In high school I’d hit up the local record shop, Crow’s Nest, at least once a week. The vast majority of the money I made at my after school job, and recording bands in their garages, went right back into buying CDs.
Some days I would dig through the imports sections, other days the box sets and singles. A few times I’d even hit up the New Releases wall. I hadn’t heard of most of the garbage on there, but occasionally the album art alone would be enough to get me to spend my hard earned $15 on a band I didn’t know.
This was before YouTube, before Pandora and before iTunes.
I “discovered” a lot of shitty bands by buying on album art alone. But for every ten Nickelbacks, there was one Isle of Q, one diamond in the rough.
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Welcome to my completely redesigned, recoded and rebuilt website!
There are so many cool things about this little website that I’ve been working non-stop on over the past seven days.
First, and probably most importantly, you can now stream EVERY song on my site. Not only that, but you can stream every song in high-quality. Most of the mp3s have been encoded at 256kbps, which eats up my bandwidth dollars, but will sound very pleasant to your ears.
Along side those streaming songs, you will find lyrics and chords and album artwork for every song. And for every song that appears on an album or EP, I’ve created a really cool “track list navigation sidebar” tool, so you can hop from any song to any song without digging through endless menus or using your browser’s back button. Take THAT bands who artificially inflate page views by using sub par navigation menus!
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About once every three months I get to be really depressed for a few minutes, and then really proud for a few minutes. O’Reilly, the publisher that released my YouTube book, sends me quarterly royalty statements. I just got one of those statements this morning.
This past quarter I sold 295 copies of my YouTube book. After two years of being available, that’s not too bad. The book sells at a retail price of $29.95, so that’s $8,835.25 for 295 copies sold. That means I’m taking everyone out to dinner at Red Lobster right? Hah, no.
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With how much work there is – and how fast it all needs to be done – for DFTBA Records, sometimes it’s hard for me to see the big picture. Being so focused on the daily tasks of packing orders, or designing artwork, or cutting checks to our artists, etc, sometimes it all just blends together.
Alex Day and I talk about future personal projects often when we chat, and pretty much since the beginning of DFTBA’s existence I’ve told him I wanted to release a covers CD, where our artists just cover each other’s songs. It’d be fun, it’d be a celebration of the label, it’d be a good way for fans of one artist to be exposed to the music of another artist… and I just plain love covers (as anyone who owns my album Erase This knows).
But I kept putting it off. [click to read more…]
A few days ago I was interviewed by 24/7 Creative, an online project for artists, designers and musicians. I was their featured “Voice” for the YouTube and Guggenheim collaboration Play. I wanted to share the article with you here in case you missed it. I rambled on for a while, but they edited me together well:
The following article was originally published by 24/7 Creative, a community for artists, designers and musicians.
Alan Lastufka: I love the idea of mass, independent, free distribution of art. YouTube is truly the first time that anyone from anywhere can reach an almost unlimited audience with video.
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