I have a colleague in Los Angeles who in one year did 150 recording sessions as a guitarist. Of the 150 sessions, five (as in 5) were done in recording studios in Los Angeles. The rest? In his home in the Santa Clarita Valley north of Los Angeles, where 145 sessions were done by e-mail with Digital Performer, and then e-mailed or FTP’ed back to the client. After one “session” (as he reported to me) , he and his wife went grocery shopping.

Here’s a broad brush of what this means.

The computing industry needs us.

That’s because you don’t need an 8-Core Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM to run Microsoft Word or iWork’s Pages. And you certainly don’t need an 8GB PC system to run QuickBooks.

So who needs the 64-bit 8GB+ systems?

We do.

It is we, us, the composers, who on a global basis, outside of certain military and scientific applications, justify the need for the new technology to the Common Man. We demonstrate the amazing things that are possible not just for personal artistic gratification, but to create income and wealth within this new emerging economy.

In May 1969, Thomas Stafford, a US Air Force pilot, became one of 24 Americans to go to the Moon and return. Thirty odd years later, now retired, Stafford and his wife adopted a child. Last Christmas, the child wanted a iPod more power than the 2 GB version he already had. Stafford said this to his young ward, “Do you realize that the computing power of the iPod you already had is 20 times more powerful than the computing power that was used to put a man on the moon?”

Think about that for a moment.

The computers we need for music production, are vastly more powerful than the computers that put a man on the moon.

Wouldn’t you think that Intel or Microsoft or Apple (or even a company making music production suite software) would want to do a series of print ads outside of traditional music mags or even TV commercials showing off what we do? Oh, I forgot. I did see one. It featured the son of an Intel exec using Cubase.

But nepotism aside…

So let’s get serious.

We’re now at a place in States, and elsewhere in the world, where the cost of buying two tanks of gas, equals the cost of a low end software instrument program. It takes the equivalent of five tanks of gasoline to buy Logic. Another nine tanks to buy a Mac Mini, or even better, a pre-owned G5 that you can pump up to 8GB of RAM.

So, yes, it will take a bit of sacrifice. For example, skip Starbucks and go to Dunkin’ Donuts. They have great coffee. It’s not as foo-foo, and it has all the atmosphere of an air conditioner, but the coffee is excellent. And did you know that now McDonald’s serves a really decent cup-a-joe?

Troubled by high grocery prices? You can buy a pork shoulder (the ham kind) for about $0.98 per pound. Find a rub recipe, then cook it slow for about 18 hours at 220. When it gets to 175F it hits a resting plane, but then after a while, moves up to 190F to 210F. When it hits that range, pull it out the oven and you now have pulled pork barbecue for which in restaurant you’d pay several dollars for only a few ounces on a bun.

Sometimes sacrificing just means getting your priorities in line, getting back to basics, and focusing on the vision called your dreams.

But it also means crystallizing the vision you have of what you want to accomplish and then going for it. With a little effort, you can save up for Ministry of Rock, or one of the under rated gems of our segment of the music business, Muse from SONIVOX. You don’t need a $5000 mic to start. Practice and build your recording skills with a Shure SM57. And if you have children, enfold them into the process.

All success comes through relationships. With a little patience in used book stores or your local thrift store, you can find a beat-up copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. The principles still work today. If you want a more up-to-date book, try Life’s a Campaign by Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball. For advertising, Confessions Of An Advertising Man by David Ogilvy is still tops.

On forums, so much time is spent talking about the newest software program that’s sure to goose your career to new heights. But you don’t hear too much talk about relationship building or the need to acquire business sense.

Or the need to really learn how to market yourself to bring in the bucks. It’s like we’re too good for the common man to discuss such things. But have you noticed that the people who market creativity make more than those who create?

Whose fault is that?

The only reason it’s like that is because composers (and much of music academe) are all too willling to be the sheep, without wanting to take the risk of becoming the shepherd. There are four skill areas composers need to develop in few of which are taught in music school:

• musical craft (and I don’t mean the newest software program)
• engineering
• relationship building with some sales training (and follow through!)
• firm grasp of business basics and Intellectual Property Rights

This is the new music curriculum and you get a lot of training online for free by just subscribing to the NY Times and reading the Business and Arts Sections, especially on Sunday. For financial training, there’s Morningstar, TheStreet.com, Stockcharts.com, much of the online Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.

Lest we forget: the library.

But if you’re not near a library, or it’s closed when you’re open, try UPenn and their list of 30,000 books online for free. Find a library online. Hundreds of museums are online.

For $15 a month, you can subscribe to the Naxos Music Library which has over 200,000 classical, jazz, and film score audio tracks to listen to. Some of the lowest priced classical tracks for download can be found at eClassical.com. Then there’s Radio 3 for free from the BBC.

Even iTunes and Windows Media Players have outstanding on air Internet radio choices.

My point to you is that even in a negative economy, you are not without resources. And with some financial discpline matched to a vision of what you want to accomplish in music, now is the best time to achieve.

Why now?

