… and maybe I should have been marketing it a bit better.
I mean, the main goal wasn’t really to get as many listeners as possible, to launch a fancy new career or to make enough money to never have to do anything else ever again. They would have been nice to achieve, but they remain distant long-term goals. Especially the last one is, at least for the time being, tagged with the label “will never happen”. And I don’t think my type of music will ever let me achieve that. Not without an extreme amount of work and dedication put into something that for now is a fun hobby and little else.
Oh, and if you want to listen to the music while you read the rest of the post you should probably start doing that now. And perhaps listen a few more times, just because you like it so much. And tell all your friends. I’ll add a Spotify player, but you can also visit my ONErpm Smart Link for other options.
Goals for Digersånger
- Get something distributed. Anything that’s not completely trash. Just get something out there.
- Find out how distribution actually works from using an album that I’m not as emotionally connected to as a test before releasing the songs I really care about.
- Make something fun for a LARP I would be attending.
In that order? Meh, something like that anyway. I guess #2 should be lower than #1 and #3 could be anywhere on the list. So it fits. But the order isn’t as important as the goals. Let’s look at them.
Get something distributed
It’s pretty easy to keep pushing publishing music in front of you. These excuses are the main ones I had to fight, but there are more. However, with a deadline for when they had to be released and fairly basic expectations for how good I wanted my music to sound I found it possible to push past them.
- No, I have to wait until I have at least 10 songs.
- I wanted at least five songs on the album because that seemed like a good number. I ended up doing four.
- I can’t publish yet, the final touches are missing.
- There is quite a lot of stuff I’d like to change with the songs, but it’s too late now and it’s good enough.
- How will I know which distributor is the absolute best one? What if I have some of those problems with distributers everyone seems to have?
- If all distributor have problems, why not simply choose one that seems good and roll with it. If they suck I can distribute my next album with someone else.
- It’s not actually good enough for releasing, it’s not professionally mastered or mixed and I’m just a hack pretending to be one of the cool kids. Why would anyone ever listen to this anyway?
- Whoa whoa there, you checked the levels and LUFS and stuff, right? And it’s for a LARP, the music doesn’t have to be perfect. Also, there’s plenty of worse music getting distributed, this isn’t going to be that bad.
And now I have an album online for anyone to stream. That lowers the entry point for me releasing my next album, which will hopefully be something a bit more representative of the kind of music I normally do.
Find out how release and distribution works
How do I do it? What should I know and consider? What might go wrong? Now I have a lot more knowledge to arm myself with when going into the fray next time. Some of them are:
- Releasing an album takes time; let it.
- About the longest two weeks ever, but it was indeed well worth it. Or more precisely, it will be the next time around. This is because…
- Stuff can go wrong, and that’s OK.
- It’s OK because of the first point. You will have time. A store didn’t accept your cover? You can change it. Some aspect of the music file you sent over wasn’t up to snuff? With a generous deadline you will be able to fix that.
- Have the campaign planned ahead of time.
- Make sure you have everything rearing to go when you start that countdown. There is so much to do and work with that having it all planned out in advance will really help you.
And more. So many more little things. I’ll write something a bit more detailed later, but these points are pretty helpful to begin with. But maybe the most important lessons I learned were that my distributor did their job and they helped me when I needed their help. This gives me the confidence to trust them with my next album as well.
Have some fun
It would not be correct to say that the album was a joke album, but neither was it an album that just anyone would understand the context for. The text is pretty specific for the LARP and I used different music styles for the shanties to mix it up a bit. I did do my best to write good lyrics and arrangements, but I also wanted the songs to by fun and I wanted them to be finished.
Most singing is done in one or two takes. In a few places I work with the vocals a bit more to get them polished, but I figured they would be alright for the most part. Good enough would have to be good enough.
What about the distributor?
Oh, didn’t I write a text about that a while back? One where I looked at some of them and tried to decide which one to use? Whatever happened to that? Did I select a service back then or did it take a bit longer?
Well, it took a bit longer. And forcing myself to choose one was actually another reason to release my album. I figured I could either read reviews and listen to testimonials all day long OR I could choose one that didn’t seem to suck and actually find something out. And for a few reasons I chose to go with ONErpm as my distributor.
- It’s not a subscription and there is no upfront payment
- Them taking a percentage of what I make might hurt the profit margin for me, but I’m just looking to get my music out there right now so I’ll worry about that when I start earning some real money. This model means less hassle for me and that means one less barrier to breach before distribution happens.
- I haven’t seen any horror stories about them
- No doubt there are people who have had a bad experience with ONErpm (anything else would be statistically improbable) but when I’ve seen videos or read articles on the topic it has never been about them specifically. All distributors probably have their issues, but some seem to be more represented than others. Perhaps because they’re not very good companies, perhaps because they have more vocal customers.
- On this note, I did have some issues with my distribution and they helped me resolve them quickly and easily so customer support seems to be OK.
- To a degree, they were the least disqualified
- Some companies seemed risky because they were new and untested, some didn’t offer distribution to as many places and so on. When going through the things I wanted from a distributor ONErpm ticked off most of the boxes I wanted to be ticked off.
- I had to choose a distributor so I might as well choose them
- There were other distributors I considered. Some of them seemed as good. Some of them seemed better at certain things but worse at others. But at the end of the day I will never release anything if I simply don’t take the plunge and choose. And so far the experience is good.
Perhaps one day I’ll choose a different distributor because of some reason or other, but I’ll stick with ONErpm for now.
But didn’t you have another album coming?
Yeah. And it still is. Or, rather, they still are; I have more than one album coming. But this needed to be finished before the LARP and it was pretty good preperation for releasing my next album. I feel more at ease releasing an album now and hopefully that will help in getting it out.
I’ll write a bit more about the upcoming albums as they come closer, but generally speaking I have four albums planned (not specifically in this order):
- An album with remakes of my old music. Stuff I wrote, or started to write, many years ago.
- An album with light synth music. Poppy, synthetic, perhaps 80:sh. Simple stuff.
- An album with noise/distorted/ambient music. The kind of artsy fartsy stuff my GF doesn’t like.
- An album with folksy music. Hummable ditties for the modern age. Or for long ago.
At first I wanted to throw everything together and just release albums with no real theme to them, but the more I think about it the less sense that makes. Some people will like the mindless cotton candy synth stuff while others will enjoy the headache-inducing noise stuff. And grouping similar things together makes a bit more sense. It also allows me to focus on one genre (or area of genres) at once which will hopefully make for a bit more cohesive albums.
What more is there to say?
Not a whole lot right now. Maybe I’ll add a post later on where I talk about the tracks more in depth, but this is not that post. All I really have to say for now is that… Well… It’s pretty fucking amazing to have an album out. It’s not an album for the history books, but it’s a first step.
And that means that the journey has officially begun.