The Schema

Sales Figures

2007-08-30T07:46:00.000+01:00

So, over the weekend we watched the video viewing figures level off at the 250,000 mark. Throughout this project - and especially through the latter stages, our self-belief fuelled by a huge sense of achievement at reaching #1 on various YouTube charts - I was always wondering, in the back of my mind, how many mp3s I might have sold. Well, we got the sales figures through from the OCC (the British official charts company) yesterday, and the exciting news for all concerned is that we sold 58. Fifty Eight. Now, this may put you into the lower reaches of some kind of local chart in the Hungarian town of Medgyesegyhaza, but nationally, in the UK, it puts you some 4,000 places behind Kanye West.

So, what does this tell us? I had a text from Alex, the video director, who commiserated with me and said "Well, nobody buys music any more, do they..." Clearly some people buy music, but only 58 people buy a yacht-rock spectacular with a cute video. Obviously you can't use The Schema's tune as a benchmark as it's a barely contemporary sound made by a fat bloke in his mid 30s, but these unspectacular sales figures probably extrapolate pretty badly for the music business as a whole. I'm guessing. Actually, we don't need to guess, we know the business is in crisis.

Anyway, I wrote about this tale for The Independent, and the piece comes out today. You may draw a conclusion from this that all my expenses were somehow covered by a slush fund at the newspaper, but no - this was meant to be DIY, and when Westminster Council shafted me for £300, it was me who had to bite the bullet. Otherwise, what would have been the point? In fact, the council haven't invoiced yet, although I'm sure they will if they see the finished article, so my total costs: £867.65. Total receipts will be about £28, plus a few quid from sales of the track via the "buy from us" link you see above on the left. I don't have a calculator to hand, but you can probably estimate the net loss.

But what have I gained? Well, a 250,000 audience for a song I knocked up in my bedroom. I don't know what John Peel's listening figures were like in the late 80s and early 90s, but I'd say that this song probably got the largest number of listeners out of any song I've ever written or had a hand in producing. Which has to count for something. The interview in the Argentinian newspaper never materialised, but later today "Those Rules You Made" will be Alternative Pop track of the day at garageband.com. Which, again, is a crumb of comfort. As I'm on the front page of the bloody Independent today, my mouth hanging open like an imbecile, I guess the whole DIY thing is out of the window, and I can ring up MTV2 with my journalist hat on and beg them to play the video so I can claw some money back.

Or maybe I'll just keep it real.

Quarter Million

2007-08-26T11:21:00.000+01:00

So we've nearly racked up a quarter of a million hits on YouTube, which is at once funny, and fantastic. When you have a YouTube viral success, other things start happening: garageband.com are making it their "Alternative Pop" track of the day on Wednesday. And then I had an email from an Argentinian newspaper asking for an interview. Can't see any paparrazzi hanging around outside my flat, but there's always time.

Tomorrow, we pay 20-odd quid to the OCC to see how many we've sold; if you asked me to make a prediction, I think that the ephemeral nature of YouTube means that that 1/4 million hits will convert into maybe 150 sales. And I know the music industry is dying on its arse, but that's still not many. Let's wait and see. Total cost: £567.65

Number One

2007-08-24T08:35:00.000+01:00

At about 5pm British time yesterday afternoon, the video for "Those Rules You Made" became the most-watched music video on the whole of YouTube - and that's worldwide! I captured the moment for posterity:

This morning, we're up to 126,491 views. I'm still a bit flabbergasted. Remember, this video was made for less than £500, in less than 10 days from deciding to do it to getting it up online. Amazing. In the weekly chart, we're vying with Linkin Park and 50 Cent - a totally DIY music video, amid a sea of major labels. W00t, as they say on teh internets.

YouTube insanity

2007-08-23T10:37:00.000+01:00

So, the video was posted up on YouTube at about 1am yesterday. When I got up at 7am, it had had about 15 views; I was the 16th. I sent an email out to anyone I thought would be remotely interested - maybe about 400 people? - and posted it on my own blog. By lunchtime we were up to around 600 views, and by the end of lunchtime - clearly important YouTube viewing time for the UK's office workers - we were tipping the thousand mark, and, incredibly, had become the 64th most-watched video on YouTubeUK that day.

At which point the editors of YouTube must have noticed the number of hits it was getting. And they put it on the Front Page - at which point things went ballistic. As of this morning, it's had 25,000 views, although as the back-end of the site is down for maintenance, I suspect it might be a lot more. I also can't see where we're sitting in various charts, but someone informed me that it was the #1 viewed video yesterday on YouTube UK. Whether that means I'll sell any MP3s, who knows; but hey. We created something, put it on the internet, and people are looking at it. You can't ask for more than that.

