The market is really, really different now because what has transpired in the last several years is rap music is still maintaining it’s place in the marketplace, right? And so, a lot of – especially my friends or people at my age, they’re all scared of that. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to make their records. They’re just trying to chase the beat of somebody that’s 20-years-old. I just think that’s ridiculous and that’s wrong. You should be true and cut what it is to yourself because the people that love us from that era, who followed those records, they wanna hear you do you. They don’t wanna hear you do the other guy. They already have the other people that do that. So what I tried to do on this record is not chase any of that, you know? This is just true to itself and true to what it is that I would do.
And so, I don’t think it – the marketplace is that big a difference. I happened to be from a very large of people called war babies or whatever you wanna call it. There’s a lot of us there and we don’t go to stores that much anymore, we like the internet and all of us have a little more money now. And we’re just looking for something to do and I noticed that every time there’s a big concert or somebody reaches that audience, the concerts always sell out, like, you got the Paul McCartney concert. They can’t sell enough tickets. You know, Prince came back – boom. Everything’s blowing up. So I think that just no one’s really accurately reached the marketplace for this audience right now and so I’m gonna try and do that.
In the old days, you make a record and I don’t care, you could be writer, producer, artist, everything, you’re gonna get like a buck 60, a buck 70. I think at some point Michael Jackson’s getting $1.95 or two bucks or something like that. And at the end of the day, the record companies would give you the money to cut the record, but then they’d own the master even after you paid the money back for the record. They’d take that outta your money, right? So now they got all the money back for recording that you paid for and they still own the masters. And nowadays if you do it independent, you can make, you know, $8.50, nine bucks a record and even if it’s a little less if you took off the dollar for making the record. So even if you’re making six bucks a record, now if you sell 100,000 records you just made $600,000.00 as opposed to the other way you’d have to sell millions of records to get the same amount of money and then they’d have written into their contract, “Well, we’re gonna pay, you know, 90% of that after we deduct 10% of this and 5% of this.” And you really were probably down to a buck 10 or a buck 20 in actual, you know, what you got paid on.
And so, I think that, you know, things have changed now. It seems that the public doesn’t seem to care what label it’s on or they don’t even know, you know? The CDs and everything have changed the world. Now we have digital downloading. It’s real easy to get your stuff up and distributed, like I was saying before. You can get your things distributed out at retail and it seems to be now, if you know how to spend the promotional dollars to promote your record. Which I must say, I’m a new guy at this. I’m not an expert. I’m gonna try and hire some people who know a little more than I do, who can help me, but it’s just – I’m so excited about the possibilities of doing it. I wanna shoot the infomercial, which some of my good friends are gonna help me with, you know? And with – and I’m gonna buy time on that, you know, I’ll take all the free late night time that doesn’t cost much and see how it goes or maybe take, like, Fresno, California, buy some good time in that area and see if we get some response from it; see if it sells.
That is the other thing, by the way, that I like about being older now. I’m not the new, hot, 19-year-old, so I don’t have to be on all the radio stations the same week is what used to be so expensive. You had to coordinate an effort where you could dominate the entire planet earth in one week. That’s not necessary anymore. I can take one great idea like an infomercial, buy spots in Fresno, which maybe I can afford to buy in one market and we’ll see if that does anything. And if that does something, then we’ll take the money that comes off the records ‘cause now you don’t have to wait two years to get your money to get paid. You can get your money in, like, two weeks. So we can take the money from that and maybe roll that over to Sacramento and just spread it like a great disease, let’s say. And so, I’m really looking, you know – to me, that’s very exciting to try to go out and do some of that.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I wanna hire somebody in radio promotion, somebody in marketing, somebody in, you know, the publicity department, who will get the trade ads, get the magazines like Ebony magazine, People magazine, all of that kind of stuff – Variety magazine. And I wanna take the advantage of late night TV, which is a new medium that nobody’s done much of. You know, I’m looking at TV late night and I see Ace Cannon coming on there blowing a saxophone and I’m saying, “Oh, that’s ridiculous.” Then I find out he’s sold millions of records and nobody even knows what the heck he’s playing, Waltz of the Danube or something, you know? So there’s gotta be some merit to that and I’m sitting here saying to myself, “Well, I bet you some of my audience is sitting there at midnight, thumbing through – thumbing like me. They got the remote control, which we all have now and we just sit there and thumb through the channels.” And so, I want them to thumb through and find Ray sitting right in the middle of some of that other stuff.
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