help with press release [Archive] - Music & Musician Forums

kidcrash

07-01-2008, 07:07 AM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information, contact:
Buster Ross
1666 1/2 Cerro Gordo Rd.
Santa Fe, NM, 87501
505.490.9481
kidcrashband@gmail.com

THE KIDCRASH AND DENOVALI RECORDS LAUNCH FREE DOWNLOAD PAGE OF THE BAND'S ENTIRE DISCOGRAPHY.

JULY 1, 2008 (SANTA FE, NM) – On June 28, 2008 a blog appeared on the Santa Fe/Olympia based band Kidcrash's Myspace profile titled "FREE KIDCRASH MP3 PAGE IS UP" The first line was a link, www.denovali.com/kidcrash, followed by the two simple statements "share the link! **** myspace and itunes."

The link opens a page that reads "You can stream selected KIDCRASH songs or download all KIDCRASH releases below. Everything is for free, but you may donate something, if you like to support future releases of the band."
Below this explanation the band gives a statement, "we ask that you make a $5 donation in support of helping us continue to afford to make new records and tour, but obviously our music is and must always be available to anyone who wants it regardless of an ability or a desire to make a donation; knowing as artists that: in the process of creating we produce works that by definition are the property of society, not the artist."

Kidcrash is not alone in their qualms with the ways records are released to the public and specific music is circulated, but their gesture is in many ways a significant departure from the critical-but-inactive stance. That is, they do not presume to ultimately benefit from material record sales, instead relying on the spirit of diy independence and gift of a supportive community.

Confident that their live performances offer the best representation of their music, Kidcrash have put in a motion a shift in the way they want their listeners to consume music. By allowing it to be downloaded for free, they are relying on donations/door money and merchandise sold at shows to provide their source of sustaining revenue to continue touring, recording, and releasing new material. What they are doing by offering free digital releases is essentially opting to forgo selling their music through third parties, and more importantly rendering any digital copy of any and all work from their discography completely valueless. While they will continue to release material that will be available from various distros and some small independent record stores, their labels will offer cd/vinyl/cassette versions of releases through their own sites and the bands discography page. Ultimately this reduces the cost to the consumer and increases the revenue of the artist, with an emphasis on selling releases at shows to reduce costs created by shipping and unnessecary intermediaries. In turn, this makes the amount of units needed to be sold in order to cover the costs of a release much smaller, making sustainability as independent artists more achievable than ever before.

Interestingly, they even ask that consumers *DON'T* buy one of their records. Unable to get their first official release taken off of the iTunes store and Amazon MP3 service, despite the fact that their former label doesn't have the digital distribution rights, the band has resorted to posting a detailed explanation of why the label thinks they are entitled all of the royalties made over the last four years and into the future. While some artists might argue that iTunes offers a solution to the issues originally created by the explosion of Napster, it's interesting to think about this reality: iTunes isn't stopping copyright infringement issues for artists when they sell music and pay out royalties to parties who don't actually have the legal right to digitally distribute the material. It's an even more serious case of copyright infringement than any peer to peer sharing. The artist doesn't get paid and their friends/fans are paying a ludacris amout that end up going to two parties who have no honest entitlement to revenues from the recordings, all the while the consumer assumes they are doing the right and honest thing and supporting the artist.

More from the Kidcrash Blog:

"Today I read an email from denovali records saying that it seemed like everything for our mp3 page had been set up as we had asked. Today I also noticed that we broke 200,000 plays on our Myspace profile, and while it is incredible to think about how many people are listening to our music, it's unfortunate that the number is surely the result of us not making our music accessible online anywhere besides myspace. Well, it's a new day.

I'd wait to triple check with everyone about the page, but i think we might as well not waste another minute waiting to make our music available to anyone who wants it.

If you want to download any and all of our releases you now can.

Obviously we won't sell as many copies, and obviously most people won't make a donation, but luckily we record music to share it more than to profit from it.

It will be interesting to see if we can raise any money, right now we need to come up with a ton of money for plane tickets for touring southeast asia and australia in early 2009 (hopefully), and anything anyone donates will lighten the load.

Thank you all for being so great to us. I'm sorry that we all don't take the time to each respond to every message, just know that when only one of us writes back that sooner or later we all get around to reading your letters, and if we somehow manage to not reply it doesn't mean we don't appreciate you taking the time to write us (it either means we got distracted, were waiting to let someone else reply, or just plain dropped the ball).
Seriously try to email us individually or as a band instead of myspace messaging us... It's a much better way for us to be able to find your contact info if we ever need it down the road, it's 1000 times easier to organize, and its that much more time that neither of us are forced to spend on myspace.

More from the Discography Page:

"You can mail Kidcrash via kidcrashband(at)gmail.com and leave a comment below if you like."

Below this there is a link to donate that is next to the status of how much money has been raised.
"(Donations up to June 28th, 2008 20:04 CET: 79.18Euro)"

And finally, some other Denovali Records download & streaming pages are linked.

All that is left are images flashing between the front and back of the cover art of 7 Kidcrash releases, and below each of these is a counter indicating the number of downloads so far and links to download or order the album. More than half of the albums are out of print and are not even available for order.

For further information, contact Buster Ross at (505) 490-9481.
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DFelon204409

07-02-2008, 12:59 AM

You get hung up on the part about New Ruins and iTunes a lot. Press people don't want to hear big caveats to your album. They want the essentials. They'll be pumped about hearing that it's up for free and if you detailed the main releases that are featured (I guess mention the early demos, New Ruins (under the breath of course), Jokes, and the current collection of recent split EPs in those units) people will readily know where to look. I know you're probably pussyfooting around mentioning Radiohead, NIN, Girl Talk, or any other artists who have the tip-jar format of collecting money for studio recordings, but maybe the name-dropping would be convenient for contextualizing your new format for releasing studio music and would lead to the press people doing news releases on their sites like "Another Band Chooses an Alternative Way to Distribute Studio Music..." if they're going to be stingy and not completely review or even listen to Jokes or something.

I've been doing PR and marketing stuff all day (I'm at this summer business school program right now) and I read so many of these press releases from getting review solicitations. The ones that suck are either the ones that don't give relevant information for reviewing or news updates and the ones that try to inflate how cool the band is (For example, "Metallica's GENRE-BENDING, EXTREME new album..."). You don't fall trap to that but make sure your press release feels more like a bullet-point list of relevant information turned into prose rather than "the complete picture" of your transition. Otherwise they'll just look at it and think it's too much fluff to read.

Hope that helps. Good luck man.