By all means go and look at it on YouTube, but here's a higher quality version for your viewing and listening pleasure:

Internet Radio

2007-08-22T13:22:00.000+01:00

Just a quick note: I've just submitted the mp3 to a handful of online radio stations, namely Kooba, SomaFM and Indiefeed...

Video Cost

2007-08-22T13:13:00.001+01:00

We shot the video on Saturday; the results are on YouTube, but I'm going to post a lovely-quality Flash version here later tonight. Alex obviously wanted to do a professional job, but - as with any creative process - it was a question of balancing high quality with meagre resources. She was, very kindly, working for free, so we got the budget down to:

- Film stock: £117.50
- Digibeta cassette: £14.75
- Developing film: £105.75

Which is £208.50. Then I had to buy a couple of bottles of Perrier as props, making £211.50. Then we had to cover the costs of some of the actors, which added another £200, making £411.50. There's a couple more expenses still to come, one of them small, the other stupidly colossal; Westminster Council want £300 for letting us film On Their Land. But let's see if they bother invoicing us. For the moment, the Total cost: £540.04.

It's Out

2007-08-22T12:57:00.000+01:00

So the single has been out for a couple of days. Impossible at the moment to know whether it's sold anything, nothing or something, but Emubands can prise sales figures next Monday of some organisation or other for about £27.50, so I'll probably end up forking out that sum, because I'm impatient and vain. I'm also prepared for disappointment, obviously.

The number of stores that the single is on is extensive and colossal, but in fact iTunes accounts for around 80% of online music sales, so that's the biggie. And it's up there, and it's already got one review, but that is from my friend Karla, so does it count?

Of course, lots of those stores require certain operating systems to work, others need you to register as a member first – and, frankly, some people can't be arsed with that. But with our hosting plan from Dreamhost, we get a service called Files Forever, which lets you store files for eternity - and sell them to the public, be they mp3s, pdfs or whatever. So we did the sums...

There's a one-off charge of $0.03 to store the file for ever. Then another $0.03 per sale, along with a $0.50 transaction charge, along with 5% of the value of the file. So... if I sell both songs for $2.79, which is currently about £1.40 - less than iTunes! - then I get back $1.85. Which is 93p. Which is about 47p per track. Which is about what I'd get from iTunes anyway. Hey, it doesn't count towards the chart, but I'm not ripping anyone off, and I'm not losing out. So here you go. DRM free tracks. Should you wish to own them... Total cost: £128.54.

Web ranking

2007-08-19T19:15:00.000+01:00

When I misguidedly chose the name "The Schema" for this project, and then my friend Dicky said to me "Oh, The Schemer?" and I said "No, Schema, with an A", I obviously realised that I'd ballsed up by choosing a name which you'd have to spell out to people. Not a problem that The Farm or ABC ever encountered. Then I looked up "Schema" on Google, and of course I get a shitload of sites about javascript programming. For a band attempting to promote itself on the internet, that's a pretty poor showing.

But, to my surprise, searching for "The Schema" on Google does actually bring up this site; 10th in the ranking if you put quotes around the phrase, and 11th if you don't. Perhaps, just perhaps, I might be able to get that up to the top 5 with the help of a few people. Who knows what effect it might have on mp3 sales. None, probably. But it helps to stroke my ego. If you have a website, or a blog with a links bar, could you stick it in? The Schema. www.theschema.co.uk. It doesn't have to be high up. Just there. Somewhere. Let's see what happens.

Online Press

2007-08-14T12:35:00.001+01:00

I'm terrified of getting reviews, actually - I don't response very well to criticism, I tend to curl up into a ball, start blubbing, and then fire off furious ripostes to the person who dared criticise me. I'm not proud of this. Nevertheless, getting some reviews online is part of the process. So this morning I emailed out 13 MP3s along with this press release to writers or editors at 13 online webzines / music sites, namely:

Yahoo, This Is Fake DIY, Subba Cultcha, Room Thirteen, Music News, Last Broadcast, Glasswerk, Gigwise, Drowned In Sound, Contact Music, BBC Collective and PlayLouder. Oh, and PopJustice. Making 14.

