A few years ago, when I was still living on the East Coast, I decided to produce a jazz album of my own original music. This was my first time doing such a thing and I would find it to be a very exciting and educational process.
I put together a band of great musician (Dave Samuels, Mads Tolling, Vadim Neselovskyi, Mike Oien), booked a studio, prepared the music, booked flights and hotels, and took care of a hundred other details to ensure that the recording would run smoothly. We recorded for two days at a studio in Massachusetts and got it all done on schedule. I took the material home, did a bit of editing, and then moved onto mixing. I hired my friend Christian Kaufmann, whom I highly recommend, to mix the album. We spent two days in his studio, tweaking, turning knobs, and loading plugins to get the best sound possible.
Finally the music was ready. The last step was designing an album cover before printing 1,000 copies. I hired a designer to help me but wasn’t happy with the results. I ended up designing my own album cover and sent it off to the factory. Two weeks later, I held in my hand the fruit of 4 months of hard work – my own CD. Wrapped and sealed, with a bar code on the back, just like the ones at the store. I was very excited.
The next step was to promote the album and sell it. I sent promo packages for reviews in magazines and websites. I set up my account with CDBaby, I also set up a store on my own website. A friend helped me customize my myspace page. Finally, my CD was out there, ready to be discovered.
Soon after the release I received a few great reviews. My album was even featured on the front page of CDBaby for a couple of days. I was thrilled!
But guess what? All of that exposure sold little more than a few copies.
I started looking for other avenues of promotion. I contacted publicists and people who specialize in radio promotion. Their fee was too high, and it would only make sense for me to use them if their work would result in massive sales of CDs. At the time I couldn’t take the risk to do that. I was looking for a promotional tool that would be inexpensive, yet efficient.
I realized that I’m not alone in this game. So many of my friends had produced their own albums, similarly stacked in boxed and collecting dust. I knew there are people out there who would enjoy our music and be happy to purchase it. But how could we find them?
This problem has been bugging me for the past 3 years. Finally, I believe Joey and I found a solution to it. We’re not quite ready to reveal the secret sauce of earbits, but we feel very strongly that it will be a highly effective online marketing tool, allowing independent artists to connect with their ideal audience. Not only that, but unlike other tools available online, earbits won’t require a lot of work on the part of the artists. Our goal is to build a scalable solution that takes the burden of promotion off the shoulders of artists, to let them focus on what they do best – making music.
Yotam Rosenbaum
EVP of Music, earbits.com
yotam@earbits.com
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/pub/yotam-rosenbaum/8/308/651
Twitter: @earbits
