January 2012
1 post
MIKE SNIPER: An Indie Label in 2012. →
mikesniper:
I posted a recent Facebook comment regarding our policies with signing artists and found myself getting into a discussion of what the role of an independent label is in 2012, something I’ve often been asked about in interviews but have never really been able to elaborate on.
Basically, it…
December 2011
1 post
September Sales Stats
We finally received the statistics on Spotify streams for September so here’s what the split looks like.
Let looks at Digital Vs Physical first.
Digital Revenues= 50% / Physical Revenues= 50%.
But if we look at profit (the cost of selling digital is much lower) we end up with:
Digital profit = 62% / Physical = 38%
Here’s a graph with the profit from direct digital sales from...
November 2011
4 posts
Evil Surveys - Knowing Your Fans
We ran a survey recently in which we asked people who had purchased and / or downloaded our music to answer a few questions.
The purpose was to get to know our fanbase better, to try and understand how they had found us and what had motivated them to download and/or pay for our music. We also slipped in some questions to see where Spotify fits in with all of this. Here’s what we found...
How to set up your own Kickstarter site.
Kickstarter is great but if you’re not a US resident, you can’t use it to kickstart your creative projects. They’ll take money from anyone, anywhere in the world, but if you’re not an American, you can’t be part of their club. Maybe there are legal reasons for this but it still sucks!
There are alternatives like Indiegogo, RocketHub, Funded by Me and many others but...
Introducing One City Per Second
Touring is expensive. You need to put fuel in your car, plane tickets are not cheap, accommodation is expensive and traveling can be long and uncomfortable.
The venues you play in are businesses and therefore need to make a profit when they book a show. Tour managers and booking agents need to pay their bills as well, so a large portion of the money you pay for a concert ticket goes towards...
Hanging Out On Google+
Last week we organised a Hangout on Google+ to see if it could be a viable platform for streaming our hypnotic audio-visual experience!
Google+ hangouts are like video chats but they can host up to 10 participants and there are some advanced features such as screencasting and document sharing.
We set it up in the following way.
Renaud (our illustrator) shared his screen (where he was sketching...
October 2011
2 posts
Break Even Celebration
We said we’d lower the price of our physical products if we broke even. Well, here it is folks. You can name your price for our CD and Vinyl. Minimum price is 1 euro (plus shipping). Bandcamp won’t allow us to put zero. This is kind of an experiment. You can thank a lovely chap called Thierry who suggested the idea.
Finance Friday #1
Hi everyone,
This could be the first of many posts containing financial tidbits, statistics and other more or less useful information, or it could be a one off. Time will tell.
This one could be a little controversial because we are going to talk about how generous people are in different countries!
As some of you may know, we allow people to download our music for free, or to pay for it.
...
September 2011
5 posts
Data, or lack thereof.
We received a few requests from some cheeky individuals asking us if our new high profile had translated into more plays, sales, etc… That got us thinking.
We were thinking of posting some numbers to give people an idea of what a bit of internet buzz can do for your bank account and self esteem. So we started looking at the numbers.
But how exactly does one determine how big the increase...
Remix Kits
We thought we’d set all the stems from our latest album free. The files are all under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. This means you can share your remix, and even sell it if you want as long as you state somewhere that the original work was made by Uniform Motion.
The BPM’s are in the SoundCloud set comments and all tracks have the same starting point, so when you import them...
The Play to Pay Ratio
It looks like our accounting insights have more appeal than our music does, so we’re going to give the people what they want and go into a bit more detail!
We’ll be forever known as Uniform Motion, a promising indie band who gave up music for a career in accounting! Maybe they’ll add a new ‘Accounting’ category at the grammys and we’ll win it!
Just so everyone...
Clarifications.
It seems rather ironic that we got ten times more hits to our website yesterday than usual following an article we wrote about the economics of a DIY album release. Hundreds of people visiting our website the day we release our album just to see how much we would earn if someone actually bought it. We are grateful for the attention though.
We only wanted to provide our fans with the facts so that...
Release day economics
Our new record was ‘officially’ released today. This means that you’ll find the digital version on various different Digital music stores like iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic, and you’ll be able to stream the music from services such as Spotify and Deezer.
The physical versions (CD and Vinyl) are only available from our Bandcamp site and at gigs.
