Here are the Tipsy Gypsies performing ‘Pokin’ Around‘ and ‘Baby, Won’t You Leave Me‘,
Live on ‘Morning Cup Of Jazz’ on KCBX 90.1, Central Coast, CA on December 3rd, 2009.
In all fairness it was 10 am, which is a little early for musicians!
Featuring Tasha Powers filling in for Matt on the Upright Bass.
Pokin Around
Baby, Won’t You Leave me
Tipsy Gypsies Live Videos:
iTunes
It’s official, Lipstick Holdup is now live on iTunes! Does that mean we’re legit? Unsure.
And for the record, we ended up using Tunecore.
CD Release Party & Radio Performance:
We’re preparing for our grand release party and getting pretty excited. Everyone’s coming out and going to be looking sharp. The entire back restaurant area of the Clubhouse (740 w. Foothill Road, SLO) will be our party area - the dining room, banquet room and back bar - and the joint will be jumpin.
The Red Skunk band is going to start the night off right at 7pm, Molly and her crew of young, talented vagabonds are going to take the stage and hopefully they won’t show us up!
Then The Tipsy Gypsies will perform around 8. We will be playing all the songs on the disc, as well as a variety of old and brand-new-never-before-played-live songs!
Unfortunately, we’re going to have to ask everyone to look good and please have as much fun as humanely possible. I know that’s a lot to ask, but this sort of thing only happens once in a great while.
Share the release party on Facebook!
Or add to your:
Also, for those who listen to KCBX 90.1’s Morning Cup Of Jazz, we will be performing live on the radio Thursday Dec. 3rd at 10 am! Tune in and listen to us biting our tongue for the general populace! We love Neal Losey and 90.1 so we are very excited to be performing on his show.
Thanks again,
We’re the Tipsy Gypsies and we love you,
Forrestt
P.S. We are now listed on Rhapsody.com, Shockhound.com, AmazonMP3, LALA,
and iTunes will be live in January. Yay internet!
http://www.TheTipsyGypsies.com
Online Distribution - Tunecore vs. Ditto Music vs. Reverbnation vs. Watunes vs. CDBaby
**UPDATED**
I revised the PDF to include CDBaby and correct minor errors. Also, check the comments! COOs and CEOs from the companies compared are piping in and giving their two cents. Helpful.
I’m looking at getting my group, The Tipsy Gypsies, up on itunes. We are receiving our physical CDs this week and I want to get cracking on selling them online. There are a number of sites out there to help the independent artist with this daunting task. I did some pokin’ around and discovered what I think are the major players in this industry.
You’ll notice I’ve omitted the biggest player of them all, CDBaby, because they take 9% of sales AFTER the online store take (iTunes takes 30% of sales). Because of that, I’ve decided to sell our physical CDs strictly through our own website and do all the ‘warehousing’ ourselves. So for our purposes, these listed are services that deal exclusively with online distribution that do not take any % of sales. It is a given that each company listed do not take rights to your music or cuts of sales.
The setup fees and annual fees vary, but each company essentially offers the same service. Getting your music up on iTunes. These companies all offer different online store submission as well, Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster, etc, and some sites have different pricing for which stores you choose to submit to.
Slightly taken into account is the amount of griping about each of these services from disgruntled customers. I know that you can’t please everyone all the time, but the amount of negative comments and posts does weigh on the final decision. For instance, WaTunes has a shotty website with broken links and a large amount of negative comments and press. Ditto Music has a fair amount of negative comments about their often malfunctioning website services. Tunecore, Watunes and Dittomusic all have isolated incidents of not presenting accurate download figures and sales reports (which is a little understandable - the companies present their own sales reports as not being %100 accurate and insist that you use the final itunes sales reports as a basis for your concern. The reports from itunes and similar companies are released infrequently as well.)
Other things to think about are perks like this one; Dittomusic offers a service that will essentially register for you a proper record label and make your download numbers UK chart eligible. Because of that they’ve became the first company to get an independent artist on the UK top 40 with ONLY download numbers. That’s pretty damn cool. I don’t think those sorts of things would even fly in America, but hey.
I put together a comparison chart located here: PDF
For my money, it looks as if we might go with Tunecore, but I’m still unsure. I like the fact that they are a bigger and more established company, which makes them a little more trustworthy in my book (or a little less! Big corporations aren’t exactly proving themselves trustworthy these days….). But we can pick and choose which sites to be listed on. I don’t feel that we need to be on every single one of the internet mp3 download sites.
Take a look at the PDF and hopefully this will serve as a resource for yourself to make an informed decision.
