Revolver Digital, from Revolver Records

Debating the effectiveness of the industry’s current antipiracy stance

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:48:13 +0000

After reading this article from Broadcast Magazine, it got us thinking:

Don’t demonise piracy, says IT Crowd creator

12 August, 2010 | By Ellie Broughton

Graham Linehan, the writer behind comedy The IT Crowd, has said the entertainment industry is gambling with its future by “ignoring or criminalising” the issue of piracy. Speaking at a debate on piracy last night, Linehan said the current response to online pirates was unrealistic and aggressive.

“It seems a bit like the big corporations are saying, ‘put down the gun or I’ll stab you’,” he said. “The discussion at the moment is not particularly reasoned.”

The television sector mirrors the music sector in many regards – sharing and unlicensed distribution of telly is almost as rampant as music, what limits its spread is more the unwieldy size of the resulting video files more than anything else (which is where we in the music industry have more of an uphill struggle with as music’s far more squeezable than video!)

We’ve traditionally taken a fairly lenient stance towards issuing takedowns, going instead after those originally uploading our music to sharing sites – largely because it’s a pointless exercise to spend all of your waking hours chasing pirates, unless you have VERY deep pockets and sufficient human resources to dedicate to solely pursuing the culprits. We do issue takedowns to the sharing sites when we find our artists’ music available without permission, but pursuing individual filesharers is like cutting the head off a Hydra.

By contrast, sites like Youtube – although they have music by our artists uploaded without our permission – serve to be very useful as promotional tools and aid exposure to new audiences, so it can be a balancing act deciding how heavy-handed one should be when enforcing copyright infringement. From our standpoint, it’s refreshing to see that other large programme producers can step back and highlight that neither side is totally blameless in this ongoing saga of legit vs pirated… Imagine what it would’ve been like if the music industry had cottoned on Napster upon its launch and then rolled out a pay service model on top of the existing system? They could have cleaned up!

We are fortunate that most of our customers are still music fans in the truest sense of the term – they buy CDs or the downloads, they respect the musicians for their hard work and investment and they also respect the role the label has in the process, a role which has dramatically changed over the past decade. We value those customers immensely and always seek to reward them for their honesty however we can If you have a suggestion for a competition we can run, or the kind of things you would like to see us offering (interviews with bands, backstage features, exclusive podcasts featuring an artist’s Top 10 tracks etc) then hit us up on Twitter at either @revolverdigital, @heavymetalrecs or @revolverrecords!

We’ve got a new Friend!

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:44:34 +0000

Revolver proudly announces Revolver Digital Store with Friend For Music

As part of Revolver’s longstanding commitment to music, we have always been at the forefront of new developments in the industry.

Be it Direct Metal Mastering and releasing music on the (then-new) CD format in the 1980s or our support of the first mass market music services in the early 2000s. Today, we continue to release CDs and make increasing amounts of our catalogue available for instant purchase or via one of the many streaming services, satisfying the shifting customer demand we have witnessed over the past decade.

Like many other indie labels, we have no illusions as to the state of the music industry – whilst revenues began to decline in the 1990s, that decline has no doubt been accelerated by the widespread availability of copyrighted music via the Internet. For all the inches of copy, coverage and layoffs in the “Big Four” labels, it has directly hurt independent labels to a far greater extent. And not only that, but artists have felt the pinch too – for labels releasing new material, it’s more important than ever to preserve the integrity of a release prior to its full release whilst still offering promotional copies to radio stations, journalists and selected individuals.

The ease of ripping, encoding and sharing digital music is a double-edged sword for music lovers. Releases that leak weeks or months in advance become trivial to duplicate and distribute. There has been limited success with individually identifiable promo CDRs, but what about people who buy a track and then seek to distribute it for free via the Internet? Up until now, there has been no cost-effective, simple way to identify these customers.

Revolver’s partnership with Friend for Music demonstrates previously unimaginable opportunities that can directly benefit independent labels alongside their artists.

