Step one: Write some songs
The first decision of the DIY superstar: avoid arguments over “direction” and “identity” by taking charge of the musical side of things and getting a couple of songs written. Should I make a contrived attempt to appeal to the kids and risk looking like an idiot? Or just produce something heavily influenced by the kind of stuff I listen to these days, i.e. Steely Dan, Hall & Oates and The Doobie Brothers?
After a couple of days of introspective, poetic contemplation and musical doodling on my computer, this initial task is pretty much completed. One of the songs, “Those Rules You Made”, tells the story of a paranoid bloke who suddenly realises he’s in a relationship with someone who has extremely high standards, but he’s somehow slipped under her radar. It sounds a bit like, well, Steely Dan, Hall & Oates and The Doobie Brothers, and thus (at least to me) like a first-class A-side. The total cost to me so far: effectively nothing. Monkeys? Shmonkeys.
Step two: Choose a name
The typical procedure here is to ransack your brain, scrawl words on a piece of paper, go to bed, wake up the next day and discover that the best idea you had was something like “Tollund Man”. But I eventually come up with something reasonably arty: The Schema. I set up a page on the social networking site MySpace, and upload the two tracks for the world to hear. I then spend £9.99 on a domain name for my own website, www.theschema.co.uk, and call my friend Dicky to tell him what I’m up to.
“Called what? The Schemer?”
“Er, no. Schema. With an ‘A’.”
I’ve fallen at the first hurdle: I’m trying to promote a band whose name actually needs spelling out to people. I also discover that searching for “the schema” on Google turns up a load of pages about Javascript programming. Brilliant.
Step three: Spread the message
There is a big area on my MySpace profile where a picture of the band should go. Reluctant to present my overweight, balding self as the saviour of rock’n'roll, I find a picture of some stick-figure silhouettes on a photo site, istockphoto.com, so I pay £2.35 for it. I e-mail it to an ex-flatmate, Simon, who has his own design business called Drinkmilk, and in return for just £25 he summons all his visual skills and tints the image pale green and selects an agreeable font for the lettering on it.
Back in the old, pre-desktop-publishing days, CD manufacturers would bamboozle you with wallet-busting quotes for processes you didn’t understand, such as “origination of camera-ready artwork”, and the record sleeve would always come back looking like a dog’s dinner. But now it’s a piece of cake. I set up my website using the same colour scheme, uploaded the image, and added a tantalising message: Coming Soon - The Schema.
Scritti Politti had listed all the costs associated with making their records on the back cover of their first three releases. Maybe I have a similar duty to list all my expenses, too. So I set up a blog on my new website, with a rolling list of the costs incurred so far. The current total: £37.34. Easy? Yep. Cheap? Certainly.
Step four: Get the product out there
Truthfully, my hopes for the success of my single aren’t high. But I find a website called www.hitsongscience.com which mathematically analyses songs for hit potential. The results for “Those Rules You Made” make interesting reading: it scores 7.07 out of 10. Which, apparently, puts me in the company of such luminaries as Kasabian, Shakira and Elton John.
Chart status seems almost a formality now - but I need get my single into the online stores, and particularly Apple’s iTunes store, which currently sells around 80 per cent of all music bought online. But how?
Relevant information on Apple’s website is scarce to non-existent, and if you search on Google for “getting on iTunes”, you end up at third-party sites that deal with Apple on your behalf in return for a percentage cut of receipts.
The demand for these services seems enormous; musicians’ forums are awash with stories of how, with some sites, your music sits in a backlog of unprocessed material, and how it takes over four months to reach the online stores.
But a bit of digging uncovers a smaller Glasgow-based operation, emubands.com, that promises to get my two-track single on to over 170 internet outlets - including iTunes - within four weeks, and all for a flat fee of £24.95.
This seems too good to be true. I’ve had awful experiences of the parallel world of CD distribution: you manufacture as few CDs as the factory will allow (the minimum run is usually 500) and the distributor, after haranguing you to somehow set up a UK tour and contrive to be reviewed in the NME, might then take 50 of them on sale or return, if you’re lucky. After a couple of months, they generally return all of them to you in the same box you’d delivered them in.
Bands all over the country have hundreds if not thousands of their own CDs stored under beds or propping up the TV, filling every conceivable space with a grim reminder of the unmarketability of their music. MP3s, however, occupy no physical space. You don’t have to guess how many you’re going to sell before you start; every download just magics another copy out of the digital ether.
Ally Gray, the proprietor of emubands.com, explains his business model. “Traditionally, bands had to beg for distribution and had to somehow prove themselves. But we’re open to absolutely everyone, and we just charge a flat fee for liaising with the stores, getting the tunes online and doing the accounts. We pass on 100 per cent of our receipts from the stores straight to the bands - which works out at between 40p and 50p per downloaded track.”
After e-mailing the sound files over to Ally, I get back a confirmation of the release date: 20 August - right on my self-imposed 30-day deadline. This achievement, however, quickly gives way to a grim truth. My MySpace page has been up now for over a week, and its handful of visitors are all, in fact, me sneaking a peek at the page to see if anyone has visited. MySpace and its like are nothing but shop windows, and on the internet, no one comes walking past by accident. It’s time to start the horrible process of publicity.
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