Wampus Multimedia

Who Needs a Record Label?

2013-05-09T11:19:26Z

There has never been a better time than now to be an independent artist. More easily and efficiently than ever, you can build a digital recording studio in your home, connect directly with fans through social media, and distribute your wares around the world through artist-friendly companies like CD Baby and Tunecore. It’s a DIY world, right? Thanks to powerful, affordable technology, you can cover the bases — from creation to marketing to distribution to retail — without anyone’s permission, entirely on your own.

So who needs a record label?

The short answer is that nobody needs a record label. The days when only a record label could introduce and expose an artist to the public are gone. If you can accomplish everything a label can — produce records, design packaging and promotions, create marketing plans, build relationships with writers, convince broadcasters to air your music, track your sales, and exploit licensing opportunities — then you essentially are a record label. You are an artist who happens to own and operate a label business.

The long answer depends on your goals as an artist. Do you want to run a label business? Do you have the knowledge and experience to run one? Are you comfortable diverting a large share of your time from creative to business activities? If so, setting up and running a label could be a good fit for you.

Either way, you need a creative team.

Maybe it’s a carefully chosen group of friends and acquaintances. Maybe it’s an established record label that understands your music and career goals. Either way, you have to identify your needs and meet them.

Putting Together a Creative Team

Whether you hire freelance help, sign to a label, or handle everything internally, you need to address five areas to realize your commercial potential as an independent artist.

1) Production. Maybe you’ve built your own recording studio, maybe you book time at a commercial facility. In any case, take the time to learn how your vision translates from performance to recorded audio. The studio can be an integral part of the artistic process, as intrinsic to your sound as your voice, guitar, or piano. Work with an experienced engineer who can help you unlock the possibilities in mixing and mastering your music.

2) Manufacturing. Some disc manufacturers push quality, others price. Some have quick turnarounds, some don’t. Do your homework and make sure you get the results you need and expect. Have someone on your team monitor manufacturing at every stage of the process, and ensure quality is high. Your music is an extension of you, and you only get one chance to make a first impression.

3) Distribution. There is no reason your music shouldn’t be available for sale to anyone with an internet connection. Study your options and select a distribution partner who guarantees easy access to your music around the globe. Know what additional services they offer, too, such as song publishing administration and sync licensing. Designate a team member to track sales and pay the team on a regular basis.

4) Marketing. Marketing is the public expression of your brand and identity. If it’s engaging, it stands to reason you probably are, too. Great marketing can be as artful as the product it endorses. Don’t delegate it without your involvement — identify the right person and work closely with them. Every message that goes out about you and your music is a reflection of who you are.

5) Media. Use social media — Facebook, Twitter, Google+ — to engage and grow your existing fanbase. Use traditional media — magazines, web sites, radio — to find new fans. When you communicate in a compelling way, people pay attention. Work with your team to come up with fresh content for your audience.

* * *

You’ve heard the adage: if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. To succeed as an independent artist, build a versatile team or partner with an established group who can guide and assist you. Don’t leave every last responsibility to yourself, or assume everything will work out on its own. Know exactly what you need to do. Have a plan. Cover the bases.

Surround yourself with talented, committed people who are emotionally invested in your art — and see where it takes you.

Resources

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The Tyranny of Music Genres

2013-04-26T12:28:46Z

As a recording or performing artist, you find yourself answering a familiar question: “What kind of music do you play?”

How do you answer?

Maybe you have a stock reply — “rock,” “folk,” or “pop.” Or maybe you try to be a little more descriptive — “modern rock,” “folk rock,” or “indie pop.” Or maybe you try to connect more directly with the person — “Pearl Jam-style rock,” “Barenaked Ladies-type stuff,” or “a Sufjan Stevens sort of thing.” These generalizations categorize what you do, make it digestible for someone else, give them an entry point. But they don’t reveal much about you.

Is that what you want?

Why Music Genres Exist

Music genres exist to differentiate, for practical purposes, between “styles.” They are helpful to retailers wanting to separate classical from jazz, or country from rock. They are useful to marketers concerned with “relatability.” They do not, technically speaking, describe anything important about your music. They simply pigeonhole specific pieces of music with generalized tags, removing the identifiable details for the sake of the whole.

If you’re an original artist, music genres present a problem for you.

Sure, a music scene built around a genre might help you to “fit in” or reach a certain type of fan. But your true challenge as an original artist is to demonstrate the uniqueness of your work. The ways in which your work resembles that of others do not distinguish you. The characteristics that make you “accessible” are actually your most unremarkable.

