You should dress only in capes.

But.

The capes should be covered in sequins.

Furthermore, each sequin should actually be a miniscule Compact Disc emblazoned with the artwork on top of the CD of each of your previous releases and of photos of you.

The sequins should also be arranged in an impressionist fashion, so that, standing from a distance, people can behold the image of the artwork for your next album.

I just wanted to ask to to pretty please with sugar on top enter this competition my company is in the midst of creating for Tooheys Extra Dry! It’s kind of a talent comp for Australian artists with the amazing prize of popping over to New York to create a track with Mark Ronson, Santigold, Nick Hodgson from Kaiser Chiefs, Sean Lennon, John Tayor of Duran Duran and members of The Dap-Kings.

We have an ad campaign running for recruiting talent but I just wanted to shoot this over to you because in my humble opinion you’re by far the most interesting and promising Australian artist out there at the moment.

And you wanted to figure out a good way of releasing your new album… Well here it is :)

The catch is that the last day of registration is TOMORROW, November 18th… So if you’re interested, you need to act now.

Sign up at: http://www.tedthelab.com

Here’s a clip of Mark Ronson introducing the comp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bkuX9w5eyw

/Andreas

I think what linked the generalisations you made about Wrong Ways Of Doing It (whole album too soon, or too many songs too often) is the scarcity of Other People’s Attention, or OPA. And so the mission is to find a way to promote your stuff as though OPA was scarce. Which seems to lead inexorably to the two tools for increasing attention: mystification and publicity stunts. So you should release the album however you want, but dress only in capes, refuse to explain why, and organise to be on reality television.

As for Battlesnake: you’d make us blush if we weren’t covered in scales.

re-reading it, i think i’m definitely making some generalisations – i can think of a lot of radio presenters who would surely prefer to hear the whole record upfront so that they can judge the whole thing on its merits. like, you wouldn’t ask the necks only to send you 3 mins of their record and save the rest til later.

i guess what i am largely talking about – aside from my own pitifully short attention span – is the idea of a single release. if you are lucky enough to get some attention from radio and/or blogs, it can be helpful if its focused around one song. even if i’d ‘released’ the FP album here on the blog next week (now looking unlikely)- i think i still would have only sent 1 or 2 songs to radio/blogs initially.

as for you personally michael – you should send me battlesnake albums, or anything else you’re working on, IN FULL, AS SOON AS THEY ARE COMPLETED!

Let’s pretend I’m the one with an album I want to release, not you. If I wanted you (in your To & Fro identity) to give it the best attention possible, what should I do? Should I send you a track at a time or the whole thing, or some other alternative?

from the radio point-of-view, and i would think bloggers might feel the same way about it, ideally you want to be eased into a record and not just have all 45 minutes of it front up in your pigeonhole one day. this is largely because of the volume of stuff you get sent. you get sent so much stuff… its rare that you are going to give more than one or two tracks from any release your attention, even if a whole album is sent to you, not enough hours in the day. unless of course you really love it (even then sometimes its hard to find time to really appreciate it, when you’re trying to stay on top of other stuff…)

that said, dave and i try and give whatever gets sent to us as good a listen as we can. for our radio show we are generally playing stuff we have found independently. only a handful of things that make it on air during our show are things sent to us out of the blue – usually local unsigned stuff and demos that we wouldn’t find out about any other way. aside from those very limited/homemade type of releases, when we get sent releases that we like, we’ve usually known about it/downloaded it/bought it many days or weeks previously!

most would argue that its better to give radio & blogs one or two songs at a time than give them your whole record, at least to begin with. ideally, if people actually start featuring your music, there’s some kind of cohesion to it. so, yeah.

the single-every-few-weeks idea is cool, but you can definitely alienate people in radio by assaulting them with simply too much stuff. just yesterday someone at rrr was telling me a story about getting letters from bands saying “hi, i’m from such-and-such band. in two weeks time, you’re going to be getting the first single from my new record, keep an eye out for it.” two weeks later, a cd-r with one song on it arrives with a letter attached “ok, here it is. in two weeks time, we’ll be sending you the second single from our killer new album, keep your eyes peeled.” a few cd-rs later… well it doesn’t matter how great your music is, that is going to give people the shits.

and then all the radio presenters are going to sit around and make fun of how desperate you are. i’d love to say this doesn’t happen, but it does! radio presenters are jerks! also, most of us are very dumb, so if you give us one track at a time, it saves our brain power for the difficult tasks of pressing play on the cd player or saying what time it is.

@james:

yep. pretty sure. the only thing i’ve signed is my soul to satan, in exchange for some d&d miniatures

(The words ’something’, ‘part’ and ‘alternative’ above would have been italicised if I knew how. I figure you’ll get the idea though.)

Anyway: you’re in radio: tell me if I’m wrong. I just assume guys like you get a slew of new releases each week, and your attention drifts to at least some of the shiny new things when that happens. If this is true, use it to your advantage by releasing often, rather than to your disadvantage by putting the whole thing out there in one hit. The music-appreciating public is like a very long digestive tract, and the tastebuds are only at the front bit.

not really – i am genuinely confused. i’m also terrible at picking what to eat at a restaurant or ordering pizzas.

anyone reading this who has had personal dealings with me will attest to the fact that i will go to great lengths to avoid taking personal responsibility for important decisions in my life. at least thats what gabriel byrne said to me in that dream i had.