A funny thing happens when you go into business as a record label: suddenly you get a lot of people sending you email asking where they can send their CD for you to release.

There are a couple of important presumptions there.

The first, and more easily dismissed presumption, is that if they send you a CD, you will be interested in releasing it. By Sturgeon’s Law, that’s sort of a stretch right there. But let’s not dwell on that too much.

The second presumption is much more interesting. Even if we posit that they have recorded the finest music ever heard by the ears of humankind, they are presuming that you will want them to send it.

Hell, why wouldn’t you want to hear it?

Money Enough and Time

Well, first: releasing records is sort of resource-intensive. It takes a fair amount of two things: money and time.

It costs money to press an album. Even assuming, as with Lotuspike, that the artist himself is responsible for delivering a finished recording to the label, it costs money to master the recording, to design and prepare artwork for it, to actually press it, and then to promote and sell it.

It also takes a fair amount of time to press an album. By time here, I really mean effort: someone has to, on behalf of the record label, make all the arrangements for mastering, graphic design, pressing, promotion, and sales and distribution.

Both of these things mean that your average resource-limited indie record label (hi!) can only release a limited number of recordings in a given year. The actual limit will depend on the size of the label, both in terms of financial resources and in human resources. Bigger labels with bigger budgets and more staff can likely handle more releases in a given year. Smaller labels with fewer people and smaller budgets can do fewer releases. (For reference, there are three of us at Lotuspike, all part-timers, and we operate on a shoestring budget.)

And all of this means we need to be extremely selective about what music we will release. For Lotuspike, at the moment we have nine discs in our catalog after three years. At the moment a release pace of four to five discs in a year is about all we can handle.

Legal Problems with Unsolicited Demos

An “unsolicited” demo is one that someone sends in without being asked to, or making prior arrangements for. It is as opposed to a “solicited” demo, one for which prior arrangements have been made (and the label is expecting).

There are some legal issues to consider. This is more of a problem with the larger, deep-pocketed labels (because those with deeper pockets are more likely to get sued than us little guys), but is still something that even the little guys need to think about.

In particular the problem is this: suppose we release a CD next week, and Joe Synth comes along the following week claiming we ripped off the music that he sent us without crediting him. Big copyright infringement lawsuit; end of label. Only problem is we’ve never heard of Joe Synth. Maybe he sent us a demo, but maybe we hadn’t even gotten around to listening to it yet.

If instead we adopt a policy that we do not accept unsolicited demos, we can have a lot more control over what set of demos we can really be expected to have heard. If Joe doesn’t send us that CD, he can’t sue us for ripping it off because there’s no expectation that we’ve heard it.

By limiting the number of demos that we accept to the number of albums we can reasonably be expected to actually critically listen to, process, and reach consensus on, we limit our exposure to this sort of liability.

Umm, Did You Listen to Us?

As an aside, we get a fair number of requests (usually through our contact form on the site) saying “hey my metal band just released this r0kkin album, do you want to release it?”

These are often sort of amusing. But also a little bit offensive at the same time. I mean seriously, if they didn’t take the time to pay attention to the fact that we are a progressive ambient music label, why should we take the time to listen to their CD? (Even for amusement value?)

Sometimes we hear some music that is really good stuff, but just doesn’t quite fit. I mean, thrash metal is far enough off that anybody who has any idea of what sort of music we do would know that that ain’t it, and anyone who thinks metal would fit here should probably do some more homework before contacting us. But often we get a (solicited) demo of music that is really top notch, and we like it a lot personally, and it almost fits but just doesn’t quite match exactly the aesthetic we’re going for with the label. Those cases are often a little harder to turn down, but again we’re just three guest room warriors trying to keep a label cohesive and targeted, so we have to pick and choose what CDs we put our name on. (We’ve reluctantly turned down a few discs that some of our favorite colleague labels have subsequently released and have done well. Just because we turn it down doesn’t mean it’s no good!)

Be Honest With Yourself

OK, I’m not exactly Simon Cowell. But are you William Hung, or are you Taylor Hicks? Actually, American Idol highlights exactly the point I’m trying to make here. Every (non-prank) Idol contestant comes into those auditions because somebody, somewhere, told them they could sing. And yet those initial auditions are often so hideous you can’t turn away. Why does it happen? Usually, compared to the average shmoe on the street, even some of the stranger contestants would come off favorably.

But truly any musician who expects to sell CDs to complete strangers needs to have a really good look in the mirror and decide. Is my music as good as I think it is? Is it as good as my mom says it is? To be successful as a professional musician (and by “professional” I don’t mean that it is your career; rather I mean that you are offering music for sale, and by “successful” I don’t necessarily mean that you are the next Justin Timberlake; rather I mean that you are able to achieve your personal goals as a musician, which apparently include selling CDs to the public), one really needs to develop the capacity for brutally honest self-criticism, and to encourage those around oneself to offer one brutally honest criticism.

Have You Fished the Pond Already?

Another thing that happens to us occasionally is that someone will often ask to send us a CD, saying something like “I’ve made this great CD, and I think you will want to sell it, because I’ve been offering it as a free download on my website for six months already, and 800 people have downloaded it!”

Well gee whiz. So your fans all have the music already, you say? Hmm. And we should drop two grand pressing it onto a disc so that they can, what, buy it again? Hmm.

Free downloads have their place, for sure. You can download free snippets of some Lotuspike tracks at the lotusShop, in fact. iTunes offers free 30-second snippets of almost all of the songs in the iTunes Store. Those are intended to enhance the market for a disc by giving a buyer an idea of what they would be getting by buying the disc. A test drive, more or less. But in the same test drive analogy, the dealer doesn’t just give you the keys and say “heck, keep it for a month or more, no need to pay”. You’d never buy the car if you could get it for free.

How Unsolicited Becomes Solicited

OK, then, let’s assume that you’ve recorded a fantastic album, and you’ve been brutally honest with yourself, and it’s still fantastic. And you’re sure it’s absolutely a spot on match for our artistic direction. And you haven’t diluted the market for it by offering your full album as a free download. There is no doubt that your album would be a smashing success as a Lotuspike release.

But we have no idea who you are. And so we don’t know any of that. So how do we know you from the aforementioned Joe Synth? Or from the r0kkin hair-metal band? Or William Hung?

The answer is that you have to get to know us, and get us to know you. But how?

Connections. Maybe you know someone who knows us, or you know that we know. And maybe that person agrees that your music is great, and can arrange an introduction?

Dialogue and Reputation. Maybe you don’t know anyone we know. Yet. So build connections. Get active on various forums and mailing lists. Build a web site that showcases your talent (but if you offer full album downloads, don’t expect to turn around and sell those same tracks!). Then get in touch and tell us who you are and what you’ve done. (When you contact us, say something more than just “where can I send my CD?”. Include a little bio or at least a link to your site.)

And maybe at that point we’ll ask you to go ahead and send in a demo.