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Putting out a compilation CD
of local bands in 10 easy steps |
So you want to put out a compilation CD? Okay, I’m here to help. Before we go on, I should briefly warn you of some of the hazards involved. I know you’re tempted to skip this bit, the way you skipped the “don’t plug things in with wet hands” bit at the front of the instruction manual for your new TV when you bought it, but don’t. It’s important. Some facts: * This will take up most (and sometimes all) of your free time, and the whole process from scribbled concept on the back of a fag packet to ‘mmm, this shiny CD in my hand feels sooooo goooood’ could take the guts of a year. * This will not get you laid. In fact, it may put stress on your current relationship – “you’re more interested in that CD than you are in me”. * This will not win you respect, credibility, or friends. * This will not get you served at the bar any quicker in the 13th Note. * You will not make a significant amount of money from this. You might just scrape enough together to buy a Lion Bar, but more likely you’ll end up out of pocket. Can you handle all of that? Excellent. Let’s move on. 1. Sort your concept It’s always a good plan to have a vague notion of what you want to do before you start doing it. This rule works at all levels, from putting on your pants to staging an armed land invasion. What you’re planning is pretty much exactly halfway between the two. With Smoke, the original high-level concept was “lots of good bands from Glasgow or thereabouts all chip in a wee bit each to fund a compilation CD to get collective exposure that none of them would get individually”. The only major change we made later was to expand our remit to include some bands from outside our own neighbourhood, substituting ‘Scotland’ for ‘Glasgow’ in the description above. Your concept might be “20 of the best ska bands in Britain on one CD” or “20 bands doing songs with theremins in” – whatever it is, have your concept sorted before you start, so that you know what you’re looking for and, importantly, what you’re not looking for. Thrashing out the actual logistics of the thing involves a lot more head scratching. What I did was type up a little description of my idea, post it on a web messageboard frequented by various local musos, and asked for suggestions. Lots of frantic posting later, we had a title, half a dozen bands had signed up, and we’d worked out how much everyone would have to pay. Yes, pay. This article assumes that you’re doing your CD on the Smoke model, and you’re asking the bands for a contribution towards the cost, for which they receive a pre-agreed number of CDs. If you’re an eccentric millionaire and can afford to fund it out of your own pocket; then you won’t have to ask the bands for money, everything will be ridiculously easy and I hate you. The Rules The single biggest hassle you will encounter will be money. People hate parting with money. Most people want to get things free - people in bands expect to get things free. I think this is a good time to introduce the three Golden Rules.
It’s nice to think the above might end up on my headstone. If you take these into account, and work with them rather than trying to disprove them, you’ll experience a lot less stress and hassle. I realise that it sounds a tad mean to describe bands as “bastards” but remember that I’m in band – I’m a bastard too. Bands rarely mean to be bastards – all sorts of factors cause them to do the things they do and, to be fair to them, it has been pointed out to me that if you replace the word ‘bands’ with ‘people’, the Golden Rules hold for pretty much all creative endeavours. Do your sums Anyway, back
to logistics. My original suggestion for Smoke was 20 bands chipping in
£50 each to get 500 CDs done. After much argument, mind-changing
and indigestion we ended up with 18 bands paying £70 to get 1000
CDs done. The best way of trying to gauge how much it’ll skin each
band is to work out how much everything will cost, and then divide by
the number of bands taking part. Let’s assume some typical prices
for 1000 decent quality CDs, and that you’ve got 18 artists on board.
