Any updates on a potential release date?

Cannot. WAIT.

I am back on "don't know," unfortunately. 

*sifts uncomfortably in seat*
Waiting sucks...   

"Life is about movies; anything else is a bonus!"- Me   

Actually, now is as good a time as ever to ask y'all about this, because I'm still working it out in my head.

I have no idea what to do with this thing when it comes out. I've been trying to figure out the best move, and here's what I've come up with.

First a list of what I'm taking as givens:

• Nobody who doesn't already know I exist wants this album, naturally. Some sort of promotion will have to happen too, if that is to change. (Duh.) The only people who will buy it off the bat are in Group 1 - People Who Know I Exist. I'm estimating this number to be in the mid-thousands, and further estimating the number of people who will actually buy the damn thing to be in the low hundreds, if not lower.

• The first wave of what could be called promotion will be word of mouth by people in Group 1, and may facilitate a few more purchases relatively quickly. This would be Group 2, People Who Know The People Who Know Me. Obviously this number would be an exponent of the mid-thousands estimate, but I'll bet the proportion of people in this group who buy the thing will be way lower.

• Thusly, it is my assumption that until some sort of promotion happens, I'm looking at no more than a couple hundred purchases, probably fewer. Probably way fewer. My odds-on guess, just for funsies and for future amusement, is 61 purchases within the first month.

Now, a list of "you should take these as givens:"

• I'm pretty lazy once a project is done.

• I'm pretty much categorically embarrassed to promote myself at all.

• Unless I already have a magic fanbase in attendance, I'm probably not ever gonna gig for my own music. I'm not trying to get a music career off the ground. I'd love one, but for reasons one and two, I'm not the guy who gets a music career off the ground by gigging. Which means I'm probably not the guy who gets a music career.

Kay?

So here's my general thoughts. I think, for sake of ease and with an eye toward practicality, the first thing I do (once I have the album, which I momentarily do not) is run a print of CD's, maybe 25, some small number, that I actually put a bit of time into. Cool album art, possibly included HD versions of the video blogs, full-quality audio tracks, etc.. Sign those, whatever. CD's.

Then, on the website, I offer up a five-track song download for five bucks, through PayPal and whatever other easy and popular money services I can set up, and maybe sell the CD's for fifteen bucks or whatever. Make a shirt design or something, maybe. But handle all of that on my end, doing a bit of accounting, and not even bothering with iTunes and Cafepress and the like. Because I don't wanna. For now, anyway.

I'd handle Group 1 and Group 2 this way, instead of going through all the iTunesy stuff I'd have to do to sell my music through the store. All of this on the assumption of the givens above: I'm not Amanda Palmer, y'all, we're really not talking about a lot of people.

Then.

Depending on the response, I might immediately decide to move over to iTunes or what-have-you, or might not. If it's as I expect it will be, probably not.

I'm loosely planning on making at least one music video for this album, for whichever song I think would make the best single. (Failing that, best video.) This would ideally function the way a music video is supposed to function: as promotion. Make the video, make it well and do a good job on it, and do a bit of promotion on the video itself to try to get the ball rolling. io9 maybe, Reddit, that whole deal. Hope it takes off. Hope people buy the album.

If that actually starts to happen, or if I think it might, then do the overhead work to get onto iTunes and all that jazz.

Basically, I'm pre-exhausted thinking about the work involved in getting onto iTunes and dealing with however they pay an artist and bank accounts and all that. It'd be exciting and crucial for someone trying to get their music career off the ground, but like I said, unless the whole internet decides I'm a rock star, I'm not.

PayPal is already set up. Easy peasy. Adding other forms of payment for people who aren't comfortable with PayPal should be fairly straightforward, too.

This is my thinking. Thoughts?

Does 4Chan do those 'Ask Me Anythings' =P

UGH. You suck SO MUCH Teague. You are so close to kicking off a Jonathan Coulton-esque career of endless travel and comedy club gigs making you literally thousands of dollars a year and making you a well-known Internet personality among geeks, who gets to hang out with the likes of the guy who played the PC in the Apple commercials.

