Why am i doing this? I must be mad!
I guess I’m posting this as a sort of therapy. There’s a lot buzzing around in my mind at the moment and getting rootscd.com off the ground has been a long, hard but enjoyable slog. So yeah, why am i doing this? Well….it dawned on me about a year ago that pretty much all of my friends are musicians! (sad but true) and on top that, i am one too! Now, that’s OK…nothing wrong with musicians but when we’d meet up we’d often talk about how our own little careers were going i.e. how many gigs we had booked, if we were recording, where we’d been touring lately, general gossip and of course how our CD’s were selling.
The usual answers were “we sell a few at gigs” and “we sell a few at gigs” or even “we sell a few at gigs” (can you see a pattern emerging here?). Being a musician and the geek who “does” the website for my band, I’d often get asked “how did you set it up to sell CD’s on your website?”, more often than not, i’d explain what to do and watch the other guys eyes glazing over. Or, on few occasions I’ve explained the process step by painstaking step over the phone to be told, “yep, I’ve got all that”, but….two weeks later….two months later….they still haven’t *#”$*>! got ANYTHING up and running on their site to sell CD’s.
I want to make it very clear at this stage that 1. I’m no expert….primarily i’m a musician, not a computer programmer, and 2. I’m not insinuating that musicians are incapable of selling CD’s on their own websites! But, it seemed clear to me that many could benefit from from a musician friendly site that would do it all for them. That’s why I started rootscd.com.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, there are already sites doing this, CD Baby for example (which i think is fantastic BTW), but there’s three main differences with rootscd.com. The first and most obvious is that we specialise in quality “roots” artists and bands. We don’t do, rock, punk, hip hop, rap, electronic, classical and the rest, we concentrate our efforts towards what we love and understand the most…Blues, Rockabilly, Jazz, Folk, World etc…
Secondly, rootscd.com is aimed at gigging, touring artists…bands out there doing it at the coal face, the very bands that probably haven’t got the time or interest to sit down and set up payment facilities on their websites and mail out orders to customers etc…there’s enough to do in just getting your gigs together and promoting them. The other sites that sell CD’s for everyone and anyone, no matter what your style or ability are fine but I made the decision to concentrate my efforts on the many high quality roots artists that perhaps don’t have record company backing (that’s a subject for another blog soon!…can you believe the tripe that record companies chuck money at!?). As you may know by now, we don’t offer any product that isn’t of a professional standard…no home copied CD-R’s, photocopied inlays etc….that might be cheap and convenient for some artists, but even if the musical content is of a high standard, I don’t think the majority of your casual customers want to pay good money for it…i wouldn’t (maybe I’m wrong?).
Lastly, we’re UK based and i think a little more convenient for many European artists than the U.S. based sites. I know from experience that posting my bands CD’s to the U.S. isn’t exactly cheap, then, when you take into consideration the weak dollar against the Pound and Euro, it’s not that great financially for European artists to sell their CD’s in U.S. Dollars. Example: $10.00=£5.00 (roughly)….take out the websites cut and your postage costs and you’re not making much money if any from those sales. Selling your CD in Pounds makes sense if you’re an American artist too. If we sell your CD for £10.00-£12.00 that’s $20-$25!, so even after deductions you’re probably making a little more money, and your European customers are getting a faster service, without the risk of incurring customs charges too!
The bottom line is, i want roots music to be more successful for it’s up and coming artists and everyone involved. We all work so damn hard to keep roots music alive and kicking, we can’t help it that we love and play this music, once you’re bitten, there’s is no other way. Our music often gets overlooked or just plain ignored when it comes to record company investment, press exposure and radio airplay. If it wasn’t for all the independent artists, record companies, D.J.’s, magazines, clubs and festivals that operate at a very small level (compared to mainstream artists, record companies etc.), we’d be sunk.
Now’s the time for us all to think small!…do what we do to the best of our ability at a micro level, but join together to make bigger movements. What we do isn’t about competition or chasing charts, it’s about quality, integrity, spreading the word, keeping traditional music forms alive and pushing them forward, evolving and developing them for a new audience.
We can all do this by creating the music, buying the CD’s, attending the festivals, subscribing to the magazines and many, many other ways. Every little bit helps.
If rootscd.com is successful then great! and i want the artists involved to gain along the way too. Let’s hope that we can both work happily together to spread the word about our great music and that we’ll both be around for many, many years to come.
So, back to question!…Why am i doing this?…am I mad?…oh yes! Mad about the music!
To the future!
Martin
Rootscd.com