Amateur CD Music Distribution - How the Internet Gave Musicians Professional Footing in the Marketplace

Introduction

This essay is about a much different journey than the rest of the cloudtravel essays.  Here is described how the similar technology and outlets of creative expression have made it possible to publish your own music like you might a blog of your favorite meat loaf recipes. The journey is just one opinion, and the technology seems to change daily.

Sometime since the Beatles broke upon the music scene with existential German haircuts and Cuban-heeled boots, playing music became a great American amateur pastime.  Kids previously interested in cars or surfing developed fascinations with amplifiers, sound mixers and drum kits.  Throughout the country high schools sprouted new musical interest groups.  It seems now that I meet more people in my professional life who have been on stage in a band than I meet people fluent in a second language.  Everybody is a closet guitarist, or bass player, or drummer.

I’ve been a night-job musician for twenty years.  I played in a band in London and sang on stage at New York City venues including the Chicago Blues, the Bitter End, Le Bar Bat, the Elbow Room and others.  While the theme of the cloudtravel website is travel, what causes me to write this essay is my fascination with the remarkable changes during the last 20 years.  During that time music production and distribution options opened for the amateur musician that used to be solely the province of the professional musician signed to a label.  Many of the professional attributes that record companies clutched greedily in their hands twenty years ago have become democratic.  This includes access to quality recording, access to music distribution channels, and access to promotional vectors that literally span the world. 

If you’re a dedicated musician this century, you can easily take your record for a spin in the market place.  A few point and clicks later, people in the Asian rim are looking at your CD cover, thinking about taking advantage of a depressed dollar exchange rate to buy your recording.  

Now, to be clear-headed about this, I’m not suggesting that there is much money to be made.  The money I’ve put into music far exceeds the money I’ve been paid.  Chances are that your music project will end up in red ink also.  Unless you are touring in some organized way and have a publicist aiding your cause, most people who produce and sell their own music embark on a losing investment.  But there are other reasons people play and share music.  For me it's a hobby that I do because I can and I enjoy it.  The expense for me is like people who spend money on Calloway golf clubs without expectation of ending up on the pro golf circuit.  This article explores some of the opportunities that have opened for musicians of almost all levels to test their sound in the market place.

The Door Opens

I am constantly finding out that professional colleagues harbor underground musical interests that have followed them from their high school days.   Most of them can hold a few songs together.  Some have enough music experience that they can keep up in a musical combo.  A few have stood up on stage to play, and some fraction has spent recent time in the recording studio.  They have in common that almost all of them adore the dream of holding a CD in their hands of music they made themselves.

This year I took two recent musical projects, packaged them in CDs for retail sale, and got them on the product catalogues of music outlets around the world.  For someone who has always thought of breaking into retail music circulation as a function of an unobtainable record contract, it turned out to be ridiculously simple.  Here is one of the CDs listed for sale on the Sam Goody site, and another on Amazon.  Commercial opportunities through the Internet made it possible.  I didn’t lose my job or get divorced and when I had finished it occurred to me that there must be others interested in the same thing.

Gigging and Playing on Stage

Gigging and stage play is one area that has not benefited much from internet technology.  Publicizing your gigs, getting the word out and getting on stage still has the key promotional value that it always did.  The toys of stage music – guitars, amplifiers, mixing boards and stage gear – are cheaper, more versatile and a little lighter than 1980, but those are the few advantages Father Time has bestowed on musical stage craft.  Certainly in New York City the number of music venues has contracted (NYC jazz clubs listing).  Music clubs have seen similar hard times to comedy clubs.  Manny’s Car Wash, Chicago Blues, even that low-ceiling West Village haunt The Wreck Room have closed. That means less opportunity for bands on the hoof. 

