Lipcrack — Welcome to the Future
Some of you might be wondering what happened to the Lipcrack site during August — and if you haven’t visited lately, you possibly wouldn’t know that Lipcrack has quietly undergone a transformation.
We’re bringing the site a little more in line with the future of Lipcrack and the plans that are developing around it. The changes aren’t enormous, but the site has been tidied up, navigation has been improved and, perhaps most importantly, the catalogue is beginning to look like a catalogue rather than a collection of songs we’ve accumulated along the way. You can check out the changes from the Lipcrack home page https://www.lipcrack.com, then head into the Music section via the music tab to see the newly renovated catalogue, https://www.lipcrack.com/catlog.htm .
Why now?
Well, there is a fairly obvious reason. The new Lipcrack track, arriving in early September, is called “Welcome to the Future”. It seemed appropriate. With several albums sitting in the catalogue backlog, it felt like the right time to stop looking backwards and start moving things forward. There isn’t some enormous secret behind the renovation — we’ve simply given everything a bit of a clean-up. And for those wanting an early taste of some of the imagery surrounding the new track, there are already some clues appearing in the Lipcrack shop, https://www.lipcrack.com/shop/viewitem.php?groupid=0&productid=30
But be warned… It’s all droids.
Which brings us to another slightly familiar topic. Another recent Spotify adventure – if you’d call it that.
This month we had another track on Spotify temporarily taken down by the distributor. We’ve been assured that it is only temporary and by the time this newsletter appears it should hopefully be back where it belongs. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
As regular readers will know, we’ve been testing some of the online promotional services available to independent artists. Unfortunately, we’ve now had it made very clear to us that some of these services can create more problems than they solve.
And this is where things start getting a little strange. You would assume that these companies would operate within their own little microcosm — they offer a service, you pay for it, they promote your music, everybody goes home happy. Business is business. Apparently, it isn’t quite that simple. Spotify considers most of these activities to be scams, and every time we experiment with one of them, we seem to run the risk of doing ourselves a disservice.
So perhaps the obvious conclusion would be: Okay, we’ve tried it. It doesn’t work. Move on. Except that isn’t quite what we’ve discovered.
Two rather interesting facts have emerged from the whole process.
1. Being placed on playlists can, in fact, generate more streams.
2. The amount you pay for the service doesn’t necessarily reflect the amount of success you achieve from it.
And that second one is where things become interesting.
You can pay a couple of dollars simply to have someone listen to a track and give you feedback. From there, services can range from around $19 to $149 just to get onto a playlist, with the prices climbing considerably higher depending on what you’re supposedly buying. But what we found was that paying more didn’t necessarily produce more. The playlist plays were often fairly minimal regardless of which level of service was being used. So before we ended up with a huge hole in our pockets, it was time to put the brakes on.
Of course, having your song removed from Spotify while you’ve been placed on a playlist rather defeats the purpose as well. It doesn’t exactly help build the reputation we’re trying to establish with Lipcrack. So once again, the humble email list is still looking like one of the more positive ways of building the Lipcrack audience.
That doesn’t mean we’re finished experimenting completely. We may still test a couple of other services hesitantly, if only to establish what they’re actually selling and how closely that resembles what you’re actually getting. Because sometimes the difference between the two is quite remarkable. And, to some extent, surreal.
The Rules of the Game
The really interesting part comes when you start looking at the contractual agreements involved in distributing music. There are plenty of rules surrounding artificial or fraudulent streaming, and quite rightly so. But once you start reading through exactly what constitutes a stream, what activities are acceptable and what activities can potentially put your music at risk, the whole thing becomes surprisingly convoluted. I’m not going to go any further in to this because we’d probably still be here till next month. And besides, some of the clauses leave you wondering exactly where the line is between protecting an artist, protecting a platform and protecting a business model.
That’s my personal opinion, of course. But the underlying message is becoming increasingly clear. Whatever we’re doing is being scrutinized under a microscope. One move and you’re offline. One move in the other direction and you might just get played on a playlist or by the system.
And perhaps the strangest part of all this is that much of this isn’t being decided by a person sitting somewhere listening to your music. It’s being controlled by algorithms. Computers are increasingly deciding what activity is acceptable, what isn’t, what gets noticed, what gets ignored and, ultimately, what gets played.
Which brings us back to the next Lipcrack release “Welcome to the Future.” Perhaps it isn’t just a song title after all but a glimpse of what the future has in store for us all.
So despite all of the above, there was actually some good news from our playlist adventures. Lipcrack did make it onto a new playlist, and we were genuinely pleased to have met their criteria for inclusion. It’s called The Beerman Club, broadcasting 24/7 from Seville, Spain, and featuring rock, blues, folk and independent artists from around the world, along with interviews and cultural discussions over beers, https://www.thebeermanclub.com
We thought it was totally rocking. If you’re interested in discovering independent music from around the world, it’s definitely worth checking out.
And Then There’s September… that’s where we currently stand it’s going to be a big month for Lipcrack, with the release of “Welcome to the Future” arriving very soon.
We’ll also be getting back to regular mailouts while all of that is happening and I’ll be finalising the samples for the remaining tracks that will eventually appear on the media player page. I’d love to release every track in full, but I’m still of the belief that the people who actually purchase the albums deserve that extra something for the money they’ve committed. You can buy a single here and a single there, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with doing that. But when you’ve got an entire album sitting there, the full album is simply better value and a much more complete body of work.
More new music coming your way very soon.
Welcome to the Future
Lipcrack