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[thisismasses]

Is Spotify Evil? (An In-Depth Assessment)

By James, 25th Sep 2015

I've been on the fence about Spotify for quite a few years, since it was first launched in 2008 when I was at university. I could never decide if it would be a great thing or a horrible thing for the music industry. As a music consumer, a music creator, and someone who has a decent grasp of the ins and outs of music royalties, I feel like I'm qualified to explore the subject in detail.

It seems like every other day there's an article about how some famous artist has made some tiny amount of money from Spotify royalties. Yesterday there were two pieces of news that inspired me to think about this further... La Roux claiming she got £100 for the last quarter, and "All About That Bass" cowriter claiming £3700ish in total for that song (178 million streams). These articles are clearly written in a "Spotify is evil" way, so of course they don't give you any basis for comparison. That's what I'm going to do here, then we can make up our minds with all the facts of how royalties are broken down.

This will be a case study of a fictional top 10 song by a fictional major-label pop artist, based on one week of fictional airplay, streams and downloads. It’s based on average stats which have either been researched or are common knowledge, with educated guesses filling the gaps. The point is to compare how royalties are generated and split for different listening mediums.

NOTE: I'll be talking mainly about UK royalties for UK artists. Each country is slightly different, and international artists sometimes get paid differently, so the numbers are variable but the concepts will probably always apply. Most of these figures are estimates anyone, but ones from official bodies so they should be fairly accurate, and of course numbers change month to month.

INCOME FROM MAINSTREAM RADIO

I'll use Radio 1 as an example since a lot of data is easily accessible: 

- BBC Radio 1 apparently averages 9.7million listeners (presumably in primetime).

- A-list (heavy rotation playlist) tracks are played 25 times per week (presumably in primetime).

- This means an A-list track will be heard about 242 million times (equivalent to 242 million streams) per week.

- Performance royalties (PRS) for Radio 1 are apparently around £14.91 per minute, so assuming average song length of 3.5 minutes, that's about £50 per play. This gets split 50% between the songwriters and 50% to the publisher. 

- Broadcast royalties (PPL) for Radio 1 are apparently around £38 per play. This normally gets split 50% to the record label and 50% between the performers (in the case of a pop singer, most of that will go to them and a few percent goes to session musicians who also performed on the track). 

- For purposes of discussion lets assume a typical pop singer/songwriter would co-write their songs with one or more people, so lets assume they have 50% of the songwriting credit (so 25% of the songwriting royalties). Also let's assume it's an electronic track with no other performers, except the producer takes a small amount, say 5%, for their "performance" of adding all the electronic instruments to the song (via their computer). So the total royalties this artist would receive for 242 million "streams" is (£50 x 25 plays x 25%) + (£38 x 25 x 45%).

This adds up to £740 to the artist, and total royalties on the song would be £2200 (just for that week, just for that one radio station). This works out as around £3 in royalties per million listens go to the artist, and £6 further royalties for the record label and publisher. 

ARTIST INCOME = £740 

LABEL & PUBLISHER INCOME = £1460 

EFFECTIVE LISTENS = 242 million (non-proactive) 

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO ARTIST= £3 per million listens

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO LABEL & PUBLISHER = £6 per million listens

  NOTE: make sure to bear in mind that a hit song will be played for many weeks on many radio stations, perhaps around the world, so the number of actual song listens coming from radio for a hit song will be in the tens of billions. When you think of it like this, a million hits on Spotify or Youtube is nothing. Also note that big hits will get a lot of TV play, which works much in the same way as radio in terms of royalties, with extra payouts for the music video too. And there's sync royalties for hit songs used as a soundtrack to TV shows etc, but that's a whole different subject.

INCOME FROM STREAMING SERVICES

It seems that total revenue from Spotify (and Apple Music) is divided 30% to them, 58% as broadcast royalties and 12% as performance royalties. The 30% makes sense as it's the same cut iTunes takes from digital sales. But it might seem odd how the royalties are split so unevenly between "broadcast" and "performance". In radio broadcast the split is about 40:60, whereas here the split works out as 83:17. I don't know how they decided this figure, but this means songwriters and publishers are getting less and performers and labels are getting more for streaming than for radio play. 

You could speculate that the labels swayed this ratio in their favour when they collectively "invested" in Spotify, and as the labels are the master rights owners, there isn't anything the publishers can do to stop them. This I suppose is one area of dubious morality, though note that most major labels have a publishing arm to their business as well so they're not really losing out. In this case it's songwriters who are losing out and performers are benefiting. 

BUT remember, in the case of music sales, the songwriter and publisher get nothing, and the label and performer get everything. And an on-demand streaming service essentially bridges the gap between radio play and music sales. So it makes sense that the ratio would be adjusted to support this fact, and on reflection I think it seems fair. 

So anyway, here's how the royalties break down: 

- With Spotify as the example, over 700k streams in a week will put a track in the top 10 of the Spotify chart, so let's assume our track hits that benchmark. 

- After looking at a few different articles and reports, it seems that Spotify pays an average royalty rate of £0.0034 (0.34p) per stream. 

- This adds up to about £2400 per week total royalties for our fictional hit song.

- Split 83:17 this equates to £1990 for label/performers and £410 for publisher/songwriters 

- So our artist would be earning about £900 for the performance royalties and £100 for the songwriting, for a total of £1000. 

ARTIST INCOME = £1000 

LABEL & PUBLISHER INCOME = £1400 

EFFECTIVE LISTENS = 0.5 million (semi-proactive, see note below) 

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO ARTIST= £2000 per million listens

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO LABEL & PUBLISHER = £2800 per million listens 

NOTE: I couldn't find any information about percentages of songs streamed as part of curated playlists. That type of listening is similar to radio, i.e. non-proactive listening, the listener didn't specifically choose that song. Whereas listening to an artist's album, or even just to their singles, is proactive listening which is more similar to making a purchase. From my experience the type of people who listen to the top 40 are also the type of people who like to listen to the same songs over and over anyway, so I'm guessing a lot of spotify users like this will just play the "UK top 50" playlist on loop, or other similar playlists. To some extent this makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy that once a song gets in the chart it will stay there, and so I'd assume the percent of proactive listening on chart hits will be low, maybe 20-40%. And conversely I'd expect the percent of people deliberately listening to underground bands/artists would be quite high, maybe 80-90%. This logic suggests that streaming probably doesn't impact chart sales too much, and probably has a bigger impact on sales of underground music. But then again, people who listen to underground music are also people I'd say are more likely to buy the music anyway to support that artist. This model would fit with most people I know, but it's certainly an untested theory!

INCOME FROM MUSIC SOLD

A chart hit could be anywhere between 2k and 100k sales per week. On a slow week 2000 sales might be enough to break the top 40, but let's assume the song we just talked about, after a week of Radio 1 A-list rotation, sells 20k copies (which probably puts it somewhere in the top 10). 

- Most of the songs in the chart are 99p, so total revenue on our song would be about £20k for the week. 

- The distributer (iTunes, amazon, etc) keeps 30% of that, leaving £14k. (Note that CD single sales are mostly zero nowadays. And also note that iTunes in the UK pays out a further 6.5% to MCPS, which will eventually go back to the master rights holder (i.e. record label).

- Depending on the deal the artist signed with their label, apparently they will often get 8-25% of gross sales (sometimes 50% of net sales). Although from that will be deducted any advances they've been paid ("recoupment"). 

- Also from this share their manager will normally take a cut of 10-20%. 

- So this could leave the artist with something like £1200 to £7000 (just for that week, just for that one single, just in the UK, depending on all these factors and assuming there's nothing to be recouped). 

- Let's assume an average fan will listen around 50 times to a song that they buy. (That's in their lifetime. Check your iTunes play counts, very few songs will get over 100 listens, and there will be a lot with less than 20 listens, so I think 50 is a fair average estimate). So 20k sales x 50 listens equals 1 million listens. Giving a total effective royalty of £14k per million listens. And also note these listens will be spaced out over a few years, but these "royalties" are all paid up front in the space of 1 week. 

ARTIST INCOME = £1200 to £7000 

LABEL & PUBLISHER INCOME = £8300 to £13700 

EFFECTIVE LISTENS = 1 million (pro-active) 

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO ARTIST= £1200 to £7000 per million listens

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO LABEL & PUBLISHER = £8300 to £13700 per million listens 

Note: There’s an article claiming 33 streams on Spotify equates to one sale in terms of revenue, but also the Official Chart Company have determined a rate of 100 streams equating to one sale in terms of chart performance. So again, my estimate of '50 listens equating to one sale' falls in between these two, and hence I think is a fair assumption.

