So much stuff has happened in the last month! Most of it I can’t talk about yet, but I can tell you about our plans to do studio recordings of some of our best pieces. 😉
We’ve been brainstorming ways to raise money. We can make and sell merchandise, of course, but why do you come and see a Hideo performance? You come for the music! Sadly, both the audio and video recordings of the premiere performance are less than stellar and there are complicated licensing issues if we wanted to then give away – much less sell – these recordings.
But a studio recording is different; you don’t have to ask permission first. Once a song has been released on phonorecord (i.e. a material object that embodies sounds, such as cassette tapes, CDs, or an audio-only digital format), anyone has the right to reproduce it on phonorecord as long as they pay a fee. This fee is known as mechanical rights, and is usually something along the lines of X cents per song per sale.
So then, how does one go about booking studio time? Check out your local university! Studio time is expensive – you have to pay for the day as well as for a sound engineer. You can easily spend $1000 or more just for one day. But campuses like SFSU have top-notch equipment and mixing for just the cost of the recording tapes.
As it turns out, Mike has connections with the sound department at SFSU. Scheduling is proving to be tricky, but if everything works out, we could be on iTunes by the end of April! How cool would that be?
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