As if making the best music that you can weren’t complicated enough, releasing that music so that people who would enjoy it can find it, buy it or stream it (legally, you would hope), and listen to it is another life of complication. You need help to do this at all, and you need even more help to do it right. We get a lot of that help from our distributor, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, IODA.

There’s a whole series of stories to do about IODA, but here’s just a small look into who they are and what they do for artists like ‘ohana Dreamdance and labels like All Over The Place.

When ‘ohana Dreamdance collaborates with a choreographer like Lizzie MacKenzie, the performances of the company performing her work, as Extensions Dance will perform “Time Now” at Dance For LIfe’s Next Generation this Sunday, is very much like our version of a live show -- one of the best ways for people who don’t know us to find out if they enjoy our music. Naturally, it’s important to try and co-ordinate the release of the music with the show, but because of the complexity of that whole different world of Dance Performance, that can get complicated.

The question of which of their performances would be the actual premiere of the new work depends on a lot of factors, some profound (is the piece really ready for an official premiere?), some more practical (is Lizzie on tour and can’t be at the show?). As these complicated issues settled into something substantial, ‘ohana Dreamdance then has to begin to work through the separate complications of completing all of the final mixes and mastering, not just for the performance (the MacKenzie Choreography Mix), but in this case for the original songs “Time Now” and “Some Time” that are on the EP release “Time Now Choreography Mixes”.

That's always a little hazardous, but it got even more complicated when I found out the premiere would be in a month, and went to do the final mastering for the release to IODA, and through IODA to all of the sites like Amazon and eMusic and iTunes. I certainly can’t explain this in any way that I would want to see show up in a search engine, but only then did I realize that I had never actually mixed “Time Now”. I had mixed, and mastered, the two separate sections of the song that are part of Lizzie’s choreography mix, but in the Choreography Mix they’re separated by the middle section, which is the song “Some Time”. Putting the two halves back together turned out to be a completely new challenge. They could have just followed eachother with no change, and that’s what we did in the Piano-only version, where it works well. But with all of the String Orchestra parts in the full versions, it really needed a transition.

Back to IODA. By the time we finished all of this, created the release art that shows up with the track at all of the online and mobile services (you know, iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Verizon, Napster, Rhapsody, Shockhound, Beatport, well alright, not Beatport for this EP, and about thirty others), wrote the release description, set the bar code, set the ISRC codes, copied the tracks to CDs to send to IODA, and too much more to abuse the patience of anybody still reading this paragraph, there were about two weeks to the show. IODA recommends nine.

IODA handles thousands of labels, and we don’t want to think about how many individual artists and tracks. They get CDRs or retail-ready CDs from those labels, encode them, and distribute them on hard drives to legal download services all over the world. They do this so consistently, and so professionally, that for those services that are just as effective in ingesting (that’s what they call it) the new releases, like Amazon and eMusic, you can actually see the release in a few days, ready for purchase. Everybody knows about Amazon; if you don’t know about eMusic, it can be a really intriguing choice for a music lover. They require a monthly subscription, starts I think around $10, and for that you get legal downloads at half or even less of the cost at places like iTunes. We pay them $9.99 per month and get thirty downloads, so that’s about 33 cents each. Almost all independent labels are there, and now a couple of the majors with their older catatogue.

Here’s the link to the track at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dmusic-artist&f...

and as soon as Dan gets out of rehearsal, I’ll try to get him to clean that up into one of those cool hyperlinks he knows how to program.

Here’s the link to the track at eMusic:

http://www.emusic.com/artist/Ohana-Dreamdance-MP3-Download/12630671.html

If you’re interested in trying out eMusic for a free trial, use the link in this article Dan wrote about them a few months ago. We’re pretty sure they mean it that if you don’t like it you can cancel before you pay them, at least they did come through on that with me a few years ago when I tried them out and then cancelled the same day.

Get AOTPR Tracks For Free Through Emusic

Enough of all of this. The main idea is to say thanks to IODA, Amazon and eMusic. It's always nice to have records for the show.