2015 - years end.

2015 is almost over, so it's time to reflect on this year's achievements. I've done approximately 125 gigs so far (it will be 126 by the time the year ends, and 127 if you count getting roped into playing at my Mom & Dad's party as soon as I arrive!) left a band, put another band on the path to a mega agency deal, sat in on a career day as a 'proper' musician, got elected to the MU regional committee, played some great new venues and put on another highly successful Codfest.

Outside of music, Kayla and I have bought our first home and are expecting our first child!

However, I still haven't finished recording this *highly* anticipated new album. This year has been busy on and off stage, and I don't want it to be a rushed job as it's been hanging over me for so long now. It's no excuse now, and I've promised myself (and everyone who has asked) that it will be done in 2016. I've even comandeered a room in our new house for a studio!

A major highlight for me this year was getting the chance to support Bleeding Hearts in Kidderminster. They are fast becoming one of my favourite bands, and it was a pleasure to share a stage with them.

I just want to finish this post by paying tribute to Rich McMahon, a greatly talented local musician who died suddenly this year. I was blessed to play with Rich at The Grain Store and spend some time with him and Maggie that night. His music and personality were both inspiring in equal measure and he is hugely missed. His song 'Inbetweenland' is on the playlist that I play in between acts as the gigs I host, and is seriously worth a listen if you haven't heard it already.

Here's to 2015. 2016 has a lot to live up to!

Spotify ~ Hero or Villain?

There have been a lot of blogs, articles and the like flying around recently about streaming services such as Spotify and whether they are dangerous to musicians due to their low royalty payouts. I read a lot of arguments from both sides of the fence, and thought I would share my views with you guys. Leave a comment with your thoughts at the bottom of this post, I'd love to hear what you think about the whole thing.

As an independent musician, I don't think Spotify is ever going to make me any money. That doesn't mean, however, that I think it is a bad model. The idea of the royalty payouts by Spotify is that you get paid a tiny amount of money every time one person listens to one of your songs. For me as an independent musician without ties to a record label who has a deal in place to collect 100% of my royalties, I get about a third of a penny per track play, so if someone listens to 'The List' from start to finish (12 tracks), I'd make about one and a third pence!

It sounds like nothing, but I'll put it another way. Imagine how many times around the world in different people's personal stereos, car radios and MP3 players 'Dark Side of the Moon' has been played. Millions? Hundreds of millions? More? Now imagine if all of those plays had been on Spotify, which in the future will be possible as they branch their service out to mobile devices so you can take it with you wherever you go. You are looking at millions and millions of plays, each being paid a third of a penny or more as the music is so popular. At a third of a penny per play you would need just 334 million plays of individual songs to make a million pounds. For 'Dark Side of the Moon' as a whole, it would be under 33.5 million plays. Considering sales of that album are estimated at 50 million worldwide and not many people listen to an album just once, you can see how it mounts up. And it would be growing all the time.

So Spotify is just another service that's good for the guys at the top and rubbish for the guys at the bottom?

Well, sort of. I use Spotify's player to play the music on my Facebook page and on this blog. I don't think of it as a way to make money, but rather a way to advertise my music to anyone and everyone that wants to hear it, for free, through a trusted medium. And if they like it, they might just go and buy it. Or at least it might get them interested in my music enough to come and watch me play.

So that's my view on Spotify. If you write a great song or album that people keep going back to, it will pay you in the long run. However, if someone decided to listen to my album 'The List' solely on Spotify rather than buying it, they would have to listen to the whole thing over 385 times before I got the £5 for the CD!

That is why I don't use it for financial gain, but rather treat it as an advertising expense. What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know :)

No frills - getting my music online.

Being independent in the music industry has always been seen as being either for small bands who can't get a record deal or artists who fall out with their major label partners. In these cases the small bands were just seen to be making excuses and the large band either being greedy or righteous, depending on the public's perspective of them.

Nowadays, with the decline in major label dominance, it has become important for an emerging artist to know how to run their own show. Labels no longer sign artists to development deals like they did in the 50's and 60's, but instead wait to see if they come to fruition on their own or within a smaller label, then either buy them out or envelope the label they are signed to within their own company. But do not despair. With a decline in huge label contracts comes the decline in price for, well, pretty much everything you need to release your own record on your own label.

I say your own label, but I use the term loosely. I am not signed to a record label, even one I have created myself, by name. However, to date I have released 3 studio albums and number of EPs and have plans for a further two albums this year. I record, produce and mix the albums myself, complete all the artwork and send them off to a duplication company to have them pressed and when they are finished they come back to me and I sell them at gigs and on my online store. I could make up a label name and stick it on there, but the fact is it's just me making the arrangements, so I don't see the need for it. I could pretend to be a label when sending the album out to radio or promoters, but that just involves making yourself some interesting looking letter-headed paper, which is easy to do.

So what did I do? Who did I use? I get a lot of people asking we where I got my CDs made or how I got my music on the fabled iTunes. It's actually a lot easier than you might think.

I'll start with iTunes. The thing that people don't understand about iTunes is that it has no quality control. None. Anyone could record three minutes of garbled gibberish and put it up on iTunes through an aggregator if they had £20 to waste. All you need is an aggregator, or a company that provides the service of getting your music to online stores. There are hundreds out there, all offering slightly different deals in terms of what percentages you get from your sales and what you get back for your money. I;ll tell you about 2 in this blog, the one I use, and another I have heard good reports about.

The company I use is called Zimbalam. Their deal is simple. You pay £30 for an album (£20 for a single) and for one year it goes EVERYWHERE. That means all the online stores, from the famous ones like iTunes , Spotify and Amazon downloads right through to some I've never heard of, in every territory in the world. That's right Burkina Faso, you can buy my album online! At the end of the year you either pay £30 to renew the subscription for another year, or you pay £30 to take it down. The take-down charge is a drawback, but  it's a good deal if you want something that's all encompassing and no hassle, and the statistics they give back to you on where and when your tracks were bought or streamed are quite insightful and thorough.

The other company I have often pointed people towards is called Ditto Music. They have a range of bespoke packages depending on what you want, from a comparatively cheap 'get a single on iTunes and Spotify' packages, to a full works with everything including starting a label for you, getting your songs chart registered and using a sister company to collect performance royalties on your behalf (I'd advise against this, I'll talk about collecting your own PRS royalties in another post). The benefit of this is that if you have done your research about where and on what platform you want to release in order to have the most impact (so you have decided Burkina Faso isn't for you!) you can save yourself some money. Another main benefit is that, to my knowledge, they don't have a take down fee, so that's something to consider.

As I said, there are hundreds of other companies offering hundreds of other deals, so shop around. The perfect deal for you could be out there. Leave some links as a comment at the bottom of this blog if you like, I'd be interested to see some more deals.

I'm going to sign off now. Thanks for reading my blog, and for those of you who aren't musicians like me and are not interested in all this, I promise to rotate my content as much as possible, so the next blog either tomorrow or at the weekend will be about something different. Maybe a competition, if I come up with something cool for you to do before then!

Thanks again,

Sam.