averyfineline

From a face and name most of you would immediately recognize:

Just read your post talking about union players on southern gospel sessions. Well, there are a couple of reasons why [so few union players work in sg]. Some of them are the very same reason why I won’t even think of touring ever again in […]

I’ve been lurking on the Association for Recorded Sound discussion list lately. It’s mostly studio technicians, archivists, music librarians, and other assorted audiophiles (professional and avocational). And the last few days internet radio has come up. This is so primarily because July 15 is fast approaching. Barring any Congressional action, that will effectively be the […]

Since I flogged the switch at Solid Gospel radio in Nashville from sg to Praise & Worship pretty hard, I should probably say something about the recent purchase by Grace Broadcasting of WVRY 105.1, (formerly Solid Gospel). Grace promptly undid the P&W format and reinstated the Solid Gospel programming, putting sg back on the air […]

Roy Pauley’s June column in the Singing News has all the makings of an interesting read: “Gospel Music’s Biggest Blunders.” And indeed it’s arguably true that, as Pauley has it, prematurely parking the Gospel Singing Caravan and consistently inducting gospel greats into the hall of fame posthumously have lastingly diminished the long-term viability of gospel […]

David Bruce Murray posted this comment in the Canaan thread and it seems worth promoting to the main page, lest the point get overlooked in the mix.
If a group like the Hoppers can create great music on their own, that’s well and good, but the reality is they have no decent distribution plan in place. […]

I was on my quasi-sabbatical from avfl when the Canaan Record deal was announced, but I’ve wanted to get around to commenting on it even if it’s later rather than sooner.

I’ve been thinking about this a while (the news has been an open secret for a few months now), and the first thing to […]

Prologue: I brought back some kind of North Carolina head cold from the bloggers conference that has funkified me the last few days. Thus the lag in putting together some reflections on the meeting.
By now you’ve may had a chance to read other summaries of what went on at the Crossroads headquarters in Arden, […]

Regular reader Montana Man brings up a good point about personnel changes that is worth bearing down a little harder on:

Speaking of money … How much are we speaking about? $400 a week is $20,800 a year … $500 a week is $26,000 annually, $600 a week is $31,200. And how many groups are […]

Jeremy Lile’s move from Crystal River to BFA, coupled with the recent loss of the CR’s former baritone, Jeff Snyder, reminds me of an email I got months ago from a friend, who wrote: “I find it troubling how easy it is for some people to leave one group for another. There seems to […]

In another life, I used to do a lot of print design, so I tend to pay abnormally close attention to these things, I guess. But I noticed that Legacy 5 has taken down any direct mention of what was, until recently, being billed as “The Cathedrals Remembered” tributes put together by Currington Promotions. Currington […]

David Bruce Murray dredges up some interesting details about 15K minimums in Christian music. It’s a nice diversion for a Saturday morning.

Reliable sources confirm that EHSSQ moved roughly 25,000 pieces of product (split about evenly between cd and dvd) in the debut week of Get Away Jordan. Of that, about 17,000 of the units shipped were part of “non-traditional” sales – that is, not part of the standard retail transaction in which one person purchases one […]

David Bruce Murray has been cranking out some provocative and thoughtful stuff about the nuts and bolts of the industry lately. Much of it is first-rate and insightful. But his latest list of ideas about how sg could be a “leader” in exploiting the popular of listening devices like iPods is well-intentioned but unnecessarily […]

David Bruce Murray revisits the ongoing discussion about work load and labor trends in southern gospel and their relation to the success (or not) of sg. Most notably, he provides the kind of historical comparison I was pining away for the first time he wrote about this. You can see today’s Kingsmen’s schedule lined up […]

David Bruce Murray follows up my earlier post on new production and marketing paradigms in sg and builds significantly beyond what I had to say. Money quote:

Some independent artists have tried dealing directly with distribution companies, but that doesn’t generally work.
Take a look at a distribution company’s list of projects. 99.9% of them are on […]

A sidebar discussion emerges from within the number-crunching conversation that DBM started. Reader Jim writes:

I work on the retail side of the industry and one of the questions about SG music has always been about what percentage of album sales happens at retail and how much is sold at concerts. A good example […]

Over at musicscribe.com, David Bruce Murray is digging into gospel music, labor, and economies of scale in southern gospel. Nothing too shocking if you pay attention to gospel music regularly, but the numbers do put what we already suspected into an interesting perspective. Read both posts (here and here, in that order). Of the several […]

So Solid Gospel 105.1 in Nashville dumps southern gospel in favor of 24 hours of “Sunday morning worship music” and the hopelessly focus-grouped name, Life 105.1. Wow. And ugh. “Sunday morning worship music”? Whose Sunday morning worship, exactly? If the answer is, everyone’s, I guess this means Nashville is in for a bunch of the […]

The Homeland label looks to be coming back (David Bruce Murray floats a “magic three” thesis about the need for a third established record company here). My first question about the Homeland resurrection is, yeah but will the new Homeland be any better at paying its bills and royalties than the old one? I […]

Via Daniel Mount, David Staton of the LeFevre Quartet tries to take a page from the Sherri Easter playbook and drum up some populist outrage over an NQC mainstage decision, in this case the board’s choice not to put TLQ on the mainstage in 2007. I don’t really have an opinion one way or another […]