Thanks Louis C.K, now here's my Dad
workingsoftware.com.au
workingsoftware.com.au
A kid loves his dad, his dad makes some good songs, so he decided to show him that you could sell them online without a lot of complications.
He referenced Louis CK, which I think is appropriate. Different scale, but in the spirit.
I'd like to see more authors, artists, and musicians do this. It would be quite a poke in the eye to the DRM-loving companies that are pushing SOPA right now if they saw that indie artists can thrive without them.
Right now, though, I fear they're missing an opportunity. They should least figure out how to get people to sign up for a mailing list, or give them a Facebook page to like, or make it easy to share the page via social media... anything, really, to keep a connection to the audience you have right now and using that to get a bigger one. They appear to be doing nothing of the sort yet, which may lead to an initial boom followed by nothing, just as if the intersection they were playing at had gone from a busy one to an empty one.
With RL busking you can always find a crowd, but online it's not always that easy to get or retain attention. I mean, there's a reason why business people like to see graphs of user numbers that are increasing steadily.
I say this because I want to see him succeed. I believe that this model can work here, but only if he can build and retain the fanbase to support it. It's no different than trying to make sure that you always have a crowd to play for. Busking on an empty street won't get you anywhere, after all.
I wish him all the best.
It's below the PayPal button - perhaps you missed it? Makes me think the positioning isn't all that great.
EDIT: It took me a while to figure out why I missed it. I went there and found nothing at all but an email address. I looked through everything and found that PayPal is serving a 1x1 tracking pixel via https. Odd.
https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_AU/i/scr/pixel.gif
Ghostery didn't see that, either, and many things have default exceptions for https. Strange. Finally noticed that the Wufoo thing was getting eaten by NoScript. You can't even tell that something is missing, you have to whitelist them to get it to show up. So, this probably only affects some of the HN folks, it wouldn't affect a more general audience.
Unfortunately for every decent artist/band there are a thousand people with MIDI keyboards and Garageband...
One was a massively successful, near household name who has his own cable television show releasing what he normally releases, but doing it without a formal distributor.
This is an unknown street musician that I doubt anybody has ever heard of. Musicians like this have been giving their music away for free on the Internet as long as I've been here.
For him, there isn't a real risk. At best he gains popularity, at worst his situation doesn't change.
I hope he gains that popularity, but there is nothing new here, and this certainly doesn't have anything to do with Louis.
This distribution model worked in one instance for a big name. The Dooley's are leveraging the similarities--super easy distribution, no DRM, very low bars for the audience--and seeing if they work for a different kind of artist.
Content distribution models are broken, experiments are good, and I think this is a great one. I'm listening right now and will certainly throw in a few bucks--it's nice music, and Nick's got chops.
This, on the other hand, is an experiment in both marketing and distribution, and barring any significant innovation in the former, it will probably fail.
Just for reference, I think a mix like these might get closer to bringing out the subtleties:
http://grooveshark.com/s/Company/2h3knu?src=5
http://grooveshark.com/s/Old+Man/1MhNJ8?src=5
Those are both really dry, imprecise recordings, but that's appropriate for the material.
I agree with the others that the fundamental character of this experiment is pretty different from what Louis C.K. did. But your father is a good songwriter, and I think you might get more milage out of releasing the source recordings with Creative Commons licensing and encouraging people to mess with them and report back. It'd at least have the potential for more of a feedback loop than you'd get just posting them as-is.
Consider Ani Difranco and go read the article about her from The Economist from 1998 : http://www.economist.com/node/174267
Small 'indie' labels did something similar starting in the 1970s at least and probably earlier.
Louis CK doing it is interesting, but people have been able to build up their own distribution before the net existed. It's easier now but piracy is also much easier too.
Loads of people do it on the net now, one of my current fave bands Amiina which is the string section from Sigur Ros, has their music available for a few bucks out there direct too sans DRM.
Louis CK put out a $200k production at $5 / pop, not including editing time (since he edited it himself). This is not the musical equivalent of a $200k production.
I hope your dad makes a few bucks because it's important to support local artists, but this isn't particularly well produced, so comparing this with Louis CK's production isn't going to safely lead to general conclusions about the approach to sales.
Ever heard Hasil Adkins' self-produced tapes that he made in a shack in the 1950s? Giving them big studio production values would have been totally inappropriate.
The thing about music is that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to how it should be produced. I'm not saying this singer should be compared to Hasil Adkins, or that he's a musical equivalent of Louis CK. I'm saying that you should look at what it is on its own merits.
All I got out of this was that he was taking the same approach as Louis CK by skipping all the complicated stuff and just selling as directly and simply as possible. Just because it's not on the same scale doesn't mean it's not in the same spirit.
Out of tune moments - they happen to really amazing musicians (especially when performing live) and a lot of what you're calling "production" these days is just auto-tune.
That being said, he's not, never has been, nor will ever be a "diva". The style of music doesn't necessarily call for it, although that's not to say that he hasn't worked on improving his voice over the years - mainly with a focus on unamplified street performing more than intonation and accuracy.
Really, though, the goal here is to allow a musician to connect with anyone who enjoys their music - not to make anyone like it or convince them that it's great.
