Quote:
“Now that I’m off the label it’s a bit of a shock, because now it’s like, ‘Oh ****, it’s real now.’ I mean, even though I’ve been doing it myself the whole time anyway, now it’s gonna be more pressure,” she said. “I have to do it myself, I have to hire all the people, I have to find all the stuff, I have to pay all the producers, I have to do everything. It’s fine, I actually don’t mind. I have a good team, lawyer, manager.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/naomizeichne...tive-interview
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Two tenets:
1) BWET must be released this fall, during the BWET tour.
2) Regardless of whether she'll sign with a major or indie label in the future, BWET will be released independently: “Banks hopes to release those songs on her own label, and move on.”
Distribution
I'm in the group of those who think a digital-only release would be a disappointing embarrassment. If she can't strike a temporary deal directly with a distributor or larger label just for the purpose of releasing CD and vinyl versions of BWET (well worth it even if she has to pay a lump sum to them and hand over 75% of the profits, for heavens’ sake), she should frankly use a service geared more towards tiny artists like
tunecore Disc Manufacturing or
finetunes Digital Media Services. My only concern here is whether this would open her up to the album leaking weeks before release…
Digitally, she can stick with what she's doing, which I think people have speculated is through tunecore.
Can she buy her own iTunes banner, or is that something that can only be negotiated via a label?
Promotion
She should immediately decide the next two songs she's going to release, keeping in mind critical acclaim and potential for mainstream success. Frontrunners are Miss Camaraderie, Chasing Time, and Wallace. Everyone seems to agree Miss C is her best song, and yet I get the sense she's hesitant to release it because she wants it to get treated right.
Well, sorry, babe, but the time has seriously come to put your best foot forward.
So yeah, record videos for those two tracks. Release first track by the 20th of this month, and the video the video the following week. Rinse and repeat for track #2 in September. At that time, put out the album cover, tracklist, release date, and preorder.
All this time, she should be getting her Beyoncé-level work ethic on,
recording as many videos for BWET tracks as possible. Like, Gaga-during-Monster-Ball, sink-a-ton-of-your-own-money-in-it ****. When it comes time for release week, the strategy is
saturation: as many radio and blog interviews as you can grab, any TV promo you can snag (probably zero, unless maybe something in the UK), and one new video per day each day that week. (Yes,
Weird Al's Mandatory Fun-style. It sure worked for him!)
Goal
BWET gets critical acclaim with >78 on Metacritic. BWET sells at least 20,000 copies in the US so that it isn't a total flop.
Physical distribution will make this possible, in contrast to Sky Ferreira's iTunes-only release. (50,000 would be the beautiful goal, possible if there's more people checking for the long-awaited BWET than we expect and/or if her video saturation works like it did for Weird Al.)
After this,
it won't matter if she doesn't chart a single song from the album in any country. She'll have proved she didn't completely annihilate her career and can move on to
Fantasea II and whatever else next year, either on a real label or using the blueprint for BWET.
And yeah I mean it seems to be dear to her heart so I'm sure she won't treat it lightheartedly.
Really though, she's in her early twenties. She could take a 10 year break and still stay lol.
