World With No Conscience 'Lost Hope EP'

World With No Conscience 'Lost Hope EP'

Project 2017-01-10 22:23:25 +1300

Left to Right: Courtney Allison, Rebekah Fox, Khan Buckman

Photographer: Ariana McKay

WHO WE ARE

We are an alternative rock band from the West Coast, called World With No Conscience. We formed in September 2015 and currently have three members, Courtney Allison (Lead vocals/Guitar) Khan Buckman (Drums/Backing vocals) and Rebekah Fox (Keyboards).

WHERE WE'RE AT

Right now we are in the process of self producing an EP, that we will use to grow our audience and use as a demo tape to send to record labels. We have been working hard on the six tracks that will be appearing on the EP, and are now ready to get into the production phase, recording, cover art, making hard copies. We are lucky enough to have been offered the use of a proffesional studio for free, but as we are not experienced in recording, we will be paying 1-2 people to help us and run the technology. 

WHAT'S UP NEXT

While we are recording we will also have someone working on the cover art. Once we have both the recorded tracks and art, we will be ready to make hard copies. We have found a Christchurch based company called The Duplicators that makes exactly the product we are looking for, and are aiming to produce the physical copies through them.

After we have accomplished all of this, we will finally be able to release the EP, both digitally and physically. For digital distribution, we intend to work with something called TuneCore, a digital distributor that will upload the EP to streaming platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, and many others, then gathers money we earn from any one of those into one place. This makes managing the digital release a much simplier and cost effective process, as well as putting our music on platforms we wouldn't of thought to put it on ourselves.

PRICE BREAKDOWN

Recording:

        - The pay for the people who help us in the studio is currently an unconfirmed amount.
       - The studio is in Christchurch, so when we go to record we have to cover the cost of travel and staying away from home for 1-2 weeks. We have family in Christchurch who have offered for us to stay with them, so we won't have to pay for a hotel/motel.

Cover Art:

        - We already know how we want the EP to look, and we have friends in graphic design and photography, so it is unlikely we will have to pay much, if anything, for proffessional quality cover art.

Hard Copies:

       - The most expensive part of producing the EP is getting the hard copies made. Because we have already found the company we want to make them through we have been able to price how much it's going to cost. 

As the price changes based on how money copies you are making, we are going to make 500 copies, where each copy is $3.37. We would be getting the best value for our money, and excluding GST, it would cost $1,685. 

We will be selling each copy for $7-8, meaning each copy pays for itself twice over, and we will have the money to make more if the demand is high enough.

Digital Distribution:

       - On TuneCore, it costs $10 to release a single, and $30 to release an album, this is much cheaper than paying to host on many different platforms.

As with anything, we are expecting to come across hidden costs and run into things we didn't account for, and we are hoping that our funding goal is enough to cover both what we've budgeted for and what we haven't.

WHY THIS PROJECT IS IMPORTANT TO US

Music is all we want to do with our lives. Its given us a lifeline through dark times, and helped us stay on the right track. Becoming so entirely focused on something like this, pouring your heart and soul into creating songs that help us process and let out our emotions, letting people know what you're feeling when you're unable to say it, in all these ways music has helped us work ourselves out, and we want to give back to that community. To help other people with our music, would be everything we could ever ask for. Whether we make a change in one persons life or thousands, there's no difference to us.

Our name, World With No Conscience, came from a song called Anonymous by Three Days Grace, 'We get by in a world with no conscience, by shouting it out and being anonymous'. When we were in the process of trying to think of a name, Courtney was listening to that song, and those four words were the right wording of everything we were trying to express. There is so much wrong with this world, and not everyone sees that. 

Major companies see sweatshops in China, Japan, Bangladesh, Taiwan, and many other countries as a cheap and easy way to mass produce their products, not caring that they're coming from the hands of exhausted, overworked, and underpaid people, who are just trying to put food on the table for their children, who end up working in the same dangerous factories to support their parents. But you can bet that the big wig executives of those companies, who are lounging around in their lavish and luxurious homes, paid for by the products they are destroying people's livelihoods to produce, think its their right to live the way they do because they have obviously worked so hard to earn money they don't deserve a cent of.

Yes, the Paris attacks were a devastating event, and what happened was awful, but those sorts of events happen daily in the east, and they're lucky to get five minutes of media coverage. How long were we hearing about the Paris attacks for? How many millions of people changed their Facebook profile pictures to have the French flag over them? How many corporations lit up their buildings with blue, white and red lights? We ignore it when the exact same thing happens elsewhere, but as soon as its a direct threat to us, then, and only then, does it become something we should pay attention to. 

Fixing problems like that is what we stand for. We want to help the world get a conscience, but you need a platform, a following to do that. And its hard to be working with such dark stories without falling into a dark place yourself, so music is a way to connect like minded people into a platform we can use to make a change, while keeping ourselves afloat. This EP, is a start.

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