Finding like-minded mucisians for music projects can be an additional challenge.  Urban centers have the edge when it comes to musical networking.  New York has a few musican clubs where you can sign up for a fee and come down for various "jams."  These clubs are a more service-oriented version of the traditional rehearsal studio.  They not only organize music combos, but also offer tutorials on different instruments and about making music work in a band format.  Often they offer a selection of instruments are available for you to borrow, which relieves you of carrying your double cut away Gibson into the office in the morning.  They usually feature gig nights where various bands play for thirty minutes at a time at a local venue.  My favorite organization of this kind is The Studio at 235 West 30th Street.  The Studio is a congenial place opened by Bob and Roger a few years ago as a splinter club from the competing Off Wall Street Jam down on Murray Street in south Manhattan.  The Studio features open jam nites where musicians come and go and take part in combos to test their chops.

Regardless of how you get your band together the gig routine is virtually unchanged after all these years.  You record a demo of your band, gather some press clippings if you have them, find the club owner during the blinding, awkward daylight hours and you try to get a gig.  There are some angles.  Maybe your group has an agent.  Maybe you know somebody.  The night of the gig you invite everybody you can, fill the house, play professionally and get asked back.  Playing live and promoting your gigs is the marketing life’s blood for most professional musicians.  But with the internet and other technologies available, a calendar of live engagements and loyal fan base is not a requirement to market your music. 

Songcraft

Home Recording

Elvis Costello worked as a computer programmer and played in a country band called "Flip City" before landing  a contract with Stiff Records.  He used sick his days from work to record his first, fame-bringing album, “My Aim is True.”  Declan McManus, as he was then known, worked out detailed demo tapes of his music and then was able to bring a focused plan with him into the recording studio.  With the help of an able group of musicians he captured lightening in a bottle and the rest is history.  

Costello's story has been instructive for thousands who have used home recording to mold and evaluate their music.  When you're just starting out and haven't spent time in the professional studio, you don't know what you have to work with, what elements are needed to make a song sound good on record and what challenges you're going to face to get a recording made.   Home recording is a fun way to indulge your musical interests while answering the practical questions you ought to answer before venturing into the professional recording studio.  

Technological advances in recording technology have conspired to bring home recording musicians cheap wares that have recording quality that will bring you much closer to the commercial marketplace than you could get in Elvis' day.  In the early 1980s it became possible to purchase multi-track “portastudio” recorders with a few hundred dollars.  With these musicians could layer overdubs onto tape and (in theory) create the same magic as the Beatles captured on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, recorded circa 1967 with four-track technology (Beatles' recording technology page).   A dozen years later digital recorders started to come within a price range that wouldn’t threaten the stability of the average marriage.  This new purchaseability made it possible for the insurance salesman by day to pursue a recording ambition by night (build a home studio on a budget). 

But home recording isn't a panacea for musical dreams.  Investing in a simple, $400 portastudio is a great place to start, but understand the limits.  The problem with home recording is the basic problem with professional studio recording, only more so.  There is a mythical, bewitching distance between the beautiful sound that comes off the strings of your guitar and what a recording device captures.  Many musicians are amazed to find how difficult it is to get a good sound on record when, after all, they're probably getting a pretty respectable sound just strumming a flat-top guitar in the living room.  This is why producers and sound engineers are so valued.  

Jimmy Miller produced what are considered the four best Rolling Stones albums using vastly different studio resources in England, America and France.  Many have argued that his production talent is the magic ingredient that made the difference.  True enough, Jimmy Miller was a constant among many other variables.  Much of the Stones' album Exile on Main Street was recorded in the basement of a rented French villa using a mobile recording unit (and, legend says, stolen electrical power from the French national railroad).  Tracks from Sticky Fingers (including the ubiquitous hit, "Brown Sugar") were recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama while the band was on tour in America. Olympia Sound Studios, London was also used intermittently.  Through the talent of engineers and producers these varied recording environments captured the elusive sound.  The point is that home studios don't often have this kind of recording talent available.  Because the “right sound” is so difficult to get, people can lavish vast amounts of time and resources on recording and come up with relatively little product that is useful in a professional sense. 

