Re: What does it mean to you, to "release a record"?

[David Gans <david@trufun.com>]

At 2:16 PM -0800 1/21/09, Matt Davignon wrote:
>I'm sure a lot of people in online music communities use CD baby.
>
>My big beef with sites like cd baby is that they make it *too* easy to
>release cd's. There's nothing to stop people who take an amateurish
>approach to releasing music from flooding the market with
>not-very-good cd's that are released on a whim. As a result, more
>serious artists who put an intense amount of care into their releases
>get buried under a mountain of junk if they use cd baby.

True, but I think the leveling of the playing field and the 
broadening of access to the marketing channel are a net plus.  Rather 
than fight our way into a record deal that is pretty much designed to 
prevent artists from prospering, we can control our own destinies on 
the creative end and spend our energies fighting for attention in the 
vast marketplace.

As CDBaby founder Derek Sivers said in an interview, where we used to 
be little tiny needles in the immense haystack of the music industry, 
now we are little tiny haystacks in one or more of several hundred 
much smaller haystacks.


>If I was a cd reviewer or a radio station, I probably would ignore
>most cd baby releases, not because good musicians aren't involved with
>CD baby, but because the choice of finding the good musicians is much
>smaller.

"CDBaby release" is a misnomer, isn't it?  I put my CD up there, but 
I "released" it myself and I am spending money on promotion and 
publicity to get it heard, reviewed, and played on the radio.  The 
fact that it's sold on CDBaby shouldn't be a disqualifier on its 
face.  Any responsible journalist is well aware that the major music 
channels are full of drek and the good stuff is gonna take some 
digging.



>However, in order to get the good kind of notoriety, I think it's
>smarter to release a smaller number of albums, and make sure each one
>is of higher quality.

Absolutely!



>I've been an advocate of artists creating their cd releases as
>professional albums. That means editing the music down to the absolute
>best 40 to 50 minutes (not 70 or 80 minutes), paying close attention
>to how songs flow into each other, getting it professionally mastered,
>having the artwork/package designed by someone who's good at that
>stuff, and lastly, and lastly, professionally duplicated (not cd-rs)
>including a UPC code. A lot of this stuff costs money, but it requires
>musicians to make their records something really special.

Yes!






-- 

David Gans - david@trufun.com or david@gdhour.com
Truth and Fun, Inc., 484 Lake Park Ave. #102, Oakland CA 94610-2730
Blog:  http://cloudsurfing.gdhour.com
Web site: http://www.dgans.com
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Music: http://www.cdbaby.com/all/dgans