I'm not expecting this intense PR activity to yield up particularly amazing results, but let's see what happens, before I start climbing Tower Bridge in a superhero action costume. Total spend: still £128.52

VHS, DVD, 320x240 MPG

2007-08-14T12:10:00.000+01:00

The harsh reality of publicising music on the internet is that videos are annoyingly useful. However much I might enjoy hiding behind a green square with some cutout men drawn on it, being able to put up something on YouTube - especially if it's half decent - is going to help get people listening to my half-arsed MP3. I'm not a fan of listening to half-arsed MP3s myself, but I'm quite happily to while away whole afternoons watching bizarre self-made videos such as this. So that's that, then. I have to make a video.

Despite being 35 and playing in shite bands for 17 years, I've only been involved in the making of one video, ever. That was in 1990, and it featured a cat moving in time to the music. How ahead of the game was THAT? Who knew that about 50% of the internet would end up being taken up by videos of cats - real or animated - moving in time to the music? (Actually, I've just remembered a couple more, but let's pretend I only ever made one for the purposes of the blog entry.) That was the only video I ever made, because in comparison to releasing tunes, it was bloody expensive. I could make a video using my mobile phone camera right now for nothing, but it would be shit. And I have to maintain some level of, er, quality. So I met up with a friend of a friend called Alex de Campi.

She is phenomenally together, which is just as well, as I'm visually hopeless and had no ideas whatsoever. I've already received treatments and storyboards. We're filming it in a little garden next to Embankment tube station on Saturday morning, he said, anxiously looking at the weather forecast. Sadly, making a video is still expensive compared to releasing tunes, but as I've spent less than £100 so far, it shouldn't be too bad.

My first outlay for the video is for a couple of props: A book called "The Rules" (£6.74), and 3 imitation Perrier bottles made out of sugar (£24.67), which I have to collect from a studio in Shepperton on Thursday morning. I feel that this is just the beginning of a long list of expenses. But it'll be worth it. Won't it? Total spend: £128.52.

Endless profiles

2007-08-12T19:13:00.000+01:00

MySpace obviously isn't the only social networking site where you can stick your band and make tenuous connections with people who you wouldn't allow in the house. There's also Tagworld - which hasn't really learned from the design nightmare that MySpace is still cold-sweating over - and PureVolume, which is sleek, beautifully sculpted and gorgeous to look at by comparison. I obviously have better things to do than stare at a PureVolume profile, but it's Sunday, it's supposed to be a day of rest, isn't it.

Now I just have to go and do a Bebo one, but I got annoyed as my first choice of URL was already taken by someone called Hayley. How dare she.

Mathematical Potential

2007-08-11T13:43:00.000+01:00

Someone alerted me to this website called Hit Song Science, where your uploaded MP3 will be mathematically analysed for hit potential. I quote from their website:

The analysis application is able to "listen" to any CD and isolate patterns in many musical events, some of which are melody, harmony, tempo, pitch, octave, beat, rhythm, fullness of sound, noise, brilliance, and chord progression. This is a process called Spectral Deconvolution. Each song is then mapped onto a grid we call the music universe and is positioned according to its mathematical characteristics. Each song is represented by a dot on the universe and the songs on one end of the universe are vastly different from songs on the other end of the universe. Songs with mathematical similarities are positioned very close to one another.

Well, they were offering a free trial, so I decided to have "Those Rules You Made" Spectrally Deconvoluted. The results make for astounding reading, so much so that I've used to report to get my bank to guarantee me a £500,000 loan against future sales of the MP3. Hit Song Science advises that:

A score of 7.00 or above denotes clear mathematical hit potential.

"Those Rules You Made" scores 7.07. My closest neighbours in the Music Universe are, apparently:

AALIYAH - MORE THAN A WOMAN
KASABIAN - PROCESSED BEATS
TRAVIS - WALKING IN THE SUN
SHAKIRA - WHENEVER WHEREVER
ELTON JOHN - ARE YOU READY FOR LOVE

If it made any bloody sense, it would almost be revealing. Hit Song Science do, in fact, cover their arses by adding that their mathematical rating doesn't guarantee hit potential:

Remember that in order to have a hit your song must also sound like a hit and be promoted like a hit.

I suppose I'd better try adding a few more friends on Myspace, then. Total Spend: £97.11.

Facebook Question

2007-08-10T17:06:00.000+01:00

MySpace, despite all its grotesque, misaligned boxes, hideous background images and unintuitive user interface, is still the natural home for the DIY musician (along with people with aliases like AquaBastard who ruin your profile by posting gigantic pictures of disfigured reptiles in the comments section.) Meanwhile, Facebook – with its whiter-than-white canvas, friendly typeface and cutesy buttons – is the place that real people choose to go. Especially people like me, over the age of 30 and desperately clinging to the last remnants of their youth.

