Crisis – Crisis – Crisis…

Music Industry – belly up!
Classical Print Media – belly up!

I am sure you read about it, somewhere. Media is going on and on about it, searching for reasons and coming up with fantastic explanations like: The industry doesn’t understand the way new technology changes people and their behaviour, latecommers, arrogance and ignorance, and so on and so on and on and on.

So now our experience with exactly those smartypants explaining you the way it works and the way it will work.

Everybody was reliefed when we split with our former record label and our management, enjoying the new found  freedom after ages feeling like being locked in a cage. And as you read about it somewhere, the times are changing, so take the chance and do it yourself!

That’s the way we’ll do it. We thought

After the production at big studios with guys like Andy Sneap and Roberto Laghi we felt that it was about time to record and produce ourselves at our lovely small studio ‘the chappel’. All went down smoothly, good songs and to our own surprise the recording sounded super-lovely as well (at least something we learned over the years). We had it mastered, because mastering is something completely different and you should know what you are doing (which we do not ).
The final result sounded fat, edgy and tops.

You maybe read about our attempt to market the thing by ourselves in my former posts and how successful these attempts were. Of course you need PR and media coverage, we read about that somewhere…

This is what we thought: We will give everybody who had written glowing reviews on the last two albums a promocopy, bundled with a nice infosheet informing them about why nomore big record company, why nomore classic distribution, etc. etc. they may have read or written about it somewhere… This should be a nice way to get some covering on the beloved crisis, crisis, crisis topic and even more fantastic reviews.
Aren’t we a clever bunch of guys.

NOPE!

because…
the reactions of our attempt were smashing: no deal? no label? no distribution? internet only? equals – no review. Something i can understand with big print titles like Metal Hammer, ’cause no deal, no label, no distribution, internet only – equals – no ads/no money. Fine!
but…
Even the tiniest blogs on the planet, with layouts that burn your eyes and a style of writing that might melt your brain reacted the same way: no deal, no label, no distribution, internet only – equals – no review. Which leaves me mad, sad and completely puzzled. Exactly those people should know, because after all they exist because of the classical media crisis, they do things differently (at least they think so), still they behave exactly like the biggies. And offering a review in their demo/garage corner really made us laugh. Telling me that the industry has no clue, still behaving exactly the same way wants me to copy some of their own journalistic attempts, put them together in a nicely layouted pdf, send it over and ask them: Maybe you have read about it somewhere?!?

PS: We finally got our reviews, with the biggies and the tinies, because Claude (what a cool and nice guy) took us onto his fine and tiny recordlabel ‘muscon records’ which is distributed by Intergroove, and suddenly reviews all over the place and not of all them were bad , and not a single one mentioned that it sounded like a demo or a garage thing, i am sure you can read about it somewhere.

.

The results of the Thorn.Eleven free download / donation experiment were astounding. I do not know if astounding describes the result really well, maybe “total fuck up” might be more appropriate.

Here is the story in all it’s glory:
On the first weekend prox. 250 people downloaded the album via our server. Very cool.

One day after the release the album suddenly popped up on a brazilian rock pirate blog, bypassing our nice email mechanism and linking directly to the album file. Direct downloads via our new Brazilian friends: More than two and a half thousand!!!

By the end of the ‘get the album for free’ period we got round 600 ‘official’ downloads and 2500 ‘hey cool a warezed album’ ones, which adds up to a total of over 3000 downloads. I spare you the details of what i think about the pirate guys, more than 3000 albums delivered – FANTASTICO!

Now the funny part:
Ladies and Gents, it is Donation Time!!!

So what do you think, how much did we make?
More than 3000 downloads of the album, how many of those 3000 peeps thought it is a worth a few pennies?
The final results are in and….. less than 100 Euros. ROFL.
Even funnier:

This includes

• Me – for testing purposes 2 Euros.
• David (our singer) – for testing purposes
• Matthias (our guitarist) – because i forgot to give him a final high quality copy and he didn’t want to wait
• Kai (our bassplayer) – see Matthias’ entry.
• Kai’s Girlfriend – being far to generous donating an unbelivable high amount.

Overall we had 4 (FOUR!!!) people donating the mindblowing overall amount of 35 Euros. – which is less than 0,15% of all the people that have downloaded the thing.
The explanation might be that the album simply sucked, hmmm maybe… but we received around 120 emails saying thank you and how brilliant the album was (thanks for every single mail, friends).

Conclusion:
Don’t expect too much – good thing we didn’t from the very beginning, so i can say we weren’t dissapointed, but still we were kind of surprised.

After that whole download adventure we took our 35 Euros and decided too have 1000 physical copies made. We sold nearly enough copies on the release party gig too cover the pressing and mastering costs, which leaves us with our monthly costs for our small studio, which we think is fair. By the way Circles is available at Amazon or nearly everywhere else.

And if you think that was funny, it even gets better in the next episode:
Your best friend: Music Press….

After all these days of preparation it is about time to put the finishing touches on the album itself. Still missing: the final cover version(s), band infosheet, label infosheet, heaps of changes for all our websites.

My main tool at work is photoshop and yes, i DO KNOW, it is a program for picture manipulation not for doing printstuff, that is what indesign is for… blablabla clever talk, i do it in photoshop anyway, i know my way around it best.

After blowing out several final and final-final designs (even final-final-final ones) everyone agrees on the one i call “my old school bible”, something no one understands, this picture might explain why (yes i kept all my books from school, nostalgia, you know it):

Everything works like a charm, crammed all the pictures, lyrics to the songs and the credits into the 16 page deluxe booklet. CD label, CD tray inlay, all no problem – what did you expect? pro at work!

