Comply or Die are Belfast's premier merchants of doomy punk rock. They terrify and energise in equal amounts live, and their recorded output is usually of a couple of different colours. Earlier this year they released a split cassette with fellow doom-sayers The Slomatics, in which they showcased Vermin from their 2nd album DEPTHS which is due in August.
Well, that may be too much for some of you - but there's another side to Comply or Die, and that's their more rockular tendencies.
Shanghaied is available here for nowt, and it's a slice of bouncy-bounce rock-a-long that won't quit. I've enjoyed this one live for a good while now, and I'm glad it's now been recorded.
So that's Comply or Die - I love them, and so should you.
I still can't get over how obvious an idea this is - release an album, then the same week put up for free a video of you playing the entire thing from start to finish.
Every band should do this - especially if you're trying to advertise yourselves as a live act worth seeing.
Apart from the lighting, I don't think a video like this is beyond the reach of many small, local bands - and lighting doesn't HAVE to be as good as it is in this video.
If any local bands fancy having a crack at doing something like this, I'd be interested in helping produce it, whether from a production side or just helping out, or editing it. I think it's too good an idea to NOT copy...
So, in part one of this guide I made the claim that MySpace is dead. This has been challenged by folks in the know, so I thought I better see what they had to say:
Edwin McFee - music and entertainment journalist for the likes of the NME, HotPress, AU Magazine, The Belfast Telegraph and other illustrious publications. You can find his blog here, where a lot of his articles go up eventually.
First I wanted to know how often they used MySpace:
Steven's answer is pretty straightforward:
Almost every single day. My main reasons for using it are to specifically confirm where a band are from, and where their tour dates are (believe it or not, MySpace is generally the best place to look for this). I almost never use it for music.
Edwin:
Due to the nature of being freelance, my day to day work can vary quite a bit, but let’s say I’ve been sent a batch of albums to review and I’m not hugely clued up on a couple of the acts. The first thing I’ll do while listening to the record is type their name into Google and see what comes up. Nine times out of ten, I’ll click on the first few entries to get a rough idea of what they’re about/where they’re playing/what they have achieved and 99per cent of the time their MySpace will be one of the first entries on Google, resulting in my clickage.
Davy:
Once or twice a week, purely to give someone, a mate or a PR person a quick listen to a band I want to work with.
Has MySpace become a habit for journalists and industry types? Is this down to lack of awareness of other services, or does it offer something the others do not?
Edwin:
Who knows? I work from home and for a variety of different places (and each of them have very different ideas and attitudes on life in general), but I have found that (generally speaking) the more information made available on your band online can never be a bad thing-whether that’s via MySpace/Bandcamp or wherever. As for MySpace offering something that others don’t...apart from being one of the first sites to popularise social networking, it’s pretty much the same as every other band related site I click on in terms of what it can offer.
Steven:
In a lot of ways, it is a habit. If there was something else that grouped all this together in an easy to use format, I'd use that instead. (Other platforms - other than specific band webistes - don't generally have ALL the info you need under one roof). I think a lot of this is down to the laziness of bands, as well as the laziness of journalists.
Davy:
My main point is that it is used by music supervisors and industry types in America as their first port of call when checking out a band that they have heard or have been recommended to them. Purely to listen to the tracks and to decide if they are worth looking into further. These people are too busy to be going oooh and aaahh at how cool/user friendly other platforms are. They are of an age where MySpace delivered for them online first and that is where they go. Bands need to know that they should keep their MySpace free of clunky shite and make sure the tracks on MySpace are the tracks they want to represent them.
Have you noticed an increase or reduction in the amount of MySpace linking you've been sent?
Edwin:
I’ve noticed very little change to be honest. Though what I have found, in terms of Northern Irish bands anyway, is that a lot of them are horribly misinformed and clueless when it comes to how to present themselves to the media. As ridiculous as it may sound, I regularly receive emails from people telling me I “have” to listen to their band, only for them to actually omit the name of their act, So, from that perspective, I’m just grateful some of these poor mites have the foresight to include a MySpace/whatever in their initial correspondence.
