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Fate, Publicity and the Giant Crap Shootby George Ziemann -- July 10, 2009 It used to be easy to get publicity. All you had to do was offend old people. In the early 60s, that was real easy to do. Of course, you were lucky if you had three television stations available. Then we got UHF. Celebration time. Now we've got cable. The "next Beatles" could be playing on some channel at this very moment but no one Twittered you about it, so you may never know. After watching Walk Hard: The Dewie Cox Story (a legally purchased DVD, which accused us of being thieves), Carl and I agreed that running down the main street of virtually any city or town in your underwear, knocking over newsstands, trash cans and scaring old ladies will still get you some free publicity, but none of us are particularly willing to do the whole get-arrested-for-a-while thing at this stage in life just for kicks and a mention in the local paper. That's not going to sell our record in New Zealand or London (and we know we have fans in both places). This would require a publicity stunt of global proportions. Oh sure, I've got ideas, but projecting the album cover on the moon is gonna be kind of expensive and our budget is like maybe $20. Most of the other ones would probably result in a much longer prison sentence, than running down the street in your underwear, screaming like a monkey (did I leave that out?) and knocking stuff over. The next album is already recorded, so one of the other guys can do it, but I have production to do. These days, all you can do is release your music into the wild and see what happens. Tim and Carl say, "It's in God's hands now." While I agree with them in principle, I am well aware that God isn't really tight with the music business. He doesn't hang out at the studios and help make rap videos. What you need is pure sumb luck. Like having United Airplines break your guitar. I'll probably put a press release out through the channels when it's closer to release date, but I'm really counting on my regular flock of readers. But you never know what people are going to like. I just read a quote from one of the guys in Abba, who said sure, they had a couple of good songs, but the ongoing Abba obsession was a mystery to him. My life's ambition was to make an album. Category One is the second one, recorded seven years later because the RIAA had made it pointless for independent artists to record music, since you couldn't release it without them. And the more you know, the less you want to get involved with that bunch. Seven years ago, iTunes was a piece of Mac software that played mp3s. Most people were still using dial-up. A three-minute song could take 10 minutes to download. Few of us knew how to make a proper mp3 that sounded good (I certainly didn't). You know what's out there now, probably better than I do. A lot has changed, and we are extremely glad to see that happen, since I spent a lot of that seven years bitching about access to the marketplace. Now that we've got that and a few examples to lead the way (Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails), I think it's only fair to point out that we've basically been giving away Hayden's Wall since 2003. It didn't work quite so well for us but that doesn't matter because it was the underlying principle at issue -- that the RIAA was (and still is) acting like assholes. I think that my anti-RIAA stance is what has drawn in most of my readership. It will be interesting to see how many of you like the music. |
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