First slight problem after exporting 16 single pages as pdfs and stitching those together in acrobat – the frigging booklet is 130 megabytes huge :-O. So the artwork ist twice the size of the actual album – hmmmmmm – maybe it wasn’t that brilliant to do it in photoshop in the first place. do it again in indesign – costs me one whole day – pro at work! – ROFL.

while doing all that stuff i blog, post bulletins and change my status on myspace like a berserker. at least twice i day i tell my 3200 myspace homies that the album is coming, that it is free, that it bloody fantastic and that the release day will be a release minute: FRIDAY 23.59. I always have been into cheap drama and to stage a big bang for a free album without any airplay and 140 peeps on the band’s mailinglist is cheapest drama at its very best i think.

The day has come .. Friday 23.50

Captain checklist!
All album versions – Check!
Paypal donations page – Check!
Dedicated download pages – Check!
Automatic remailer – Check!
Upload album zips – Check!
Albums on rapidshare – Check!
Newsletter prepared – Check!
Myspace bulletin prepared – Check!
Myspace blog prepared – Check!
Myspace status prepared – Check!
Popistan Blog prepared – Check!
Rockistan Blog prepared Check!
Rewriting of all pages’ codes – Check!
Google analytics inserted – Check!
FTP client open and connected – Check!

23.59.00 according to the Braunschweig atomic clock.
I change the index page of the download page, the images for all websites upload very fast.
23.59.10
The remailer tells me the first person has submitted his email to receive the download link :-0!!!!
i press update on all blog submission buttons, i update my status on myspace and post the bulletin.
23.59.30
i press send – the newsletter is submitted.
23.59.50
All done!!!!!!!!!!

23.59.55
Mail from the first person who received the automatic replymail with the link:
NO WORKY! oooooooooooops wrong link in that reply mail – hehe – pro at work! – LMAO!!!

Quickly reconfigured the download page’s name, change of the downloadlink in the automatic reply mail.

Saturday – 00.02.00
Everything up – everything running smoothly – Herr Schmitt is a happy camper now and is having a well earned fag.

The download page for this episode can be found here:
http://t11-circles.rockistan.de/

Don’t miss episode 3:
The marvelous results of the first weekend.

Here we go! What’s it all about.
There is this nice little band Thorn.Eleven i have been involved with for years now. After years of trouble with records company, drummers and management they finally managed to get out of their contracts. (you wont believe how hard that can be once you have some).

HEY FREEDOM… Nice, but what to do with it???

Their record ‘Circles’ was completed over a year ago. Now what? Search for a new deal? Nah, bad idea, seen one, seen all.
Long, long, very long pause.
So we, they, us decided to release the thing for free.
Sounds stupid, but considering the fact that they have sold roughly 10.000 copies of the last two albums and received roughly ZERO euros it is not so stupid on second sight.

Okay – Free Download Release – Not so Stupid – But Now What?

Tell it to the people. (next but) but how. Others did it on myspace, etc. so will do it there as well. Bloody brilliant idea my friends, so i started my quest.

Step 1: the virtual record company
We founded our own small label ‘VUP Recordings (Very Unimportant People, brilliant David ).. that was easy – did a logo – did a website – created a new myspace account.
Number of friends: 1 (yes you know him: ‘annoying myspace tom’).
Where to get some friends? Easy as pie. I checked out all myspace-friend-adding-tools. These all seem to kinda work, i decided to use the easy adder.
It has a nifty feature that scans another person’s profile and adds all existing friends to a profile id list.
Okay done… 10.000 potential friends… add a nice message to my request add.. hit the send request button.
Born on the naive side of life Herr Schmitt. Myspace has a fantastic feature, it is called capture code. nearly all new requests require you to type in a stupendous amount of numbers and characters displayed on a completely unreadable graphic.

But there are solutions for every problem – a captchakiller – which does work brilliantly – NOT…. it recognizes shit . it is a free service – so why do i moan. but hey there is a paid service as well. 1000 capture codes for 33 dollars.
I didn’t take that way, because i am 100% sure that in a badly lit cellar somewhere in Xīnjiāng there are some 12 year old kids ruining their eyes while typing 500.000 horror myspace capture images. Instead i chose to simply skip all requests using a capture code. (apart from the fact that myspace forces you to type these in from time to time, that worked).

So final results of the first episode:
Record label.
Myspace Account.
10.000 potential friends.
Too many capture codes.
Actual sent out requests: 5091
Capture codes entered manually: about 500
We have now 3222 myspace friends.
which leaves 1869 open or rejected requests.

Coming in the next episode:
The uber-fantastic releaseday.

I did what i could do.
THORN.ELEVEN`s new baby CIRCLES was released this very minute.

Go to the Rockistan THORN.ELEVEN downloadpage and grab that thing.

Due to the fact that it is a free/cc/donation based release we all (especially i am) very curious what will happen.

Over the next week i will post what we did and what the results of our actions were, so check back tuesday when the first results are in.
(gets his pocket calculator ready)

That is all for tonight.
Sleep well (i know i won`t )

Markus

After a long and tedious journey thru CDRom Driverstan and Encoderland
our travel will come to an end this friday night.

Release date for Thorn.Eleven’s Circles Album will be friday 23.59
(middle european daylight saving time). And I am a happy camper .