things meeting minutes, 21.07.03. (1 Viewer)

[silo]

minutes of things meeting, 21.07.03.

there: tom (silo), cormac (egg_), ronan (mumblin' deaf ro), liam (lmd64) and, much later on, puffing for breath, allen (unclealo). boy = 5. girl = 0.

discussed: the compilation, predominantely. the zine, briefly. the provincial distro, which turned into a talk about the possibility of getting professional promotion, but that's just an idea.

t'others will fill in details, i'm sure...

(oh almighty moderators: add this thread to things minutes meetings and then kill it)

 

[billygannon]

Heya... sorry about this whole zine thing... just really up to me eyeballs at the moment.

I'm going to be meeting Colm Downes from the FMC this week (probably Thursday)....
A lot should come from this.

 

[egg_]

sorry about this whole zine thing... just really up to me eyeballs at the moment

What was that you said when you volunteered to edit the zine? Something like 'you may cruelly punish me if there is no zine out by July'?

 

[billygannon]

What was that you said when you volunteered to edit the zine? Something like 'you may cruelly punish me if there is no zine out by July'?

Bring out the rack. Usual Billy stuff of putting way too much on my plate.

 

[egg_]

Stuff we decided:

Compilation
- The compilation is a stall sampler.
- Liam will contact everyone on the stall and ask if they want to submit a track.
- If there are more interested acts than space on a single CD, we'll decide then how to narrow it down
- The CD will be a pressed CD, not a CD-R
- Basic information on the acts (name, website, contact details, broad description of the music) will be printed on the inlay card
- Promo copies of the CD will be sent to a list of people who we hope will promote the music on it. All other copies of the CD will be available on the stall, where we will give them away with sales AND give them for FREE, but expect to get a donation in return

The last point needs a little bit of explanation. Tom felt (and I tend to agree) that to give free copies to journalists and the like while charging normal punters for a copy isn't right-and-proper, and that we should either charge both or give free copies away to both. However we all agreed that it is impractical to charge people like John Kelly and Leagues for a copy, and to give away copies to punters would mean we risked people taking the CD because it's free rather than because they're interested. So we decided that, seeing as we're giving the CD to media types without demanding payment, but expecting that they will pay us in kind by giving us media exposure, likewise we should give the CD to punters also without demanding payment but expecting that they will pay us 2 euro.
I know a lot of people are gonna go "what's the difference?" and a lot of people are gonna go "oh you're so idealistic" but fuckit, I'm an idealistic fella and I think it's an elegant solution to a real dilemma - one of the things I love most about THings is that we can make our own rules and don't have to sacrifice ethical consistency if we don't want to. Also, for the hardhead commercialists among us, I'd imagine that our policy on this stuff, being novel, gives journalists an 'angle' when writing about us and so might work in our favour as far as getting publicity goes

Tour
Kieran wasn't there, but it seems that he has got a new job and as a result isn't able to spend as much time on this as he thought he would. As a result, the autumn tour is in doubt

Provincial distribution
Well, it seems our experiment in provincial distribution in the Republic has been largely a failure.
Limerick: Ivan has sold a handful records on an AMC stall, but hasn't put any records into any shops
Galway: there are some records in a shop, and Gugai has had them on his stall, but it's proving very difficult to find out if we have sold any (which we probably haven't)
Cork: records are in Plugd, but we have sold nothing
The north is kind of a different story, cos of the untiring work of Yakuza and The Evangelists.

So we conclude - unless we have a very active person in a town (or far better publicity), we won't sell anything, and we're wasting our time.

Where to now? Allen thought that perhaps we should talk to Gael-Linn or some other Irish distributor about taking on some or all of the things catalogue. We simply don't have the resources to do the distribution ourselves. BUT, as we have learned, we won't sell a damn thing unless the music is publicised, and again we don't have the resources to do publicity ourselves - really, we're all music-makers, not marketers, and we don't have the time or the skills or the interest in this shit. So, we talked for a little while about getting interested bands/labels together to pay a publicity person to do this shit for us.
I'm gonna start other threads on the distro and paying a promo person ...

 

[LMD64]

Compilation
- The compilation is a stall sampler.
- Liam will contact everyone on the stall and ask if they want to submit a track.

as regards those who've already contacted me, i'll contact youse again anyway, just to confirm/fill you in on any extra details

- If there are more interested acts than space on a single CD, we'll decide then how to narrow it down
- The CD will be a pressed CD, not a CD-R
- Basic information on the acts (name, website, contact details, broad description of the music) will be printed on the inlay card
- Promo copies of the CD will be sent to a list of people who we hope will promote the music on it. All other copies of the CD will be available on the stall, where we will give them away with sales AND give them for FREE, but expect to get a donation in return

as to funding the compilation, we reckon that, given the fact that it's a promotional tool, we/I felt it's only fair that each band/act contributes towards the cost of producing the CD. We estimate the cost per band to be in the range of €50, assuming there to be roughly 18 bands on the CD.

18 bands on a 74min CD means an average track length of 4:06 per track, give or take.

The last point needs a little bit of explanation. Tom felt (and I tend to agree) that to give free copies to journalists and the like while charging normal punters for a copy isn't right-and-proper, and that we should either charge both or give free copies away to both. However we all agreed that it is impractical to charge people like John Kelly and Leagues for a copy, and to give away copies to punters would mean we risked people taking the CD because it's free rather than because they're interested. So we decided that, seeing as we're giving the CD to media types without demanding payment, but expecting that they will pay us in kind by giving us media exposure, likewise we should give the CD to punters also without demanding payment but expecting that they will pay us 2 euro.
I know a lot of people are gonna go "what's the difference?" and a lot of people are gonna go "oh you're so idealistic" but fuckit, I'm an idealistic fella and I think it's an elegant solution to a real dilemma - one of the things I love most about THings is that we can make our own rules and don't have to sacrifice ethical consistency if we don't want to. Also, for the hardhead commercialists among us, I'd imagine that our policy on this stuff, being novel, gives journalists an 'angle' when writing about us and so might work in our favour as far as getting publicity goes

oh you're so idealistic