Some of the amounts above might seem high, and you might not recognise some of the terminology. Don’t worry my little moguls, all will be explained later. I rounded up rather than down the amount each band pays, as it’s better to have more than you need than run out mid-project. Not that you won’t run out of money anyway (see Rule 3). The number of copies you decide to get pressed is up to you. CD pressing plants don’t generally do orders of less than 500, but any fewer than 500 copies and you’ll struggle to make much of an impact anyway. Remember that once giving each band the pre-arranged number, you’ll need 100 or so for promo and other things. What’s it called? It might be an idea to come up with a title at this point. Many things, from your artwork to the name of your web domain depend on your album’s title, so deciding it early on is a definite advantage. Well, it’s one less thing to lose sleep/hair over, anyway. A lot of
people asked why we chose Smoke as a title. The simple answer is that
we liked the sound of it. All the early suggestions were along the lines
of “Alternative Glasgow” or “Underground Glasgow”,
and it took someone to point out that the title of a compilation doesn’t
have to be an exact description of the contents (“Now That’s
What I Call Music” wasn’t called “Some Singles You Liked
But Didn’t Buy”) before we decided to go for something a little
more abstract and snappy. Someone suggested Smoke, and people gave it
the thumbs up. Once you’ve got your compilation CD idea together, the next logical step is to get some music to put on it. This is where you advertise. I did most of my advertising by posting on various messageboards on the web. The advantage of doing stuff on the web is that’s it’s free (sort of); the disadvantage of course, is that bands who don’t have internet access won’t see it. To keep everyone happy I also put together some A4-sized ads and stuck them up in record shops, music equipment shops, and rehearsal studios. The web proved far more successful a recruitment method for me. Either all bands with any ambition to be on a compilation CD are on the web, or I put my posters up in the wrong shops. Advertising needs to be in the right place – if you’re looking for metal bands, try handing out flyers at metal gigs/clubs; if you want bedroom electronica artists, there’s no point in putting up posters in guitar shops. If you want lo-fi sadcore, one handwritten bit of foolscap taped to a bollard in Ashton Lane should suffice. If you’re looking for bands online, you might want to think about putting together a website. This isn’t an article about putting a music website together, so I won’t go into any detail here. All you need to know is - you can get webspace free and you don’t need to know any code, but if you pay for webspace and you do know some code, it’ll help tremendously. People have remarked that the rather chic Smoke website (largely the work of Gary Marshall) made our scabby little project seem a lot more professional than it really was. We were fortunate in that Gary already had proper paid-for webspace, so all we had to do was buy a domain name (co.uk domains cost less than a tenner) and point it to his server. When we looked for a domain, we discovered that a tobacconist owns Smoke.co.uk and, bizarrely, someone had already reserved smokecd.co.uk, so we went for smokealbum.co.uk. One of the great advantages of meeting bands through the web is that it’s really easy to keep them updated with what’s going on. One e-mail CC-ed to everyone involved is a lot better than making 18 phone calls each time something important happens. As long as the band check their mail - beware of dead e-mail addresses, and student mail accounts which aren’t checked over the summer. It’s probably worth getting a postal address and a phone number from each band when you make initial contact. If you’re doing this with guitar bands, you *will* have to go to gigs. If people read this article and decide to put their own compilation out, it is at this point where the ones who *really* want to do it will be separated from the ones who just kinda liked the idea a bit after that fifth pint. By the time Smoke came out, I’d seen at least one show by all 17 gigging bands involved. I like going to gigs – I’m weird like that – but it is a bit of a slog. If you think staying at home, drinking tea and watching repeats of Family Fortunes on cable sounds like less hassle and more fun than leaning uncomfortably against the greasy walls of a dank, BO-stench hell-hole, listening to four Mech. Eng. Students struggling to stay in tune then …erm…you’d be right a lot of the time. However, this isn’t about being right – it’s about the music, man ;-) 3. Get the music Once you start getting bands/artists on board, the next step is to get their music, money, and details. You won’t really get much artistic control beyond choosing the artists. Pretty much all the bands will tell you “we’ve got this new song that’d be perfect” – they won’t give you their demo and let you pick the best one. This shouldn’t really be a problem, but if you don’t like the song they suggest, you’ve got problems. One band that wanted to be involved with Smoke let me hear four songs they’d recorded. The only one that was any good was track four. The band, however, were dead set on using track two – a bad punk number with uncleared samples. That band didn’t get on Smoke. That reminds me. Samples – don’t do it. Paying for a license to use one sample from a semi-famous song can cost more than the entire budget of your project. And don’t be tempted to put out a CD with uncleared samples on it - the fact that you’re only putting out a small number of CDs doesn’t mean that no one will hear it. If it’s there, someone will notice it. When the time comes to get the tunes to