All posts by Kevin

Entertainment Makers, Things I Wrote Today

I Fight… The Music Industry as We’ve Known It…

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What’s up with the “new” music industry?

I put new in quotes because the even the new way of doing things is pretty old (relatively speaking).  But with physical media slowly earning a permanent spot on the endangered species list, and digital media being easier to share than that photo your friends took of you last week at the club after that girl got sick all over….

::cough::

…EVER…

…yeah…
easier to share than ever! haha

Labels and artists have been forced to get creative and diversify their income streams unlike any other time in the modern music industry landscape.  Take licensing for example.  This desire to diversify has included licensing and has made it more common for smaller artists to get companies to agree to pay to record their records and not even expect it to be sold to fans, and was ok with the band giving it away.   Who would have thought a label would sign a contract where section 27.65a reads something like this:

The Artists physical Recordings may or may not be sold to anyone upon transfer.  Furthermore, licensing income aside, any and all funds advanced for said Recordings can not be recouped by The Label from any of The Artists other earned income.

All that mumbo jumbo means, is that the label would agree to not only give up their ability to recoup the album production costs from album sales, in essence giving the artist a “free” album with their choice to, charge for it,  give it away, or whatever if they want; but they also give up their right to collect any money from the band aside from licensing income…. not quite the same as the “Robbie Williams, all inclusive from merch to tour income, but you can’t even say your own name without having to shell out some sort of residual payment first because we own your ass”  contract.  Either way, with crowd sourced album funding who needs a big label  ::pauses::  or any label for that matter?

Ok, to be fair labels come with their connections and support advantages…yes even the big ones.  I mean after all they do have shareholders and accountants to impress with solid balance sheets. They can’t really afford to say, “Yes!” to too many bands that they don’t think will guarantee them some serious return though.  With that said, they are more selective , more inclined (and may be more able) to hook an artist up with big time tours,  big time recording /distribution, and maybe even a big time radio campaign.   They also come with lots of hooks though too…

:: pauses ::

ok I’ll stop now haha

Originally this post was supposed to be almost a case study of sorts of the rise of the Chicago band I Fight Dragons.  A look at how they went from a local Chicago based chiptune-power pop band, to signing with Atlantic/Photo Finish Records within a year of releasing their first EP, to winning what seems to be an amicable release from said labels 2 years later, to dominating a “Voltron-Style” Kickstarter for their new record, and to somehow, through all of that, maintaining ownership of all of the songs that were paid for by the label… but alas after hours of searching I couldn’t find enough specifics as to how it all went down.  So we’ll just have to deal with a little different look at the band and the industry.

Aside from the fact that I’m a fan, I chose IFD, because I think they’ve actually “made it” (and yes I know that only the artist can determine that).  They are at a point where they have a sizable fan base, they have a theme for a network TV show (The Goldbergs), have had their cup of coffee with MTV, and have played multiple Warped/National Tours with some pretty big acts.   Well in the end, they were able to pull all that together to raise almost 600% of a $20,000 kickstarter goal for their upcoming album!

The thing is, that aside from reading about all the hard work, and seeing the tireless connections that they made with their fans early on, I couldn’t find any specifics as to how they got their big break.  As far as their release from their record label obligations…all I know is that they now have enough control over their own  music to do whatever they want with the songs that the label paid for.  Enough so that they, are able to give it away for free on their website.  Maybe the label gets all the money from the Goldbergs theme and other licensing things they have done, I don’t really know.

As for their rise?  I guess the specifics don’t really matter… they worked their asses off (harder than this guy), and it sure as hell paid off.  They put themselves in a position to put out six figure album “on their own”, and have some name recognition and a sound that is likely to get more licensing deals/big tours/record and merch sales in the future.

So as for the crowdfunding part of this all, what do you guys think?  How badly is crowdfunding killing major production companies?  Is it even at all?

With big time movies like Veronica Mars out there scoring 2 million in a single day and all sorts of bands like IFD going it solo what’s next for the industry?

Personally, I see history repeating itself.  At least since the start of Rock n’ Roll, indie record labels have  been small and agile enough enough to take a risk on something new and untested, and as soon as they show that their business models work the majors step in, buy up the indies (and whatever else they can of the working process), and form a “new world order”; until their shareholders won’t put up with the risk taking anymore of course.  At which point the market is ripe for indies to step in again and the cycle repeats.

In this case, once the guys in suits realize how to best put crowdfunding to work for themselves they’ll totally jump on board. (if they haven’t already) It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a site like indiegogo was snatched up by some media conglomerate in the next year or so.

Ha…this totally reminds me of the late 90′s and early 00′s when I’d be listening to panels of people talking about the “Celestial Jukebox”…Sure there were nay sayers out there, but at least on paper leasing a satellite to access all of my music in my car sounded like a good idea… ok at least a hell of a lot better than running extremely long audio cables everywhere I went haha

What related future trends have you guys seen going on in the industry?