INCOME FROM YOUTUBE

I never really considered this before as I'm not a person who listens to a lot of music on YouTube, but after some research it all sounds very cloak and dagger... The sneaky people at YouTube (Google) have strong-armed the music industry into basically letting them do what they want, and apparently this is paying a relatively low (but undisclosed) royalty however they see fit (i.e. once every few years it seems). 

The best numbers I've found are $30 royalty on 1 million plays, but who knows how that is split. Hopefully when YouTube's new music service "MusicKey" is rolled out fully, the royalties will be in line with other on-demand streaming services. We can only hope. 

- There is advertising revenue from YouTube hits, and this apparently can work out around $8000 (£5200) per million hits. But this isn't a royalty, and so won't be split according to any royalty laws but would presumably go to the master rights owner (record label)... I'd think an artist would be lucky to see any of that unless they have a very good record deal. 

- If the report of $30 (£20) performance royalties on a million hits is accurate, this puts the rate a little bit above radio and well below Spotify (and Apple Music etc.) 

- I couldn't find any UK numbers, so I've just converted the dollar amounts for comparison. I also couldn’t find any stats on how many YouTube views are typical per week (just from UK users) for a top 10 hit song, although I’d make a guess of 500k to 1 million hits per week perhaps on average.

ARTIST INCOME = ?? 

LABEL & PUBLISHER INCOME = ?? 

EFFECTIVE LISTENS = ?? (pro-active) 

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO ARTIST= maybe £5 to £50 per million listens, depending on a lot, maybe more if they're getting a share of ad revenue

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO LABEL & PUBLISHER = maybe up to £5000 inc ad revenue

INCOME FROM ILLEGAL DOWNLOADS

Don't forget about this one - hate it all you want, but it's one of the other main ways people consume music! 

- Estimates are that 20-30% of music downloaded is pirated. Let's call it 25%.

- If our song sold 20k copies in a week, this suggest a further 6600 people will download the song illegally. 

- And again if each illegal download represents 50 listens, this equals 330k listens. 

- The income on this is of course zero to the rights holders (though maybe a bit of ad revenue to the hosts of the pirate sites!)

ARTIST INCOME = £0 

LABEL & PUBLISHER INCOME = £0 

EFFECTIVE LISTENS = 0.3 million (pro-active) 

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO ARTIST= 0 per million listens

EQUIVALENT ROYALTY TO LABEL & PUBLISHER = 0 per million listens

SUMMARY

In this specific situation for our fictional top 10 charting song, the APPROXIMATE ROYALTIES the artist would receive PER MILLION EFFECTIVE LISTENS of the song, for comparison, are as follows (in ascending order): 

Illegal downloads... £0

Mainstream Radio (e.g. BBC Radio 1)... £3

YouTube... £5 to £50 at a rough estimate 

Streaming service (e.g. Spotify)...  £2000

Sales (e.g. iTunes)... £1200 to £7000 (depending on record deal)

When you lay out the numbers like this in comparison, the Spotify rates seem quite fair and well thought out. They pay out at a rate comparable to sales, however with the one major difference that sales "royalties" are sort of like an advance, whereas streaming royalties are paid as they happen over months or years. So in the short term it might be worse for artists but in the long term it works out about the same, and it's certainly better than YouTube or piracy. There are a few controversial issues that Spotify and other streaming services will have to iron out, but it's pretty clear to me and most other people that streaming is the future of music consumption so I'm sure they'll get there with time. 

Furthermore, one could presume that Spotify (backed by the major labels) would be a lot more concerned with the future of the music industry than the tech giants Google and Apple will be... remember the major labels are TINY companies compared to Google and Apple. One of the major labels, EMI, was sold a few years ago for £1.5 billion... Spotify's value is estimated at £5.6 billion, Apple is worth £428 billion and Google is worth £287 billion. It's clear who will win in any power struggle, and what's good for the tech guys may or may not be good for the music guys. As a music guy, this concerns me. 

So after doing the research, my verdict is that Spotify certainly isn't evil and is probably a good way forward for the music industry, despite all the click-bait articles complaining about royalties etc. I would encourage people to use Spotify instead of the competing services Apple Music and YouTube MusicKey, thereby supporting the dwindling music industry rather than the booming tech industry. 

If you enjoyed reading this, and you do indeed have a Spotify account, please do me a favour and click the link below to check out my band. We try really hard to make the sort of tracks you’ll want to listen to 50 times! Thanks!

FURTHER THOUGHTS

- The number of streams to equate one sale is higher than rights-holders would like no doubt, but in another way this idea rewards artist creating complex music with longevity that requires a lot of listens, and punishes the instant fix throwaway pop songs that no-one will remember in 2 years. So that's a good thing for art, even if it's bad for hack songwriters.

- It seems there is a disparity between royalties paid on songs streamed by free accounts compared to premium accounts, the former being apparently a tenth of the latter. This seems obviously unfair and seems like an easy fix, the pot should surely be evenly split rather than tracking account types separately, and the royalties can be adjusted across the board. As it stands, I suppose this benefits artists who's fans are more likely to pay for a premium service, but that seems like a weird distinction to impose on rights-holders. At least Spotify are planning to sell more ads to close this gap, so they realise it's a problem that they need to work on.

- I have a free Spotify account on which I listen to maybe 2 or 3 albums per month, and the reason I wouldn't currently pay for premium is because I hardly get chance to listen to new music, so I wouldn't feel like I was getting my money's worth. Conversely there are lots of people who have Spotify on at work all day everyday, streaming hundreds of hours of music all for one low monthly fee, maybe even to a whole office of people rather than just themselves. The artists here are losing out, getting less money per song because more songs have been played for the same subscription fee. Apparently only 25% of Spotify accounts are premium, but I would assert that anyone who listens to Spotify for more than 20 hours per month should have to pay for a premium account, they should bring back that limit that used to be in place.

- Actually to me a fairer model would be if Spotify charged £0.01 per song streamed, and you get a monthly bill, the same as with a phone bill. No adverts would be necessary, the royalties paid out would still be 70% (£0.007 per stream, double what they are now), and it would mean 1000 songs (about 60-80 hrs of music) would cost £10 to stream; I don't think anyone could argue against that being a fair price. (Also I'd suggest there should be no royalty due if the song is skipped after less than halfway... this would hopefully encourage better songwriting in the mainstream!) 

- Differences in the US music laws mean things work slightly differently for US artists. Eg radio in the US doesn't pay any broadcast royalties, only performance royalties, though there are waves being made about this currently so it could all change. Apparently this law also carries across the pond in that US artists don't see any broadcast royalties from UK airplay, which seems odd.

- This article is mainly talking about "top 40" type artists, normally signed to major labels. It could be further explored how this related to unsigned artists and indie acts perhaps. And one other thing that certainly becomes clear looking at these numbers... for any major artists that can part ways with their record label and start releasing music on their own, they stand to make a LOT more money per play/sale (assuming they have the status and momentum to keep getting plays without a major label marketing budget). Thanks for reading. Now click this: http://spotify.masses.band Cheers,

James Grover (masses, Peak Studios, Signal Records)

REFERENCES http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1155395/business-matters-why-spotify-royalties-are-greater-than-radio-royalties http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/may/25/radio-1-playlist-secrets-uncovered-battle-of-brands http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/21/radio-1-loses-1m-listeners-nick-grimshaw-bbc-4-extra-6-music http://www.statista.com/topics/2075/spotify/ http://www.sentricmusic.com/blog/2014/october/a-dab-ble-into-radio-royalties/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18351910 http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/06/09/breaking-apple-is-paying-just-58-of-streaming-royalties-back-to-indie-artists/ http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2013/11/26/spotifypremiumadsupported/ http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-pays-out-100-more-money-for-its-biggest-tracks-than-it-did-a-year-ago/ http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/03/how-much-musicians-make-spotify-itunes-youtube http://charts.spotify.com/embed?object=tracks&rank=most_streamed&country=de&windowtype=weekly&date=latest http://www.riaa.com/faq.php

[thisismasses]

VIDEO: In Circles

Brand new single from Leeds-based alt-pop band masses.

[thisismasses]

SONG FOCUS: Two Hands In The Dark

Lost hope, dark paths and word getting around...

By Cain, 22nd Jul 2015

I always believe it’s a good sign when a song comes together quickly. Two Hands In The Dark literally fell onto the page. Twenty minutes sat with my guitar and that was it. 

