Blog: Forging New Business Models

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This week, for the first time in about TWO YEARS, someone very kindly bought a "Postman's Back Breaker Back Catalogue Gift Pack Attack" from the Special Offers part of our online shop. This was all very exciting, and caused me to go and have a rifle through my STOCK.

This is always a delight, but even more so these days as there is a lot LESS of it than there used to be. When i lived in Leytonstone the spare room was pretty much FULL of boxes and boxes of CDs but since then (thanks to a suggestion by The Stock In My Warehouse) i have been following a two pronged policy of stock reduction, firstly by giving away CDs to people who come and see our shows and secondly by not ordering MORE. This has worked extremely well - in fact it has worked almost TOO well, because I now find I have only ONE box of Forest Moon Of Enderby left and only about SIX copies of Dinosaur Planet!! These are the two CDs that I've generally given away over the past few years, I think I'm going to have to start giving away something else for the rest of the dates!

During this stock evaluation I discovered that I'm also out of the My Boss Was In An Indie Band and Better Things To Do singles, not because of any SALES RUSH but because as I've tended to chuck them as extras in when people order other stuff. I DO however now have a few more copies of Shed Anthems available, as another box was discovered in Tom's spare room a while ago - the shop has been updated accordingly!

While all this has been going on The Validators themselves have been back in action - not in the tawdry, run of the mill world of PERFORMANCE but in the THRILLING arena of Business Practice Methodology, as we've been developing new procedures for efficient collaborative album production. Oh yes - I am ready to deliver PAPERS at the Business Excellence Conference of your choosing!

As mentioned before, we're currently in the MIXING stages of our next album. Usually this would involve one or more of us spending several nights at Snug in Derby saying "Can you turn everyone else down?" before sending the results back to the rest of the band who would feedback by saying "Can you turn me up?" However, this time around I thought we could save ourselves the TRAVEL by asking Mr R Collins to just get on and do it himself - he's ENGINEERED all the sessions, know's what we're meant to sound like, and very definitely knows what he's doing, so it seemed like a sensible solution all round.

Now, however, we're onto the next bit which is us all listening to the tracks and giving thoughts on further TWEAKS. Early on we agreed that we'd discuss this amongst the band first and provide one unified list of changes, rather than BOMBARDING Rich with bits and bobs, and so we all agreed to listen and send back a) general impressions of the overall sound b) specific points for each song to ME by the end of last week, so I could compile them into one document.

The Validators are a well-oiled ADMIN MACHINE and so everyone duly complied, leaving me to create a surprisingly AGREEABLE list of comments. Much to my surprise we were in almost total CONCORD about what needs doing, with only one song causing any real dispute. We're currently in the process of discussing this document ready for fine tuning and sending back to Rich, after which we'll hopefully be almost ready for the next decision: the running order. We're probably going to be deciding that with a FITE!

And then, of course, we enter the wonderful realm of Actual Physical Copies. This time I'm going to try and NOT buy twice as many copies as I will ever sell - it'll mean less free copies to have to give away for the following five years, but it'll also mean I don't have to buy a new cupboard to keep them all in!

posted 13/11/2015 by MJ Hibbett

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