Trying to get the word out to press & radio folks via email which also means needing to update some of the contacts & there’s a few hundred radio stations I need to research as the new semester starts (excellent interning opportunity as always!). So just a bunch of tedious work for the next few days.
Here’s a little video I did with my nephew a few weeks ago:
So it was a nice day today & I was able to take my grandma out to walk (meaning me pushing her a couple miles in a wheelchair (takes about 40 minutes)) several times (4 trips) which lowered my amount of time to work on things. Still makes for a day where I feel like I’m more useful alive than dead & that’s a plus. But I scored a ton of cicada skins today (about a dozen & most days I find three) that I’ve been collecting for a month to try to use for a Remora video when the time comes that I’m ready for it. I have it semi-done in my mind, but that’s a long way from even being shot in reality.
I tried to post some stuff about my comics & the new feature page in a few Facebook groups. I’m curious if it’ll generate any interest or not.
I composed the promo letter for digital press for the new releases & sent it out to some of the folks. I suppose at some point I should upgrade my mailing stuff so I can send all my emails out on the same day. It’s still relatively new (a couple years) that I’m using a software to do it rather than writing a couple thousand by hand which took a solid month.
So on Facebook this guy I’m hypothetically friends with posted a thing saying he didn’t mind buying music off of iTunes if he couldn’t find it on Mediafire. & of course it’s a guy who would call himself a professional musician (which of course really just means he has a girl that is letting him not have a job) that should do what he can to support the industry. Total douchebaggery. I know I shouldn’t be upset about it, but it’s been bugging me for two days. In related news, I got a Google Alert about the Azalia Snail being on a pirate site (hardly news) & one of the hosting sites for file traders now does profit sharing with people who have popular downloads. WTF? In the FAQ it encourages content owners to post albums up on it, but I think we all know that’s not how things work. Sheesh. I’ll give a potential moral gray area with wanting to share music you love for free to your friends (though I disagree), but making money off of other people’s music like that is pretty fucking awful to me. Once again I know it’s not anything I really should be upset about, but here I am complaining.
I’ve been listening to the Silber Radiostream Page today & it makes me realize I really have kind of done something of value with Silber over the years. There’s been a lot of good music that no one would’ve heard otherwise. At the same time it makes me a little confused how Silber hasn’t ever “made it.” Then again I have a friend who’s label is getting a big buzz right now & I was a little jealous about it & then I heard his parents invested $20,000 on the label which was spent on promo & advertising in more or less a single swoop. It’s like that joke, “How do you make a small fortune in music?” “How?” “Start with a large fortune.”
I got contacted by Shazam today about wanting to add some Silber releases to their service for music recognition. Feels like I’m doing something right.
Spent a lot of time making up the special page for press/radio folks for the new releases.I’ll probably start emailing them about it in the next day or two. Hopefully it’ll cause some resurgence with some of the other recent releases as well.
I spent an hour recording a Remora song (well actually a cover song) for a compilation today. I think I have two tracks (of 8 I need to do) done except for cleaning them up & mixing them. So I feel pretty good & like there’s a real possibility of me getting them all done by the September 1 deadline.
I’ve got this plan for a semi-crazy intense recording that I need a bunch of DI boxes for (the kinds with a through line like people use right before the amp & such). So if anyone has extra DI boxes they want to donate, let me know. To do this recording as I’m thinking I would ideally need 16 DI boxes, which is kinda crazy I know. I might scale it down drastically in the end.
My big event for today was making a new page for the Silber site for a monthly featured release that will have a streaming copy of an album & the album available for a couple bucks off. The first one up is Remora’s Enamored. I guess I probably should’ve started doing this a couple of years ago.
I tried to do a little more research into the Twitter robots that people use to build followers & I couldn’t find any that function in a way I would feel was useful instead of dumb &/or creepy. What I’d be interested in is something that does what I would do by hand, but does it faster – & I guess that just doesn’t exist yet.
