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Hurricane Alley's Category One Released to Retail
It seems like it took forever, but our new album is finally done and delivered to retail. Now, it's time to consider all of those things I've been dreading -- like selling it. And giving it away. I'm not talking about the physical process of selling it. Between Apple, Amazon, Rhapsody, e-music, Napster and wherever else I put it, that end is handled. Amazon will even make you a physical CD now, if you prefer. Instead, I'm talking about the process of pitching a spiel to you about how awesome we are and how great this album is. It's that salesman Jedi mind trick thing. That's not how I roll. Of course we're going to like it. Even if we think we are pretty fucking awesome and this is a very, very good album, it would probably be better if someone else told you. So if we find someone to do that, we'll let you know. What I will say is that there are 14 songs on the album, so even if you don't like a few, you still get a full album's worth by industry standards. Unlike industry standards, none of ours are throwaways, so it's a good deal. Plus, I took a mid-level pricing tier at most of the services to keep the price down. I still believe that the best advertisement is letting the song pass through your ears, repeatedly. However, the reality is that after having 420,000 downloads from this site, it is obvious that supporting p2p is a loser's game. It is also obvious that the average listener can't tell the difference between an mp3 and a CD track. Part 2 -- June 30 -- Makin' CopiesHaving spent a couple of days with the band, during which time we discussed marketing, buying physical CDs to sell from the stage and this site, how to get publicity, and a lot of other issues that we always knew we had to deal with, but had never made a solid decision on. In most cases, this was not due so much to procrastination as it was to the reality that it's really hard to do this stuff before the record is actually finished. Release Date Tunecore says that the album will be in all the stores by August 2. They also said that Hank Tomlin's album would show up in June, but he got royalties from Rhapsody for April. I guess it depends on how efficient each service is. And I got a special "global" package to put us in every available store that Tunecore has arrangements with, which magically included Limewire's new music store, an option that seems to have come after I entered my agreement approval. What I'm saying is that we just don't know when you can find the record at whatever service you might use until it has already shown up, but by August 2, it should be everywhere. And by everywhere, that includes every iTunes store in the world.
The problem with the DIY approach is that despite the warm and fuzzy feeling of producing a product with your own hands, one at a time, is rather time consuming and every minute I spend doing that is time I am not spending writing, working on music, or working on the website. The other consideration is this -- If we buy 1000 CDs (or 5,000 or 10,000) and sell every one of them at shows or from this site, there doesn't seem to be any way to for those to officially count as sales. If we use Amazon's new On Demand service to sell physical copies, those will actually count in the event that a miracle happens and we sell a significant number. I'd rather be at the dead bottom of the charts than to not have been there at all. If we buy our copies to sell at gigs at full retail from Amazon, we're going to get most of it back in royalties. The retail/royalty price gap is our new cost, which is close enough to our DIY cost (plus how much it was worth to the entire band for me not to have to make the physical copies any more) that it makes a lot of sense. It also seems to be on the edge of being unethical somehow but I think that it's just because it is contrary to the traditional industry, where the artist's actual royalties per album would be so low that the idea of buying copies at full retail to resell would be insane. But when you're gonna get 70 or 80 percent back and you just need to keep a handful all the time for person-to-person sales that never used to count at all, it changes everything. I've got a retail sales license, we pay sales taxes to the city and state but, to my knowledge, anything we sell on the web through PayPal isn't a sale in the eyes of SoundScan. Try as I might, I can't find a down side to this yet, other than the fact that, artistically, I felt like the two inside pages of the insert were weak, so I am going to make pages with the lyrics and photos that I would like to have added. Unlike an actual physical CD, all of these things will be large enough to read, which is an improvement all in itself. Bottom line -- Other than the band itself, Amazon is the only place that will offer a physical copy of Category One. This is not any kind of exclusive deal or anything, they're just the only store offering to do it that I could access through Tunecore. This could change next week, for all I know. More to come... |
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George Ziemann -- June 23, 2009