When the heck did you find the time to do all this music?
A few folks have asked me this question over the past few months, primarily, because at the end of 2005 I released 3 CDs, and then I've released 3 more this year. First of all, most of this music already existed. I just hadn't polished it up, and was unsure of exactly the distribution method I wanted.
I figured I would do a quick post and give you a bit of history on this.
A longtime ago....in a virtual studio far, far away (Roughly 1999, 2000)
I had plenty "Melodies" in my head, and some down on paper and recorded, but I didn't have a way of really getting my music out there to be heard. (See my History of Musical Influences.... postings)
Back in the day, there was this place called mp3.com. (It still exists, but is totally not what it once was). The OLD mp3.com, allowed any artist to upload their music, in mp3 format, and call it an album. Users could come to the site, and have and order a "Burned" CD of a single artists music, or a custom cd with music from multiple artists. If you were not an audiophile, and didn't really care about total quality, this was great. The OLD mp3.com, allowed artists to get paid by streams to their music, downloads, and CD purchases.
This was really cool for me, and allowed me to get some stuff heard and get comments on my music early on. (And back then, it was pretty terrible :))
Unfortunately, many people learned how to game the system, so they would upload one stupid track, and then create spiders and such that would cause their earnings to roar sky high. Obviously, this wasn't very profitable for mp3.com, so they stopped doing it :) And eventually sold it off. (I won't go any further with this, as I'm sure most of you knew about them, and there was plenty of coverage of it...)
Once MP3.com was dead, I reconsidered many different ways of getting my music out there. There are literally tons of web sites that allow artists to do pretty much the same thing, and all of them have their pros and cons. I had come across CDBaby at the time, but personally didn't like the way their web site looked. I then created indieopolis.net initially to develop a platform that allowed artists to do pretty much the same thing as MP3.COM, but only with "Pay for download" and CD production. I realized shortly after, that I did "Not" want to get into the business of running a full scale indie music site, as there were tons of these out there, and rather I wanted to concentrate on my music rather than running an indie site. I decided to just use the name indieopolis as a name for my music and a few others who were interested, as far as distribution, that was somebody else problem.
In the mean time, there were a couple of other sites that I tried, and hated. I won't go into a diatribe of why, they just didn't fit with what I wanted.
Then one day CDBaby started allowing folks to sign up for their digital distribution deal that enabled you to have any CD you sold through them, to be channeled to tons of digital download sites such as iTunes, MSN Music, Rhapsody, Napster, etc....for a small fee of course :). Since this was exactly what I wanted, and really didn't want to get into the business of physical CD's, this was perfect. Of course, this still requires a physical product to be sent to them, that is then used as masters to send to the individual digital distribution companies. I figured if I started selling lots of physical product, there are places I can use to help out with getting them made.
Roughly mid 2005, I decided to give CDBaby a try, and started re-mastering all my material I had that was ready to go.
I had about 3 full CD's worth of material ready to go, and 2 or 3 more that were still being polished up, thus a bunch of music seemed to be churning out pretty quickly :), but mind you, this was music that's been sitting around for nearly 8 or so years, just trying to find the perfect distribution avenue :).
In 2005, I released the following 4 CDs:
Sidetracks - Volume 2_DARN_LOUD
Sidetracks - Volume 3 - The Heikkenen Exclusive
In 2006, I spent some time polishing up more music and released:
Sidetracks - Volume 4 - Eye of the Innocent
Mark Akin and I finally stopped talking about it, and decided to start colaborating, and in the process decided to work together to get his CD released:
Mark is a Multi-Platinum Soundtrack recording artist for the insanely popular anime series Dragonball Z, with syndication on Cartoon Network. He’s also shared musical credits with Dream Theater, Bootsy Collins, Buckethead, Sum41; and Saliva to name a few. He has had music on MTV’s Real World with Pop-Tronic band ‘TripRocket’.
His style is diverse, ranging from Hard Rock to Electronic Soundtrack Vibes, to all out Metal Mayhem. Mark also teaches at Murphy’s Music in Irving, Texas.
I was inspired and put together
The Maestoso Interstellar Suite
So, in answer to the original question....I didn't just come up with all this stuff in the past year or so :). I still have about 2 more full CD's worth a material that needs polishing up, and once I have the time (Probably AFTER we release Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007), I might have some more personal time to get back to work on them.
- Keith