We’re Releasing a Record

You know you’re old when that phrase, “we’re releasing our record” means something significant to you. I realize it was a while ago when that statement meant a long process of:

• hyping a demo tape or EP resulted in getting a contract with a label,
• writing enough songs to fill out an album’s worth of material (at least 30-45 minutes of music),
• convincing someone at the label (probably the AR guy) that your material is strong enough and the band is good enough to book serious studio time,
• keeping it together long enough to get into that studio and get all of the songs recorded without anyone in the band killing someone else in the band,
• doing well enough in the studio that the material is deemed worth paying a mix engineer to put all the performances together into some kind of semi-coherent collection of songs,
• impressing the label, again, with those songs so that they cough up the money to send the mixes to a mastering engineer,
• once the mastering engineer has done his work finding someone at the label to commit time to getting the record and, hopefully, one or two singles played on the radio,
• and, eventually, selling enough records to pay back the label’s advance and even get some kind of return on the time and committment that results in the band making enough money to do it all over again.

That is what “making a record used to mean. But that was when music was some sort of “business.” Today, at the label end of the “business, the business seems to be mostly a money-laundering affair. Music sales are dismal, at best, and unlikely on average. Personally, I think the industry’s CD sales reports are bullshit, too. I absolutely doubt that they sell 1/4 of what they’ve been claiming for the last decade. If radio were any indication, there hasn’t been more than a dozen new records/CDs made in the last decade. Both bands and the pay-to-listen venues are buried in 30-year-old music and yak-radio. You could count the number of Milennial songs played on one hand, most days and nights. The music business has been mobbed-up since—forever—and it’s worse now than any time in my life. Like movies, major label music is a great place to wring out your illegal cash to keep the IRS guys from flagging you. I mean look at these numbers. Would you put your hard-earned money into this sort of vanishing business? That is one seriously steep declining graph. Unless it flattens in the next year or two, it will approach zero really soon.

The “indie” route is particularly profit-free, too. I have way too many friends who have gone the whole route on their own, from hiring great musicians, renting time in a professional studio, assembling a terrific collection of songs and performances, getting it professionally engineered and mastered, and the end result is a basement or attic stuffed with boxes of unsold CDs and a talent diminished by frustrated dreams. CDBaby, BandCamp,  and the other on-line distribution scams are full of stories of musicians “bragging” about selling $300 worth of music in a YEAR! If you can find a worse job than that, on a per-hour and financial investment basis, run don’t walk as fast as possible from that “opportunity.”

So, these days “we’re releasing a record” means “my friends and I cobbled together 20 minutes of mediocre songs, we spent a couple of hours recording them on mediocre equipment that none of us knows how to use, a friend ‘mastered’ the CD with Garageband, and now we’re hoping our friends and family will buy enough copies of our ‘record’ to make us feel successful.” Or, at least, not completely stupid. It’s a brave new world out there. I’m glad I don’t have to make a living in it as a musician.