I think I may of mentioned it before, but for me songwriting has to be fast. I’ll throw ideas down really quickly and not look back; any song that takes more than an hour to get it 90% there generally tends to not do it for me in the long run, and will end up being looked back on with disdain after a while.

When I recorded the demo of Two Hands I had been messing around with my vocal delivery in the studio and was really into singing incredibly quiet with the preamp cranked up so that you could hear every lip smack and breath. This intimacy paired up with a dark theme can create a really kind of sinister feel. That was the feel I was going for with this track.

I love the “anti-chorus” of this song - it is an internal voice, It cries out for affection and hope, it is resigned, it is undeniably british, and it contains one of the best bits of imagery I think I have come up with.

“We’re falling apart. Good heavens we are. Two hands in the dark, you know"

We were interviewed for London radio station Reprezent recently and I was talking about how people have songs that they listen to and they say “oh this song could be written about me” or that they connect so closely with that it ends up even shaping their identity. For me lyrics are always the most frustrating and difficult part of the songwriting process but also the most rewarding. I’m connected innately to all of my songs because I know exactly what they are about. Two Hands discusses love, loss, self destruction and losing something important to a dark place. That resonates incredibly strongly with me every time we play it. Songs such as Testing The Nerve (and a lot of other songs I write) look at bad situations too, but have an element of fight and resilience to to them, that things will get better. The true power to this song for me is the resignation of the lyrics and the vocal delivery, particularly when juxtaposed with the pounding drums and insane bass sound of the verses, courtesy of ol’ Yacob.

I also thought I’d give you a peek at the original demo for Two Hands (click to hear it!). The guys in the band will tell you that i suffer from a terrible syndrome called “Demo Love” - when i’ve recorded something I’ll invariably listen to it to death, picking out what i like and dislike. Unfortunately this technique engrains it so deep in my psyche that if anyone dares question one of the elements I like I can really become an arse about it!

The original demo’s instrumental section in the middle is completely different to what was released on the EP. It contained drums that i’d slowed down to half speed and annihilated to give this insane heavy swelling sensation. Then, as I’m officially the 2nd worse lead guitarist in the world, besides the kid that attempts ‘Layla’ in every PMT store i’ve ever been in, I took a recording of a girl in the midst of her first LSD trip from the 1960’s and put that over it. Yes I understand that that is perhaps the most cliched, pretentious exercise ever but at the time it just felt so right and I argued my point for a long time!  Enjoy!

You can download Two Hands in the Dark and the rest of the I Couldn’t Be Happier EP for free here.

Oh and this is where we live on the internet:

www.thisismasses.com

www.facebook.com/thisismasses

Twitter: @thisismasses

Instagram: @thisismasses

[thisismasses]

IN REVIEW: June

By Jacob, 26th Jun 2015

So this is a little thing we wanted to start getting running. Since Cain graced you with his duck metaphor we again appear to have gone quiet. So we’re going to try and keep you updated (hopefully) monthly...(ish?) On what is going on BEHIND THE SCENES at masses.

Since the release of our ‘I Couldn’t Be Happier’ EP, we have been playing all over the place: down in London, all the way up to Hull and Preston, and everywhere in between. We’ve had some good experiences and some pretty fucking terrible ones (one of the better ones being an extremely drunk James taking out a load of lighting with his ridiculous height whilst onstage). I’ll try and do this vaguely chronologically. But I’m so drunk most of the time I’m not even sure how old I am, never mind the order of things that happened over the last few months.

So we played our EP Launch at the library, which we all thought went pretty great. We played the songs well, sold quite a few tickets. We did this sweet deal where you get a ticket, EP and a t-shirt for £10, which seemed to go down well. Only to have it ruined in the critics eyes by our on stage 'antics’ I was extremely loud onstage into the microphones, hurling t-shirts at people and generally making a bit of an ass out of myself. Cain made a bit of a whoops by saying we don’t care if anyone buys a CD or not. Which is probably for the best being as we didn’t sell a SINGLE ONE. Although I personally think it’s because we sold them all to people with the tickets before the gig! But it still doesn’t look great. So all in all what was in itself one of our better performances was tarnished by a few extremely minor things which were all the reviewers focused on!

We went a little quiet after that as we locked ourselves in the studio again to get a version of our new single 'In Circles’ ready enough to shoot the video to! We had a great time doing this. We teamed up with filmmaker Alec Birkbeck who worked so hard with us to get a product that we were all really happy with and I think I speak for everyone in the band when I say I can’t wait for you guys to see this. The song itself is obviously awesome, it’s one Cain has been sitting on for a long time and we’ve taken it and a band and somehow made it even better than it was when Cain demoed it out. We’ve been playing it for a while so if you’ve come and seen us you’ll have heard it in some form or another. We’re constantly changing and adapting our live set and we like to 'road test’ songs, so you may have heard a few iterations of quite a few songs!

So going through this we launched ourselves into the next run of gigs. I’m not going to go over all these in too much detail, as they were pretty standard gigs, we had some great experiences and some big fuck ups. We had our first inevitable synth death at our first London gig, which was great. George’s computer (through no fault of his own) completely just packed up on us mid set. So we launched into a synth-free version of In Circles while he sorted it out and everything went smoothly. We had a pretty frustrating incident of a sound engineer (who will obviously not be named) off dancing with a girl in the middle of our set when the bass completely cut out for a while and Cain had to stop singing and shout at him to get him to come and fix the problem. Which was obviously great fun.

We’ve recently placed 3 new songs (with another two on the cusp of completion) into our live set and it has really transformed us as a band. The last 3 gigs we’ve played we have absolutely destroyed and featured on a few acoustic session/radio appearances that have gone really well. Keep up with us on our social media if you want to hear more of these as we’re lining a few up!

We’re sorting out the release of 'In Circles’ now. Slated for release in July, and lining up recording time to get another 7 tracks down to be release across 2 ep’s at the end of the summer and during the winter sometime. These will coincide with a tour in December, which is also being organised.

Have you seen where we live on the Internet…?

http://masses.band

http://www.facebook.com/thisismasses

http://www.twitter.com/thisismasses

http://www.soundcloud.com/thisismasses

http://www.thisismasses.tumblr.com

http://www.thisismasses.bandcamp.com

[thisismasses]

STUDIO FOCUS: An Introduction

By Jacob, 22nd Jun 2015

Recorded music is, in my opinion, the most incredible creation i’ve ever known. It’s nothing short of magic, an area where music meets physics, electronics, computer science and psychology. Culminating in a few minutes of audio that has the power to take us all somewhere that transcends emotion. It is a truly powerful thing.

I find it difficult to pinpoint my first love of a musical recording. I remember waking up every morning as a kid to my older brother blasting ‘Sgt. Peppers’ as he got ready for school. I remember my Dad waking the same (and incredibly moody in the morning) brother with the start of Pink Floyd’s 'Time’. The first record I truly had that was mine was 'Is This It’ by The Strokes (I think). But none of that is particularly important aside from the fact that without all those tiny moments and experiences I probably wouldn’t be sat here writing this right now.

It’s hard to point out one exact moment that defined your entire life from that moment on but I remember mine as if it were burned into my memory. I don’t know exactly how old I was, but I was in my older brothers room, I don’t know why. I was probably being a dick (I used to do that a lot). Pouring water on his bed perhaps? Sometimes I used to spray furniture polish all over his braces, it’s a good thing he didn’t wear them… But I was in there and I saw a guitar in the corner, that my Dad had gotten for my Mum for one of their wedding anniversaries. A crappy 10 year old Epiphone with strings that were (possibly literally) older than me. I remember just picking it up and asking Mum if I could learn to play it. She went and dug out some of those 'teach yourself acoustic guitar’ books that every household inexplicably has whether there are musical instruments present or not, and off I went!

I ask myself often why I didn’t give up, I couldn’t even press the strings down to the fretboard because I was so small and it was so poorly set up. My young mind rationalised this into; 'Well it must be MEANT to be like that, the chord must be made up of the strings i’m not blocking with my fingers!’ conveniently omitting the presence of frets and that fact that my pitiful rendition of 'House of the Rising Sun’ didn’t sound anything like the original (or any other) version. But for some reason I persevered. There was another period where I thought that guitar tab was meant to be played one line at a time. So I would play the high e string of a 'block’ of tab, then the B, G, D, A and E, before moving on to the next bit. I realised there was a problem when I was my Mum's face when I told her what I was playing as meant to be 'By The Way’. I asked around and realised my foolishness.

I eventually learnt how to hold down the strings and the other key milestones, learnt to play 'Comfortably Numb’, learnt to play 'The Song Remains The Same’ and carried on like this till I was smashing out Paul Gilbert and Joe Satriani.

