flawed:LOGIC

Being that it’s a rather slow day at work today, I spent the better portion of my morning pricing out the entire cost of recording and pressing 1000 copies of a 12 song CD. It’s strange because I was picturing the price to be either really high or really low, and it turns out the reality is right in the middle.

Breakdown:

• 20 hours of studio time (recording and tweaking single songs): $1000
• Mastering (tweaking the full album; making it all flow): $490
• CD replication service (pressing the 1000 CDs w/ jewel cases, 300 posters, 1000 stickers, 24 limited edition t-shirts, UPC barcode): $1590
• 20 countertop sales displays: $50
• Design of all artwork (CD, jewel case inserts, posters): $390
• Commemorative Plaque (for hanging on the wall): $49
• Distribution package (submission of all tracks to iTunes, Yahoo! Music, etc; submission to CDBaby [online CD store]; submission to Nielsen Soundscan to track sales): $29
• Taxi Membership (A&R group that will shop your CD around to the major labels for possible distribution deal): $299.95
• Photography for CD insert [optional]: ~$200

Grand total: $3797.95

So basically for less than $4000, I can have an entire CD recorded, pressed and delivered professionally. That means that if I sell the CD for $12.75 each (plus shipping), I only need to sell 300 copies to break even. From everything I’ve read on independent music publishing sites and blogs, 300 is doable even if you don’t market yourself at all. Just from word of mouth (e.g. whoring yourself out to anyone who will give you the time of day; parents telling their friends to buy it out of pity for their children; etc.) I plan to sell them all.

There are a few things, like the Taxi membership, or the commemorative plaque, that aren’t absolutely essential, but the Taxi membership is a potential revenue earner as it could put me in touch with people who will buy large quantities of my CDs and therefore give a greater return on investment. I would also just like the plaque because this would be something I’m doing completely on my own, with no label help at all, and I think that’s a pretty damn big accomplishment and deserves to be remembered.

The sales displays will be great too, because I’ll be able to have people like my sister in Calgary, or friends in Winnipeg, as well as myself here in Bermuda, attempt to have independent record stores keep a few copies right by the registers which will give me some exposure too. Obviously this part depends on my family and friends being supportive in this endeavour, but I have enough dirt on enough people that I can call in some favours if absolutely necessary.

The t-shirts will be great for marketing because I’ll be able to keep a few for myself, and then use the rest as special gifts for either contests or just as extra goodies for random/certain purchasers when I sell the CD online. I’ll be able to throw in a sticker with every sale, and the posters will be good for the record stores to give away or sell with the discs, depending on the quality of the prints.

It’s strange to think how far the recording industry has come, and how accessible it really is to completely self-publish an album. I don’t have to worry about one of the Big 4 breathing down my neck to have anything accomplished; I can do it all at my own pace. While the whole process looks rather daunting, it’s also really exciting, and I can’t wait until I can take my first steps into the studio and finally get on my way to having my own professional CD.

Now does anyone want to give me four thousand dollars?

It’s very obviously winter time, even here in Bermuda, as my sinuses have become about as backed up as a Californian freeway during Friday rush hour. In the span of a few days breathing has become a chore, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I was just “promoted” this week, I would be in bed, at home, praying that I had bought enough boxes of Kleenex earlier this week.

I took Tuesday off to see my doctor who prescribed me some amoxicillin and some Flixonase nasal spray, which both seem to remove the blockage for about a half hour after I take them. The problem is that I am only allowed to take 2 amoxicillin pills a day, and one spray a day, meaning that I have an hour of peace a day. Not quite the results I was looking for.

On the bright side, I officially started my Incident Response Management position at the bank, which now means that instead of monitoring the ticket queues of about 10 people (approx. 120 tickets), I’m keeping track of every ticket in the organization (close to 400 tickets). Every hour I send off a report to all the higher-ups indicating who is falling behind, who is doing well, and other metrics we’re using to track our progress. It’s a lot of work, but the word around the water cooler is that since they created this position for me, it will be a permanent thing, and I won’t be going back to ACT after 6 months like I’d been originally told.