Because when an economy tanks, the people and the companies that survive, sustain, and grow, are the ones with the Charlie Hustle to work smarter, harder and faster. There’s still a lot of business out there.

You just have to go for it.

]]> http://soniccontrol.tv/2008/08/10/taking-positive-advantage-of-a-negative-economy/feed/ 0 http://soniccontrol.tv/2008/08/10/selling-mp3s-on-your-web-site/ http://soniccontrol.tv/2008/08/10/selling-mp3s-on-your-web-site/#comments Mon, 11 Aug 2008 03:39:38 +0000 Peter Alexander http://soniccontrol.tv/?p=53

Yet another break in the traditional record company’s hold on music sales has taken place, and a new one for the likes of Amazon, Apple and Wal-Mart, is the announcement of a new collaboration between the Wimpy Player company, makers of the Wimpy Rave Player, and the programming service of Soaring Music, which enables composers, songwriters, and musicians to cash in on the opportunity to sell their music in MP3 format directly off their web site and get paid through PayPal.

This is a serious breakthrough for music creators since until now, MP3 download sales revenues had to be shared with companies like CD Baby and Songcast Music, unless you had the big bucks to do expensive custom programming which some artists (like David Bowie) have done. But now, at the going rate of $0.99 per track, the composer keeps the sales revenues without having to share them with anyone.

The screenshot above tells the story.

On the left side, you see four categories: * High Adventure * Heartwarming * Alternative * Trailers

In your version of the Wimpy Rave Player, your categories could be your most recent film project where you have the rights to sell your cues, a new album project, a collection of recorded works that fit a theme (Christmas Music, for example). Once the category is clicked, the cue list/song list appears on the right. A 30-second demo can be set up. To make a purchase, the customer puts the mouse on the song/cue title and the word BUY appears. Click, and the purchase cycle begins.

One composer’s site you can see this in action is Craig Sharmat’s Score Dog Music.

Craig has opted not to sell downloadable MP3s. So when you click BUY, you’re immediately taken to his home page with the CONTACT button clearly displayed. With the new Wimpy Rave programming from Soaring Music, you can have the choice of selling your music directly or using the player’s BUY procedure to take prospective clients to a Contact page. Just don’t forget to post your contact information! Before I talk about the specs and pricing,

I want to make a few marketing points here.

What Business You’re In

If you go in the direction of the Wimpy Rave Player with Soaring Music’s programming service, how you look at your career changes. Yes, you can continue to think of yourself as a composer. But now that you have even more control over your music sales and distribution, you can also look at yourself as an artist, which is what people who record their own CDs are considered. As a composer however, where you’re doing a bulk of the writing and producing in your own home studio, the business you’re in has now changed. Instead of being a composer, you’re now the head of music production/distribution company where what’s being distributed is your music in audio, video, print, or combination media format. Now, more than ever, you avoid taking business, marketing and advertising courses at your own financial peril. Make no mistake. The “big leagues” are being redefined.

Follow the Dollars

Here’s how the numbers have worked in the past. Once the album is finished, distributors then buy it for 30% or better off the suggested MSRP. For most CDs, excluding budget classical, that’s a list of $16.98. On a $16.98 list price, the retailer pays $11.89 and typically sells the CD at $2 – $3 above wholesale, or $13.98 and up. Out of that CD, the artist usually gets $1 or more (depending on their strength and negotiating power), plus publishing (mechanical license fees).

If the artist is signed to a traditional publishing company, income from the mechanical license fees are split 50/50. The current rate is 9.1 cents or 1.75 cents per minute of playing time whichever is greater. So on a typical album with 12 cuts, that’s a total of $1.092 per unit sold.

If a composition runs 6 minutes or more, the 1.75 cents per minute earns the composer a greater fee than the 9.1 cents flat rate. Let’s be generous and allow for a flat cost of $2.00 to press the CD, the jewel case, the insert, etc.

So on a 12-cut album, the artist gets $1.00 + $1.092 mechanical license income for a total of $2.09. Adding “pressing costs” of $2.00 and that comes up to $4.02. The difference between $11.89 and $4.02 is $7.87 for the record companies out of which comes promotion fees (which can be considerable) and other costs.

Let’s talk about a company not mentioned too often in film music circles: Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart can work a calculator. Because they’ve done the math, they’ve now creating new direct-to-artist distribution deals where WalMart has the exclusive distribution rights. According to the June 9, 2008 issue of the New York Times, the result of the Eagles selling their newest CD, Long Road Out of Eden, through WalMart only, yielded sales in one week of 711,000 units (according to Nielsen SoundScan), and to date, over 3 million units. Because the Eagles went direct, the group picked up several dollars extra per each CD sold.

In a similar deal with Wal-Mart, Journey’s newest album moved over 45,000 units the first three days and is expected to move 80,000 units the first week. Both groups are handled by Front Line Management which is headed by Irving Azoff, who ran MCA Records in the ’80s.

By comparison, according to a private conversation the late Jerry Goldsmith had with a composer at an ASMAC luncheon in Los Angeles, his soundtracks moved an average of 80,000 units.

