Top 10 Mistakes an Electronic Music Composer Can Make

Hi, I've been meaning to write this for quite some time but could never really find a suitable place to post it at.
I've been releasing music on CD, CDr, Vinyl and Digital formats for the past 17 years - if you count Tracker Modules (Scream Tracker 3, Impulse Tracker 2, Schism Tracker, Buzz Tracker holla!), this would be 20 years. 

I've visited and played gigs in 18 countries over the years. 

I've also made a ton of mistakes over the years. Here's a pretty subjective list of ones I would take back if I could.

01. Trust and Obey Labels That Don't Know What They Are Talking About

Eons ago, I got contacted by a label that wanted to release my music. Great! You're sorted! It's all champagne and caviar from now on. Surely you said yes, right? Why yes, I totally did. They wanted to push out some tracks on a compilation 12", and sign me up for two EPs and a LP. I had no idea what I was doing, so I just said yeah, sure let's go for it. They sent me an advance, I got gear, everything was fine.

But then they asked, say, hey, are you published? If you're not, don't get published.  I asked them if I could join Teosto, a Composer's Copyright Society operating in Finland - somewhat similar to ASCAP in the United States.  They said "don't get published".  Turns out they meant being signed to a Publisher with a Publishing Contract. Turns out they thought a composer's copyright society was the same as a publisher. So I didn't sign up for Teosto.

The label promoted themselves really quite well, and the EPs and Album got played quite a bit all over the place, on British radio and elsewhere too. The first release was put out in 1999. When it came to radio play, since I wasn't a member of Teosto, I never got any royalty statements for radio play. My original CDr was played on the Finnish National Radio YLE in 1999-2000, no less than three times. Laugh if you will, but that's almost 70 euro of free income, post-taxes. Who knows what the rest of it would have amounted to. 

02. Trust Your Anti-Establishment Friends on Composer's Copyright Societies

But turns out that wasn't the end of bad advice re: Composer's Copyright Societies. Eventually, around 2000-2001, I started also releasing MP3s online, and consulted friends as to whether I should sign up to Teosto and Gramex. No, they said, of course not, don't do it. You'll have to pay hundreds of euros per each download, of each track, if you post them online on your website.

Me? Pay hundreds of Euros per each download? That I'm not going to do! Good grief! That's insane! Fuck Teosto!

So I didn't sign up to Teosto back then. This meant that I would only join Teosto in way later in 2006. Over 7 years of radio play down the drain. Turns out the anti-establishmentarians had no idea what they were saying, and just liked to freak eachother out. "Someone somewhere heard something about something, SO DON'T DO IT!".. 

Also, at least one close friend threatened to never buy a single record I put out, if I joined Teosto. Turns out he never bought any anyway, so it was just some confused thinking that led me to ignore the siren call of Teosto.

Luckily I was later approached by a friend who wasn't absolutely insane and anti-all-organizations, who happened to work at Teosto, who walked me through the process of joining Teosto (turns out it didn't cost anything), and I wound up adding ~200 tracks or so to Teosto and eventually even playlists of gigs, and that saved my bacon quite a few times over the years, financially.

03. Give Everything Away for Free, Because It Ain't That Good

At some point in time, after signing the original record contract, I resumed releasing music for free, and one guy just straight up came and asked me: "Why did you release this for free? You could have released it properly!".. I shrugged it off and just said "Yeah well it ain't that good". 

*BZZZzz electrocutes past self* 

Well, how do YOU know what's good and what isn't? What's worth releasing for free and what is worth putting out commercially? If you have a real-life label that wants to go through the whole process of preparing a release, mastering it, getting artwork done, scheduling the release, etc, they either know what they're doing, and if they don't, they'll still try and do it to the best of their skills.

That track you made-in-20-minute could be the soundtrack to someone pulling through and emerging from a suicidal depression. But they never heard it, because you released it on an obscure netlabel, thinking "Nah, this tune ain't that good, I'll just put it out for free." 

Which brings me up to..

04. Go on, Be a Total Idiot and Delete the Wavefiles After Releasing It for Free

Well, it wasn't that good anyway, right? It's coming out on a new netlabel in 96kbps/112kbps/128kbps/160kbps.. People will hear it, they'll go "that's a nice tune".. I can just delete the WAV / FLAC files, right? The MP3 is good enough, right?

WRONG.