Once you make a first impression, the categorization of your music actually works against you.

As an original artist, you need to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Defeating Music Genres

Let’s try this again. You’re asked the question: “What kind of music do you play?”

How do you answer?

Try this: “I play original music. It might remind you of other things you’ve heard, it might not. That’s up to you, not me. I hope you like it, as I’m not trying to trick you into liking it by giving it a ham-fisted resemblance to the Dave Matthews Band. I’m just doing what I do.”

See? Easy. It’s not a genre. It’s you.

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Are You Serious About Your Creative Work?

2013-04-10T11:03:15Z

Seriously. Do you give your best to your art?

Maybe you do creative work for yourself, maybe you do it for others. Maybe it’s a mix of the two. In any case, whatever you’re up to, if you’re not serious about it, it probably won’t amount to a hill of beans.

Sound a bit harsh?

Yes, it is. Go ahead, test it yourself. See if you end up playing Nickelback covers at weddings, or scribbling half-baked sonnets after an awesome night of PBRs. See if you find yourself hanging out at Starbucks talking to no one in particular about the novel you haven’t started yet.

Not the prettiest sight.

But there’s hope.

“Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.” –Wynton Marsalis

That’s right, being “serious” doesn’t mean being sullen or humorless. It means seeking to prioritize, to nurture. When you are serious about your creative work, you place it before other things. You tend to it.

You give it your best and it grows. And that’s fun.

Maybe you’re serious about your regular job, and think of your art as an escape. Maybe your creative work serves an an outlet for your persistent thoughts or bottled-up emotions. Maybe it’s a refuge from the day-to-day. But if you have something to say, something you haven’t expressed yet, you could be selling your creative work short if you relegate it to the humble purpose of blowing off steam — sandwiched between days spent, it so happens, doing work that has little or nothing to do with your art.

Do you want to have fun or not?

Then get serious.

Getting Serious with a Creative Plan

You’re busy, you say? Well, you had time last night to watch back-to-back reruns of How I Met Your Mother, so you probably have a few minutes to come up with a creative plan. A few post-it notes for your workspace:

Post-it #1: Respect the clock. Use your time wisely.

Post-it #2: Banish rationalization. You always have a moment for something important.

Post-it #3: If it’s not fun, you’re doing it wrong. Your playful self is your creative self.

Set a schedule. Stick to it. You don’t need to produce something brilliant or enduring every Thursday night at 8:00. You don’t really need to produce anything at all. You just need to be there, thinking and working and seeing the possibilities. As you recognize those possibilities, they will return to you again and again to continue the conversation. You’ll come to take them seriously.

And the more serious you get, the more fun you’ll have.

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Stop Waiting for Creative Inspiration

2013-03-27T17:45:32Z

Of course it happens to you. It happens to everyone. You want to write, you want to make music… but you’re just not feeling it. Creative inspiration, it seems, has forsaken you and your prodigious talent. It has vacated the premises. And you have no idea where to find it again.

What can you do? It’s out of your hands.

But that’s not actually true. Your ability to create is always within your control. And that is why it weighs on you like a backpack full of hardbound books. To create something, you have to summon discipline and courage. You have to give yourself exclusively to it for a period of time. And you don’t entirely want to.

No, you want to write “I Am the Walrus” while you sit for 15 minutes in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube. You want to pen A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius while watching a Seinfeld marathon.

But you can’t.

It’s OK — John Lennon and Dave Eggers were a lot like you, just trying, sporadically at times, to put pen to paper.

Prioritize Your Creative Time

Creative inspiration is not a mysterious gift that washes over you. It is a power you hold and wield. To use it, you must accept two things: First, you are not going to create anything by accident. As serendipitous as creativity is, it doesn’t bear fruit without your intellectual and emotional attention. Second, you are not going to create anything by wishing or waiting for it to happen. To produce something, you have to prioritize it ahead of other things – including barbecues, Facebook, and long drives in the countryside.

You have to make it your best friend, at least for a little while. And your best friend gets dibs on your time.

It’s simple: stop waiting for creative inspiration to visit you with a little wand and a handful of pixie dust. Open the door and let it in — and lock the door behind it. Turn off the TV, put your digital devices away, and give your undivided attention to the blank page staring back at you.

And get to work. The results might surprise you.

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Finding Your Natural Audience

2013-03-16T13:38:22Z

Songwriters, do you know who your natural audience is?

