Glorify The Turd

Links are down. As far as “not cool” goes, you get the prize for being the first artist on here to bitch.

I deliberately don’t publicize, but that hasn’t stopped several of the people on these records from finding this place. There are literally thousands of music blogs like this–if this is the first one you’ve run across, you’re in for a rude awakening. Try searching Blogger! Half those guys don’t even care if the stuff is out of print and, quite frankly, neither do I, but I don’t do it. 99.9% of the stuff on this blog has been out of print for decades. Some of these records sell for $50-$300 a pop on the collector’s market–I much prefer people hear them for free.

Hey, it’s his stuff–if he doesn’t want it out there, then I will honor his wishes. I suspect he doesn’t appreciate how the “industry” has changed over the years and the amount of rampant so-called “piracy” that goes on these days, putting more demand on the “artist” (cough, cough) to put out something worth actually spending your money on. As far as this record goes, my guestimate would be a generous 300 to 1,000 units if it was reissued as-is, which equals virtually no profit to speak of. If it got put out on LP with unreleased stuff and live tracks, I’d guess maybe 1,000 to 5,000 units, depending on how good it is, which might yield some (and I mean very, very little) cash, but more likely the artists get “X” amount of the product to do with as they see fit. That’s generally how it rolls with small labels. Any way you slice it, the money just ain’t there but, like I said, it’s his stuff. Maybe he’s gonna reissue it.

Owning the rights to a song is a big deal if you’re a career musician and you think your stuff might be worth something. Right now it couldn’t be easier to put a record or CD out, get it distributed worldwide, and find an audience. But money? There ain’t shit and, if anything, it’s gotten harder. The days when people lined up outside the record store at midnight to buy a CD at 70% mark-up on material costs are over and there is really nothing to be done to stop music getting ripped. No matter what you do to encrypt a CD, it ultimately comes out as analog through a pair of speaker outputs and can be re-converted into digital and bootlegged. If you want to make a living in that business, you have to have something that enough people want to buy to counter the folks who only care enough to rip an mp3. I like to see a band or label make their money back on a release but after it goes out of print it’s fair game in my book.

I hear all the Majors are bidding for the rights to this things as we speak. He was smart to hold out! Ha!