The brand new Revolver Digital Store, operating on the Friend for Music platform allows labels to upload, automatically watermark (at their discretion) and then sell tracks in the industry-standard MP3 format directly from a completely customisable portal. Tracks are invisibly watermarked with a robust unique ID, allowing a label to simply and efficiently trace back any file found on a web site or P2P platform to the exact person who made the original purchase. For indie labels and artists, who can’t afford a court case to identify a potential filesharer, this is a real boon. The evidence is clear as day, with no ambiguity whatsoever… Any unwanted leaks can be eliminated once and for all.

What does this really mean for fans, artists and labels?

For artists and labels, they can work together safe in the knowledge that where their work may once have leaked, wasting time, money and effort in prerelease promotion, they can be confident in the knowledge that unscrupulous people cannot take their hard work and share it for free any more. The end result? Artists and labels are fairly compensated, ensuring that there is money to reinvest into releasing more records! A true win-win situation.

For music lovers, it rewards them for their honesty and helps to weed out the unscrupulous people who place less value on a musician’s creative output than others. Quality new music simply does not get released for free, and the Friend for Music platform not only provides a safe, secure and trusted platform for labels, it offers the same for the many valued customers who still appreciate great music and want to pay a fair price to support their favourite artists.

FFM offers us guaranteed traceability of unlicensed sharing, absolutely identifying the culprit if our artists’ music is leaked or shared.
FFM offers our artists the opportunity reinforce their most loyal fanbase, guaranteeing that every copy of their music has been paid for. No need for stupid DRM restrictions on music, allowing enjoyment without limitations.
FFM offers fans the ability to still enjoy MP3s of their music, with an absolute guarantee and proof of purchase. It removes the possibility for allegations of filesharing or piracy and if questioned they can prove their innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt with the very files they have purchased.

The only people who lose out? Those who don’t value quality music.

We at Revolver are very excited to be rolling out our new Revolver Digital store with Friend for Music as one of the first independent labels on the service. We’re actively increasing the catalogue available via our store on a daily basis so come back soon to find even more great music… With over a thousand releases from hundreds of artists you’re bound to find some music you love.

Latest BPI industry figures highlight the continuing role of digital music

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:56:03 +0000

As you may have seen on Hypebot or NME.com this week, the BPI’s final summary of 2009 music industry figures have been released and it’s ‘a mixed bag.’ The gory details:

Total UK recorded music trade income rises 1.4% overall to £928.8m
Trade revenues from physical formats down 6.1% to £739.9m
Digital income now a fifth of total recorded music revenues – up 47.8% to £188.9m

The main observation: digital sales have offset the losses accrued in physical sales, leaving not a very large margin of growth at all. Forrester Research usually provide their insight into BPI stats and figures, and once again they’re on hand for an expert opinion:

What does this mix report mean for the future? According to Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan, the glass half empty perspective is appropriate. “The UK recorded music market has lost close to 40% of its value since 2003. Though this isn’t necessarily a dead cat bounce, it is going to take a lot more than 1.4% annual growth to turn things around”.

Take all if this with a pinch of salt – especially when you consider alternative viewpoints, such as those expounded upon by The Guardian in late 2009 (around the same time, InformationIsBeautiful highlighted how the New York Times took the MUCH longer view).

Even more interestingly, at the end of last year Synthtopia published a graph comparing recorded music revenue versus live music revenue, based on figures from the BPI and PRS For Music (formerly the MCPS PRS Alliance, who handle all royalties from recorded and live performances). The evidence is clear: recorded music is now overshadowed by the vast amounts of money potentially available through the live sector – but nurturing and developing recorded music is still crucial for all artists who are seriously considering a career in music.

Looking to the future, it remains true that digital music continues to be the mainstay of many artists’ revenues. Whilst we at Revolver still love our albums, they’re incredibly inefficient from a cost perspective to manufacture, to store, to distribute… And while there are still some painfully obvious problems with the digital music industry as a whole, you cannot afford to ignore it.

Putting your best foot forward is incredibly important – making sure you have your material in pristine quality available on the digital stores to complement touring, gigs, any promotion you have coming up… Today, you must consider your digital music as on par with a vinyl or CD release. And, when it comes to finding someone to help get your music onto iTunes, 7Digital, Spotify et al, Revolver might be able to help you with that. Get in touch to find out more.

