The forum · September 2003 – July 2004 › GENERAL
How to make Trancecontrol successful
Started by Hardwired · 2 posts · 8 views · this thread in the Internet Archive
Hardwired14 Jul 2004, 00:02 These are some tips I think are worth gold. I would like to see that trancecontrol gets good revenues for the work they do. Feel free to criticize or to write additional suggestions.
- Give your listeners/potential customers the feeling that you are done at the moment. What you have produced up to now is all you will ever provide them. As long as you keep on stomping out new titles every month (or at least keep up the promise/feeling that you will), potential customers will wait for your new releases. They won’t buy what’s available, since they think: „Maybe something new/better/more shiny/more [whatever the listener likes] comes out, so I will wait.“ Your listeners wait for new releases since you started releasing. Give them the feeling that your are done. You did well enough.
- When you decide to produce something new, don’t tell your listeners, or even worse, DO NOT release each single track after each single track. This leads to the „let’s wait“ syndrome (see above).
- Decide on a style for each album. You are into a lot of styles. Dream trance, trance, psy trance, hard trance, acid, whatever. You distract potential buyers if you mix your albums too much. Myself your example, I lke psy trance and hard trance. If you release an album which features only a few tracks of my preferred style, and some tracks of dream trance, I won’t buy it. I would calculate: „There are three tracks of my preferred style, and five other tracks, so I pay a lot for each track I like.“ But on the other hand, if all the tracks I are of styles I like, I would get more for my bucks. Thus I would be more willing to buy that particular album.
- Implement a decent online shopping system. If you are into website programing, use the paypal.com system. If not, use a system like regnow.com. At the moment, even if your listeners WOULD buy your music, they COULD NOT. If this statement is false, change your website in a way that a surfer finds your music store. A store where I can buy shirts with „trance control“ printed on it, is not something I need if I just like your music.
- If you want to give your music for free, give your listeners the chance to support you by donations. Add a „if you like our music, support us!“ button on your main page.
- I am not a money addict. But I think in our world money is a reward for achivements. If you don’t get money, sooner or later you will get frustrated and you will stop releasing new music. So give your listeners the chance to reward you. You have earned it.Alle14 Jul 2004, 04:28 Hey!
Before I start commenting on your post I'd like to say that I take any serious advice with great respect. I've brought myself up with the belief that there's always a better way, and therefore I'm happy to momentarily overthrow my own concept to make room for new ideas and put them into my own perspective.
I've been reading your post 10 or so times now and spent about an hour or so thinking over a cup of fresh morning coffee. And here's my point of view.
§1. Give your listeners/potential customers the feeling that you are done at the moment.
I'd say this in general is a very good advice, simply to get people more excited about new releases and so on. However it will not work for us. I've noticed in the past that, when we've been inactive in the studio - people tend to turn their attention elsewhere. I know I would loose intrest if my fav band suddenly stoped letting me know they're alive n' got stuff going on.
§2. When you decide to produce something new, don’t tell your listeners...
In my opinion there's no right or wrong here - I treat others the way I want to be treated myself, and in direct translation for this topic - I'd like to keep track of what's going on, hence my brief reports & updates.
We went public with our filosophy of releasing work for free years ago. And one important thing that I've learnt during my years is to NEVER ever loose ground and/or forget what got me to my present status. I must admit though that there are times when we don't release things we create. A good example is 'Sunrise 2004' that'll be on 12" in September. However the reason for this is to get more DJ's to play the track as well as to save the exclusiveness for the label and the release.
§3. Decide on a style for each album...
We've been adviced to split trance[]control into several smaller parts, where each projectname stand for a sertain style. This can be a good move in many ways, yet very confusing at the same time. I'm very determined not to split our past creatios under various project-names, however we might have an ace or two up our sleves for the future :)
As for the albums - In case you're reffering to the M2002 Volumes - they're released in the same order we create them - we don't select songs and we even number the tracks as they're produced. In terms of other albums, It's a strong point, however I'm falling back on my original theory here. If you give an album a bit of diversity & twist, and try to build the album as a sonic journey instead of making it a package of similar typed songs. Then I'm pretty sure you'll have an album that will last way longer and give more joy in the longrun.
You say you're into hardtrance & psy and I can see how you probably would find our albums a bit boring as they all are mostly progressive/melodic emphasised with just a few harder tracks on each CD.
§4. Implement a decent online shopping system.
I'm glad you bring this up :) It gives me a good kick in the butt to finnish off the work with our new webbpage. We currently sell our CD's via Ampcast - and I must admit that it's not very obvious from viewing our webbpage :)
§5. If you want to give your music for free...
This is why we've got the VIP Vault - http://www.trancecontrol.com/mp3 - up and same thing here, our webbpage doesn't really throw this info in your face...
§6. I am not a money addict...
Naturally our dream is to get back to where we where and again make a living off of our music... However, look @ history - music and rythm have been with mankind since the birth of thesame yet musicbusiness itself have only been a profitseeking industry since 1920 (A total of aprox 85 years or so). Surely people have lived off of entertainment before the 1920's. However, it's only after the age of recordings where we've seen music being turned into an actual industry feeding others then just the entertainers themselves.
- Just my way of throwing some perspective light.
I end this by extending my great respect & gratitude to your suggestions and will to help. Feel free to 'bite' back :)
//Alex