Experiment: Band Management: Blog 18: The Nitty and The Gritty

The nitty and gritting of getting a record out. Band management is not all-sexiness, all-the-time. Although, my style of band management is mostly being sexy all-the-time. How do you get your music out into the world? In physical form and on major online platforms? (Most of you know this sh*t already.) And what are you paying? And why are these sites and interfaces so f*cking annoying?”Band A” released a new album. The lead single is being played on the radio in a few markets – so I need to get it on the most popular online platforms right away? iTunes? Spotify? I’m using Tunecore to help me. It costs about $30 to release an album – and they’ll distribute it over a whole bunch of platforms, and deal with a bunch of stuff I don’t understand. Great right? Except Tunecore is annoying the hell out of me. Tunecore asks you to lists the songwriters, which I did in the classical format: “Rose/Gibbons/Justice/Kennedy/Kennedy” – for example. But that wasn’t right. Tunecore wants each person who contributed to the song to get a different line. So I went back into the interface and corrected it. Then I sent the guys at Tunecore an email saying I made the corrections. They didn’t give a crap. Did it about a week ago – and they haven’t done anything to acknowledge I’ve made the changes. Some radio stations have asked “Band A” for CDs – and some of the publication will want a package in the mail, with a CD, a one-shit-er, some merch – so we’re printing 50 CDs using CDBaby. Which costs $156.94. $3 a CD. We could print more, but no one buys them. CDBaby has one very annoying aspect to their interface. Graphics. The cover and packaging needs to fit their specs, which means you need to download their specs on Adobe Illustrator, and then you have to learn how to use the program if you want to upload graphics. And they’ll come back to you, all bitchy, and tell you you’re made shitty design. Come on. Anyway, that’s what I did for “Band A” this week. Also, here is the letter I wrote to 25 radio stations (college and independent) and 3 stations wrote back to say they liked the song. And here’s come additional paperwork on costs and interfaces…