New year, new stores, new artists

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:14:39 +0000

Following on from our Gogoyoko deal earlier this year, we’re now pushing ahead with new agreements with MediaNet (suppliers to many of the highstreet digital stores and Tesco Digital, amongst others), HDTracks (a specialist vendor with a heavy focus on High Definition audio and 24bit/96kHz high resolution recordings) and LoudTrax – a rock and metal specialist. (Their list of subgenres is incredible!)We’re also working on a few more which we’d like to keep under our hat for the minute, but rest assured they’re very interesting.

We’re also happy to announce that we’ve signed several new artists, as well as welcome back an existing artist. Justin Willis has just released his second album, The Butterfly Zoo, which was released last weekend with a companion album launch at the JB’s venue over in Dudley. We’re also very happy to announce new releases from Stoke-based Operation Error (their debut album, A Sign of Faith, is available now) and the Portugese group Blasted Mechanism (their latest album, Mind at Large, is also available to buy right now).

Most exciting of all, we’ve been working with The Superions – brainchild of The B52s member Fred Schneider and co. – and their eponymous debut EP is also available to download. Featuring the hit single ‘Who Threw That Ham At Me’ (check out the video on the Revolver Records front page!) the Superions have gone down a storm in the States. (Have you got Superions fever? Tell us!)

In the meantime, we’re just doing what we do best – supporting new artists, answering any questions they have and continuing to offer some of the best value digital distribution services around. Get in touch with us to find out more.

New single available now from Justin Willis

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:49:33 +0000

After the success of Justin’s debut album ‘Silvermoon’, Revolver’s pleased to present his follow-up single, Nothing Better – available right now on iTunes. The title track is a radio-friendly, vocal led track with engaging hooks culminating in a wonderfully grungy chorus. The B side, ‘No Sympathy’, is a much harder affair – smashed guitars in a more traditional rock style accompanying Justin’s emphatic vocals.

Garnering excellent reviews from all who’ve heard them, these two tracks are not to be missed if you’re a fan of Justin’s work. Why not gift a track to a friend for Christmas?

Have digital downloads democratised the music industry?

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:04:24 +0000

Once upon a time, the major labels controlled the charts absolutely with an iron fist. Radio stations only playlisted tracks from major labels, payola was rife and pluggers knew the station controllers on a first name basis, they were in their offices so frequently.

Today, the major labels control the charts, but independence is slowly making itself felt. Radio stations still really only playlist tracks from major labels, but even with the passing of John Peen there are still some notable torchbearers for new, fresh and independent music (think Zane Lowe et al). Payola? Well, it’s still probably there to an extent, but everybody’s pursestrings have been tightened for a whle now. Pluggers still do the rounds but more artists are embracing the music machine and arranging their own marketing and promotion with the same people.

But what’s changed in twenty years?

To start with, ‘Specialist’ stations like Kerrang Radio (playlisted in the AM and daytime, DJ-chosen in the evenings) are still going strong, and the rise and rise of the Internet has given birth to scores of high-quality, free online radio stations. Online retail, driven by the likes of iTunes, Play, Amazon, Tesco, 7Digital and HMV, continues to take market share (almost 100% of UK single sales are digital, along with a good dollop of albums).

But yet, until this year, the one remaining safe haven for the pop industry – the Christmas Number 1 – had remained unspoilt (for the major labels) since 1998, when the Spice Girls were (within 5,000 sales) almost usurped by Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls. From then onward with little exception, we witnessed manufactured pop song after manufactured pop song, with the SyCo Pop Factory doing its bit for novelty singles and two-week ‘hits’ (up to #1 in the first week of sales, then falling down past #40 within a month). But in November 2009, Jon Morter took the pulse of the music-loving nation and spearheaded an online campaign – to push Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name to the Christmas Number 1 spot. This campaign proved marvellously successful, with RATM easily making the Number 1 spot over Joe X-Factor McElderry’s (cover) single by a margin of more than 50,000 sales.