Unfortunately, you will not...
August 2011
1 post
What is the meaning of this?
I keep hearing that if you want to get people’s attention, especially the attention of bloggers and journalists, then you need a story. Otherwise, they’ll ignore you and no one will ever find out about how cool your music is. I think a lot of people don’t really care what your story is. They’re into the music and that’s enough.
On top of that, we don’t really...
July 2011
3 posts
How to produce a record on a low budget.
The music industry is in a mess they say. People no longer purchase music. Piracy is killing us all. Blah, blah. One way of making it all more financially viable is to control your production costs.
We’re just about to self-release our third album. This means we have been through the process of recording, mixing and mastering a ‘collection of songs’ several times.
It also means...
CD and PlayButton Editions ready
The PlayButtons and CD’s are ready folks. Here’s what they look like.
We were thinking we might order another batch of PlayButtons, but unfortunately, the company who provides the blank PlayButtons has run out and won’t have any new ones until October. Thanks again to all those who pre-orded and helped us fund all of this.
Our Battle Against The Evil World of File-Sharing.
We released two songs, a video game and a video clip just over a month ago in order to promote our new album, and to ask people to help us fund the mastering, and other costs associated with releasing an album. We are really grateful for the all support we got.
Since we didn’t quite raise enough for professional mastering, we decided that we may as well send the digital album to all those...
June 2011
3 posts
Summer Playlist
Dark Dark Dark - Wild Go
Danger Mouse & pals - Rome
James Vincent McMorrow - Early in the morning
Josh T. Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen
The Head & The Heart - s/t
The Cave Singers - No Witch
The Middle East - I Want That You Are Always Happy
Benjamin Francis Leftwich - Pictures EP
Thomas Mery - Les couleurs, les ombres
Herman Düne - Strange Moosic
Jay-Jay...
One Frame Per Second!
New album!
Our third album is called One Frame Per Second and it will be released 1st September 2011. Available in Digital, CD and Playbutton* formats.
In the meantime, you can pre-order a CD, or a Playbutton* here
You can name your price for the digital download. The minimum is 50 cents (bandcamp won’t allow a lower amount for pre-orders unfortunately) but you can put whatever amount...
May 2011
1 post
The Importance of Sound Quality
Some of you may be aware that we self-produced our last record, Life. For those of you who are not fully familiar with the term, ‘Self-produce’ in this context means that we recorded all the individual tracks (vocals, guitars, etc…), we mixed all the songs, and mastered the album ourselves. To some, this is heresy, but to most of the us, it’s the normal way you make music...
January 2011
1 post
Renaud's Fav Albums from 2010 (spotify inside) →
December 2010
1 post
All we want for Christmas is A Little Respect
Merry Christmas folks. We hope you will enjoy our rendition of Erasure’s ‘A Little Respect’.
Don’t ask us why we covered this song because it was for all the wrong reasons. :)
We’ll be back next year with a new record and some very cool stuff that we would love to tell you about now, but we can’t because that would really spoil the surprise!
In the...
October 2010
1 post
Why I am quitting Spotify
For the past few months, we’ve been posting Spotify playlists of 5 albums we each like. After Uniform Motion received yet another ridiculous royalty report from Spotify, I started wondering how they actually pay artists for their music and whether Spotify will still be around in the future.
To be very clear, I really enjoy using Spotify, it’s a great service. I pay Spotify a monthly...
August 2010
1 post
Instrumental Life
Hey there, We were asked to make some instrumental versions of our songs for a television series, which is really cool of course. But rather than just leaving them on our hard drive to pick up digital dust, we thought we would set them free and see if anyone would be interested in doing something creative with them.
So we’re launching a RELIX COMPETITION! A what? What on earth is a relix?...
July 2010
4 posts
Spotify Playlists for July & August
Click here to listen to Reuno’s playlist.
1) Born Ruffians - Red, Yellow & Blue
2) Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip - The Logic of Chance
3) Lawrence Arabia - Chant Darling
4) Pernice Brothers - Goodbye Killer
5) Owen Pallett - Heartland
...
