You’ll probably know that I’m a great fan of the ramblings of Bob Lefsetz. I heartily recommend that you sign up to his newsletter.

In one of his posts this week he referred back to an interview with Jerry Greenberg on Bite Me! in which Jerry makes a major statement on how to build your fanbase.

It almost passed me by but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it is exactly the ideology that we now follow with our artists and which we suggest you should too.

The piece said, “Bud Prager—who managed Leslie West in the old days and Felix Pappalardi—he’s a great producer who I have the utmost respect for. One day we went for lunch…it was 1979/1980 and MTV had just started. Warner Communications funded MTV in the very beginning along with American Express.

Steve Ross had a vision of creating music on TV and having it be a marketing tool. Bud said to me as MTV progressed that he felt MTV hurt the record business. His whole philosophy and, I have to agree with him, was that we broke bands by them going out and getting a fanbase – a real fanbase. AC/DC started out in a little club called Max’s Kansas City then they worked their way up to the Fillmore then the Forum and then the stadiums. They built a fanbase, but so many of these artists just became these video stars and you could see them on video. The only way you could see AC/DC, before videos, was to wait until they went on tour.

Bud felt that in the long run it hurt the artist and hurt their career and then it also created a lot of what we call “The One Shot” video artist – who were really acts that people got because of the video but when they really had to go out and do it there was no substance.”

It’s obvious really isn’t it?

If you are hyped and leveraged into the national (or international) consciousness, you’re going to have to be spectacular to make it last. All the kids who get the big break on the TV talent shows cannot sustain the level that those shows give them.

Why not? They just aren’t actually talented enough, but, more importantly, they haven’t built a fanbase. They get instant recognition but it fades in the public interest when the next series comes along.

I can see that the same was true with MTV – and the same is still true for major label artists today that are over hyped and simply manufactured. Sign someone half pretty and get them a load of songs from the current writer / producer du jour. It all sounds good enough but 99 times out of 100, there isn’t anything to back it up. I’ll accept that there will occasionally be an exception.

BUT – if the right thing to do in order to build a career is build a fanbase, then how do you do it?

Look at Arcade Fire – how did they do it. Quality material, no bullshit, slow build of momentum, unreal live shows, true talent.

No-one wanted to sign them when they started, so they did it on their own!

The message is the same now as it was for AC/DC when Jerry Greenberg remembered how they started.

Get your material strong and go out and play it. Watch this video of legendary Island Records boss Chris Blackwell telling how a live show and word of mouth is all you need.

So now that the music industry has changed and everyone wants music for free, how do you build that fanbase and why is that change a good thing?

Well, you can still do what AC/DC did and go out and play. You must! You’ll improve, you’ll bond as a unit and you’ll find champions who will tell everyone how good you are.

BUT - you now have an advantage that outdoes MTV in it’s heyday and will allow you to build momentum slowly, reach a global audience, perfect your style and sound – all the while sticking two fingers up to the old music industry hegemony.

The internet. You must use the internet to build your fanbase.

Here’s what you do:

1. Get your act straight. Right people, right look, right sound and BRILLIANT material. Not ‘good enough’ – brilliant is what is required.

2. Buy domain hosting for your band’s website. Use Hostgator. I know you have loads of choices, but, trust me, this works really well and I have never had a problem.

3. Build a website – Use Wordpress, hosted on your own domain (that’s downloaded from wordpress.org not hosted at wordpress.com). Personally I always use Thesis as the theme for the site for a host of reasons that I won’t go into here. It is awesome. If you think you can’t build a site in Wordpress and/or Thesis, you will be able to. Honestly – there are loads of videos on YouTube to talk you through it and if you get stuck, find someone at your school, college or even on Elance to do it for you.

4. Build a list of fans using serious email software. You can use Fanbridge – it works fine – but if you are really serious, there is only one choice – Aweber. It will do more than any competing mailing list software and it will last you your whole career.

5. Give people something really valuable in return for joining your mailing list. Sure, give them mp3’s of a few tracks. But, you can do so much more. Give them a whole album and ask them to get their friends to come and sign up for it.

I love Pretty Lights and what he does – 3 albums, 2 EP’s and some live material. All FOR FREE. How does he make a living? He sells merch and has a massive live following. If he hadn’t given this music away he would not have gotten anywhere. The free music gave him the momentum. Now he makes more money from his music career than if he had signed to a major – by a factor of 20 or more. Plus he gets to be a true artist and do exactly what he wants, when he wants with his art.

