Back in the dark ages, when recordings were made on analogue tape recorders, you needed a record company with hugely expensive equipment to get songs recorded to acceptable quality and released. But these days you can do it all yourself. Amazing! When your recording is finished you can upload your music to streaming sites, Soundcloud, YouTube or wherever.
But if the whole project is do-it-yourself you’ll need the following skills:
- Writer
- Composer
- Singer
- Musician
- Producer
- Manager
- Recording engineer
- Mixing engineer
- Mastering engineer
- Communicator
- Art director
I might have missed something, but in addition to the above you’ll need to find out how all the copyright and registration stuff works and arrange the distribution to streaming sites. Then pay for it. Not too bad, in other words.
That last bit might have been dripping with irony, but in fact none of it is impossible. Especially if you’re in a band and share responsibilities and tasks. Apart from being able to record yourself there’s another important difference today compared with those dark ages of a couple of decades ago: you’re not forced to rely on a newspaper or magazine to get your name out there – which is very hard these days anyway. We now have all the social media channels and they are free. If we’ve put all that time and energy into making a whole album, then we might as well do something to promote it. We can even use an iPad and make a video to upload to YouTube! Record company advice, or even demand, is for band members to be active on social media every day, which might be difficult if you have a day job, but even that’s not impossible. After all, evenings are free. Are we living in the golden age for artists, musicians and bands? Well, it depends. You can inform people that you exist and have released an album, but you can’t force anyone to listen and the chances of them doing that on Spotify or iTunes are in fact very low. Can you get on the radio? Extremely unlikely. And on streaming sites you’re competing with the whole of recorded history and new music being released every single day to them. Music has always been very competitive, so why bother doing it if in the end very few will listen? Well if you love doing it and are prepared to pay for your hobby, then maybe it is the golden age after all.