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Thursday, October 29, 2009 It's done! After 70-80 hours at Uptown Recording (recording and mixing) and Gravity Studios (mastering), the music is done! I can't wait to let you all hear it. It's a little scary to be essentially finished with the album after so long - I've been planning this project for years. And now that it's done, I feel a bit like Inigo Montoya: "It's very strange. I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it's over, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life." ("Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.") No more tweaking the songs. Or changing the track order. Or anything else. Doug at Gravity compared it to sending a kid off to college: at some point, you have to let go and trust that you did a good job. Of course, there's still a lot of work to do before the album will be truly done: I still need to do a photo shoot, design the album art, get the CDs pressed, and redesign this website. So there's plenty to do even though it feels like a chapter has closed. But it's done! Labels: music industry, recording ^ Top | 11:44 PM | | | 
Saturday, October 17, 2009 Conceptual Art and Craft Denis Dutton, philosophy of art professor at the University of Canterbury, writes an interesting piece about conceptual art and its place in society. Clearly, he values craftsmanship: We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful. However, he stops short of condemning the likes of Jeff Koons, whose oeuvre consists of concepts executed by others. I won't. I've seen an exhibition by Koons, whom I consider rather lazy from an artistic standpoint, but I'd mistakenly assumed that he did create much of his work, albeit with a large team. In Koons's work, I admit that there are a few interesting ideas and the pieces overall are made with some skill. (I will here discount the pornography that was included in his exhibition at the MCA - and I'm not exaggerating, there were nude photos of him having sex with his former wife, a porn star, complete with genitalia. You could not have considered this "artistic nude" by any stretch of the imagination. Porn is self-funding - it does not need to be subsidized by art museums.) However, Dutton mentions that Koons actually commissioned his famous porcelain Michael Jackson from an Italian manufacturer. In another Koons work, vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas cases, I'm fairly convinced that the designer who created the vacuums should get at least partial credit for the piece - after all, vacuum cleaners have to be designed by someone, or usually a team of someones who specialize in industrial design - and thus perhaps a share of the $11,801,000 sale price. (Yes, you read that number correctly.) If we were talking about snippets of music rather than vacuum cleaners, Koons would owe a significant portion of royalties. Copyright law has an overwhelming number of issues I won't go into here, but if you make millions using someone else's work, some compensation is not outrageous. While I dislike visual art that is too representative and technique isn't everything, it does seem like craftsmanship is mattering less and less in the art world, even if Dutton does not think this will be a lasting stage. For that matter, I wonder if craft is mattering less and less in the musical world. Little pop music could be considered finely crafted, lyrics in particular. Most musicians in the pop/rock realm have little training and less technique. Training doesn't necessarily make you a good artist, but ideally training will give you enough technique so that you have the freedom to express yourself more fully. I'll be the first to admit that my own technique often falls short - but if you recognize the gap between the art you want to make and the art you do make, and you keep creating, keep trying, your art gets better. Ira Glass says that it took many years of trying, years of being a professional and still continuing to hone his craft, before his storytelling was anywhere near what he would consider good. I'm obsessing over recording quality and track order on my new album, but realistically most of the music is probably going to be turned into MP3s and listened to on iPod headphones or laptop speakers in a track order that bears little resemblance to mine. I know this. But I can't help myself from spending hours mixing and fine-tuning musical details that few people would ever notice. Because to me, it matters. Even if it doesn't to anyone else. Labels: aesthetics, music industry ^ Top | 1:49 AM | | |
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Promoter's Ordinance Tabled! Great news! The Promoter's Ordinance is being pulled and will not be voted on tomorrow--it's going back to committee, but apparently they're going to ask for more input from the entertainment community this time around. Thanks to anyone to contacted their alderman and the 6000 people who signed the petition at Save Chicago Culture, and the various venue owners who met with City Council members. So for now, the ordinance is something we don't have to worry about, though it'll be worth keeping tabs on. What a relief. Labels: Chicago, music industry ^ Top | 1:34 AM | | |
Monday, May 12, 2008 Save Chicago Music In short, the City of Chicago is planning to rush through an ordinance on Wednesday that will severely damage the live music scene (and theatre and DJs, among other things) if passed. In summary:
Very, very few performers would be able to afford a $500 license fee (much less one for every venue they play at!), and few small venues could afford it either. If you live in Chicago, please contact your alderman before Wednesday, when the City Council will be voting. Click here to find your alderman. Labels: Chicago, music industry ^ Top | 11:25 AM | | |
Sunday, November 04, 2007 Big Time Entertainment Why pay for something when you can get it for free? Even better, why pay musicians when you can get them to pay you in order to play? In order to book a show through Big Time Entertainment, you have to guarantee that you'll bring 25 people into a show. Your payment as an artist is based on how many tickets you pre-sell. Big Time is counting on every band on the bill to pre-sell tickets, and they won't promote the show themselves. Here's their cost breakdown. Click over there and read how ridiculous this is--while trying to look "reasonable." The site looks fancy, but it's deliberately misleading. According to this, the venue gets over 65% of each ticket purchased through this program. Big Time Entertainment gets over 11%, and you, the artist, get 23%. That is, if you manage to sell over 73 tickets. But wait, Big Time isn't giving the venue a cut of the sales. (OK, that's not entirely true--they rent out the venue, so they're paying the venue whatever they've agreed upon as rental for a couple of hours.) So really, the "promoter" is taking a whopping 76% of the ticket sales. And doing nothing: no promotion, no publicity, just renting out a space that provides sound, lights, etc. and convincing a few naive musicians to get on the bill. Big Time certainly isn't paying for venue upgrades or a sound system or almost anything else that they're listing as costs on their end---the venue itself takes care of those. Out of your percentage as a musician, you need to cover: gas/travel, food, and promotion (press releases, postcards, flyers, websites, emails, etc.)--not to mention that if you're not a solo act, you're splitting your portion amongst various people. Each band is paid based on their actual draw for the night, according to BigTime's sliding payment schedule. 0-34 is $1 per ticket, 35-49 is $1.50 per ticket, 50+ is $2 per ticket, 73+ is $2.50 per ticket, 86+ is $3.50 per ticket, and 100+ is $4 per ticket. Since ticket prices for BigTime events range from $7-10 (depending on the market and venue) and every band that plays a BigTime show is paid according to the above schedule, bands are never paid less than 10 cents on every dollar that their fans spend purchasing tickets and in some cases are paid as much as 57.1 cents on every dollar of their fans ticket purchases. Again, 23.4 cents on the dollar is the average band payment from the ticket sales that a band generates. Let's say you pre-sell 50 tickets at $7 a pop (if you could pre-sell that many tickets at that price, you probably wouldn't be interested in talking to Big Time Entertainment, talking instead to the venue itself or a reputable booking agent, but we'll leave that aside for now). You, the artist, would get $100 to cover all your expenses and split your take amongst your band. Say you have four band members: you're each getting $25 a piece minus promotional, food, and travel costs. You've spent time promoting the show and practicing, and spent money on flyers and such. Big Time would get $250 for giving you the privilege of playing. Remember, without the bands at each show there would be no audience (because Big Time certainly isn't trying to get people to come to the concert) and no act. Which leaves you with an empty room. In comparison, the Heartland Cafe (a great venue, by the way) charges a cover but doesn't take a cut for themselves--they make money when fans buy drinks and food. So each cover charge goes to the artist: if you brought in 50 people at $7 each, you'd make $350 there for the night, as opposed to $100. I'm tired of people who prey on unsuspecting musicians. Labels: music industry, scams ^ Top | 6:14 PM | | |
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