Sellaband

I'm being called out in the comments for being a Sellaband slacker. It's interesting, I've been on lots of musician services and social networks but I've never been ragged on for not hassling everyone more to listen to my junk. What's up with that?

My impression is basically you need to spam the shit out of everyone to get anywhere on Sellaband. I really hate doing that sort of stuff. But if I was going to resort to brute-force hassling I might as well do it on my terms, with the proceeds going directly to me on a website permanently in my control.

Also as much of a capitalist I am, the phrase "maximize your believer potential" kinda turns my stomach.

businessBrad Turcottesellaband Comments
Guitar Tabs dot com shut down

Guitartabs.com suspends under legal pressure:

Today I received a certified letter from Moses & Singer LLP, a law firm in New York City which asserts that they are acting as counsel for the National Music Publishers Association and The Music Publishers Association of America. They have stated that guitar tablature hosted on my site violates the copyrights of several of their clients.

Guitar tabs have been under attack for a long while so it's not a big surprise, but it's disappointing. I taught myself how to play my favorite songs way back with guitar tabs off of Gopher.

guitarBrad Turcottelegal Comment
Built a new deck

A few weeks ago our old rotted deck developed a giant gaping hole. There were many other points of decay on this thing so we decided to tear it out and replace it. Here's the old one:

We decided to make it bigger and get rid of a lot of the useless raised part. Here's the finished new one:

In the winter I'll put the barbecue up on the landing for sub-zero degree barbecuing. But right now I'm gonna try not drilling or lifting anything for a while. Should be awesome. More pictures here if you want them.

Brad Turcottemisc Comments
Pictures

Here are some photos I have been sent lately:

Gia models her Brad Sucks button and a hand-written note from me.

 

Steve's motorcycle, now with an advertisement for this here website. I'm gonna rake in the hits... from the ladies!

newsBrad Turcottemisc Comments
Let's be Best Friends Forever

You can now sign up to be my Best Friend Forever. I don't like the sound of fan club or anything else I could think of, so I figured we could just straight up be BFF via you filling out a simple form. (Note: if you already had a forums account, that's now your BFF account.)

It's free of course. And right now it gets you extra music, access to the forums and a super-badass Brad Sucks BFF identification number. I'm hoping to add automatic discounts for CDs and digital downloads in the next couple of weeks.

For a long time I've been wanting to put more experimental stuff online -- stuff that I don't think would make a great first-impression for the majority of visitors, but maybe some people would like. This should give me a place to put that stuff.

music, newsBrad Turcotte Comments
Bebo protects my copyright from me

Got this email today from Bebo and it looks like every song except for Borderline has been removed from my Bebo music page:

from: Bebo Service service@noreply.bebo.com to: brad@bradsucks.net date: May 22, 2007 2:48 AM subject: Bebo Bands: Songs Removed for thebradsucks

Brad

Song content was removed for your Bebo Band, Brad Sucks.

Content was removed because it was recognized by the Bebo copyright filter to violate the Bebo Terms of Service:

<http://www.bebo.com/TermsOfUse.jsp>

As a result, the upload songs feature for this band has been disabled. If you believe that a mistake has been made, you can request that your Bebo band page be reviewed:

<http://www.bebo.com/BandReviewRequest.jsp?MemberId=1530240065>

Please don't submit bands that you do not own the copyright to or your band may be deleted all together.

Thanks,

The Beboers

I think it's pretty awesome that I seem to have violated my own copyright somehow. Well done! I'm sure glad my copyrights are safe!!

musicBrad Turcottecopyright, misc Comments
Where your music money goes

An ask Metafilter question that caught my eye: Will my money get to the musician, or all end up with the record label?

Interesting question to me, but maybe not for the reasons the asker intended. While I recognize that fans want the artist to get paid, when a label is involved it's more complicated:

  • The artist entered into an agreement with the record label. Even if it's a shitty deal, why are you second guessing a decision that the artist made? Are we assuming that every artist on every label has been tricked?
  • The record label likely put up a lot of money to get the record made (which is a loan) -- this is why most of the money goes to the label. Why do they not deserve to make their money back? The record might not exist without them.
  • The artist may actually enjoy the support they get from their label. Recording advances, promotion and tour organization are some of the more common benefits. The label's only solid metric for determining the success of an album is sales through their distribution channels. If you take away those sales the label will likely decide the artist is a bad investment and drop them.

