The New Economy of Sound and Leviethan’s Forthcoming Album-- Local Cut

The New Economy of Sound and Leviethan’s Forthcoming Album

April 22nd, 2009 [2:29PM] Posted by: Casey Jarman | 6 COMMENTS

So you’re a musician, right? And you’ve just finished recording an album’s worth of music. You’re ready to release the thing. But, like many artists, you’re also broke. What are your options?

A) Release the album digitally for a fee or donation.
B) Burn a hundred copies and hand-decorate ‘em yourself.
C) Find a label that’s willing to release your work.
D) Invite all of your friends and family to buy the discs for $10 a pop before they are produced, making them investors (or evangelical fans who give their extra copies away) in the process. If 100 or so people buy discs, you might be able to make this thing happen without a sizeable investment of your own.

Levi Cecil, whom you may recognize from his other band Heroes and Villains, has mulled this whole thing over in his head. His first solo outing was praised by myself and a host of other regional press outlets: It’s really warm, delicately constructed music with as much Led Zep in its DNA as Elliott Smith. But lord knows a little shimmery press doesn’t always lead to riches. So Cecil has decided to go with option D—a strategy he formulated on his own and posited Monday on his MySpace blog. If Cecil’s second album, Everything is Fine, sees the light of day, it’ll have a team of investors.

Here’s the post, which I would like you to at least skim before considering my final question, because Cecil says a lot in here:

Please help me release my new CD!

Hello everybody,

I have a proposition for you. It involves almost none of your time, and maybe twenty of your dollars…

I am about to finish my second solo album, the follow-up to Monuments In Memory Of Nothing So Far. It’s called Everything Is Fine. Check my profile for the first song from the record, “A Mass In Empty Space.” Feel free to share this MP3!

I recorded this album with the help of friends over the last two years in Portland. The album benefits from the musicianship of such notable Portlanders as Adam Raitano and Ali Ippolito of Heroes & Villains, Scott Magee of Loch Lomond, and William Joerz of the Nick Jaina Band. I couldn’t have made this record without their help.

That’s where you come in, dear friends. I recorded the songs with various talented recording engineers (Skyler Norwood, Brian Kramer, Kendra Lynn, Jeff Stuart Saltzman) and mixed it the studio I share with Julie Sabatier. If I’m going to release this album on CD, I’ll need to pass it along to another engineer to have it mastered (the process that prepares music for distribution on a physical medium). That master will then be sent to a CD manufacturing plant and replicated many hundreds of times. I’ll have to commission artwork for the cover. I would like to hire a publicist to promote the disc to reviewers. These services cost money. As it stands, I don’t currently have the sums required to take these steps. Sure, I could put all of this on a credit card, or take out a loan, and hope to sell enough copies of the CD to pay it off. As we’re seeing more and more these days, that business model is fading fast.

SO… Would you give me twenty bucks? Really, think about it. You’d float me a Jackson until next week if I asked, wouldn’t you? You’d probably bring $20 worth of food and drink if I threw a party. Why not invest in my new record? If I can get at least one hundred of my friends and family members to give me at least twenty bucks, I’ll be able to release my new CD. In return, all of the “shareholders” in Leviethan will receive copies of the CD to keep, sell or give away to your friends, fry in the microwave for kicks, donate to charity, etc. You can do whatever you want with them; you paid for them! For every ten dollars that you give me, you’ll get another CD. For example; a donation of $20 gets you 2 CDs, $30 = 3 CDs, $40 = 4 CDs, and so forth.

Here’s an approximate production cost breakdown for a CD after it’s been recorded and mixed:

Mastering -$300-700
Pressing (1000 copies) -$1400
Artwork & Layout -$400-700
Promotion -$500-1000
Postage to mail out CDs to everybody who invested -$200-400

Total needed $2800-3800

These numbers can be a little flexible depending on which specific services I commission. The more money I sink into the album, the better it will look and sound. The promotion budget and number of copies pressed will depend on how much dough I’m able to raise. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking you to help because I want to get rich making products on somebody else’s dime. I’m asking you to be involved in helping me spread my art. Again, I could pay for all this, and try to move the discs on my own, but that’s a huge uphill battle for a guy with limited resources. I love to be as DIY as I can in everything I do, but like that old song says: sometimes we get by with a little help from our friends.

This patron system has worked for public radio for decades. I see it every day at KBOO, the community radio station where I am fortunate enough to have a music show. Many thousands of people (including myself) contribute small amounts that help keep the station up and running. I recently watched our friends at Bitch Magazine raise $45,000 in just a few days to help keep their great feminist journal afloat. A few thousand dollars may seem like a lot of money (it is), but a couple hundred people could raise that in a matter of minutes with small contributions. It says so right on the dollar bill; “E Pluribus Unum” From Many, One.

I know times are tough, and there are many causes out there than are more worthy of support than this one. If you can get involved, I will be eternally grateful.

I’ll be setting up a donation button in the next couple of days, til then send me a PM for my Paypal address.

Sincerely, with love and thanks,
Levi Ethan Cecil

In the spirit of openness and conversation, let’s work on this formula a bit. If you believed in an artist, is this something you would buy into? Because there’s definitely something here—maybe not a new way to structure the music business, but a more realistic model for those who still want a physical incarnation of their music and can’t really afford to make it. Everyone says they’ll buy your CD, right? But no one does. So if you make them necessary for the disc’s very production, does that give them a bigger stake? Shouldn’t their names be in the liner notes?

Links:
LeviethanSpace
My review (wow, archives!) of Leviethan’s last album.
Leviethan tour diaries

Photo courtesy of Mr. Cecil

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