June 2010
1 post
June Spotify Playlists
Click here to open Andy’s playlist
1) The National – High Violet
2) Micah P. Hinson – And The Pioneer Saboteurs
3) Stornoway – Beachcomber’s Windowsill
4) Broadcast 2000 – Broadcast 2000
5) The Acorn – No Ghost
Click here to open Renaud’s playlist
1) Sage Francis – Li(f)e
2) John Vanderslice – Emerald City
3) Darren Hayman – Pram Town
4) Woodpigeon –...
May 2010
2 posts
May Playlist
Andy’s Playlist
Matthew Herbert - ONE ONE
Seabear - We Built a Fire
MGMT - Congratulations
Radio Dept. - Clinging to a Scheme
Lost on Purpose - If Not But When
Renaud’s Playlist
Flotation Toy Warning - Bluffer’s Guide to the Flight Deck
The Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt
Deer Tick - Wild Elephant
The...
April 2010
3 posts
It's Free Friday again
We’re doing something slightly different this week. You can name your price (including 0)
Don’t put something silly like 50 cents though, because you’ll just be donating 50 cents to PayPal who take about that much for the transaction!
It’s all happening on our bandcamp page.
Free Friday (Again!) + Bonus Track
Hey there,
We’re doing Free Friday again. You can download our second album, Life, for free today. You can also grab yourselves an exclusive Bonus track called Farewell that we decided not to put on Life. You can decide for yourselves how good or bad the track is.
Cheers,
Uniform Motion
Spotify Playlists for April
Renaud’s April Playlist
1) Rodrigo Leão: ’A Mãe’
2) Megafaun: ’Gather, Form & Fly.’
3) Gorillaz: ‘Plastic Beach’
4) Johnny Cash: ‘American VI: Ain’t No Grave’
5) Miss Li: ‘Dancing The Whole Way Home’
Andy’s April Playlist
1) Broken Bells: ‘Broken Bells’
2) JJ: “JJ N° 3”
...
March 2010
8 posts
Free Friday
All you twitterers out there have probably heard of follow friday.
Well, we’re doing a #FF of our own, called Free Friday. Our new album, Life, can be downloaded for free today.
We recently noticed our album had been uploaded to file sharing sites and since we can’t fight this, we’ve decided to embrace it. We may even continue this trend by making the album available for free...
We're on RockBand Folks!
Hey folks, We are proud to announce that one of our songs, Roll Over, has been released on the Rock Band Network. It is currently only available on Xbox 360. Wii and Playstation versions will be added shortly.
Win a poster with last.fm
If you use last.fm to scrobble your music, and you listen to Uniform Motion you have a chance of winning a wonderful Uniform Motion poster. When we hit 1,000 listeners on Last.fm, we’ll randomly pick a last.fm user who has recently listened to Uniform Motion, and send them a poster of their choice! Get scrobbling! We have 957 listeners as of today so it’s only a question of time.
Lady Gaga Cover
Until yesterday, I had never actually heard a song by Lady Gaga. Sure, I had heard the name but I had never felt the urge to actually listen to her music.
Renaud had been pestering me about doing a cover of one of her songs for months so yesterday, I agreed to check out ‘Poker Face’ and fell in love with the song.
Renaud’s already done the artwork and we’ll be working on...
8 Goals for 2010
It’s good to have goals. I’ve been told that all up and coming bands, whatever that means, need to set themselves tangible objectives.
So I thought I would draw up a list. So here it is.
1) Break even.
We’ve spent a lot of money on this project so far and would really like to see some results this year.
We have 5,237 EUR to go, before we break even, although I’m sure...
March Playlist
Hey there,
Renaud and I are going to try and post a monthly Spotify playlist each.
Here’s March 2010. Click here to open Renaud’s playlist in Spotify. Click here to open Andy’s.
Renaud’s Spotify Playlist
Architecture in Helsinki - Places Like This
Beach House - Teen Dream
Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros - Up From Below
Local Natives - Gorilla Manor
...
February 2010
6 posts
Watchb-jects.
Here are a few b-sides and rejects from our debut album, Pictures.
Remixes by Full-Source
Some great remixes by Full-Source, check ‘em out!
Uniform Motion Remixes by fullsourcemusic
2 tags
Illustration contest
Hey people,
Renaud is organising a contest on his website. It’s really easy, just think of a song title and draw an illustration to go with it, much like we did for Life.
The winner gets a copy of the album and we will also write a song to go with their illustration!
This is where it’s happening.
Watch
January 2010
4 posts