You're not allowed to delete your work. Always retain a master copy. Retain duplicate copies of it. Burn them on CDrs AND DVD-rs, stash them on USB sticks, never lose the masters.

And what happens if you want to re-release them on Bandcamp or CDBaby later on? What if they were actually really good tracks, but you were so thick that you thought you knew if it was a good tune or not?

What are you going to do now? Re-render the track? Good luck with that.

You've lost all the plugins. The software has drastically changed and no longer loads your old songs. It was a Beta version that you can't get any more, and it crashes anyway, and this was your only recording of it. And you. You. You went and deleted it, because a 128kbps MP3 is good enough. Because you needed disk space. Because you were never going to do anything with the tune. Aren't you clever..

Which brings us up to..

05. Don't Save Presets. Don't Archive Plugins. Don't Maintain Songs. Keep Samples in a Disorganized Jumble, Misplace Them Whenever You Like, Because You're an Artisté, Right? Everything Is Supposed to Be Broken and in a State of Perpetual Chaos, Right?

Wrong again. If you don't maintain your songs, samples and files, you'll never know what's what. You'll never have closure. And if you get that brilliant idea, or figure out that maybe you could spend half an hour and move those played-in notes into their right places, you never will. And even if your song is just pure MIDI sent to gear, maybe you'll already have sold your gear to pay rent. Obviously you never diskwrote the separate parts, so you're done for anyway.

Here is where that "But it's not that good anyway" -mindset will come and bite you in your ass. Just spend a day figuring out how to record everything in one go, so you can always come back to them, how to maintain presets so you don't end up overwriting them, save your SYSEX dumps.. Be organized.

Otherwise you might as well be that painter that arguably paints amazing portraits, but sets them on fire when he's 95% done with the portrait.

06. Stay Loyal

Out of that first record label experience, I thought, hey, these guys are really nice, I like what they're doing.. Oh, here's a request from another label to send them a demo.. Nah, I'll give this original label my newest album. 

Why? Because loyalty is being nice, and being nice is nice. What would have happened, if you hadn't? If you had sent your newest material to the newest label that came a-knockin'? You'll never know. You might've taken a step into a larger world.

What wouldn't have happened was what actually did happen, which was that a better Distributor Company got in touch with the first label, and spent 9 months negotiating a better distribution contract, promising the label the Sun and the Moon - delaying your follow-up album by 9 months, and then..

Then what happened?

They promptly distributed it worse, didn't know what to do with it, and the whole label went bankrupt and no-one even found out your follow-up album had been released on CD + Vinyl. Who cares if the artwork looked wonderful, or if the background was just the right shade of purple?

07. Burn Bridges, Because Your Time Is Worth More Than Theirs

But time kept on progressing. I kept getting requests for demos from new labels. I would normally reply with something, and then hmm and haw for either months or years. Then, a year later, I'd send them a demo, date all the tracks, and after 2 weeks of waiting, mail them back and demand to be told why they hadn't been in touch.

Because this is what an intelligent person does, first makes them wait 1-1,5 years, while you're sitting around listening to tracks and waiting for them to "age like fine wine", "so you know if they're good", then quickly toss up a selection onto a CDr and send them over to the label. Then wait for barely the minimum amount of time required for postal delivery, and start bombarding them with "did you listen to it yet?"

Needless to say, I got told "hey, why did you send us tracks from 2002, it's 2004 now! What is this! We can't work together. Buzz off". And they were right. 

But the tracks were good. So why did you have to put in dates? Oh yeah, because you couldn't be bothered to title the songs. EPtrack01-EPtrack02 would have been fine. Not 10/07/02 & 10/07/02b. The release might be out today!

What else can you mess up?

Maybe, the label that contacted you in 2000, you send them four CDrs worth of demo tracks, with one being ambient drones and another being b-sides, a third being remixes you've done, and the fourth being the "If you listened to all 3 before this, this is the stuff you want to release.. But the volumes are about -25dB and you can't hear a thing." - demo. And, of course, they went "Nah couldn't be bothered to listen to this stuff" -- they probably listened to the ambient drone stuff and just gave up.

Which brings us up to track titling.

08. Be Stupid with Your Titling, It'll Make Sense in the End!

Non-fictional encounter at a gig:

"Hi really love your stuff"

"Aww shucks! Is there any tune you'd like me to play during my gig?"