I remember one night I had another one of those 'moments’. I downloaded a version of Audacity and was recording a cover of (all the guitars from) 'Seize the Day’ by Avenged Sevenfold (don’t judge me I was 15). Obviously it was awesome and I was having a great time trying to match all the guitar tones and panning positions and levels (again, I was 15, fuck off). I remember, again weirdly clearly considering I’m viewing this portion of my life through a weed tinted haze, thinking, “I wish I could do this as a job.” From that day onwards I had a plan. I enrolled in college not soon after and took all the subjects needed to take a music tech course at Uni. I somehow managed to scrape together the grades required whilst doing enough drugs to kill a small elephant every weekend, got into Uni and managed to get myself sorted out enough to get onto a work placement at Peak Studios.

I remember coming in for my interview and being interviewed by none other than James 'The Grove’ Grover. (Our bassist) A baby faced Cain Cookson was sat in the office (We were briefly introduced). George then started later that year. The band was formed in the front of Cain’s car on the way to pick a bunch of the new interns up from hospital after an EXTREMELY minor car crash. They all got compensation and we were all jealous.

So I guess I should probably get to the point of this rambling, vaguely autobiographic introduction. The point being I am masses’ self proclaimed recording nerd. Cut me and I bleed stereo microphone techniques and eq presets. I will be making a series of blogs/videos and whatnot about how we went around recording and mixing our music, seeing as we did it all ourselves and we’re very proud of it. You should poke your nose in if you’re into all this stuff. You might even learn a thing or two.

[thisismasses]

LIVE FOCUS: Ableton Live Setup

By George, 12th Jun 2015

Ableton was always a piece of software that I had been meaning to get my head around; I’ve seen people do some incredible stuff with it in a live context, and that definitely appealed to the synthesist in me. So when this opportunity to be in a band as a synth player came along, I knew that Ableton was the route I needed to take to be able to get the most creative freedom whilst playing live. 

For those of you who don’t know, Ableton allows you to do pretty much anything you can think of in a live capacity, but for now (as I’m still learning the full extent of the software, how to play the keyboard and also how to sing properly) I simply use it to trigger various pre-recorded sounds and play my synth parts live over the top.

As it stands, the masses Ableton Live set looks like the picture at the top. It looks fairly complicated, but is actually a lot simpler than it seems. Basically, the set list goes from top to bottom, with the colours denoting different songs. The column on the far right denotes the different songs and their respective sections, with the white cells separating the songs for easier differentiation. One row of cells indicates one section of a song, so each song is split up into its component sections (verse 1, chorus 1, middle eight, etc) and then all the different instruments in the song are split up into various columns going from left to right (percussion, synth pads, fx, etc). The section at the bottom of the screen is the mixer section, where I can control the various levels of all the instruments and my synth parts, although this is rarely needed as all the elements are mixed accordingly before they are placed in this session. There are also a few hidden sections for various other features, such as a panel that tells me where I’m sending all of the tracks and what effects are in use.

The way that I control the software at the moment is that I use pads located on the top right of my keyboard (pictured below) to tell Ableton to play the different sections of the songs, which then triggers the various instrument parts to play. In future, I would like to be able to manipulate these instrument parts on the fly (triggering reverbs, effects and various amounts of fuckery), but for the meantime I’m just concentrating on playing the synths live.

To play live, I use the M-Audio Axiom 49 (pictured above), a 49-key keyboard with 9 faders, 8 endless rotary encoders and 8 drum pads. Now the really difficult part was getting this to work with Ableton the way that I wanted, and it is still a source of great frustration and endless adjustment (which will become the source of inspiration for this forthcoming series of articles). At the moment, 7 of the faders pictured are mapped to the volumes for the various synths I actually play live, with the other two being the volume for the reverb bus and the master output level. Over on the right-hand side, another 7 of the rotary encoders (knobs) are mapped to send a certain amount of each synth to the reverb bus, to make some huge and possibly horrible mess for the louder sections. On the far right, only 4 of the drum pads are being used at the moment to navigate my way through the backing track and trigger each section. I chose to use the drum pads for these over the usual transport buttons located under the encoders (play, stop, fast-forward, etc) as these were going to be buttons I needed to push very regularly and whilst playing the synths and singing at the same time, so I opted for the biggest buttons on the keyboard. This is a very primitive setup at the moment, and I hope to expand it’s potential in the future as I learn more about both the keyboard and Ableton itself.

Now onto the various amounts of routing. At the moment I use an Edirol FA-66 audio interface (pictured above) to output all of my sound. This hooks up to my laptop and Ableton to give me a total of 4 outputs, all of which are currently being used. The first output is for the backing track, which consists of the instruments in the songs that I don’t play live and just trigger from the software. The second output is purely devoted to the synths that I do play live. The reason for splitting these two up is that it gives the sound engineer at the gig more freedom if he needs to mix it in a certain way. I always try and match the levels of synths with that of the backing track so that they mix well together, but it’s always good to have a flexible set-up on your end as you never really know what the situation is going to be like at a gig venue before getting there.

The third and fourth outputs are dedicated to a monitoring feed for me and John (our drummer), so we can both hear the backing track when we play live in our earphones that we wear onstage. The way this works is that within Ableton I have set up two different auxiliary buses, where I can send various parts of the backing track at different volumes to create two different feeds depending on what each person wants to hear in their earphones. For instance, John mainly wants to hear the click track so he can keep in time, and in turn keep the rest of us in time (as it stands no one else gets a feed from my laptop, so we all rely on keeping to John’s rhythm to keep us in time with the backing track - fortunately he’s a pretty good drummer and has no problem playing along to a click track). This differs with my feed, where I mostly want to hear the synths I’m playing and some of the backing track so I can keep track of where we are in the song.

In order to hear what I’m playing through my on-stage earphones, I use the Samson S-Monitor headphone amp. This accepts the feed I provide from Ableton through a normal jack cable, and has the added bonus of being able to provide me with a feed of my vocals as well if I plug the microphone on stage into it. This allows me to make sure I’m singing in tune by being able to hear the backing track and my own vocals clearly, giving me plenty of peace of mind. Saying this, I have encountered a problem when playing live where it is fairly hard to hear myself through the earphones, and I usually just end up being able to hear Johns drums coming through my microphone and subsequently into my monitoring feed. This is most likely as a result of always being placed next to our drummer when playing live rather than a shortcoming with the hardware (being a five-piece band playing in small venues means there’s never a lot of space on stage, and as the member that has to move around the least, I’m often placed out of the way in the back, which of course is by the drum kit).

In the future, I hope to expand this setup so that every member of the band can get their own personalised monitoring feed from my laptop. Being able to hear all the elements is critical to our band members during a live show, as there are times when we are solely relying on the backing track to keep us in key when singing, and also for audio cues for the next sections. This wouldn’t normally be a problem in the right kind of venue, but being a small band playing at small venues can mean there is often a less than idealistic monitoring setup, so occasionally one of us will barely be able to hear an important part that could drastically effect the outcome of the live show.

Oh and BTW, all masses. music available on iTunes and Apple Music: http://itunes.masses.band And all the other usual places: http://masses.band http://www.facebook.com/thisismasses http://www.twitter.com/thisismasses http://www.soundcloud.com/thisismasses http://www.thisismasses.tumblr.com http://www.thisismasses.bandcamp.com http://www.instagram.com/thisismasses 

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10 Tips for Making DIY Music Videos

By James, 5th June 2015

So here's my top tips on how to make a music video yourself; whether on the cheap or with a decent budget, most of these will be applicable every time! 

See the previous post for the case study that inspired this!