6. Put the sign-up box for the free stuff on the top right of every page of your site – what designers call ‘above-the fold’. Why? Because it works. Also – have a dedicated ’squeeze page’ on the site or even on another domain that you can send people to. He doesn’t do this, but Pretty Lights could have a squeeze page at freeprettylights.com. It’s easy to remember and you just put a single page site there with just a small pitch and a sign up box for your Aweber list.

7. Build a quality profile (and interact – don’t ignore any of them) at MySpace (yep, still – it is the music directory and you need to be there), Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. This is the minimum – there are others that you might wish to add.

8. Shoot LOADS of video of your band. Writing, rehearsing, gigging, in the van – goofing off. It doesn’t matter. Send emails to your list at least once a week telling them to check out something that you have posted somewhere online. DO NOT just email them the week of a show asking them to come. Be in regular content. Put those videos on your YouTube channel and all over the place.

9. Post on Twitter and Facebook all the time. Not inane stuff but things that your fans will want to know.

10. Don’t neglect the art! Keep writing. Write much more than you record and rehearse as much as you write. Recording is important and you need tracks to give away, but it is having great material that is going to make your fans talk about you to their friends and build that fanbase. Writing is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing.

11. Play live. Anywhere for anyone. Not to the extent that your fans can’t keep up. But spread wider, cross genres, make new fans. Obviously, collect every name and email address that you can at gigs. Go to other band’s gigs – hand out cards with your site address on them at those gigs. Hang out, meet other bands and meet their manager, agent, sound guy….whatever.

12. Be tired. No, really. If you’re working a full time job and you’re doing enough to succeed, you are going to be exhausted. The people who can keep going when they are exhausted will win.

There you have it – I think that’s a blueprint on how to build your fanbase. I’ve just read it over and, in essence, that is all there is to it.

Of course, I can and will expand on many of those points and go further another day – how do you move from this point to selling records, how to go up a level etc.

But, right now, that’s not important. It’s not important since you MUST build a fanbase to get started and to achieve anything – whether that is DIY and Direct-to-Fan success or the aim of getting signed. Either route will happen much more easily if you have built the fanbase yourself – that’s what other fans will see so they will want to be in the in-crowd – and it’s what agents. managers and record label A&R will see that will help take you to the next level.

One last thing. This is not ’selling out’. This is ’selling’. It does not cheapen the art. It gives you a chance.

It will only happen if you do it – start now.

I came across this brilliant pdf report by Virgine Berger about a month ago that sets out a blueprint for your online music marketing and asked her if we could pass it on to you for free.

She was happy to let our readers have it, but we didn’t get round to posting it until now as we are still busy redesigning the site and preparing more great stuff that we will be adding when we have the makeover – we’re hoping that will be at some point in September. Thanks for putting up with our delays. Oh, and I am on holiday a lot with my kids too!

So, when I read the pdf, I was very impressed. It covers all the things that you should be doing for music promotion online – why MySpace still counts, how to use Twitter, what Facebook can and can’t do for you etc. More importantly, it ties together all the strands that you need to be providing to your fans.

You can get your copy of Virginie’s report here -  ‘What is a good digital music Strategy’ pdf.

Why should you listen to Virginie?

Well, she is the former head of marketing for MySpace France. Now she works as a music marketer and with more than ten years in the entertainment industry (television channels, radio broadcast industry and digital music industry), she knows her stuff backwards.

You can find out more about her at these links below:

Email: virberg@gmail.com
Web: www.digitalmusic.tumblr.com (in French)
Twitter: www.twitter.com/virberg

Our last post was all about the best software and methods you should use for building your band mailing list.

Although our best pick is Aweber (read the post to see why!), one of our mild criticisms of Fanbridge has just bee fixed.

With the launch of the Fanbridge Fan Collector uses of Fanbridge for their band mailing list solution can now get a fancy app for Apple mobiles (ipod, itouch and ipad) that can be used at a gig to take email addresses and whatever other details you desire to take from your new fans.

We love any method that does away with handwriting lists and scraps of paper and this is very welcome.

It also syncs automatically with your online FanBridge account.

The key issue for us is that we want to see all artists building a mailing list in a professional software system that they control. If you’re not sure whether to go for FanBridge, the app is another reason that might well sway it for you.

Let’s hope that Aweber are going to get this sorted soon too – as they have indicated!

In ‘Part 1’ we looked at why you should be building a mailing list of fans and some of the basic ways of going about that, both online and at gigs.