This grassroots fan campaign, coordinated through Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth, also set a couple of remarkable precedents:

Killing In The Name is the first UK Number 1 achieved purely from online sales
the track also achieved the biggest download sales total in a first week ever in the UK charts (more than 500,000 by the cutoff point for that week’s chart’s sales)

How’s that for democracy in action? The pop machine, if only for a week, had a massive spanner thrown in the works. Not only did the X Factor content fail to secure a Number 1 position for its winner, a first since the trend began in 2005, it showed just how much can be done by a galvanised group of passionate fans to promote and support great music (even if it’s twelve years old!) when the means to do so are already in place. Without digital downloads of the track being available, this would have never been achievable.

If your faith in the industry has been shaken over the past few years, with the overall contraction of the market and smaller revenues, hopefully this should restore some faith for you. Getting your music up online on the major hitters is now easier than ever before, and it’s one of the core services we take pride in offering to quality artists. Additional services, like promotion, plugging and tour management, are increasingly accessible to independent artists. There’s still no such thing as a free lunch, but even on a meagre budget, a surprising amount can be organised and put into action.

Through all of this, the single most important aspect of any musician’s career is the fanbase. Today, it’s far simpler than ever before to directly connect with your fans. RATM4Xmas should have proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt, first with Morton ramping up his campaign through Facebook and then with Tom Morello tweeting directly from his Blackberry to the campaign’s supporters (and showing that support to the campaign right to the happy end). Negative comments from Cowell and McElderry were forwarded by campaign supporters and industry publications (NME took delight in reporting that McElderry, upon finally hearing the Rage track for the first time, denounced it as ‘dreadful’). Rival fans duked it out in cyberspace, sales figures and rumours were swapped and spread about and – in the meantime – a large amount of money (over £65,000) was raised for charity by the RATM4Xmas fans.

Upon winning, RATM confirmed that they would donate the majority of their earnings from sales to charity, and also hold a free concert in the UK in 2010 to say thank you – the ultimate payoff for the campaign’s supporters. Would any of this – could any of this – have ever happened before now, before the rise of social networking and all the other simple means of engaging with people en masse? Probably not, not even in the 90s. The web had very little to offer in terms of small-scale communication during the first few years of the 21st century, but instant messengers, MySpace, Friendster and others began an upward trend which has not slowed since.

But irrespective of how well people could have communicated or not – everybody managed with email and texting before AIM and MSN took hold – in the 90s, there was simply a lack of legal digital music venues available for customers. Napster was still reigning supreme, downloading was on the rise and habits were changing incredibly quickly. Portable music players were still very much a novelty.

Today? Digital sales are on an equal footing with the good old polycarbonate CD single. In fact, they have an edge – a band can record a single, have it professionally mastered, given to a record label or digital distributor and available for sale within a month, if they’re in enough of a hurry. A fe years ago, the Official Charts Company granted full permission to digital music to be included in the Top 40, provided that the shops selling the tracks pass on a de minimus “Dealer Price” to the label above a threshold which is set out in the OCC Rulebook. Currently, the Dealer Price is 40p per track for digital singles; this is where some of the confusion arose around the 29p Amazon deal during the RATM4Xmas campaign (the Dealer Price is not the retail price, showing that Amazon was selling this track, and the X Factor track, as a massive loss leader… Shrewd marketing from Amazon as always).

Thanks to some visionary organisations and small groups of intensely creative people, all of the tools an artist needs to be heard are available and free to use – with a small amount of money spent, a web site can be put up, MP3s shared, social networking profiles used to chat directly with fans. Today you can find Radio DJs on national stations busy on Twitter and Facebook, talking directly with listeners and bands before, during and after shows, and bands talking to their fanbases directly, bypassing The Label. At every step, it’s more engaging. Given the right push, and enough support, almost anything can be achieved.

We at Revolver like to think we offer that step up many bands need to find their feet online, navigating the complex maze that is international digital music retail. We handle the paperwork, the legalities and the massive amount of different requirements every digital music store insists upon… And with that headache out of the way, artists can set about doing what they actually love to do (writing music, playing gigs and building their fanbase) in the knowledge that we’re handling the tricky stuff for them.

It’s still a two way street, whatever the circumstances – if you have a fanbase, provided you connect with them and give them a good enough reason to support and promote your work, what you can achieve with very little promotion and marketing (compared to splashy, big budget campaigns) is nothing short of astounding. So next time you’re having doubts, just remember: the music industry’s not dead, it’s just sleeping. Time to help wake it up!