Steven:
Yes and no. My personal interactions with bands are rarely anything to do with myspace, although it still happens often enough. But as a general rule, most bands still trade off their myspace, either in interviews, standard communication, or whatever.
Davy:
Yes. It's all about Soundcloud and Reverbnation bla bla bla. Too many platforms but it is a necessary evil to have a presence wherever the fan is. Bandcamp is my fav for free downloads and bands are catching on to this one obviously.
Is MySpace still the most useful source of information on bands in general, or are emailed press-releases the norm?
Edwin:
As far as I’m concerned, word of mouth and actually speaking to the bands and checking them out live will say a hell of a lot more about them than any website or press release will. However, if I had to choose between either MySpace or press releases, I would pick an updated MySpace over a cold press release any day. A press release spoon-feeds you the information that the pr/bands want, whereas with MySpace you can read between the lines a little by scanning through the comments pages and seeing who they’re ‘friends’ with. For example, if I get a press release through saying *insert local band here* kicked ass at a recent battle of the bands, and then I go on their MySpace and read comments from various people saying that they ballsed the whole gig up, it gives me a better idea of the bigger picture.
Steven:
Most bands at my level rarely use press releases, and when they do, they're generally through one of several local publicists, who group a lot of info in one big email (which is generally badly written, and badly laid out). So myspace still wins out at this.
Davy:
No. But this question is irrelevant! It is where the industry go and that is a fact so it has to be taken seriously as a platform to host your tracks no matter how crap it is.
Are there things about MySpace you like? Are there things you hate?
Edwin:
Personally speaking-I’ve very little interest in all things ‘online.’ For me, I use the internet purely for work and when I don’t have to work, I’m never on a computer, so for me, I really could not care what features MySpace (or any other website) has. As long as they tell me what I need, I’m not bothered.
Steven:
The new layout of myspace is rubbish, unneccessarily "sophisticated" and flashy. It works best when it's simple, and all the information is right there. If they could guarantee that the music player would ALWAYS work, then I'd see no reason why bands should stop using the basic myspace layout. But it rarely works properly, and most bands fill the page with useless junk, detracting away form the simplicity of information people might actually need.
Davy, brief and to the point:
There is nothing about myspace that I like.
Do you use MySpace's messaging service? Why?
Edwin:
A few years ago I used the private message service to contact bands who I don’t have a personal email/number for, but these days I don’t use it as a lot of bands rarely update their pages anymore (possibly because the novelty’s worn off).
Steven:
Occasionally. The fact that myspace still lets you know when a person last logs in, can actually be a really useful thing. If i need to get in touch with someone, and i see that they use their myspace every day (and I don;t have any other method of communication) I'll probably use the myspace over a standard email, just because I know when they've been online, and I know it the message has been read.
Davy:
No. Too many melters / spam but I do read messages sent to me on there every now and again.
And lastly, what would you change about MySpace? Anything?
Steven:
Get rid of all that flashy rubbish. A basic profile, with a clear layout would be an ideal business tool.
Davy:
I do not care for it. Other than perhaps to make the listening to the music thing easier and less lumpy.
So there you go. Musicians should probably pay attention to what these people have to say about MySpace rather than me - I've abandoned it out of disgust, but it's not my business - I can choose to ignore it. Edwin, Steven and Davy, for better or worse, have to interact with the biggest fish in the pond, even if that fish is starting to turn belly up.
Obviously there will come a day where MySpace achieves whatever the opposite of critical mass is and the service no longer has any cache with users, journalists and bands alike. For the minute though it seems that day is a while off yet.
It's my contention that there is little point in supporting a dying platform, but others are more pragmatic than me on this issue. I'm guessing that most bands will choose to still represent themselves there, but as I outlined in Part 1, I think we have reached the stage with online services that it's become so easy to manage your own presence online now that bands should take a serious look at what can be done for little or no money, yet have complete control over the look, the message and the content.
