The music and artwork is now finished for my next album Joyless Pleasure. I would like to send out pre-release copies to get reviews in magazines and important websites. I actually think normal people/fan reviews carry more weight but this is the first step. I have two questions to Wire to the Ear readers. 1. What’s the best way today to go about this? 2. Do you have any specific recommendations of places I should try and get the album reviewed? If you have any specific contacts at a media outlet that would be a bonus as sending music off into the abyss makes me cranky.
Thanks for your help!
photo credit: Steven Depolo
This entry was written by , posted on March 31, 2011 at 2:41 am, filed under business, promotion and tagged album reviews, Joyless Pleasure, marketing, promotion, reviews, The Horrorist. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I’m back from France and I’m happy to report that the event known as La Nuit Rouge pulled in 7,500 party goers. I spent some talk time with Pet Duo, Alan Fitzpatrick, Mindindustries and DJ Rush (at the airport). Everything from the moment I started my set was golden. Now since this is a tell all blog let’s rewind to my departure to France from JKF Airport.
I arrive at Long Term Parking. I’m a little later than I hoped because there was of course a few hours of traffic for what should be a 20 minute drive. I get on my Delta, KLM, Alitalia flight. I think they do this codeshare crap knowing they need to blame someone for mistakes so they take turns on each other. I’m in my seat. One hour goes by we don’t take off. Two hours go by we don’t take off. We finally get a report from el captino, “There’s a broken clasp in the cargo bay we are manufacturing a new one. Once we get the paperwork from Atlanta we can fly.” We approach three hours and they tell us we have to disembark. I know why they did this. There’s some new rule you can’t leave passengers hostage more than three hours. Now if you thought that was the bad part oh boy you are mistaken.
I had a layover in Rome. I missed that layover by a mile so when I asked when I could get another connecting flight from Rome to Marseille I was delighted to find out the only one would be late Saturday night at 9:30PM. That would get me into Marseille at around Midnight. I had a 1:00AM set time. That also meant that I’d have to spend 9 hours in the Rome airport waiting for that connection. I thought about canceling my show and just going home but I’ve only missed three shows in my entire career.
I was supposed to play the weekend after 9/11 in Stuttgart. I had my apartment robbed a few days before I had a gig. The third show I missed was my fault. Being that I have performed a zillion times since 1992 I think it’s a record worth keeping nice and I am sure promoters know I am reliable (which keeps bookings coming). So I decided to check into the Hilton Hotel Rome at the airport. I got a day rate of 100 Euros and slept myself into superman again. I woke up and took the short flight to Marseille.
I got to the gig and it was the usual war zone. Pet Duo was on stage with 6 CD players, two mixers, booze. On the same 5 foot wide table sat the lighting guy, his controller, the house mixing console and sound guy. I need a few feet of space too and I was on next. So I hovered around the Pets who are luckily my friends. They are also generally happy people so they didn’t mind me crawling around them. I hooked my gear up. They stopped playing. I started playing. I had a wonderful time after the show (this isn’t really a tell all blog!). Life is good and no matter what I go through to get there it’s always worth it!
“one night in new york city ou encore can you hear the sound… olivier chesler, trop bon, même le personnage c’est quelque chose!!! c’est quelqu’un ce mec!!!” – jérémy couvreur (via facebook)
For more info: facebook.com/lanuitrouge
This entry was written by , posted on February 28, 2011 at 6:12 pm, filed under business, live performance, promotion and tagged Alan Fitzpatrick, DJ Rush, La Nuit Rouge, live performance, Mindindustries, Pet Duo, The Horrorist, Things to Come Records. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Over the past three months I’ve been experiencing Chinese Democracy syndrome. Chinese Democracy was the Guns and Roses album that took them a decade to release. They wrote, erased, rewrote, sweated, talked and stressed instead of just letting it out. The truth is I have recorded almost 30 songs for my next album called Joyless Pleasure. I’ve worked harder and I’ve been more inspired while making these songs than ever in my life. Certainly it will be my best effort and about half I consider gems. Yet I still sit wanting to make one more song. One more that will be the one that will take it all over the top. I don’t have any advice in this post. I’m only sharing this strange experience. I am going to let go. I have my last song in Ableton. Maybe I just don’t want to go take the album photos!
