The Living Rockumentary

So, I've been spending some time over at Amazon.com where I am setting up our new album to be sold. In doing so, I have been checking out other local bands that I know and have found that for a lot of them, there are a whole bunch of used cds available for purchase from various sellers. Take the Aloha Steamtrain for instance, there are some people there selling our last album for as cheap as $1.67.

Do you know who these people are? I do. They are college radio music directors and djs, album reviewers, and booking agents that we naively sent our albums to. They then took those albums and sold them.

For the Steamtrain there is only a handful but for some of my friends' bands who had larger promotion pushes there are as many as 30 or 40 new/used disc available. Some of them are not even opened or unwrapped. That's nice, huh? A band spends all their money to make these records and send them out and the people that receive them don't even open them, they just turn around and sell them.

Sure, it's true, those people don't owe the band anything - they don't morally need to open and listen to the music. Lots of times they probably simply don't have the time. I don't hold it against them. It's just another glimpse, though, into the seeming futility of the traditional approach to promoting and distributing your music.

I'm not going to do any bulk mailings of "The New You". I'll find another way. Soon enough, the reviewers and bookers and radio stations will be coming to us anyway, right? Right?