If you want to see an innovative Kickstarter check out I Fight Dragon’s “Voltron Style” Kickstarter (Project Atma) It’s a pretty cool way of putting one together, and might give you some ideas if you decide to put one on.  Orrrrrr if you want to REALLY want to look at the future of the biz (and keep it hyper local to Boston while you’re at it)  just gaze at the awesomeness that was Planetoid Means Business.

::pauses::

after all “There’s no nation like do-nation”! haha

Thanks again for reading everyone… you guys totally rock!

Oh yeah… I almost forgot!  The “will work for Warped Tour tickets” offer in my post about the last IFD album  still stands!

xo – Kevin

Entertainment Lovers, Things I Wrote Today

I’m Pretty Sure They Don’t Actually Fight Dragons (but they still kick ass anyway)

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Ok … I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a catchy pop tune.  Throw a little Stacy’s Mom, or Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend on and you’ll see me rocking harder than this guy (minus the pizza haha).

Well a little over a year ago I heard one of the coolest songs that I had heard in a long while on WBRU… yea the actual radio!  Who would have thought?  It was kind of chiptune, but had a lot more guitars….annnnd I loved it!  It had just about everything that a polished power pop song should have, a short and sweet intro, a catchy chorus about a minute in, a sweet solo, and enough I’s, IV’s and V’s that would literally make Beethoven roll over in his grave!  I was instantly hooked, the song ended and they went to  a commercial…who was this band that had me doing the DiGiorno dance in my car?  Well it turns out that I couldn’t catch the tune with my phone’s song identifier, and the ADD in me kicked in and I totally forget what the damn song was….

…until one random day I was browsing through Rhapsody and it happened.  It was as if the rock gods themselves had come down and  handed me the Mouse of Destiny and guided  me to it, because right there on my screen as a recommended artist was none other than I Fight Dragons.

So I see their latest album (Kaboom!) and  in addition to the album title being a video game reference, the album art was as well, and the first song is a 30 second was a  slower more chiptuney instrumental called “Fanfare” that seemed kind of reminiscent of the theme from the original Legend of Zelda.  (did I mention that I’m a recovering gameaholic… :: pauses ::  annnnd I’m only half joking about that one haha).

So there I was, seemingly having found this cool chiptune band to check out. When all of the sudden the chorus of the next and title track came on….which turns out to be a full rock version of the theme of the first song! Ah-mazing!  That radio single came on a bunch of tracks later, but hooked on this record way before it came on.

So as I said before, they had the chord progressions, catchy choruses, and sugar coated solos down for some good ole awesome pop amazingness, but Kaboom!  brings Much more to the table than that.

Everything from the instrumentation, harmonies, and song titles to the lyrics themselves make this an extremely solid album as a whole.  You don’t see that very often anymore.  In today’s music landscape, people put the single out, maybe make an EP and hope to digitally get it into the pants of the masses!

Although I’d recommend this album as a whole, if you want some highlights I’d say check out their video for Save World Get Girl (which takes a big cue from the 1995 single Moon by the band Fossil)  The video features the band battling space baddies and rescuing the “maidens” in distress using their Nintendo weapons, powerpads, and of course the Konami Code.  Turns out that it was actually released in 3D for the Nintendo 3DS.

And although that lead single “The Geeks Will Inherit the Earth” does prove worthy of a great alternative (or even not so alternative) radio single; my favorite song on the album is the epic finale of a track called Suburban Doxology.  It is a track that interestingly reminds me of  Coheed and Cambria’s “In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3″.  Although the IFD song starts off with more of a bang , it has got good range of highs and lows, and has that battlefieldesque feel at the end with a buildup from slow soft snare drums and an A Capella high school chorus singing an altered version of Gloria (in excelsis meo) to the whole band backing the rendition in full force. This not only transitions well when the singer starts the main chorus over the top of this, but its melody was featured earlier in the album on a short instrumental track called “Gloria”.  It’s just brilliant I tell you!

Well these fine gents have a new album in the works… but my post on that will go into the Music Makers section of this blog as it deals more with the biz side of things.

Thanks for reading… what are some of your new favorites?

On a related side note…these guys are playing the Warped Tour again and as much as they are in my top 1 right now, as close as the show is to me, and as there are actually other bands playing that I’d like to see I just can’t afford to spend the money on tickets right now… so if anyone’s buying I think I could whip up a few t-shirts in return… or something!

Thanks again!