I sent out emails to a few hundred stores about stocking the new releases. Who knows if that really helps with sales or even awareness, but I feel it’s something I should do.
I also wrote up the monthly newsletter (which it ends up I forgot to do for July) & I got half of those sent out (email limits) & I’ll get the other half tomorrow.
They’re switching from small collection bins for recycling to these mega containers in my neighborhood which will make me have a harder time finding beer bottles to recycle for Silbeer without getting them from a bar.
Last Night’s Dream:
I’m with my grandmother in Pittsburgh sitting in my car & we’re casing a joint to rob when I realize the street we are on is the one that the local anarchist book store moved to & I get out of the car & go to check it out leaving my grandmother to plan the heist.
GoddakkAttack says: you know, when i used to work at the Bulldog in five points or near five points. we had to walk around the surrounding areas to find the bottles everyone left the building with and tossed in the bushes and parking lot. Also read about some town providing locks for their bins to keep the homeless from making a buck off their discards. So good luck, the free market is at work.
All of the restaurants in this county seem to have locks on all their recycle bins, from glass down to used cooking oil. So we’ll see what happens. If I don’t sell them, I guess I can theoretically use them forever.
I made the PDF versions of the Robert E Howard mini-comic & Lost Kisses #22. So free reading….
read REH #1
read Lost Kisses #22
I finally got Twitter to accept me importing my address book (which retardedly I needed to export from Thunderbird & import into AOL for them to accept). So now I am following over 1000 accounts. One day I will have to go through them to group them to be useful. But looking through things I am confused how labels I think of as peers have 20,000 followers.
I got a few physical copies of the new Plumerai (the band hand made them) so order one while supplies last.
I did a little bit of work on a Remora track for a compilation. I have five or six invitations I nee to catch up on after the music computer being down a few weeks.
Here’s a pretty bizarre episode of The Outer Limits. Think of Franz Kafka & Lovecraft collaborating on a story:
GoddakkAttack says: for the record, only the covers were hand screened. the cd’s were replicated in some facility.
Yeah, I guess I should change the description slightly. What was the type of machine you used to print them again?
GoddakkAttack says: Gocco Kit. japan’s finest at home printing press.
Been a bit of a rough week (lost a couple sleeping periods taking care of my grandmother), but I’ve gotten a bit done anyway.
So the first big news is the two albums from Jon DeRosa under the Dead Leaves Rising moniker are now available for digital download on Silber. Just five bucks a piece. The first one is from his senior year in high school, which is kinda crazy. In related news the new EP that Jon did as a solo disc should be up for sale in a few days.
I went to my buddy Darin’s house & he fixed my music computer (it was some kind of Bios thing as I’d suspected, but I couldn’t get the screen up & he had to do some fooling around to get it to work as well, so I don’t feel too dumb). So I should be able to get to work on the Remora remix thing & some compilation appearances & this special little EP thing “soon.” Also afterwards we drank some Silbeer Honey Apple Mead & he said it was the best mead he’d ever had as it wasn’t overly sweet & syrupy like so many are. Which is possibly because I let it age to become more alcoholic.
I finally did the minor adjustments needed for the Deadpool comic I’m working on with Nick Marino. Speaking of which my guest writing thing is still going on over at Super Haters. I kinda realize that I did a story that works better as 30 panels (how I’m used to writing) than broken up into ten sets of 3 panels. I know there’s a craft to writing things that short (as well as a separate set of tools to writing a novel) that I haven’t developed as of yet. I need to really get more practice in writing. Go back to trying to put down a few hundred words a day that no one will ever read. Wait a minute, I just described this blog!
The other day I was accused of not eating enough food. It’s true that I have not been eating as much in an attempt to save money. Anyway I added up the calories & I’m averaging under 1500 calories a day. No wonder I get so cranky if I miss a meal. So I think that maybe I need to start drinking mead every day except the honey to make the mead is expensive (basically a pound of honey makes five 12 ounce bottles & a pound of honey generally seems to cost at least $5). Then there’s the whole thing of needing to take care of my grandmother after drinking not sounding like a super great idea.