This second part is a look at what options you have in setting up your mailing list, in which will decide that it must be web hosted In a 3^rd part, we will look at how you can best use it to build your relationship with your fans.

Often when we first meet a band they tell us that they have a mailing list already. The two most common things that this means is that they have a list of names scrawled on sheets of paper that they have had the brains to get filled in at their shows. Or that they have managed to get these names (and others) on to a spreadsheet or in to the address book of their email client. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it is very much stage one and obviously fraught with possible cock-ups.

Firstly, there is the perennial problem in getting that information from drunken scrawl on a sheet of paper from the gig the night before onto a database of some sort and being able to accurately transcribe people’s names. That problem can’t be overcome when collecting details at a live event from people. That is, it can’t be avoided unless you plain just take a laptop, which I would heartily recommend, and get people to type in their details themselves in some way. These days you can get a very cheap netbook that will do all you need and it’ll save so much time, whichever way you choose to manage your list. There are clever widget bits of Champion Sound and FanBridge which will allow you to do this, or you can get your own cool techy system – which we’ll look at below

If you have managed to get a way to also collect details on your MySpace page, facebook, and on your own website etc, you still have to get them into your one combined database. Often what we see people doing is manually transcribing this collected data with that from shows on bits of paper into a spreadsheet or their email address book and then mailing fans from there in small groups. OK – it works, but it’s a load of grief and you’ve missed out a load of very cool and useful stuff that comes from being in the 21^st century and using what’s available.

It’s also a major pain sending emails from one account and copying it to all the other addresses in your list – plus it can get you into trouble as a spammer!

In short, it just about works, but why would you, when there are much, much better solutions available, some of them for free.

We’re only going to look at some of the possible options, some in much more detail than the others. There are other options and we cover a lot of them in the resource section of our MySpace book, and will get that on to the forthcoming ‘Resources’ section of the site as soon as we can!

All of these systems are web-hosted databases for your fan’s emails and other details and will give you varying degrees of ease of use and control. No single one suits all and some are more difficult to use than others. But, you must use a web based email mailing list tool! There is no debate!

1. ReverbNation

ReverbNation is, quite simply, awesome, and I make no apology for spending the longest on it.

I think that using ReverbNation’s mailing list system, called ‘Fan Reach’ is the easiest and most obvious route for many, at least up to a certain level.

We’ll have a good look at the whole site’s great in depth features another time, but it’s certainly somewhere that you should have a profile and where you should send your fans.

There’s always a lot of chat about ReverbNation on the forums at Taxi, so go over there and get an impartial view.

For now, I’m just going to have a very quick look at their email list system.

The reason it’s so good at what it does is that it’s simple to set-up, import lists that you already have and, since you’ll be running a profile here anyway, it makes it easy having it all in one place. What it’s not so good at is offline data collection and some major tracking and detail tools that others offer, but they aren’t exactly slack in that department either. Oh, but it is free, nada, zilch! Well, at least for the basic version which is all you need to begin with.

So, the main ways that you’ll be getting new emails for your list will be by having sign-up forms, widgets or boxes at various places on the internet, or by collecting names in the real world – at gigs or wherever (a band we worked with had a sign up form at their local record store – owned by a friend – and when he played their stuff he left a sheet out for people to sign up, and it worked, building them a very healthy young local fanbase). ReverbNation excels at online widgets to create the sign-up forms. Their widget creator is set up to automatically make the form for most of the Social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc), so it’s really easy to do. The system will also create html code for you to use anywhere else – or to give to your friendly geek fan who helps you out to deal with – you do have a friendly geek ‘fifth Beatle’ don’t you?

The widgets also integrate seamlessly with all the other elements of a ReverbNation profile so that it’s very easy to offer a free track in return for an email address and it’s all done automatically. When you see how this works in practice and how your new fans can take parts of your profile to spread around the web for you it makes sense to use such an integrated approach – and the email element won’t let you down

To start you out, Fan Reach will allow you to import any existing mailing list you have, either from your email address book, a Word or Excel file, or just by typing them straight in. To ensure that you’re building a valid and useable list, these names get quarantined for 72 hours whilst ReverbNation’s systems ask people to opt out if they don’t want to be on your list. That’s fair enough and actually means your list is better targeted.

Lastly, you can email people a link automatically from your email client asking them to join your list. You can also use the same link as your usual email signature.

