shoegaze

Here’s my take on what it’s like to be in a shoegaze band in the 2000’s entitled: Shoegaze, and the Dawn of Internet Downloading. This is a fairly long and humorous/tongue in cheek story with some fairly accurate insight and bits of relevant information. I’m not gonna say it’s 99% accurate or even 13% accurate as it doesn’t go for every band. Some have it better, some worse. Some of this is based off personal experience; some is from what I know from other friend’s bands, and some off working with and for various labels. Really it’s applicable to most bands but I wrote it as shoegaze-centric in particular.


You’re starting a shoegaze band. Alright! You got some pretty good tunes and found 4 others who are down too play with you. All you have a love of the music. No one has any unrealistic ideas cos it’s shoegaze man, it’s just never gonna be very popular. Which means you’re not gonna get rich off it. Who cares? You’re all just doing it cos you want to. You like to hang with each other playing music you love. And it’d be rad to go play some gigs on a different coast, tour through the country, maybe even other countries! Oh and get a record out. Man this is gonna be great!

Some of you have some decent equipment. Others need a bit of an upgrade. Most bands members standard setups (guitar, amp, cables, effects or kit) would average maybe close to around $1000. Shoegaze bands a bit more most likely with the effects. So about $2500 of your bands personal monies go into guitar, amp and effects upgrades. Right off the bat cos you got some specific sounds and tones in mind. The drummer buys some new heads, sticks and a drum key cos it’s all about “proper tuning”, not the actual kit. No one speaks drummer so… K, whatever, cool. Let’s rock!

So the bass player’s mom has a basement you can all practice in. Yeah, no practice space fees! Only thing is you gotta be done by 8pm on weekdays cos she likes watching Cops and needs to hear what the criminals are saying cos it’s “always funnier than reading it”. Oh and no weekends! Well, you figure in a few months you’ll be playing gigs on the weekends so cool. 8PM stop is a drag cos every one gets off work around 5. The one guitarist is a bartender on Tuesdays and Thursdays at that cool bar where no one shows up until 11:30. And the bass player has to watch his kid on Monday so his girlfriend can take a night ceramic class at the local college. So that leaves Wednesdays and Fridays. It’ll have to do cos you don’t want to pay $200 a month to share some leaky warehouse spot in a not so good area across town with 4 other bands. Someone’s already stolen your hubcaps once down there. And you’ve only ever been down there once.

So after 2 months of practicing and getting things sounding pretty good you go get a gig. It’s 2 weeks later opening up for a band that has a decent local following. The supposed “headlining” band on the bill tapped out when they found out that they couldn’t play 2nd out of 4 bands on the bill. They just wanted the headlining credit. Whoa, you’ve already learned something. But seriously, you’re the opening band no matter what. You don’t care one bit at all, you got your first gig so cool.

You manage to get most your friends out, but you played too early for most them to see you. Oh well, you party down the rest of the gig. But you did really well and someone in the crowd books for some other bar, er, venue in town and wants you to play there. Rock! As the weeks pass you keep getting more gigs. Some are to pretty sparse crowds as your friends can’t come out to every gig but you’re all getting more confident each time, tighter and just better overall. You figure the only way to start getting better gigs is to record at least a demo. Plus the myspace band page you got isn’t really a band page til you get some tunes up. And you’re tired of your friends sending messages like “dude where dem tunes at man gets dem shitz up there!”

You don’t really have the money at the time to go into a studio. The gigs you’ve played didn’t really pay out much at all. And you learned another important lesson: most venues only really give members 2 drink tickets a piece. Bogus! So the cash already went to booze. But, one of you has a laptop with garageband and an interface. Awesome, it’ll have to do. You gather up what mics you can, some outboard gear and start recording a demo. It’s slow going at first as you all try to figure out how garageband works and what you’re going for but flies by with ease towards the end. After a month you got 5 tunes that sound pretty good! You listened to them on every speaker system you could find to make the sure the mixes sound right. You even smoked some weed even though you don’t smoke weed just to see if you could hear something wrong or get a different perspective. Sounds good to all your ears. Or as good as it will with the knowledge and equipment you have. Well, the drummer thinks his drums aren’t loud enough in certain parts but begrudgingly excepts being overruled. Actually you think your demo is good enough that you figure you could try to send it to some smaller labels and see if anyone’s interested. Who knows?