Forrestt
PS, if anyone is doing this same research that I just did, please check out Mike King’s website. HUGE resource for online marketing and the like.
Mike King is the associate director of marketing at Berkleemusic, and author/instructor of Music Marketing 201.
http://mikeking.berkleemusicblogs.com/
Fast Food is Awesome
Admittedly, I don’t consume much fast food. Or at least, I try not to. But just the other day I found myself standing in line in McDonalds. I looked up and saw a flat screen television broadcasting non-stop McDonalds commercials to everyone standing in line.
How is that good? Inundating your customers with even more annoying commercials? I mean, we’re already here, we’re standing in line to get food. That’s not good enough for you?
I noticed that this is a new trend. Union Bank of California and Jack in the Box also broadcast non-stop commercials for their own company while you wait in line. Tooting your own horn. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all, but I guess the corporate think tanks feel this might make a greater impression on the public?
Maybe, because most people don’t watch the commercials, this is a chance for these companies to show their expensive 30 second promotional spots to a captive audience.
Either way, I believe this reveals something dirty about our consuming culture. I don’t know what exactly that point is, but it’s dirty… and hungry.
New song
This kind of sounds like where my head is these days, with so much going on.
Written 2 weeks ago, played by Me on guitar and Tasha Powers on Upright:
Second Place - New Times Music Awards
The Tipsy Gypsies won second place for Best Song at the New Times Music Awards on Saturday night.
We showed up immediately following a show we played earlier in the day just in time to see the end of the Damon Castillo Band’s set. We had a good time, drinking and laughing at the event in all of it’s silliness, when all of a sudden they called us to the stage.
Imagine our surprise and awkwardness standing in front of everyone. We immediately exited backstage.
It turns out that the judges liked ‘Love Don’t Come Cheap’, a song I wrote from our upcoming album and we won second place for ‘Best Song’ category.
So thanks New Times and everyone who put on the show, and cheers to second place. Or as my friend Jon likes to call it, First Loser!
My Feet hanging off the edge of Half Dome
It was a 12 hour hike, from valley floor to the very top. To our credit we did take two lengthy breaks, but my legs were sore for the next two days!
The Most Annoying Person in the Universe Award
There was steep competition. Creatures from all over the galaxy far and wide to vote for the “Most Annoying Person in the Universe”. Annoyances you’ve never even heard about were represented.
But in the end, the award was given to a fellow from planet earth. He was nominated by some poor schlep that lived above a deli. The annoying person in question was the guy who ‘power washed’ the patio outside his bedroom window several times a month at 7:30 in the morning. The ‘Power Washer’ is a device that uses an extremely loud generator to shoot water out of a very high-pressure hose, creating a sound that is both loud and high pitched.
Now this would be okay, but the Power Washer guy seems to enjoy his job and spends far too long cleaning this little patio. Keep in mind that this patio is not that dirty. The days that it is not power washed the patio is leaf-blowed and swept and even sometimes vacuumed. During the day people eat food and drink beer on the patio. It really is not that dirty.
Not only that but the Power Washer typically sprays a section for a minute or so and then stops. He adjusts his settings or whatever the hell he does and then starts again for about a minute and then stops again. Trying to sleep through this is a complete disaster. These intermediate high volume and high frequency noises are far from pleasant. And to make matters worse, he spends his sweet time down there cleaning. Every little nook and cranny gets power washed to near sterile cleanliness. He must not have many customers on his route these mornings, for there is no way it takes more than half an hour to spray a small patio clean, but he routinely spends 45 minutes down there, off and on, off and on, off and on.
Upon hearing that the Power Washer won this highly coveted prize, the poor schlep upstairs said:
“Aw, he’s probably a nice guy, but I HATE him.”
The power washer himself was unavailable for comments.
A close second went to the guy who shares very thin walls with the poor schlep and plays poker with his drinking buddies until 5 in the morning once a month.
Working Hard on the new Album
Spent all day at the music store after hours on sunday recording percussion tracks for our Tipsy Gypsy album.
We have this Bossa Nova tune that I wrote, and we decided to put a Brazil style drum breakdown in the middle. Sean had so much fun laying down all these tracks, including the few tracks miked in stereo, we layered 30 percussion tracks!
I filmed much of it and plan on making a video of him playing all the parts together once the album is done.
At the rate we’re going though, it won’t be done till August or September.
Thanks for your help Russell. And thanks Dan for letting us rock in Grand Central Music! There were great tones and reverbs coming from the acoustic guitars reverberating on the walls… sympathetic vibrations!
