I was listening to Alanis Morissette’s newer album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and it got me wonderin’–who the hell came up with the idea to release the worst track on the album, Unsent? And then the only moderately better So Pure? The album had a great many much, much better songs on it than those two painful pieces.
Front Row, Baba, Would Not Come, I Was Hoping… all would have been IMHO far better releases. They are more lyrically and musically interesting than the boring self-reflective relationship babbling of Unsent and the cheesy attempt at pop-dance music in So Pure.
Was this Alanis’ idea? Or her studio? Or do they agree together? Why why and why?
:::looking around to see what aha has to say about this:::
Alanis’ is signed to a major label. I’m guessing she signed away her rights to choose her singles a long time ago. She probably signed a horrible deal before she was famous and is now waiting that contract out. Of course, I’m not familiar with her ‘work’: perhaps she genuinely likes the songs she released. But I’m more inclined to think that even if she does have some say in the matter, her record company is trump.
Oh and in response to the actual subject of this thread: it depends who you are.
If you’re say, the Backstreet Boys, well, you’re record company is going to take care of all that. Now if you’re an established musician like maybe Neil Young, even if you’re on a major label, you probably can choose what stuff you want released.
And, as in my case, if you’re on an independant label or you self-release your music, it’s all up to you. Since my band owns all the rights to all of our material, we can release whatever we want in whatever format whenever we want. Case in point: we recorded 15 songs at our last session. 2 of them we didn’t like and threw away before mastering, and we left one extra one as a bonus track. Eventually we decided we’d rather release 9 of the 13 mastered songs in a less expensive tape format, raise some money, then release the other 4 on an EP CD. Plus we can dump them to MP3 if we like and distribute them freely (look up Piston Hurricane to find a few).
CD blanks (at retail even!) are so cheap now @ .55 to .70 each and CD players are even more prevalent than tape (or so it seems) is the cost differential that great between the two formats?
Rush for example certainly has had the power to control what’s released as a single for (god help me) decades. But they don’t seem to care. I caught Geddy Lee in an interview once saying that they recorded the songs and decided in what order they went on the CD and that’s it.
Horribly misquoting Geddy here: “After that it’s up to the guys at the label. It just doesn’t matter to us.”
Depends on whether you wanna lay down the jack to by a CD burner of some sort if you already have the ubiquitous 2X tape deck. Plus, getting CDs burned preofessionally for “demo quantities” (say, <500) is by no means economical. Might as well by a whole crapload of 20 min cassettes and do your J cards at kinkos.
For some reason, in my experience at least, cassettes seem to have more street cred than CDR for a band that’s just starting out, anyway.