After looking a lot online and seeing what labels such and such bands are on and researching labels in general you find two that might actually be interested. The main part of “interested” is they take unsolicited material. Awesome! You ship off cds and a badly proofread bio and an awesome blurry pic of your band. Oh, and a friend of yours knows some dude with a label around town that puts out mostly bad indie rock. Ahhh, ok, you give your friend one to get “Mr. Bad Indie” too just cos.

About two weeks go by and just when you’re all thinking of maybe getting online and researching some more places cos the only person who got back to you was Mr. Bad Indie (who you got introduced to at a pub the same night you gave it to your friend, cos Mr. Bad Indie HAD to talk to you that night. Cos he’d love to put it out, of course. But really, Mr. Bad Indie kinda creeps you out so you don’t want to sign with him if you can avoid it). Anyway, just when you think it’s time to hunt some more places down you get an email from one of the labels. He’s interested (the label = it’s one person)! Alright! So he, we’ll call him “Label”, sends his number in the email and you get all your band mates down to your place and think about what to say over a case of Pabst, and you try to work up the nerve to call the guy and after false-dialing for the 10th time, that 5th Pabst hits and the courage comes flowing. You finally dial all the numbers to put a call through. He answers!

After chatting for 10 minutes you hang up and your head’s swimming. You come away with a few things. It probably wasn’t a good time to pound a few Pabst’s. Cos everything you planned on saying, you forgot. But Label was ultra cool and obviously knows his shit. At least when it comes to running a small label. And most importantly you come away with an album deal! With a $2500 recording advance! And an initial print run of 1000 copies! Oh Baby! So THIS is what it’s like to get signed to a small label? Awesome! (small side note – this rarely happens. Especially for a shoegaze band. I’m just being very tongue in cheek at the mome and this helps propel the story).

The guy really likes your music. He thinks your music could pretty easily sell itself with a little buzz from some reviews at the key shoegaze review spots, some of the decent side indie mags and some mp3’s online. He likes that you’re willing to tour. But he wants all the tunes on the demo, re-recorded and 5 more and do a whole album. Cool, this is great! Just got to write a few more tunes. You spend the next week churn up 3 more tunes + the 8 in your set you figure you’ve got an album.

So a month or so later everyone’s practiced up and ready to go into this dude’s studio where pretty much everyone in town goes to record. He’s not the cheapest and you’re not entirely sure he knows much about what you’re going for sonically or even if you really like his production values… But he’s got some serious cred man! He’s got a long list of local bands who’ve gone on to better things who recorded there. A couple you even kinda liked. Kinda. Even that one band recorded here that really made it pretty big, but no one likes anymore. They changed. But that’ll never happen to your band. You’re in a shoegaze band, you don’t have to worry about getting big and having to change for suits. It’s all about noise, fun and blissing out damnit!

Ok, so recording is going good. You got an entire weekend and 5pm-1am for the 5 weekdays following. All of you show up everyday that can. Well, except the drummer. He got all his bits done on that initial Saturday and hasn’t been seen since. As long as the drums are loud enough, he’s cool with everyone else handling the rest. Ok. But you realize that $2500 isn’t going as far as you thought it would by Wednesday. You hit Label up for more money. Label asks how much? You say, I don’t know yet really. Label says, “let me listen to the rough mixes”. You immediately get bounces and email them to him. The next morning Label writes back “I think they’re fine as it is. Just do the final mixes with what you got. Get them mastered if he’s good at it and it’ll be ready go!” Which you translate as: not giving you any more money. Ok. Well, you know your album is not right yet. You don’t want it to go out the door until it is. So you confer with your bandmates and decide to make up the difference out of pocket. The engineer dude is cool and knocks some cash off the total bill cos it’s been slow lately and he says he digs the music. Really, he just likes flirting with your keyboard player… But whatever, you’re only gonna have to make up the dif to $300. Score!