Because those people are not going to be common (let's face it - we're never going to see Spunky Junk Tambourine performed at the MTV VMAs), what I'm interested in finding out is whether or not simply taking the same approach as busking but broadcasting it to a much wider audience will allow Nick to make a living from his originals in the same way as he can make a living singing Khe San at 2am on a Sunday morning (and having people steal his tambourines :)
Four tracks for two bucks, that's more than fair. We all spend that on an iPhone app easily, I'm happy to pay for these songs.
Nick Dooley's songs are really beautiful. I'm going to enjoy having these.
I'd love to see an open source version of this, so that other people can do the same without having the 35k up front to pay a web developer.
The problem is then you end up with a bunch of cookie-cutter sites that look and feel sloppy and poorly optimized for the particular promotion. Also, if you happen to have a Louis C.K. size success you better have some know-how in your corner or your site will go down and your profits are flushed straight down the toilet.
Sorry to direct this at you since I realize it's not your point, but I'm also responding to prior assertions that Louis C.K. overpaid for his site. No, he paid for an extremely professional and impeccably thought-out user experience that operated flawlessly at a non-trivial scale and he got it. It didn't check all the web developer hipster snob boxes, but there's no denying it was extraordinarily successful in meeting its purpose. There's just no way to open-source that level of custom-tailored detail.
Random 5 minute website critic:
Website is very wide. Stretches to full width even on wiiiiide screens ruining readability.
Signature is cut off on 1050px desktop height for me. The text itself seems to be many fancy words with no content. I had to force myself to read it. There were not instant eye catchers or a visible structure.
The photo looks kinda sad and negative.
"Hi I'm" should be "Hi, I'm" I think?
No idea what "busking" is.
"please feel free to get in touch" -> "please feel welcome to get in touch".
Buy button is greyed out and "invisible", the paypal image next to it is much more visible.
Remove that "Artist Statement" headline, it's clutter.
Definitely add a Facebook page.
You definitely want to add in-browser streaming for those demo tracks.
Another note, let people put in any amount on paypal. I would have donate more, but paypal wouldn't let me.
So yes, IMHO this is absolutely the way to.
Thank you Nick Dooley, for doing this. And thanks to everybody who is chipping in some money. You are building blocks of a society I would like to live in.
Is there a socially-charged music site where independent musicians can load their music into a radio station, and get traction by upvotes? While I'd be hesitant to listen to such a radio station at length it could be a way for more musicians to get their better songs listened to.
From what I've seen, almost every "indie distribution channel" puts a whole bunch of technology over the top of this that's supposed to make things easier but just sort of acts as a barrier - I really wanted to have this really friction free experience, as close as possible to the process of throwing a couple of bucks in someone's guitar case as possible.
PS: I've never been able to figure out how the hell reddit works. Do you know of a sub-reddit that would be a good place to post this thing? I've tried posting to reddit before but I think I always get flagged because I post into the wrong place or something.
You could put up 30 second samples and then a zip of four MP3s behind a cheap Gumroad paywall. That might better approximate Louis CK's setup.
Louis didn't get publicity because he put stuff on the internet, but rather because he had built a following with his previous work, and used that to publicize this effort. He could have spent three months in a glass box suspended on the Hudson river and sold the tape at some random street market, and he would have probably received the same amount of money and attention.
The OP knows this very well, and is actually just trying to get publicity by arbitrarily linking his dad's stuff with Louis' name. To be honest, it's quite disgraceful.
The newsworthy factor for Louis was about a big comedian deserting the old distribution model, something that had mostly been done before only in the music world (Radiohead, Trent Reznor, etc etc). (Even the, it got much more publicity than it really deserved, but that's the magic of showbiz for you.)
But this? This is a nobody uploading mp3s on the net. Is this new? No. Is this hacker-related? No. Is this Louis-related? No. It's just a marketing trick. What next, "hey Hacker News, here's my store selling potatoes directly on the internet, I'm doing it like amazon" ?
Did it work because the model is inherently sound or because it was so novel?
I don't think we can say one way or the other yet.
If I had to guess, I'd say that I think that his model will work for others but probably not as well, once (if?) it becomes commonplace I suspect you'll get a higher ratio of downloaders who don't pay to those that do.
The thing nobody gives studios and labels credit for is that they assume the financial risk on productions by advancing the money and then they profit handsomely (or lose money, which happens often). Louis CK decided to take this risk on himself. From what I've read it was about a quarter million of his own dollars on the entire production and distribution system. It seems genius in hindsight, but be didn't known that this was going to work so it took some balls. That's what makes it awesome and interesting in my opinion.
For an unknown person to do this is not especially interesting because they have no real audience and no labels or networks waiting to hand over a cash advance to them. There is no real risk involved at all - it's simply the case of a musician trying to get their name out there and using the cheapest (and most likely only) option they have available to them.
Though, I did give it a listen so it worked to some degree of getting your father some exposure. I say congrats on doing whatever you can to get exposure, there is no shame in that at all.
Obviously, Louis C.K. could require payment first because people had some expectation of the quality of his content already, and that won't work for an unknown musician.
That doesn't mean this is a bad idea, but it's not really the same idea.
It was written by Robert Woodhead on selfpromotion.com as "Virtual Tipping"[1] in 2000. That's where I first read about it - and I'd talked to my Dad about it before but never knew how to tackle the whole distribution thing. Seeing Louis do this so simply just made me think "fuck it, let's go".