Planning an album release, even a small scale release like mine, is a nebulous affair. I gave myself four to five month and planned those out. This weekend, I’ve made considerable release show progress by tentatively getting opening acts and organizing the events.
Release Show Progress
In the past couple weeks, I’ve set the date at two different venues, The Wolf and Henry House Concerts. Both offer their space for free in return for bringing people. I have budgeted $100 to pay co-performers for each event. Yes, this is my expense. I hard sell is offering a small sum for someone to play 3 songs or so. That was not easy for me to do. But, having learned from releasing Hallowed in 2014, I need to create a budget and stick to it. There’s a snack story associated with that I’ll tell you in person if you know me and really want to know. I’ll announce all the performers once things more from tentative to planned for everyone.
For the events, hopefully there will be two different opening acts at each. The main event will be songwriter rounds featuring myself and a folk duo. At the house concert, one of the planned openers may perform some songs with me giving both shows a different flavor.
Besides a detailed plan for each month, I setup an IndieGoGo campaign. That will go live in February. As I work through details, I can electronically “cross them off” which is a good feelings.
I’ll be posting details about my planning in order to show if I meet my goal of breaking even with the album release. Usually, music is an expense. I’m seeing if I can plan accordingly and offset that expense. So, upon the second release show in June, I’ll see if I’ve broken even.