You send the finals to the label and label dude loves it. You’re keyboard player is a graphic designer, well, went to school for it at least, but she works at a Starbucks. Don’t worry, hers isn’t one that’s closing. She really, REALLY wants to do the artwork and everyone’s cool with it. She has a hacked version of the latest Adobe Suite at home and a good digital camera, so rock! She goes and takes some awesome pics at a long exposure of car lights going by this scenic outlook at dusk with an observatory out in the distance and pulled all the colours out and made it all vibrant like. Looks totally rad! Oh and this one blurry pic of the bass player playing with multiple exposures that’s kinda like the Loveless cover, but totally different. Way cool! Anyway she templated all the artwork out in illustrator, created outlines of all the text so there’d be no hiccups at the printers. She’s a genius. And better yet, you don’t have to pay for someone else to do it. So the illustrator files get sent to Label a week later.

Discs come back from the press a month later. No hiccups and more importantly, it looks and sounds great. But the release date won’t be for another 2 months cos the label has to promote it ahead of time so there are reviews out on its release. Label says he’s gonna spend $500 in mailing, packaging, and little one sheets sending the album out for reviews. That will be a part of recoup. He gives your band 100 discs as part of your deal, at cost and go towards recoup. That leaves 900. Cost on 1000 for 4 panel color artwork was $1.25 per cd. Plus the $500 on promo and the 100 he gave on recoup you’re looking at $1.90 per cd.

Label is mad cool and giving you $2.50 per cd once he recoups! Alright! so $1.90 x 900 + $2500 advance means he needs $4210 back before either your band or Label starts making anything. He’s gonna sell the cds at $10 off his site but the distros are gonna need to get it cheaper for bulk purchases. Plus it’s available in more places then. So distro price (amazon, tonevendor, parasol, etc) is $7.00. So essentially, your disc would have to sell 421 copies at $10 for Label to recoup before you see any money. More if a lot of copies are “sold” out to the distros (depends on the distro whether they flat out buy or can return if they don’t sell by a given time). You don’t know this but a lot of smaller shoegaze bands sold on say, tonevendor, they’re pretty lucky to sell 500 copies of an album over a year - or ever. But you don’t know this so no worries!

A couple months later the reviews start coming in. And they’re pretty positive to great. Rock on! You only got called out on two rips: one was a very similar bit of vocal melody from a tune on the Telescopes Celeste 12” and one was a guitar bit from an unreleased Slowdive tune. How these guys know these things?? Crazy. You don’t even know these tunes. You find these tunes online and download them (you figure out of print or never released = ok to DL) listen, and just don’t hear it. You play the parts in question to your girlfriend and some of your bandmates and they all hear it. You explain exactly what you’re doing melodically and what the tunes are doing melodically by dah dah dahing and pointing the notes in the air. Everyone still says they’re the same and laugh at you. They call you “Dahling” which comes with a point of a finger and it sticks as your nickname for years to come. Good going. You forget about the “rips” and move on.

The album finally comes out and there’s a decent buzz for a no-name shoegaze band like yourselves for a first release! The label manages to sell 300 copies the first month. You have a cd release party in town and a couple gigs after and manage to sell 75 of your allotted 100 cds. The other 25 were split between your band: 5 a piece personal copies, for girlfriends and moms, especially your bass players mom. It was last seen being used as a coaster for her gin and tonics.

So cool, you made $750 off those sales. But you remember the $300 you put in to the record yourselves so really you’re only $450 up. You pay yourselves back. But still, that $450 probably doesn’t cover the gas, transportation, food, booze, cigarettes and parking it cost to make the record or play the gigs. So essentially you’re at zero or minus. But no one seems to really care. You got your first disc out and played some pretty killer gigs with most your friends out (and actually showing up to see you play) and your bands stature is growing in town and out there in the world. Life’s sweet!

