Are young/new bands naive?

Gonzo_Reporter

A young band that were recording a demo/EP asked me a question the other day. What were the steps to getting a CD mastered, printed, copyrighted, into the shops/iTunes and possibly even chart. Basically everything after the initial recording.
Their lack of knowledge surprised me a bit, granted they were young(ish) but there willingness to keep going despite not knowing what there next step was or even how much it could cost them financially in the end seemed reckless. They had already spent money for the recording time amd me and would have to spend more again to see any possible return artistically or financially.

Is this a common occurrence these days? Has anyone noticed that new/young bands dont know what is ahead of them or has this band just not done their homework?

madtheory

It's always been like that. Send them this:
http://www.mosesavalon.com/nadine.shtml

dav nagle

Anything below 18 and you are talking about sheltered kids that was me at one stage too, talking for the sake of talking.

MrStuffins

The popularity of overnight pop star shows also these days doesn't help. Everytime you listen to the radio or watch MTV or whatever, every second song is by someone who was working in McDonalds a year ago and went onto TV to become a star.

Paolo_M

"Young people don't know as much, or have as much experience, as older people" shocker!!

Seziertisch

Gonzo_Reporter wrote: »

A young band that were recording a demo/EP asked me a question the other day. What were the steps to getting a CD mastered, printed, copyrighted, into the shops/iTunes and possibly even chart. Basically everything after the initial recording.

Don't forget the step of actually having music that people like.

I'm sure everyone here can think of at least one band they know/know of who have impressive websites etc. but who don't really have great music.

In the past, the trappings of being in a successful band (having professional band photos or making a video for example) were limited to successful bands. This is obviously no longer the case, and I feel that now a lot of bands put more time into acquiring all of this stuff than they do into stepping their game up as musicians/songwriters.

Gonzo_Reporter wrote: »

Their lack of knowledge surprised me a bit, granted they were young(ish) but there willingness to keep going despite not knowing what there next step was or even how much it could cost them financially in the end seemed reckless.

I think this is a healthy attitude on their part. They are doing it because they want to, not because they want to make money from it. They are recording because they want recordings of their songs, when they listen to the finished work that is a victory right there for them. If they took the attitude that they were recording with the specific aim of making money from the finished work/product, there is a pretty high chance that they will be disappointed; what should be a triumph of them celebrating their love of music and playing music together would then be a failure.

Making music should be treated like a hobby, not in the sense of being amateur or uncommitted or whatever, but in the sense of doing it because you love doing it.

Gonzo_Reporter wrote: »

They had already spent money for the recording time amd me and would have to spend more again to see any possible return artistically or financially.

Hopefully in your recordings they are seeing a return artistically.

PaulBrewer

It's not a issue that relates to young bands alone.

The core 'Make a Tune that people will like' step is oft times overlooked (or even 'make a tune that YOU like').

The other conundrum that confuses me is the 'must do 4 songs, but don't allow enough time' one.

No one cares if you have 300 songs or 3 - all you need to get the ball rolling is one good one. That's it .... 1.

I suppose that's what separates bands - ones that see a whole picture and most that don't.

Paolo_M

PaulBrewer wrote: »

No one cares if you have 300 songs or 3 - all you need to get the ball rolling is one good one. That's it .... 1.

I suppose that's what separates bands - ones that see a whole picture and most that don't.

Absolutely.
Most people that bands will hock their demo to will listen to the first 20 seconds of one, maybe two if they're good, of the songs on the demo.

If you are lucky they will ask to hear more, to which a "come to see our next show in xxxxx venue" is a perfectly acceptable response.

A demo with two well crafted songs, well produced, well recorded and mixed is worth far more than four half arsed efforts.
Where did the magic number of four come from for demos anyway?

PaulBrewer

Paolo_M wrote: »

Absolutely.
Most people that bands will hock their demo to will listen to the first 20 seconds of one, maybe two if they're good, of the songs on the demo.

If you are lucky they will ask to hear more, to which a "come to see our next show in xxxxx venue" is a perfectly acceptable response.

A demo with two well crafted songs, well produced, well recorded and mixed is worth far more than four half arsed efforts.
Where did the magic number of four come from for demos anyway?

I'd guess the concept that 4 songz is better than one ....

krd

Paolo_M wrote: »

Absolutely.
Most people that bands will hock their demo to will listen to the first 20 seconds of one, maybe two if they're good, of the songs on the demo.

