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Originally Posted by aberkok
Man I wish I'd sold 150 discs... currently I'm sitting at no more than 30. It's really tough. Funny I'm coming to this thread today, when frustrations are high. It'll be nice to vent.
Currently, it's hard for me to differentiate what I spend on my band and what I spend on myself as a musician. Do my instruments count when they're not specifically for the band?
I don't intend on recording in a studio every year (or ever again until I learn how to sell the discs I already have), but let's take last year when I made the album as a typical year.
studio - $1200
duplication - $900
artwork/printing - $800
postage (mailing to radio, reviews) - $350
Other costs, like emergency cable purchases on gigs and stuff is usually pretty negligible. There are certain costs which I'd like to be paying, like maybe paid rehearsals for the band (one day...one day...) but most importantly, it seems like I should be paying more for promotion, possibly hiring a publicist for press releases and publicist type stuff, and maybe spending a little on postering services.
So yeah... it's tough to be going at this with no capital.
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That's the trick of it, really. All the rehearsals and gigs and CDs in the world don't do you a lick of good if nobody knows who you are. I actually really enjoyed my copy of Hyprovisation (even though I'm not sure I spelled that right) and thought that musically it was quite well done. On the other hand, you have a particularly tough time of it because contemporary jazz is something of a niche market when taken in the context of the music industry as a whole, so your listening base is much smaller to begin with.
Past a certain point, your technical skills are largely irrelevant. You can't get very far if you're a bad musician, but a competent musician with good press will go farther than a great musician with bad or no press. Thus, the key to being successful in music isn't to be the best player possible, but rather to do the best job of getting your brand out there that you possibly can. Free downloads, youtube videos, and any other way you can possibly imagine to make yourself more visible is really the key to it. Unfortunately, there's no direct link between musical ability and business savvy; although some musicians know how to market themselves and manage their brand, the vast majority are pretty clueless. Traditionally this has been the role of the record labels, which have been therefore highly necessary, but their refusal to embrace digital technology makes signing with one of the Big Four a losing proposition right now. The advantage to the musician in being independent comes with a hefty amount of responsibility as well, so that doesn't work for everyone (and in fact works for very few, by my reckoning). There needs to be a middle ground, and it doesn't exist yet in any coherent or widespread form.