All in all, it wasn't a bad year!
For someone who does very little advertising, and I'll get to that in a minute, as the above attests, people are listening, which is what all artists want, right? While it's not mind blowing, it's not too bad considering I'm an old guy putting out original music without the benefit of a label or a big PR machine or the youthful pout that is part and parcel-still to this day-of the popular music scene.
I got over that. Plus it's not a good look for someone my age.
The above doesn't include the many plays on other platforms such as Apple Music and Shazam and any downloads from CD Baby, of which there have been a few. I've also sold a few CDs, so that revenue stream hasn't completely dried up. And I've made a few bucks performing. More, I should say, from everything else, but that true of everyone in music, including the big stars. Sad, but that's life these days.
Recording-wise, it been a productive year as well. I've released 2 albums, Desperate Mothers, in January, and Winter, in July.
Desperate Mothers, from 1984, was another of the legacy albums I made in the 89's, but 3 of the songs had to be redone because the originals weren't as good as the rest of the songs on the album. It's therefore an album of old and new.
Winter, which was actually written just after Desperate Mothers in late '83, but never properly recorded-there were only demos of the songs-turned into something like a passion work in that the more I got into it, the more I felt I had to complete it, which put all the new music I was working on on the back burner. I'm working on those songs now.
The surprising thing when you go back and revisit songs and find they need a better recorded version is how little little the arrangements needed to be changed, which is code for I liked them they way they were. Winter was in some ways an actualization of the music I had heard in my head whenever I would listen to the demos, which wasn't very often mainly because they weren't what I wanted them to be. Being able, finally, to record them the way I wanted was an almost transcendent experience.
As to the advertising, I am, at this point in my life, fairly sanguine about whether there's any value in trying to get people to listen to what I've recorded. I am too old to fully take advantage of these new platforms, though I am grateful that I now have a reasonably inexpensive way to disseminate my music. People in their formative years, musically speaking, aren't going to be interested in old guy tunes, and the people who would be are older and therefore have already formed their music preferences.
I'm ok with that. After all, I still write, record, and perform. And that, essentially, is all I need.
©2019 David William Pearce
No comments:
Post a Comment