Bandcamp is joining Epic Games

[PavlovsCat]

14 hours ago, Jesse Screed said:

the link will work

 

 

 

Why did I click on that? I thought I was smarter than that. And the survey says -- "No. No you're not."

[Ric]

3 hours ago, Philip G Hunt said:

However, are you seriously telling me you never saw any underhanded tactics?

I can tell you some direct accounts of underhanded tactics if you'd like. Especially when it came to demo deals.

You’re not obliged to tell of things you know of although they may well be interesting.

The 2nd part of my biog (to be published in November) will talk about negative occurrences I witnessed or experienced in the business.  But, no I didn’t personally see any underhand tactics, there is plenty of that sort of thing revealed in artist biographies or autobiographies.

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, Ric said:

It was different in the States

Distribution in the States was a WAY different story in the physical media era due to the geographical enormity and population size. Touring still is of course. I get a smile whenever I see the phrase "UK Tour." Geographically, that's about equivalent to touring the state of California.

If for whatever reason your label ran into a snag getting your records on the shelves, it could blow your whole career. There's this band from the '70's, Crack The Sky, who were attracting album-of-the-year reviews for their first record, being compared to a heavier Steely Dan, etc., but their label got the radio station copies around before they were in the shops. They wound up very obscure except for in one major urban center, Baltimore, Maryland, where somehow a dj liked them AND the label got records in the stores. So in one single city they were like Styx, and everywhere else like....I dunno, Hatfield and the North or Mogul Thrash were in the US. A few cognoscenti might have known, but that's it. #3 on the bill everywhere but Baltimore, where you better have a big enough venue for their headlining appearance.

To this day, if you're an underground-ish act doing a van tour, if you make just a little extra effort to stop and play the college towns between the bigger cities, or book shows an hour or two's drive from whatever larger city where you're part of the "scene," you can make the kids deliriously happy, because they're starved for live music. There's less to do in those smaller towns. If a band from (gasp) San Francisco takes the trouble to play there, you'll sell out of merch and get treated like rock stars. Really quite wonderful if you're used to comparatively jaded big city crowds. Kids will come out whether they even like your style of music or not because it's where everyone's going to be that night. And they're so much less "cool" and standoffish than city punters.

Edited March 14, 2022 by Starship Krupa

[X-53mph]

1 hour ago, Ric said:

You’re not obliged to tell of things you know of although they may well be interesting.

The 2nd part of my biog (to be published in November) will talk about negative occurrences I witnessed or experienced in the business.  But, no I didn’t personally see any underhand tactics, there is plenty of that sort of thing revealed in artist biographies or autobiographies.

Ohhhh biography? Where can we read it?

Are you Simon Cowell?

Edited March 14, 2022 by Philip G Hunt

[Tim Smith]

Musicians obviously notice  Bandcamp because we are looking at all of the options out there. The general public though? Probably not to any large degree.

I see Bandcamp similar to Soundcloud. I mostly use SC for storage, but at one point I was more genre focused and garnered a fair amount of followers. Shot myself in the foot by getting into too many different things and alienating my small fan base. I have thought about deleting a bunch of my old material and attempting to remain more focused on a genre. If I had done things better I could have probably doubled my followers. At some point I will likely clean house there and pare it down some. I used my existing YouTube channel to put up some other stuff. The people that like it, like it a lot but there aren't very many of them.

A few years back something major happened to Soundcloud . I can say this because material that was of lesser quality was getting lots of legit listens and comments from listeners. 

Now when I release anything in that same genre that's at least as good if not better I'm lucky to get 35 plays on it in a month. On a good tune I would have 300-500 plays in a month if the material was good. A couple of my loyal listeners stop around probably more out of curiosity to see how far away from the main genre I'm going to stray this time with comments like, " now THAT was different." So between the odd change at Soundcloud and me drifting too far from center on a chosen genre, my following is pitiful. I blame only myself for it, because I didn't care what genre it was. I just made music I wanted to make. My goals were pretty much non existent so far as a marketing plan is concerned. I still have over 2000 people as followers, but I've lost at least 500.

It costs me about 155.00 a year which is mostly money down the tubes, so I might be looking for another place to park a few tunes. SC has marketing plans I have never looked into. Now when I launch a new tune I get fake members with big boobies offering to market my tunes for $$. I suspect they are on every new launch of anything. I could put out, " I pick my nose for fun" and they would make me an offer.