the CD pressing plant you don’t want to send nearly twenty different CDs, DATs, MiniDiscs and wax cylinders in a large box. The postage will cost as much as a small car, and there’s a chance that they’ll put the wrong songs on, or get the running order wrong. If you put all of the tracks onto one CD (or DAT), and just send that, it makes things a lot easier. There are two ways to do this. You can compile it yourself with nothing more than a CD writer, and ask the CD manufacturers to master it, or you can get your friendly local studio to compile and master it for you. If you decide on the former, then it’s best to get the song from the band in CD format. You may have the nicest CD writer in town, but it’s unlikely that you’ll have a DAT player lying about, which you need to copy from their DAT to your CDR. Ditto for MiniDisc machines. Also, MiniDiscs are a bit unreliable for this sort of thing – we experienced technical problems trying to master tracks from MiniDisc that delayed us by a week, and some studios don’t like them. I’m not saying you can’t use MiniDisc, I’m saying that if you’re a cack-handed fool like me, then you may experience problems. Mastering is another one of those things that deserves it’s own article (which someone who knows what they’re talking about can write), but here’s some basic info. Basic mastering tends to consist of chopping extraneous noise from the start and end of tracks, putting the standard 3 second gap in between each track, and normalising i.e. setting the loudest part of each track to the same level. This last process is very important for a compilation CD, as the songs won’t have been recorded at the same time and place (the 19 tracks on Smoke were recorded at 16 different locations), and could have been recorded at very different levels. You don’t want the acoustic ballad to be twice as loud on the CD as the death metal workout. All of the above can be done at home if you have the right equipment and you know roughly what you’re doing. If you don’t have the equipment, it’s a good bet that someone from one of the other bands has, and you can ask them to do it. Remember though, that the act of buying some pirated software from The Barras does not instantly instil you with the skills, knowledge, and experience of a pro mastering engineer. So be careful. Professional (i.e. more expensive) mastering also involves tweaking the music slightly, using compression, EQ, de-essing and various other turd-polishing tools, as well as the stuff mentioned above. This won’t turn “20 local bands fall over their portastudios” into “Pet Sounds”, but it will make a noticeable difference. The quality threshold for the actual recordings (and I mean that in a technical, not artistic sense) is very much up to you. If you’re getting pretty full-on mastering done, then you’ve got a little bit of leeway, as the mastering engineer will tidy stuff up to the best of his/her ability. One of the tracks on Smoke was mixed down on a 4-track cassette recorder, but the people who mastered the CD managed to siphon off so much noise and sibilance, you’d never know. 4. Get the money We set up a bank account because we needed to have one before we could apply for a grant from The National Lottery. We didn’t get the funding, but it’s a good idea to have an account anyway. Any bank should have a club/society type account, and you can set these up in such a way that you can't withdraw any money without two signatures. That way you’ve got a passbook to wave under the noses of any bands who imply that their cash might be funding a trip to Barbados for you rather than a CD. If you can meet up with people to get their tracks from them, fine, otherwise they’ll have to send you their contribution through the post (MP3 just isn’t good enough to master a compilation from). If, for whatever reason, they don’t want to send a cheque then cash is fine, but make sure they disguise it. Put it in a CD case, or wrap it up in newspaper. It’s a good idea to keep a note of who’s paid and who hasn’t. I made up a PC Notepad file containing a list of the bands, and marked them off once they’d paid. It's also worth remembering that cheques bounce sometimes, like big rubber clowns that laugh in your impoverished face. You’ve not got the money until the cheque has cleared. Our application for National Lottery funding was unsuccessful. Without wanting to sound bitter, the body that hand out grants for these things has a finite budget, and so need a way to thin out the stacks of applications they receive. This they appear to do through a nastily worded application form. So beware. If you do decide to go for Lottery funding, let us know and we’ll advise you on the Lottery people’s underhand techniques. 5. Get the details I used TXT
files like post-it notes the whole time I was compiling Smoke. As well
as the list of who had paid, I kept a file containing the inlay copy and
one with all the MCPS info. More about MCPS, and how to keep them happy,
below. The details you’ll need from each artist/band to compile the
CD inlay and fill out the MCPS forms are: Your inlay
file should have an entry like this for each band: while your