Be sure to check out Edwin, Steven and Davy at their respective web-homes. They all talk sense and entertain on a regular basis.
Yesterday's blog on social networking and web presence for bands seems to have raised a debate on whether or not I'm right that MySpace is worthless. It's probably worth its own article, to be fair, and I'd like to talk to some music journalists about it. If you work in that field, get in touch with me via here or Facebook and I'll ask you what role MySpace plays for you.
So... music. It's the raison d'etre of a band, supposedly. The main question is, of course, how to get that music from the CD you got from the recording studio to the ears of your adoring (and possibly demented) fans?
Let's start at the top, and work our way down, shall we? Here's another one of Ron's patented sweeping statements: CDs are dead. Deader than disco. In fact, that's unfair - disco could see a revival. Now, I just know I'll get flak for this, but I don't care. Some people will read that statement, shrug, and move on. It's already happened for them. For others, CDs never got started - they moved from Vinyl to MP3 without stopping in between - CD had no appeal for that sort of music fan, whereas any fool can see the appeal of being able to leave the house with 3,000 albums in their pocket.
So it's probably not surprising that the biggest music retailer in the world now is iTunes. You mightn't like it, but if you want sell your music to the widest possible audience it's the store to be in.
Fortunately you don't need a record deal to sell your tunes on there. In fact, it's become a fairly simple affair to get music onto iTunes, Amazon MP3, 7Digital, eMusic and a load more places (including streaming services like Spotify) just by signing up with a digital distributor. There are a multitude of these to choose from, but for what it's worth the one I went with for Black Bear Saloon was Record Union - a list of the sites they distribute to is here and their FAQ for how their site works is here. You can certainly shop around the net for someone whose rates suit you best at your particular level of projected sales.
To work with these sites though, you'll need the uncompressed audio of your recordings. That means NO MP3s, AACs, OGGs - none of that. It usually has to be WAV files, or occasionally AIFF or FLAC. Nevertheless, either you need to get your studio to give you these files, or else rip them yourself from the CDs. Never try to convert from MP3s to WAV. You're just making an idiot out of yourself then, and effectively you'd be trying to sell your audience a very inferior product.
For Windows users I'd recommend EAC as a ripper. No frills, just does the job accurately.
For Mac users, I've had plenty of success with XLD.
Both are free to download and use.
Make sure when you're uploading your tracks that you enter the correct meta-data (song name, artist, album etc), and also make sure you have some cover art. There's nothing guaranteed to make you seem irrelevant than a digital release without so much as a JPEG for the cover.
As for other ways to sell music? Well, the one I'm most fond of, and never shut up about, is Bandcamp.
I'll admit it. I'm smitten with Bandcamp. It's incredibly easy to use, the pages look great when they're finished, its social networking integration is brilliant and best of all the service is, by and large, free*.
(*ok, so recently they've announced that they'll be taking a tiny percentage of sales. Seeing as how they've got to pay staff/rent/server costs, I don't think this is unreasonable).
It's pretty simple to customise your page to fit the style of, say, your Posterous page, and have this be the place that your 'music' link on Posterous goes to.
The nice thing is that once your album is up and available to buy, you can set whatever price you think is fair for your customers to pay. Transactions go through the ubiqitous Paypal, but non-Paypal users can still buy using their credit/debit cards.
So what other benefits are there to Bandcamp?
Well, each release or track has a Facebook 'like' button beneath it, for starters. Anyone who clicks it is essentially advertising your wares on their Facebook page to their friends, and recommendation by friends is one of the most powerful forces in marketing. Also the share button can send a link out to a few well know social networking sites, as well as generate embeddable players of any release. Such as the ones below:
There are some well known artists using Bandcamp, such as Sufjan Stevens and Amanda Palmer - they've managed to make it work for them. I'd be very surprised if more names didn't start flocking to the platform soon.
Also, Bandcamp can be used to sell other products, namely physical versions of your digital releases. The trend seems to be to offer the option to buy a limited release of a CD or Vinyl, which, when purchased, give the buyer an immediate download of the digital version so they don't have to wait for their package to arrive.