- Kevin

Things I Wrote Today

And Up Until Now I’ve Pressed Them All…Except One

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Well hello there!  :: spoken in his best old school deep voiced sitcom guy trying to be all attractive-like  :: (kind of like this - but not really)

Thanks for stopping by!  Well, I’ve finally done it!  I am finally crediting a blog as written by me that is actually about me….all of me!  Life, love, sex, friendships, music, entrepreneurship, my crazy waay-too-distracted-mind and all!  Ok so this blog will be a lot more than just about me, and if all goes well I’ll have contributors talking about themselves, doing reviews on things they like (and don’t like), as well as just plain having fun!

Believe it or not, the decision to blog here in this format was a pretty big one.  I’ve wanted to have a more public blog for years where I could write about the things and topics that would show my love for music, education, helping people and musicians network, poetry, and all sorts of silly things, but as you’ll read the decision as to how it would appear was a carefully long and drawn out one.

See, I Loove to write!  Over the years I have been an on and off blogger, college newspaper journalist, PR-spread-the-word-promo-guy, poet…you name it!  I started blogging back in the old myspace days just journaling my day/asking people questions like “Is it worse to be called Fat or Creepy”, pitting two cultural “icons” like Barney the Dinosaur vs. Big Bird, or Fred Flinstone vs. George Jetson in mock fights to the finish and seeing who people thought would win, as well as writing poetry and just keeping a general journal of my thoughts.  I will have to say that I was at least ahead of the curve on the which is worse/who would win thing (as tons of people do that now). [gotta love Epic Rap Battles of History]

:: 10 minutes later after getting distracted by ERB ::

I actually got the battle and questioning idea when some kid I know from college started calling random dorm extensions asking the simple question “Shaven or unshaven?”.  I asked him to clarify annnnnd he just repeated the question.  It was pretty fantastic!

Annnnnyway, I was writing on MySpace for a while and then got invited to this site Catch27.  I’ll blog about how ingenious that site was later, but in the end it kind of gave me this place I could write where no one knew me.  After a bit I slowly started writing about things more personal to me.  Getting all “risky”, I’d write about things like being single, clubbing, sex, how at times me talking to women would usually go something like this, how amazingly socially awkward I can be sometimes, and other things that I wanted to work on personally.

Before I knew it, I had a following of mostly women and my blog titles morphed from pretty G Rated ones like “Who’s the Best Breakfast Cereal Mascot?”, to more “risqué” things like “Condoms Condoms Condoms!”  (Where I posed a the question of condom preference to all my readers), and of course… “Shaven or Unshaven?” haha

I actually just now realized what made me change my writing topics and style.  Well, for reasons that I’ll blog about, I can be really shy.  Waaay more shy than one should be.  I’m talking “it took me 9 months of talking to this one girl every day and night for hours at a whack to even get the guts to ask to see her outside of high school” kind of shy.

But as soon as those words hit the proverbial page, I was a completely different man.  I went from that shy guy in the elevator, to a guy just being the confident self that he really is/wanted to be.

[Ok, so I was going to scratch that last line/video link and put a deep-voiced "awwwww yeah" type of analogy there referencing some kick ass performer that is all shy until they hit the stage... And the first thought that popped into my head was Barney Rubble being this amazing singer in the shower, yet terrible otherwise...and yes I'm a dork and know that they reused that storyline at least once more in the "Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show" in the 70's haha.]

I think about at “the wall” of the computer screen, and how I also used Catch 27 to keep me kind of anonymous, (an alter ego if you will), and see how those thingsjust gave me less to worry about when it came to what other people would think.  Up until now I thought that talking to women on there just came natural to me.  Now after thinking about it and reflecting back on it, I see that it all had to do with the fact that I wasn’t a terrible writer, asked people questions, women read what I had to say, and just like in person they thought I was alright and started responding.  Alas, if an “in person” opportunity came up for me to start actually having a conversation with most of the woman that read my blog out from behind the comforts of my big ass 19 inch CRT monitor…you can bet that even Shy Elevator Harold would have more “game” than I.

:: inserts blog here about how I’m so not a fan of using the word “game” in that way::

Don’t get me wrong, just because I’m not all about having “game” and that took me 9 months of psyching myself up to ask a girl out, didn’t mean sex wasn’t ever on my mind.  It was on my mind all the damn time (and still is haha) I was a typical male teenager during those 9 months, and the fact the fact that it took me 9 months to just get the guts to ask a girl out just meant that I had That much more time to think about it.

So there I sat…this girl crazy kid, finally finding a way that I can “talk” to women.  Why wouldn’t I want to write about being single… or be at least a little more risqué talking more openly about sex?  Especially when attractive women would respond.  Sure people write what they like, and while I did and do that,  initially I just wanted to be a better communicator with women.  I Absolutely Never wanted to write about that stuff with the goal of meeting women and having one night stands, I just assumed that if whoever I was talking to was into reading/talking about sex then I’d be more likely to meet someone who would be able to compete with a lifetime of pent up sexual energy.

