An Indie Musician's Diary Vol 2

October 28, 2019: Planning Releases

Above: my latest "pondcast", I mean podcast, Lol! 

Album Update: At this point I have completed 8 remixes of the 12 songs on my Change My Mind demo album. They have been sent to Panorama Mastering and checked so they are ready to roll. 

Why has this taken 4,5 - 5 years to get done? It's my first album and I am doing it pretty much all alone at this point although there are 10 other musicians and artists who have collaborated on it through the years. I am the songwriter, playing multiple instruments, the web designer of my homepage, the promoter, the graphic artist, the videographer and I AM TIRED! 

Mostly I think that it is the fear of failure as well as the need to learn how to mix, produce, and promote music that has taken time but now I am beginning to see the project coming to a completion. YAY!

Planning my release date: A few weeks ago I made a schedule and planned to get the album out by Feb 14th, Valentine's Day. It's a Friday and that is good because people have time to listen on the weekends. It's all about unconditional love and that's why Feb 14th is an awesome release date. 

Planning has made me so much more efficient. I mix between 6 to 8 hours a day. Last week I mixed too much and got deppy. So I took a day or so off and now I am back at it again. 

Data loss!

After working intensively the past few weeks, I got sloppy and forgot to back up my files every day. That is of course when the data glitch strikes. I was just about to let my husband hear the song Questions before I was going to send it for a mastering checkup when they file crashed! I lost 15 hours of work and had to load up a older version of the song and redo two days of work.  Note to self: don't forget to back up! Now as I get to the final stages of this project I backup twice a day on two different external hard drives. 

CDBABY

CDBaby is one of the top three distributors preferred by Spotify. I am waiting for their yearly Black Friday sale because my hubby and I just planned net year's releases already. If you read below you understand that I need to create a single before I can create an artist's account on SPotify and Apple Store. so I am going to release two songs:  I'm Leaning on You and the Swedish version,, Jag Lutar Mig Mot Dig Alltid, before the Change My Mind Album release. 

First I am going to finish mixing this first album and then proceed with completing the two singles. They really are the same songs with identical backtracks, it is just in one I sing in English and in the other one I sing in Swedish with some friends. I promised them that I would get that song out there asap and this is my way of getting my artist's account going asap. Two birds with one stone. 

A great article in CDBABY that I think you might not want to miss if you are releasing singles is  this:  https://diymusician.cdbaby.com/music-promotion/it-all-starts-with-a-song-10-strategies-for-releasing-a-single/

Here are some insights and tips copied straight from the article. Go to the link to find out more details. It is really a good read. 

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The strategy behind the release of your single:
How are you going to attract listeners, encourage streams, and drive downloads?How is the launch of this single going to enhance ?How will this song help you get to the next level in your music career?How does a single help you tell a little bit more of ?How do you position your single to capitalize on ?.1. You MUST release a single FIRST.

In most cases, I'd give this advice: You should absolutely if you've never put out music under your current artist name! Why?

Most streaming services don't let you claim your artist profile or use their various promotional tools until you actually have music on their platforms. Since those tools can be pretty powerful, you don't want to MISS the chance to use them for your priority releases (like an EP or LP).