How to release a record independently of a label

At Assault, we’re all about doing it yourself, and we recently got into contact with a band on Twitter called Trippy Wicked. Needless to say we liked them, and their new album and were delighted to find that they’d posted an in-depth how to on releasing an album on your own, independent of any record label. We’ve asked their permission to repost their blog as we feel it’ll probably help a few of you looking to for help on releasing and promoting your own indie record.

Topics covered include:

• Why release your own music?
• What goes into releasing an album?
• Pressing CDs
• PQ sheets and CD Masters
• Cover Songs
• Artwork
• Digital Distribution
• Spotify
• UPC/EAN/Barcode
• ISRCs
• Physical Distribution
• Release Date
• Websites and Web Presence

On 30th October 2009 we will release our debut full length album Movin On. We recorded in June this year, there’s just under a month to go before the release date and there is still a hell of a lot to do. I’m writing this still in the thick of it to get a real sense of what’s going on. So why are we releasing it ourselves and what actually goes into releasing an album?

Why release your own music?

Because you can. It’s 2009, we are living in the future, worldwide digital distribution is available for pennies, worldwide physical distribution is available at your local Post Office, you can do your own marketing, YouTube exists, MySpace/Facebook exists, Twitter exists blah blah blah and so on. The mid 80′s are thankfully nothing but a distant memory.

The possibility of releasing our own music had always been at the back of my mind and I had tested the water with a few labels to be met mostly with silence. I could have contacted a lot more labels, spent a few months hassling them for a response and then maybe getting a release early next year if we were lucky but we decided to go it alone and get it done ourselves. I probably wouldn’t rule out working with a label in the future but doing it ourselves is the best way for us right now.

What goes into releasing an album?

As much or as little as you want. There’s nothing to stop you making an album, burning the CDs, designing/printing/cutting/folding/inserting the covers and inlays yourself. I did this for our first 2 demos and selling something you made entirely from scratch like this feels damn good.

Movin On, however, is a full album and a lot of love and effort went into writing and making it so there was no question about making this a proper release. A lot goes into preparing for a proper release even for an underground band. More than you may realise. I’ve learnt a lot about barcodes, ISRCs, CD Replication/Duplication, preparing artwork for print, why pictures on screen look different when they’re printed, how to include cover songs, digital distribution, red book standard, PQ sheets etc.

Pressing CDs

I went with Testa-Rossa in the UK based on a couple of recommendations from friends and so far so good. They’ve been quick to respond to my questions and quick to email any forms I need to sign. As a general rule if you want fewer than 500 copies you’re going for duplication and anything over this you’re going for replication. Duplication involves CD-Rs and a process similar to burning your own except with much larger and faster machines. Replication involves the creation of a glass master and metal stamper to ‘press’ your CDs. There are lots of pressing plants and it’s worth checking out their websites to see what information they offer about things like artwork as the amount of details varies from place to place. There is debate in the underground DIY community on the merits of using replication of duplication but for me replication is the more professional route.

Before this gets under way though you need to approve the artwork and we had ours sent to us as PDFs. Printed proofs can be ordered at cost (both time and money) for the super careful. You also need to sign an IRP (Intellectual Property Rights) and Sound Recording Copyright form. This is basically where you state that yes this is your own music, you own the sound recording copyright/publishing rights and if not you have to specify who does.

PQ sheets and CD Masters

The format for writing CDs is Red Book. Red Book specifies various standards such as the physical parameters of the CD, max playing time, data storage, ISRCs (more on these below) etc. A PQ sheet lists all the track start and end times, ISRCs for the songs and track names. PQ sheets are used as a check-list when the glass master is created. The chances are you wont be doing this part yourself though and it will be handled by whoever created your master CD. For us, the PQ sheet was created by Testa-Rossa and I had to check the tracks times, names and ISRCs and sign it off as ok before they started pressing the CDs.

Cover Songs

We recorded a cover song and right up until the last minute we were going to include it on the album. I had sought the advice of friends that were involved with or ran record labels and the advice was, don’t worry about copyright, you’re a very small band and if the publisher picks up on it they’ll simply come and ask you for the royalties you owe them. This didn’t quite sit right with me as I knew full well we had a cover song and that really I should do something about it if we were to use it. During the process of sorting digital distribution and getting the CDs pressed I would have had to have lied several times either stating the copyright/publishing right was ours or that we had gone through the necessary steps for using someone else’s material.

The actual steps for using copyrighted material are actually relatively simple and I chose not to do them out of sheer laziness. Running a band, releasing an album and working a full time job is time consuming to say the least. The basic process is to identify who owns the publishing rights, write them a letter stating what you’re going to use and then pay them monthly royalties according to your sales. CDBaby give a really good description of this process in their artist FAQ. We may well include the cover on our next album though because it’s an awesome song that needs to get an airing at some point.

Artwork

You have to have some good artwork for your release even if it’s a digital only release and by good I mean appropriate to your sound and style. If you can’t do it yourself and you don’t know anyone that can help find someone on deviant ART or Flickr who’s work you like, contact them and see if they want to help out. The world is full of the most incredible artists and I’m sure many of these will jump at the chance to create something for your music. Our album cover was taken care of by a friend based on some rough ideas we described to him, a lot of which were taken from the experiences we had whilst recording.