10. WARDROBE - obviously a music video is a visual representation of your band, so you'll want to look your best and convey your 'brand' visually in the most effective way. However, being dressed for a music video isn't always the same as being dressed for a gig... You want to stand out on screen and there's no need to feel self-conscious about things such as bold outfits for example; you're not wearing them live in front of a crowd, only in front of your mates and the camera. Also a music video is (usually) just for one song, so instead of dressing to look cool for half an hour on stage, you can dress to fit the tone of this one song (for 4 minutes or whatever). Eg if it's a upbeat summery song, you might want to all wear bright fun colours, or hats or something similar as a visual hook (avoid cheesy-looking stuff though unless that fits the song, or its deliberately ironic!) 9. LOCATION - unique locations can add a level of interest to otherwise bland footage. Eg just an idea off the top of my head... have you ever seen a music video filmed entirely up a tree? Me neither, but it'd sure be a good talking point! (You'll have to beat us to it maybe!! Haha) 8. CAMERA ANGLES - similarly, creative camera angles can add a level of interest to otherwise bland footage. Most TV and films are shot from head height as if you're standing there watching the action, so your eye is used to this and when you see a camera angle out of the ordinary, it should subconsciously or consciously pull your attention to it. (This concept works for most things of course, being original = standing out) 7. CAMERA  / FOOTAGE QUALITY - obviously the better the camera the better your footage will look. Most people know someone with a half-decent DSLR nowadays, and many of them can shoot nice video. Also the cameras on newer iPhones are surprisingly good, and using certain apps like Filmic gives you in depth access to camera feature just like those on a DSLR, even more sometimes. Also apps like RecoLive allow you to shoot multi-camera scenes and edit them live, which is a hugely efficient workflow for "live" type videos. 6. LIGHT - all video cameras work by capturing light; the more light there is the easier the camera can do its job without compromise. With a digital camera, in a bright place the camera simply records the light data to disk with no trickery, but in a dimly lit place it has to attempt to amplify it's readings (by increasing the ISO setting) to give a useful level of contrast between the brightest and darkest parts of the image. This amplification introduces noise, which makes the image look more grainy and low-quality. With analog film I believe you can get different formulations which are more light-sensitive if necessary, but of course any use of analog film in videography will add a LOT of extra costs and probably isn't recommended for low-budget work. The easiest and cheapest way to get good bright lighting is to film outside during the daytime (particularly at "magic hour" and "golden hour" right around sunrise and sunset, when the sun is at a low angle and looks especially pleasing on camera). The sun is MUCH brighter than almost all indoor lighting, even when it's cloudy. Keep your subjects pointing towards the sun so their faces are lit, unless you specifically want a silhouette. If you have budget to buy/rent lights, do a little research on "3 point lighting", this is the most common technique for making a subject look pleasing on camera. You can buy bright LED lights for quite cheap that are specifically designed for the purpose of low-budget videography, and they'll definitely give you a lot more options and a much higher-quality picture if used effectively. 5. CONFIDENCE - Just rock it. For obvious reasons. If you look like you don't have confidence in yourselves, the audience will quickly lose their confidence in you. 4. AUTHENTICNESS - If you're being yourself (as a band), you're going to look much better than if you're awkwardly acting or doing something pretentious that doesn't come naturally to you. Eg music videos composed from live footage are often a lot more watchable than other types of low budget video due to a very low cringe-factor! There's nothing cringey (you'd hope) about a band playing live since that's what bands are supposed to do. Just don't try any in depth fake-emotional acting if you're not an actor, it will be awkward to watch. 3. HUMANITY/EMOTION - try to pick one emotion that complements the song, something everyone can relate to even if the lyrics of the song dont directly relate to them. Then focus on conveying this emotion or feeling strongly. Regardless of whether or not there's an actual 'story' running through the video, the tone should be consistent (unless you deliberately want a schizophrenic feel). A great example of this is the video for Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know"... The very human feeling of sexual tension throughout that video is what makes it so compelling... I saw that video around 8 months before it was even released in the UK and I instantly knew it would be a hit because of that video, despite the song being a slow-burner that doesn't usually work on radio (a great song though it is). 2. EDITING - a good edit job can turn any collection of bland footage into something watchable... It's about the creativity and bringing it all together. Use the speed of cuts to highlight the different sections of a song perhaps, eg faster cuts in the chorus compared to the verses to give the visuals a lift in energy to match the audio, and also gradually increasing throughout to let the energy build over time. If the footage looks boring or low quality, use some artistic license when editing and perhaps do something interesting with colour or effects to give it some drama and disguise any technical shortcomings perhaps. (See the image below for examples of this!) If you have a small budget for a video, potentially filming it yourself then paying the entire budget to an experienced video editor could be a good use of funds... For some types of videos you could certainly get better results this way rather than paying a cameraman then trying to edit that yourselves for example.

And finally...

1. CONCEPT - a good concept can override everything else. This is what will separate a standout video with viral potential from one that looks perfect in every way but that no-one cares about. In some situations a really great concept might even work better with low production values, if the low-budget style helps it connect better with the audience. Especially in genres that lend themselves to this, like indie rock, punk, underground hip-hop etc, and obviously the benefit of spending less money to get a better product is clear. More on this in a future post. --- Ok, that's the tips, so get filming! And don't forget, how you market your video is just as important as what's in the video and how it's made. Much more on that later...

Again, don’t forget to check out our video for Waiting (as shown in the above photos).

[thisismasses]

VIDEO: Waiting

By James, 31st May 2015

Ok to celebrate the release of our first music video, "Waiting", I'm going to write a post listing everything I know about how to make a good DIY music video, with no budget and minimal experience of cinematography! But first a rundown of how it went with this particular video.

I've made around 5 - 10 music videos for various bands and projects I've been involved with (to varying standards of quality and depending on what you count as a music video).... The "Waiting" video is probably not the best technically but I’d say it's certainly the boldest and most effective so far. Our criteria were that we needed the concept to be: - easy and quick to film with minimal equipment and no budget - easy and quick to edit (we had a busy schedule) - quirky and eye-catching, something a bit different with possible viral appeal. So the initial concept we settled on was to be like a living painting, a stark non-moving image of the band while the world passes them (us) by. Initially we wanted to film it on a couch in a field in the rain, but our schedules and lack of van (for couch transport) forced us to reconsider. We ended up filming in the carpark outside Peak Studios, on plastic folding chairs at night... This gave a more urban nonchalant feel than the bleak Yorkshire countryside in the winter rain would have, but either way it works with the song so it wasn't too big of a compromise. So we sat almost motionless in the biting cold for 30 minutes, lit by car headlights against the cityscape backdrop, then time-altered the footage to match the pacing of the song. It was filmed in one shot so the editing only took around 2-3 hrs, rather than the days a normal video would take to edit... This is one of the major benefits of any one-shot concept. However there were two major problems to solve after that point:

1) the footage was very noisy and blurry at full size (1080p)... I had to de-noise then sharpen it and reduce the footage to 720p to make it useable. Then I went for a very stylised high-contrast colour correction, and a jerky lo-fi type video effect to further reduce the noticeability of the grainy footage and to give the stylish feel I wanted.

2) despite the artistically bold concept, we had to admit that the lack of movement in the video was not bringing out the best in the song... We agreed to overlay the lyrics, in a brash way, not in the aim of deliberately making a 'lyric video' but just as a way to add punch and energy to the visuals, and to define the different sections of the song more clearly. I actually think the text overlay make the image even stronger and more visually striking, so it was kind of a happy accident that it turned out this way. So that's the case study - in the next post I'll give my top tips on making DIY music videos according to what I've learned from my own experiences.

Oh and BTW, all masses. music available on iTunes and Apple Music: http://itunes.masses.band

And streaming on Spotify: http://spotify.masses.band

And all the other usual places: http://masses.band http://www.facebook.com/thisismasses http://www.twitter.com/thisismasses http://www.soundcloud.com/thisismasses http://www.thisismasses.tumblr.com http://www.thisismasses.bandcamp.com http://www.instagram.com/thisismasses

[thisismasses]

ARTWORK: I Couldn’t Be Happier

By James, 20th Apr 2015

The conclusion to the saga of Cuban Keith! I've already explained the story behind all this in the previous post, so I'll talk briefly about the design side of making this artwork.

Thematically the 3 pieces of artwork (Dive, Waiting, and I Couldn't Be Happier) are deliberately consistent(ish), not just in terms of narrative but also in "look". Generally I like the look of hi-res photography used in music-related artwork, and I thought this was a good starting point for the first masses record... I wanted to use strong eye-catching images, and ones that were colourful but in a non-too-happy way, for reasons of both marketing and art. This photo, like the last, was shot by my brother on a trip to Cuba, and it always stood out to me as one of the most striking from that collection of his. Thinking about it now, I guess it always subconsciously reminded me of that scene near the start of 28 Days Later where the guy is walking through a deserted London. I'd been wanting to use this photo as an album cover for a few years, but never until now found the right project that suited it. Besides the photos tying together, the design around the photos is meant to be consistent... Of course we have our standard logo on all 3 covers, then in the same font (I think) and the same formatting we have the song titles. Every time I make any cover art, my default place to put the artist name and title is in one of the corners, usually whichever corner is most sparse due to the image used... I'd say this is a good baseline, you can't really go wrong but the only issue is that it's quite conservative. In this case that was good as it let the photos speak for themselves. There's very few critical decisions you make when creating cover art... As long as the result is eye-catching nothing else really matters too much. One other thing is that I always like t-shirt designs that use the album cover, so we made the limited edition Bridge tee to go with this release... 50 in black that have almost all sold out now, then we'll do 50 in white pretty soon, and then it'll be time for our next release and a new t-shirt design... Get em snapped up while stocks last!

http://www.musicglue.com/thisismasses/products/bridge-tee/

[thisismasses]

LIVE FOCUS: An Introduction

By George, 16th Mar 2015

Now that the band is playing more and more gigs around the country, I thought I would give everyone some insight into what exactly it is that the keyboardist does to contribute to the dense wall of noise that makes up a masses live show. This is my first blog post in what will be a series of my forays into the beautiful, complex and somewhat annoying world of Ableton Live.