Look, a lot of what I can tell you is already in this excellent wee video the Bandcamp people made. Watch it.
So, that's all I wanted to say about Bandcamp for now. There are thousands of Bandcamp pages out there already, but it's best not to think of it as a social network - it simply doesn't work that way. Think of it more as a way to distribute your music yourself, while at the same time giving your fans (idiotic as they may be) a way to do your promotion for you in places that never occurred to you. You never know, you might even make a few bob from it.
On that note - if there is something I've learned in the last few years, it's that while CDs are notoriously hard to sell, vinyl isn't. As long as you can keep a vinyl run sufficiently small as to appear 'limited', and can afford to go to town on the artwork and packaging, there's a very good chance you'll be able to sell a lot of units. Assuming you aren't a shit band, which you're not... are you?
Lastly for this piece is a bit of a clever one. Dropbox.
I've found Dropbox pretty difficult to explain to people without showing them, so here's how they explain it:
Ok, so the video is a bit cheesy, but you get the idea. How is this useful for musicians?
Whenever I was in Black Bear Saloon, more than a few times I'd run into a promoter, journalist or ne'er-do-well who wanted something from me. A hi-res band portrait. A sampling of tracks. A press bio.
Until I started using Dropbox, this was often a pain - I had to first remember to email the said person, then I had to find the file in question, then I had to hope their email inbox could handle larger files...
Dropbox came along, and right away I could see the benefit. I created a 'Black Bear Saloon' folder in the Public folder, shared it to the other band members (waste of time, they never bothered!) and then created folders inside that pertaining to the various things I had to send. Artwork, photos, music, collections of tracks in ZIP folders, PDFs and DOCs of press releases, setlists... whatever was to do with the band, that's where it lived (and still does).
Where this really came into its own was when they released their iPhone app. Then it became a trivial matter for me to run into someone at a gig and on the spot email them a link to the exact file they wanted from me. It's stupidly simple. They also have Android and Blackberry apps that do the same thing.
You could also use Dropbox to host those same files from your blog or website - if you wanted to have a link to download the press pack, just keep it in a ZIP file in Dropbox and link to it that way.
You get 2GB free 'cloud' storage when you sign up, but if you use my referral link (which I have handy, right here) we both get an extra 250mb. Which is always handy.
That's all I have in me tonight. Except for the obvious...
None of this is going to be of ANY use at all to you and your band if you don't practice, play gigs and continually write better songs. The sad thing is that there are loads of bands for whom that aspect of being musicians is almost an afterthought.
When you can, record. If you can make a music video, do that. Get regular photos done. Call in favours all over the place. Blog often. Interact with your fans. Make the people you interact with feel some sort of friendly obligation to check out your music, come see you live and, yes, give you a few quid for some music. Impress upon your fans that you want them to embed your Bandcamp players wherever they can. Rope in a mate who's handy with design to get all your various web-presences looking vaguely similar. Tie it all in.
It's your band. I can only offer suggestions, but I might be able to answer questions about the various web-things available. Failing that, there's a very good chance I'll know someone who does know.
Someday you might get a record deal and someone else will be paid to take care of all this bollocks. But until that day comes, there's work to be done.
Being in a band is tough these days. I mean, it was never easy, but now it's a lot less clear what it is you have to do. The reason for all this uncertainty comes down to the internet. While it was out there making it ridiculously simple to steal the food from Lars Ulrich's unborn child's mouth, it was also telling bands that it was the only show in town for promotion and distribution of their music.
It's 2010. How does one go about doing this now?
Well, let's assume that you're at a certain level. You've written some songs. You've maybe even played a few gigs and recorded some tracks. Well done. Pat on the back for you. The next step is getting the word out about your band. For many bands this means one of two things - get your own website, and get a MySpace page.
My contention is that you don't really need a full bells and whistles website, and you certainly don't need a MySpace. What you do need - and this is critical - is a band name that is easily Google-able and doesn't currently give the name of any other entity, be it a business, a club and most definitely not another band.