Headline image credit: “Wrecking Ball” by Paulie Brierley, via http://ragefactor.co.uk/#/propaganda/.

The Industry Insider: What’s in an ISRC?

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:36:25 +0000

Although the latest BPI statistics show that an all-time record of 98.6% of all UK single sales were digital (over 117 million!), the digital world has not fully divorced itself from its history in the real world. If you’re an artist selling your music online, you still need the essentials - EAN13 barcode, catalogue number and (most importantly) an ISRC for each track, or you simply cannot have your tracks on any of the major online stores. (As a label with 30 years’ operating experience and almost a thousand albums under our belt, this irony’s not lost on us!)

However, unless you work with them on a daily basis, ISRCs can look confusing. How are they made up? What do they mean - and what purpose do they serve? In the first of our Industry Insider articles, Revolver explains it all – read on to find out.

ISRCs, or International Standard Recording Codes, are actually defined as a worldwide standard as ISO 3901. Think of them like the music industry’s version of the ISBN system. There’s several mandatory elements, and a five character ‘free text’ area which the label can define.

Here’s a sample ISRC: GB-AB3-09-429-01

… and here’s what it means:

Country code (as per the two-digit ISO country codes; for the UK, it’s GB)
Three letter alphanumeric label code (e.g. AB3)
Year of release (two digits, e.g. 09)
Five characters which the original label defines. Some labels have complex ways of generating the last five digits, but we prefer to use the last three digits of the release’s catalogue number, and the number of the track in question (e.g. 42901)

ISRCs are unique to each track and can’t be reused. Occasionally clashes occur for whatever reason, and when they do you must reassign a new ISRC. The code’s used as a unique tracking device for helping to calculate royalties, tracking radio play and keeping tabs on if a track is included in a compilation or rereleased on another format (for example, released digitally, then later released on CD and 7″). If a track is remixed, it must have a new ISRC assigned to it – likewise, if the track length changes (for example, if a track’s made into a radio edit) then it must also receive a new ISRC. You can imagine how quickly some releases acquire lots of ISRCs!

You might sometimes see ISRCs written with hyphens. This is purely for readability – some online retailers like iTunes won’t accept them if they have hyphens in (the release will simply fail validation if they’re left in) but this isn’t the same for everyone.

Keeping a detailed list of all relevant metadata is one of the most crucial aspects of digital distribution as you manage catalogue across all the many hundreds of online stores, but if you’re a Revolver Digital artist, we handle all that tricky stuff – leaving you to focus on making music. If you’d like to find out more, browse through the rest of our site or get in touch with us.

Image credit: 37Hz on Flickr.

Ok, ok, ok…

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:17:06 +0000

… We know. We’re too good to you people. “What,” we can hear you say, ‘Revolver Digital gives me free barcodes AND Free ISRCs AND doesn’t charge me to upload my music to iTunes?” Yep, you got it. We don’t charge for any of that good stuff.

If you went elsewhere, you might be out of pocket to the tune of almost £100 before you even got started if you requested those features with another company. Plus, how do you know that they won’t just take your money and run? Some companies even charge a yearly fee just for “storage and maintenance”, even if (heaven forbid) you didn’t sell anything – we think this is outrageous, and it’s why there’s no up front charges for any of our services.

Plus, with us… Well, we’re a familiar face! We’ve released hundreds (literally) of albums from hundreds of artists over the past few decades – we’re an established company in a sea of one-man bedroom labels, and we have the knowledge and experience to back it up. Some other companies are anonymous and faceless – at Revolver, we like to think that we are one big family, artists and label working together for mutual benefit. You can pick up the phone and call us – you can send us an email and we’ll reply personally, and that’s a promise. Some companies will charge you once for putting one EP onto iTunes – and then they’ll charge you AGAIN if you want to make any changes or upload more music! We will never do that, because we just don’t think it’s right.

Having forty years of experience under our belts as a successful label and business, we know just how tough it can be for artists sometimes. We want to nurture and foster talent and creativity by helping artists become more successful – charging fees up front just to put your music online is competely against the grain for us, and we think it’s horrible.

