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Bad Move, Guys! The Big Brass Blunder Monday, April 14, 2008

#1 User is offline   Chefelf Icon

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Posted 14 April 2008 - 01:22 PM

Bad Move, Guys!

You may remember a couple of years ago when I saw a band that was charging way too much for a cheaply made CD of their music. Since then I eventually caved and bought their CD (though I think they drastically reduced the price). I've been enjoying their music ever since. I've seen them a number of times around the city. They're incredible. I highly recommend their music.

You can view their website here. Just be warned, the last entry is on December 31, 2008. Go figure.

You can also check them out on MySpace. I highly recommend that you do. They're one of my favorite bands and I love hearing them play.

Now that they've been sufficiently plugged, let me get on to my griping with them.

Yesterday, as I got off the subway by work I heard the unmistakable sounds of Hypnotic playing upstairs. I quickly came up the stairs and was surprised to see a very small crowd gathered around them. Every time I've seen them in the past they've had a swarm of people surrounding them so thick that it was difficult to see the band. Given that I had a few more minutes to kill before work I walked over to them to check it out. I watched for about 15 seconds when I saw the trumpet player walking around to people in the crowd. At first I thought he was doing a little mingling or plugging their CD like performers on the street and subway often do. After a minute I realized that this was not the case. What he was doing was going up to everyone holding a camera and signaling to them to stop taking pictures or recording their performance.

Wow.

C'mon, guys. Do we have to go through this again? You already tried to charge me $20.00 for a damn CD that you burned on your computer. Now this?

Think about what this does to your fans (or people who are considering becoming your fans). Someone has heard your music and walked over to check it out. In the New York City subway system where people are on the move, on their way to work or school and there are hundreds of other performers, just to grab someone's attention alone is impressive. To grab someone's attention so much that they'd want to take out their camera and shoot a little crappy 2 minute video to show their friends or post to YouTube is another step all together. Instead of capitalizing on that or embracing it, you are going over to these people who would be your fans and telling them to knock it off. Why? I'd really like to know how Hypnotic's false economy works in their minds in such a way that this is a good idea. What you've done is embarrassed someone who was enjoying your music and made them walk away and stop listening and, even worse, stop learning more about your group.

I watched each person this guy told to stop and they all looked disappointed and embarrassed. And they all just left immediately afterwards. After about thirty seconds I left too. I was a little turned off by the whole thing. As someone who has taken a crappy video of them in the past I can say that all that did was spark my interest in the band. I watched the video a bunch of times, showed it to friends and uploaded it to YouTube:


My crappy video of Hypnotic's awesome performance.


And there are dozens of videos of the band on YouTube. Just click on the recommended videos and you can watch them all day. Here's another awesome video that the band themselves uploaded:



So I guess I just don't understand the band's thinking on this matter. I still love this band. I love their music. I want them to be successful. I just don't know if they're taking a very great path by turning off so many would be fans. What is the negative outcome of someone taking a video of your band and either 1) sharing it with friends or 2) posting it on YouTube? I guess you could maintain the wrong-headed idea that they're "stealing" your music by filming it, but that's idiotic. What they're actually doing is spreading the word and working as a free promotional tool for you.

I guess they're taking the RIAA approach to their music. It's a flawed way of looking at your music/art and reeks of the culture of ownership. Furthermore it does far more to damage your ability to get the word out about your band than it does to help you somehow make more of a perceived income off your music.

Guys, I still love your music. Unfortunately I think you are continuing to put yourself in a position where others will not have the opportunity to love your music as much as I do. I would recommend doing some crazy things: 1) Allow fans to make crappy, personal use videos of your music. It will allow more people to find out about how awesome you are. 2) Sell CDs for less than $20. I'd recommend $10 maximum. It's a very simple principle, you will make less money per CD but you will sell more CDs. Your fixed cost is low so your profit percentage will still be high. 3) Allow downloads off of your MySpace page. If people like the music enough they will buy your other mp3s. 4) Link to your Amazon.com page on your website. It's much better than iTunes.

Reluctantly still a fan, simply because I can't help but love your music,

Chefelf
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#2 User is offline   Heccubus Icon

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Posted 14 April 2008 - 09:51 PM

It sounds like maybe they just have the wrong impression of how to go about maintaining a good hold on their music. They don't really seem to like free publicity very much. Not to mention word-of-mouth is the absolute best way to either succeed, or develop a reputation as a bunch of douchebags. Sure some people are going to go home and say "man I saw this AWESOME band in the subway today!" Still others, however, are now going to go home and say "there were some egotistical douchebags playing music in the subway today. Yeah it was good, but they were kind of being total dicks." The latter is likely to have more impact on their reputation, which is unfortunate because yeah, they're good.
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#3 User is offline   civilian_number_two Icon

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Posted 18 April 2008 - 05:53 PM

Maybe they've gotten tired of crappy videos being made of them. I agree with everything you said, in principle, but my first experience of these guys was your crappy video. Recorded from the side, the music didn't mix right and it was a bit cacaphonous. I first had to turn the volume down, and about a minute in just shut it off. Their video however is great. I mean, not so much the video, but the sound mix is professional (and likely not recorded live).

