For the past mumble months I’ve been working on a musical project. It’s sort of a rock arrangement of some classical music. I’ve intended to release it as a CD sometime in 2011ish.
But do people do CDs anymore? It seems that the popular format these days is discrete audio files, MP3 or otherwise. If it can’t be downloaded to an iPod, it won’t get listened to.
Here’s the problem: This music was never intended to be a loose collection of of discrete songs. It’s a suite, meant to be listened to from beginning to end, every song in a particular order. If I release it as individual files, it won’t get listened to properly. If I record it all as one giant MP3 file, it’s going to be a huge file. (It’s maybe 30-40 minutes long.)
Just release it as a long mp3 AND individual tracks. You will have to accept some people won’t want the whole file, so just make it a long wave file. Then convert that file into FLAC, for lossless, mp3, mp4.
There are a lot of free programs to convert formats. Cue Tools will easily split a long file with a cue sheet.
So just make a long wave file with a cue sheet.
Then convert the wave to flac, mp3 and mp4 (m4a for ipod)
You can upload it to rapidshare if you don’t have webspace and then people can download it as one track or individual tracks.
If I wasn’t sure of a band, I might not waste time with the long file, but on the other hand if I liked one of the tracks I downloaded I would definately download the rest.
That sound like great advice. I still might make a CD version and sell it through CD Baby.
One thing about splitting it up into files, though – Some of the songs are incredibly short (30 seconds, maybe?), while some are fairly long and flow directly into another long song. So song #12 might be 30 seconds long, while songs #14 and 15 together might be a good 8-9 minutes. This could come out to be really uneven.
one that is tracked for singles with space between tunes where the music has an end and one that has no space between where the music flows from one to the other. You still have track numbers just no pauses.
It cost relatively the same for one cd as it does 2, as long as the artwork is the same.
People have no problem with long MP3 files - as long as they think of it as a podcast. You might also consider setting up a blogtalkradio.com account and do a show about it, playing the piece of music in its entirety. The advantage of that is it’s worse quality than an MP3, and nobody expects “internet talk radio” to sound good. Before and after the piece’s “premiere”, you can talk to callers about your music.
If you perform concerts, you’ll want CDs. You can sell them at the performance. Can’t really do that with MP3, and you want people to buy them there instead of having to go home and deciding not to buy during the drive.
My brother is in the habit of buying the CD even if he didn’t particularly like the performance, just on the basis that CD sales is how many touring musicians pay for the gas to get from town to town.