The second month the record slows to selling 100 copies. It could be more but one day when you were looking for reviews you found a link to download your album on the net. The link takes you to another page with links to 5 sites that have your album for download! You click through them and download them and yep, it’s your whole record. You get to one site, mediashare or something and it actually tells you how many times it’s been downloaded there. 195 times! And that’s just from one of these sites! Oh well, what you gonna do? You brush it off.

The label finally gets you up on itunes! There was a hiccup there, but it’s corrected. Sweet everyone that has a computer pretty much has itunes you figure. Your music is gonna be way more easily available. But you’re not gonna see any money ‘til a quarter year from now. Ok, you can live with that if that’s how it works.

You want more cds to sell at your shows, but Label hasn't recouped yet. Label is once again mad cool though and will sell you your discs at $5 a cd that doesn't go towards recoup as you'll be making more money off the sales of these. The label just makes some money back. Cool! What a nice guy! (as you the reader can tell this is a rarity). So instead of messing up the books and making everything more confusing you just use that $450 you got from your last batch of cds to buy 90 more cds from him (90 x 5 = 450). Actually, you buying your cds has gotten Label pretty close to recouping.

Third month after release your label sells 75. They've recouped! You’re starting to make money there now. Label owes you $137.50 at this point. You've managed to sell 40 from your stash over 6 gigs! Whoa, that’s sick! That's $200, but you took a loss of $50 average (after being paid by the venues) at each gig on gas and food and drinks so... you're down $100. But label owes you $137.50. So in fuzzy logic you’re up $37.50.

Over the next 3 months the label sells discs at a steady decline of 60, 50 and 40 a month. itunes has paid and, alright! You sold 200 tunes! You and Label had agreement to split the itunes money. BUT its itunes. You didn't know they take $.70 per DL. So you and Label split the $.29 per song. You make about $30.

You ask Label if they could send a check for what they owe you at this point. Label is (surprisingly) cool about that and whips off a check for the $542.50 you've made so far. You guys decide to split it cos a couple people in the group really need some cash so you each make $108.5.

Over the next 6 months the Label manages to sell out the remaining 185 discs. And you manage to sell the rest of your discs at shows out of town (but you take a loss every gig cos you got take two cars to gigs and gas prices suck). Congratulations! You managed to be one of the few current shoegaze bands that could move 1000 discs in less than a year. You managed to get $20 from itunes for each of the two quarters during this time. You are owed $502.50.

The reason you started a shoegaze band is cos you love the music and you wanted to have fun and maybe tour some, see places, meet people. You knew that you weren’t gonna make much money. In this time many people have written to you about coming to play their towns, mostly on myspace. You really, REALLY would love nothing more than to do this and meet and hang out with people, have fun and play your music. But the $500 the label owes you would only really cover a van rental for an East Coast tour. Gas is crazy. And cos you play in a shoegaze band, you’re probably not gonna be making much money from the venues you play at as most the dates would be weekdays on bills with bands that are relatively in your same position and: most people won’t know who you are; people just aren’t going to shows as much cos they either “got better things to do”; are too cool; aren’t gonna hang around late on weekdays cos they got work; or really want to come out but don’t want to drive cos of gas prices.

You figure you’ll probably only make enough money from the venues for gas to the next gig, cos most the bills are 4-5 bands. And the $10 door prices they’re gonna have to charge tend to keep more people away (sider: In March 2000 we were going through a gas “crisis” when it went up to $1.54 a gallon. The average door at venues for bands like this still hadn’t changed much from the early 1990’s; meaning $5. Now we’re at or were at $4.00 a gallon. Anyone who would like to do the math can do so. This is a prime factor as to why bands don’t tour as much as they used to. Cos the door prices haven’t increased with the gas, and most people going to shows don’t really take this into consideration. They still want to pay $5 or maybe even $8. $10 is usually “stretching it”. I as well am at fault for rationalizing at times “yeah but $10 bucks, I don’t know..” Of course what we’re all getting paid for our jobs hasn’t kept up either so…).

