Don’t Close the Session Yet: Build the Revenue Package When You Finish the Master

Making a Scene Presents - Don’t Close the Session Yet: Build the Revenue Package When You Finish the Master
The Song Is Finished. The Business Asset Is Not.

There is a wonderful moment in every recording project when everybody finally agrees that the song is finished. The singer has stopped asking whether one word in the second verse could be louder. The guitar player has accepted that the solo does not need another half-decibel. The mastering engineer has sent the file called something reassuring like SONGTITLE_FINAL_MASTER.wav, and for one brief shining moment nobody has added the words “new,” “revised,” or “really final” to the filename.

This is usually when the independent artist exports the stereo master, sends it to a distributor, uploads the artwork, picks a release date, and closes the recording session with the satisfied feeling that the job is done. That made a certain amount of sense when the main job of a record was to become a record, but today's finished recording can do far more than sit inside Spotify, Apple Music, or somebody's phone.

That open recording session is actually sitting on top of a small factory.

The master recording is there, but so are the ingredients for an instrumental version, alternate mixes, useful stem groups, shorter edits, clean endings, remix materials, creator licenses, sync versions, direct-to-fan products, and assets that may someday become valuable in licensing systems we have not even invented yet. The strange part is that the cheapest and easiest time to create most of those things is right now, when everybody still remembers how the record was made.

Six years from now is not nearly as convenient. Six years from now the computer may be gone, the plugin company may be gone, the engineer may be working in another state, and somebody will be standing in front of a closet full of hard drives muttering the traditional recording-industry prayer: “Where the hell did we put that vocal stem?”

That is why independent artists need to change the definition of finished.

http://www.makingascene.org