Parker Loghry is a sophomore organizational communication major at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He grew up in St. Libory, Nebraska, a town he describes as having “a hundred people, two bars, and one gas station.” So of course he starts an ambient/post-rock one-man-band called PlainFire. He’s now distributing his music using long-tail tools on a “pay as you please” basis. In this guest blog post, he tells how he’s gone about chasing the musical long tail. Thanks, Parker.
PlainFire was an experiment. I had always loved metal, the in your face, complex, and loud style of music, but after hearing the Explosions In the Sky album, “The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place,” I began to appreciate simplicity, emotion, and mood in music. I had heard this during the summer of 2010 and listened to this style of post-rock/ambient non-stop up until December of that year, when I took a stab at making my own ambient music.
With a little push from my scholarship community to complete some type of a research/creative project to fill requirements, I jumped on GarageBand on my MacBook Pro, a production program which I had been pretty familiar with due to lots of tinkering on my family’s Mac mini, recording rough mixes growing up. Using an M-Audio interface for my guitar recording, I went to work. The first song ever recorded was “No Matter, Time Will Always Elapse.” I started from nothing. I just went. Not knowing how to read music, and writing whatever I could think of that sounded good and would be something I would want to listen to. I programmed all the drums by dragging and dropping samples, changing note velocity to make them sound more human. I used my keyboard to write any part that wasn’t guitar. I never used a preloaded GarageBand loop. All tracks were original using sampled sounds. So it went, writing on the fly, experimenting the whole way. 7 days and 14 tracks later, I was done. My first album had been written.
Afterwards, I wanted to share my music, but had no idea how. My first move was burning a spool of a hundred CD’s that I could hand out on campus. I chose a picture I had previously taken of a landscape and used the photo-editing site, Picnik, to make my album art and logo. My father, a professional photographer, happened to have a printer capable of printing on CD’s, which were then placed in a paper envelope along with a printed insert with track listings and website information.
I didn’t want money for it, and I never asked for it. I just wanted people to listen. Surprisingly, I had trouble getting people to take my free copies of the album. I knew I had to put it on the Internet somehow, with a huge “FREE” sign beside it. I searched around and found a website called Bandcamp, which allows artists to create a page and release their music however they prefer. I spread the link around on Facebook and blog-spots everywhere across the web. Using Bandcamp, I received sixty downloads of my first album, “The Farther We Stride.” A dream come true, sixty random people from the Internet were listening to my music.
The following summer of 2011, it was the same routine: A week in front of my computer tinkering away on a new album. This time I had more experience and had learned tricks to make the project easier and more professional in quality. I had dove in to Logic, another audio production program, which amped my sound entirely. Another seven days, and I came out with a new 10-track album, “The Stronger We Have Grown,” a continuation of the first album’s title.
On April 9th of 2012 I had finally finished my project and released it onto Bandcamp under the same page as my first album. I spread the link around Facebook a second time, but once again, got little response. I set up an account through the online distributor, CD Baby, which put my album up on sites and stores including iTunes, Spotify, Amazon
, and Google Play. I also turned to a few blog-spots that I knew of who supported indie music artists and shared their downloads links. Soon after I contacted the owner of a certain blog, my album spread like wildfire. I was surfing the web through every ambient/post-rock blog I could find. American, European; I was there. People were re-posting my link all over. Downloads gradually grew, twenty, to forty, to one hundred and seventeen. By May 2 of 2012, I had gotten 835 downloads on Bandcamp. I was floored. I was still ecstatic about my initial sixty downloads of my first album. My music was being played on radio stations in Connecticut, Maine, and Hungary.
Through all of this I have been donated around $30, which to me is $30 too much. The satisfaction of having people I don’t know listen to my music and connect with it brought overwhelming satisfaction and joy that money couldn’t buy, making every hour I spent on making it more than worth it.