Lax studio discipline often magnifies problems arriving at a good result in home recording.  You also have to deal with the distracting influence of music supply salesmen.  Amateur musicians start with a recorder, then buy a really good microphone to get the right sound, then invest in a pre-amp and effects packages, etc.  You learn about phantom power, mic placement, trim level, compressor settings and various other nuggets. All these recording toys often result in serious mental distraction and diminishing musical returns. A lot of people with home recording experience can attest that the basement studio can become a time magnet where you can spend hours in a misguided belief that you’re working productively toward a product when in fact you are experimenting in circles.  It's an environment where a clever salesman can make an appealing pitch that just one more equipment investment will turn the tide. 

So the truth about home recording is that while it is theoretically possible to record your own hit record from home, you will be stretching some long odds.  You probably need wise equipment purchases, a trained sound engineer and some able studio production.  And you need grade-A musicianship and some great songs.  Computer editing technology can work small miracles, allowing flexibility to fix mangled parts, mix and master the song into a cohesive sound and sand down fine points like fades, crackles and sound spikes.  But without some professional-quality help the best you are likely to achieve in your basement falls short of the lowest rung on the ladder of what is professionally acceptable in the marketplace.  For many musicians home-operated studios are best to sharpen song ideas.  They allow you to break a song down to its recorded components and teach you to translate musical concepts.  With that experience you can go into a professional studio prepared to make your record.

Professional Recording

I once did legal work for the Hit Factory in New York City where many legendary musicians recorded famous music, including the last studio sessions of John Lennon.  Like Abbey Road Studios in London, the chapel-like Hit Factory is the stuff of popular music legend.  The whole first floor is literally paneled in gold records.  They have antique elevators and beautifully polished wood floors.  Capacious, state-of-the-art sound studios are spatially anchored by glistening, perfectly tuned baby grand pianos.  Mixing consoles are custom installed in wrap-around control booths with LED lights twinkling like the cockpits of commercial airliners.  There are dozens of devastatingly stylish assistants on call who can instantly produce Icelandic bottled water, sushi or God-knows-what pharmaceutical substances.  There are plush sofas for you and your entourage to use to reflect in airy, artsy ways on your latest re-mix.  In a city starved for space the Hit Factory provides a small universe of high ceiling and vast, echoing rooms for you to use in forming your musical vision.

If you are a recording star your label will pay for you to spend weeks and weeks at a studio like the Hit Factory while you perfect your latest record under the watchful eye of a world-class producer.  The expense is of the corporate magnitude (and often charged back to the musicians against future earnings).  But with technology there has emerged a breed of professional recording studio that opens opportunity to amateur musicians.  More and more studios are smaller and cater to one or two musicians caking layers of overdubs on a production.  There are also traditional studios where entire bands can lay down tracks playing simultaneously.  Here is a (non-comprehensive) list of US recording studios and here's where you can take a virtual tour of a couple dozen of these.

Prices for professional studios seem to be regionalized.  New York City is pricey, with $50 per hour pretty common.  In greater London, meanwhile, including the outer counties, even with a pretty difficult exchange rate, it is possible to get into a studio with a three-day demo package rate that allows you to get a few songs professionally on tape for half of what it would cost on the clock in New York.  An Internet survey of studio prices around the United States shows a lot of price flexibility.

Professional studio recording can bring and experienced sound engineer to your project, the single most important element for realizing a quality recording (here's a UK site outlining what it takes to be a sound engineer).  A studio can also bring high-end hard disk recording and editing, pre-amps and microphones, the likes of which you’re not likely to have in your home studio.  Professional studios put these crucial tools in your grasp.  Quality equipment, engineering talent and knowledgeable access to editing toys like Cakewalk and Cool Edit Pro can make even a modest professional studio a place where great music is captured.  It is the easiest path to bring your recording within the range of commercial quality.

