Green Day is sticking to their ideals, however, and not releasing a censored version. They don’t believe they should have to censor their music, and that Wal-Mart should have an obligation to sell their customers the correct art.
Wal-Mart has the right to decide what products they want to carry, and I see nothing wrong with bleeping out a few F-bombs. It seems like a reasonable request, and most people hear those versions on the radio anyway. But what happens it goes beyond a simple f^*k or s%#t? Should artists have to edit out other lyrics that are considered objectionable? That takes away from the meaning of the song and the statement its trying to make.
I applaud Green Day for making a stand for their art and not being overly concerned with making a few more bucks. But then again, they didn’t seem to make a big deal a few years ago when radio stations gutted out a significant portion of the song, “Holiday.”
So what would you do in this situation? Would you censor your music for a retailer? What if your CD didn’t contain any blatant curse words, but, as mentioned in the article, lyrics that contained “some references considered adult?” Is Green Day being too sensitive, or does Wal-Mart have a faulty policy?
Recently, we stumbled upon a blog posting a bunch of stunning cover art. You’ll see some classics on there, like Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of The Moon,” as well as fairly new albums like Green Day’s “21st Century Breakdown,” too.
We decided we’d post some notable artwork that we’ve seen come through our office over the years. I’ll post some suggestions from each employee here at COPYCATS Media. Here are some of Justin Kristal’s favorites (click on images for more information about the band/album):
If you are an upcoming band in the Twin Cities area, you should think about signing up for Battle of the Bands 3. You can enter by filling out the form at their website.
The stakes are high for this competition, as the grand prize package is valued over $65,000 with items including but not limited to: a recording session at Masters Recording Institute, a year worth of Pizza Hut pizza, a prize package from Twin Town Guitars, and a retail ready CD package from your favorite CD replication company.
Here is a full description of what COPYCATS Media will be adding to 1st place prize package:
1000 Retail-Ready CDs
Glass-mastered, replicated CDs with full color imprint on the disc
6 panel insert and traycard printed 4/4 (full color on both sides)
Packaged into jewel cases with your choice of black or clear tray
Polywrap, barcode, and topspine sticker all included
500 Full Color Posters 11″x17″ posters printed 4/0 (full color, CMYK print on one side)
Graphic Design Services Our design team will bring your ideas and concepts to life
Professional Audio Mastering Services We’ll give your album that extra pop to make it sound its best
Free reference master sent for your approval before replication
We’re also contributing a prize for the runner up package, too. Here’s what you’ll get along with a $500 Taco Bell certificate from Border Foods:
500 Digital Download Cards Cards are printed 4/1 (full color on the front; black and white on the back)
Each card has a unique code to redeem for your music, video, and artwork online
You can distribute however you want: sell them or give them away for free
There are plenty of other 2nd and 3rd place prizes from other sponsors. Click here for a full list of prizes and rules. We hope to see you at the Fine Line Music Cafe on August 6th!
If you are planning to leak nude photos of yourself in an attempt to increase music sales, you may want to reconsider. This article from Billboard shows that download sales of Rihanna and Cassie remained flat after all the buzz related to nude photos of them that were released onto the internet.
The good news for these performing artists is that their sales did not decline. There weren’t many fans who decided not to buy music from Rihanna or Cassie because of these photos, but there weren’t any fans who decided to buy their music because of these photos, either. It was a push, and there’s a perfectly good reason for this.
This graph shows the spike in blog chatter when these photos were first released:
Chart from www.billboard.com
The thing to remember is that any one can write up a blog post on any subject. It’s a good bet that the majority of these blogs weren’t written by music fans or reviewers, nor were these blogs necessarily targeted to readers who are music enthusiasts. A large portion probably cover general news, pop culture, celebrity gossip, etc. I suspect a larger than normal male demographic driving this huge spike in blog activity. There are lots of guys out there who don’t like Rihanna’s and Cassie’s brand of pop music, but they certainly like to look at nude pictures of female pop singers.
So if you want lots of people to see pictures of you in the buff, by all means, post naked self portraits on the internet. If you are looking to drive up sales of your CD, then you better find a different strategy.
As a musician, you may develop a “survival-of-the-fittest” mentality and see other bands and artists as your competition. Instead of fighting against your fellow musicians, the article suggests uniting together and forming your own internet radio station based on the particular niche market you serve. Get a concentrated group of artists to join in and form a co-op of sorts, then start building a channel for like mined fans to follow.
You can read the article in full to get a better idea about what this author advocating. But I’d like to just focus on this excerpt:
It’s essential to find unencumbered songs (no strings attached – any deal is possible) that squarely appeal to the niche you are targeting. Each song will have to meet a quality threshold and you will have to monitor your traction analytics (plays, skips, session ends, downloads, etc.) to determine when it’s time to say goodbye to certain songs. You will also have to set all politics and personalities aside when programming your station. Death occurs for a proposition like this when you start spinning songs and featuring videos because you like the person more than his or her music.
