Artists Producing Albums - Listen Up

There is a revolutionary product struggling artists can start making today, out of stuff they already have kicking around on their hard drives, which can be sold for a decent profit per unit and has a huge, active market ready and waiting for such material to exist...

Until now, the fact that a collection of musical works and a volume of visual pieces share the same name (album) has been a slight inconvenience to creators, making it difficult to label ourselves clearly enough to garner online traffic being among the pet peeves I have with it. To my mind, the word "Album" needs a new lease of life, but the same is true for the actual concept.

They used to be something we held, proudly nurturing the beautiful lyric book as our new CD played on the stereo beside us, but those days are of the past and new needs in art lovers are arising that aren't being met as an industry standard... Yet!

The problem

In today's society musical consumption is limited to Mp3s and Youtube videos (or similar), but we've all been there - wanting to relax along to a download of our favourite album while watching something vaguely relevant to it, or at least more visually stimulating than our own desktop window! Perhaps we've settled for a randomiser, screen-saver mode on our device or even set a random image album as a slide-show, since making our own collage especially would be way too time consuming.

Why it matters

People all over the world are experiencing this same conundrum with a large percentage of them entertaining guests and small gatherings during it! Therein lies a market gap and a chance for artists everywhere to gain decent financial support for what they do. From music gear and studio time to professional videography, the music scene is an expensive place to be and our earning resources seem to be constantly dwindling as music venues close down and stream prices reach an all-time-low. People on a tight budget won't support you, no matter how cheap you make it- that's why I propose this new product be pitched as something lavish - a symbol of status if you will.

The solution

So without further ado I present "Super Albums" - a new work-around artists can start using to bridge visual and audio experiences on gadgets worldwide. It's a digital concept consisting of an album in both known forms, sold as a zip consisting of two separate folders, one for the music, the other for the slideshow material.

Concept rules

New ideas transform into commodities when everyone sings from the same song-sheet. Having established the basic product elements as two folders in one zip, no album is complete without a cover! For best practise, this would become your opening slide but I think since we've also established a gadget-specific target audience, that an important rule to follow is sticking to landscape ratio images, however, far from eliminating meaningful vertical moments, it would just require more imagination to include them i.e. old gig flyers can offer a sense of history and be placed beside a portrait band shot from the occasion. Given also that your product is being designed to slide and loop, I feel that a minium of three images per track offers enough variety to avoid over-repetition once active on a system out of your control aka the buyers device, whose template timings for slide-show viewing will vary. All that leaves to discuss is price suggestion for which I’d propose £30-£50 for anything between 6-12 tracks. It's affordable yet respectful while leaving room for extravagant expense further down the line.

Practicalities

Listing such a product comes with it's own barriers since many established music-selling platforms offer rigid templates which may not cover zip file upload, but where there's a will... It may be worth exploring options when it comes to building your shop but by far the best way to showcase this kind of product is from your own website. Not all artists have one and they can be expensive, therefore Steamjunk will happily list your Super Album (right here on this site) in return for 25% of all proceeds, where you'll be promoted as part of our collection.

Conclusion

In a world where "content-creation" (we hate that phrase!) is booming more than ever, it seems outrageous to us that talented artists are struggling to monetise their work on a global scale. Super Albums provide a possible solution to a modern problem during an age where demands for physical merchandise continue lowering and a call to revolutionise and reinvent how our music is consumed by those who love what we do, very much upon us!