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m in a bank & it’s getting robbed by a bunch of kids wearing Staples uniforms. Rather than getting on the floor I start making conversation with the one guy who is wearing a t-shirt about some Staples sponsored event rather than a red three button shirt.
I donated my car into a Silber mobile for touring bands. PD Wilder calls me on the phone to tell me he’s been in a car wreck with it in Atlanta. What the hell am I supposed to do about that?
I’m walking on an abandoned interstate (presumably after an apocalypse) & there’s a bunch of kitty cats running around. I want to catch one & take it home, but then I remember I don’t have a home.
GoddakkAttack says: an “ex” of mine had a co-worker who vanished one day and it turned out he was put in the hospital because he ate nothing but Peanut-Butter for the entire year or close to it.
Okay, the big news for the day is that for the next two weeks I’m the guest writer for the webcomic Super Haters. I hope you dig it. It’s about a dad abandoning his responsibilities & then trying to reconnect with his son. I suppose the reason why is obvious….
I was looking at my webstats for July. Of course the ad on Tiny Mix Tapes delivered essentially no traffic. But the interesting thing to me is the blog is now getting three times the views as the front page & about as many as all of QRD. Kinda strange to me. I imagine it has to do with Google loving blogs. Also interesting is that I received no webtraffic from searches on Bing as opposed to the 100 or so I received from search engines other than Google.
I’ve been working on stuff for the re-issue of the two Dead Leaves Rising discs from Jon DeRosa (Aarktica) for digital download on Silber. They should be up soon.
I recently had a review of some of my mini-comics that makes me feel pretty good about them & want to start working on them more again over at Forbidden Planet.
There’s a new video from Azalia Snail for “Death Gets in the Way.”
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m taking my biological son Andrew to a family reunion for the first time. While I’m in the shower someone kidnaps him. I’m trying to figure out a way to get him back safely without paying the money while simultaneously killing the kidnappers so they can’t pull this shit again.
I’m in a mall & this store has all these book bags shaped like The Hulk’s head for sale. The owner tells me he got them on clearance from Hong Kong & plans to donate them to a charity for full retail value.
Yeah, I guess I did give away a punchline. Oooops. It’s strange when I think about how my storyline kinda started less based on my real life than it ended up. Though I guess it would’ve been closer to my life if I had “new Destruct-O-Tron” show up as Todd’s kid from when he was 13, at least I changed it up a little bit.
That reviewer wasn’t into all of the books & I know he wasn’t into XLK at all, but I think his critiques were fair. I think the Deadpool book we’re working on is closer to what I planned for XLK than what I handed out in that it’s bad-ass sad-bastard book instead of just a bad-ass book.
So here you go, new music from Goddakk & Plumerai available for $5 album download.
In other news Ben Link Collins (former Silber intern) has his first release on his new label Silent Media coming out. It’s called Coupling & is a tribute to Stan Brakhage. It includes exclusive tracks from Small Life Form & Electric Bird Noise & Promute & a bunch of other folks. You can order it here. I was talking to him about a bunch of things about the release & running a label today & he said he needed to stop talking to me about label stuff as I’m too jaded & he’s still excited about things. Of course he’s right. I need to let people be happy with what they do rather than discouraging them because I haven’t been too successful with what I am doing.
So my music computer I replaced the power supply on & it still is not working properly. I think the battery that is used to hold the bios info went bad when the power supply went out & I need to reset the bios. But for some reason it isn’t recognizing my keyboard in the first wave of startup so I can’t do that. So I am supposed to meet up with the guy who built the thing for me in the next couple of days to see if he can figure out what is up with it. But I might need to buy a new machine. Kinda sucks.
