The Null Device Blog

My Oktava 219 arrived yesterday afternoon, back from Oktavamod.  It was great working with these people – they kept me informed every step of the way.

I haven’t had a ton of time to really put this mic through its paces, but I did want to hear what it sounded like, compared to my Rode NT2.

It’s…really different.  The Rode, being designed to be an “airy” mic, has a lot of top-end.  Sometimes this is very nice, particularly with female vocalists.  But it can be rather “eshy” and brittle too, and lacks punch in the low mids.

The Oktava, on the other hand, is a much darker mic.  It imparts a very warm, punchy character to the material.   It makes my voice sound pretty damn good, I’ll give it that.

As a little experiment, I set up the Rode right next to the Oktava, plugged it into input 2 on the ULN, linked the trim settings and set the preamp characters to neutral.  Then, I sang.  The difference is very audible.

Rode NT2

Oktava 219

Given that, back in the late 90’s when I bought the Rode, I paid somewhere on the order of $400 for it (it was before the explosion in low-cost condenser mics), and the Oktava I managed to snag on ebay for a whopping $70 + the $270 charge for the mod…well, the Oktava ends up being a simply fantastic value.  The Rode is by no means a bad mic – particularly since it has a multiple patterns, very low self-noise, etc.  But for my own vocals?  219 FTW.

I do wish I’d kept a few sound files of the Oktava before the modifications, though. It really is an entirely different beast now than it was before.

I’ve been watching the eBay auctions – the trick seems to be to get the 219.  The newer 319 has a nicer-looking Neumann-style cylindrical body.  Because of that, they’re in higher demand and seem to command higher prices.  Given that the capsule design is identical to the 219, I don’t know if there’s much advantage in the 319.

The OktavaMod people also do other mics, not just Oktavas.  I’m half-tempted to buy some cheap ribbon mics and let Mr. Joly work his magic on those at some point.

In the past week I’ve crash-coursed in the mechanics of putting out a CD with all the appropriate “stuff” attached.

It’s danged easy to put out a CD – got a CD burner and a few blanks and you’re set.

To put a CD out that you can sell widely?  That’s trickier.

First off, there was licensing.  “Recursions” contains a cover of Dead Can Dance’s “Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove.”  Yeah, I’m a small enough artist that likely nobody is going to notice if I didn’t pay the mechanical royalties for the cover, but…well, hell, it’s easy, and if I liked the song enough to cover it, I should help support the artists who wrote it.    And, there’s the additional issue that if on the off chance Brendan Perry does happen to come across the song, my arse is legally protected.  It’s cheaper to pay the $50-some for the digital download license now than it would be to pay the lawsuit later.    The fees vary – for downloads they require an estimate, and then charge .0105/download.  You can renew easily if you go over that estimate.  CDs are usually a flat fee of $35/500CDs.   And this only applies to songs managed by the Harry Fox agency…which is most of them, actually.  www.harryfox.com

Then, there was the UPC symbol.  Amazon won’t sell a disc anymore unless it’s got a UPC symbol.  A lot of aggregators, like TuneCore or CDBbay, or CD duplicators, or design bureaus all have the stuff to add a UPC.  It’s often cheap or free through one of those services.  I, of course, did it manually.   I procured a UPC from someone I know who has a lot of them (I could’ve also bought one from one of the many UPC resellers online), then did some figuring and got some tools from Simply Barcodes and some advice from AccuGraphix et voila.  A right pain in the ass, let me tell you, but now I can sell this stuff wherever I want without any hassle.

Finally, ISRC codes for the tracks.  International Standards Recording Codes (ISRC) aren’t required, and they’re not a deal-breaker, but if you’ve got ISRC codes, things are easier to track and easier for some services to make sure your music isn’t duplicated, misattributed, etc.  They’re also embedded in the Redbook Audio CD standard.  So it doesn’t hurt to have ‘em.  Now, to get them is another story – you gotta sign up at  usisrc.org for a one-time $75 fee, which means you can assign up to 1000 ISRC codes a year for your own works.  I toyed with the idea of becoming an ISRC manager, which would allow me to assign codes for clients’ works in addition to my own, but that cost more and I don’t think I’m going to want to pay a few hundred a year for a service I might use 4 times.

What’s left?  I’ve got to register all the tracks with my rights management organization (in my case, ASCAP) so that club somewhere that actually pays artist royalties when they play tracks will send me my six cents.

I may be a small-time artist, but I go by the book.

Continuing my random stream of music-industry/marketing blogging…

Yesterday, I was talking to the good Dr. Goedken regarding all the recent blasts of marketing ideas, sales concepts, promotions, etc etc that I’ve been itching to try.

Eric asked me “so, well…what’s the goal?  What are you trying to accomplish?”

I was nonplussed for a moment.  It’s not merely a fair question, it’s a very, very important question.

There are thousands of blogs, services, marketeers and consultants at the ready to help you “succeed” in the music business.  But how do you define success?  What’s a realistic goal?  Hell, what’s an unrealistic goal?   Do you want to be the biggest band in the world?  The biggest band in your town?  Sell a lot of records?  Play a lot of shows?  Make a lot of money?  Be respected as an artist long after your death?