But before all that, I am going to regale you with a little background of my credentials as a musician. 

As the keyboardist/synth player of the band, you might expect me to know a fair bit about playing my instrument… but I really don’t. In fact, I’ve never learnt to play the piano or keyboard properly, I've been a guitar player my entire life.

Now at this stage, you may be asking yourself why on earth would someone who can’t play a keyboard join a band as a keyboardist. Well fortunately it’s a fairly amusing story. In August 2014, I was partaking in my annual tradition of volunteering at Leeds Festival as an after-hours campsite DJ (which is yet another amusing story for another time).

But I digress...

At some point in the weekend, I got a text from Cain (our lead singer and guitar player) informing me that I was now suddenly in a band with all our other work mates and that I would be playing keys (which he knew I didn’t play at all). It should probably also be noted that the language he used made it seem like I had very little choice in the matter, and he was in fact telling, not asking. In hindsight, alarm bells should have been ringing, but this being Leeds Festival, I may have been a little drunk and giddily accepted without thinking through the consequences and the amount of new knowledge I would need to procure from thin air.

However, I wasn’t completely out of my depth when it came to synthesis. Even though I was a guitar player from a very young age, I quickly garnered an interest for all things electronic, and eventually became more of a sequencing synthesist, spending my weekends delving into the depths of various soft synths and sound design. Creating weird sounds from nothing absolutely fascinated me, and the more complex the journey from conception to end result the more joy it brought me. Over the course of many years and many, many, failed attempts to sound like Aphex Twin, I became fairly proficient with the likes of Massive, FM8, ES2, Hybrid, and various freeware soft synths I got from Computer Music Magazine. This being all well and good, I still didn’t actually possess the ability to play any of these instruments in a live scenario.

Enter Ableton Live.

[thisismasses]

Releasing A CD - The Right Order

By James, 11th Mar 2015

Ok so we just put out our debut EP, mainly as a digital release but also as a limited edition CD. I've personally been involved with the release of around 20 CD albums and EPs since my teenage years, so I know the process pretty well, but the order in which all the steps should be done has never been clear in my mind... It's always a fumble getting everything done haphazardly in time for the release date. And there's a lot more steps than you might think, including some that a lot of bands don't even know about. So I'm gunna take this chance to write out the process we just used, for my own future reference as well as the benefit of anyone who wants to use this as a guide.

So here's the order I'd recommend:

1 - Record the music you want to put on the album/EP (obviously). Ideally do demo recordings of more songs than you need, then pick the best ones to record properly. Unless you're a professional producer, you should definitely be going to a good recording studio to do this... It's important to get the best quality recordings you can afford, I'll go into why in a future post. 2 - Figure out the running order for the track list. It needs a nice flow to the record in terms of pace and size of each song... Allow the slow songs to breathe in between the fast songs etc. Also, typically you want to start with your best and most accessible song, and end with something very strong as well though it can be something more winding or epic. Track 2 should also be great and should have a slight contrast to track 1 but not too different. Then leave the weaker or more experimental songs around the second half of the record. If you're releasing a 3 or 4 track EP, they all have to be great, there no room for weakness there. 3A - Have the CD mastered. If you don't know what mastering is, look it up... There isn't room to explain it here. But to summarise, it's the final difference between your record sounding polished and professional, or inconsistent and amateur. As a guideline, you should spend about 10-20% of your total recording budget on mastering... This will get you a quality of mastering that is consistent with your recordings. Mastering can cost anywhere from £10 to £200 per track depending on the experience level of the mastering engineer; my point is that you'd be selling your music short to get cheap mastering for an expensive recording, and conversely it's overkill to spend £100 per track on mastering if you recorded 5 songs in 4 hours. And for you home and university recorders... if your budget is non-existent, you can use free online mastering services (like Landr) that use computer algorithms to listen and master your music rather than human ears and skill, and to be honest this might sometimes get better results than a lot of the very low-end mastering engineers. However, this will only master the music track by track, and won't make you a Master CD - you'll have to burn that yourself (you'll want to do this to Red Book standard... Google it!) 3B - Embed ISRC codes. An ISRC code is a unique identifier for each song you release (actually if you release more than one version of a song such as a remix or acoustic version, these will need a separate code too). Radio stations and all sorts of other places use these codes to track plays/sales/royalties etc, so basically you want to make sure your songs have their codes sorted to make sure you don't miss out on any money. The codes should be embedded in CDs and in any mp3s you send out. If you're paying a mastering engineer to put together the master CD for you, have them get you ISRC codes too and embed them. Then when you rip this CD to make mp3s, they should also be embedded. If you're burning your own master CD (or just releasing online as mp3s), you need to obtain and embed your own codes. There are a lot of places you can get these, and if you're releasing through an online distributor like Ditto Music, they'll give you them as part of the release. Then you'll need to embed these when you burn the CD... You can do this in the advanced options in Nero Toast, for example. 4 - Design the artwork. This can be started alongside steps 1/2/3, but you'll want to include the finalised track list and recording credits in the artwork too. And also a barcode if necessary, which you should also be able to get from your distributor (UPC or EAN codes they're officially called). For a digital release you only need the cover, but for a CD release you will need at least the cover, the reverse cover, and the On Body design (the print on the face of the disc). It's highly recommended to include contact details in the On Body design; if you're sending the CDs out for promo and to labels etc, you want to make sure that they can get in touch even if they lose the box/sleeve. As graphic design goes, CD cover design is pretty easy, so you can probably do it yourself if you can't afford a graphic designer. Every CD pressing facility nowadays has a website where you can download artwork templates and guidelines that will make it easy for you to get all the layouts done to an ok standard (we used Lazer Beam CD Duplication in Leeds, because they were local so we could collect them at short notice). There's not really any rules to the actual design of the artwork... Just do what looks good, and check out the artwork for some of your favourite albums for inspiration. One big tip would be to make the cover look eye-catching and interesting, for obvious reasons. 5 - Make the physical CDs. Ideally you'll want to allow 2 weeks for this step if you need full replication plus delivery, though small runs of duplication can be completed much quicker, and collecting them will be 2-3 days quicker than having them posted to you (cheaper too if the CD plant is local). On average they'll cost you around £1 per CD in a case with artwork... This goes up or down depending on the type of case, how many pages in the booklet, and the number of units you're ordering (bulk discounts). For example, our I Couldn't Be Happier EP cost exactly £1 per unit to manufacture, for 50 copies in a slimline jewel case with a 2 page booklet (ie front and back only, no inside printing) and black & white On Body design. But note this doesn't take into account all the recording and mastering costs. - If you're making 500 CDs or more, you'll want CD replication, which involves pressing discs from a glass master and properly printing on the discs. Usually getting 1000 CDs instead of 500 is only about 20% extra, as a lot of the cost is for the complicated set-up, but unless you're confident you can sell that many, it's still not worth the extra. And in my experience you'll always sell less than you think! Also note that if you need replication, there are forms to sign regarding the MCPS, and if there are cover songs on your record you'll have to pay a license fee upfront. - If you're making less than 500 CDs you'll want CD duplication, which is essentially burning CD-Rs in bulk, then printing on them with inkjet or thermal printers (or sometimes for very cheap services, printing a sticker to go on the CD). Technically the MCPS issue should still apply here, but normally no-one will bring it up on a small run. - If you just want to make a few demos to give out at gigs, you can burn them at home and print your own sticker labels. I definitely wouldn’t recommend making any CDs without at least a printed sticker covering the face, as anything handwritten looks incredibly cheap and shows that you don't take your music seriously enough. 6 - Submit the track listing to the Gracenote database. This is the online database that computers will automatically search when you insert an audio CD. It matches the CD to its database by comparing the track lengths and number of tracks, so for a CD single it might have a lot of possible matches, but for an album it will usually find the right one straight away. It's obviously better for your CD to display the correct song titles rather than "track 1, track 2..." etc, but the main reason you want to do this is to avoid the faux-pas of you CD showing up with another band's metadata, just because their death metal EP had the same track timings as your folk-pop EP etc! Note this is different to "CD text" which is embedded at the master CD stage, but which is (inexplicably) only displayed by CD players and not computers. CD text is a standard option that you'll get whenever you burn a CD, through iTunes or dedicated burning software like Toast, and if your master CD was made by a mastering engineer, it should already be handled. So, you can submit your CD info to Gracenote via iTunes: Step 1 - open iTunes, insert CD into computer, click the CD in the iTunes side menu. Step 2 - fill in the metadata... Artist name, album name, song titles, genre etc Step 3 - click "Submit CD data" or something similar... it may be in a menu or in the top bar depending which version of iTunes you have. 7 - Decide on a release date (and ideally book a launch party gig and then a tour). Now your CD is ready, you'll be itching to get it out there as fast as possible, but you should take your time and do it right. Especially if you've been working on the music for months, it's definitely a shame to rush this last step. Ideally you need about 2 months to prepare everything. Also at this point you can upload the accompanying digital release to your digital distributor of choice, and set the release date so that it will go live on iTunes, Spotify etc on the right date. If you think you have enough fans that you might be able to break into the charts, then it's also a good idea to set up a system of preorders and chart registration (again I'd recommend Ditto Music for these services). 8 - Start the promo cycle. More on this later, but the basics are that you want to send you CD out for reviews and 'service' it to radio 2-8 weeks before it's actual release date. Here's a really in-depth explanation of this whole process that you should definitely read in full: http://songbytoadrecords.com/media/GuidetoReleasinganAlbum.pdf Also, because you hope your promotional activities will lead to radio play amongst other things, it's probably a good idea at this point to register your tracks with a royalty collection agency; either directly with the PRS and PPL, or through a company like Sentric Music who handle the complicated stuff for you and take a small cut of your money. Note that if you have a publishing deal, your publisher should sort all this out for you instead. 9 - Set a price for your CD. As an unsigned band you probably want to sell your record as cheaply as you can afford to, and I'd recommend allowing free downloads of all your music if your aim is to build your fanbase. Of course it's nice to recoup some of the recording costs by selling your music, but it's just a fact that the more you charge the less people will hear it. Our strategy was to allow totally free downloads, then to charge a small price for the actual CD, which we thought seemed fair as it's limited edition etc... 10 - Launch it! Ideally you'll play a gig and make a big deal of selling the record to get it into people's hands quickly and get the buzz building. Make your merch stand look nice and well lit, and maybe try some sort of one-day-only offer like a free T-shirt with every CD... Etc