Independent artist money breakdown

For independent artists it's simpler of course as we have no record label loans to pay back, but there's still a lot of mystery. I'm asked often where I get the most money from awesome people who want to make sure their dollars go to me. Today in the interest of science and like... money... I did up some charts:

Net amount received by me per album sale. That's the amount that actually goes into my pocket, so bank fees, postage, digital distribution fees, manufacturing and other charges along the way are factored in. The album price per service is listed next to the service name.

Percentage received by me per album sale, based on the same data above.

Neither of these graphs take into account any signup or yearly fees. Amazon is $30 a year and CD Baby (who handles all the other digital distribution for me) is a $35 one-time fee. I'm also not 100% sure I got the iTunes UK album price right and Magnatune lets buyers decide the price from $5-$18 so I used an average of $8 which I think I read somewhere.

Analysis

No big surprise, buying direct from me is the best (for me). Direct digital sales (using my free open source digital store, natch) is the best in profit and percentage as I only pay Paypal fees and a negligible Amazon S3 amount. I make more per sale on CD Baby and iTunes UK than direct CDs from me, but that's only because the unit price is three or four dollars more.

It's interesting how low Magnatune ranks in both charts. Magnatune is a non-exclusive record label that I'm on (and enjoy being on), but unlike other label agreements I referred to in the beginning of this post, I have no debt with them. It's their decision to split the income and bank fees 50% with the artist, which means significantly less money for the artists than most other services.

Conclusion

It's pretty simple. The less middlemen, the more money gets to the artist. The best would be to pirate the album and personally hand the artist a ten dollar bill. That would be as close to 100% as you're going to get.

business, musicBrad Turcotte Comments
Lists for nerds
Brad Turcottemisc Comment
So long China

Recently I finally got off my ass and wrote a thingmabob to track MP3 downloads. Here is the fallout: China, you are cut off.

Seriously, I've never to my knowledge received a single nice email from anyone in China about my music or sold a CD, yet you guys make up like 60% of my bandwidth usage via sites like QQ and Baidu and Yahoo China Music.

I mean maybe if I felt like I was huge with this silent mass of Chinese I'd just roll with it, see where it takes me, but the fact of the matter is that every MP3 on my server gets hammered 24/7 by the same blocks of IPs, over and over again. Is it just their haywire search bots? Is it proxy requests from very shy Chinese Brad Sucks fans? I don't know!

So for now you're blocked, go sit in the corner and think about what you've done.

musicBrad Turcotte Comments
Music advocacy

Interesting article over at Pitchfork: What Do You Look for in Music Writing? As in music reviews, not like, writing music.

Music advocacy (well, it sounds better than "what mp3 blogs do") is exploding. Music criticism on the other hand survived commercially for the past 40 years or so by hitching itself to its own version of advocacy. In an age of limited music supply, the word of an informed expert was invaluable, and the flights of fancy or theory that expert indulged in were part of the deal. Sharply and suddenly, the internet has broken that link.

Since I was a teenager I've thought music criticism was silly. I've never really understood why I should care that someone doesn't like an album, it alway seemed like trolling -- a ploy to get fans riled up and generate attention. I prefer the idea of music advocacy, though I get impatient reading overwrought poetic waxings about music when I could have decided if I liked the music in the time it took to read the article. (Also there are only so many times I can read the word "scintillating" without wanting to puke.)

Lately as I've been working on my album I've been getting existential. Is there still a point to doing albums? Why should they be in 11 or 12 song bundles? What will I do when it's done?

It used to be a bad idea for a musician to release too many songs too quickly. You get the rep as being a prolific genius, but the quality pretty much always goes down. You oversaturate the market with a lot of b-side material, confuse potential fans and make it hard for anyone to find the songs they'd like.

But now that music advocacy is the name of the game, are things different? It seems like all you have to worry about is if there are enough people interested to separate the good from the bad. The bad gets ignored, the good gets spread around.

business, musicBrad Turcotte Comments