I guess I should have believed Matt when he said I’d be here forever when he told me that on my first day.

12 years ago, a rapper named Coolio, fresh out of Compton, came out of nowhere with these lyrics in arguably the best selling hip-hop single of the 90’s: “Gangsta’s Paradise”.  Not embellishing ‘hoodlife’ or drugs or crime, the song gave middle America its first real look at the inner city from people with first hand knowledge.  The words in the song spoke about life in a city where people dealt with death on an all too frequent basis; where even something as simple as having a job was out of the reach of most residents.  No longer was rap/hip-hop a genre relegated to the back corners of a few select record stores; it was about to explode in a huge way and ready or not, it was going to bring some powerful messages with it.

Executives of the gritty high-school drama “Dangerous Minds” decided to use this song as the anthem of a nation – a nation of underprivledged, underachievers stuck in America’s inner city with essentially no way out.  This nation, where acts of crime are committed as often out of necessity as they are out of greed, had never had a strong voice outside itself, which meant that the message of such poverty in an otherwise rich country was a rather new message to many people.

I remember being at home one day that summer and turning on MuchMusic (Canada’s version of MTV) before going out to race my bike against my friend Jon; something we would do daily.  This was the day that the video for “Gangsta’s Paradise” was premiering, and I happened to catch it, not realizing at the time how much influence this single song would have on both myself and North America as a whole.

Now here we are, over a decade later, and this lyric is the one that still holds the most weight for me.  I’m sure you’re all asking why, considering that I turn 24 in 9 days; let me explain.

[Editor's Note: This is the first time I'm sharing this story with anyone that isn't my therapist.  Please read the whole thing before you jump to your phone to call another one.] 

As most of you know, when I was younger, I was a fairly ‘troubled’ little guy.  I would get quite depressed, didn’t have many friends, you know, the usual social outcast stuff.  I remember being about 15, and thinking that the first thing I wanted to do when I turned 18 was get a tattoo.  No, not a tattoo of some Chinese symbol that says “idiot”, or a tribal band around my miniscule bicep; I wanted to get a barcode, and not on my upper arm, but on my wrist.  Why?  Because that way when I turned 20, I could use a razorblade in place of a lazer, and slit my wrists while I “scanned” the barcode.

Obviously, I wasn’t all there upstairs.

I remember thinking that it would be mostly symbolic, being that I was obviously a product of technology, and that since technology wouldn’t kill me itself, I would aim to emulate the same as closely as possible.  Attention seeking?  Absolutely.  Ingenious?  A little.  Pathetic?  *ding* *ding* *ding*

It’s weird to see how less depressed I’ve become over the past 5 years.  I’m not saying that I’m 100% better, in fact just a few days ago I was feeling really down, but the frequency of my depression has definitely slowed down.  I remember there were entire months where I wouldn’t go a single day without thinking about how I would rather be dead; about how I really didn’t matter to anyone.  Now if I feel like that, it’s rarely for more than a day or two, and I’m able to tell myself that I won’t be feeling like this in a few days, so I don’t worry about it as much.

As I’ve said on this blog time and time again, I think the mind is a very incredible thing; in the span of less than a second, I’m able to have a thought about suicide, realize that committing suicide is 100% ludicrous, and convince myself to smarten the hell up.  And it’s not just as simple as those words; in my head I basically go through a huge scenario of me dying, followed by the funeral, etc., and then I think about what life would be like if I was alive (having Sunday dinner at Gramma Smith’s; waking up one morning to a mini-Justin begging to open his presents on Christmas day, etc.) all in less time than it takes for you to count to 1.

Hell, even just this morning, I found myself realizing how much happier I’ve become.  I was sitting at my desk, when LaVerne (a co-worker) walked by and asked me how I was doing.  Without really comprehending what I was even saying, my brain managed to spit out “I’m living; can’t get any better than that!”  Even before she had fully walked away, I was still sitting back, amazed that something that positive had actually come from my lips.

I guess what they say is true after all: you can change, if you really want to.