And that's it! Then you keep promoting it anywhere and everywhere, playing as many shows and talking to as many people as you can. And in your free time you'd better start writing the next record too! Really you need about one album a year for any decent sized band, and probably 2 EPs or 4 singles if your a smaller band (don't bother with albums). Best of luck, and don't forget to get your free download of our latest record here: www.thisismasses.com Or here: www.soundcloud.com/thisismasses Or here: www.thisismasses.bandcamp.com (By the way, we haven't decided how limited of an edition the CD actually is, but so far we've had 50 made, and may or may not get another 50 when these sell out. That will be it though, CDs are pretty much a dead medium except for being played in the car. To be honest we only got the CDs made so we'd have something to sell at shows.... It's important to look professional, and any band without merch is not professional-looking! We have T-shirts too of course...) Enjoy! James

[thisismasses]

SONG FOCUS: Waiting

By Cain, 22nd Feb 2015

Now that our Debut EP is out there in the ether for everyone's delectation, I’m going to write a run of articles about the songs on the EP, and provide a bit of background on how they came about.

Before I go into it, I want to say a massive thank you to everyone that has streamed, downloaded, shared and/or championed this track. As the lead single from the EP there was a lot of weight on its shoulders from inside the masses camp and it has received a fantastic reception to date and has given us a great springboard for the EP. Here's how it came about...

Waiting was another one of the tracks that I had been sitting on for a while, before we pooled all of our songs and started the band. The funny thing about it is that it probably did 3 laps around the UK before it was finished, and actually starts at the end….Let me explain.

The first building block of the song was actually the twee acoustic loop that you can now hear at the end of the track. I wrote that part on my first day in my student house in Clifton, Bristol. I’d been listening to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours pretty much religiously at that point, and was trying to write something that Lindsey Buckingham would be happy with. (Chances are he’d actually be able to play it all on one guitar but that's not my game!)

Anyway, I’d quickly recorded it into Pro Tools and was messing around with a few ideas but nothing really stuck. One thing i did do though that I thought sounded great, juxtaposed against the acoustics, was to play the chords on an electric guitar, distort it into next week, and swamp it with a huge reverb. Anyway it never really came to anything and sat lingering on my desktop for about a year.

I dug the session out around the same time that I wrote Dive, when I’d decided that guitars were to be avoided at all costs (!?); I was looking for something to pitch for a film (that unfortunately never happened). So I had these huge distorted guitars that were so processed you couldn’t even tell what they were, and I thought this had an amazing vibe about it. Properly My Bloody Valentine or something, but I’m far too poppy to get away with anything like that. 

I was still going down the route of vocal loops and 4 part harmonies at that point so I got it on loop and started throwing some ideas at it. Within literally 5 minutes I had the two main loops that are now the verse/chorus I guess. (I actually love that this track doesn't have a real chorus or verse or anything but anyway…) 

The middle section came together too in about 5 minutes. I wanted it to do something really weird so i just hit a random note on the keyboard and said “Its going to go there”. No warning, just completely change.  The middle bit is my favourite part, its probably my favourite thing i’ve written. I just kept thinking, "It needs to sound like 'The Fugees’... what would they do?" and worked out the vocal flow and harmonies with that in mind.

The track kind of stalled then for a little while. I had about a minute and a half of the song, and just couldn’t work out where to go next. That's actually strange for me because normally the structure is one of the first things I get sorted - to be honest if i don’t get a song finished in one sitting its normally a none-starter.

So then, one day I played it to fellow Peak Studios producer and Forever Cult bass player Alex Greaves (Forever Cult, NARCS, Orchid Family) and we locked ourselves in the studio and came out with the outrageous pumping, side-chained section that makes up the final third of the song. The idea was that it should be properly overwhelming by this point, huge yet dreamlike at the same time. And that was it. Done!

This track didn’t actually change too much from the demo to what's on the EP now, other than Jacob’s insane engineering and mix work. We just emphasised "the journey”. What I love about this song is the first time you hear it you have no idea what is about to happen, and yet, to me at least, it makes sense. It ticks all the boxes I think. Is it catchy? Yeah. Does it sound cool? Yeah. Do the lyrics resonate with people? I hope so… and at the end you're left thinking “That was fucking great” (Hopefully!)

To me its MBV meets Jessie Ware meets The Fugees meets M83 meets Fleetwood Mac. And thats pretty interesting if you ask me!

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and all of your amazing support.

Cain

[thisismasses]

ARTWORK: Waiting

By James, 10th Feb 2015

I suppose I like to be very literal, but in a clever way... Yes the song is called Waiting and the cover art is a picture of a guy waiting, but it goes a lot deeper than that!

At the time our first single Dive was released, the plan was to include Dive on our debut EP and for Waiting to be the second single from the record. (This plan eventually changed but anyway...) We wanted all our artwork to be thematic, so each time we release an EP/LP all the artwork for the singles will relate to the main album cover. The point with this cover is that there's a subtle storyline running from the Dive cover, to this and then to the cover for the EP.

The story (although very nebulous) is that of our fictional anti-hero Cuban Keith, and his struggle to come to terms with the way his life has turned out… Yeah he appears to be waiting, but he’s also reconsidering his life choices… he’s talked himself down off the ledge from the Dive artwork, and now he’s thinking what’s left for him to do. In the next installment (the EP cover) we see him riding alone off into the distance to start a new life somewhere else. It starts very bleak and dark, fitting the mood of those songs, but the story ends with a message of hope, reiterated by the EP title "I Couldn't Be Happier". I can't speak for Keith personally(!), but it's my assumption that he's happy because he's realised that all the stress in his life was caused by other people, and if he breaks ties with all these people he can just be content to be himself alone. To be honest the narrative was an afterthought of this cover and mainly served to tie it to the next, helping us pick a photo for the EP art. When I first made this cover I was half joking - it amused me to make an anonymous old man the centrepiece! But when we saw it finished, we agreed that the stunning level of detail captured within the photo (taken by my brother in Cuba), gave the image a compelling humanity when paired with the word "waiting", and we thought it would be a strong image for the cover art. When we later imagined up the story, it was a fitting echo of the misanthropic sentiments behind the record, so it seemed to me quite poignant and noteworthy enough to explain here! Hope you agree...