It’s a great system that covers all the online bases. What it doesn’t do….. is have a straightforward answer to the issue of getting people to sign up offline. OK, you can still use the pen and paper routine and transcribe the addresses very, very regularly (preferably the day you get them, so that you can send a thank you email immediately – preferably with a freebie), but that’s what we’re trying to get away from.

You could take the html and get your geek to make that into an application that you run on a laptop at shows for later uploading when you can get to the web, but that requires some skill. I’m pretty sure that ReverbNation will come up with the solution in the near future –as others have – see below!

The last thing to cover on Fan Reach is the upgrades available – ‘Fan 360’ and ‘Fan Reach Pro’. Fan 360 is a paid upgrade and basically helps to flesh out the information that you have about a fan – name, location (useful if you’ve not asked for that in the first place, as we suggest is sensible) and details from their Social Network profiles.

Fan Reach Pro is a further upgrade that includes the Fan 360 features but also adds a load of customisable templates and integrates with your ReverbNation content, which could be song players or your digital download store.

For the pricing and all the other details you need on thisclick this link – ReverbNation Pricing

This is a great option!

2. FanBridge

FanBridge comes next as it deals with the one current flaw in ReverbNation’s system – it has a totally cool offline widget that is called the ‘Merch Table SignUp Form’.

So, not only do you get all the same online widgets that are dead easy to use and place in all your internet profiles – all going to one central mailing list database – but you also get this cool way of dealing with sign-ups offline!

This form installs on a laptop and runs full screen so that fans can walk up to your merch table at a gig and put in their details. It’s all saved to a file and uploads the next time you log-on to the web and the fan is added to your list. They’ll receive whatever welcome email and freebie you’ve set up.

A great addition and, of course, makes you look like a very switched on band to everyone at the gig – fans and promoter alike.

The best way to look at FanBridge is as the cut-down email-centric little brother of ReverbNation – it doesn’t have all the other stuff that ReverbNation offers for a full band profile, but it does the email bit just as well, probably a bit better in fact.

FanBridge offers all the sign-up boxes and widgets that you’d need and allows a significant degree of editability. Its tracking stats are fantastic too, giving you information about who opened the emails, when and whether they clicked on any links in the email you sent them. All good data to have.

You lose nothing in the ‘offer for email’ department either as FanBridge allows you to automatically offer tracks or images in return for a fan signing up. It also has clever methods to incentivise fans to share your newsletter to spread the word and build your list even further.

The other difference that it has as an advantage is the mobile marketing that’s possible if you’ve collected mobile numbers on your sign-up forms. Being able to update fans via SMS at the last minute before a gig is a major plus.

Downsides? It’s not free. Well, it is for the first 400 messages per month. This is calculated as a total number of messages sent, so that 100 people on a list sent four messages in a month use up your 400 total. After that, it becomes paid – see the rates here – FanBridge Pricing – but it’s a small investment to make to have such a powerful tool to communicate with your fanbase at your fingertips.

3. Champion Sound

Champion Sound is a smaller company that doesn’t yet have the reach of FanBridge and ReverbNation, but it’s a really great alternative that some will decide suits them perfectly.

It does most of what the first two do, but with a little less sophistication overall than FanBridge in terms of pure email managemnent (although it’s still very good) and none of the bells and whistles in addition to email list management of ReverbNation.

You can offer free downloads for an email sign-up but you’ll have to do some of the work to deliver that mp3 or image yourself – setting up a page on the web where people can download it. Not hard but not slick. You do however get a public profile page on which to do that.

So why’s it mentioned? Well it has great tracking and list sub-division (so it’s easy to split the people in one town from another in an email blast) and does the main task of building a list and mailing newsletters without any drama. Users also like the way that you can blast out the email messages to Twitter and Facebook. And it builds guest lists too!

But that’s not why we include it here. It’s maybe a bit sad for us to be excited by it, but the thing that makes it different is the iphone app! I know, it shouldn’t come down to that, but it’s a great idea and it works brilliantly.

The app allows people to sign up on your phone at a gig. Simple as that. It does other stuff too but that’s the cool trick. One of our clients uses this platform and people at gigs love it!

Using Champion Sound is effectively a paid service unless you have a tiny list and don’t use all the features (and that’s not the point is it!). Check the pricing here – Champion Sound Pricing.

We like Champion Sound – it’s another good option.

4. Aweber

So, what’s left?

Well, we’re going to be a bit perverse now and recommend the service that we use to contact all of our subscribers on this site and which we have used in the past for our bands. Aweber.

