Got some orders filled today & a few specially requested promos out.
Been sending out all these emails trying to promote the Christmas comp & such still. A few responses to it. Kind of weird how it’s only gotten 160 downloads. I don’t know if it’s going to make 1000 before Christmas at this rate. Sometimes I feel like people just aren’t quite as excited about music as they once were.
The other day I was talking to Nathan Amundson (Rivulets) about people being your fans versus your supporters. Fans like your music & supporters give financial support for you to do it. So supporters don’t buy your disc used or download stuff or anything else that doesn’t end up giving an artist royalties. & when I think about it, I’m as bad of steward of music as anyone else. I have a few thousand CDs & a couple hundred records. I’d say 50% of them I bought used & 40% of them I got free as promos or whatever. So I don’t help the artists either. I have PJ Harvey’s whole discography, but I got them all used so she didn’t get any money from it. I should figure out a way to mail her the money. The only artists I feel like I’ve really given a decent shake to are a few of the ones on my label & I even wonder about that as no one’s been able to quit their job & work on music full time yet.
So doing the promo of the new free releases I’ve been going to some of the places I used to promote on that I haven’t been too for a long time. Most of the newsgroups I used to be on are having less than a hundred posts a month with a majority of them being advertisements for sex sites. What happened to the late 1990s communities? Did the people migrate to other spots that I’m unaware of or did people get married & have kids & run out of time? Like Jon DeRosa (Aarktica) was joking about with me the other day, the thing that makes us special is that we’re the only ones dumb enough to do it for this long.
A lot of random things in my life seem to be pushing along my weird delusions of time travel lately. Like randomly coming across more John Titor stuff. But I think a bigger part of it is needing to go Christmas shopping for my nieces & nephew & that throws a wave of nostalgia for good & bad things in childhood through to the events that have led to me not living the american dream with wife & kids. Then there’s me reading comic books again & then the particular one I read today (Black Hole) is set in high school. I need to move to Jakarta or something to reset myself.
I was talking with Jeremy Bennett (Sorry Welcome) about some stuff today & he thinks I should start doing little infomercials about the label explaining why the music is good & viable & interesting. On the one hand it is completely ridiculous & demeaning. On the other hand it’s my job as a businessman to do anything that might make the bands enough money to focus on their music.
Speaking of which I have a couple of ideas for some super simple videos that I want to shoot. Maybe I’ll get them done in the next few days.
Did some more work on laying out the Sarah June cover. I need to get over my hatred at Illustrator. While there are some bonehead things about it, there are good things to. I think it’s partially that the templates aren’t designed as well.
I was asked to name my top nine things of the year for what I guess amounts to an interview or poll for a webzine. It wasn’t top nine albums, but just things. So it was half music.
I got contacted by an artist about doing another comic collaboration. We’ll see if it falls together. That would put me at eight series going. I need to catch up on scripting as I only have three out being worked on at the moment.
I try to go to bed by midnight & lately it’s always 4am when I lay down.