MySpace is dead. It may not seem like it, with the likes of Radio 1 and bands still promoting it, but the eyeballs and ear-holes are elsewhere. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is the one of the very things that made MySpace so popular in the first place - it's customisation options. It allowed users to run whatever widgets and themes they wanted, which inevitably led to the site becoming nigh-on unusable. Add this to a flash-player for the music that always seemed a bit sluggish and ugly, and it wasn't long before it became more hassle than it was worth. Its gig-listing and messaging options are still clunky. Tom and his mates there have tried to keep up with the Jones', but it's too late.
So what to do? First thing I'd suggest is to buy your own domain name. It's not expensive and it looks a hell of a lot better to be able to put thisismyband.com on a poster than www.myspace.com/thisismyband. No?
However - and this is important - I'd recommend you stick to 1 email address to give out to promoters, venues, other bands or whatever. You can still use something like Gmail as your interface for your email (in fact, I'd recommend Google Apps for your Domain), but it's important that every member of your band has access to the same messages. Otherwise there can be arguments or excuses. Neither are fun to put up with.
So what else can you do now that you own a domain? Well, the most obvious thing is have a website. For nothing. There are a few web services out there that offer a one stop shop for your website needs, and the one I use for this very blog is Posterous. Stupidly easy to set up and customise, you can create your site simply by mailing your first blog post to post@posterous.com. Once you've verified that you want to have a site you can set up different pages for things like music (coming to that in a minute), videos, info, contact details etc, as well as standard links to other sites that you'll set up. 'Other sites?' I hear you whine? Yes, other sites. Shut up.
Once you've added everything you need at Posterous, and made the horrific realisation that I expect you to become a blogger, you need to set up a few other sites in order to effectively get the word out to your social circle and beyond what you're up to. Currently, this means Facebook and Twitter.
You already know about Facebook. You've probably got an account already. What you need to do is log into your personal account and create a 'Fan Page' for your band. Then go back to Posterous and follow their instructions for autoposting to Facebook. After you've done that, it's time to start annoying everyone on your friends list by asking them to 'like' you. I know. I already don't like you. Unfortunately this is somewhat of a necessary evil. Once you convinced people to 'like' your band, they'll be able to see your blog updates in their Facebook feed, via the magic of autoposting. Make sure when you've created your page to give it a decent URL - something like facebook.com/thisismyband - the facility to do this is here.
A lot of people don't 'get' Twitter, but that's not Twitter's fault. It's a great way to communicate to a lot of people at once, and, like Facebook, it can be autoposted to from Posterous. This can save you a load of hassle and going to different sites to post updates. Sign up for Twitter here (if you're sensible, use your band-name - ie @thisismyband). Then find people in your area to follow. Twitter will help you with this. For your sanity I advise turning off the email notifications you get when someone 'follows' you. It's tedious, and if you're doing it right you'll start to be inundated with emails, so better to just opt out of that.
It is possible to autopost updates from Facebook to Twitter, but Twitterers in general would rather you went the other way around. Use Twitter as your first stop for little updates, and via the Selective Tweets Facebook app you can pick and choose which Tweets go to Facebook. All it asks is that you add #fb to the end of Tweets you want to go beyond Twitter.
Interact with your Twitter followers. Talk to them. Engage in the discussions you see. Make yourself, and therefore your band, known to them. Invite them to gigs. Link them to songs. Hell, give them songs.
Finally, for this post - blog. Blog your wee heart out. Blog about upcoming gigs, photo shoots, video shoots, tour plans or just your thoughts on guitar tunings. Posterous makes it dead easy to do it - you just email post@posterous.com from the email account you set it up from, and it will do the rest. Attach an MP3, and Posterous will embed a player. Attach a video, and it will make a video player. Attach some photos, and Posterous will make a gallery. A complete idiot could manage it. And with all the right autoposting settings in place, those blog posts will appear in Facebook, Twitter, and whatever other sites you've set up.
