Release notes: Meditation & Tranquility by Andrew Brel

After three months of long days in the treadmill studio, my 8th album of Meditation music is ready for release.

Releasing music has changed a great deal since the first time I made a cassette and sold it over forty years ago now, with my garage band in Bryanston, called Hobo.

Since then I have released over 100 albums (as either writer, producer or record label) in the UK and been responsible for the manufacture of several million CD’s. For which I apologize to the environment.

This 2017 release is my first where there is no longer any hard copy. The entire process exists in the digital domain. It is either downloads on iTunes or CD Baby, or streaming via Spotify, Pandora and others.

While this is great news for the trees, the down side of existing solely in the digital world means it is very easy to be missed in the flood of digital tripe being fed into the same music portals. The absence of traditional release-expense to get a release into the market means even the lowest level of amateur irrelevance can find it’s way into a massively over supplied streaming market. Good news for knowing anyone can release anything without a cost. Bad news for the same reason.

Winning interest in support of my music means convincing would be listeners to actually click a few buttons and I appreciate that for the pre-digital generation, this is not as convenient or familiar as just buying a CD and slotting it into a CD player. It is a new consumer model, familiar to the young generation but less so to those raised in the pre-streaming years.

What makes this release especially curious for me is that in writing the press release, having written sales notes for over one-hundred albums, my product here is essentially free to buy.

The choice is with the consumer. Pay a small amount to own a copy via iTunes, or just have it for free on Spotify. In this the Times they have-a-changed. The challenge here is to sell you something you don’t have to pay for. (Unless you want to that is. Which is also fine.)

While the conversation about streaming media among my generation of musicians who enjoyed the analogue era is mostly negative, focusing on the awful payment scale from streaming media like Spotify, my experience is different.

Getting onto a curated playlist on Spotify is the present day equivalent of a hit song on the radio. On the rare occasions I have had songs on Spotify playlist, (Mary’s Journey from my album Atlantis is one example) there is real reward and many reasons to be excited about the future of music in the streaming era.

The way we sell music has migrated unrecognizably since I first wrote article’s for Music Maker Publications in the 90’s when shock waves rocked the established music industry with the advent of digital recording replacing glorious analogue 2 inch machines (remember the memorably super high resolution 16 track two Inch Studer) and the swift and painful death of analogue recording became inevitable. You couldn’t give away that two inch Studer these days. Imagine anyone paying $300 Ampex tape bills for 15 minutes of recording time?

In those early days of digital opportunity we marketed new releases with self made html web pages, which was ground breaking. In fact the first CD sold in the UK on the internet was on my label Bridge Recordings, in 1991. (Ronnie Johnson, Give them enough Rope.)

Revisiting my tired web making skills now for this new release has been a humbling reminder of how far web technologies have migrated. (HTML was so easy and logical.) Linking to the various streaming services, the iTunes links with all the issues surrounding price, and even the basic design criteria for making a page look appropriate in a new ‘virtual-market’ for a majority who are raised on Tyga and Dre and Kanye and DJ’s whose names blend in my memory to one mush of Booty/Ho/Niggah/Bitch/pop-a-cap-in-yo-ass, made me sigh. It would take days for me to put all that together.

Especially as, after forty years of making a living out of music, I don’t understand the music that accounts for 90% of current sales. Kendrick Lamar? I still stay in touch with popular music, listening through the top hundred every month in a process that usually requires 5 seconds per song. I don’t know why they make it, why they buy it, or what the point of either really is. Kanye West is a best selling artist and my music is very clearly not going to compete for his market share and nor should it. The popular music market is not where musical music is marketed. ‘Relaxation and Tranquility’

But if I have learned anything from tech, its that where there is a demand, someone has already written a brilliant app to do it for you. And so for $24 a year I had the most wonderful service of ‘Hearnow’ make up the sales page which will take you to either a free listen on Spotify or the opportunity to buy the album as a download from iTunes or CD Baby.

So please do buy the album if you can, or if not, listen to it for free on Spotify, and if you leave a review on either, my chances of being noticed by the most powerful people in Music today, the Spotify Playlist curators, goes up.
And I will be able to buy you a drink next time we meet.

This album, Mediation and Tranquility’ was real fun to make. It has a positive energy which has a special place at a time when the worlds vibration is being challenged by a new low. It is a studio written album in which the frequencies are as important as the choice of note. Tuning those frequencies into a positive, healing experience was my goal. It has a number of first take guitar improvisations on my super lovely Taylor Nylon and many recordings of nature I have made during travels.

Taking on stress in these awkward times is like a tug of war. Just let go and its over. This is one hour of music designed to help you do just that.

My first reviewer, the wonderful Doctor of Music, Berkeley educator and arranger of many number one hits, the estimable Richard Niles says:

“Andrew is a brilliant musician, writer and producer. This is a wonderful album”. Richard Niles

  iTunes   /  Youtube playlist  /  Spotify   /   Amazon

Peace and love,
Andrew