These few weeks since the recording was finished for our newest album, #PowerLoveFreedom, and the release on February 6, 2016 have been a WHIRLWIND OF ACTIVITY.
Between today and March, we will have four…count ’em…FOUR live and on-the-air radio appearances to support this album. Our presales are fairly robust in comparison to the last recordings, both in hard copy CD and digital sales.
There is so much activity already that it’s finally time for us to reconsider our business structure. The band is an LLC, held primarily by one person. But now because we have more than one songwriter on the album, and also because our personal values call out, we’re evaluating turning the LLC into a worker-owned collaborative, so that every band member owns the work we do (workers create all wealth anyway). We have been very proud to pay the side players some of the best gig money in the region for a band of our age and notoriety, but we want to take this a step further and fully enfranchise them in the band’s success.
Worker-owned collaboratives are a fairly common way of doing business in Colorado. The company that prints some of our posters, P&L Printing, is a democratically-run collaborative. So too is LeftHand Brewing Company in Longmont, whose “Fade to Black” is our frontman’s favorite beer (hint…hint).
Jason, our frontman (sax and vocals) and the main songwriter, has decided to split the royalties on his songs with the side players going forward. He is very serious about making sure that whatever wealth is generated from this music gets shared with the people who produced it.
Additionally, since songwriters are entitled to royalties from live performances (which is why venues pay fees to ASCAP and/or BMI), when entering a set list for royalties, Jason also enters in the cover tunes we’ve played on a show. More often than not, our sets are full of music written by black musicians; for example, Professor Longhair, Al “Carnival Time” Johnson, Earl King, Allen Toussaint and more. The music industry has a terrible, longstanding reputation for stealing wealth from the black musicians who have created our American body of music (big time side eye at Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, etc.), and so we do our part to even the score by making sure they get royalty payments when we play their works. #BlackLivesMatter in every way, not just as regards police brutality.
Because we are independent and self-funded, we depend on our crowd to feel good enough about our work to make their own investment in our future by coming to shows and buying our CDs and merch. A tip also helps. You all have been very generous to us over these last few years, and you can help us even more by spreading the word about our new recording and sharing our show schedules with friends.
- Buy a digital download or CD here.
- Buy a t-shirt or other items here.
- Check out and share our gig schedule here. Click the gig date, and it will expand and show a “share” button.
Thanks for listening! Wish us luck!