Multiple CD Release Advice
My feeling in that you should space them out, maybe six months apart. Unless they're all very similar, it will "confuse" most critics (which one sheet takes precedence over the other?), and you might end up with nothing. Even when I ran XI, I found that if several cd's were released at the same time, that I got less coverage than if they'd been spaced out.
Several people noted that the issue is very different in pop music than it is in (post)classical - most pop musicians are careful to space their CDs out for maximum sales. As Galen Brown pointed out,
A slight majority recommended spacing CDs out, although Joseph Zitt noted,[W]hen Radiohead released Amnesiac close on the heels of their very successful Kid A, and acknowledged that the Amnesiac songs were recorded at the same time as the Kid A songs, people assumed that Amnesiac would be more of a collection of B-sides than anything else. Personally I like Amnesiac even better than I like Kid A, though.
Speaking as a record store guy (my day job is as classical music specialist as a large CD store in San Francisco), I know that if three CDs come in, looking like a uniform release and packaged as such, I would be quite tempted to make a display of them.
In general, however, Beth Anderson spoke for the composers in the audience:
I think you should get those CDs out as fast as possible. You could be hit by a bus and they might not happen at all. Life is short and CDs take a long time to finish and a very long time to let people know about them.
Cumulative average message: put CDs out when you can and don’t worry too much about control, unless you’re really famous enough to influence reception.
Categories:
Sites To See
American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects
Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station
New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking
The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross
William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer
Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation
Eve Beglarian's Home Page - great Downtown composer
Just Intonation Network - a meeting place for people interested in alternative tunings
Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site
The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer
Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues
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