This is the kind of question everyone needs to ask.  I personally often forget to keep this in mind, but it’s dreadfully important.  If you want to be a great touring band, then all the bandcamp.com’s and TuneCores in the world aren’t going to help, so focusing effort there might be a waste of resources.   If you want to sell a kajillion records, then going the indie twitter-famous route isn’t a good one.  If you want worldwide respect, signing on with a major label isn’t necessarily your best option.  And so forth.

Sure, everyone has the ambition to be the greatest band on earth.  That’s a goal one could set, too, but I think it’s probably just a little unrealistic, at least from a planning perspective.  It’s also ridiculously hard to quantify, which is an important facet of planning.  A goal like “I want to sell 3000 records” is a lot more quantifiable, or even “I want to sell more records than that douchebag from Null Device” (not only is that quantifiable, it’s not all that hard).  A goal that makes sense and isn’t so nebulous that you don’t know if you’ve met it or not is a good thing to have.

Of course, you don’t need to treat it all like a business.  This isn’t the IT industry where you need a small army of project managers, gantt charts, and some guy coming in periodically to teach your band members “Agile” this or “Total Quality” that.  Failing to meet a goal doesn’t mean you’re going to get fired (unless it’s a sales goal set by your label).  Success as a musician is by its nature a moving target.  So you didn’t sell 3000 records, you only sold 2000.  That’s still pretty good, and if you hadn’t been doing all the stuff you did  to try to sell those 3000, you probably wouldn’t have been able to sell those 2000 either.  That’s a success in and of itself, driven by a goal-based plan.

For a lot of musicians, “success” may simply be “I wrote a song that I’m really happy with.”   That might be enough. Everything beyond that is just a bonus.

I’ve been following the twitter feeds and the blogs and the RSS and all that for various “music marketing” sites.

In the past week alone I’ve seen three heavily buzzed digital music marketing handbooks come along.  These handbooks are spreading more virally than anybody’s music, that’s for sure.

They all say pretty much the same thing.  Leverage online tools, start a blog/twitter feed/facebook, generate tons of content, something something long tail, no economies of scarcity, etc.  That’s all very well and good, and there’s an element of truth to everything they say.  The problem is, if these things all worked so flawlessly, everyone would be a megastar by now.

There is no silver bullet.  As a musician, there is no golden solution to breaking the band.  It’s easy enough to say the old models don’t work anymore – the big label system is crumbling under the weight of downloading and a million indie artists – but what nobody seems to want to admit is that the “new” models don’t really work that great either.   Oh, sure, having a facebook page and a twitter feed is not likely to hurt, and a few artists have managed to use these sorts of things to keep buzz going about themselves.  But something like Facebook or Twitter or MySpace will not, in and of itself, guarantee success.  Sending mp3’s to every music blog on the planet will not either.  Having 5000 accounts on every music network service from last.fm to OurStage to Reverbnation won’t either.   All these things in concert may help with your promotional effort, but they will not replace a promotional effort.

And of course, there’s the key thing that none of these how-to’s ever want to mention: you need a product people want. You may not suck, you may be the most skilled musician in the world on your instrument or in your genre, but if you release an album of 1930’s-style ukelele music, you’re pretty much guaranteeing that you won’t ever become much beyond a very, very niche sensation, much less a household name.  Given that most of the bands I know, myself included, labor in sub-sub-sub genres with at most a few thousand adherents worldwide, there are economies of scale to take into account.  Unfortunately, a good number of musicians I’ve come across over the years are still waiting for the old-school major-label discovery, hoping that their genre will come into vogue (in some cases, again) and a whole new bucket of fans will appear.

Those days are long gone.  That is one thing the how-to’s do tell you, although, it’s often couched in don’t-give-up kinds of language.  The market has changed, and we’re never going to see another “Thriller” or “Joshua Tree” or “Frampton Comes Alive” again, simply because there’s just not the scarcity of releases there once was.

This is not to say that  no indie band out there will ever achieve that coveted quit-your-day-job success.  It could happen.  But “success” really also needs to be redefined.  The days of Rick Astley moving from studio tea boy to worldwide megastar are behind us, and I think we’re going to see a lot more “really good weekend artists.

Out of the blue I received a pair of tickets to see Mr. Peter Murphy in Milwaukee.   I’ve seen him on a number of different tours, going back to 1995.  I’ve seen a pop tour, a rock tour, an acoustic tour, a turkish-ethnic tour…and now he’s back doing a kind of rock thing again.

It gives me hope, though – the guy’s in his early 50’s and he can still just bring it onstage.  His voice sounds as good as ever, he’s still bounding about the stage like a 19-year old, and he’s still doing his crazy bendy dances onstage.  Okay, it looks a little weird to have a 52-year-old skipping around a stage to a Bauhaus song, but aside from that, he still has an enviable amount of stage energy and presence.  His backing band seemed to be roughly half his age, too.

He also did possibly the best cover a Joy Division song I’ve heard.

Sadly, the show was not particularly well-attended.  The venue did a fairly piss-poor job of promoting the show, which was sad.  Still, it was also nice that even given the low attendance he didn’t just phone it in.

I admit I haven’t been the rabid Peter Murphy fanboy I was back in the mid 90’s, but I still have a healthy respect for the dude, and damn can he perform.