The reason that this is perverse is that it isn’t an email list system that is designed for musicians to build a mailing list – it’s actually a system that is designed for email list marketing for any business and it’s the market leader in that field. The number one system that businesses use if they need ultimate flexibility in email list management.

That means that for the job of building an email list and communicating with the people on that list, it is the best that you can get.

Why is it so good? Well, basically it comes down to the depth of the functions and what you can do with them.

The big advantage is that Aweber is not just an email management system it’s also an ‘Autoresponder’. That means that it can be set up to automatically send a series of emails that you pre-load into it at any given intervals. So, you can send all the new people that sign-up to your list an email the day after they signed up asking them if they liked the free tracks you gave them, and then a week later asking them to leave a comment on your blog and then two weeks later asking them to buy a single – and, once you’ve set this up once, Aweber will send all these emails automatically.

This is a very powerful way of communicating with your fans. You can actually set up as many pre-determined emails as you like. It could be one a week for a year.

You kind of have to use an autoresponder to see how clever and effective it is. Explaining it doesn’t really do it justice.

All emails are what is called ‘double opt-in’. This means that when a fan signs up, they are sent an email that asks them to confirm that they want to be on the list. This makes for a better controlled list that only people who are genuinely interested get signed up to. It also means that your emails are more likely to be delivered when you send them which then also adds to the ‘open-rate’. This is significant and ‘double opt-in’ (not used by any of the others we have looked at) is industry standard for professional email list management.

Of course, Aweber will allow you to create a form that you can use anywhere on the web to get sign-ups. This will be html or javascript but is easy to use, to update and is super effective.

Aweber allows you to do some really cool stuff with your list. It’s easy to write a newsletter and send it to a segment of your list. And then, a few days later, you can send it again to only those that didn’t open it or didn’t click on the link you wanted them to click. Maybe you can change your offer just to those people? Lists can be segmented and mailed as often as you like. There is no charge for the number of emails sent) unlike the other systems. Aweber charges for the number of people on your list, not the number of emails that you send them.

As you’d expect, you can create as many lists from scratch as you like.

And, the analytics of who is doing what with the information you send them is more detailed than you can get anywhere else. Split tests to increase open rates and click conversion, automated follow ups and web-hosted versions that you can link to Facebook and Twitter – all very trick stuff.

What’s wrong with it? Well it’s not designed for musicians. It’s not hard to use and the tutorials, and step by step set-up, are fantastic (as is the customer support) but you will have to build your own ‘thank you’ pages where you send people after they sign up to get the free download track or whatever you’re offering. That could be a pain and a deal breaker if you have no geek / nerd skills at all.

At the moment they don’t do mobile and they don’t have an offline sign-up, but you could code one from their html form if you were smart enough. I have raised this with them though and they are looking at it as it’s something they know they should offer.

And, of course, there is no integration with a myriad of widgets and a full music profile like you get with ReverbNation. This, again, may be a deal breaker for many as it does make a whole lot of sense to have all your software tools talking to each other.

If though, you are tech savvy and are building your own site (which you should be) and can deal with creating a page for free downloads for people who sign-up, then it’s well worth thinking about. Particularly if your band is getting to the stage where the fan sign-up is more than a trickle and your fanbase is active.

We use it and we work with bands who use it and, used correctly, it is the best email management tool

5. Anything Else?

Just to confuse you a bit there are three others to consider.

Bandcamp is another brilliant multi-faceted online profile site that allows you to sell your music direct. It has an email collection element, but the reason we haven’t looked at it here is that it just isn’t up to the job like the four we’ve covered. It’s a great system overall but the email list is an add-on, not the focus.

Then there’s Nimbit and Topspin. These are the lurking wannabe giants that might change things for good.

In short they’re full service music systems that do email (very well but not with autoresponders) and manage all your digital (and physical) sales of music and merchandise and provide tools to virally spread your music.

They have subtle differences. We haven’t looked at them here as they aren’t just about email and aren’t necessary for most bands until they are up and running and selling commercially viable amounts of music.

We’ll look at them both in detail in the future. For now, let’s say that Nimbit is the longer established of the two with great tools and an expanding user base and is great for all levels of artist. A slightly more heavyweight answer is Topspin but they don’t let all and sundry in to use the platform. More another time. Just be aware of them and have a look around the web to see what people think of these before making your choice.

In conclusion, I’d recommend all four systems we looked at. My preference is for either ReverbNation or Aweber depending on your point of view and how important the added features of ReverbNation are to you.