There is a temptation to stick with Facebook, because that's where your friends are. Don't. They'll already know about your band. Twitter is where you can break new ground. Try it out, and come back soon for the next instalment, entitled 'part 2 - music'.
Right, I've been evangelising about Posterous on Twitter today, and have convinced a couple of friends of mine to use the service.
First to crumble was Adam Sims, guitarist in a couple of local Belfast bands, and all-round super-nice bloke.
His new blog can be found here. He's already imported a few posts from another service, as you'll find. He's probably going to be writing about pop-punk, fitness and general being nice-ness.
The other convert is Rudedoodle (I don't know if she wants me to use her name). She used to live with me a few years ago, and she's obsessed with filling her house full of kitschy tat. Good for her.
Her new posterous blog is here, and she's already talking about creating a new one following the adventures of her toddler.
Just spotted this on Flickr. The two pretty ladies along the front there are, respectively, Rus-Bass's girlfriend, the lovely and talented Catherine B. the pale, but obviously smitten brunette is my wife, the vocal and snarky Karen Q.
Also poking his wee face in from the back there is the great Dolbro Dan. You should really stop what you're doing and watch/listen to his Micro-chipping Song here, now.
It's genuinely one of my favourite songs I've heard in recent years, even if I don't agree with its paranoid sentiment. If I get set up with recording equipment soon, it's my mission to get a decent recording of that, even if only for my own enjoyment. Also this performance in Terry Hooley's Good Vibrations shop in Belfast is worth seeing as well.
Y'see, when you're in a band, it's really handy to be able to record stuff yourself, even just to demo how it sounds.
In my band this task seems to have fallen to me, for a number of reasons.
1. I'm the only one who seems to have a clue how to do it.
2. The rest of the band have spent enough money on gear without worrying about spending more on computer hardware.
3. I like messing about with recording software.
I'm a Mac person, me, and I would normally mess about using Garageband to record stuff. However, the most recent release of Logic Studio has prompted me to have a go at getting a bit more serious. Plus, some of the plugins and effects it offers seem like it might be just the ticket for recording a young(!) rock band on the go!
I need HARDWARE though, and preferably something with a lot of inputs, as I'm intending to record drums. So I sold my old Line6 Toneport UX2 and started looking for an 8-channel replacement. Which is tricky, as there are loads, and quite a wide price-range (like, from £200 to £800). Also, I'd prefer one with all XLR inputs, rather than a mix of XLR's and Line-level inputs.
So, I've kind of settled on this one, the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R. It isn't cheap, but it does seem to be pretty much what I'm looking for.
This guy gives it a favourable review - his caveats, like the low headphone level for live recording, aren't going to affect me as it'll all be done in our practice gaff.
Then, to record drums, I'll need drum microphones. These seem to be appropriate - CAD DMTP-7
But then, you see, I'm going to have to buy another 5 or 6 XLR leads to go with the 2 I already have, and they're about a tenner each. I'll also need a drum mic-stand and probably 2 overhead mic stands, all at £20 each!
It mounts up so fast, and at this stage I'm not even positive my laptop will be able to handle recording 8-channels at once while running Logic and the virtual mixer that comes with the audio-interface.
What to do, what to do? This is all coming close to £400 of gear, and I'm worried it'll be a waste of time.
So, I'm going to be an extra in this movie that's shooting in Belfast, and I just got told my days are 26th, 27th and 28th of August.
Oh, and they're now night shoots. Isn't that great!? From 6 pm to 6 am the following day. Which means I'm finishing just before breakfast the day we go to play this show in Derry.
Can I do this? After 3 nights of night-shoots? I really don't want to be flopping around the stage like some sort of barely comatose fool. I'm kind of hoping the running order resembles the poster a bit, as I might be able to grab some shut eye for a while then.
Looks like it may be another Red Bull fuelled set.
Plus, this gig is actually on my birthday, and we'd been planning to spend the weekend there, maybe even kick back in Derry until the Monday, which is a Bank Holiday. But I've been told I'll definitely be working on the 31st, so no Bank Holiday for this scruffy peasant!
