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Releasing an album on iComp
July 1, 2010 | 2:00 am

There's no upload from the new EndTimes album Lies To Children this week. Instead, some thoughts about the process of releasing an album here.

First, apologies if you came here looking for the next track on Lies To Children. I'm not uploading anything this week for a couple of reasons.

* We'd actually already decided to move to a fortnightly release schedule. This is mostly because I also practice martial arts and my black belt grading is coming up in a couple of weeks; most of my spare time will be spent training between now and then, which means correspondingly less time in the studio.

* Despite that, I was actually aiming to get track five up today, then move to fortnightly release afterwards. However, track five is a light-hearted, major key piece, and it didn't feel right uploading something in that style so soon after the news about Geo. I actually considered uploading something different to mark his passing, but the first point above kicked in, and generally I hate to do something at all if I don't have the time to do it well. Instead, then, I'll just reiterate what I said before: iComp has lost a community leader, and his passing will be keenly felt.

Releasing an album here is actually kind of a weird business. iComp's upload model, and the behaviour of most of our listeners, doesn't really support the notion of a significant number of tracks (say ten or twelve) being considered as a unit. We actually can't upload more than two at once if we want to appear in the Recent Uploads list; and many a newbie has learnt the hard way that if you upload ten songs on the same day then maybe one or two will receive some serious listening and the rest will fall by the wayside.

In effect, every upload here is a single. It appears in the Recent Uploads list as 'song name' by 'artist name'; no association with any other work, unless you indicate it somehow in the song title (as I've tended to do, tagging songs with the album name). Once uploaded, listeners visit the song page (well, they do if you're lucky) and play the song. In almost all cases, they'll play it direct from the song page, out of context -- in other words, treating it as a single.

The difficulty here is that, because any upload could potentially be the first 'single' that a listener hears from our album, there's a temptation to try to make every song stand alone. Maybe that works for some people, but to me it sounds like a quick way to make the 'album' nothing more than a collection of songs. I've always preferred albums that feel like a single entity -- albums that flow from start to finish, where every song has its place in the context of the songs around it rather than simply as a few minutes of music in its own right.

Unfortunately, that kind of album doesn't tend to lend itself to being listened to on shuffle; a single song out of context just doesn't really work all that well. Imagine if Pink Floyd released Speak To Me as a single without the segue into Breathe In The Air (or, indeed, uploaded it to iComp).

Of course, in the professional music industry, bands generally don't release every song from an album individually. They'll put out a small number of singles, then offer the album for people who liked the singles enough to make a bigger commitment. The singles may even be changed from the album version to make them more appealing at first listen: an edited arrangement to make the song shorter and punchier, a hotter mix which grabs the attention more readily but which would be fatiguing to listen to repeatedly. By comparison, the album version can afford to be a little more relaxed, because by the time you've bought the album the deal is closed, so there's a bit more room for artistic expression.

If we use that as a direct analogy, the solution would seem to be to upload a small number of tracks as singles, then make the album available as a whole by some other mechanism. And I did consider doing that, but ultimately decided not to, for a couple of reasons.

* Comments. I'm an enthusiastic amateur rather than a working professional; I need all the feedback I can get to help myself develop as an engineer, producer, composer and performer. I've tried releasing a large work all at once before now, and while plenty of people have shown an interest I've received very little feedback. I gave out quite a few mastered CDs of my first album, Shadows, and only one person gave me a comment on every track. By comparison, uploading every song separately (as I did with that album) pretty much guarantees feedback on everything.

* Motivation. I think one of the reasons why it's taken so long to finish Lies To Children is because, frankly, making a full-length album is a lot of work, at least the way I do it. (Maybe I'm doing it wrong.) Once I set myself a weekly (now fortnightly) deadline to arrange, mix and upload each track, I broke the task down into manageable pieces which I find much easier to approach. Without the carrot of immediate feedback and the stick of the deadline, I'd find it even harder than I already do to bring a project to term.

Unfortunately, then, despite the arguments in favour of releasing only a small number of 'singles', I find myself pretty much obliged to upload every track as I finish it, and simply have to do my best to fight the urge to make every song sound like a single, because I want a cohesive album at the end of it rather than a jumble of songs. Unfortunately, this means that not every song will necessarily stand on its own as well as it would in the context of the album, but that's a trade-off I have to accept.

The only remaining decision, then, is how often to upload. Once per month is a frequency which has worked very well for some of my favourite artists, but I don't really want it to take another year to release Lies To Children, so quicker is better. But there's a further twist; since personal motivation to get the work done is a factor here, I find it much more helpful to finish one track and upload it then move on to the next, rather than trying to finish everything and then upload the songs one at a time after the fact. (Originally I wanted to finish everything before showing any of it to anyone; several years later I still hadn't finished, so I guess that approach didn't work for me.) To an extent, then, I'm limited by how fast I can work. In the case of Lies To Children, a lot has been done already, of course; all the pre-production, almost all the recording (we're having to redo some vocal takes because computer gremlins ate part of them) and some of the arranging have been finished months ago. But there's still quite a lot of work to take the song from there to the finished article.

In the end, then, I chose a once-weekly frequency at first, and it worked pretty well for me, at least until I got a concrete date for the black belt grading. I'm hoping that the new fortnightly schedule will strike the balance between giving me enough time back that I can do well in my grading and allowing me to continue releasing music. And I guess I have to hope that even those songs which would be at the bottom of my list to release as singles still work well enough on their own that listeners aren't completely turned off.

Ultimately, I guess one of the benefits of the diversity in iComp music is that listeners here are rather more accepting of material that isn't a conventional mainstream single. As we proceed through the album, we'll find out if that's enough...

In closing, I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to listen to any of the Lies To Children songs so far. I hope you're enjoying it -- and if you aren't quite sure yet, please give the whole album a whirl once it's finished, and see if some of those songs don't make a little more sense in context...

Thanks for reading,
-Eido

Comments

becwil

Moderator

I certainly understand all the dilemmas you speak of and accept your judgement of how to handle the project. Of course, you need to do it the way that fits your life at the moment. No question about that. I, for one, am ready and willing to listen however you post the tunes and as I am downloading each, I do listen to the whole as it is adding up. And look forward to having all the pieces in order to get the full impact of the album.

Latest Song: Phronesis (AET)

July 1, 2010 | 2:19 pm

Henno

Artist

ok with all that

its very well argued ...

im waiting for the released master version for sure

Latest Song: Bette Davis Eyes (I think shes a spy) Collab

July 1, 2010 | 3:28 pm

carlajpatterson

Artist

Makes sense to me. Reading your blog and forum comments always fascinates me since we work very differently. But, I totally understand what you're saying and agree with most of it. Looking forward to the entire album and how the songs work together.

Latest Song: Someone Like You Collab

July 1, 2010 | 4:19 pm

mdestiny

Artist