Making and Marketing Music: The Musician's Guide to Financing, Distributing, and Promoting Albums by Jodi Summers

Author:Jodi Summers [Summers, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: music, Business Aspects, Individual Composer & Musician, Recording & Reproduction, Instruction & Study, Composition, Lyrics, Business & Economics, Commerce, marketing, General, Home-Based Businesses
ISBN: 9781621535911
Google: 1DmCDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2004-10-01T23:38:56.129521+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Timing Is Everything: Planning the Release Date

If you’re concentrating on your art, following your

instincts, then you’re doing your homework, the rest will

come. There’s going to be an increasing amount of people

around you to help get the word out to other people.

—Chris Douridas, DreamWorks Records

In the beginning of their career in the early eighties, Van Halen used to take a week to record such classic albums as Van Halen II and Fair Warning. In those days, the average album took two hundred hours to record. All that has changed. On more recent records like Van Halen III, it takes the current lineup of Van Halen six months to a year to create an album. They go into 5150, Edward Van Halen’s home studio, putter around, make a song, try it again. They deliver the record whenever they wish and it inevitably sells a million copies.

You will have to earn the luxury of delivering product on your own time parameters. If you’ve got any kind of deal at all going, you will have a deadline for finishing the album. It’s all part of the cycle. Your record company may schedule your record for release in late July because in August, the company has four big megastars coming out, and has to focus its energies in that direction.

■ Schedules and Deadlines

Once your album is slotted into the release schedule, the record company machine starts working on your behalf. This is where recording an album becomes a group process. The record company needs an adequate amount of time to promote your record, and you need room to set up a proper tour to support your newly released effort. The proper touring and promotion schedule will take anywhere from three to six months to set up and execute.

In the real world of making a career go, album releases, marketing, touring, and television appearances have to be synchronized. You want to have your record out for a month or two before your tour starts so you will have some radio airplay. Obviously, you’ll want to go and gig in the markets where radio airplay is happening—that’s called building momentum.

“When an album comes out, a band and its record company will set up a schedule of when they’re going to radio and what kind of markets they want to be pushing,” confirms Virgin Records’ Laura Cohen. “Then publicity sends out advances to magazines to start getting some press rolling on it. So when it actually comes out on the release date, there’s a little bit of a buzz going with it. Especially on new baby bands. With anticipated bands like Culture Club, Janet Jackson, or the Rolling Stones, people come to us, clamoring for information, so those bands kind of work themselves.”

If you are not a megastar, you can’t afford to put out a record and decide to tour a year later. It all has to be coordinated so that you have the most impact. If you miss your release date, you’ll be sitting around for the next eight months, because everything was planned on a specific agenda.

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