Doctor J

Regarding CDbaby, you have to register each song and get a UPC/EAN code for your music as part of a digital distribution setup in order to get payments. If you're registered with them already it will probably be cheaper but you still have to pay to upload and get the songs published to their "digital partners". You need the UPC/EAN codes to qualify for PRS payments. I would say it's worth doing but, financially, it might not be worth doing, if you know what I mean.

I shall return the favour and line a very small part of your pockets 😂

Alabama Thunderpussy. No cats, no meteorology, not even from Alabama.

For sure. I installed a tonebrass nut on a bass recently, along with tonestrap tonelocks.

Yeah, I know, but I'm asking about toneacrylic and tonegraphite now 😉

That was exactly the situation we were in and felt pushed into publishing it on the streaming sites. This one, which we gave permission for as the guy is good about publishing links back, was getting almost 1000 plays per day, initially, which was the trigger behind taking ownership of the music in the streaming world. It had gotten to around 14,000 plays before the licencing kicked in, which you can now see in the description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9mCQ9JXYYA Youtube can recognise the music published to it and will automatically apply a licence like that into a previously existing video. A lot of the people sharing music are monetising it themselves. They're getting paid for someone listening to your music. If they're "sharing" loads of band's music every day, however, it can start to add up. If you want to... not control it, you can't, but at least establish your ownership, setting up publishing with the likes of CDbaby is the way to do it. We didn't get paid for the first 14,000 or so plays of this and, granted, it's not like I'll be buying a speedboat, but I think the people who wrote and played the music should get something out of it instead of someone just putting up music they didn't have anything to do with. I am not a Spotify customer, they are the very worst thing to happen original music, but you're in a corner as an original artist. If you don't take ownership of your music, someone else will do it for you, sadly.

This is streaming only. Itunes Music or IMusic or whatever their streaming service is called. They're trying to get out of the music purchase game.

It's everything. The reason I was specific about the kind of music we play is because our three-track EP takes 27 minutes to listen to. That 27 minutes still only counts as three plays, however. I could get precious about our art and all that but basically it takes a long time to play four bars at 55bpm 😁 The whole thing is weighted in favour of having as many short tracks as possible above 30 seconds. Vulfpeck nailed it with Sleepify.

Here are some real world numbers just to show the bare bones of the actual situation. I don't know why people are so protective of this information, everybody should see how things really are. This is for some original music I wrote and released in 2019 and used CDbaby to publish to the streaming services which cost around $90 to do, if I recall correctly. This is all streaming activity since it was released right up to today. I hope to recoup by 2030. Ok, 2040 😂 Granted, the style of music we play - slow stoner/doom type stuff where our shortest song is 7 minutes long - is exactly the opposite of how to play the streaming game. Ideally, songs should be as little over 30 seconds as possible to register a play, hence why so many albums now feature short songs, short skits and other filler. We're in it for the doom, not the money, though. I have had to go to 4 decimal places to make sure everything gets covered. Pay is counted in US$. To clarify, we're getting 1.05 cents per stream on SoundExchange, for example, and 1/3 of 1 cent on Spotify. Why would you bother, I hear you ask? Well, something is better than nothing, I suppose, but only just. People are going to post your music to youtube and the likes, "share" it on your behalf, whether you like it or not, so you might as well get paid (yes, I know) for it rather than them. That was my logic, anyway, based on it being uploaded to Youtube by several different people unassociated with us. I felt forced into it rather than waste my time finding it and having it pulled down (we did that too, a few times). By contrast, we have around 100 digital sales on Bandcamp, priced at €3.00 and get roughly €2.33 for each sale there. If I ever come across as a Bandcamp fanboy, it's because they are, without question, the only decent digital music provider who aren't ripping artists off. Bandcamp also give you free streaming and downloads for every purchase of music you make. If anyone wants to check out the music behind the numbers, http://witheredfist.bandcamp.com is my shameless plug 😉 If you actually want to support an artist, Bandcamp or direct from the artist is the only way to do it, in my opinion. I'd be interested to hear what people think of those numbers, is anyone surprised by them?

Do acrylic or carbon graphite basses show more tonal consistency across multiple instruments? Anyone got two fully carbon Statii out there? 🙂

Instruments made of the same woods, sorry, tonewoods, sounding very different to each other? What trickery is afoot? We all know that if you take 10 of the most basic and mundane bass out there, the Precision, with ash bodies, maple necks and fretboards, they will not all sound the same. Wood is organic. No two pieces of the same species are the same. To apply blanket characteristics to something which, by its very nature, is inconsistent in cellular structure - before you get into age, how it is dried, how it is cut, etc, etc, etc, is just prone to error. Still no-one can present a list of wood species which are structurally suitable but tonally unsuitable for solid body electric instruments?

It also makes it spoonwood, chairwood, batwood, gatewood and any other application you may use it for?

Save those fingers and just call it wood?

What woods do they reject, out of curisity? What woods constitute non-tone woods? I'm guessing ones not rigid enough to support the stress of strings under tension but if anyone knows of a wood which is hard enough, stable enough but doesn't have tone, I'd love to know. The only one which readily springs to mind is Fender being attracted to pine but finding it too soft and easy to damage, even though the instruments sounded fine and it was cheap and plentiful, their primary criteria for electric solidbody wood back in the 50's. Harder finishes have allowed pine to cross the treshold into Tonewood University, though. Even some Ekos were made of pine 40 years ago. No balsa basses I'm aware of. What wood would be good if only it sounded like it should?

That kind of thing reminds me of the Metal Sludge interview with Jason Ward, bassist from Flotsam & Jetsam who were on MCA for a few albums, as well as a few independent label releases. They sold a decent amount of albums in their day and toured regularly. This bit was an eye opener to me, twenty years ago. http://metalsludge.tv/classic/?p=28283 Jim Sheppard and Warrell Dane worked as chefs even when Nevermore were doing well. The myth of the full-time professional in original music was, and still is, greatly exaggerated.

Those 60's P basses were built with plentiful and/or cheap wood, not carefully selected wood. Fender were and are in the mass-production game. Besides, all the old Fenders seem to be good ones these days, even the ones which barely had a note played on them. How has their molecular structure changed?

Rosewood fretboard, though. It should have a nice, warm tone.

😂

Congratulations! 👏🏻

Sorry to annoy you, I was just trying to understand why you have that opinion in a spirit of open discussion. I'll go back in my box and just post pictures.

So the name matters more than the bass? Sorry, I just don't understand where the negativity is coming from. Surely the quality of the instrument is all that matters?

Really? I have never heard of this. What stuff?

Vote or perish!

The first Metros weren't a dilution of the brand?

Have basses no-one here appears to have actually played yet ever been so unpopular? I don't understand the ire towards this project. Sadowsky knows his stuff. Warwick know their stuff. Despite the shaky embryonic stage we appear to have passed, I can't understand why anyone would think these are going to be anything less than superb.