3 Years Ago Today...
... I released one of the most important albums of my career
In early 2022 I started work on what will eventually become the longest, and most consistent chapter of my career.
I think I’d made the decision subconsciously many years prior when I basically took myself out of the business of mercenary pop and commercial music touring around 2011, but it took until 2022 to figure out what the passage to the end of my time here might look like.
When we went into the studio in Spain to track “One Way Out”, none of us had any idea what the album might sound like, how many songs would be cut, or if we would even get enough material for the record in the short space of time we had.
What came out of those three days was, at least for me and Juan Pablo, a top three studio experience of our entire lives. Not only had we worked on 100’s of projects separately, we also did so much work in the studio in NYC together in the 2000’s, we kind of thought we’d seen the peak of what was possible.
I think the drum sound alone was worth the price of admission. The delicate combination of Nico, Juan Pablo, and the 12th century farmhouse conversion that the studio sits in, can be summed up beautifully in “Northern Line”. Originally meant to be for the trio, Tom (our keyboardist) campaigned for it to be recorded as a bass and drum duet. You know you’re in the studio with the right people when you get that kind of suggestion from a bandmate. Completely selfless and 100% committed to the music.
In this video you see the arrangement coming together in real time as it happened, and then the full performance of the take that’s on the album. From start to finish the song took maybe 15 minutes which included two takes.
If you have longer to watch or listen, we released a full-length documentary about the album, and about the process of recording music that was far more improvised than it was composed.
At the time of the release I was very much against the concept of putting the music on Spotify and other streaming platforms. A lot of the information I based those beliefs on has sadly not changed.
Artists are not fairly compensated based on the number of times their music is streamed, and much like most world economies, and elite class-systems that are in place whether people like to admit it or not, a very few people make a majority of the profit off the backs of many. Spotify does it by barely paying artists while charging subscription fees and profiting from ad revenue.
According to some basic internet research, Spotify had an annual revenue of almost $17B last year, and it’s founder and CEO Daniel Ek has a personal net worth in the region of $9B.
That’s pretty amazing for a platform that doesn’t produce original musical content of any significance, and spends an obscene amount of money trying to be the worlds largest podcast platform.
Despite all of this fairly horrific information, I have actually changed my mind since 2022 as you may have noticed with not only “One Way Out” ending up on streaming platforms, but all my releases since.
I can’t change the way Spotify pays me for the use of my music, but if I accept that streaming simply isn’t a form of income that is going to replace physical CD sales and downloads that existed 20+ years ago, I can actually use Spotify and other streaming platforms to my advantage.
Concert promoters, venues, managers and booking agents all use as much data as they can to determine who to book, where to book them, and how many tickets they might sell on a given night in a certain location.
One data point that is starting to become more significant, is how many monthly listeners, how many followers, and how many plays your music gets on streaming platforms like Spotify. And since Spotify is the only mainstream platform that publicly displays those stats, it’s starting to become the most useful bargaining chip when it comes to having a career playing live.
Over the past month I’ve had a pretty low number of monthly listeners at close to 6,400. This can grow as high as 30,000 when I have a new release, and sometimes more around the time of a tour. The difference in revenue is completely insignificant. I would need to be in the millions and millions of streams before it would ever approach being able to cover the cost of making an album. But the more the songs are added to playlists and shared, the better these numbers start to look, and the more bargaining power I get with promoters to book shows.
We used to tour and play live to promote the album and boost sales. Now we make the music for free essentially, in my case completely self-funded, in order to play live where there is still a living to be made from selling concert tickets and merch.
So why was “One Way Out” one of the most important albums of my career so far?
Because it started me on the path of committing to recording as much music every year as I possibly can. One album every few years might not be enough to maintain the interest with the audience, and since I’m not about to start making 30 second tik tok videos where I dress like a traffic cone and play as fast as possible, I’m going to work on the consistent engagement with my audience in the only way I know how: Honest performance that is committed to tape on a regular basis and released into the world.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not doing it for you. I don’t play for the audience in the studio, I play for me. But the hope is that some of you dig what you hear and want to follow along and be a part of the process, eventually allowing me to play for YOU live.
I have a new album coming out next month, a recording session in June for an incredibly special project that I’ll talk more about soon, and plans for a full band session later in the year. The Vinyl for Mystery to Me should arrive any day now, so thank you to everyone that grabbed a copy early, and if you’d like some Vinyl of the 20th Anniversary re-mix/re-master of my debut album, there are still some copies left.
There are less than 20 tickets left for the Bass Bash in London June 1st with Ian Martin Allison.
I appreciate you taking the time to read this far, and for streaming the music if you have the time to listen.
More soon,
Janek
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I paid for the preorder of One Way Out (and Night Watch), loved it, and would be willing to pay to preorder your next album. Spotify is so convenient that I do listen there, but I have a different relationship with that album because I paid for it.