Your songs exist at a point within or outside the commercial mainstream. If they fall in the mainstream, they are similar to other songs, and are most likely to be embraced by a pop audience. If they hang out on the fringes, they are discernible from other songs, and are most likely to be noticed by a niche audience. The pop audience is larger and more accepting, the niche audience smaller and more discriminating. Each has its pros and cons.

Pop and niche artists are different animals:

Pop: Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, Kelly Clarkson, T-Pain, Gwen Stefani, Chris Brown.

Niche: Nick Cave, Jonathan Richman, Polly Jean Harvey, Howe Gelb, Daniel Johnston, Robert Pollard.

You’re more likely to hear Taylor Swift at the shopping mall than you are Howe Gelb. Why? Swift sings of romantic disappointment and packages it for adolescent girls, who frequent malls in droves. Gelb sings about more arcane things, which are less relatable to shoppers. At the mall, Swift is going platinum while Gelb is going quietly. But Gelb, a rough-hewn, outsider songwriter in the Neil Young vein, is known to a certain audience, and has been known to that audience since before Swift was born.

Each of these songwriters has enthusiastic fans. But their audiences are as different as Diet Coke and desert dust.

The Artist-Audience Mirror

“I’ll be your mirror,
reflect what you are,
in case you don’t know.”

-The Velvet Underground

An audience responds to a song when they identify with it. Something about the song — style, sound, point of view — resonates in them, rings a bell, causes them to remember and replay it. When an audience responds to your song, they are basically mirroring you, identifying you as one of them. They are seeing things as you do, and valuing your song as you do.

You are giving voice to something the audience already feels and knows.

And that can’t be faked — you either reflect the audience or you don’t. If you reflect the audience, your songs might, if you’re lucky, play as background for some of their thoughts and dreams.

It might look like it’s just you in the mirror. But your natural audience is there, too.

Connecting with Your Natural Audience

Artists sometimes try to reach out to everyone with their marketing. It makes sense at first — why limit yourself, after all, to engaging a particular group? Why not introduce yourself to sparkly tweens and college professors and stockbrokers and pizza delivery guys all at once? It’s better to have “more balls in the drum,” right? Wrong. Your music career is not the lottery. The less you focus on a particular segment of your audience, the less those people feel you’re talking to them, and the less they identify with you and your music. When you try to talk to everyone, you’re actually not speaking directly to anyone.

To connect with your natural audience, set aside your preconceived notions and think for a moment about who you are. Ask yourself: What do I write about? Who is interested in those things? Who are my favorite artists, and which artists do people think I sound like? Who listens to those artists? The answers to those questions will produce a surprisingly accurate sketch of your ideal fan.

That person is living in your town, in the next town over, and on the web. Find them and introduce yourself. And then find their friends.

For more on your natural audience, read “Why Originality Matters” (at Wampus | at Music Think Tank).

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Warming Up Your Digital Mixes

2013-03-20T14:15:04Z

So you’ve just recorded and mixed your latest song digitally in Logic or ProTools, and gotten every little detail just the way you want it. But something, you decide, is “missing” from your mix. And it’s not just that — something actually seems to be wrong with it. Your ears detect it, and complain to you in a language you vaguely understand, but the exact, technical nature of the problem eludes you.

It’s the bane of digital recording.

Despite the obvious virtues of digital audio — pristine fidelity, ease of tracking, automated mixing — the modern studio can produce music that sounds sterile and cold, and fail at the most basic task of record-making: pleasing the human ear. It doesn’t matter how stunning the frequency response is, in other words, if it sounds bad. This is often bemoaned as the loss of “analog warmth.”

Digital recording is a lot like point-and-shoot digital photography. What you hear (or see) is essentially what you get. But analog? It’s more like an impressionist painting, full of rich color and blurred edges.

This is why museums hang more paintings than snapshots.

Making digital work for you

First, no amount of sweet sound descending like choirs of angels to your rig will alter the unforgiving nature of digital audio. Your digital studio will reproduce music just as it receives it, and that includes spiky transients and other unmusical sounds. Your job is to take the signal you capture and make it pleasing to the ear.

Second, it is the operator of the equipment, and not the equipment itself, that produces the magic in a mix.