[X-53mph]

12 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I'd always been a guitar and bass player until about 20 years ago I started taking piano/theory lessons, which stopped when I cut the end of my left index finger off with a jointer. Fortunately a good hand surgeon was on duty that day, so while my left index finger is about 1/4" shorter, it still works. It didn't exactly improve my guitar playing. Tony Iommi'd. 

That's hard core ?

A guitarist friend of mine had a fight with his brother who slammed a door shut..... with my friend's finger in it. He went to hospital with the finger hanging off. Doctor said, it couldn't be saved. My friend replied...'but I'm a guitarist'. Doctor took pity and saved the finger. What a star.

That friend of mine is The Great Park. About 80 albums to his name.

http://www.thegreatpark.co.uk/

Then there's the story of Django Reinhardt.

[Ric]

5 hours ago, Philip G Hunt said:

Ohhhh biography? Where can we read it?

Are you Simon Cowell?

https://amzn.to/3pBkYry

Edited March 14, 2022 by Ric

[PavlovsCat]

49 minutes ago, Ric said:

https://amzn.to/3pBkYry

That book of yours looks really interesting, @Ric. I think I may give it a read! Thanks for sharing.

Just curious, and completely unrelated to your conversation with Philip, as you are a very experienced engineer from the industry, do you use Cakewalk mainly to record your own music or to record others? 

Just a short thought with regard to Philip's post, as you said you left the music business prior to the Internet (I'm sure you meant web launching, which occurred around 1994),  it is entirely possible that the practices Philip mentioned, as they allegedly occurred during the web era, with a completely different generation of record company employees in place. I have heard of some of the things Philip mentioned, but I never worked in the record industry and have no inside knowledge. At best, back in the 90s, I knew a bunch of indie record label owners out of Chicago from labels such as Touch & Go, Pravda, Alligator Records..as well as a friend in management for a major record label and a number of musician friends, some with record deals.  But I never had any first hand knowledge of industry practices. But I am a marketing pro and have written on marketing since the 90s too, had a well known and respected publication and major book deal with  Wiley and have heard people I've met in the record industry talk about one of the practices Philip mentioned. Again, I have no first hand knowledge, I just wanted to put out there that it is indeed possible that you both could be right, as you were in the industry at different time periods. Peace to all! You both seem like nice people to me. 

Edited March 14, 2022 by PavlovsCat

[X-53mph]

@PavlovsCat don't worry about me. I can actually name names if I wanted to. For example, I can tell you how a certain UK national treasure's label managed to screw a very talented singer out of his best material, and then passed it off as his.  Didn't happen to me but someone very close to me.

[sarine]

On 3/13/2022 at 4:51 PM, PavlovsCat said:

I can't help but sense that our friend is going to come back and complain that this shouldn't be in the deals forum. But this thread is exactly what makes this place so good.

Isn't it true, though? Why are you so resistant to the idea of a little housekeeping by posting in the most appropriate subsection? When we registered for the forum we all gained access to all parts of it, so there's nothing but habit keeping us from moving around instead of getting stuck in Deals. Maybe we should form new habits that adhere to how the forum is organized instead of stampeding it into something unrecognizable out of stubbornness.

Organization of the forum into subsections serves everyone as it makes relevant discussions and information easier to find. Taking this thread to its appropriate subforum (e.g. "Production Techniques: Discuss best practices for mixing, recording, production techniques, music distribution, etc.") would make it easier to find, make more room for actual deals here, and prevent the constant stream of deal announcements from knocking it off the first page. If someone comes here just for the deals then these threads are noise to them, while the appropriate content of Deals is inherently an unstable environment for long, meaningful discussions.

I don't think the quality of this discussion is by any stretch of imagination a consequence of the thread being posted on the Deals subsection, as I wouldn't expect desirable personality traits to cluster with deal chasing. Not that I gave it much thought (change my mind).

I don't really care so much for strict compartmentalization and am all for free discussion and stream of consciousness type of thing, but I think the off-topic posts (i.e. chatter taking place within threads pertaining to deals) add significantly less entropy than routinely starting off-topic threads.

