It's very complex, difficult, expensive, interesting and fun to be an independent music producer. Volume three covers my attempts to: make acoustic improvements to the studio; cut down my production times; learn the art of mastering in-house ad muc...
If the truth be known, being an independent artist and not having a band or any support is expensive, lonely and trying. I am almost to the limit of what I can bear.
I just completed the release of Midnight Lullaby and I'm pooped. My many weeks of work gave a meagre result.
After a ten day countdown full of mp4 animations on Instagram and Twitter and personal posts on Facebook, Wavves with the song and texts as well as a new lyrics video I created, I have one more subscriber on YouTube. I lost 10 followers on Instagram and only 35 views + 3 likes (30 hours later) of the Midnight Lullaby video. Seems like a waste of time.
Swedish Pop
But my husband and I have been watching a documentary on SVT Play about the Swedish pop musik phenomenon. In it you learn that it is persistence, networking and hard work, mixed with a bit of luck that makes the music go viral. Many times the artists tried and failed but didn't get any traction, notice or success until after many tries. So never give up. Roxette is a prime example.
The last couple of weeks have been so intense that my stomach crashed and I lost all my joy. I've had trouble holding the tears back every single day this week. Sometimes I can't. My stomach is doing better now that I am off coffee and I am starting to be able to eat almost anything again. I can honestly say that I have lost my joy in making music. Perhaps it will come back.
5 years without extra money. Learning, learning, learning. Alone. Always alone until my husband comes home. Him wondering what I have done, being worried about everything hasn't helped. All the while I see young talen wiz by and older talent with professionalism take money for doing a quick and awesome session - making my music better and me poorer.
I had to pay for a revision of the Midnight Lullaby track and next week, when I am done with the fix on The Vine, I will have to pay for a new mastering on that one too.
Everyone is making money off of me: the sessions musicians; CDBaby; the mastering studio;
I started out
Hear Now Page - I can do it myself
Once I got the single Midnight Lullaby uploaded the ads came trying to get me to send even more money on promotion. I got emails from promotion companies got contacted via my LinkedIn page and CDBaby tried to sell me a Hear Now Page. (See pic on top.) The thing is I am used to designing my own homepage and to create a mobile friendly landing page with the same content for each release I do and integrate it into my linktree gateway is no problem and no extra cost for me.
To those of you who have Linktree and Wix it's a synch. Fot those who don't maybe you will want to buy the CDBaby Hear Now option. I am doing it on my own.
They want you to pay 240 SEK per release and year for a mobile friendly site that leads people to all your music. I am going to create this myself.
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Midnight Lullaby
I've got 31 views after 2 days. I just changed my Youtube banner (created in Canva). which I should have done on Friday. Well, now it is done. It was a bit difficult. The star photo is very large and I needed to center the words as a package which took a few shots. After about 5 times I got it. I used Pixlr to resize.
An important thing is to keep posting stuff next week about it and contacting people personally - friends, radio stations and the like.
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And I am live on the CDBABY store
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