Behind the Scenes: #18 The Demo
A Peak Behind the Curtain: A Solopreneur Produces an Album Recording
Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash
The purpose of the first recording session was to come up with two song recordings I could use as a demo of my work and a sample of the album material. The demo recordings would serve two purposes: 1) to raise money to fund the next segment of recording the songs for the ELEMENTS TWO album and 2) to show my work to potential musicians I might want to engage in the future to work with me on this project or other projects in the future. I’ve been making music professionally for over fifty years now, yet you can’t find recordings of mine online, other than a few on my YouTube channel. It’s time to change that!
The first choice was that of platform: where would I post the demos?
Quite a few years before I began this project, when I had some recordings I wanted to share (since removed), I searched for a digital home that offered options for getting the music in front of an audience. The only real options at that time were Bandcamp and ReverbNation; SoundCloud wasn’t really a thing yet, although you could post recordings there. At that time, Bandcamp seemed like the best option out there, so I built my profile and created my first recording offerings there.
When I began this recording project, I continued with Bandcamp, since I’d already done the substantial initial work there, and since Bandcamp at that time still kept a very low percentage of any recording sales.
Things have changed.
Bandcamp was bought out last year by a larger, much less artist-friendly company. It now keeps 15-18% of sales! It seems to be focused on selling music and making money, rather than supporting musicians. And it doesn’t offer digital distribution for the artist, which seems to be essential now in getting your music heard. In fact, that might be the most important item to me now. It seems to me that not many people are going to go to the Bandcamp website or app to listen to or search for music; they go to a universal app, such as Spotify, iTunes, TikTok or Amazon Music. No artist makes money at all on Spotify or most of those distribution sites, but it’s essential to have a presence there if you want to be heard by a lot of people who’d otherwise never know about you. Bandcamp doesn’t help me at all in that regard.
ReverbNation now offers digital distribution to apps such as Spotify at $10 per album per year or at a very low price for singles.
That’s a big plus in my book.
ReverbNation also will place ads for your music on popular social media and other sites at an extremely low cost, lower than those sites would charge the musician. Another plus.
It doesn’t seem to offer the opportunity to create a presence on their website in the way that Bandcamp does. Instead, it allows you to create a separate website for your music. I have to research this a bit more to see how different that really is from what Bandcamp offers. It might just be semantics that makes them seem different.
SoundCloud has upped their game quite a bit, and they’re known for great sound. It seems that they offer digital distribution now, but I don’t see that they have the social media options that ReverbNation does yet. And their presentation of their product makes it seems more complicated. Still, there’s that sound….
At any rate, when I finished the demo in this project, Bandcamp hadn’t yet changed their pricing to satisfy the (greedy and commercial) new owners, and since I’d already done so much work on my profile and other recordings there, I went ahead and posted the demo recordings there.
Now that there are the glaring differences between the companies—1) an extremely high percentage of the take from Bandcamp and 2) offers of easy distribution from ReverbNation (and possibly SoundCloud)—I am likely to make a switch in the next couple of months.
Posting recordings on Bandcamp or any similar site requires first of all that your music is in a lossless format. Put simply, that is a format that doesn’t sacrifice any sound quality in the way that, for example, an mp3 does. When a file is compressed to mp3 format, a lot of the sound quality is discarded or squeezed out in order to create a smaller file. A lossless format doesn’t do that. Typical lossless formats are WAV and FLAC, as well as Apple formats ALAC and AIFF. I always go with WAV.
Once I had received the recordings in WAV format from the engineer, I uploaded them to Bandcamp as singles in an album called “DEMOS.” Ultimately, I plan to add those recordings to the ELEMENTS TWO album, but for now, I needed them in the DEMOs album in order to share them.
For each recording I uploaded, I input the personnel on the recording, the lyrics, the composers and lyricists, and any other relevant information. An image was also required; in this case, I used the ELEMENTS TWO album image for the time being, since that was what I was raising money for. In addition, the DEMOS album on Bandcamp needed to give viewers information about the album in progress.
There were many choices to be made for each recording, such as price and whether the buyer could choose to pay more than the suggested price. Quite a bit of time is required to create a good-quality offering that ends up looking simple, enticing—and hopefully professional.
But how would anyone know those recordings are there? That’s what Bandcamp didn’t offer at the time I posted the recordings—and still doesn’t, apparently. I could have used ReverbNation’s (and SoundCloud’s?) digital distribution and social media ad options! Since I didn't have them, I posted what I hoped was an inviting blurb about the recordings on social media and also offered it in my next Newsletter.
All in all, it took quite a bit of time to manage the multitude of tasks involved in posting and sharing the recordings.
As I said, I’ll likely move my recording work over to ReverbNation or SoundCloud in the future—another time-sink, but I suspect it will be worth it, since it will get my music more exposure. I also plan to upload the recordings to YouTube at some point in the future, which is also a time-consuming process. A musician's work is never done!
For now, the recordings on Bandcamp will serve as a repository for the two demo songs I just recorded, as well as others I will add, to use for sharing with potential musical colleagues in the future and for fundraising.
Again, here’s the link to the (less than perfect) demos: Elena Greco–Demos (ElenaGreco.Bandcamp.com).
I’ll be adding some recordings from the past in the near future, so do check back periodically.
Next up: The Review
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