content has a much shorter shelf life. The Internet is a voracious beast and is always hungry for more content. Importance is placed on newness and exclusivity.  In a song-based system there is always something new to engage the media. If an album of songs is released you lose that newness factor when pitching for placement.

The second is that it creates a platform to consistently engage fans. In the current media landscape, attention is the most valuable commodity. By consistently releasing new material, an artist has an opportunity to engage their fans much more often than the year or more that commonly occurs between album releases.

The third is that it gives consumers a chance to know what they are buying.  This eliminates the feeling of betrayal or trickery when buying an album based on a single song and finding out the rest of the songs are either poor quality or just not their cup of tea. The best analogy I can use to explain this is the DVD compilation release of a TV show. Fans buy a DVD of a show after having seen the complete season. If DVDs of television series were marketed the way music albums were, a 12-episode season would have one show picked to be played on television repeatedly in the hopes that it would drive people to retail stores to purchase the whole series DVD. It is not an exact comparison, because of the variety of differences in how the two are monetized, but I still think it illustrates how bizarre the current album-marketing paradigm is.

Why this strategy works artistically

First, I want to be clear that this method doesn’t mean that an artist can’t create a full album of songs, or even a concept album. It only changes the order and format in which it is released. This results in the album not being fully experienced until all the songs are released and collected by a fan.  The baseline question that needs to be confronted when evaluating this method is “Is it absolutely necessary that the first time a fan hears my album is in its entirety?” If the answer is no, then a song based strategy can work artistically.

After that hurdle is cleared — and there should be very few bands that should answer the above question with a yes — there are several reasons why this method can lead to better artistic expression. First it forces artists to step up their game. This method puts every song on a pedestal or under a microscope. The temptation to phone it in on an “album track” is eliminated. It might be a little hyperbolic but I hope that it could usher in a new golden age of songwriting.

The next advantage is release flexibility and the opportunity to be timely. Presently, there are a number of obstacles to releasing a song about current events in the middle of an album cycle. No matter how relevant or great the song is, there is a tendency to not put full promotion behind it, because the song will not drive album sales. With the song based method there is greater flexibility to interrupt the release schedule with a timely or important song, because there is less financial disincentive.

The last advantage is counterintuitive in that it allows great albums to stand out. The true concept albums become something worth noting. If song based release strategy becomes the dominant model, and some group has another Sgt. Pepper or The Wall in them, then it will stand out. If they don’t, and have just another average album, then they will have given up their shot at sustained revenue.

Why this strategy works financially

This leads to the most important questions for whoever has invested in the music. Is the sustained revenue of singles equal to or greater than the lump sum of album shipments and sales? In terms of pure revenue from recorded music there is a relatively simple equation to determine how many singles an artist would need to sell to equal the money generated from the current combination of album shipments and individual track sales. This is:

((Album $ + Track $ ) / # Tracks ) /Single Wholesale =  Average Sales Per Track

Using hypothetical sales figures it would look like this:

Traditional album release A

10-track album

50,000 albums   x $6.50 wholesale = $325,000

200,000 tracks x $.70 wholesale = $140,000

(($325,000 + $140,000 ) /10 ) /$.70 = 66,428 average sales per track

Traditional album release B

12-track album

1000 albums x $6.50 wholesale cost = $6,500

13,000 tracks x. $70 wholesale cost =  $9,100

(($6,500 + $9,100) / 12) /$.70 = 1,857 average sales per track

After doing this initial equation for either previous or projected album sales the next step is to look at how the track sales were divided on previous releases to determine the possibility of meeting or exceeding the target average sales per track. As this is a subjective process there is no exact mathematical formula that will work every time, but I have two formulas that will give a rough idea of how a release will fare with this strategy.

Formula 1

(Sales of the promoted singles + average of all other singles) / promoted singles + 1

If that number is greater than the average sales per track needed, then a singles based release strategy is probably a safe bet.

Formula 2 (which is really not a formula and only for veteran artists)

Average first two week albums sales = core audience.

If the average of first two weeks of all an artist’s album sales is greater than the average sales per track needed then a singles based release strategy is likely worth pursuing. This method does not work for artists with one album that experienced great success after a slow build ala Mumford and Sons.

If, after running the numbers, it is still not clear what release strategy is best, there are two other financial incentives to the song based release strategy to consider. First it eliminates the phenomenon of putting all your eggs in one basket and in turn spreads out risk when developing an artist. In this case the basket is the single.

There is nothing worse than the process of picking a single. In my experience it is usually a bunch of music executives sitting in a conference room listening to two or three tracks with their most intense faces, maybe with a couple of head bobs to let you know that they really feel the music.  It is very funny to watch people try to indicate that their sense of hearing is working.

