A SONG-A-MONTH EXPERIMENT?

I saw the suggestion today that artists should quit this fixation on producing albums. Albums may be what record companies want to sell, but they’re apparently not what the public wants to buy. (It’s been noted repeatedly that record companies do not care what the public wants to buy. Folks with less hubris should care, though.) What people are paying to download from places like iTunes and Rhapsody are individual songs—singles. What radio stations are playing—have always played, except for a brief psychedelic period in the ‘70s—is singles. Maybe what we should be delivering to the public is singles. Sure, we can still produce albums—but as collections (perhaps themed collections) of songs that have already been released as singles.

It really does make sense. Can I do it?

The process is fairly simple. I write a song which I know is a “keeper.” After doing the usual “draft” recording on the Tascam, I assemble the musicians, we go into a studio and record it professionally. The product goes to the various online distributors, and I tell the “joelist” it’s out there. I burn CDs with the single song on them, and send those to radio stations (&c.) that I know. If I’m being as productive as I like, I’m doing that once a month, on average.

I have to worry about costs, of course, because I have no money to sink into this. In this scenario, online sales are the only means I have of recovering production costs, and I’ll only get 70 cents apiece out of the 99 cents the vendor will charge. If I spent $100 on the recording, I would need over 140 sales to make my costs back. I’m really not sure that’s possible yet—are there really 140 people who’d pay for a new joe song on a consistent basis, even at just 99 cents?

After I’ve done it for a while, and word has gotten around, it might be possible to expect sales on that scale. For the immediate future, though, I’d need to find a way to get the studio work done for no or minimal money, because I couldn’t reasonably expect a return. I do know a couple of people who have been working on home studios, and I’ll talk to them about being part of this Song-a-Month Experiment.

I’ve got not only new songs to release this way, but there’s a good 60 existing songs that have never been recorded as anything but Tascam drafts. I could professionally record and release those, too. Yes, there could—and would—still be albums, but they’d be “themed” albums (like the “12 Reasons Joe Is Going to Hell” album I’ve talked about), or “Best of…” albums, and the only cost would be in the manufacturing (short runs, of course)—the studio work would already have been done.

Elsewhere: Tried “Valvoline” out on the square dance callers as my first singing call, and it went over well. Now I need to choreograph a few more. Tentatively, I’ll be doing this on stage at a square dance in mid-March, and I’ll need about an hour’s worth of thoroughly rehearsed material. I’ll need to find and use mostly other people’s material for this—there won’t be time to record any of my own. Using my own songs for square dancing is something I want to do, however, and there are at least three more of mine that I think would work. I need to create the equivalent of karaoke tracks, though—concentrating on achieving precisely the 64-beats-repeated-seven-times needed for singing calls. (There’s that need for a studio again.)

I have a couple of recordings from the 2007 Pineyfest “demo derby” that are karaoke-able, too, because one of the recordings of each one was sans vocal (so I could substitute somebody with a real voice later). I assume those will have to be lengthened to hit that requisite 64-beats-repeated-seven-times, but I think I have the software to do that.

Tuesday night at the Thirsty Lion. Dang—that’s coming up fast. Need to get notices out. And practice.

Joe