Posted 17th November 2012
Nearly time to say goodbye to 2012. It's been a good year but as I get older I feel like the time moves faster, feels like yesterday we were out and about filming the Shock! Horror! video and that was like 2 years now. I've tried to do a release a year while I'm busy with other things but months just seem to fly by worryingly!
If you didn't know my new remix album "Darkling" is out now! It's 15 tracks of awesome remixes of my stuff by friends and fellow artists. Now I must admit I'm not usually fussed about remixes and I've been often disappointed by "remix albums" but for this one it's pretty damn good, nice selection of stuff on there and personally I think some of the remixes actually sound better than my originals (Madeleine Bloom's version of Of Rolling Hills from Ambients, and Ark Elfs "news report" style version of The Enfield Poltergeist from the Andromeda EP. You can download the 15-track Darkling album here for pay-what-you-want or free.
Do Unsigned Artists Put Too Much Work In?
The thing I'd like to write about is something that a fellow artist asked me about the other day. They were feeling very down about their music and the feeling that no-one was listening, how hard it is to get exposure and how upsetting it is to work so hard on something and then no-one really seems interested. All fairness this is something that I've been feeling a lot lately too and it made me realise just how common it must be.
I'm not really meaning anything in a "why aren't I a big rockstar yet?" way, considering the style of music I do and how I compare to so many of the other more talented unsigned artists and musicians I know I'd be shocked by any kind of big attention! It's more whether we unsigned artists put too much work into what we do.
With my Synoiz stuff I'm doing artwork, singles, B-sides, digital booklets, remixes, music videos (you'd be surprised how much work goes into just one of them!!), then for every release I prepare large press lists of potentially interested magazines/newspapers/radio/blogs and contact each of them and send out press packs consisting of press releases, press CDs and other promotional material (such as the postcards designed and printed for the Shock! Horror! and Darkling releases); all of this is essentially just to help get attention and to give people special stuff in addition to the music itself.
The problem is that does any of this need to be done? My latest release Darkling seems to have been ignored by almost everyone and type of press it was sent to, and while the reaction from fans has been great and the release is doing well but I'm sure most of you would have been happy with just the album in MP3 with some quick artwork chucked out over Bandcamp or as a zip file on my website. If this was what I did it probably could have been out months earlier.
Obviously it makes me wonder if maybe my music is just rubbish and only me and some select few truly enjoy it, or if it's so different to what people want at the moment, or maybe I'm just not getting it out to the right magazines or crowds? So it begs the question should artists just focus on the music and throw it out there for whoever wants it and hope that someone finds it? Should artists who are not "discovered" yet stop putting effort into artwork and videos and such and wait until we've hit the big time with some random tracks we've put out? Or should we just make sure we enjoy every aspect of what we're doing and if we don't enjoy it (like press and promotion for me!) we should just not bother with it and hope someone manages to dodge all of the other millions of bands all over the internet and give a listen to one of our tracks and immediately fall in love with it?
It sounds mad doesn't it?
What do you think though, are you an artist trying to get promotion or feeling like you're not sure if anyone is listening? Would you prefer to focus on the music and not have to do the promotion or do you link everything else to your music so that you need all of it together?