Unfortunately, you can’t really be a band on Facebook, unless your band happens to be named after a person, like Franz Ferdinand or Danny Wilson. But if I can use a Facebook application to play a game of Scrabble with someone in Cyprus, surely I can use one to just play them a tune? That can't be too difficult, can it? Of the 2700 Facebook applications, only 146 come under the banner “Music”. Two new ones in particular – MyBand and fBand – offer a MySpace-like extension to your profile. But I want to get my song onto as many Facebook profiles - and heard by as many people - as possible.

So, to bring it to the well-groomed Facebook community, I just needed to find someone to write me a Facebook application. My mate Alf came to the rescue, in return for a few pints - well, £25, mates rates. The results harness all the mighty power of Web 2.0 to, er, play a tune. Look! I formed a band! And I'm on Facebook! Astounding! Total spend: £97.11

Assessment

2007-08-10T08:02:00.000+01:00

I've been pulled up short for using the royal "we" rather than talking normally, which is fair enough, so I'll stop that right now. This morning, I was musing on what a waste of time Garageband is, despite the fact that the songs sound far better on there than they do on MySpace, for some reason. Essentially, it's just bands reviewing each other. And of course, people in bands are human beings too, but it just has the feeling of being at an indie-band evening class. I entered the song into this "contest", but it's not clear how many years it's going to take for the contest to finish, or indeed if it ever will. But then, this morning, I got a review that re-affirmed my whole belief in the site:

We have a winner! Now that's how you achieve greatness.

Love that growling bass, choice of chords, ever so slightly flanged electric piano. Wonderful vocal tone. Ah hell, it's perhaps the most accomplished composition I've heard on Garageband.

All the ingredients are there. Top notch production. An arrangement to die for. Tight musicianship. If I could write and produce a jingle half as good, I'd be over the moon. Superb work fellas.

Written by some chap in Australia, apparently. No-one with any power, no-one who will be able to lever the song to the top of the charts - it's just a big of ego-stroking that means one more person likes the tune than did yesterday. I'm pathetically shallow.

Total MySpace profile views (well, it's as good a measure as any of how things are going, innit) - 457. Total spend: £72.11.

What Do You Think?

2007-08-08T22:44:00.000+01:00

So, we've had our MySpace page up for a couple of weeks. We've also had our Garageband page up for a week, too. Needless to say, we've had about 8 hits on the MySpace page, all of which are directly attributable to us having a look to see whether anyone apart from us has been there to have a look. They haven't.

On Garageband, it's slightly more complex, as you can't tell whether anyone has looked or not. So out of complete vanity, we succumbed to the juicy publicity-carrot they dangled before us: pay $19.99, and get your song entered into a Song Contest! Which we sheepishly did.

There's no evidence that this has made much difference at all; our single has been reviewed once, by a bloke called Johnny, who obviously knows his stuff. Johnny says:

"Production is a bit weak; some of it's distorted in the vocal area and the vocal is not quite on the mark tuning-wise."

He also adds that it's "good stuff", which claws it back a little bit. Clearly, this level of promotion is not sufficient. You can't just set up pages on the internet and expect people to stumble across them. What has to be done is Make Friends. It's time to resort to the address book. It's time to start friending people like never before. It's time to abuse relationships, and urge people to establish slightly-meaningless internet links, purely in order to bolster our own short-lived musical career. But we're not proud. The shameless whoring starts here. Total spend: £72.11.

In The Shops

2007-07-25T08:37:00.000+01:00

Getting your tunes onto vinyl or CD used to be expensive, but provided you had the cash in the bank it was easily done. More difficult was actually getting it into the shops. Distributors were, and are, a hard headed bunch of fuckers, and with good reason - they know full well that your record was likely to sell barely anything, as no-one beyond your own cultural and physical cul-de-sac had ever bloody heard of you. This led to the common phenomenon of bands with hundreds upon hundreds of their own CDs under their beds, propping up the TV, filling every conceivable space with a grim reminder of the unmarketability of your music.

Today, we have the mp3. It occupies no physical space whatsoever. We don't have to guess how many we're going to sell before we start. Every download just magics another copy out of the digital ether. If we have big hopes, but fail miserably, we won't trip over a teetering pile of mp3s every time we go to the bathroom. This is a relief. But how do we get it into the online stores?

iTunes is obviously the key. It's where the majority of online music is bought. Of course, Apple don't want to talk to a zillion different artists who all want to upload their warblings. So if you're unsigned (and god, have any of us ever been remotely signed, even for a second) you have to deal with a 3rd party.

