Thursday, 29 April 2004

Country Road 2:51:37 PM    comment []; Aged Paper 2:51:21 PM    comment []; Mark's idea.... Picking up on Mark's suggestion we will create a couple of PDF files, once the album cover design is set. One will feature the new album "La Semana" and the other one will be about our live show. If somebody would download the PDF, print it, and hang it up somewhere, we would be very appreciative! We might have the PDFs ready in two or three weeks. You know, I find this way of promoting an album or live performance a lot more exciting and real than all of the usual music industry bullshit!! 2:47:38 PM    comment []; Radio cont..... I can almost guess which station in LA said that. - Nancy • 4/29/04; 9:45:08 AM The response I wrote about did not come from any radio station....it came from an independent radio promoter, somebody who makes a living calling up radio stations and plugging artists who pay him/her to promote them. Here is how it works in detail: a record company hires a radio promoter to take their music to the radio stations. The radio promoter, who prides him/herself in knowing all of the Program Directors and Music Directors of all the radio stations within a certain genre, receives advance copies of an artist's latest CD. Those CDs are sent out to all of the radio stations and then the promoter calls up the PDs and MDs and tries to get the music added to their playlist. Sometimes, the radio stations ask for a different mix or a shorter edit. In this particular case the radio promoter thought that our chance of getting Jon's music added to the playlists was so slim that s/he did not want to take our money to even try! PS: Radio was soooooo different 14 years ago. Somebody sent a copy of "Marita: Shadows and Storms", the independently produced predecessor to NF, to the radio station known as The Wave in L.A., when John Sebastian was still PD or station manager there, and he added half of the songs to his playlist without even knowing who this Ottmar Liebert fellow was....and without ever getting a call from a radio promoter... 2:36:26 PM    comment []; Singles vs Albums What are your thoughts about selling singles vs. selling albums? I guess some artists take the view that albums should be sold as a unit because all the tracks together really amount to one creation. A lot has been written and said about that. I can't help but feel that a lot of producers (and artists and record companies...) hate selling singles, because often a pop album only contains 3-4 great songs with the rest being filler....I am not going to name names...we all have some of those albums.... I believe that a song has to be able to stand on its own, but is part of a whole cycle. Think of a song as a single poem in a book of poems. Sometimes I read a lot of Neruda poems (one of the three Pablos that I dedicated "Song 4 Pablo" to - on "The Santa Fe Sessions") in one sitting, and sometimes I read only one...... Same with music, don't you think? Listening to my album "The Hours between Night + Day" as a whole is a very different experience to just picking one song, but I believe they would both hold up. I mean, I listen to music that way, sometimes I pick one song or create a mixed playlist and sometimes I am in the mood to pay attention to the whole album the way the artist created it... I believe both are valid. This comes to mind: Richard Wagner's "Ring" (no relation to our tabla-ist Ron Wagner) is about 16 hours long...I think it's OK to listen to an excerpt, don't you? 2:12:08 PM    comment [];

© Copyright 2004 Ottmar Liebert. Last update: 01.05.04; 21:16:04.