So when I talked to my computer guy he was telling me (somewhat embarrassed about it) that he’s broken down & started running bit torrents for music. He has the same story as I’ve heard from a lot of people, he had his music library that he’d spent a lot of time & money on & someone swiped the external hard drive he had all his music on. So I can understand where the people with that story are coming from. As someone with sympathy for the situation I think he’s in the moral right to get the music he paid for back, but I think we all know that once someone starts getting their music this way it doesn’t stop so I’m torn about it as a label owner. All I want to be able to do is pay musicians enough for them to be able to have access to equipment & free time to get better at their craft. I was talking about musicians & money to CJ Boyd the other day about what an artist earns & he was saying that music naturally comes out of him & the idea that he is entitled a living for it is no more valid than him being owed a living for farting. Which is interesting & I think sometimes a valid argument, but I think the idea of a professional artist class is something I want to continue & I plan to continue to do what I can to help people get to that level by both releasing & buying their music.
Irata was going in their home studio to record some demos today & this fall they are planning on going to a bigger studio as Jason Ward isn’t happy with drum sounds he can get at home (a common problem I’m sure). We’ll see what happens about if their upcoming releases end up with a Silber logo on them or if they are going to move up to the next level.
I updated the review pages of a bunch of the release on the website to have the reviews from the past month. I wonder sometimes if anyone looks through the reviews before deciding on a release.
I’ve been thinking about doing something where I have a featured release every month that the whole release is available streaming as a way to promote sales of items in the back catalog & encourage people to come to the site once a month.
So I’m kinda into this new show called Falling Skies on TNT about an alien invasion. Sunday they are having a marathon ending with the season finale (& since no one seems to watch the show, I’m guessing series finale for all intent & purposes, even though they say it’s been picked up for a second season for next summer). So check it out if you want & let me know what you think of it. In general I’d say it has too large of a cast because it has a dozen characters, but somehow it works for me in that only one or two characters matter anyway. Oh, & it stars Noah Wyle of ER/Donnie Darko fame.
GoddakkATTACK says: CJBoyd’s argument is a flawed. Nobody sneaks in to sniff his farts nor do they pitch in to buy him bean burritos.
He isn’t entitled to money to create music, however neither is someone entitled to hear/listen/own/download any of the music he created which is more the issue I think than the fact that a musician feels like a public is obligated to give him money to do so. It’s more that the public feels like it’s their right to hear the music and not the artist’s right to expect some token of gratitude in return.
I’m not willing to pay for a new Guns n Roses but then i don’t think i really should be able to have the songs for free either. Not really anything to do with a musician’s entitlement any moreso than Charmin expects something in return if i decide to wipe my arse with their product. The worth of music, the practice of commerce those are the topics at play not a musician’s self-worth or ego, those exist independently of the issue.
Yeah, there’s definitely a problem with people feeling entitled to free everything here in the first world. & at times it seems like not only do people feel like they should have free music, but should be paid to do the artist the favor of listening to it. Which is perhaps related to the fact that now that everyone is a musician the quality of music has lowered to the point where maybe we should get paid to listen to some of it.
GoddakkATTACK says: most of it you mean.
I think there’s a disconnect between consumers of music and makers of music.
The consumer doesn’t consider all the mundane financial and logistical details of what it takes to get that music to their ears.
Music costs money to make. Especially music recorded in studios with all the costs that entails.
Your average listener would never have reason to think about tracking, travel, mixing or mastering costs. Nor should they. They just download and (hopefully) appreciate the result.
For an artist, posting music as a youtube video or in any other myriad ways available now online costs basically nothing. It’s possible to make and distribute music more or less for free this way now.
What we’re going to lose though, is music that cost any time and money to make.
There won’t be a new Black Sabbath, Cure, Bowie, Joy Division, MBV, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Velvets, etc.
These are all musics that cannot be made, much less performed, by some dude sitting alone at a computer.
Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing is up to you I guess.