But after lauding the professional studio as the gateway to great recordings, I should report on the common caveats.  The studio environment is a strange and special experience.  The clock is running and direction is crucial to make the time productive.  It takes a producer’s vision so you see the shape of the final product even through the fragmentation of the first layers.  It takes discipline to work sequentially toward a goal without dissipating energy or drifting off course.  Sometimes the professional air of a recording studio can help concentrate recording efforts.  Other times it has the reverse effect.   Performers bickering in the studio is a situation pretty commonly associated with amateur musicians in the professional recording environment.  It takes a special brand of coolness under fire to a get great performance from a musician isolated in a sound booth with four other musicians watching.  Musicians who are used to great collaboration on stage can find themselves unable to communicate and deliver with the same fluidity in the recording studio.

But if you can navigate the difficulties then you can walk out in the bathing glare of the day with a professional-quality recording.  You can make your record polished and ready for a broader audience.  Investment in a professional studio can give many musicians a leg up to a recorded sample that is ready for a worldwide audience.

CD Design and Production

Even with a dozen good songs, nicely recorded and sequenced in an appealing order, you need some packaging.  New technologies in desk-top publishing have made it possible for amateurs to come up with winning package designs within the resource constraints felt by average folk.  Access to the tools is half the battle. CD packaging graphics isn’t necessarily high art.  Any music fan is also a CD design critic.  A walk through the average music shop offers thousands of design and packaging ideas.  The numbers of people who know how to pilot Adobe Photoshop are almost as numerous as musicians. 

But even if you don’t know somebody who can help take images and text and blend them into a packaging design, the proliferation of design talent for hire via the Internet will see you through.  Many small design companies that do website work can also provide a resource for the graphic design challenges of a CD product.  CD duplication companies offer another resource, not just to stamp out duplicate CDs, but also design assistance.  Here's one provider, which also has comprehensive links for other music resources, and here's a similar outift for comparison purposes.  But there are a lot of people providing CD design and duplication services, so it's good to shop.

Take a CD off your shelf and pull it apart.  The standard CD package you need will require a title concept, song and musician credits (remember song lengths), a cover design, a design for the “j-card” that provides the image and text on the back of the CD and along the spines, and a design for the face of the CD, which can mimic the cover concept.  Fancier packages might include an insert card so when you open the CD case there is an image looking up at you from the reverse of the cover.  Fancier still is an insert booklet including lyrics or other information.  

Once you've got artwork you need to duplicate the CD and packaging.  Options for duplicating CDs are numerous and the buyer should beware.  The cost, not including any design work you need, can range from three to six dollars or more per finished, professional-looking, shrink-wrapped CD.  Many shops will do runs of as few as a couple dozen CDs.  The price per CD drops significantly for larger orders, 500, 1,000 and on up.  Look around online or in your musical community for a recommendation about reliable CD production companies.  Watch the discount providers like a hawk for substandard printing, crooked or out-of-dimension card cutting, bad disk dubbing, etc.  I worked with a horrendous (cheap) company in NYC that made me appreciate the professionalism of the guys I rely on now: DupeCoop.

The realities color printing should be borne carefully in mind when you are moving from a design concept to the actual CD production/duplication.  A CD cover concept that looks lush on your computer monitor may turn muddy and unappealing when printed.  An image intended to be burned onto the physical CDs can be influenced by the color of the physical compact discs used (typically silver) so that the color scheme is altered. The whole package can change in appearance depending on what kind of jewel case is used, black hinge, clear or white hinge.  Sometimes slim case designs are used.  You will want to proof the artwork in person (never online) once it’s ready.  Ask to proof the complete package with the CD case they’ll be using.  Keep the prototype and use it as the final quality standard against the duplicates that are delivered.