In the Wampus studio we’ve been checking out two tape-emulation plugins — Kramer Master Tape and Slate Digital Virtual Tape Machines. As their names suggest, they infuse digital audio with a semblance of analog warmth and harmonics. They transform harsh, matter-of-fact bursts of sound into rich, shimmering tones. The Kramer is especially impressive on individual tracks, with a creamy tape delay that sounds as smooth as butter. The Slate Digital excels on the master channel, printing sparkling sonics to 1/2-inch, 2-track “tape” at 30 inches per second. Either plugin can be inserted on individual tracks or on the master, in any number of instances. How you use them is up to you.

You’ll dial up these excellent plugins to play around with bias, tape speed, saturation, wow and flutter, and tape noise. But you’ll keep them for the transparency and the harmonics. And the warmth.

Use them on your next project at Wampus.

(Wampus is not affiliated with Kramer, Slate Digital, or any other manufacturer.)

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Why Originality Matters

2013-03-16T13:41:20Z

If you’re a musician, you probably get asked whether you do original songs or covers. And as unassuming as that question sounds, it’s actually a hornet’s nest buzzing with speculation on your intent, ambition, and talent. Do you have your own thoughts? Do you have something engaging and identifiable to say? Or do you just echo the ideas of other writers?

Are you an artist or a mimic?

Originality — the quality of being new, fresh, inventive, or novel — is the difference between a piano player and a player piano. It is the distinction between a painting on canvas and a print from the museum gift shop.

It is the thing that can’t be copied.

No doubt there are more covers of Nirvana‘s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” than there are ukulele bands in the world to attempt them. Yet it’s the original version of the song people love most.

Granted, most artists begin their careers by emulating others. But then they grow beyond those constraints. In time they render their work as distinctively as Nature renders a strand of DNA.

Originality and identity

Artists often believe their work is original because of something they do. Or because of the way they do it. But nothing an artist does is as distinctive as who they are. Originality isn’t developed as much as it is discovered. Like any coming of age, the process of finding one’s creative voice is a journey.

The novelist Joseph Heller glimpsed the insanity of war in a way that was all his own. William Faulkner drew a map in his mind that only he could navigate. Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a voice that was recognizable without attribution. These writers were being who they were — and “bottling” that originality in their work.

You can hear the same thing in the songs of artists like Aux.78 and Kowtow Popof.

The ancient Greeks said, “know thyself.” When you do, you know what makes your work unique. And your originality shows.

Blending in vs. standing out

You might think, “Nothing I hear on the radio is original. Why would I want to write anything that is?” And if your goal is to blend in with the crowd, then you might have a point. Your chances of writing accessible songs are greater if you keep your ideas “universal” (songwriting code for “clichéd”) than if you set them apart. But cloning the work of other songwriters will also make you easy to forget. Unless you’re ready and willing to do battle with an army of soundalikes — and it’s a big army — you’re better off sticking to your own territory, with your own original style and point of view.

The world doesn’t need you to be a second-rate somebody else.

It needs you to be the writer no one else can be.

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DIY: Echoes of the Echoplex

2013-03-16T13:42:55Z

In 1982, I bought a used Maestro Echoplex, old and worn and scarcely functional, at a little music shop in Fairfax, Virginia. The store carried as much used stuff as new, and I paid all of $25 for this battered, little black box displayed under a glass counter. My friend assured me: “You have to get this, trust me.” I didn’t know then what I was going to do with it, but I was pretty sure that I had to buy it before somebody else did.

I spirited the box home, set it up on my bedroom dresser, plugged my Gibson SG into it, and ran the signal to a cassette deck. I hit “record,” held my breath, and struck an open G chord.

You would think I had dropped a grand piano into the middle of the Grand Canyon.

Of course this little sonic wonder was nothing new. The original tube Echoplex, the EP-2, had hit the market in 1961, and had quickly become a recording and live staple. It was followed in the early 1970s by a solid-state unit, the EP-3. Outfitted with a tape cartridge and two tape heads, the Echoplex recorded sound with one head and immediately (or almost immediately) played it back with the second head, producing a delay effect when the two signals were mixed together. The distance between the heads was adjustable, allowing the user to set the length of the delay — that is, the time that elapsed between the performance and its playback.

While the solid-state version of the Echoplex lacked some of the natural depth and shimmer of the tube original, it became intrinsic to the sounds of such guitarists as Jimmy Page, Joe Walsh, Brian May, Neil Young, and Duane Allman.

Subsequent versions contained more features — input meters, tone controls — but never eclipsed the original’s simplicity, character, and fidelity. For a long time, any Echoplex was considered superior to any non-tape-based delay pedal or rack unit.