[thisismasses]

IN REVIEW: Jan

By Cain, 9th Jan 2015

In light of us announcing our second single Waiting I thought it would be insightful for people to know what is actually going on behind the scenes at the moment, and what things a band has to get in place while they are preparing their first steps into the big wide world.

In case you can’t see where I’m going with this from the big ol’ picture of a duck at the top….. Although it might all seem pretty uneventful on our Facebook/Twitter at the at the minute….. The odd gig here. Reminder that we’ve got a single out there….. behind the scenes we’re all running around like idiots trying to get everything in place for this single and the EP that will follow it shortly afterwards. To be honest it was a toss up between a picture of spinning plates or the duck for the picture at the top but I took an immediate liking to Dazza as soon as I saw him - My kind of duck!

As far as I am aware, the absolute minimum time you should leave between having a single ready for release, and its release date, should be around 6 weeks. This allows you time to send out a press release to publications, bloggers etc, to try and get some reviews and “hype” around the release in a bid to boost interest for the single release. Unfortunately as we are all terminal procrastinators, to motivate ourselves (and enrich your lives sooner with food for the ears and mind) we have decided to take a different tack; announcing a release date of T minus 18 days for a single that is currently not finished….. not even close.

So bearing in mind that we also have an EP and small tour coming up, here are some of the main points on our to do list for the next month:

- Finish tracking Single and EP (!?)

- Send Waiting for mastering

- Single Artwork (DONE … god bless Cuban Keith)

- Devise some kind of video concept

- Shoot video ( I heard baking paper over car headlights works good as film lighting!)

- Arrange online distribution

- Promote/Sell Tickets for EP launch

- Cost/ produce CD copies

- Design T-shirts

- Manufacture T-Shirts

- Collate list of appropriate music publications 

- Contact said publications

- Arrange gigs to promote EP/Single

- Rehearse for gigs

- Take new (better) press photos.

- BLOG ABOUT ALL OF THESE THINGS!?

… and now i remember why I never got anywhere doing this on my own! Even between the 5 of we’re struggling to get all this done to (our own admittedly ambitious) deadlines. Its hard work and I’ve been hastily reminded that being an unsigned band is probably 20% music and 80% admin and promotion…..But I would rather be doing this than anything else in the world. 

To be honest with you, I’m sure that we'd be doing what we're doing now if it was for our ears only, but thankfully It’s not. Having 200+ people looking out for us is a great feeling, and whatever happens down the line you will always be our favourite 200. Please keep checking up on us and look out for the single on the 27th if we don’t hear from you before. There is a lot to come!

Oh and BTW this is where we live on the internet:

twitter.com/thisismasses

facebook.com/thisismasses

musicglue.com/thisismasses

thisismasses.bandcamp.com

Cain

[thisismasses]

SONG FOCUS: Dive

By Cain, 30th Dec 2014

So with it coming up to the new year, I thought it would be good to sign off the year with a quick blog about our current single so that we can start 2015 talking about our upcoming releases!

I think the most common reaction we’ve had since releasing Dive is “I was not expecting that!"

...and that is exactly what we wanted. Personally, I wanted to release a track that was a real statement, that would be a shot in the arm to anyone that thought they knew what we were going to sound like.

I’ve been jobbing around with an acoustic guitar for the last 10 years now, in and out of bands before trying the whole acoustic-solo-artist Ed Sheeran thing, and I think to be honest, after a while the music I was making bored everyone senseless.

About 18 months ago, I became properly disenchanted with the whole thing, threw my teddy out of the pram, and decided to concentrate on mixing and production; staying 'the other side of the glass'.

After a few months I gradually got the itch to start writing again, but I'd got it into my head that there would be no guitars. It would all just be noise and weird sounds, and in time everyone would bow down before me as some kind of electro NIN pioneer.

So I got the ball rolling, grabbing random bits of audio and manipulating them to create some weird kind of soundscapes, and then I thought 'this thing is going to need some kind of melody or I’m just not going to get a kick out of it’. But again I wanted to stay away from the standard pop structures I’d leaned on before. With that in mind I decided that all the vocals should be loops comprising entirely of 4 part block harmonies; there would never be less than 4 vocals. It would be like some sort of noise/country cacophony.

Oh, and all the lyrics had to be dark and sinister. That was the formula.

Having just written this down, it all seems a tad melodramatic, but the lack of natural light you experience working at a recording studio can really put you on a downer sometimes; hey we’re allowed to be dramatic, we’re 'artists'!

I wrote a lot of tracks around the same time as Dive with this formula, and thankfully most of them will never see the light of day. I’ve calmed down with my refusal to do anything pop related recently but I’ve always had a soft spot for Dive since that period. Particularly when played loudly in dark rooms.

When we started the band we pooled all our potentially-useable demos, and I think Dive was the first song we actually worked on together. It sounds a million miles away now from the version I had.

I like to think of myself as an ideas man in masses. A lot of time I’ll have the initial idea and then everyone will carve away at the the rock (while i sit back bewildered) to make it our song. How could i ever think I could release something without a guitar on it! Forgive me!

So that's Dive. Its not a song, its a statement.

Are all of our tracks going to revolve around manipulating classic movie soundbytes to within an inch of their life, then singing two sentences over the top? ……No.

But here's hoping that our next single surprises you as much as the first one did.

Look out for announcements in January.

In the mean time remember you can still download our debut statement here: thisismasses.bandcamp.com

Cain

[thisismasses]

ARTWORK: Dive

By James, 10th Dec 2014

So this is the Dive promo single artwork. It came from a colour experiment I was doing with a great free app, Snapseed (by Google) on iPad. The photo was just one I took from the space needle in Seattle on my phone, so I added some digital noise as a cool 'look' to hide the low resolution.

Fair enough the cityscape idea is pretty overused, but we liked the fact the word 'Dive' and the photo of a high ledge gave some nice dark undertones that hinted nicely towards the mood of the single.

Also, since this was the first artwork we needed as a band, I made the logo as a placeholder in another free app, Sketchbook Express (by Autodesk). It's just a basic font (Avenir), but we liked it so we stuck with it - simple and classic often go hand in hand I think.

So now the official masses logo is just the same font but redone properly as a vector file and with the kerning tidied up a little (I'm picky about kerning!)

In a similar vein, it annoys me a little that the word 'Dive' isn't vertically centred between the square brackets, but the app is quite limited and I didn't have time to fix it... busy work schedule and we were more occupied with getting the audio mix right in time for the release date... We set and announce our release dates before things are finished in order to make sure we actually get things finished - we're a band of procrastinators otherwise.

James

[thisismasses]

Having A Blog... A New Way?

By James, 1st Dec 2014

Having a blog is something everyone seems to expect nowadays from every group/organisation/company/public entity.

But how many of those blogs are actually necessary, or well-maintained, or interesting?

I think most bands have a blog of some sort, but in my experience it's mostly just the same stuff that's on their facebook and twitter feeds... which suggests they only have the blog because it's socially accepted that they should have a blog.

Of course there's nothing wrong with that. But us, being all 'disillusioned with society' and shit... we're trying something different. Fuck it, why not?

The plan is that we're going to have this blog as a pipeline between us and you as people. Our five separate personalities will be on here from time to time, and we'll talk openly about all band related matters.

If you want the headlines, follow us on Facebook or Twitter. If you want to know what we're actually doing day to day, follow us here :)

We always said we don’t wanna be a band that says they’re working on something big but never has anything to show for it... we'll use this as a bulletin board for what's going on with us at all times.

Also, collectively we've got a total of at least 500 gigs and 20 years experience in the music industry (we're all mid 20's), so with this fresh new band we've got a head start on how to get things right - we hope this blog can be used by less experienced bands as a how-to manual to keep them pointed in the right direction (ask us a question if there's anything specific you wanna know!)

And for the record, we're not saying we're disillusioned because it's 'cool and edgy', we're saying it because it seems (to me at least) like most things are run by idiots or corporate machines designed to separate idiots from their money.

A lot of the reason for starting the band was because we were bored with work and frustrated by the fact that most of the music on the radio is objectively bad. That's my professional opinion by the way; Radio 1 for example is at least 50% trite/badly-written songs and/or with lazy production (often nice mixing and mastering is the only thing propping a song up).

So lots more updates coming.

James