“In the music industry, a release is usually a term referring to the creative output from an artist available for sale or distribution.” – Wikipedia
photo credit: Karola Riegler
This entry was written by , posted on February 24, 2011 at 6:40 am, filed under business, promotion, song writing and tagged album, Guns and Roses, Joyless Pleasure, stress, The Horrorist. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Last night I attended the WordPress NYC Meetup Group at NYU Poly. The theme of the evening was ecommerce. I wanted to see if there was a good solution if you wanted to skip iTunes, Beatport and Amazon. There were three presentations covering the popular WordPress solutions: WP-eCommerce, Shopp and Ecwid. A representative for each product showed off what the products could do. Next, the WordPress Meetup Group broke into three parts everyone following whatever product they liked best into a separate room.
WP-eCommerce and Shopp were similar but I thought Shopp was cleaner and the develeper really knew his stuff so I followed him into the Shopp room. Ecwid was the only product with a monthly subsciption and it was based and hosted your files in Russia. I actually won a rafle for a free year of Ecwid but I still skipped past it. I’m sure it could be a great product but the entire idea of my night out was to find a free or pay once self contained solution.
Years ago I ran an online store script off my own website called the Easybe shop. Shopp is far simplier and more powerful to use. You can sell digital goods quite easily. Download links expire and are encoded so your source url is never revealed. You can send out coupon codes. You can sell physical goods. You can sell digital and physical goods within the same product using variables (such as a CD or MP3 download). You store lives on your Wordpres site within a link but there are sidebar widgets or shortcodes to put any product or product category into any WordPress post (nice!). There are options to host your files on your own server or if you’re a huge site you can use Amazon S3. There are language plug-ins and much more. The price seems very reasonable to me at $55. The only time you pay more is when there are full version point upgrades.
Because Shopp is a full store not specifically an mp3 store it doesn’t have a built in audio player but you can use SoundCloud embeds or a Wordpres plug-in like Audioplayer for your sample clips. I really liked what I saw and I’m going to set up a sample shop here on this site over the weekend. I still think you should have your stuff available for sale on iTunes, Amazon and Beatport. However, why not have a one click away store where no one get a cut of your action?
“Shopp seamlessly integrates into your WordPress website from administration to your online store’s shopping experience. It looks and works like it was meant to be part of WordPress all along. And Shopp plays well with other plugins by adhering to the WordPress plugin development guidelines.” – shopplugin.net
For more info: shopplugin.net
This entry was written by , posted on February 16, 2011 at 4:22 am, filed under business, promotion and tagged easybe, ecommerce, Ecwid, music business, Shopp, WordPress, wp-ecommerce. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Stratus from Lee Martin on Vimeo.
The only type of SoundCloud player that was missing was one that would float on the top or bottom of a site and continue to play as you switch pages. Lee Martin solved the problem with his new Stratus SoundCloud player.