It may be a little unfair, but if you are going to be a long term underground band that never ‘breaks through’ but makes a living playing circuit gigs and selling to a small diehard tribe of fans, then ReverbNation is probably right for you.

If, on the other hand, you think you’re going all the way and want the best solution and can find a way to integrate it with other tools to offer your fans all the things they come to expect, then Aweber is the one for you.

In ‘Part 3′, we’ll look at how to use your list and how to communicate with your fans.

You can read ‘Part 1′ of ‘Building a fan mailing list‘ on this site by clicking the link.

I just read about this minisite that Devo put up a few days ago and tweeted it, but thought I ought to leave a permanent post about it and just give a little more detail. It’s a brilliant piece of online music marketing.

Why?

Well, it’s a perfect example of fan acquisition, engagement and selling. An object lesson in the mindset that you should have in the modern music business. Sure, Devo have label funding and this particular idea might be too expensive for you if you haven’t got their budget, but it’s the mindset that you need to learn from and the steps that you need to employ.

Have a look at the promo video that they have made for their ‘Devovision’ YouTube channel…….

…..and then go and take the test at the Devo song study site.

So, the site is there to help Devo get feedback from their fans to choose what tracks should be on their next album. But, it’s not just for that is it?

No.

When you’ve listened to and selected your favourite 12 tracks, you’re then asked to pick your favourite. Now, that information (data, if you must – but that makes it feel too clinical!) is obviously very valuable to begin with. Devo are finding out what their fans want on the record. That’s great for them as they can pick the record that most appeals to their fans. Remember that in the digital music age you are free to make music for your fans, rather than for radio or your record company bosses, but you need to know what they want.

However, what is also going on as you select tracks is that you are pre-selecting yourself as a future Devo album buyer. Not everyone – in fact, just a small percentage – but you’re now engaged in the debate and will, despite yourself, need to find out more when the record is released.

I bet that the track that most people select as their favourite is the lead single! Don’t you think?

The next bit is even better. So, you’ve picked your favourites and then you’re asked to give up your name, email address and location. We’re all used to giving this up for free music, but here we’re doing all the giving and not getting anything for free….but the humour in the site and the historical oddness of the band has helped us want to be part of the process. The request for additional thoughts and a photo (nothing rude, please!) all just adds to that sense of ‘Devo fan’ inclusion.

I’d have added a surprise bonus. When you click the final ‘Submit’ button, it would’ve been great to be taken to another page where you were thanked and maybe given a free download of a couple of tracks or a pre-order button for the album with a discount.

In online music marketing it’s essential to remember that your fans are ‘hottest’ to take action just when you’ve engaged them, usually by giving them something free, but here by giving them a sense of ownership and having some fun with them. That’s the time to sell them something or give them something else for free to cement their love of your band.

An unannounced bonus as a thank you would’ve made this perfect. And I’d have sent an email to each person who did the survey and signed up, immediately, saying ‘Thanks’ too.

So, what else do Devo get out of this?

Well, obviously, they’re building a very targeted list of fans and, in particular, as I said above, people who are pre-selecting themselves to buy the next record.

But, the minisite also engenders discussion and is newsworthy itself – thereby spreading across the internet and by word-of-mouth, bringing more people in to the site to learn about Devo. An idea like this is, by its very nature, inherently viral and will do more than just reach existing fans. It can even ready traditional offline media to be more interested in the band when the new record has its traditional release.

Devo have been no slouches when it comes to using the internet to connect with a pre-web audience from their original incarnation. But, because they were making records before all the online marketing techniques that bands are now using came in to play, they need to use all the tricks they can to dig up old fans and get them on to their email list.

It reminds me of the Led Zeppelin reunion concert a year or two ago. With no database of fans from their active years, the need to register your name, email address and location for the ballot for tickets for the only show, brought in a million fans in a matter of weeks. I wonder if that list will be used time and time again to market re-issue albums and merchandise to Zep fans?

So, have a look at the Devo song study site and see what you can learn from it to apply to your own efforts marketing your band and reaching your fans.

Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

I know that we aren’t posting regularly enough at the moment!

I promise that will change soon. But, the reason is, that we are beavering away behind the scenes – updating our MySpace book, finishing a book on the use of Facebook for musicians, and, most excitingly, a site revamp and the full-on ‘how to make it’ year long course. Honest!

I was writing a section of that today and thought I’d use that thought process to just bang up this post with the snappy title.