Bar coding is another consideration I should mention.  Bar coding allows sales tracking and many retailers, like Amazon and Tower Records, won't carry your CD without it.  Soundscan, which tracks sales and reports to MTV, VH1, Billboard Magazine and the like, relies on bar codes.  You need a universal product code (UPC) bar coded onto your CD to get on the professional map and enable national distribution.  A UPC assigned and affixed to your CD also aids in distribution and helps prevent scam scenarios like DJs selling your unopened promotion disks back to the distributor, which then deducts it from your sales.  Getting a bar code involves registering with the Universal Code Council, or relying on a commercial service to do it for you.  A lot of one-stop CD distribution outifits (described below) add bar code procurement to the bundle of services they provide.

Websites for Promotion

In a time in the world where every poodle grooming salon has its own Internet website there isn’t much constructive advice that I would presume to give about promoting your CD through a web page.  I’m not an innovative webmaster.  This site, as you can see, is a simple template provided by the blog company with my content tacked on. 

To have internet marketing reach you need a URL for your music or your band.  There are a lot of talented people who can help you put up a site for just a few hundred dollars (here's one provider who offers some useful explanation and links for other music-related services and here's a second, similar outfit to compare with).  If you are reasonably well-versed in graphic arts, computer darkroom techniques and hypertext markup language then you can probably tack up a site on your own.  Obviously, you want it to look professional, just like your CDs look and sound.  Many musicians I know are much better at putting up the web page than they are at getting the CD ready.

Here's a simple example of a band website: This website I helped start for Pinetop’s Boogiemen is a five-page design through Verisign.  I bought the domain name (www.pinetopsboogiemen.com) from a different source because it was cheaper, but I could as well have bought it in one-stop from Verisign.  I picked an off-the-shelf template from those offered by Verisign and uploaded panels of images prepared on Adobe.  Adobe let me crunch the pixel density (to 72 dots per inch) and the compression size of the jpeg images down so that it doesn’t take a long time for the page to come up.  I’m also able to offer free MP3 downloads of some of the tracks on the CD’s which is a great way to provide not just an information posting, but also a musical sampling.

If you don’t already know about MP3s, this is (simplistically put) a way to crunch the huge size of a standard WAV file that goes on a standard music CD down to three or four megabytes so it becomes feasible to traffic songs over the Internet. The technology that brings us MP3 created a means for transferring music over the Internet without serious loss of sound quality.  It also made it feasible to load an ipod with hundreds of songs with just a few gigabytes of memory.  Nowadays you can download oceans of music from the Internet in ways that would never have been possible using the fat file sizes of the digital music on your typical CD.  To get your songs from a WAV format into MP3 you can rely on a product like Musicmatch.  A free subscription to the software will allow you to make MP3s of a modest quality.  By purchasing an upgrade for about $20 you can make MP3s at the 128 kbs quality that is considered standard.

Building a website programmed with MP3 downloads of your music is just a beginning in online promotion process.  Posting a webpage without coordinated marketing is like putting up a billboard in a desert - who is going to see it?  Driving traffic to your website is a whole additional field of marketing endeavor, much too broad for me to give much more than simplistic treatment here. 

To start you need to encode your website with a title and meta tags that will be picked up as people search the web for subjects related to yours.  Meta tags  are keywords and short descriptions of your content that are coded into your page, but not visible when the page is projected on the web.  If you want to see what meta tags look like, access "View" then "Source" on your menu bar on Internet Explorer, or View/Page/Source using Netscape.  Meta tags need to be installed in the html header coding for your Home Page so they will get scouted by search engines.  

Beyond including meta tags, you may want to affirmatively register your site with search engines (reference about how search engines work).  Some web directories like Yahoo, Hotbot, AltaVista, etc. let you visit them and register your site.  There are services that will register you with all the main search providers. You can also pay Google or somebody to commercially show your site when certain searches are made (Google's service is called "AdWords").  Once you've got your website on the grid and people are finding you, then you can evaluate how many people have linked to your site with Link Popularity.  You can also do a search query in Google; just type in "link:" and your URL and you'll see who's linked to you.