“Stratus is a jQuery powered SoundCloud player that lives at the bottom (or top) of your website or blog and enables visitors to listen to SoundCloud tracks & sets.” – stratus.heroku.com
For more info: blog.soundcloud.com/stratus
This entry was written by , posted on December 20, 2010 at 2:44 pm, filed under promotion and tagged SoundCloud, Stratus. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The incredible music info archive site Discogs now has an optimized version for iOS and Android devices. I’ve used the site thousands of times. Often I go there to get info I can’t remember about my own releases! Here’s the page for some of my music on Discogs: discogs.com/artist/Horrorist
“To access Discogs mobile, simply navigate to www.discogs.com using your preferred mobile browser. By default, you’ll see the mobile version of Discogs with an option to switch to the full site if desired.” – discogs.com
For more info: discogs.com
This entry was written by , posted on December 13, 2010 at 1:29 pm, filed under business, iPhone, promotion and tagged Android, Discogs, iOS. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Andrew Zuckerman: Music is an iPad multimedia book with interviews, photographs and portraits of 50 popular musicians. What has me interested is the theme of the interviews. Andrew asks why music is important. What makes music important to the artist. “The App is currently $4.99 and is available on in the App store: click here
“The Andrew Zuckerman: Music iPad app features dynamic portraits of over fifty musicians, from across genres, who provide their perspectives on one of the most universal and yet unexplainable art forms. It includes portraits and a short film for each contributor, as well as interviews and behind-the-scenes photography. Live text from the interviews can be organized by theme and is sharable. Musician pages link directly to the artist’s page in iTunes…” – andrewzuckerman.com
For more info: andrewzuckerman.com
This entry was written by , posted on December 10, 2010 at 5:06 am, filed under interviews, iPad, music, promotion and tagged Andrew Zuckerman, biography, interviews, iPad, musicians. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Stuck at your desk today at lunch? Need to get your Electrohouse on for a few minutes? I’m not sure if director Ron Winter created this “bangin” browser sample player or it’s from someone else. Nevertheless it’s a good five minute time waster. To try it out: click here
“In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song. The wide spread use of sampling in popular music originated with the birth of hip hop music in New York in the 1970s. This is typically done with a sampler, which can be a piece of hardware or a computer program. Sampling is also possible with tape loops or with vinyl records on a phonograph. Often “samples” consist of one part of a song, such as a break, used in another, for instance the use of the drum introduction from Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” in songs by the Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Mike Oldfield, Rob Dougan, Coldcut, Depeche Mode and Erasure, and the guitar riffs from Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” in Tone L?c’s “Funky Cold Medina”. – wikipedia.org/Sample
For more info: wikipedia.org/Electro_house
This entry was written by , posted on December 9, 2010 at 4:11 am, filed under drum machine, promotion and tagged drum machine, online, Ron Winter, sampler. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Be warned the service I am mentioning today may not be legit. Would you pay to have your SoundCloud tracks played more? Cloud Promotion says it will get you a set number of “Plays” for money. It seems the service is based in Europe because their prices are listed in Euros and the English text is well messed up (fancy detective work I know). Some examples: 1000 Plays for 25 Euro or 5000 Plays for 75 Euro. The site looks very much like the SoundCloud site. Is it officially affiliated with them somehow? Does it matter who listens to your songs? I know I would like a target audience not just 1000 random people. Lastly, would 1000 Plays = 25 actual song sales?
I tried to find some mention of Cloud Promotion in the SoundCloud forums but I couldn’t figure out a way to search there. If I am missing an obvious way to search the forums someone please let me know.
“With cloud Promotion You Can Have A couple bunch of Traffic to your mix or track And Make Easy The Audience of Your Dream” – cloud-promotion.com
For more info: cloud-promotion.com
This entry was written by , posted on November 30, 2010 at 5:33 am, filed under business, promotion and tagged business, Cloud Promotion, promotion, SoundCloud. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
This week is Thanksgiving in the United States. Usually this means some extra TV or movie time. I have a music documentary recommendation for everyone. Last year a documentary called Anvil! The Story of Anvil was released. It tells the story of a band who didn’t make it. I think every musician on the planet will relate and laugh to at least some parts of this film. It has a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Highly recommended.
“At fourteen years old, best friends Lips and Robb Reiner made a pact to rock together forever. Their band Anvil, hailed as the demi-gods of Canadian metal, influenced a musical generation including Met allica, Slayer and Anthrax. Though Anvil never made it, they never stopped playing or believing. Following a calamitous European tour, Lips and Robb, now well into their fifties, set off to record their thirteenth album, This is Thirteen, in one last attempt to fulfill their boyhood dream.”
New York Times Review: click here
Rotten Tomatoes: click here
Official Website: anvilthemovie.com
This entry was written by , posted on November 24, 2010 at 5:46 am, filed under music, political, promotion, video and tagged 80s, Anvil, documentary, Metal. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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