Anyway, this guy has some good points:
That Collateral Damage series in The Wire is really good. One of the thing that has always been funny to me about The Wire is probably 95% of the musicians they cover don’t sell as many units as the magazine does. Maybe that’s true of Rolling Stone too when I think about it.
Okay, so in the next day or so there will be new releases available for download from Goddakk & Plumerai. Just waiting for final approval of a couple things before updating everything on the website.
I got a message from Kurt Dinse today about wanting a script for a new issue of Star. So I need to get off my butt & write that one. I actually got a fairly positive review recently that makes me want to write more comics.
So this new Planet of the Apes movie is coming out. I kinda want to see it & I kinda anticipate it sucking. I really liked 3 out of 5 of the original, but the remake from Burton a few years ago wasn’t so hot & this new one looks closer to a modern movie than an old sci-fi flick.
I made some more Silbeer mead tonight for the first time in a few months & I bottled up my last batch. Made a nutmeg batch & an allspice batch along with my normal pepper & vanilla batches. We’ll see how they end up taste wise.
There is a pretty good article on The Wire about how the free download & tip jar business model doesn’t actually work for underground bands. Which makes me feel better about how much it’s failed here at Silber.
Okay, so a lot of people are making a big deal about Spotify. So I decided to look through the numbers & see what was going on with my digital distro stuff. (The Silber download shop isn’t included in these numbers, but it actually accounted for about the same amount of money as the sales from all these distros combined.) Here’s the sellers bringing 1% or more for digital sales to Silber for July:
Versus the numbers for June:
So wow. Amazon dropped to #8 from #2 & iTunes really gained a strangle hold on #1. I have stuff aggregated to about 50 download companies & all the ones not appearing added up to about 1% all together. So there you go. Spotify had an increase in their share of income for sure. While Spotify may well be the future for music listeners, it’s not looking too terribly good as the future for musicians making a living. Because the secret is Silber earnings across the board for all of the digital distributors dropped by 50% from June to July.
So it looks like If Thousands is getting things rolling again. Here’s a clip Aaron put up the other day:
& here’s a video of Thorn1 doing a Rivulets cover:
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m being held captive in a warehouse. The only light coming in is from some small windows about 15 feet up the walls. One of the other captives starts fighting one of the guards who seems to be mysteriously unwilling to use his gun. I open the door & there’s a guard outside who immediately points his gun at me & then he’s hit by a forklift driven by David Carradine that he crashes into a cinderblock wall smashing through it. I escape through the smashed & falling wall.
I’m trying to escape from something & I’m pushing my grandmother in her wheelchair & we’re in the seedy part of some tourist town a couple blocks over from the main section. I ask her if we should try to find a group to hide in & she says, “No, we should just stay alone & smile.”
I’m at SPACE & I’m assigned table 17, but it’s already taken. Tables 24-29 are open & I’m not sure if I should take one of the empty tables or have a confrontation with the occupants of table 17 or just go home.
GoddakkAttack says: aren’t all of these only paying you for plays whereas itunes and amazon pays you for a purchase of an mp3? cents vs. fraction of cents. per song. it’s more like collecting royalteees vs. sales sorta kinda.
Conceptually it’s like sales versus royalty except that the model for Spotify negates the idea of sales in the future if it gains enough users & popularity. Which would bring digital sales (1/3 of income for the past 5 years) down to the amount of selling two or three CDs. So I suppose that’s why a lot of folks are selecting to not put their whole catalog on Spotify (& Last FM & Grooveshark & GimmeSound for that matter).
do you get money off shazam as a result? i always wondered how that worked…or do they just link your song to a place to buy it online and call it even?
They don’t pay money. The email actually went into the fact that they just need to download the music to process & that they don’t keep copies of the audio on their machines. Most likely the new Plumerai & Goddakk will be getting processed, though they got in touch explicitly for the new Electric Bird Noise & Azalia Snail.