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An artist recently asked me if I felt her music production pace was too fast, suggesting she might be ‘flooding the market’ with her music and so wondering if she should release her music into the business royalty free market at a more controlled pace.

This is most certainly a good point in terms of the argument about providing too many tracks / albums to the same finite market. It’s worth considering the timing of publication of new music IF an artist’s music income comes from consumer sales. Consumers tend to want a regular flow of their favourite artists more on a seasonal or annual basis. Anything more than that might be considered too much of the same thing by consumers & thus no more is sold even though your production is higher (i.e. A finite market). If an artist also want’s to sell their music into the consumer market then they should consider starting with say, three albums and release new albums at a slower pace.

However the business market is fundamentally different in that purchasers tend to have a specific business project in mind and so are looking for the right piece of music or collection of music to meet that business need. They tend to know what they need for their project and go out there to find it in that sort of pragmatic way with less loyalty to any specific artist (although of course, over time, business clients who have a regular need for music will know the artists they will trust and visit first). They want choice and variety. So if you have a strong collection that provides choice and variety you are more likely to gain a sale than you might with less music available.

Artists who are relatively new artist to selling their music online will naturally be behind (with creating a strong catalogue) to those other artists who have been producing music for a much longer time, and therefore have a much wider selection of music for the market as a whole. Artists who are reasonably prolific in their production of new music have the opportunity to narrow the gap between the average artist who has been producing music and making it available online for a good while and the collection size expected of a relatively new recording / online artist. Artists who are not so prolific slowly develop their music collection but over time gain a good online presence. So, you need to make a decision on your music production pace, ensuring your quality is not compromised.

As long as an artist continues to develop music for licensing that has variety but within their core skill area of genre and style of composition & production they can become a major artist for business licensing in their chosen niche. As their production skills develop they can go wider in styles they choose thus building out their market reach even more. The more they produce quality music and make available in the business market the quicker the income will grow. But again, keep the quality high and you will become a trusted music producer for businesses.

So ultimately, an artist may never need to slow down on their production speed as long as it is of good quality and provides a catalogue that presents variety within your chosen music styles. Of course, if an artist has tracks available but doesn’t have them available online for sale then clearly they are not potentially making any money for you.

I know a number of artists who consider their music catalogue as their pension, in as much, that they produce music that is timeless and will earn for them for years to come, as yours clearly will. An artist I know produces probably around 80 tracks per month. His music tends to be focused on meeting the needs of business clients who need short 2 minute tracks for various corporate and broadcast needs but his rate of production is very much driven by a need to build a very large catalogue of music so he can meet the needs of most business clients that come his way.

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Kate Bush, in her most recent album Ariel, about the accidents of an artist’s painting and how those pieces are sometimes the best and most inspirational.

I read somewhere recently a guy just stuffed midi tracks into a DAW and put up instruments and just listened to the results. That’s how he got his inspiration going. I worked on something this morning and found by accident a really nice twist to something.. So it seems to me that it can be fun to just experiment sometimes :O)

I too have felt this when composing. Once I dragged a drum midi file and put it on a lead instrument by mistake and found that the result, albeit quirky, was fun and inspirational.

Composing can be hard to keep up as a professional writer, constantly looking for fresh and new creations. Sometimes the accidents can take you down a road that you never would have thought of consciously to do new things that are not your usual mode of composition and so are exactly that which you are looking for, fresh and new creations.

What is Royalty Free Music?

Royalty Free Music is music offered for use without the professional user needing to pay additional costs for using the music within their own line of work, just the initial purchase price.

Don’t get the term ‘royalty free music’ mixed up with copyright. Copyright is about the ownership of a piece of music. Each artist will aim to retain the ownership of their piece of music unless they specifically sell it, or hand it over to a record label as part of their contractual agreement (although this is changing with the entry of net labels such as Ambient Music Garden.)

Music you hear on the radio costs the radio stations for each broadcast. Music you hear within a film production has to be purchased specifically for film making. Music played in the background of shops and galleries requires additional costs to cover royalties. However Ambient Music Garden music is royalty free so you can play our music within your theraputic sessions without being charged any additional costs.

Each piece of Ambient Music Garden music is licensed to an individual for their use within their own theraputic work and also for those that are self healing. A different agreement is required where the piece of music is going to be used with large audiences or for large health organisations. This agreement is included within the terms and conditions of sale.

Musicians are protected by international treaties that enable them to collect money from users of their work.

There has never been a better time to try to go it alone as opposed to sell your music via a record company. Clearly record companies do offer benefits still, however for the smaller circulation musicians the Internet offers a fantastic opportunity to get access to a global market (although I have to stress here that Ambient Music Garden does not currently market to the whole world for security reasons).

Within the western world I have all probably witnesses and even been involved in the increased acceptance and interest in alternative therapies. In addition to this, ‘alternatives’ have become ‘conventional’ & increased their popularity even more.

With broadband so available now in western countries alternative and conventional therapists looking to music to enhance their client and customer’s experiences now have a great opportunity to browse and download a better range of music to suit their needs than that which is physically available on CD in the small genre collections at the local music shop.

Additionally those of us who want to use music to assist in our own healing or simply relaxing or meditating can browse and buy so much easier online. As one artist put it recently, “…this is a type of music that is traditionally hard to obtain…i.e. sifting through endless whale song Cds and Tin gongs down ur local record shop!”

Holistic therapy seems to me to becoming a strong competitor to hairdressing for like-minded young people entering college today. Each one of these new therapists needs quality music to suit their therapy style.