MCPS list will have an equivalent entry along the lines of: Keeping all this info on computer might seem a bit anal, but believe me; it’s worth it in the long run. It’s hard enough to get the info from some bands in the first place, let alone chase them up for it again because you wrote it on the back of an envelope/matchbook/summons, and your mum chucked it out. Bands will want tiny changes made to their details at a moment’s notice, and you have to be reasonably competent at admin to keep everything together. Also, bands will change their mind (sometimes more than once) about what track they want to use. One Smoke band changed the name of their track by one letter – twice. Another lot changed their mind about what song they wanted to use three times before settling on the one they were going to use originally. Bands will always want their newest recordings on the CD, which is fair enough, but it means that the longer the project takes, the more bands will record “fantastic new stuff” and want to put it on the CD in place of their ‘we liked it at the time, but we hate it now’ older song. Even 60s retro bands will want their shiniest, newest, 30-year-old-sounding numbers on. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it means there’s more to the admin than you think. 6. Get the artwork Have you decided what the front cover of your CD is going to look like yet? Remember that this is a compilation, not an artist album i.e. it’s not going to sell to a pre-existing fanbase – sales will have to be won. For this reason, it’s probably a good idea to have something interesting, eye-catching, and original. We got professional artist/illustrator and cult in the making Terry Anderson to do the front cover of Smoke. Professional artists are jaw-droppingly expensive, but as Tel and I have been friends for around 80 years now, he was happy to do it for a reduced fee of £50. Money well spent, I reckon. If you don’t want to spend a fortune on an artist, there are cheaper ways of getting artwork. Ask around your bands, and see if any of them have artistic capabilities. While you’re doing that, see if there are any budding graphic artists on board (there are bound to be – everyone with Adobe Photoshop on their PC and too much free time on their hands considers themselves one these days), and see if they’ll help with the design and layout. The CD pressing plant will probably accept the inlay from you as a graphics file, usually in CorelDraw or TIFF format. The easiest way to get the artwork to them is to burn the files on to a CDR and send it along with the music, although some manufacturers might be okay about you e-mailing the files to them (check first – the files will be very big and the company may not have a fast e-mail connection). Beware Bands will drop out (remember, Rule 1). Bands split up, change their minds, or get better offers elsewhere, so be ready to find replacements at the last minute. It might even be an idea to keep a few people in reserve, letting them know the score. Whether or not they will be happy being ‘on the bench’ depends on them. The bands that don’t drop out may decide to use a different song (as discussed above), but occasionally a band will change name or line-up. Be ready for this. Don’t make up the graphics files for your artwork until quite late on, that way you won’t have to make too many changes to it afterwards. Don’t set concrete dates until you absolutely know you can meet them. We originally arranged launch gigs for Smoke for March 2001 – we didn’t get the CDs until the start of July (Rule 2 big style). 7. The law There are two types of royalties paid to bands; performance royalties, which are earned through radio and TV airplay, and mechanical royalties, which are earned through record sales. PRS (Performing Rights Society) are the people who collect performance royalties, while MCPS (Mechanical Copyright Protection Service) collect mechanical royalties. While PRS collect money from radio stations etc, MCPS bill record labels when they get new releases pressed up. By “the label”, we mean you. A label is just an identifier on a record; it doesn’t have to be an enormous multinational company. Just choose a name you like (it might be an idea to do a quick search on the web, just to make sure no one else is using it). I chose “Press Hat & Cigar” (the name of a bizarre sci-fi story written by my bass player many years ago) because I liked the sound of the phrase and I was pretty sure no one else would be releasing stuff under that name. Anyway, back to MCPS. You need a license from them to press a record. To apply for this license you need to fill in two forms for your album. The forms are available from MCPS themselves, and possibly your local practice/recording studio. One asks for general details of the CD, such as the number of copies you plan to press, the label name you plan to use, catalogue number (which should be unique), price (which is used to set the amount of royalties paid), format, number of tracks etc. the second form asks for each tracks’ title and composers (see 5). On the form
where it asks for the proposed price of your album, be careful. The form
asks you for a price, then asks if it’s the retail or dealer price.
The dealer price is the price a label (or their distributor) charges shops
for copies. As you don’t have a distributor, you should indicate
that your price is the retail price. It’s probably a good idea to
put your retail price as something low, like £1. MCPS charge a royalty
rate of 8.5% of the dealer price per copy of the record, so for 1000 CDs,
with a price of £1, the maximum royalties payable are: MCPS also demand that you put certain things on your CD. The CD itself should have the catalogue number and “MCPS” printed on it somewhere, along with a copyright disclaimer. The official MCPS disclaimer is a little stuffy and long-winded and a simple “All rights reserved” should do fine. The inlay should feature the artist’s names, song titles, and songwriter credits. As well as the information for each track, you’ll also have to put copyright info for the CD as a whole. (c) 2001 My Little Label Beware: MCPS are buggers to get hold of on the phone (when I finally got through, I ended up speaking to a French woman who couldn’t understand my accent - which stressed me out somewhat) and they take a week to reply to e-mails for some reason. So, if you want to get hold of them for something, leave plenty of time.