If you search on Google for "getting on iTunes" or similar, you usually end up at a site called CDBaby. Investigate online forums talking about CDBaby, and you quickly realise that CDBaby are swamped beyond belief, and will take 3 months to get back to you after you've sent them, er 5 CDs - CDs? come on, it's 2007! - and might never get back to you at all. Sounds a bit like a CD distributor circa 2002. And they're in America. We'd like a home-grown solution.

And we found one. EmuBands is a company based in Glasgow. They'll get your music on iTunes, Napster, TuneTribe, MSN, Yahoo, MTV Download Centre, CD Wow, etc, with the minimum of fuss, it seems. For a 2-track single, as we've just made, we just pay £24.95, email them the WAV files of the tunes along with a JPG image, sit back and wait. We've asked nicely, and they reckon 4 weeks before we get in the stores. Provisional release date of Monday, August 20th. And we get to keep 100% of receipts. Now this, we like. Total spend: £62.29.

What About The Music?

2007-07-24T08:22:00.000+01:00

We've kind of glossed over the making of the tunes. Thing is, it's difficult to cost, isn't it. One thing about DIY in the 21st century is that gear is cheap, the technology is tidy and the results have the kind of sheen you used to dream of getting from your local studio, and they were charging you £120/day to sit around in damp conditions while a long-haired engineer ruined your magnum opus. Studios are shutting down left, right and centre, kids are buying Pods to put their guitars through - and suddenly they can sound like Metallica, in their bedroom. Electric guitars at home always used to sound like a sealion being plucked with a bag of sugar.

Without wishing to get techy, here's what we used. We either owned or borrowed this stuff, so we're saying that the total cost of recording = zero, otherwise where would you stop. Do we include our keyboard player's piano lessons when he was 8 years old?

1 x Powerbook G4. 1 x tambourine. 1 x MOTU828 audio interface. 1 x AKG mic. 1 x Logic Pro software package and a couple of plug ins. 1 x midi keyboard. 1 x bass. 2 x guitars. 1 x Behringer V-Amp. Lots of drum samples (sorry, drummer, we kept it simple.) 1 x Line 6 Bass Pod. 1 x pair of maracas. End of tech. Total cost: £37.34

Art Route

2007-07-23T08:02:00.000+01:00

So, the unanswerable question is posed: What do The Schema look like? We're cagey about this. Whether this is because we believe that a little mystery goes a long way, or because we're trying to avoid the hilarious world of band photography where everyone stands moodily in a line and pretends they're about to start a revolution, or because there's an outbreak of acne on the bass player's chin, well, we'll let you think what you like. But music does need a visual aspect, and after spending 2 fruitless hours dicking about in Photoshop with this image (cost £2.35) we decided to haul in the professionals. It didn't cost much (£25, mates' rates) but then again, they didn't have to do much. One JPG image, tastefully colour-matched, nicely laid-out, kept simple, represents us, represents the song. Change the website to match, bingo. Total spend: £37.34.

MyGarageSpaceBand

2007-07-22T10:12:00.000+01:00

So, we've recorded these two songs. It's like the old 7" a-side and b-side, I guess. Of course, this format is completely outdated, and we may just as well have recorded just the one song if we're going to release it on the internet. But, as Isaac Newton put it, for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction, which was relevant when I started typing that sentence.

You can't be a band on the internet without a MySpace page. That's like being a chef without a stove, or a football player without an offensive wife. So here it is. You can hear the tunes, ta-daa. But you can't have them yet, oh no. Streaming only. We're nothing if not tight-fisted. There's also a Garageband page, here. I'm a bit suspicious of Garageband, though, as they're already trying to persuade us to part with $19.99 to enter Those Rules You Made into some kind of song contest. We're fans of Eurovision, but I don't think Bucks Fizz or Lordi had to shell out $19.99. We'll ponder this one. Total spend: £9.99.

Domain Master

2007-07-21T10:10:00.000+01:00

So, a website and a band is born. Thanks to Freeparking, we've got the domain www.schema.co.uk for 2 years. I'm not sure we'll need it for 2 years, but there you go. Webhosting courtesy of Dreamhost, which we already have an account with, so costs nothing to stick another site on the plan. There you go, our very own web presence, for under a tenner. The blog system is done via the freebie system at Blogger, which is owned by Google, so, uh, so much for DIY, we've got the multinationals involved at the first hurdle. Brilliant. Total spend: £9.99.