So why do we run Revolver Digital so differently from other companies? Well, being part of a legendary, thoroughbred indie label means we think a little differently from the rest of the herd. We understand that artists and bands don’t always have a stable cashflow – the last thing you want is money disappearing from your bank account when you don’t have enough to pay the bills. That’s why we decided that the fairest thing for artists was to remove the barriers – so we don’t charge for you to come on board with Revolver Digital, and our core service is 100% free to sign up to.

If you’d like to learn more about what makes us the best music company to work with – and the best way to get your music up online and start selling it to the world – just get in touch with us.

Namaste,
Revolver x

Twelve tips for a more successful mailshot

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:29:23 +0000

Time and time again, we receive boxes upon boxes of demos at Revolver Towers. A few of them are good, some not so much – but a lot of them are completely irrelevant, which makes us sad.

‘Why is this?’ you say. ‘How come you don’t listen to all the demos you receive?’ Well, for a couple of reasons… First: indie labels usually don’t have many staff members. Second: when we do get time to listen to some demos, it’s usually not much (twenty minutes here, ten minutes there)… Most demo appraisal happens in small bursts, just so we can work through the demo mountain a little bit!

We’re continually surprised at how we receive stuff which is clearly inappropriate for the angle of our labels… We sometimes receive Country & Western! In itself, C&W isn’t a bad thing, but (to be brutally honest) Revolver Records is probably not going to take much of an interest in this genre. This raises a few interesting points for artists on the prowl for label interest, and hopefully the following tips will help you save money and increase your effectiveness if you’re sending out demos.

So, here are twelve things (ten + two bonuses! you lucky people) to consider when putting together your demos.