"Yeah I think it's called 12th of November 2002"

"Oh yes, I have that"

Did you kinda shake your head at that? Why yes, OF COURSE the tracks had no title, just a date. Why of course, someone will know that the tracks 31/10/99 and 13/10/99 are different tracks. They really roll off the tongue like molasses on tar. Catchy, huh?

And what about radio play? "yeah we played this track called "eleventh of November nineteen ninety nine" by Lackluster, sure, I only had to go look the title up four times".

Why did I do it? Because It Was Important. Important For Everyone To Know When The Track Was Made.

Could've called it Porridge, for chrissakes. At least people will remember "Yeah, I wanna hear Porridge by Lackluster", not 05/02/00 or 05-02-00 or 2000-02-05 or 02-05-2000, depending on if you're in dd-mm-yyyy, dd-mm-yy, yy-mm-dd, mm-dd-yy, yy-dd-mm -world. Yeah, really clever.

Imagine this. There's a popular track called, alternatively.. "07/10/99". "071099". "Strateface". "Strateface/KCL0". It gets better. "Manual Lounge Ticket (28/06/00)" "Manual Lounge Ticket 28-06-00" "Manual Lounge Ticket" and so on.

Why would you do that? It makes no sense. So why did you do it? Because you're a numpty, that's why.

09. Play Too Many Gigs for Free

Now, this is actually kind of difficult to pin down. You wanted to play gigs, but thought the performance "wasn't worth asking money for".. But.. But.. It's all about appearances. If someone wants to pay you a thousand euros for a gig, you don't go "Yeah I'll do it for a cup of tea and 20 euros, don't go bankrupt on behalf of little old me" at them. Mind you, sometimes you could just go "Can you make this worth my while in some other way? I could use some empty CDRs or something".. Or anything at all.

If you price yourself as free, you might get to play, but when people get to hear you for free, they won't actually want to pay to hear you again. Once it has been established that you are an artist who will play for free (or, good grief, even PAY to play (do not EVER go there. Just. Don't.)), you'll never be able to convince anyone that you should actually be paid a reasonable fee. 

The fee is symbolic anyway. Same as with remixing. Ask for a symbolic fee. 

And speaking of remix fees, the original label I signed on got contacted by an American label asking for a remix from me. I didn't know what to suggest, so the label boss said "Well, Boards of Canada do it for a thousand pounds per remix". Sure, that sounded good to me. But remember, you're not Boards of Canada. 300 Great British Pounds would have been just as fine. Another possibility missed.

10. Don't Do It Yourself, Have Someone Else Do It While You Play the Artisté

You're so busy. You can't put your own stuff up for sale via these crazy digital distributor systems. It's all a lot of bother anyway, you don't care about your past music, you just want to make new stuff. So you'll grudgingly  send those tunes out as WAV, and, because you're not in touch with the third party company that sells your music to Spotify, iTunes Store etc, you never know what you earned, or if there were any sales. Much much later, you'll have them all withdrawn and post them up yourself via CDBaby. And then you'll start getting actual royalty statements.

And you'll wonder "If things had gone differently.."

So, don't take the easy road. Don't coast around. Your music, if it was worth making in the first place, is worth cataloguing, maintaining in a good shape, keeping in as many formats as possible, and just a little bit of organisational skills will go a long way.

Bonus: Don't Use Interviews at Meetings with Fans at Gigs as a Free Therapy Session and Moan About

This should not require any explanations. Keep upbeat. When the only thing that people hear out of you is how shitty your tunes are, and how noone wants them, and how this or that label went bankrupt, and how nothing ever works out.. Well, would YOU like to listen to music made with that kind of energy?

Bonus 2: Take Care of Your Ears

So you got your absolutely wonderful, feel like a satin-pillow headphones (Beyer Dynamics DT-990 Pro). And then you went on a train trip to a festival. And you decided to make music while on the train, because laptop, 2003 and soundcard. And you kept increasing the volume, because RME Multiface. And someone looked at you like their eyes were about to pop out of their sockets. Maybe you should think about it. You're using OPEN headphones, not closed headphones, in a train, and EQing a bassdrum for an hour.

And after that 5 hour Tinnitus session, your hearing is considerably worse. Was it worth it?

Get those Elacins. Get them right now. Go listen to that "Hospital Records with Audiology" Podcast from 2013. Get those Elacins.

I hope this was worth reading. And I hope you're not as dumb as I used to be and still am.

Never burn bridges. Never get angry. Your work is worth something. Don't just throw it away.