Why don't bands make songs 20 seconds long then?

I was listening to The Beatles Revolver the other night. Very few of the songs are that much over 2 minutes long.

madtheory

Reveolver is a funny one. Quite a few of the songs seem unfinished, as in they stop before the end..?!?! Especially "For No One" (which is kinda the point). As if they were more interested in sonic experiments- research for Pepper? It's a great album though. Of course it bloody is, it's the Beatles!

krd

madtheory wrote: »

Reveolver is a funny one. Quite a few of the songs seem unfinished, as in they stop before the end..?!?! Especially "For No One" (which is kinda the point). As if they were more interested in sonic experiments- research for Pepper? It's a great album though. Of course it bloody is, it's the Beatles!

Songs used to be shorter. Look at the times for Elvis's first album

Not a single song makes it to 3 minutes.

Side one
No. Title Writer(s) Length
1. "Blue Suede Shoes" 1:58
2. "I'm Counting on You" 2:24
3. "I Got a Woman" 2:23
4. "One-Sided Love Affair" 2:09
5. "I Love You Because" 2:42
6. "Just Because" 2:32
Side two
No. Title Writer(s) Length
1. "Tutti Frutti" 1:59
2. "Trying to Get to You" 2:33
3. "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You) 2:05
4. "I'll Never Let You Go (Lil' Darlin')" 2:25
5. "Blue Moon" 2:43
6. "Money Honey" 2:36


I blame Pink Floyd.

I think it could also have something to do with the limitations of vinyl.

madtheory

On Revolver, the length is just a side effect I think. Not many of the songs actually resolve. Either lyrically or harmonically; sometimes both- For No One is the obvious example. Their earlier stuff is more traditional in this regard.

krd

madtheory wrote: »

On Revolver, the length is just a side effect I think. Not many of the songs actually resolve. Either lyrically or harmonically; sometimes both- For No One is the obvious example. Their earlier stuff is more traditional in this regard.

I think you're right. I think it could have been down to the pressure they were under at the time to bang stuff out. For No One sounds like a demo - well done demo.


As for young bands. Most stuff is about getting experience.

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though something really pertinent. In the guardian today, I saw contemporary indie referred to as landfill indie.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/06/gregg-araki-kaboom-shoegazing


Kids these days have an incredible amount of technology at their disposal but they're not making records that are either unique, unusual, or anything anyone would really like to listen to again.

Right now is a great time to be a teenager in a band. You can get demos done you'd never have been able to afford even a little over ten years ago.

We should be at a time when hundreds of little Beatles are springing up, instead we're not even getting Herman's Hermits.

Hayte

How do you expect them to know any better? In the internet age, music is increasingly regarded by many people as a worthless commodity - something that anyone can get anywhere, anytime on bittorrent. Whether thats right or wrong is an argument for another thread but music sales are down year on year and the industry is shrinking.

Like all other industries that are shrinking, there is no prerogative to train in new blood, which is part of the reason why unpaid internships that go nowhere is becoming so prevalent. So you have alot of people wanting to get into the industry, and the industry doesn't have enough space to accommodate the overwhelming majority of applicants. Pretty soon, you have a whole bunch of people like you, me and hundreds of others stuck on the outside trying to figure out the discipline for ourselves.

What about the unpaid internship route? How many people can afford to do that for free? Theres alot of people that have the will and the talent but they just can't survive on their own working for no pay. At the end of your internship theres also the stone hard fact that most applicants won't be kept on regardless of how well they perform, because the industry is getting smaller.

Music production is a terrible vocation. For every one youtube phenomenon or MTV success story (do they even play music on MTV anymore?) there are literally thousands who put in the work but never had a mentor, couldn't live on unpaid internships or couldn't get access because they didn't know any insiders.

As far as apprenticed professions go, it isn't law or medicine. After the economic collapse the law firm I work in couldn't wait to get rid of its qualified apprentices. They don't have the vacancies anymore and they don't want to pay them. The music industry is more or less the same except the decline has been steeper and has been going on for longer. There is also no real prospect of recovery unless the industry wide business model and intellectual property law radically changes.

You can't practice law or medicine without a license but you can produce music. So what you see are a bunch of people practicing music production without a license because nobody wants them, nobody wants to spend the time or the effort to teach them and nobody wants to employ them unless through some pure fluke they can provide more value to the studio than it costs the studio to supervise their work for free.

