Now, even though we've got our master, our finished music, we're still not done! We still need to get it to you somehow. We derive a lot of satisfaction just from the fact of our music, but it's always better to share.
These days, it couldn't be easier to get your music accessible by millions of people, using an online distributor. They handle submission to the likes of Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, etc. The list of services we're on is surprisingly long. If you use it, we're probably on it! There are, of course, controversies around the streaming services' royalty payment models, but they're for another post. The important thing is that people are able to listen to our music. As we said, it's always better to share.
In the same spirit, we make our music freely available for listening on our own website. In fact, for the All My Crimes EP, we've tried to bridge the gap between the impersonal playlist, song-skipping, tune-in-to-tune-out-your mind model of algorithmic streaming that dominates digital playback with the more immersive experience of playing back on vinyl. With liner notes, lyrics, artwork, and bonus material, we're hoping we can forge a new way for people to listen to music online.
The streaming platforms, with their standardized interfaces, don't have the flexibility to do this. Some may argue that this is just extra work, what's the point? But if you want people to value your music, then you can start by valuing it yourself. It shouldn't just be another song on the list, another track to discard after "consuming" it. The artist has to provide context to flesh out their work, so that's what we've tried with these pages. We will update our website design to do the same for the back-catalogue at some point.
We also make physical releases, so far only on CD. These are super economical to produce and therefore we can sell them cheaply at our shows. Despite not being the mainstream way that people access music, there are still a handful of people buying CDs and we don't see any reason to ignore them. The All My Crimes EP CD has the four-song EP plus everything else we'd released until that point on it as bonus tracks. It seemed a shame to waste the space. We also add a small personal touch to each of the CD covers by stamping our logo by hand on each one (also adding smudges to some of the fronts by stacking them!).
We'd love to have a vinyl release some day but, unfortunately, the economics of it don't really add up. Vinyl presses have higher minimum orders than CDs and at our stage, we can't really say with certainty that we'd shift enough of them to cover our costs and avoid having hundreds of LPs lying around. Maybe one day we'll set up a pre-order system so that people can buy them ahead of time, giving us a better idea of demand.
Thanks for sticking with this series, hopefully it's shed a little bit of light on what we do without boring you too much with the small details! As ever, if you've got any questions or comments, then feel free to drop us an email.