Label isn’t gonna repress your disc at this time cos he doesn’t see enough demand. Translated this means there’s too much risk that he’ll lose money or he can’t chance that his money will be tied up too long sitting on the discs at this time. Label now says he wanted you to tour when the disc came out. But you didn’t have any money and no one knew you then. It would have been even worse. So Label’s not gonna give you money to tour (most little labels don’t anyway). Plus he has other acts releases to fund as well coming up. Label just can’t spare the money. But Label still says touring is a good idea, that you should do it and try to drum up enough demand to repress the disc. Still, he’s not giving you any money besides what he owes you.

Bringing tshirts and what little cds and merch you have is in no way gonna fund your day to day costs even if you got free places to crash. Most your band are on a tight budget in life and can’t lose much money or they won’t be able to pay their bills. So, your band unfortunately can’t go on tour. The hit you’d take would be too hard. Depressed, you all take a little time off to actually have a life.

So you’re back home after this realization and you’re on the computer. You find that link again to DL your album on some shoegaze blog. For kicks you click it and are given all the options on where to DL it from: rapidshare, sharebee, mediashare and a few others. You click on the mediashare and see it’s been downloaded 756. Just from there. You come to the conclusion that total on just those 5 DL sites your album has been DL’d most likely over 2000 times. You figure that if you sold all your discs ONLY to the people who downloaded your album via one of these 5 DL sites there’d still be 1000+ people buy your album. And really, you’d be VERY surprised if 100 people who DL the album on the net actually bought the disc. So that leaves 1900+ that didn’t. Which if they all bought the album would have given you at least $4750+ extra and you could have feasibly financed a tour or two off that. You could actually start growing your band more by playing different parts of the country. Or hell, you could have paid for your own studio time or bought all the equipment needed to record your next album and self release it and maybe make a lot more money to try and tour off of. But all your fans that believed in you and actually bought your album and want to see you play their town are shit out of luck. They’ll probably never be able to see your band play, ever. Oh, unless you get big. But then most of them probably won’t like you anymore if you got “too big”, so….. Oh well. You get in a bit of a depressed state which spurs on into a creative rut and your band lies in limbo for a few months as you sort yourself out.

Somewhere towards the end said three month period something happens, everything starts turning your way and your inspiration comes back. You can’t explain why or point to one specific reason, just everything seems to converging right in your head and life. Now every time you pick up a guitar you come up with a great tune within in 10 minutes. Yeah! During your funk you could sit there for 6 hours straight and come up with nothing, which depressed you more so you’d just go watch an Ace of Cakes marathon for 5 hours on your couch or out to the pubs and get hammered and hope the next day the inspiration would come. Well now it’s back and you have at least 9-11 good new tunes to introduce to the band. You’re all fired up ready to get back up from your knock and take another crack. Get the momentum going again. You call up all the members to schedule a practice but…

…Your window of opportunity with your lineup has collapsed. Life and survival have taken over in their minds. Stagnant waters absolutely breed uncertainty. And due to the rather sour wake up call of the amount of work for no gains it takes to be in a smaller band that’s trying to get somewhere, the prospect for more is rather daunting, grim and plainly just not feasible.

First your keyboard player has gotten upgraded to Grande at Starbucks. She can no longer be a part of your band. She wishes she could, but she has to close out most nights and run the numbers. Plus they have good health benefits there and she really needs that for her own peace of mind. Oh and that night where you both got hammered at a pub and kissed, yeah, she thinks it’d be bad to be around you too much, especially since you still have your girlfriend. She doesn’t want to cos any problems or ruin your friendship. Top Lass. Ok, you understand.

Next you call up your bass player and find that his wife has gotten into a local University for ceramics. It’s fairly intensive and now he’s gonna have to take care of his kid at nights while she goes to night classes after working all day. But he’ll play bass on recordings if needed. He wants to play, just can’t. Oh and he still lives with his mom so… no more practice spot. Ok. No keys, no bass, no practice spot.