Most of your budget will go on CD pressing. You could attempt to save money by getting CDs burned, but if you want a product that people will be impressed by, it’s better to get them pressed (the blue tinge of CDRs always gives them away). If you are getting CDRs done, the most important thing is to make sure they comply with the Red Book standard (a set of technical protocols and procedures for CD manufacture), or you might find yourself with 500 albums that don’t play in car stereos/CD walkmans/computer CD drives. 1000 CD albums will cost you over £1000, assuming the pressing plant do the mastering, and that the CDs are in jewel cases with good quality colour inlays. The most common deal you get is for a 4+1 booklet (4 pages, colour on the outside, black and white inside) and a 4+0 back tray card (colour on the outside, blank inside). That’s not set in stone – you may decide you want something different - but it’s what the prices you’re given are based on. When you ask for a quote, make sure you find out exactly what the price includes and what it doesn’t. Manufacturers are supposed to press up stuff only when they have an MCPS license, but most will do it while your license is pending, which saves a bit of time (give Rule 2 the finger for a bit). The company we used for Smoke were pretty expensive, but the service they gave was really good – they took the time to consult with us about some technical aspects, and we got a much better product because of it. Usually, once they've finished the mastering, the manufacturer will send you a copy of the mastered material, so you can check the running order and listen out for any pops, clicks etc. Once you’ve given that the thumbs up, they can start pressing the actual CDs. This should take 2-3 weeks. During that time you can start putting your ingenious promotion campaign into action. 9. Promotion By the time you get the CDs back from the pressing plant, you should be ready to send out some promos. Promo list As the project progresses, you should be building up a promo list. You’re looking for any radio/TV programme, magazine, fanzine, or e-zine that will feature your CD and hopefully say nice things about it. Ask all the bands involved for names and addresses – some of the bands may already have a promo list that they use for their own releases. It seems to be quite difficult to get this information from people. I asked NEMIS, the organisation of managers, promoters and other music biz people in Scotland, for possible contacts and only one member of their 130-strong mailing list replied. While I was working on Smoke, I spoke to three different people who claimed to have Radio One DJ Steve Lamacq’s home address (apparently Lammo is more receptive to records that get delivered to his house than his Radio One PO Box), none of whom would part with the information. It’s also worth remembering that promo lists get out of date very quickly – people who work in the media tend to change jobs fairly frequently - so, if you get a list of names and addresses from someone else, find out how recent the information is. By the same token, if you find an address on a webpage, check when the site was last updated. E-mail is your friend – send out a quick mail to everyone on your list, describing your CD and asking if they’d be interested, then wait and see who replies. Remember that you’ll send out more promos than you have names on your list just now. As news of the project spreads, various industry people will crawl out of the woodwork, looking for copies. Make sure you have some spare. Radio Radio stations are very important. Pretty much everyone would rather hear a record than read a review of it. Also, a bit of airplay looks good on any artist’s CV, and is a great way of boosting a band’s profile. A few suggestions: Fanzines Fanzines are low budget magazines (often little more than pamphlets) produced by hardened music fans and distributed largely by hand. These days, a lot of them exist on the web (e-zines). You should feel an affinity with fanzine writers as, like you, they’re doing a lot of work for very little reward because they love music. Fanzines tend to review pretty much everything they get, although you may have to wait a while, as new issues tend to appear as and when the writer has enough stuff and can be bothered putting it all together. Some zines adopt a “we love everyone and everything’s great” approach, and will say your CD is brilliant without really saying anything about it. This might not be useful feedback, but it’ll give you some good quotes for your website, or future promo. Generally though, you’ll usually get a pretty honest review. A few pointers: A&R You’ve no doubt heard tons of horror stories about A&R people. Well, they’re all true. However, there’s nothing to stop you sending copies of your CD to labels. As long as you’re not expecting Alan McGee to phone up tomorrow and demand to sign everyone involved with your album. When Smoke was imminent, someone in the industry gave us a list of 15 or so reputable A&R people, and advised that we send them CDs. We’ve yet to hear back from any of them. * Only ever
send stuff to a named contact. Packages addressed to “EMI Records”
have more chance of causing a letterbomb scare than they have of being
