New Strategy Thinking…free music from Cassette Electrik

Lucy & I have been thinking about how we write music, release it, gig it, and how we go about getting our stuff ‘out there’, you know, all that normal band jazz.

And it ocurred to us that we’re just doing the standard industry process of working towards an EP or album, withholding all the music till then and releasing it in a big ‘splash’. You know, standard music industry stuff. But this is the 21st century, and there’s no excuse for simply trying to replicate the major label model of the pre-internet world – especially as we ain’t signed to a major label, and that business model seems to be having trouble in the face of new technologies anyway.

Not to mention the fact we have very different aims to the Major Labels, whose #1 priority is to make money. Our priorities as artists are:

1. We’d like as many people as possible to hear (and enjoy) our music
2. We’d like as many people as possible to come to our gigs
3. We’d like to play at some Festivals!
4. We’d like to make some money to help us to be able to do more music

So, which is the best strategy to achieve our aims?
a) keep our music as close to our chest as we possibly can and only allow people to buy it when we determine, or…
b) give away our music, encouraging people to share it if they like it, and try to get our name out there as much as possible

Yes, we decided option B would be best for that, too.

So, from May 1st we will be posting one new track a month on our site, available to download at a high mp3 quality, and will be urging you to send it to friends, to upload it to bittorrent, and to include it in your blogs/myspace/facebook/webpage, whatever.

It will also mean that we will have to write stuff a bit quicker with a regular monthly deadline for new tunage, which will be a good discipline. Then, after a few months we’ll have a nice collection of new songs, which we could then polish and release as an ‘official’ EP or album. In the meantime, people get an opportunity to hear our music – and hopefully like it!

The first track to be posted on 1st May will be a rather tasty remix of 28 Days we’re working on, and we can’t wait to share it with you!

In addition, there will be a parallel strand where we will use a music PR company to push our stuff to radio and press. That way we’ll have a kind of pincer movement to promote our music, one to get our stuff to Real People (you lot!), and one to get it to radio and press, which is still locked down by the industry – it’s virtually impossible to get on the radio without using a plugger, etc, and if we want to get on the radio (we do!), then perhaps you do still have to play that part of the game.

Anyway I shall be posting reports of how successful this duel experiment turns out to be. It should be interesting.