Since the 2020 Wizard Rock Sampler just came out, it seemed like a good time to talk about just how easy it can be to put your own wizard rock compilation album together.

A compilation is a collection of songs from different artists released together as one album. Oftentimes these compilations will have a theme, like “A Hogwarts Halloween.” Sometimes the theme is in the subject matter (Wizards Give a Shit!), sometimes it’s themed around an event (Welcome to 2458), and sometimes the theme is about the creators involved (Wrocking Down Under) or the cause the compilation supports (Wrock Against Bullying).

Compilations in wizard rock are traditionally organized as charity fundraisers, but it’s totally great to do a compilation where any money made is divided up among the artists involved or to just give it away for free! Anything involving money will take a little more long-term attention from the organizer, even if it’s just checking the account once a year to distribute funds, so make sure you’re okay with that before you start.

Let’s Get Started

So, how do you put your very own compilation together? First, decide what you want to center it around. Is your goal to create a fundraiser for a specific nonprofit organization? Is the music themed? Once you know what you want, you can go out and find it. There are two common ways to get music for your compilation: an open call for submissions or a private invitation. 

Open calls are great if you don’t know a lot of artists, are nervous to reach out to people individually, or just want to keep the doors open for creations from people you might not know about. The disadvantage is not knowing how many submissions you might get (although you can select only the songs you want to include like Jingle Spells 5 did), and the production quality of the tracks which might vary wildly. If you want to do an open call for submissions (like The Wizard Rock Sampler does), you’ll post openly about your project in places like the Wizard Rock Revival and on your favorite social media spaces to ask people to take part. You can also reach out to WZRD Radio podcast and the Wizrocklopedia to help get the word out! 

The advantage of private invitations is that you know exactly what you’re getting – the number of tracks, the style of music, and the diversity of the artists. While you may lose out on great work from musicians outside of your personal circle, you’ll be creating exactly what you want. The HPA organized a lot of really great compilations by private invitation. If you’re going this route, you’ll want to reach out either to the whole group of people through one email or message, or you can send out notes to each individual band (personal notes are a little nicer, but it’s more work).

Whichever way you do it, you’ll want an easy way for people to send you submissions. You can create a simple Google form or you can just have people email or DM you their songs – whatever works best to keep you organized. Try and keep all the information in one central place so you know where everything is – the bigger a project gets, the harder it is to keep up with messages on four different websites.

Putting It Together

When you go to ask for submissions, be sure to include any guidelines you might have. These could be theme guidelines (all songs must relate to Valentine’s Day), artist guidelines (only nonbinary musicians) technical guidelines (certain file types only – this might be important if you’re putting the songs on a site like Bandcamp) and the all-important deadlines. Pro-tip: give an earlier deadline than you need! Wizard rockers are notoriously late on submissions, and nothing motivates like a good deadline.

You can ask for people to create new songs or send in existing ones or both! Make sure everyone knows if this is a paid or volunteer opportunity, as well.

While those artists are off getting their submissions ready, you can be preparing the other parts of the project. You’ll need some cover art! You can either commission an artist, ask someone to volunteer, or create it yourself. Creative Commons is a great resource for cover images, but make sure they have permissions to adapt (if you’re going to add an album title to them) and to be used with commercial projects (if you’re accepting money for the album). If you need to fundraise to pay musicians, visual artists, or producers, now is the time to get that together if you haven’t already (it’s a good idea to fundraise before you call for songs if you can, so you know you have the budget for what you want).

Preparing For Release

Next you’ll want to decide how to release the compilation. Most do digital-only releases to keep costs down, but you could totally print CDs or even vinyl records to sell if you wanted. Bandcamp doesn’t charge any fees upfront to host your music, but they’ll take a percentage out of every purchase. Distributors like DistroKid are popular, which will put your music in places like Spotify and Amazon. Some will charge an upfront fee, but there are others like Soundrop that avoid that upfront fee and just take a portion of your royalty. You could also just release a folder through DropBox with all the songs in it and let people download that directly, or email it to them. 

When the musicians send songs in, give all the tracks a listen and decide on what order to play them (this is part of “sequencing” an album). This is one of the most fun parts of organizing a compilation! Think about what makes a good album opener and closer, and how you want things to flow throughout the compilation. The Wrock Snob wrote a nicely illuminating blog on their experience doing this for Jingle Spells 5.

Once you’ve ordered your songs how you like, you can release them as-is or go one step farther and master the whole album. That will help everything sound cohesive like it belongs together, but it’s not a required step and can often be pretty expensive. You might be able to find an awesome volunteer (the Wizard Rock Sampler has benefitted from the kind genius of John Pisani and Eddie Mowery), you might be able to do it yourself, you can hire someone to do it, or (most commonly) you might decide that the songs are fine as-is and that you’re ready to go.

Set It Free

Once you’ve received all your completed tracks, it’s time to put it all together. Go to whichever distribution site or tool you’re using and upload the songs and the album art, making sure that you credit all the artists involved correctly. Include lyrics for all songs to make your album more accessible! Do a test download and make sure the files look and work like you expected. Now you’re ready to share your compilation with the world!