I'm not surprised most young/new bands are naive. Given half a chance in any workplace that isn't as amazingly f**ked up as the music industry, theres plenty who could go on to get real good at this game. But most don't get that chance and its not for lack of trying.

MilanPan!c

New bands, old bands, youngsters, old wans - it doesn't matter really... most people in EVERY industry fail, lots of them dramatically, and most of the failure comes from not understanding their own industry/the market they're aiming at...

It's not about age, though obv youngsters are often more tapped into the Zeitgeist/scene and oldsters have more experience...

But even being good and cool and hip doesn't mean success, and having a ton of experience doesn't mean anyone will like your music...

--

If you have good songs, a good singer, don't act too insane, work hard and have a bunch of luck, you may get a chance or two...

...but that's hard... and you can't control luck.

krd

Hayte wrote: »

I'm not surprised most young/new bands are naive. Given half a chance in any workplace that isn't as amazingly f**ked up as the music industry, theres plenty who could go on to get real good at this game. But most don't get that chance and its not for lack of trying.

It's been f**ked up for quite a while.

You could blame the appearance of the phonograph about a hundred years ago.

Before music was a trade not too different from any other. Or the way Nicholas Taleb put it: In the 19th century, every town in Italy was able to support a few professional opera singers. The big stars existed, but you'd have to travel to one of the cities and go to the expensive operas to see them. The only way to hear music was to pay musicians to perform. Then the phonograph arrived. And it made the big stars richer than ever, put lots of other people out of work.


Then the Italians invented the discotheque. Which put even more people out of work. In Ireland, before Saturday Night Fever, clubs and pubs used to have to pay live bands to play. In the showband era there were literally thousands of people making money out of performing. I've heard, people who could barely play two chords were making a living out of it.

Then CD burners and the internet appears and even the big stars are beginning to really struggle. I think the worst effect has been to kill off real indie labels - like Creation. Creation did lots of interesting things in the 80s and early 90s. Alan MacGee was able to bankroll Primal Screams Screamadelic out of the proceeds of the sale of a few Ride EPs. The Primal Scream money bankrolled Oasis. And lots of interesting stuff in between. A band like Oasis couldn't have existed without Creation - their sound owed a lot to the label's output. Oasis were like what the Beatles would have sounded like if they'd been a Creation band. Major labels rarely come out with anything interesting. They're much bigger, but they lack the balls.


When I was growing up, there was a guy who lived nearby. He made his living by going around to pubs with a Casio keyboard and playing god knows what. Every year, he'd play somewhere in the US on St. Patricks day. But this guy was able to buy a house out of this and live. He was awful - but some people like awful. They fawking lav it.

There is a good living to be made out of playing Irish agricultural music. But you'd have to love it.

There are a few people who started out in rock bands who now make a living from trad.

krd

MilanPan!c wrote: »

It's not about age, though obv youngsters are often more tapped into the Zeitgeist/scene and oldsters have more experience...

Yeah, but youngsters also lack a lot of the baggage older people pick up.

One of the problems with music in the 70s was a lot of it was being made by musicians who'd been around since the 60s. There was a lazy virtuosity to their playing. Everything was studied and still born. And punk was a real reaction to that.

Zeitgeist things are stranger. No one really predicts them - they just arrive. And they're more about that time than the cultural artefact. They're about the people. They're about a mood. A feeling in the air.

But even being good and cool and hip doesn't mean success, and having a ton of experience doesn't mean anyone will like your music...

The funny thing about kids. They think if they dress up correctly it confers a coolness on them. It doesn't always work. They can end up looking like dorks, indistinguishable from the other dorks.

Like the music scene in Manchester in the late 80s. All the bands were painfully and studiously trying to imitate the Smiths - it didn't work for them. The Happy Mondays on the other hand (drug users who started dabbling in music) were nothing like the Smiths. And they were in the right spot when the Zeitgeist struck.

If you have good songs, a good singer, don't act too insane, work hard and have a bunch of luck, you may get a chance or two...

...but that's hard... and you can't control luck.

I don't know, sanity may be overrated. If you took the craziness out of Amy Winehouse's music, would it have worked. Eccentricity is interesting - sobriety isn't. Would Daniel Johnston have been anything without his madness. Still, didn't work out too well for Daniel and Amy in the end. But that's show business, innit. When you think about it - music is a more hazardous business to work in than coal mining.