In the 52-week course, we’ll take you from whatever stage you’re at, to releasing a record and getting a fanbase and industry attention. No matter who you are or your level of talent. We aren’t going to be able to teach you everything that you need to know about how to play or write in that course (although there will be lots of advice in those areas) but we will teach you to look at you, your band or crew, your talents and your strengths and weaknesses in those areas. With honesty and impartiality – about yourself. A difficult thing to do.

You see, the vast majority of people we see who think that they are going to ‘make it’, get a deal, or just be able to make enough of a living to survive as a working musician, are horribly deluded. They just aren’t good enough. And no amount of tweeting, MySpace building, networking or whatever, is going to make any difference. You can’t market rubbish to the top.

But, what you can do, is look at your act dispassionately and try to work out what needs improvement. All too often, artists never do this. They’re convinced that they have everything right and that they will be huge.

In fact it’s those that can have this introspection, and then the nerve to up their game and make the necessary changes, that will succeed.

My title is aimed at the front-man of a band who knows deep down that he’s in that situation. If you’re supposed to be carrying the band and you know that, in truth, your voice isn’t good enough, it’s either just not in key or strong enough or you know that it doesn’t have a sufficiently distinct tone,  or you know that you don’t have the real ‘x factor’, or that your on stage performance is weak – what are you going to do about it?

Should you persevere for years, deluding yourself, or should you face it and make a change.

Perhaps you can improve your voice with training – for example, I’ve recommended this Brett Manning course to people with great success – and everyone I have ever worked with has been to a vocal coach at some point. Maybe you need help writing songs (but you have to realise and admit that first!) – and if so, there are plenty of ways you can learn to do that.

Whatever it is (stage craft, the ‘look’ of the band, the quality of the recordings etc) it may be possible to improve it with work and training. In many cases.

But sometimes, it’s just not right and never will be. You aren’t a front-man and will never make yourself one and you’ll be eternally unhappy trying to be something you’re not. So, what then?

Well, better to go (to stab yourself in the back) and let the band change and evolve. Hopefully you’ll naturally fit into another role. A different instrument. Or maybe you’re now the manager.

Again, whatever it is, you need to be the right man (or woman) for the job.

I hope this makes sense. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t believe in your ability, your music and your eventual success (this is absolutely crucial) but you also need a dose of realism, so that you’re continually assessing every aspect of your ‘game’ to make sure that you’re giving yourself and your act the very best shot possible.

And, if, deep down, you know that you aren’t cutting it, then learn to change and improve……… or move aside.

I saw the email below quoted earlier today in Bob Lefsetz’s Mailbag round-up.

This isn’t on his site – you get it if you are on the mailing list. You know I love Bob’s perspective on the state of the industry and I often tweet his posts (I strongly recommend that you sign up to his list whether you agree with everything he says or not.)

But, this email that he had received from a senior industry figure from the UK really caught my attention as it set out the fundamental view about what you need to succeed that we bang on about here – the message that we want to get across. It is one man’s view of all you need to know about the music business.

The writer is Richard Griffiths, whose bio you can read through that link. Richard is very well respected throughout the industry and has very many years of experience. Our paths had crossed a few years ago when an artist I managed was signed to Sony/BMG and I found him to be honourable and great to deal with. His many successes qualify him to make these kind of observations.

Richard graciously said that I could reproduce his email to Bob here – it’s short and to the point but sums up perfectly what it takes to succeed as an artist in the music business.

Take the advice on board.

His email to Bob said:

It’s all about the 5 pieces of the jigsaw to get the perfect picture.

• You need talent
• You need ambition
• You need work ethic
• You need luck
• You need business taken care of

Have all those and you have the perfect picture. You’re Paul McCartney or Elton John, etc.

Its possible to be successful without any 1 or 2 of these pieces even the talent one. Madonna showed what an initial small talent could do with all the other pieces.

I’ve worked with many very talented artists who didn’t have ambition and-or work ethic and therefore failed.

I’ve seen brilliant managers/label heads make the most of little talent.

I’ve seen lousy managers/label heads fuck up brilliant artists.

Over the years I’ve come to realise that actually as long as there is SOME talent the other pieces of the puzzle are far more important to having success.

Obviously with GREAT talent the other pieces have a lesser role except the business partner.

Look at all the GREAT talent and how they nearly all had a great manager.

Sometimes they fall out with them like Bowie or Elton but without Tony DeFries and John Reid those icons would have had a different career path.

The problem in today’s world is that too many new artists think that with exposure and a bit of talent they can have careers.

