The worlds first literate garage band?

Combining the work of the romantic poets with acid rock and SEO

A few years ago my kid got a set of drums. Playing drums is boring without a band, so I thought why not join him? I’d played most of my life, though not in several years. So I recruited my old musical partner to form the trio Folkswitch.

I never cared for playing bars, and with a twelve year old drummer that’s not an option. Other places to play in my area are few and far between. But with today’s technology, anyone can make an album with a minimum of investment. Luckily, the lowfi movement make even rough sounding music commercially viable. Except of course, few people buy music now.

We settled on romantic poetry for lyrics because there’s always people searching for the poems. If they like the poem, they might like the music as well, so it became an SEO experiment too.

After a full year of having our work out there, we’ve had a few thousand people listen to one or more songs all the way through, even sold a few albums and tracks. To me, it’s much more satisfying knowing that someone in their home listened to one of our original songs and liked it, rather than the instant gratification you get watching drunks wiggle their bums as you play a cover song in a bar.

The downside? My now sixteen year old kid is too good to play with us, soon rendering us an acoustic duo. Until he wants his allowance.

An album page from the website, with two of our albums. Since we exclusively sell online, there is no need to plaster the cover art with our logo and album title. It’s already on the site. That allows the artwork to remain pure. And hey, it worked for Pink Floyd.

Even Ozzy Osbourne bemoans the end of album sales, but it’s important to make them available. Bandcamp is an excellent choice for selling as it is essentially a free service, you can set your own price, has high quality downloads and even offers physical CD and merchandise sales. Also, you can customize your Bandcamp pages to match your website to a great degree.

Album pages on Bandcamp allows you to let your audience preview the track or listen to it in its entirety up to three times. Many people use Bandcamp as a source for finding new music, so it’s a bit of a community as well, and includes the ability to share tracks on social media. A phone app is available too.

Let’s talk

Call 631-935-4726 or click here