In addition to (or instead of) buying and maintaining a page on the web dedicated to your band, you can build a page for free at one of the many music sharing sites on the Web. MP3.com is one of the pioneers in this area, but there are many others, including my favorite, IUMA.com.  Here's the IUMA webpage for Pinetop's Boogiemen, which is free of charge.  IUMA has been around for years and they offer an appealing, easy-to-use way for people to upload a couple of images and a few songs to an IUMA page that serves to promote your music to whoever visits.  There is a band bio, place to download songs and even a gig calendar that you can update.  IUMA allows you to track how many page reads and song downloads you have, which is a handy indicator of the success of your promotional efforts.

Getting Your CD to the Marketplace

If you have good CDs packaged and ready to sell you can have your music digitally or physically distributed worldwide through several different arrangements.  A number of providers are out there who will deal with bar codes, shrink wrapping, compressing music to MP3 format and those kinds of wrinkles.  Most of these are non-exclusive retail deals, so you can sell music through one shop and keep selling at your gigs, or through other outlets you've arranged.

You generally have two approaches to work with.  With a digital distribution plan your music is sold via Internet download and sale rather than delivery of a physical CD.  Typically, a service provider makes your music commercially available to paying online e-tailers, like Apple’s iTunes store, Rhapsody, Sony Connect, eMusic.com, AOL's MusicNet, BuyMusic.com, the new Napster, Music Match, etc.  This is the simplest means of making the music available because it is accomplished through electronic transfers of product and payment information.  This plan can relieve you of some of the formal CD packaging requirements essential to selling actual, physical CDs, as well as ongoing duplication of the music and artwork to meet sales demand.

You can also arrange to have your CD physically available.  This is done by you shipping a supply of your finished CDs to the provider, who will then sell them in-house, or arrange for them to be available for sale within the catalogues of major music retailers.  Physical distribution is more complicated than digital distribution because the actual discs have to be warehoused in some location, subject to call if somebody wants to buy them.  Typically, it's up to you to replenish the provider with fresh supplies of CDs within a certain time frame if they call you and say they're running low.  There is a sign-up fee, sometimes one-time and sometimes annual.  Payment schemes for sales of the discs vary, but you generally get a percentage after expenses.  There will likely be a minimum check cutting amount, $250 or so, and a quarterly payment schedule.  Thus, you can find yourself in a situation where you're selling disks briskly, laying out for more CDs to restock your supplier, shipping them at your expense to the warehouse, but not likely to see a paycheck for several weeks.  So in effect you serve as the banker for the enterprise as well.  As described a little below, this arrangment makes a few customers unhappy.

Conclusion

The counter-culture of music in the 1960s had a massive and enduring appeal.  Anybody could be a part of the music and all were invited.  The Woodstock ethic proved to be an over simplistic view of the world, but the change in music since the 1960s - the corporate-driven ethic - isn't an ideal vision of a culture revolution.  But quietly, after work and on weekends, musicians have endured in their interests.  Now, with the Internet and cheap technology, some democracy has come back to musicians enabling them to produce cheap recordings and make them availble for sale without a recording contract. So go ahead, sing your song.  Put it out there.   

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This website, cloudtravel, is a non-commercial travel resource that has, for the purpose of this article, branched in to music and entertainment and how they span the world.  If you find this page useful, please visit our other travel guide pages.  The Normandy, France and the Irish Driving Tour page have been distinguished by Google in their search results, showing them to be among the most relied upon on the Internet.   There are also pages on visiting New Orleans, visiting Paris, France, visiting Newport, Rhode Island, visiting Quebec City, Canada, and others.  If you are interested in a particular destination, please go to your favorite search engine and search for "cloudtravel" plus the name of the destination - maybe I wrote about your place.  Posted on a slightly fancier page, at www.cloudtravel.net, are my day-to-day posts about travel subjects.  Please visit and subscribe via XML feed.

Thanks.  Happy trails

© Copyright 2006 Chris Cloud. Last update: 9/5/2006; 8:37:15 PM.