Additionally, music therapy within conventional mental health trusts is coming of age with new initiatives to support a range of mental health problems. So, although Ambient Music Garden today focuses on the single therapist, and the license that is sold covers single therapists there are opportunities to sell to larger organisations.

I think this also gives a signal about what I can achieve together. Avoiding stereotypes of fluty meditative tapes with comically patronising voice-overs I have the opportunity to create a new direction for therapy music.

Here’s some fun music games for anyone. The power of Flash!!

http://www.FlashMusicGames.com.

At 18 I was inspired to do get a synthesizer. I was into the latest bands and although I look back and cringe at the 80’s it was an interesting exploratory time.

As synths begun to enter more the mainstream pop there was a backlash by some of the guitar bands at the time. The poor dears were probably quite threatened by them since all the marketing speak was about them taking over ‘real’ instruments.

My band and I hired an EMU. It had floppy disks (long assigned to the museum of computing) with one sample set each. Each floppy took a few minutes to load so we all hung over the keyboard waiting for the whirling of the machine to stop. We would all then stab at the keyboard and then roll about laughing at the amazing sounds that would be forthcoming. Orchestral stabs the like we couldn’t create with our analogue and digital keyboards, they were amazing. And so, like all pop artists, we needed these sounds in our productions so that we were up with the rest and in with the times.

My first monophonic synth (plays one note at a time) was a Roland SH101. I loved Roland stuff; they were only a few miles up the road from me, so when the keyboard packed up I got one changed there. Whilst there I noticed a Roland Jupiter 4, looking old and dusty. I pressed a few presets and out came sounds I had heard from my latest album purchases. Presets have always been looked down on by artists trying to create some individuality for themselves, however they would regularly appear in pop, and still do to my surprise.

In the early 80’s the synths to have were the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 and the Roland Jupiter 8. No real keyboard artist, what ever their genre, would be seen without these (unless you were into big stacks of Mood modular kits (e.g. Tangerine Dream).

As much as I wanted at least one of these, I couldn’t afford them so when I started hearing about this new Yamaha DX7 and how revolutionary it was I was all stoked up ready to buy one. I got a loan and in 1983 I got one of the first ones to come in to the country.

So really, for me, the DX7 was my real introduction into synthesizers as it was a polyphonic synth. Not only that, it was digital. The future was here. We could create amazing sounds never before heard, as well as create very crisp real – like sounds.

Eventually I bought the Jupiter 8’s little brother, the Juno 106 that was the first midi keyboard from Roland. I could hook this up to the Yamaha and create gorgeous mixes of sounds from one keyboard.

I also bought a Yamaha CX5, which was a computer keyboard that you controlled from a TV. It had the ability to create some basic DX like sounds from presets plus sequence and control external keyboards via midi. Brilliant!! I was now in control of all my computers from a TV screen!

The outputs went to another piece of Yamaha kit now long disappeared that was a four track on a cassette player much like the Fostex and Tascams of the day.

I created full songs, arranged and composed from beginning to end automatically from that machine.

Had I been able to grasp the concept of Apple’s Logic or Steinberg’s Cubase or Abelton Live (no lets not get silly now!!) it would have blown my mind for sure.

We were being introduced to new concepts that were amazing at the time, such as digitally routed mixing desks that costs the same number of digits as my mum and dad’s phone number. Yet there were also progressions with home musicians such as the Atari.

Now you hear a lot of todays electronic artists talking about the Atari but I cant say I got involved in this, mores the pity really. Fans of the Atari have ridden the Digital Audio Workstation wave for over twenty years now. Who knows where it goes from where we are today.

After a long and regretful break from music composition, in 2001 I bought a computer specifically designed for music and also purchased cubase to run on Windows 98.

By this time, attitude to synthesizers had changed in a number of ways. Firstly, my old SH101 could be purchased second hand at the same price I purchased it at. Analogue synths were back, albeit rather unpredictable in their performance after so many years on the road and being stabbed in bedrooms.

Secondly, the synth, and sampling had met mainstream. The new generation wasn’t so pure about being a guitar band or a synth band. All the pouting synth bands had lost their hair and grown bear bellies, the guitar bands were the same, just a bit more gaunt through the amount of drugs they’d used over the years.

New musicians were happy to mix samples with synths with guitars; they were all creative resources as far as they were concerned. But now no one was interested in trying to sound like an orchestra from their keyboard.

That didn’t impress anyone now.

The new exciting areas were mixing and mashing samples of whatever could be captured on an audio recorder and mixed using innovative software such as Recycle which enabled the musician to make (almost) any rhythmical sound match any beat by stretching the sample in time.

After a few years I met up with one of my old band mates and he convinced me (very easily) to purchase a Mac and get Emagic’s Logic.

Since then I have stuck with Logic, not ever needing anything else since it is the basis for providing the platform for the new synths in my life, the soft synths.

From these synths within my apple computer I can emulate the DX7 and the Prophet 5 quite happily without worrying about the age related issues of electronics.

The guys that make these soft machines keep on innovating and it’s hard to know what will happen next for me.

One issue that is coming up is the length of time a soft synth is supported, and how long it can be used whilst operating systems continue to upgrade and morph into new operating systems.

Since I started with Logic I have had three different Macs, all more powerful than the last to keep up with my needs to create even more complex productions. It seems to me to be really important to make sure you bounce down each channel into a digital audio file so that, if the DAW, the operating system or the soft synth becomes un-useable in the future I have at least got my audio that I can mix elsewhere.

Soft synths get upgraded and presets and saved creations may not be able to play again. Native Instruments now ship the FM8 instead of the FM7. I’m not sure if the FM8 will play the FM7 patches as it is a different synth altogether by the looks of things.