OPTIMISM: call it your promo, not your demo! Make it sound as good as it possibly can (both when talking about it and the actual sound quality of the music) – “quick GarageBand recordings” or “rough demos with my laptop microphone” just won’t cut it if you’re serious on getting labels interested in listening to your songs more than once.
RELEVANCE: don’t send your music to a label which is never going to be interested. Miracles can happen, but they most likely won’t for you. Sending Hip-Hop to a Rock label, or Grindcore to a House label, will get you nowhere fast.
DON’T DUPLICATE: don’t send people the same thing twice! Revolver Towers has (for over 30 years) also been where Heavy Metal Records and Black Records call home. We sometimes get two, three or even four copies of a demo from bands who have clearly just scraped all of our labels’ details from a record label listings web site, printed labels off and stuck them onto envelopes.If two labels have the same address, it’s going to most likely be one desk (and if you’re unlucky, one bin too). Plus it’s a waste of your time and money!
THINK LIKE A LAZY LISTENER: if you’re sending out music via email, upload clips - don’t attach to emails. Make it as easy as possible for the recipient to listen without having to jump through hoops, as you’ll probably only get 30-45 seconds to impress whoever’s listening.Don’t ever attach MP3s to an email (or several emails), it just clogs up inboxes and music often doesn’t get listened to.
DON’T NAG: more is not better! If you’ve sent your music over and the recipient has acknowledged receipt, a polite email after a couple of weeks is fine to ask if they’ve had a chance to listen to your tracks. If they like it, they will reply. Don’t constantly email asking for feedback – and similarly, once you’ve submitted your material don’t ring the label every other day! Getting your music heard may be your top priority, but for most record labels keeping the lights on and their current artists happy are far more pressing concerns.Find the happy medium – only call people if they explicitly say you can, and they give you their contact details. The author speaks from experience; a band member ringing your personal mobile number (which, mysteriously, was never even given to him) on weekends to ask for feedback is severely unappreciated.
START SMALL, THINK BIG: split your promotion into rounds. Focus on the labels who you think you’ll have the most luck with, and devote more time and resources to luring them into your product. If you have no joy from the first round of PR, gradually widen your parameters and include more labels in your campaign.
MUSIC SANDWICH: mmm, delicious music. The best way to grab someone’s attention is to make it appealing to them (first visually, then musically). You could have the best demo EP in the world, but if it looks boring there will be no desire on the part of the guy at the music label to listen to it. Think of your music like the ingredients of a tasty sarnie: your onesheet/bio is the bread, the press shots/posters/stickers are the ham and chicken filling, and your music is the butter which glues everything together. (Oh, and the eye-catching packaging is the paper wrapper!) The best demos have a well made presskit along with the EP in a jewel case and full colour artwork… It’s the musical equivalent of presenting someone with a readymade sandwich, versus handing them a carrier bag (with the unprepared ingredients to make that tasty sandwich in it).While doing this costs more than just burning a CDR, printing off a one-page bio from Word in Times New Roman and stuffing it into a plain jiffy bag, it can make the difference between someone passing it over or that same someone picking it up, opening it and taking a listen. Also, if you have to budget more carefully, you can only afford to send out fewer copies – so it also helps you separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of potential record labels. (See tip 6)
TAKE THE INITIATIVE: don’t wait for a label to come along and do everything for you. Book yourself gigs, get touring, build up your repertoire. If you have some material which you think will be popular, maybe even self-finance an EP, record at local studios and sell it through an independent retailer / at gigs / through your own web site. This is infinitely easier to do today than it was even five years ago. Record labels *love* bands that have a proven track record and have shown that they can go and drum up some interest on their own, even before seeking label interest. Times have changed; where ten years ago some bands might be signed off the back of a demo EP, this happens less and less. A mark of maturity for a band would be to seek label support once they’ve taken these first steps themselves – the label can give them that boost which they need to take their music to the next level.
PATIENCE vs. PRAGMATISM: don’t lose heart, but know when to cut your losses. Sometimes, your demo may be halfway up in a pile of demos which fills a cardboard box – your demo might sit unopened for several months before saying hello to the CD player. If you’ve heard nothing back after a year, it’s either sitting at the bottom of another pile of demos, or it’s been passed over. Maybe try again, or send in an email to see if the music was ever listened to. If your packaging wasn’t the usual brown jiffy bag (or had some crazy designs on it), DESCRIBE the packaging! It might inspire whoever reads your email to go looking for it.
RETURN TO SENDER: just because a label doesn’t like your music doesn’t mean they still have to keep it. Some artists and bands send out demos with prepaid envelopes inside – although this costs money up front, it’s a great idea if you want to recycle some of your demos to send to other labels. If a label listens to your demo and doesn’t like it, it costs them nothing at all to return it, and once you’ve got it back you can send it out again. It beats having to put together another presskit and demo from your stockpile – and what’s not to like about that?
PRUNE: keep your mailshots organised. if you receive replies back from labels (or even your demo, if you included a prepaid envelope), don’t send it to them again when you do your next mailout. Be organised and keep a record of who you’ve sent copies to and you will save time and money in the long run (plus, it’s not hard to do with a simple mail merge in Word – or even just a list of contacts with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ next to them).
BEST FOOT FORWARD: get everything synchronised. If you have a web site, a MySpace page, a Facebook Page… Link to every page on each one. If you don’t have a web site, get one! And pick a good domain name. Set up email addresses for the band members on your domain name (it looks that little bit more professional emailing from ’stu@mygreatband.co.uk’ as opposed to ’stu_loves_ponies_1987@hotmail.co.uk’). Spellcheck all your material! If you have an EPK, put it on your web site and link to it on your other social networking pages / web pages. Photos from fans taken at gigs, official press shots, audio clips, bios… All of those should be on your web site from day one. Maybe take it a little further, get some friends together and make a weird and wonderful music video for one of your tracks! It’s just another thing that can help set you apart from all the other bands out there, and if it’s entertaining you might just grab the attention of someone who’s interesting in taking your music further. (It’s often coincidence and random luck which yields most success, so you never know…)

Hopefully some of these tips will help you on your quest to rockband superstardom. Do you agree or disagree with any of the suggestions made above? Have you already tried any of them? Let us know how you got on!

Revolver Digital webhost move complete

Christopher (Revolver Digital Team) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 03:16:33 +0000

Hopefully you won’t have noticed (because our resident codemonkey and geek was so brutally efficient) but the Revolver Digital site has moved webhosts. Things like page load times should be drastically reduced for our visitors – it was getting a little ridiculous before.

If you have any problems with the web site in the next 48 hours, please let us know.