It seems you're trying to establish your own law that would make the forum adjust to your habits, first by tarring & feathering our friend and now sanctifying it by appealing to communality, in effect repelling criticism - whereas in my view the criticism is valid because the forum already facilitates all kinds of interaction by virtue of its subsections and all we have to do is make better use of them by adjusting ourselves.

[Ric]

3 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

Just curious, and completely unrelated to your conversation with Philip, as you are a very experienced engineer from the industry, do you use Cakewalk mainly to record your own music or to record others? 

Just a short thought with regard to Philip's post, as you said you left the music business prior to the Internet (I'm sure you meant web launching, which occurred around 1994),  it is entirely possible that the practices Philip mentioned, as they allegedly occurred during the web era, with a completely different generation of record company employees in place. I have heard of some of the things Philip mentioned, but I never worked in the record industry and have no inside knowledge. 

I’m a Mac user and work, generally, in Logic Pro X. I say generally because I like Reason for the rack and other technological simulations. However, its complexities and sequencer graphics are off-putting, although from Reason 11 onwards the rack plug-in can be used in other DAWs.

I didn’t actually leave the business pre-web. My biog is titled 1969-1979 because it encompasses a decade+ and I ceased working for a company in ‘79. I went on to do other things on a freelance basis and they’ll be detailed in the 2nd volume’s lengthy postscript.

As regards distasteful aspects of the industry: much of this is idiocy and incompetence; sometimes just plain ignorance and naivety. But one cannot ignore that there was nastiness practiced by a few unpleasant people and unfairness perpetually dished out by record labels and music publishers.

Some useful informative insights to ‘the business’ can be found by subscribing online (for free) to:

The Lefsetz Letter and Music Business Worldwide

ATB

Ric

[Byron Dickens]

1 hour ago, sarine said:

Isn't it true, though? Why are you so resistant to the idea of a little housekeeping by posting in the most appropriate subsection? When we registered for the forum we all gained access to all parts of it, so there's nothing but habit keeping us from moving around instead of getting stuck in Deals. Maybe we should form new habits that adhere to how the forum is organized instead of stampeding it into something unrecognizable out of stubbornness.

Absolutely.

 

1 hour ago, sarine said:

I don't really care so much for strict compartmentalization and am all for free discussion and stream of consciousness type of thing, but I think the off-topic posts (i.e. chatter taking place within threads pertaining to deals) add significantly less entropy than routinely starting off-topic threads.

Yep.

1 hour ago, sarine said:

first by tarring & feathering our friend and now sanctifying it by appealing to communality, in effect repelling criticism - whereas in my view the criticism is valid....

If you've seen any of the gentleman in question's other posts, he is rather an asshat.

[PavlovsCat]

@sarine Your post goes from passive aggressive to worse. Two plus decades of managing digital marketing and social media and writing about it tell me responding to a hostile post directed at me isn't a great idea. But here goes anyhow. 

I'm not against people following rules. If you've noticed, I've never created an off topic thread in this forum.  What I enjoy is people freely sharing knowledge and being helpful with others. My issue with the individual you are holding up is that he is consistently extremely rude to others and attacking people, he routinely makes inflammatory posts, he routinely makes contrarian posts and political posts-- when Larry posted a developer out of Poland was giving his revenue for a time to relief efforts in Poland the guy attacked Larry for making the post saying it was political,  tried to have it removed and then referred to a statement Putin made, referring to Ukrainian Jews as Nazis and he got even more political and attacked the US,  all in the deals forum -- so much for his feigned concerns about off topic threads and posts; I call BS on that. His posts in this thread are attacks and insults  towards others. And he, as he does in other threads, then goes on to threaten to have the thread taken down for being off topic.

So it isn't that I'm some defender of off topic threads, as you are trying to spin it in your over analysis. I just appreciate people being helpful and kind to one another,  and I -- mostly -- like people. Yes, it would be better if everyone used the appropriate places in the forum,  but in the final analysis,  if people are going to post in the wrong forum but be helpful and kind to one another, I'm good with it. I'm not good with someone coming along and being hostile,  arrogant,  attacking others and making know nothing points pretending to be an expert while attacking others, as the poster in question habitually does. He is absolutely a serial forum bully and troll and in the end, I find that kind of behavior far worse than off topic -- but well meaning-- stream of consciousness  threads. Even more, those kinds of posts are violations of forum policy and, IMO, malicious and off topic is far worse than well intentioned, friendly and off topic. The latter really doesn't bother me and I'm more grateful for people being helpful and kind to one another than I am an@l retentively focused on their threads or posts being off topic. And clearly, the moderators here agree.  And that is all there is to it. I  hope you can respect that I took the time to respond to your unfriendly attack on me and didn't respond in kind. 

