How to Promote a Prog album in 2015

Lear'sFool wrote:  Just a thing, though, Skullhead and Argo: these days there are turntables that can rip vinyl to a computer like CDs have long been able to.

The general public settles for much less than they used to.  We used to consider the album cover art to be of near equal importance to the music.  It all went together conceptually, especially in Prog.  I don't buy CD's or downloads for that reason.  

Edited by Skullhead - January 05 2015 at 03:58

And here's an idea - "lite" albums.

I'd hope so ! ;-)

I'd make sure that if you take the music from the soundboard, there are at least two other ambient mics to pic up the room dynamics, otherwise, you might find the recording very cold, stale and lifeless from the board.

You'd be better to throw a few condenser mics around the stage and get a more natural sound, similar to what you actually sound like.  Try one about 3 or 4 feet away from bass, guitar and keyboard speakers.  One above the drumkit, and one 2 feet out in front of the kick.  You can do wonders with 5 nicely placed ambient mics.

I'm thinking along similar lines to Lizards... I signed up for Kickstarter a few days ago (didn't start a campaign yet, though) and already have a video out though I don't expect it to do much.

I have spent a lot of the evening generating a qr code that will lead people to my music facebook page, which has various links and other content, then going insane trying to find a way to make the business cards with the code on them CMYK color mode without purchasing photoshop.... because all the printers, even Staples, require this mode that other programs don't use.  Ugh.  I ended up downloading a free trial and have spent a while waiting for it to install.

Burning the candle from both ends, for sure.  It's frustrating and exhausting.  Was in the studio twice in the last week, too, and the nights in between I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get people to hear the music.

Here's a wacky one for you, though.  Have you ever heard the term, "swag bomb"?  It's described in ridiculous proportions here: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2013/09/29/marc-ecko/ , though the guy talking about it isn't a musician, he's a clothing designer.   The down side to it is that it is expensive and there's absolutely no guarantee that anyone will give a crap about it.  And I'm not quite sure how you'd do a music swag bomb.

^Yeah, that's why I'm using disc makers to do the CD printing, they take care of pretty much everything for you and it's not ridiculously expensive.  They do the bar codes and sign you up for CDBaby who will do the licensing/royalty/promotion stuff for you, basically acting as your temporary label unless and until you get signed.  Granted the promotion pretty much amounts to just getting your stuff on all the online services and CDs into stores, not billboards or poster campaigns or anything like that, but it's better than me having to do all of it on my own.  They do a test print (yay).

Here's a random thing - part of my day job is advertising certain events we're running, and for the first time yesterday we tried paying for the Facebook post "promotion," which funnels your post out to people who have interests that match those you list.  It multiplied our post views by a factor of forty, our post participation (likes, comments, and clicks) by a factor of about 50, and number of shares by a factor of 20, and all this is in less than 24 hours after paying a measly 20 bucks.  I was surprised.  I thought we'd get way less than that - maybe double or less.  I'm considering doing this when the album is close to coming out, maybe as the Kickstarter starts.

My major disadvantage in the live scene is that I have severe, crippling stage fright.  I can play and sing quite well on my own but as soon as someone is watching me, even if that "someone" is a microphone, I start to clench up.

I temporarily solved my CMYK issue by getting a free trial of Photoshop.  So far it seems very much like GIMP but with a few features missing and a few others added, one of those being good CMYK support.  I finished the initial qr code card design and attempted to send the thing to Staples online to test print, had trouble so will just go in person at some point.  Was hoping to do this today so that I could visit a local music store with them.