Then comes the debate. There is a discussion of what is currently on the radio and how the potential songs fits in with rest of the music landscape. There is sometimes research brought in to show what test audiences have thought of the songs.  After that it is gut feel and a bit of magic to reach consensus and a single is picked. That is it. A half hour in a conference room determines the trajectory of an entire album campaign in both focus and budget allocation.

If that single doesn’t work it doesn’t matter how many people would have liked the other songs the artist created: they will never get exposure, because of a lack of marketing funds. The majority of the budget was devoted to creating awareness for that one single, and this does not seem like a very efficient use of resources. 

The second benefit is for business arrangements where there are income streams that are not directly related to recorded music, namely touring. One of the big issues that bands have is making sure there is something new to promote around a tour. Song-based release strategy makes it possible to always have something new for fans and to either be considered for tour packages or have a story for promoters. By spreading out the release of new material, the artist will increase the demand for their other revenue streams. 

The last benefit is better management of manufacturing expenditures. For labels, one of the toughest costs to predict is the amount of physical albums to manufacture and ship. For developing artists, manufacturing their first run of CDs will usually cost several thousand dollars. The song-based release strategy helps determine what the demand is for the project and consequently physical product.

Conclusion

This article shows that a song based release strategy has promotional and artistic benefits, and that it is feasible financially. There are many factors for why certain artists or albums succeed and others fail. The release strategy is just one of those factors and will never be fully responsible for either the success or failure of an artist. There will be times when it won’t work out, but the album release system doesn’t always work either. Nothing works all the time, and nothing is the perfect solution for every situation. The premise was that it can work, and I believe this shows how it can. Of course, this can never truly be proven until artists and labels take the plunge and start releasing their music as individual songs. I hope they take that chance.

Common arguments against this theory and my responses

When writing this essay I floated the concept out to many people both in and out of the music industry. I received several common responses:

1. This will never make enough money if music moves to streaming as a dominant listening habit:  If streaming makes no money, then whether music is released as an album or as individual songs will be irrelevant. At that point other revenue streams become more important, and I would argue that the ancillary benefits of always having something new to promote and to engage an artists fans still makes the song based release strategy the more attractive option.

2. It is easier to record as an album: Agreed, but his strategy does not preclude an artist from recording a whole album at once, which I know is a much more efficient and cost effective way of creating music. It is focused on how that music is released after it is recorded.

2a. But what if all the tracks leak?: This is definitely the weak point of the strategy. A leak is much more detrimental to song based released system as it effectively destroys the advantages of letting each song stand on its own, and the newness quality when promoting. The only counter I have is that music most commonly leaks when it is submitted for manufacturing. As manufacturing is delayed or eliminated in this model, perhaps it would curtail the practice of music leaks. I am not certain of that though, and it is a risk.

3. This would kill record stores: There are many factors at work in the decline of physical music retail. Song based release strategy is meant to work in harmony with the existing trends, it did not initiate them.  The one positive is that after a little while record stores would have a lot more data available to gauge demand. There are many instances of something that was available online first finding a successful second life in music retail for latecomers to the band. Radiohead’s album, In Rainbows, is the best example. After the pay what you want experiment the band released it in stores and still had a #1 album. This method could ensure that only the albums with the most demand are in stores eliminating the phenomenon of shipping platinum and returning gold.

4. This won’t work if you want to go to radio: The question that needs to be answered here is whether the network effects of radio play of one or two songs will result in enough artist affinity to drive sales of the non-radio singles. When coupled with the other promotional methods for those songs, I think they will. The other possible benefit of this method would be that radio might go back to playing a diverse group of songs, as singles will no longer be dictated to them. Every song is promoted, and radio can once act as a filter instead of a megaphone.

Information that could make this article better

There are several pieces of information I do not possess that would make this article better. These are:

Exact sales numbers: With the Soundscan artist history (including track sales) of a large sample of artists I can run the formulas to see if there are trends between album releases and single sales.

Albums vs. Singles revenue from Tunecore: With this information it would be possible to go beyond the Soundscan data and look at the trends of independent artists.

Album streams vs. single song streams from Spotify, Mog, RDIO or Rhapsody: With this information I would be able to determine if listening habits change from singles to albums when streaming. Anecdotally I don’t think they will, but I do not have empirical evidence of that.

A case study – An artist who has released their album as a selection of individually promoted songs is the best way to prove the theory works.

About Frank Woodworth:

Frank Woodworth is a ten year veteran of the music industry and the founder Glacial Concepts, a consultancy committed to finding ways to monetize the creation, distribution, and curation of content. Contact him at frankw@glacialconcepts.com or @glacialconcepts

reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS