You have to "make it" outside your own country first

Well, two bands on the same label are obviously both competing and cooperating.

For example.

And athletes practice together, make each other stronger, then compete.

Music isn't a competitive sport, although the way bands behave, you'd swear they thought it was. Only, good music isn't really quantifiable, whereas if you are the fastest/strongest athlete, that's actually measurable – I suppose largest CD sales or biggest audience attendances would be used in the case of bands as a yard stick, but neither accounts for people's perception of what is “good” when it comes to their taste, for example, Jedward might sell X number of CD singles; doesn't mean everyone will agree they are “good”.

Anyways, here's one scenario which relates to bands who all reside in the same area and make up a “scene”, and profess their support for co-operation for the benefit of everyone.

Say you work at a call centre, along with 40 other people who do the same job as you. One day, by accident an email intended for the payroll dept. gets sent to everyone at the company which contains a list of everyone's salary. Now, you might be unsurprised to see that the bosses and upper-management earn more than you but then you notice how all of your “equal” co-workers get slightly more money than you. Wide-eyed, you stare in disbelief at the email, wondering how or why they're getting paid more than you when all of you do the exact same job; in fact some of them tend to goof-off on the job and haven't been with the company as long as you have, yet they're getting paid more.

Technically speaking, you're all on the same team (working for the company) and should be supportive of each other and work together because it benefits the company at the end of the day and hence, ensures you all get to make your money but inside, you just can't stand to see others have an unfair advantage over you. As humans, we don't like to see others around us have any kind of advantage over us. We accept it alright, but we don't particularly like it.

This is an engineered example of course, but in the case of bands, you can see how this translates across music scenes. Even if a band has an advantage over other bands it might be because they're simply “better” at what they do, but the other bands won't always like this. They want to uphold some kind of warped utopia where everyone does well, in equal measures; a fantasy, or rather, that they're in the upper echelons above some others. I think this is why they can be uncooperative in subtle ways depending on their own popularity and success.

Another thing is that audience and author are now one. More people are playing in bands than ever, so members of the audience at one gig are on stage at another. With everyone broadcasting themselves, it can make for a much more harder time when bands try and find fans, because those fans are also looking for fans of their own. Self-interest is always at work and so many conversations among punters at gigs often end with a, "you should check us out on myspace".

MilanPan!c wrote: »

So true.

It's funny, you and I see so many things in exactly the same way, but just reach different conclusions.

Can I ask, do you still play music?

Are you in a band?

What's the deal then?

What are they called? What do you play/sing? #

All of these long long answers, but little personal info... I can't be the only one that wants to know.

:P

I haven't played drums since I came back from living/touring in Canada with a niche genre band - this time last year. The band split-up afterwards.

Anyways,

My own thoughts on relocation are this:

The Internet is 24/7 and connects worldwide - besides, all bands have to travel no matter where they are based. Obviously, if you live in some small rural town and can't find musicians or any kind of an audience you might have to move to the nearest city in your country.

I moved with a band to Vancouver, Canada in 2008 because we just couldn't find a singer in Ireland (who wasn't already committed to other bands). But it was also just a good excuse to go on a working holiday and explore another part of the world too. There were no intentions of looking for labels or trying to get some radio play (we played a niche genre of music after all); just a fun-seeking adventure with music thrown in for good measure.

What I found was that, although we did locate a vocalist there and began playing locally, we just became integrated into the city's already saturated music scene, where every other band were also doing the same thing; record demo/album, play gigs locally, post MySpace bulletins/blogs, organise tours throughout Canada/USA, etc, etc, etc.

We had the advantage of being from Ireland which was an added twist and attracted some attention from the people living there as well as the local media who did a few write ups about how, “Irish group relocates to Vancouver!” etc, but all in all, we were just like most of the other local bands. We toured Canada the following summer and with our visas about to expire, returned to Ireland – where the band split up*

I think bands like to romanticise the aspect of leaving their country to prosper elsewhere but I don't see the logic if you already live in a big city. If you've ever lived in the kind of places such as Banff, Saskatoon, Kenora, then OK, I can see your reasons for wanting to get out and moving elsewhere but you don't need to cross any border lines or oceans.

You're not going to find a magical idealised “scene” where your music will somehow take root. But say, for arguments sake, there was some kind of Hollywood for bands. Would this “scene” make your life any easier? Not really, because you'll still be you. If your band are crap, well, you're crap, and every city has an abundance of bands that stink. But even if your band doesn't suck, you'll still need to invest in your career and figure out where your priorities are at.

In my case, living in Canada allowed us to play to a different kind of audience and tour one of the largest (geographically speaking) countries in the world, but the same number of people could have been reached through focused Internet promotions and then targeted touring in the areas of interest. I don't regret it though. It was an amazing learning experience and there were plenty of good times to balance out the bad, so I'm not in any way bitter.

* I don't want to go into much detail, but the reason for the split was because we weren't on the same page, some of us were happy with our own DIY progress, others wanted to look for a label, or bizarrely, thought we had to relocate yet again and play every place that supplied electricity “in order to sell CDs” yet neglected how they were hemorrhaging money as a result of their own “personal expenses” and other irresponsible teenage-like behaviours (which I've come to see are synonymous with the musician archetype).

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Now, regarding the engineering aspect, I'm sympathetic to your cause because I've been there. After finishing secondary school, I went on to study sound engineering and music business in Dublin at Kylemore College and then BCFE. At the time, the idea was to get a decent education so that I might end up working with bands in the industry and/or get to play drums for a relatively successful act (hey, I was young and idealistic back then).

Although the dream of becoming a rock star drummer had been promptly dropped after secondary school, the notion of a “modest” career in the music industry felt like a more realistic ambition and was something I wanted to pursue. Upon graduating from BCFE in 2004, I discovered, as did virtually everyone else in my class, that there weren’t any real job prospects within the industry in Ireland. Nevertheless, the education I received during those formative years served me well. But by the time I did finish college, I no longer felt as though I wanted to work in the music industry (except as a musician of course). I got a job working as a technician for a cable TV company and was quite happy with that, which afforded me the means to play music and buy more equipment.

As I continued being a musician and encountered other working engineers in Ireland (some of whom had studios), their overall experiences seemed to support what I thought when I finished college. What I'd say to graduate engineers now is that with pro-sumer companies marketing equipment at musicians, who want to record themselves, you're slowly being squeezed out of the loop, at least in the eyes of musicians who think they can record themselves no problemo.

I still think a band would do well to find a great studio and pay someone to record them, get a professional product done, don't try and cut corners on it yourself because it can lead to inter-member squabbles, never being happy (because you can always change something) and in short, a big pain in the ass. If you have a proper job, 3 weeks wages times 4 band members should cover you and is worth the investement. When you go the studio route, you don't have to worry about being anybody else expect the musician, you can focus on your own instrument and nothing else. But if you're just a singer/songwriter with a guitar, you might not need the studio if you know what you're doing.

I've done both and prefer the studio route but that's me.

Anyways, my problem is that engineering nowadays looks like such hard work for little pay-off. Bands want to haggle down studios because they spent their money on beer instead and whose playing is so crap the engineer has to sound replace and quantise everything. I've worked enough crap minimum wage jobs for one lifetime. Spending 10-12 hours a day quantising some douche for the equivalent of minimum wage? And all this so that one more band or record label or investor can cut corners, put out a lame product and try to profit from it, perpetuate the cycle, over an album/demo that is probably crap anyway?

Not for me, and I appluad any engineers who can put up with that, because I just couldn't. Unfortunatley, you need to earn money in order to work on good stuff, so it's a neccesary evil, but it must wreck your head to no end.