Well, after the days of Catch 27, another site, and a few posts here and there for Facebook and Audio Cotton I end up here.   I am in a place where I really want to write more and am in need of an outlet.  Yet, as much as I really enjoyed my previous blog format, I have been hesitant about going public with those topics.  See, some of those are topics you might not want to talk about at your local “churtempleagogue” or the family dinner table, and like anyone I have a reputation to consider. I run a business, people I see every day may think differently of me and some of my choices, and to any potential employer this (and any other internet related thing with “me” on it ) is pretty much part of my resume….forever!

So with all that to consider, and this burning need to write I started to look at the goals of any potential project.  I really wanted to be able to use this blog to, not only scratch my creative itch, but to talk about cool things are going on with my business, help expose people to great music by doing things like album reviews, blog about art, help people in parts of my network connect with people in other parts of my network, help/inspire people with AD(H)D, work on my web development skills, and (among lots of other things) allow people to just get to know me better.

Most of that is pretty straightforward.  I can write about all sorts of things publicly here, make it work, and feel no worries about who sees it. And although those non-dinner table topics won’t consume this blog, those were the things that I wasn’t sure how to fit in here and still be ok with slapping my name on it.

I thought long, then I thought hard, short, and even thought soft… it took a while but I started to hash out some blog style options.  I started by making lists of things that I would or would not write about if I went “public” like this; and in the end I kept coming up with only one solution.  I just needed to have 2 blogs.  One written by “me” where I played it safe, laid down a little awesomeness to the page, and you hopefully loved every last word; and another blog written by a pseudonym that, where instead of writing about local music, Audio Cotton or and other personally identifiable things, took the filter off and allowed people to get to know more about who I really am…polished “resume” detractors and all.  (oh the irony)

For the longest time I couldn’t see a way around keeping some topics in that anonymous format.  Eventually though I chose to write a blog by “me” and put it all in there (or out there depending on how you look at it).

I look at it this way:

I really want people to know who I am, and I know that nobody is perfect.  Sure, I will talk about things like mental illness, how I think it’s fun to go clubbing wearing the most attention grabbing outfit in the room

::coughhumancandycanewithactualcandycanestapedtohisbodycough::

How I’ve been intimate with 3 women in my life that had significant others,  hell I’ve even made a girl that I wasn’t really dating cry on a casual date.

But with all that said, and as imperfect as I am, my parents raised me to be a good person with pretty kick ass morals (thanks mom and dad).  In the end, whenever I have been faced with any decision where I could make a choice to be actually “bad” I knew that in the end I have only myself to live with.  I feel Terrible about that girl crying (although she totally got me back), and as far as the women with significant others, none of those relationships happened without some Major internal conflict.

I guess in the end, being good is totally subjective, and people will judge you no matter what.  One doesn’t build great friendships on just kind of knowing someone’s story and if personal friends of mine aren’t fans of the bits of controversial things I sprinkle in here and there then it would only make sense for me to know.

After writing that last section, I realized that this blog is more likely to have a positive impact on my life and actual “resume”.  I’m ok with choosing a life where I can express myself and be potentially closer to my friends over worrying about a stranger looking at this in a poor light and not hiring me.  Plus, this kid’s got morals and most people will see and respect that.  Either way, being better connected with more people will totally expand my overall “reach” and in the end would probably enhance the effectiveness of my actual resume.

After reading this all again haha I realized that I do have to consider my reputation at least a little.  For example, I want to teach one day, (probably music business to kids), but if it were to be in a public institution like a school what would my employers/the school board think of seeing the edgy side of me?

I just stopped to think and then answer that question to myself.  I’ll be honest, the only thing that I’ve ever done that I have heard people get fired for has to deal with dating someone who is spoken for.  As for clubbing? Sure I may have gone all candy cane or worn all purple and topped it off with some grape gum and/or Fanta, but it’s not like  I’m about to go “Full Monty” at the Bird Cage. As for any risqué writings?  So far, the topics are more like 2014′s version of PG-13, with some R rated things sprinkled in.  All of those things are things that many people experience in one form or another in their day to day life.  If I ever got a job teaching kids, then I would obviously remove some things… But not without fully disclosing such things to my employer.

The fact that I am writing about this now and have had other blogs that had some anonymity before shows that I know that there are times and places when, you do have to be careful about being too open about things.  But having things to hide?  To me that’s waay worse.  I guess what I am saying, is that I care more about living a life where I don’t have to worry about what people know about me, and that if I can personally live with the good and bad choices that I make then I don’t really have to care about what details about my life come out in my writing.

So there it is…

….and here I am!

Thank you so much for reading this… I hope it is the start of many kick ass things to come!  toast_gif_original

Oh yeah…Feel free to comment… or not… Whatever works!

-Kevin