Victorious Combinations

10 Dec 2007 Selling Music Hello, We just received a paypal payment of $6.37 from our music aggregator for sales on iTunes music store. I thought it was cool how we can see how our sales are doing each month through these services. It then occurred to me that most people don't realize how their money actually effects the independent artist and I thought I'd break it down in plain terms. In the old days, when there were still major labels signing bands to multimillion dollar deals, the artist almost never saw any proceeds from record sales. The deal was set up in such a way that only around 10% of the money accrued from record sales would be credited against the debt the band held with the record company. Courtney Love made a wonderful speech regarding this disparity and most of us are aware of it these days. Essentially, unless you were a million selling artist you were never going to be out of debt with the record company, they would always hold ...

24 Dec 2006 Churchgoer This is the last song on the album, it's an instrumental and very simple and moody. I thought it would be nice to have up on the site over the christmas season: it's a beautiful wind down to our very epic record, and my dear friend Hugh played a lot of violin tracks on it to make it sound so good! Merry Christmas to you all and I hope this song fits somewhere in your evenings! Cheers to you all! Mark     Chorchgoer by Combine the Victorious

4 Dec 2006 A little video, "All of the Love" Current mood: calm Hello, this week I'm happy to tell you about the video I've edited together for our song, "All of the Love." It was a track we wrote about a friend of ours who died last year. The video is a time lapse thing, where we took a picture of the tree straight out our front window everyday (with a few exceptions) since March 2006. I edited the individual pictures to the song and added in some nifty little transitional shots to make it more emotive. Certainly not MTV glitz or big budget quality, but it's heartfelt and honest, and to paraphrase a friend's words: it helps you understand the meaning of the song. Have a look when you have time: it's only the first cut, but I can't imagine it'll change too greatly. You'll find it under our "videos" button. Thanks for reading, hope you're all doing well. Cheers, Mark 

King's Cross by Combine the Victorious 30 Nov 2006 King's Cross Current mood: bouncy So there's quite a story behind this song but I won't spell it out because that might distract or even ruin it for you. However I will write out the lyrics and explain the voices you're hearing. One day I'd like to make a mini-movie to fully bring this story to life. It would be an epic 3 and a half minutes that would probably never get shown on any television network - but it would be so good. And the world needs a few more good things to view doesn't it? I wonder if Spielberg directs rock videos? If anybody wants the full interpretation of these lyrics feel free to ask - I'll email you the whole story, though I think a few of you will get it just fom how I've written things out anyway. Conversely, I'd be curious to hear what you make of them as well. Perhaps your version is more intersting! King's Cross (Lyrics) (old man)...

It's been years since we've actively used myspace, but going over old writings I thought it would be a shame to lose all the blogs we'd created over the years.  These first few posts will be reposts of blogs from 2007 onwards - not all of them, some were rather tepid, but the interesting ones.  Stories about songs and methods etc. Saying that, here's the first batch: glancing overa ll the posts on our old mspace I've decided to retain the ones that actually talk about our music, rather than hold onto old rants! _______ 1 Jul 2006 Bedtracks recorded Current mood: accomplished Thanks to everyone for showing up at Mushroom studios last night to help out with the gang vocals. We had fun recording there for two days and managed to get all ten songs with real drums. A big thank you once again to Jonas and Jesse for their excellent skills at the kit! The difference of replacing the programmed drums and loops with proper acoustic drums is amazin...