I handled the rest of the CD inlay myself. Most, if not all, CD pressing plants will supply templates for you to use and insist that you do so according to their strict guidelines. Preparing artwork for print is different from preparing artwork for your computer and you need to be aware that the colours of your artwork on screen will vary when printed so make sure you print out tests as you go. Basically your screen is displaying colour by mixing red, green and blue and on paper colours are created by mixing cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black) so the two systems are interpreting the same colour information in different ways. My experience has been that the same colours appear more vibrant and full on screen than in print. You’ve also gotta know that black in print is not just black; it’s a mix of the four colours. When printing black in CYMK all four colours are laid down at about 75% and the art department of the pressing plant will tell you exactly what they require. There are a million and one descriptions of the difference between RGB and CYMK so go feed your head.
Any template you use will most likely specify a certain amount of bleed as well. This is where the artwork stretches beyond the physical edge (e.g. 3mm) of the format you’re designing for to allow for any minor inacuracies of the cutting machine. If someone else is doing your artwork make sure they are aware of this and don’t design an image that would suffer from losing a few millimetres here and there.

Digital Distribution

Setting up digital distribution was tough and stressful because deadlines were looming. I had been planning on using CDBaby for some time but changes to the company earlier this year have let down a lot of independent artists and labels in a big way. This was a major problem for me as one of the main aims was to get the album into Spotify. There are currently very few options for independent artists to do this and CDBaby has been the main contender for a while. I very nearly went with them but their tarnished reputation and bad customer service with my initial contact led me straight to RecordUnion. Immediate responses in the affirmative to the questions I had made it a no brainer. I took the risk and went with the lesser know service. So far so good.

Spotify

Dear America, I’m sorry you don’t have Spotify yet and I really hope it gets sorted soon. It absolutely rules and is big news over here in Europe. You have to use it to ‘get’ it but it’s basically an enormous library of music with a slick interface and works mind-bogglingly fast. I have a premium account so I can listen without adverts and use it on my phone. Listening to Pantera, Cowboys From Hell as I type this in case you’re wondering. Anyway at the time of writing there are 3 services you can use for digital distribution that will push your music to Spotify: CDBaby, RecordUnion and DittoMusic. After I discounted CDBaby I had a quick look at DittoMusic but the budget website and fact I had to pay before uploading any music or doing anything really put me off. I’ve just checked their website now and it’s looking a lot better so they may have upped their game recently. If Spotify is not your concern there are many other distributors to choose from. I used TuneCore for our EP Lowering the Tone and they were and still are excellent to work with. Research a few and work out which is best for you.

UPC/EAN/Barcode

In order to get your music into the digital stores you will need one of these and the digital distributor will be able to provide you with one. If they don’t then go somewhere else. I paid $10 for ours; cheap as chips. UPC stands for Universal Product Code, EAN stands for European Article Number and is basically a UPC with a extra digit in front (add a 0 to the front of your UPN and you have an EAN describing an America product). A barcode is a graphic representation of this that can be read by machines and uber-geeks with 20-20 vision. If you REALLY want to learn more about this have a look at the info on Wikipedia.

Once you’ve decided on your distributor, upload your music, artwork and complete any required details, buy a barcode, set your pricing plan if this is available, set a release date (generally allowing for the 6 – 8 weeks maximum time get your stuff live in the digital domain) and press the big red button. RecordUnion didn’t offer any pricing plans so everything will just be set at each digital store’s defaults. Others like CDBaby and TuneCore will allow you to choose different price bands for the digital stores that offer them.

ISRCs

International Standard Recording Code. An ISRC is a code that uniquely identifies a recorded song (or music video recording). RecordUnion provided me with ours once I’d uploaded the songs. You need to send these along with your audio master CD to the CD presser and they will encode each track with its corresponding ISRC. When you get your CD back and put it in your computer iTunes (or whatever) will look up the code and know what each track is and where it’s from.

Physical Distribution

I’m currently planning on selling the album using Big Cartel though I’m keen to see what the ReverbNation/Audiolife tools are like once they are public. I haven’t set this up yet though and the CD mailers I’m going to use literally turned up in the post today. I went for cardboard pizza box style instead of jiffy bags. Don’t just get the cheapest jiffy bag you can find because posting CDs is really not that expensive and if you take pride in your work package it so it won’t get damaged. I’ve also been contacted by a couple of online web shops that want to stock it and I’ve identified some others that I’m going to speak to. As far as I can tell the way this works is that you send them a bunch of CDs and when they sell some they let you know how many and you invoice them.

Find the online stores that stock your kind of music and make contact with them. I haven’t bothered with trying to get the CD into any independent shops yet as I’ve heard this can be time consuming and quite difficult. I’ll look into it for the next release though. I previously used PayPal buttons to sell Lowering the Tone through our website and MySpace but they were awkward to set up so I’m trying a different method this time.