opened and listened to. Press Release You should include a press release with the promo CDs that you send out. A press release is just a few paragraphs of information about your CD, compiled for the benefit of the media. You should be able to find articles on the web which advise on how to write a good press release, but here are a few basics: * It should
be no more than one A4 page. You’ll need a shitload of these things. If you work in an office, abuse the printing and photocopying facilities. If not, find someone from one of your bands who does, and get them to do it. You can e-mail press releases, but it’s better to cut and paste into the e-mail, rather than sending them as attachments (not everyone will be using the same platform as you). Postage-related stuff CD sized Jiffy bags cost 37p each. If you buy 100 (and you might as well) from The Post Office, you get a 10% discount - so each envelope costs you 33.3p. Addressing 100 envelopes and putting stamps on them is pretty time-consuming, so it’s best to do your mailout in stages – for Smoke I sent out around ten promos a night. If your promo list is stored on computer, you can print it out, cut out each address, and use them as address labels. If you’re able to print your list onto adhesive paper, you’re laughing. First class postage for your promo package (assuming a padded envelope, a CD and one sheet of paper): UK 0.57p Packages that go outside of the EU have to have a customs sticker on them, stating what they contain. Tick the box that says ‘gift’ – or the recipient might be asked for import duty. As the majority will probably be going somewhere in the UK, it is pretty safe to budget £1 per promo. You’ll probably send out around 100 promo copies. It’s tempting to be stingy with promo copies and keep some back to sell yourself. This doesn’t work – if no one knows of your CD’s existence, you’ll struggle to sell them, and you’ll have let the bands down. If the bands aren’t all local, and you won’t all be meeting up for some kind of launch, then you’ll have to budget for sending the bands their copies. Find out how much this is going to cost (obviously it’ll depend on where the bands are, and how many copies they get as part of the deal). With Smoke, we publicised the launch by staging three gigs, featuring bands from the CD. Putting on gigs is a subject for another article methinks, so I’ll leave it there. 10. Selling it By the time you’ve got the CD out, you may very well be too knackered to sell any. Local shops Local record shops often operate a ‘sale or return’ policy. This means that they’ll take some copies of your record (usually 5 or 10), display them in the shop (often in a ‘local bands’ section), and pass on money to you from any they sell. You can take out any remaining unsold copies whenever you want. The shop will probably take a small cut for this – Missing Records in Glasgow take 25% of the sale price for example. This is actually a more profitable (per unit) way for you to sell your CDs than… Distribution Independent
distributors like Prime, SRD, and Cargo take copies of your record and
distribute them to record shops all over the UK, passing profits from
sales back to you. This is how proper ‘indie’ labels get their
records into the shops. However, getting distribution isn’t easy,
and it’s not always necessary for small scale releases. Distributors
won’t waste time distributing records that won’t sell, so they’ll
only take you on if you fulfil certain criteria. For example, Shellshock,
one of the smaller independent distributors, will only take your record
if you’ve had one or more of the following: Also, like all middlemen, distributors take a percentage. Add the profit the shop makes to that, and you soon find your record makes more money for other people than it does for you. I’ll use Shellshock as an example again, as they’re the only distributor I’ve dealt with. You agree with them how much you want per record. They add 40% of that amount to the price, to get the dealer price – the price at which they sell the records to the shop. The shop then marks it up something rotten.
The Web If you set up a website to accompany your album, then you have the option of selling copies via the web. Mail order is pretty straightforward - just add a page to your site with all the details (your address/the price of the CD/who cheques should be made out to). Whether or not you want to put your home address up on the web is up to you. Online ordering is a little more complicated to set up, but is probably worth the effort. You sign up with a company, insert some of their code into a page of your site, and they handle the credit card transactions (for a small fee, natch). At the time of writing the best service for this kind of thing is PayPal – but that might have all changed by the time you read this, such is the transient nature of the interweb. So don’t quote me. On anything. Just be careful that you’re not violating your ISP's terms and conditions by selling stuff via your site – if you got your webspace free, you’ll find that your ISP have strict rules about what is and isn’t allowed on “personal homepages”. To conclude So there you have it. Putting out a compilation album = piece of piss. Maybe. If there is anything you think I‘ve missed, let me know and I’ll amend this accordingly. I really hope all this stuff helps someone. If you, dear reader, do decide to put out a CD after reading this article, let me know. In fact, a copy of it would be nice…. Paul McGazz
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