That gets my vote for Understatement Of The Decade.

And… I can remember when touring bands here in Oz typically lost money because of the prohibitive costs of touring, but made up for it in record sales, so count me confused.

There appear to be many people out there working with them who don’t know what they are doing and could possibly be doing more harm than good in the long run.

A recent article I wrote covers some of this – http://www.somojomagazine.com/?p=486

I’ve been amazed this week in that I’ve read a blog entry from a record company about how they can get on and finish the work on the next album now they have new speakers, £27 computer speakers that needed some adjustment to the sound cards eq to get them to sound right!
I’m no audio or recording expert, but that doesn’t give me the impression that they are very professional or know what they are doing.
I’ve also read some blog entries about how cool the new iPhone is as artists will be able to shot and edit their promo videos on it!

As you say Steve some musicians spend months and sometimes large amounts of money to make records and are then seem to be ‘happy’ with crap promo photography, bad videos and awful artwork.

Who is to blame?

The musicians for accepting sub standard work or the people they work with supplying it?

I know a lot might come down to budget at the end of the day (just an excuse?), but if they have the right information about what is required, they can ask the right questions and make a better selection of who they choose to work with.

Great point – I do think that having a strong visual image is important. I’m amazed how many musicians spend months on making a record, then get their mum to take some pics with her phone for the promo, and do the album art in MS Paint… Working closer with designers would be a great idea…

Well known musicians only need to put their name to it and show up on private channels from time to time, whereas starting out musicians will need to provide real value through knowledge sharing and remote instruction.
This is going to be too much for one individual ‘unsigned’ musician though, we’ll need to get together into teams to tackle the task seriously.

We have the radio site with ‘live’ music playing only independent and unsigned artists and the magazine which we’ve just started which will has interviews with independent and unsigned musicians, artists, photographers and film makers will be in the next issue onwards.
There are plans for ‘specials’ featuring different individual bands which we will be making available to them for free so they can give them out at gigs or sell them to make a few pennies.
There is also the tv channel which currently only music videos but we will be adding animations and short films very soon, just as soon as I get the time to upload them.

The idea is to bring all the different creative arts together in one place so they can make contact with each other and hopefully some interesting collaborations will happen in the future.

If anyone has any ideas of what else we can add to the mix, then we’d love to hear them.

Have a great day
Kevin

There are people who will buy any old crap t-shirt by a band/artist just because they like them, but there’s an awful lot more people out there who will buy something because it looks really cool, even if they’re not THAT into the band. Make something look really good and people at a gig with money in their pocket are a lot more likely to be tempted to make a purchase.

The bonus of this is that people can drag the tracks off the drive and still use it as a normal usb stick.