[photograph by Michael Dunn]
Above is the working cover for the 14 track live album we recorded last month at The Green Burro for the Greensboro-based, Southern Rock, alt-Americana group, The Radials. Our featured act on opening night, Sorry About Dresden, will have their 10 track live album finished sometime this upcoming week.
Each band we put on receives a live album, professionally recorded, mixed and mastered in downtown Greensboro. We record live on 6 to 8 separate channels — depending on the amount of vocal mics and mic’d instruments needed — through our Mackie Onyx 1620 w/ a Firewire card straight to Tracktion 3 Logic Pro on our MacBook Pro. Dan “Mixmaster” Bayer, our resident sound engineer, has been mixing both live and in the studio for years with outstanding quality.
Once the album is complete, we license it with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. It basically means that anyone can use the music, even remix or sample it, as long as they give proper attribution and don’t use it commercially. Of course individual cases of copyright permission can still be managed individually, so the artists have complete control of their product.
Our distribution plan is where we shift away from the traditional label route — not to say that we consider ourselves or strive towards being a “label” on any decipherable level. Each album will be uploaded to the Internet Archive, where fans can download the tracks for free. We’ll also work with artists to get their albums out to spots such as Last.fm, iLike and AmieStreet while schooling them on how their fans can help them in the internet age by doing simple, free things like scrobbling tracks to their Last.fm account when using iTunes or their iPod, tagging tracks, recommending tracks, etc.
We’ll provide a package of audio tracks to the musicians — along with cover art, a professionally mixed video and professionally shot pictures of the show — but it’ll be up to each band to get their music to online stores such as iTunes and CDBaby or physical retail spots. We’re not interested in managing the machinations of music sales. Our profit margin is much greater designing software.
Once the product has been delivered, we’ll provide a free download of each album, along with links off to corresponding media from the evening back here at HQ. All we ask in return from people downloading the tracks is their email address and an optional PayPal donation to help us recoup our initial costs.
All of this is a designed effort to build community around diverse local artists, with local music fans, while still providing access to people around the world with overlapping tastes of music.
The Radials Live at the dotmatrix project by the dotmatrix project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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