While The Cat's Away...

Adam is on his mandatory yearly hajj to Japan, so Audio Damage dev is at a standstill until his return, for obvious reasons. In the meantime, I have lots to do.

One of those lots is assembling an EP of Micronaut material. In the past, I’ve put together these assemblages and put them in TuneCore or sold them via the Posi store. However, this time I’m considering making the leap in to Free territory. On the one hand, the gear I use to make music is expensive and difficult to maintain, and it would be nice to see a direct (rather than indirect, in the case of Audio Damage) payback for the acquisition of same. On the other hand, without steady touring and merch sales, there’s very little income to be made from direct music sales at this level, given my ability to promote any release and its limited potential audience due to its quirky nature. Any income I realize from direct music sales these days falls within the noise of my normal income generation efforts, and is thus arguably not worth the trouble.

It would be a different case if I decided to do a proper Sister Machine Gun record. A couple of phone calls would secure the full financial backing necessary to realize such a thing, but (a) I don’t have the time to properly exploit that occurance, and (b) I don’t have the desire or creative impulse necessary to pull it off in the first place. That’s outside the scope of this conversation in any event.

Anyhow, to return to the subject, another fact to consider is that the income from commercial licensing of Micronaut songs far outstrips the money generated from direct sales of same, by several orders of magnitude.

Taking all this in to consideration, I’m fairly convinced that I should just throw my old-school distaste of the concept of “free music” out the window and put the whole package up for download, cover art and all. What I’m wondering and opening up for comment are the following points:

1. If you’ve done this, what were your goals other than the obvious “increase my reputation” type things, and did you realize them?

2. What sort of PR would one do? All the normal shit that one would do with a normal release? I don’t see why not, and I have a bully pulpit here to utilize, obviously, but I’m interested to hear about success in this realm other than the normal avenues, if such is to be had.

3. Obviously, it would be wise to use Tunecore to submit to the streaming subscription services, but would it make sense to also put it in iTunes? If I was a customer and bought something on a whim in iTunes, only to find out it was freely available elsewhere, I’d be a little pissed off. Would I be pissed at the artist or at Apple? Hard to say.

4. Extras are easy in a situation like this. Are “remix packs” or whatever worth the effort expended in making them? (This would more directly concern the AI audience, obviously.)