Filtering Yourself As An Artist?

Written on April 9, 2011 – 10:42 am | by Jaxon Hallahan

Filtering Yourself As An Artist? By PennLive.com
Share Recently, I can’t stop listening to The Bouncing Souls‘ 2010 album “Ghosts on The Boardwalk.” Aside from some pretty catchy punk tunes, their method or releasing it was an interesting one; they released one song a month on iTunes, until the end of the year where they compiled all the songs onto the album and sold it in stores. Brilliant! Another one of my favorite bands that I constantly write about, Vestascension, do the exact same thing, but they’re one-upping The Bouncing Souls by giving it all away for free. Another similar concept is The Dear Hunter‘s newest album dealing with the colors, where the band will be releasing separate EPs throughout the year for each color, and are meant to be part of a bigger work overall. I’m sure there’s more cases just like these two out there, but the point is that it exists and it’s been done.
So it’s just a marketing strategy, right? I’m sure to them it is, but I’m seeing something so much more in this idea; it’s a way to get more criticism out of both yourself and your fans. Think about it like this-
You’re a fan of whatever band happens to be doing this. “Song A” released in January was pretty awesome, and now you’re anxiously awaiting “Song B” to be released next month. As it’s going to turn out, “Song B” isn’t really that great. Now, if the band had just released an album with twelve songs on it, and track one was great and track two was awful, you’d just skip right over to track three (assuming it was good), and pretty much forgive and forget right there, right? That not being the case, you’re going to disappointed with the band for giving you such a mediocre tune, and it’s going to make you more critical of each song released because you have so much time to listen and scrutinize. Now when the album drops at the end of the year with twelve songs on it, you’ll have a really in-depth opinion about it as a whole and as twelve separate pieces. I’m not saying that every fan is going to agree with me here, but I think I’m on to something at least.
Now from an artist perspective! As a (pretty bad) guitarist, if I were writing an entire album with a band, the songwriting process seems like it’ll allow you one song that’s not quite up to snuff with the rest of them, and as I’ve pointed out in the last paragraph, it’s a forgive and forget situation… but what about if that’s the only song you’re writing for the entire month that’s going to represent your most current state? It’s pretty embarrassing, and it’s going to make you think twice about half-assing a song because of the length of time it’s going to be concentrated on.
Overall, maybe the idea of releasing an album slow over the course of whatever amount of time is a good one. It kicks everyones’ “BS filter” into overdrive, and really get down to the nitty gritty of how things should be instead of just letting one song go because it’s surrounded by other good ones.
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Check out all the artists I mentioned in the article! I’ll be linking to the artists’ sites as much as I can from now on, as they’ve got all links to everything they do on there. So without further adieu, I give you… , , and ! Enjoy!

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