Recording - April 2013 - 40

nimbitmusic.com and type “Gary Eskow” into the search
field, you’ll get ported over to my store. I like the red background; if you choose to pay for your site, some additional options are available, for example replacing the
default background with an image of your choice. There
are actually two priced plans. If you’re serious about maximizing Nimbit you may want to study the options; it’s simple to start with the free version and upgrade as you get
deeper into the process.
You can set up individual categories; I created separate areas for Chamber Music, Pop Music, and MIDI

For months, years even, you’ve pored over the pages of Recording, and
look what’s happened! You now turn out high-quality masters in the privacy
of your own home. Thanks to Recording’s expert writers and your willingness
to absorb their wisdom, mixes you create sound good in your room. Even
better, they translate well into other environments! Great! ...now what?
Self-Promotion is a must
Let’s assume that you recently recorded, mixed, and mastered a couple of
smoking tracks of your own music and are ready to bring this work to market.
And while you’re at it, you have your own back catalog that deserves wider
recognition. A major recording contract and all the trappings that go with it,
including a promotional machine, may still work for the next Taylor Swift, P!nk,
or T-Pain. For most artists, however, the new model requires self-promotion.
Recording your CD was the easy part—how are you going to let the world
know about it? Let me be the one to show you a new way of doing just that,
one that I explored recently, using my own music catalog as the guinea pig.
I must confess to being a lousy self-promoter. Maybe it’s the residue from
the days when I had a jingle house in Manhattan. Reps never worked out for
me, so I sent reels out endlessly and followed up with thousands of phone calls
to ad-agency producers, art directors, and writers. What a brutal experience!
When I dropped out of that world I deliberately separated the work I do
for cash from my artistic endeavors. Most days I spend between four and six
hours writing music, and I’ve produced a fair amount of it. Richard Hobson,
a baritone at the Metropolitan Opera, recently recorded my song cycle,
“Dispatch From The Killing Floor,” and the string-quartet group ETHEL
tracked “The Amazing X-Ray Machine” a few months ago. Three new projects are in the works.
Enter Nimbit
A couple of months ago I received a press release from PreSonus announcing that they had acquired Nimbit, an online music store. I decided to check
it out. Over the last several years the process of posting tracks to my website
had gotten frustrating. I make my music available at no cost to anyone who
wants to listen to it, and the method has involved uploading tracks to an FTP
site. My web designer grabs the audio and associated copy and adds a
page to my site. Frankly, it’s not something that he’s comfortable doing. I
decided to pull the audio off of my site and create a store on Nimbit... and
wow, it turned out to be such an easy thing to do!
The first thing you need to understand is that there are two separate Nimbit
sites. nimbitmusic.com is the link you’ll follow to find artists who have stores on
Nimbit. You, the artist, will set up your store on nimbit.com. If you go over to
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RECORDING April 2013

Demos, and slotted appropriate material as “albums”
within each category. If you click on Chamber Music
you’ll see that the first selection is my string quartet,
“The Amazing X-Ray Machine” (as shown in Figure 1).
To the right of the title there is a default line of copy
that says Digital Album, with a price listed to the right.
You can set individual prices for each of your cuts, and
albums. I’ve gone with $0.99 per track. However—
and this is important—you can also set the preview
time for each track. I want to give everyone the ability
to listen to my music for free, so I set up streaming times
that deliver the entire content. If a listener wants to
download a track, he or she pays the price I’ve set; you
might want to give, say, 30 seconds’ free streaming of
all tracks in your store, or tailor each song so that the
length makes sense on a cut-by-cut basis.
Note the art work associated with the audio tracks.
Whether you’re using the free version or one of those
you pay for, you can import art to sit beside your
music.
How to add your materials
Adding individual songs, or digital albums, is easy;
I’ll walk you through what to do by showing an example of my own. Once logged in, open the Products
page and select “Add A Product”—you’ll be given the
product creation page shown in Figure 2.
My collection Reunion consists of two pieces, “Soft
As a Kiss (Emily’s Song)” and “A Brief Discourse On
The Blues,” that pianist Christopher Johnson recorded
several months ago. Chris and I last worked together
about a dozen years ago—hence the title.
Nimbit prompts you title your Product, and then asks
you to upload a photo. Louis Brown Recording in
Manhattan, where we worked, has a gorgeous 19th
century Steinway grand, so I found a photo of a similar piano that wasn’t copyrighted and chose it as the
“cover” of my album. You can offer your work as
downloads or CDs, which Nimbit will sell for you. I use
my store as a place where people can listen to music
and download MP3 files, so I chose “MP3 Album” as
the Album Format Type. You can also sell physical merchandise—T-shirts, for example—from your storefront,
which Nimbit will package and distribute for a fee. At
this point I uploaded both tracks and edited the Product
Info, which is essentially the “liner notes” for the
release. And that’s it!
One minor complaint I have is that Nimbit handles
the file conversion, not you. If you’re a purist who has
the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec (reviewed November

http://www.nimbit.com http://www.nimbitmusic.com http://www.nimbit.com http://www.nimbitmusic.com http://www.nimbit.com

Recording - April 2013

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