Edited March 15, 2022 by PavlovsCat
Grammatical edits.

[sarine]

4 hours ago, bdickens said:

If you've seen any of the gentleman in question's other posts, he is rather an asshat.

I have, and he is. Doesn't mean we have to top him.

 

1 hour ago, PavlovsCat said:

@sarine Your post goes from passive aggressive to worse. Two plus decades of managing digital marketing and social media and writing about it tell me responding to a hostile post directed at me isn't a great idea. But here goes anyhow. 

You could have just presented counter-arguments, but instead you chose to start off by misrepresenting my character and intent and insinuating my post is not worth responding to, while somehow managing to keep a straight face when you accuse me of passive-aggressiveness in the same breath.

Just because something is unpleasant to hear doesn't make it hostile, and just because somebody suggests you're acting outside your authority doesn't mean they don't see you as equal.

You said I went from passive-aggressive to worse, so if you truly believe your foreword there, do tell us which parts in the beginning were passive-aggressive, and where it got worse.

 

2 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

I'm not against people following rules.

Of course not, but you have argued for exceptionalism using community status as justification when you suggested @cclarry to be granted the privilege to post personal sale threads and when you defended @Reid Rosefelt's right to "promote" his YouTube videos (in inappropriate subsection). Who's next to ascend?

 

2 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

My issue with the individual you are holding up is that he is consistently extremely rude to others and attacking people, he routinely makes inflammatory posts, he routinely makes contrarian posts-- when Larry posted a developer out of Poland was giving his revenue for a time to relief efforts in Poland the guy attacked Larry for making the post saying it was political,  tried to have it removed and then referred to a statement Putin made, referring to Ukrainian Jews as Nazis and he got even more political and attacked the US,  all in the deals forum -- so much for his feigned concerns about off topic threads and posts; I call BS on that. His posts in this thread are attacks and insults  towards others. And he, as he does in other threads, then goes on to threaten to have the thread taken down for being off topic.

I get that. I just think it should suffice to say true things, and let everyone speak for themselves. If somebody speaks untrue things, drown them in truth and let it be. If somebody is unkind, say it clearly and don't reward them for it. I act under the assumption that we're all adults here and have the necessary means to moderate ourselves.

Let me also make it explicit that I very much appreciated you speaking out on the Ukraine topic, and was dismayed by the reflexive locking down of threads, as having open discussions serves truth and is one of the cornerstones of Western civilization.

Excuse the diversion, but the issue is (should be) on everyone's mind, and somebody has to say it:

Having realistic and truthful discussions about a war in Europe kind of trumps in importance the inviolability of our personal feelings. It's also extremely sad that we still see war as politics, when it should be seen as a failure thereof. It's different than getting unnecessarily worked up debating policies and their technicalities in a functioning society; we should be furious about mass murdering, it's the healthy thing to do. Any and all mis/disinformation must also be shot down swiftly and decisively with truth and open discourse.

 

3 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

So it isn't that I'm some defender of off topic threads as you are trying to spin it in your over analysis.

You spun it yourself. (see this thread, and references above)

 

3 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

Yes, it would be better if everyone used the appropriate places in the forum,  but in the final analysis,  if people are going to post in the wrong forum but as helpful and kind to one another, I'm good with it and I'm not good with someone coming along and being hostile,  arrogant,  attacking others and making no nothing points pretending to be an expert as the poster in question habitually does. He is absolutely a serial forum bully and troll and in the end, I find that kind of behavior far worse than off topic [ ... ]

False dichotomy. I'm not defending the person and their antics - I'm defending everyone's right to be heard when they make sense.

 

3 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

I  hope you can respect that I took the time to respond to your unfriendly attack on me and didn't respond in kind. 

That is such a narcissistic thing to say.

[Wookiee]

Keep it polite please. Personal comments seen as attacks can have consequences