Anyway, I still stand behind everything I said in the original thread, except. I think $20 is fine for a niche-marketed product, but agree they'd sell marginally more at $10. But these guys aren't going to outsell Brittney Spears, no matter how they price it. What they ought to do is get some play in a festival, get on the appropriate radio stations, and get a distributor. Just hanging out on the stree and selling CDs for any amount, be it $10 or $20 or whatever, can't be much of a living for what was that? seven guys?

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 18 April 2008 - 05:57 PM

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#4 User is offline   Jordan Icon

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Posted 20 April 2008 - 02:33 AM

Crappy videos make you sound crappy. Every concert I've been to in the last 2 years has asked people not to film the act on their cell phones, without fail some asshole will always pull out the phone and start filming. It's such a simple thing to ask yet people are hell bent on obtaining really shitty videos.
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Posted 22 April 2008 - 07:17 AM

Civ,

I disagree about the pricing. Sure, they're not going to outsell Britney Spears (though that's likely a very outdated artist for us to use in this debate -- let's just say Britney Spears = the latest greatest thing that kids like these days). The point is that people know who Britney Spears is and there is a lot more attached to that CD that would make it appealing at $17. For a band to give away a CD with Sharpie writing on it for $20 just isn't smart. They need to get their music out there. A passerby will be swayed by price when they consider what they're getting.

I agree with you both that the audio quality in videos is not great, however, these videos serve a very important purpose. I'm a huge fan of Brian Regan (the comedian) and I literally have every available CD/DVD, show, recording off of television that the man has ever done. YouTube is the last resort for finding things I've never seen before. The quality is sometimes lousy but I can still get a fix of new material or new versions of material there that I would otherwise never have access to. It's the Ultra Fans of acts that surround this type of distribution. Smart acts embrace it and use it as the free marketing tool that it is. People who are caught up in 'quality' and 'ownership' alienate their fans.
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Posted 22 April 2008 - 03:35 PM

Yeah, I agree that $20 is too much for the product they offer. I think they should make a better product - it won't cost much more to produce - and charge $20 for that. In a CD store, in the jazz section. Ideally, they should have a distributor to help them with that, and a manager to get the rights in line. These guys appear to want to persoanally control every element, and the result is they put out an inferior product, and they look like dicks.

"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#7 User is offline   Chefelf Icon

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Posted 22 April 2008 - 08:02 PM

Another thing I thought of, while walking through the same subway station this morning, was that they can't prohibit people from recording them. If they want to perform in public to promote their music, then people recording them is a side effect of that. If they want to control recordings, they need to perform at private shows and sell tickets.

Either way, alienating your fans is a bad move.
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Posted 27 April 2008 - 11:41 AM

The only way of getting a better product than a crappy cell phone video is to offer a better product. Another way, of course, is to tell people where to get that product.

Copyright is copyright, but there are good ways (and bads ways) of protecting it. Intimidation is always the easiest, but it alienates the fans. Offering it free is one way, but at the expense of a profit.

I think $20 for a niche market is not too bad. If you think of it terms of 5 twenties equals a hundred bucks, then, yeah, $20 may seem like a lot. It is economics, after all. Unfortunately it's often greed, not economics at work.

My original book was $20 retail, with a $9.00 profit to me. The revised version will be $35 ($3.85 profit to me) because it's standard in their limited niche market, which prices it out of reach for most impulse buyers. The psychology on Amazon.com is now: Wow, $35 is a lot of money. Should I buy just one book instead of two?

If people want to steal something, they will. On the internet, the product is often of high quality, it's easy to take, and it's difficult to get caught. So artists have to educate their fans. Not lecture them!
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Posted 01 May 2008 - 02:36 AM

Jordan has a point that bootlegs can be disappointing, but people should be smart enough not to judge a band by the quality of some guy at a show recording them.

Is their music really such a niche market? I think it sounds pretty nice. Comic books went from being 5 cents to 5 dollars once they stopped being pulp fiction at your local convenience store and started being strictly for hobbyists and nerds, but I wouldn't have thought brass bands have that kind of stigma to deal with.
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