Want an Echoplex of your own? No worries. If you don’t mind a little wear and tear (they were coveted, remember), you can occasionally grab one that looks like it’s been through a meat grinder for a thousand bucks or so on eBay.

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Kowtow Popof: Tastes Like Armageddon

2013-03-16T13:44:07Z

The first CD Wampus ever released, Songs from the Pointless Forest, was the debut of Rockville, Maryland-based singer-songwriter Kowtow Popof. A veteran of Washington, D.C. mainstays The Senses Bureau and Bellyland, Kowtow liked Gary Numan and Genesis and Cat Stevens, and trafficked in an acoustic-electronic mix framed by a keen observational eye. Shot through with allusion, Songs introduced a contrarian voice on the pop fringe.

And things have only gotten better since.

Today Kowtow rolls out Tastes Like Armageddon, his fifth self-produced album for Wampus since Songs. And like Songs, it takes us on a ride through a world of emotional connection and detachment, pondering life’s ups and downs and mysteries in an insidiously catchy way.

Tastes Like Armageddon is the latest chapter in a deeply involving story, obscure and cryptic and fraught with appeal.

Get more of the story.

Buy at Amazon | CD Baby | iTunes

Official site

Kowtow Popof – Ataraxis (I Brake for Squirrels)

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The Artist Compensation Storm

2013-03-16T13:46:08Z

As sure as dark clouds gather in hurricane season, a storm is brewing around artist compensation. Art and technology are at odds. However, it wasn’t always that way.

From the advent of cassette multitracks in the ’80s, to the arrival of digital multitracks in the ’90s, to the maturation of digital audio workstations in the ’00s, affordable, cutting-edge technology enabled recording artists to seize the means of production. The rise of the internet enabled them to marshal the means of distribution. Without those home studios, without a free internet, artists would still be trying to catch the ear of some well-connected impresario who could foot the bill for commercial studio time and old-media publicity. It’s a plain fact: thanks to technology, producing and distributing music is a lot easier than it used to be. And artists have reaped the benefits.

Yet, as an artist, you sense that something is wrong.

Like an impending thunderstorm, you feel it coming. The wind kicks up, the temperature drops, the dogs begin to bark. Something is about to happen, and it might just take a gutter off your house.

Art and technology are about to collide.

Wait, Isn’t “Fairness” a Good Thing?

The latest rumble arrives in the form of the proposed Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA). Led by internet-radio giant Pandora, proponents of the bill want to reduce the compulsory rate at which internet radio broadcasters pay royalties to artists. Supporters are seeking to cap royalties at a level they say supports the growth of internet radio. The “fairness” of that is debatable, but one thing is clear: if the Act becomes law, artists will be paid less, maybe a lot less, than they are now.

That is, a big chunk of the money now marked for artist royalties will be used to subsidize the internet radio business.

There isn’t really a nice way to say that unless your goal is obfuscation. As unpleasant as it sounds, with the major labels in decline, the tech industry is poised and primed to raid the artist-royalty coffers.

As Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery put it recently, “Meet the new boss — worse than the old boss.”

Open the umbrella.

Who Determines Artist Compensation?

In everyday commerce, the seller sets a price the buyer can accept or reject. This practice is commonly known as “willing buyer/willing seller.” Yet artists often find their work being made available digitally without their consent, or being sold at a rate set by others.

Pandora is seeking to prevent artists from setting a price for internet radio licensing. IRFA would make fundamental changes to the Copyright Royalty Board, and make it virtually impossible for artists to challenge new, lower compulsory rates for internet radio play.

Hear that clap of thunder?

In no likely scenario is the internet radio industry going to sacrifice its profits for the well-being of artists. It is going to pursue its own interests as a content distributor, and do everything in its power, naturally, to drive down the price it pays for content.

When It Rains, It Pours

Sure, many artists still see the tech sector as an ally. It’s fun to record songs in GarageBand on your iPad. It’s fun to listen to Pandora, a great platform that serves not only listeners but artists, too. Technological innovation has delivered a new level of freedom to artists, helping them to create more efficiently and to reach more people with their work than ever before.

So what’s the problem, exactly?

The problem is that these brewing storm fronts each have their own momentum. And they have just met at the same point in the sky: artist royalties.

The good news, and don’t let Kim Dotcom tell you differently, is that you own the content you create. Without it, all else — including internet radio — fails.

And that is a flood the tech sector does not want to see.

What should artists do to protect their royalties? Leave it in the comments below.

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