Call the drummer. See the drummer is really actually a pretty damn good drummer. And he looks pretty cool to boot! So much so that he got asked by this “up and coming” local group (that sound a lot like the Killers..) to fill in for a gig or two behind the kit. Well, now that’s kinda turned into more. They actually are getting paid a bit and doing fairly well with lots of plans for the future. They’ve only been around for 3 months but are already heading into a studio to record their album that’s gonna be out on a fairly decent sized label you’ve heard of and then will be doing a national tour to promote it. Drummer can’t really pass the opportunity up. They’ve “stolen” your drummer. You know the singer of this band from being around and don’t really like him. He’s your typical good looking, arrogant trust fund kid who’s good at schmoosing into getting his way. He has a Zelda haircut and looks like a walking STD vending machine, but always has a different pretty chick with him. You pretty much despise him, but not due to jealousy. Ok, partially. The not working and having money would be sweet and being a chick magnet wouldn’t be so bad either you suppose.

Well crap, you’re basically down an entire band. You already know how hard it is gonna be to replace all these members in your town and it doesn’t look good. You call the other guitar player, he’s an old friend of yours. He’s sticking by you and he’ll put the word out that you guys are looking for new members. He can’t really think of anybody now, but he’ll ask around when he’s working his bartending job.

After a few more months of looking, you haven’t found anyone who fits or understands what you’re trying to do. You decide to just start recording as a two piece and abandon the idea of having a band that plays live. Maybe grab all you’re now former members to come in a various times, when available to do their parts. Whomever, as long as they get it done right. Thus now you are a Recording Project and not a Band. Band’s plays gigs, Recording Projects are merely that: some people recording in a studio. Ok.

You think when you finish you’re next album, the two of you might actually make some money, or rather not lose money. You talk to Label and talk about what’s going on with your “band” you’re your plan for the next album. Label says he’ll put it out, but that he doesn’t want to take the chance in giving you a recording advance if you’re not playing live. If it doesn’t sell as well he still wants to be able to recoup within 300 sold. But anything sold over 500 he’ll bump up your net profit to $3.00 per. Ok, cool, sort of (There are gonna be a few artists reading this that are like $3.00 an album! How can I sign to this label?!? This is one of the major inaccuracies of this story. Almost nobody gets paid $2.50, or $3.00 an album. And still, in this entire scenario, this band does and is losing money. So, yeah, this is almost a best case scenario. And it’s still pretty bleak huh?)

So now you have to come up with the money to record. Doh! Neither one of you have any savings as you live basically paycheck to paycheck. Or you prefer “Urban Bedouins”. You figure it’ll be cheaper and easier to come up with $2500-$3000 for studio time instead of buying a $2750 Apple G5 and a decent sized monitor and money for a MBox and new mics and a 8 track mix board for drums, etc, etc. and learn how to properly use all that equipment and software. But you figure if each of you socks away at least a $100 a month, it’s gonna take you a year to save…

Well the next album is gonna be great once you get the money together. Whenever that will be. After making all the sacrifice to do this you hope not too many people download the next album. Or at least that people buy the album so you can recoup your costs. But that is perhaps a bit too wishful of thinking. You might have to resign to the fact that you’re just gonna lose money playing music. I mean it’s just for fun anyway, right? Everybody likes to put lots of their time, energy, talent AND money into losing money for fun, right??

Welcome to playing in a shoegaze band in the internet age thanks in no small part to downloading music piracy. Please come drown in a sea of sound… and walk the plank of debt.

nicely done... sounds like our lives...hahaha

hah, well written there EJ.

paraphrasing for those who don't have time to read all that....

"it's a shit business"

thank you. i think certain bits are pretty straight up accurate. as stated the biggest inaccuracy is in the amount made by a band per disc sold (especially considering the advance and 100 cd allotment). This is really an amazingly good deal I'm using here and the end result is still essentially a loss.

I didn’t proofread it very well. Please excuse the stray bits of and incorrect usage of some words.