This paragraph puts the emphasis on quality. You need to play good music to build credibility as a trust source of *insert genre here* music. Analytics are suggested to determine which songs should go and which should stay. But won’t this make your new music channel just like the commercial radio stations and big record labels we were supposedly fighting against? If you boot off the least popular songs and artists, you’re left with playlists that spin the same popular artists constantly. It’s no different then your typical Top 40 radio station.
As a channel manager, you’d be in charge of finding new music to keep your playlists fresh. This would involve quite a bit of hustle. Sure, there are plenty of bands out there, but how many fit within your niche channel? And how many of those bands are willing to become an active participant in your channel? Finally, how many of those bands are good enough to be on your channel?
This is where it gets fun. It’d be a lot of work to make something like this happen, but I’d imagine it gets a lot easier once you have a large group of solid artists to work with. So who’s ready to give this a shot?
We’ve been selling digital download cards at COPYCATS Media for over a year now, and there are many practical and innovative ways to use them. Picture this scenario:
You released an album a couple years ago and it has sold pretty well. You ordered a thousand or maybe two thousand copies and are nearing the bottom of the barrel. There are literally only a couple CDs left in your inventory.
Naturally, you’d think to order more. However, you’re releasing a new CD in the next month and sales of the old album have really slowed down. It wouldn’t make much sense to order another batch of 1000 replicated CDs or even 100 duplicated CDRs of the old album if you have a new one coming out soon. But if there’s a demand for the old CD, no matter how small or infrequent, you feel obligated to supply it. What do you do?
Order download cards
Digital download cards can be used to sell MP3 downloads of your album. We host the data for free; all you have to do is sell or distribute the uniquely coded cards to your fans. They are incredibly inexpensive, and you can order as little as 100 units. This would be a perfect way to supply customers with your old album without having to invest in another production run of replicated CDs.
You can sell the cards as a stand-alone item or package them with your new CD to build value. Bundle it with the new album for a few dollars more. You could even bundle the download card with the new album for free. This would give fans two albums for the price of one!
If you decide to give the download card free with your new album, make sure you ask your fans if they want it. If a fan already has your old album, they would have little use for the download card. Sure, they may give it to a friend and help spread some buzz about your band, but more than likely it will just end up sitting in their wallet/desk drawer/trash can and go unused. The cards are cheap enough that you can afford for that to happen, but why waste one if you don’t have to?
That’s just one the advantageous ways you can use download cards to help sell your music. If you’d like a price quote for these cards, feel free to contact us at COPYCATS Media.
I came across this post on Twitter today and it made me happy:
@melodicart I think you should still get the physical cd sent to you when buying album downloads on iTunes. the artwork people! It matters! Missing out
As an employee at a CD duplication company, how can I not like that statement? It really makes the point that you should get some more value when buying an album. There’s really nothing to experience when just purchasing an MP3 download. It’s just a string of binary code (zeroes and ones). Of course, you get the music, but you can find many places online to simply stream (or illegally download) the music for free.
Most people who just buy the occasional single are OK with this. They only plunked down $0.99 for the single song download, and they don’t expect much else other than the song itself. But if you’re paying $10 for an entire album, I think you should get a little something extra. A physical CD would go great with your downloaded MP3s.
It’s getting harder to market recorded music to the masses when so many are enticed to illegally download music for free. That’s why it’s important to add value to the recording you are selling. Invest in good graphic design services that may end up on a list like this. Track your CD sales and give your buyers access to exlusive content like videos or bonus songs. The more value you can add to your products, the more people will be enticed to buy.
When thinking about what events shaped my musical tastes and preferences today, I immediately think of the movie Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone and Brittany Murphy. So what does this movie have to do with music? Well that’s a long story…which I will tell you now.
I played the trombone as a kid. When I was old enough to take band class in elementary school, we were presented with five instruments to choose from: saxophone, trumpet, flute, clarinet, or trombone. Trumpet and saxophone were the popular choices, as two thirds of the kids in my class picked one of those two instruments. There were about three girls who picked the flute and handful of nerds who went with the clarinet for some reason (I mean no disrespect to the clarinet and those that play it, but I still to this day don’t understand why a 9 year old kid would choose to play it). Then there were three trailblazers who chose to play the trombone. I was one of them.
I can’t understand why more kids didn’t select this instrument. If I remember correctly, most were afraid because it didn’t have buttons or keys; just a slide. But that’s what appealed to me. I wasn’t confined by just three keys. I could play an F in either position 1 or position 6. I liked having that flexibility. And for anyone who learned to play trombone, you never forget the first time you played a glissando or smear. What a glorious sound! I learned to play this very early and played it all the time. It drove my band director crazy.