MilanPan!c

krd wrote: »

Yeah, but youngsters also lack a lot of the baggage older people pick up.

One of the problems with music in the 70s was a lot of it was being made by musicians who'd been around since the 60s. There was a lazy virtuosity to their playing. Everything was studied and still born. And punk was a real reaction to that.

Zeitgeist things are stranger. No one really predicts them - they just arrive. And they're more about that time than the cultural artefact. They're about the people. They're about a mood. A feeling in the air.



The funny thing about kids. They think if they dress up correctly it confers a coolness on them. It doesn't always work. They can end up looking like dorks, indistinguishable from the other dorks.

Like the music scene in Manchester in the late 80s. All the bands were painfully and studiously trying to imitate the Smiths - it didn't work for them. The Happy Mondays on the other hand (drug users who started dabbling in music) were nothing like the Smiths. And they were in the right spot when the Zeitgeist struck.



I don't know, sanity may be overrated. If you took the craziness out of Amy Winehouse's music, would it have worked. Eccentricity is interesting - sobriety isn't. Would Daniel Johnston have been anything without his madness. Still, didn't work out too well for Daniel and Amy in the end. But that's show business, innit. When you think about it - music is a more hazardous business to work in than coal mining.

I agree with all of this; just to clarify, my "sane" comment wasn't about "art," but about interacting with people in the business.. lot's of talented folks have never reached their potential due to making more enemies than friends, due to their crazy behaviour... in every sense of the word...

krd

MilanPan!c wrote: »

I agree with all of this; just to clarify, my "sane" comment wasn't about "art," but about interacting with people in the business.. lot's of talented folks have never reached their potential due to making more enemies than friends, due to their crazy behaviour... in every sense of the word...

You'd have to give an example. All names changed of course - to protect the innocent.

There's a lot of crazy behaviour. It's one thing I really hate about musicians in Ireland. There's a real horribleness to a lot of them. But you get the same nonsense going on if you worked in a callcentre in Ireland. It's a hard place not to make enemies.

Managers have their uses. Paul MacGuinnes was notable for protecting U2, and doing battle with anyone who caused them problems.

MilanPan!c

krd wrote: »

You'd have to give an example. All names changed of course - to protect the innocent.

There's a lot of crazy behaviour. It's one thing I really hate about musicians in Ireland. There's a real horribleness to a lot of them. But you get the same nonsense going on if you worked in a callcentre in Ireland. It's a hard place not to make enemies.

Managers have their uses. Paul MacGuinnes was notable for protecting U2, and doing battle with anyone who caused them problems.

A couple of quick examples would be people that were so high strung they couldn't sustain an active band... that band Razorlight, the singer Johnny Burrell, is such a dick that labels spend as much time trying to keep his revolving cast of "band mates" happy as they do promoting his record... if he was less crazy, more people would work for him, he'd get a better band, better producers, etc.

Another classic is singers that refuse to get singing lessons or accept they should train their voices...

Or musicians that steal other bands gear...

etc.etc.etc.

Lot's of good bands could be great if people were less crazy

krd

MilanPan!c wrote: »

A couple of quick examples would be people that were so high strung they couldn't sustain an active band... that band Razorlight, the singer Johnny Burrell, is such a dick that labels spend as much time trying to keep his revolving cast of "band mates" happy as they do promoting his record... if he was less crazy, more people would work for him, he'd get a better band, better producers, etc.

I think the thing with Burrell is down to money. His revolving cast is down to finding a way of not having to pay people much. I've heard he's a real basstard.

Another classic is singers that refuse to get singing lessons or accept they should train their voices..

.

It depends on the singer. Singing teachers are only good for so much. If you want to sing opera - you need a singing teacher. No singing teacher can teach you to sing like Bjork - or like Bono circa 83/84.

Or musicians that steal other bands gear...

etc.etc.etc.

Or musicians who do sneaky little back stabbing tricks.

Lot's of good bands could be great if people were less crazy

You know.....a guy I played with when I was a kid. This REM song became his favourite for those reasons. Bands, all that effort, can implode for the stupidests of reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CTav-2lCYs

Crazy what you could of had


And the funniest thing: The implosion comes just as things are coming together.