*sigh* Sign me up for 3 whatever-you're-doings. I'll watch for the video. It had better be "The Insidious Communist Propaganda of Steve."

This.

Maybe utilise some sort of Kickstarter-style rewards system? So much gets you the album + a one on one piano lesson on Skype. Or to just try and get the word out there, do something like a Reddit thread in which you say you will record yourself doing a song that involves everybody who replies (or if that gets out of hand, a select number of the top comments), similar to what you do now and then in the livestreams and then plug the album in the video. I dunno, cool little shit like that could work.

Coulton got attention on the Internet first ("Code Monkey" got picked up by Slash Dot). His music started getting used in podcasts by the likes of Adam Curry, and he started making some money from downloads/donations. Only then did he start gigging.

Likewise Molly Lewis, altho she did a lot of covers and was more of a YouTube star, which was ideal because she's as cute as a hedgehog. She recorded "An Open Letter to Stephen Fry" in her college classroom. That quickly got right to Stephen Fry, and she soon performed it at a benefit for him.

So the right route, it seems to me, is building a following via YouTube and your own site with original songs and covers and promote those in various places. That's why I say you're so close, because you're already kind of doing that. You just need to keep the audio quality high and keep producing (both problems for the spongmonkey guys after they got a Quiznos commercial). The videos themselves don't need to be polished, because people like finding diamonds in the rough. (But the audio really needs to be good.)

And you don't actually need to start schlepping equipment from coffeehouse to club to theater until there's a good chance your audience will have seen something you've done on the Internet.

Right now, your YouTube channel is a mishmash of songs, instructional videos, and dorking around with musical instruments. I think it would help to have a website that separates those so people can find the music easily. Molly Lewis' channel is almost entirely songs and her skateboarding—which has its own attraction.

Last edited by Zarban (2013-09-03 15:00:36)

I hear you on the iTunes bit. I really do. And I won't claim that I have knowledge at all regarding how to set it up, how to get your music on it, or how Apple pays artists. I won't.
However, with the sheer amount of indie music and psychotically obscure folk-polka and heavy metal bubble-gum poop, as well as legitimate covers by YouTube 'artists' on there, I kinda figured it'd be fairly easy to get on there. The amount of unknowns on there leads me to believe that it's almost as easy as setting up podcasts. Now, I don't know a massive amount about that either, in fact, I know nothing about it, but Extended Edition is on iTunes, and to my knowledge, Marti- erm, FALDOR, set that up in one evening.

Now, repeating myself, I thought it'd be a similar proces. If I'm completely wrong, sure, I can handle that. Being wrong. And if someone can enlighten me on how it's done, and if it's complicated, that'd be awesome, as I'd like to put my cover songs, or originals on there at some point in time, too.

All that being said, the main reason I want it on iTunes, is accessibility and ease. iTunes gift cards are sold all over the damn planet. I don't see any PayPal vouchers in Norway. Nor do I even know if there is such a thing. Of course, it is possible to transfer money from my bank account to PayPal, or link a VISA/Mastercard to it, but I'm one of the few suckers in this world stupid enough to buy too much crap on the likes of those cards to NOT EVEN OWN one at this point, so it's actually impossible. Sure, the fiancee does, but it's my purchases, not hers. As such, I'm forced to buying gift cards and vouchers, and my previous mistakes in life regarding money has taught me how this is actually a good thing. Knowing exactly how much money is available to me on iTunes, Playstation, and so on keeps my drunk purchases to a minimum, for instance.

I'm ranting. Sorry. It's that kind of day.
I'll gladly go through the trouble of getting a positive balance on my PayPal to order your album, and I'll even pay for shipping internationally, but I'd rather just own the songs digitally. Not that I don't enjoy hard copies, it's just I have no room for them anymore, and I don't have a Hi-Fi set worthy of validating a CD purchase, because those are apparently so much better, quality-wise, than 320Kbps MP3 files.