I loved playing trombone, but as I got older, I became quite conscious of the fact that playing the trombone in the school band is somewhat geeky. Not that I cared. I was secure enough to do geeky things. But I knew if I ever really wanted to live out my dreams and start a rock band, I needed to pick up the guitar or something. This would be difficult, since I didn’t have the discipline or patience to learn on my own, and there weren’t any lessons offered in my small rural town. How was I supposed to rock out playing a trombone?
That’s where the movie Clueless comes in. There was a scene in the movie where they go out to a club and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones were playing on stage. They were playing to a packed club full of good looking people who were dancing and having a good time. And guess what: the band had a trombone player (amongst other horn players). It wasn’t just some back-up horns on a song or two; they playing front and center on every song.
This blew me away. I had never seen or heard a band like this before, and I never looked at my trombone the same way again. This was a cool instrument, and I could very well play it in a rock band.
My music tastes started shifting towards ska, which was a hot trend back in the mid-nineties. I bought the Clueless soundtrack with the song, ”Where Did You Go,” by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. I picked up CDs by Reel Big Fish, Less Than Jake, and Goldfinger. That led me to other ska infused punk bands like Rancid/Operation Ivy. I started digging backwards and checking out 80’s ska bands like Madness and The English Beat, and back further to artists like Toots & The Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, and Desmond Dekker.
I seemed to enjoy any tune that had some trombone element to it. I recently heard this track called “Hongroise Les Doights” by La Goutte Au Nez. It was on the background music on the YouTube video below. I liked it so much that I downloaded one of their albums from Rhapsody.
I unfortunately never made good on becoming a trombone rock star. I mentioned earlier how I lack discipline and patience with this sort of thing. I played in ska-punk band with some friends from college for a few weeks, but the commitment it takes to seriously play in a band was too much for me.
But that Mighty Mighty Bosstones show on the movie Clueless is the reason I took serious pride in the instrument I played. It opened me up to a new genre music in a time when stale post-grunge was the norm. It’s the reason why I took my trombone with me to college and played in the marching band. It’s also the reason why I still haven’t sold the dented-up old thing on eBay. I’m keeping it forever, because the next opportunity to play again may be just around the corner.
When you work at CD duplication company like COPYCATS Media, you get a lot of perks. One of those obvious perks is seeing and hearing a lot of talented musicians come through our office. Here’s one that stuck out:
Last fall, Nina Yasmineh released an EP and we had the privilege of duplicating her CDs. Although she’ll be graduating from high school in June, her songs and voice have an incredibly mature sound. She’ll continue performing and recording as she attends college at New York University this fall.
CD cover for "Real Good Thing"
What’s really impressive is the way she has promoted and put herself out there in a short amount of time. While she has been singing for nearly all her life, her first live performance was in January. Since then, she won second place in a highly regarded local talent competition and has been playing a steady stream of solo coffee house shows. According to this article from the Knight Errant, her music has received radio airplay in Mexico, and her album has been ordered by fans in Japan.
Just last month, she was featured in a music blog run by Teen Vogue magazine. How did a nationally published magazine find out about her music? Simple: Nina just sent a CD to their office and they loved it. When she plays her first gig in New York, she’ll have some fans out there already.
We at COPYCATS Media wish her the best of luck as she heads to NYU this fall and can’t wait to hear her first full length album. If you’d like to hear more of Nina Yasmineh’s music, you can buy her EP, “Real Good Thing,” on CD Baby or iTunes.
In some ways, music seems to becoming more localized with technology. That doesn’t seem right, does it? You would think the internet, with it’s file sharing and streaming capabilities, would be making all the music out there more global. But with so many artists emerging a pushing their stuff online, music consumers have to start making choices.
I came across this little news bit about the rising hip-hop scene in Nigeria (complete with a video clip from CNN). The article cites computers and cheap recording software leading to better sounding music recordings. The music fans there have begun to choose home-grown music over imported tunes from the US and Europe. Is this starting to happen over here on the city or state-wide levels? I think it is.
Here’s my reasoning: just signing up on MySpace and befriending a couple bands will lead to daily friend requests from musicians all around the world. They are all going to be asking you to “check them out.” I believe a typical music consumer would tend to pay more attention to bands that they have a chance to see perform, and those bands are more likely going to be local.
Consumers will still be influenced by traditional media channels when choosing music. If you subscribe to Rolling Stone or Spin magazine, you’ll likely check out the bands that they write about. You’ll still check out songs that you hear on TV, movies, and commercials, too. But when navigating the vast seas of social media, I think local music will have the advantage.
As a musician, you may develop a “survival-of-the-fittest” mentality and see other bands and artists as your competition. Instead of fighting against your fellow musicians, the article suggests uniting together and forming your own internet radio station based on the particular niche market you serve. Get a concentrated group of artists to join in and form a co-op of sorts, then start building a channel for like mined fans to follow.
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