By John McGlasson
In my last column, I went over some facts and numbers regarding digital music distribution, and ended with the question, why spend so much time and money to compose and produce albums that flow a certain way and are meant to be listened to as an album, when the reality is, your album gets chopped into singles and sold as such? I also pointed out that there are usually 1-2 songs on an album that get many times more downloads or streams as the rest of the album, and it’s often not the song you may have intended to be a “single”. So what’s the solution? Do we refuse to sell single songs, and only sell complete album downloads? Do we keep selling singles, but lower the album price to encourage the purchase of the whole album? And doesn’t this cut into the profits, and therefore the promo budget?
While I don’t think it’s the solution to our problems, I see many advantages to producing EP’s, nothing new, as the indie music world survived for a long time on EP’s for a variety of reasons, the main one being that they’re cheap to produce, but I see a lot more appeal than that.
It’s very difficult to get the attention of the press these days with so many releases out there. Even if you’re paying a well-known publicist, there are no guarantees. Most bands put out an album a year, often every 2-3 years. With each release and each new publicity push, you build name recognition among the press and the public, then after the shelf life expires and the touring stops the band can seem to drop off the face of the Earth, losing all the momentum they’d built. A year or two later when you want to release a new album, the process has to begin again from square one, at great expense for each release.
This, combined with the fact that albums really aren’t albums anymore, but a collection of singles, lead me to think that EP’s are the way to keep the momentum, since you can release one every six months or so by simply dividing a full-length album into two EP’s. The promo effort never stops, you always have new material for the fans and for the press to review, you’re not sitting on material for months or years waiting to record the new album, as the recording process becomes almost constant, you write a song, you record it, and get it out within months. The process becomes a true picture of the artist’s evolution, the music is fresh and new, without being picked at and scrutinized to death, and you save a lot of money by maintaining constant press and fan attention.
Good marketing requires that you offer the public a great deal, not just a good one. I’ve found that people are a lot more willing to spend $7.99 on an EP then they are to spend $14.99 on the full-length album, and this is true in digital as well, people will buy six songs for $8.00, but not 14 for $15.00. Retail stores hate EP’s because of the lower retail price, but I’ve found the profit to be only slightly lower from an EP than a full-length, full-price album, and I’m not likely to release much into retail in the future anyway.
Bottom line, write it, record it, and get it out there. Never stop the process, never stop the promo effort, play live as much as possible, communicate with your fanbase and the press constantly, and you should be able to rise above the competition. The people who can put out the best material, the most often, with the lowest production costs, will profit in the digital world, the people who overspend on production and promo aren’t likely to ever get out of the red on a release. Thanks for reading! I welcome questions, comments, or suggestions!
John McGlasson is a life-long guitarist, producer, and founder of o.i.e. Records, Ltd., a musician-oriented independent record label based in central Illinois.
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