In other news, I recorded a new video of my song “Falling out of love” and put it up on YouTube. I started recording it several days ago, but because of a stubborn cold my voice sounded pretty funky, so I had to wait a few days before I could record the vocals and finish it. You can see me playing my new guitar in this video. I even forgot to remove the sticker on the pick guard… Check it out!



Now, I probably should have been studying psychology instead of recording this video, but oh well… The book is not going anywhere…

Here’s the video. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

And so, here it is. Check it out and let me know what you think!

I’m a bit confused about the whole page, though. I can’t find any kind of promotional tool to use, I can’t add similar artists, tags or anything that would make it easier for people to find the album, so how exactly are people supposed to find it and listen to it? Even though there is an artist profile for Rainhat, as well as an album with songs you can listen to, if you do a search for “Rainhat” with the search function, it finds nothing at all. While you’re typing in the name, both the artist profile, the album and tracks pop up, but as soon as you actually click “Search” all that disappears and you get a message that says “Your search “Rainhat” did not match anything on Last.fm”. I’m starting to get the impression that the only ones who are actually going to get to listen to any of my stuff there are the ones that already know for sure it’s there, and are tenacious enough to turn the place upside down to find it.

I’m not impressed. Maybe I’m missing something, but if putting stuff up there makes it about as available to listeners as putting the album in a box and throwing it out in the middle of a big forest and hoping that someone will accidentally stumble across it, then what’s the point? I might as well spend the energy it would take to promote my Last.fm page and use it on promoting this page or my Bandcamp page instead.

Do you use Last.fm? Am I missing something?

When that is done, I’m going to record the last song for my collection to put it online. I think it’s a bit inaccurate to call it an “album”, since it’s all mp3 files and not an actual CD, so I’m just calling it a “collection” instead. Anyway, once the last song is done, I’m going to really start pushing with the marketing. I’m going to upload the collection on Last.fm, iTunes, and any other online music store I can find. I’m going to try and make some kind of music video and put it on YouTube as well. My songs are still going to be free to download here on my site, but I’m going to put them up for sale in the music stores as well.

I read a book called Long Tail by Chris Anderson a while ago. It’s an interesting book, I recommend reading it if you’re a musician like me. The term “Long Tail” is about online stores and the shape of the sales curve. To put it briefly, a regular store like your local CD shop, usually only carries a couple of thousand CDs at the time. They have to pay rent and salaries, etc. so for them it’s not profitable to keep CDs that don’t sell enough to pay for their shelf space and then some. Online stores don’t have that problem, since a domain and the server space cost way less than a physical store, so they can keep millions of albums in their catalogs.

Now, while the top 10 selling albums sell loads and loads of copies, the 1000th album on the list sells way less than the top 10. The curve drops quite rapidly. The 10 000th album sells even less, the curve drops even lower. But the interesting thing is that no matter how far down the list you go, the curve never actually drops down to zero – it just levels out more and more and hovers around a couple of copies a month. This is the long tail effect, and it’s pretty cool. No matter how many albums you put on the list, every single one of them gets bought at least once in a while.

For a guy like me that’s good news, because it means that if I write some decent music and put it up for sale with the big music stores, my music will get bought at least a couple of times a month. Of course, the music store will grab a chunk of the profit, so I’m not going to be making any big amounts of money with this, but it will be a couple of bucks every now and then. And the more songs I put up, the more money I will eventually earn. And if I manage to write some music that is actually good and becomes popular, I will of course make more money. But more importantly – for every person that actually buys one of my songs, there will be hundreds of people who hear it. Even if they don’t like it that much, it’s publicity for me.

Well, maybe not quite. But I’d like to have a music video, I think having something on YouTube would probably help with spreading the word about my music. So how do I make one? I was reading Polybore’s blog the other day and noticed the ad for Animoto in the corner. Animoto is a site where you can create your own flashy flash videos by uploading pictures and music, which then get put together with a bunch of cool transitions and effects, and the result is a video. You could easily use this to make a music video. If I understood things correctly, you can make a 30 second video for free, or a full length video by using up credits that you have to buy. Doesn’t seem too expensive, and it’s definitely way cheaper than hiring a music video director and all that comes with it.

While it definitely seems like a cool service, I didn’t like the fact that you really don’t have much control over the end result, since the effects and such are applied automatically. You upload your pictures and music, then press a button and Ptooie! Out comes a video. You can always re-render the video until you get something you like, but it doesn’t seem possible to step in and actually set things exactly the way you want them to be manually.

Another, even cheaper option (if you have a digicam) is to just go out in the garden and film yourself. There’s plenty of video editing software out there, so I’m sure I could add all kinds of cool effects and get something that looks nice, but I must admit I don’t really like the idea anyway. I think I want something a bit more creative and original. I have an idea involving a bunch of still pictures, but it would take a while to finish and it’s not exactly an easy project. I’m going to try a few things out and see if I like how it looks.