Release Date

We waited until certain parts of the process were out of the way (getting the final master, artwork + CD layout complete) before deciding on a release date. There are so many factors involved and unforeseen changes to any of them can ruin a short deadline. Make sure you do set yourself a deadline though and take note of Parkinson’s Law; work will expand to fill the time given to it. If you give yourself a year it will take a year, if you give yourself four months it will take four months. Take into account that pressing CDs and pushing music to digital distributors takes time. The pressing plant we used gave a turnaround time of 10 to 15 working days. That’s up to 3 weeks and this doesn’t include approving artwork + any amendments, signing IPR forms, copyright disclaimers etc. Digital distributors will want you to upload your music up to 8 weeks in advance (the maximum I’ve seen, some are less) of your release date to allow the digital stores enough time to get your music listed. There’s no reason why you can’t have different physical and digital release dates though.

Websites and Web Presence

There’s a lot of debate and advice about what you should or shouldn’t do in terms of all the available places you can locate yourself on the internet. They all need working at and you need to understand how each one works. First up get yourself a website where you can pull all your online stuff together. I rebuilt ours over the last couple of weeks and it went live last week. If you don’t know how to build websites there are various services to do this for you. I have no experience with any so do some research but to start with there is Bandzoogle, Host Baby and I think ReverbNation offer a service in partnership with Bandzoogle. I also wanted a blog as well. I had used WordPress previously but found it to be far more complicated for what I needed and was a hassle because it’s constantly being updated. You need to install the updates yourself and it’s more than just a click of a button. I went with Blogger because I use it for my photo blog and is very simple and user friendly. If you want even more simple than this I’d suggest Tumblr.

Unfortunately I would suggest MySpace is still a must as most people expect you to have one and lots of promoters and webzines exist only on MySpace. It’s a good place for someone to have a quick listen to your music but make sure it’s not the only place. I gave up using iLike because its user interface was a pain to use and I don’t think anyone ever found us there. Twitter and Facebook are the some of the most popular at the moment and both are good when used well.

I’m using SoundCloud to host our music for streaming and when the album is released I’ll be making the whole thing available through them. They provide a very great customisable widget for you to use and their website is very slick and very user friendly. You can host your music with most of the usual suspects but for now I’m going with these guys for embedding our music on various websites.

Until recently I was using ReverbNation for our mailing list but I switched to FanBridge because I could customise the HTML of the signup form and their pricing plan is better for me. I’ve also been listing gigs and hosting music with them for a long time but I’m not sure how beneficial this is. They do provide lots of widgets for gigs, music, videos, mailing list signup and so on but they’re very heavily ReverbNation branded and not customisable enough for me to want to use them everywhere.

The one rule for ALL web presences is DO NOT SPAM. EVER. MySpace is an absolute shithole for this and if you spam me on MySpace we can never be friends, online or offline. Don’t send messages saying “I see you like so and so band so you should check us out and let us know what you think”. What I think is that you sound desperate and no I’m not interested in checking you out. The problem with spamming is that places like MySpace and Facebook make it so easy to do. Think about how many event/band/group/page invites you get that mean absolutely nothing to you and then make a conscious decision to not contribute to this.

This is pretty much where we are at with the release right now.

So what’s left?

The CDs are being pressed and the digital content is currently being pushed out to the digital retailers and streaming services all ready for 30/10/2009. T shirts are still to be designed and printed as well as stickers and badges, press packs have to be made up and I need to contact some bloggers and publications for reviews and interviews. There are also internet radio stations and podcasters to investigate (not looked at this at all yet). Gigs are being lined up for the end of this year and the beginning of 2010. Once the CDs are here I’ll be packing up a bunch ready to send out in time for release date and making up press packs for those that want a hard copy. I’m also going to look into some more web shops.

Money, time and effort are the three major factors to consider. A lot of the time you’re balancing the money you’re able to spend for services with the favours from friends you’re getting. You can’t hassle friends to hurry up if they’re doing an awesome job for you and doing it for free so you have to work to their timescales. There was a month or so when there was nothing I could do except for wait for a couple of parts to be complete and this was an odd time for me. I prefer to be getting my hands dirty rather than waiting round but I know when it’s time to step back and let the guy with the skills take over.

Everything else is just plain hard work especially if you’re gonna do most of it yourself. I’ve spent the last couple of years learning about and catching up on where the business and industry side of music has come from and where it’s going by putting in a lot of time reading various blogs and books. The last month has been the busiest this year and I’ve been working an hour at home before my day job, an hour at lunch and every spare hour I can grab in the evening and weekends.

If you need any inspiration for hard work and going DIY with any aspect of your music read Henry Rollins’ ‘Get in the Van’ Right now. You could also try reading ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’ and watching ‘DIY or Die’.

If you’re thinking about releasing your own music stop thinking and start doing because you have complete control and it’s so rewarding. Just under four months ago we drove away from Dorset knowing we had the makings of a stonker of an album in our hands. In just under four weeks we’ll be releasing it. Roll on the 30th.

Check out Trippy Wicked’s website to get some of their music and be sure to checkout their blog. They’ve got some great info on there.

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About the Author

Tim is the co-owner of Assault, and tends to think he can party twice as hard as anyone. Follow him on twitter @assault
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