If the composer or film production company did a deal that sold the soundtrack, or even individual cuts, off the composer or film web site, the amount of direct cash to be earned through Soaring Music’s programming service could be rather healthy. Should the composer get the rights to sell the film’s cues off his own web site, even the sale of just 1000-2000 could yield some rather excellent “bonus” income that previously wasn’t available. Let’s face it. Cash, is cash. And there’s one other happy benefit. Up until now, the pressure was on to create an album of 10 or more pieces before you could be releasing your own work. No more. Once you’ve created a couple of pieces, you start emailing notices for people to listen to a slice. They can try and buy. If they like what they hear, you now have the potential for both audio and printed music sales, that you control, not a distributor. Specs Wimpy Wave, according to their web site, is built by webmasters for webmasters. To get the best results, your ISP’s server needs to be using PHP, ASP or Cold Fusion.

Costs Right Now

Soaring Music has three basic packages: Introductory, Standard and Professional.

With the Introductory, for $199US, you can have 40 selections set up in four to five playlists. With the Standard Package, for $299US, you can have 72 selections spread across nine playlists. The Professional Package, for $399US, you get 120 selections with up to 12 playlists. Pricing includes licensing for the Wimpy Rave Player.

Conclusion

What Soaring Music has put together is a timely package that the industry needs. There are literally tens of thousands of artist web sites, not counting film/TV composers, and composers outside the film/TV community. This is not just a big idea, it’s a big business idea.

As part of film/actor/composer marketing, Dan recommended building your web site with a free program called WordPress. Well, that caught my attention because that’s the program Sonic Control now uses. It’s also the program Dan Portnoy uses along with some other pretty impressive company sites. Below is a short list so that you can get an idea of how flexible WordPress is, and how you might use it to build your site and promote yourself.

New York Times (this is Arts Beat)

CNN

Yahoo

There’s also a WordPress For Dummies book.

You can do the work yourself. Or you can bring in a designer to help you. What’s great about WordPress is that it’s built around what the industry calls a CMS – content management system. On several sites Alexander University has, we’ve struggled with the CMS that’s been provided. WordPress solves that problem, and we’re moving several sites to it using an outside designer.

If you go to a company who’s developed their own CMS, the cost of site development, which also requires hosting your site on their servers for $60 a month or more, is seriously high.

By comparison, you can host your site on servers like Bluehost.com and Dreamhost.com for $60 – $75 a year.

So financially, WordPress could be a good move for you.

Another benefit of WordPress is that indexes every word for you, which makes it easier for search engines to find you.

You can setup podcasts and RSS feeds with it.

And you can add video.

What Dan recommends is a little known site called Vimeo.com. With Vimeo, you can post your videos there, and get code to post the video on your web site. You can store up 13 files each up to 500MB and have them performed in full screen HDef.

Compared to YouTube, screen size is better. The YouTube player size is 490 x 400 pixels. The Vimeo player is 650 x 370.

What’s great about this is that starting with QuickTime 7, any personal computer can play HD without additional hardware. If you have QuickTime 7 watch Batman Begins.

For a producer/film, Dan suggested the following architecture for the site:

• Main page
• Cast/Crew
• Synopsis
• Contact
• Links (important for Social Networking)
• Store (optional)

For a composer, Cast/Crew could be projects you’ve worked on, while Synopsis could be your bio.

Dan also suggested the need for an action component to give customers/clients a reason to return to your web site.

For a mailer program, Dan recommends Constant Contact where the pricing is based on the number of names in your list (up to 50,000) not how many times you e-mail.

Design Considerations

A marketing/merchandising decision you have to make is how you the composer want to use your site. The marketing options are:

• a living business card with minimal flash that moves quickly for the end user
• a very clever hot looking site loaded with Flash and other graphics that’s filled with show appeal
• a working business-to-business web site for presentation, FTP, etc.

A Living Business Card – A good example is Bob Rice’s Four Bars Intertainment.

Show Appeal – There are a lot of these, but UK game composer Ian Livingstone’s is most impressive in this regard, as was the late Michael Kamen’s.

Business-to-Business – A B2B site is going to avoid Flash because it’s a working business site used for communication and work flow.

How Much Music?

Well, in band marketing that I’ve done, I’ve found that for a short demo, 30 seconds is enough. If someone wants to hear more, they can ask. This falls in with Dan’s advice which is don’t give away too much for free. You want people coming back for more.

Men in Black?

Another trait I’ve found on many composer web sites is the use of white lettering on a black background. On one hand it can look cool, but not when 60 or more other composers are using the same idea! Another reason not to use white lettering on black background is that’s it’s hard to read. When I worked in the ad agency business, we used to study Starch Reports which told us how well a print responded and what parts were read. A headline in reverse was fine. Very eye catching. But when you have a lot of text with white on black, readership drops dramatically because it’s so hard to read.

So, rethink if you want to have a “black” web site.

Conclusion

Marketing yourself as a composer is a tough job. But by using the materials suggested here and some of these ideas, it just might get easier for you.