They don’t realise that it takes a lot of work and the ambition to succeed to last.

I have unashamedly stolen this from Frank Kern – a much respected internet marketer – who put it on his blog a few days ago.

I’m not going to apologise too much as I felt that the content of the video is so applicable to the people who read this blog that it’s worth having it hosted here (rather than just tweeting the link to Frank’s blog), since I want to be able to come back and refer to it in the future – I’ve already watched it three times!

What you’ve got is a video compilation of snippets of wisdom from Will Smith. It doesn’t matter what you think of Will for you to get something out of watching this video. Why? Well, you can’t argue with the fact that he has achieved massive success as a recording and performing artist, then as a TV actor and finally as a movie star – maybe the presidency next?

Who knows, but the whole piece is worth a look. In it he gives his own spin on a lot of motivational thinking that you may have heard before. I don’t subscribe to that school of thought wholeheartedly. I believe that you’ve got to set your goals and work towards them but positive thinking isn’t going to get you there on it’s own.

And that’s what Will says here too. Set your mind on the task and go for it, for sure. But, and this is the crucial part that so many people miss (and we talk about it a lot here and in our free eBook), you need to work at it and be focused.

As he says right near the start, Will doesn’t count himself as especially talented, but he works harder than all his competition to learn the skills he needs to get there. His reflection on the lesson his father gave him and his brother by getting them to build a wall proves the point. In short, he sets his eye on the prize, gets his head down and works his heart out until he gets there.

Do you?

So, another year comes to an end – and, for us, the first year of our blog and our efforts to spread a little of our hard earned wisdom and expertise in the music business.

We feel that we started well when we launched in March but tailed off in the last four  months -but we do have the excuse that we’re still managing 5 songwriters and producers (all of whom have had a very successful 2009) and we also launched an entirely new business that we have mentioned here before – manufacturing and selling the best football gift ever – that’s ’soccer’ for our US readers.

So, time became very short and this site and the  musician’s educational and training business that we are working to build have ended up taking a back seat. To be fair, we didn’t realise quite how successful the football toy would quickly become and how much of the time of all of us in the office would end up being consumed by entirely new jobs in which we had no prior experience – manufacturing in China, warehousing and logistics, customer service and more.

Strangely, the experience, whilst time consuming, has taught us some new skills that we will be using in the music business – particularly the direct marketing and internet marketing stuff. Its also become a ‘hit’ by virtue of both being really good (if we say so ourselves) but also because we applied some of our Web 2.0 marketing ideas to the launch of the product – although not as many as we should have and not as many as we are always exhorting you to do!

So, before I finish with the excuses, here’s another one. The No.1 Fan business is still going to take up a great deal of our time in 2010 – there’s this little thing called the World Cup coming up and the demand for an England version of our toy is immense. So, our best laid plans for ”Make It In Music’ could still go awry, but we hope that we have thought this through sufficiently to be able to cope with all three roles that we now have to fill.

BTW, the reason why we ended up with another business to run that has nothing to do with the music business is a long story for another day, but it’s indicative of how you need to overcome the problem of too little time when you’re working a day job and trying to make it as an artist as well. We looked at that a little bit in this post about needing to make your music career a full-time job. We know how it feels!

As for how we came to be making a singing, dancing football toy – we’ll tell you another day!

So, we’ve spent a good part of December looking at this site and thinking through our plans for what we want to achieve for us and for you.

We were already doing this, but then I read Ariel Hyatt’s post about setting goals and thought that it merited me putting our plan and goals on the site.

So, without going into tedious detail, we’re planning to:

a) overhaul the site and give it a refresh in the design department. Expect that to be in place sometime in February; and

b) post valuable actionable information to help you further your music career a minimum of once a week. We’d love this to be three times a week but the schedule will be entirely down to other demands on our time; and

c) introduce video training wherever possible both on the site and in our products; and

d) build out the content of the site to include the best musician’s resources on the web, both written and filmed by us, but also outward links to third parties whose content we admire and respect – you’ll know who a lot of those we like already are; and

e) we’re going to be applying everything that we teach to two of our own clients in their embracing of direct-to-fan techniques for their albums due in 2010 (and we’ll keep you up to date with our own experiences of what’s working and what’s not); and

f) launch a whole range of in depth training products that will distill our experience and expertise into step-by-step training that you can follow to tackle specific parts of the process of furthering your music career.  A key prodcuct available from this site will be groundbreaking training designed to take you from ‘know-nothing’ dreamer with no material (and possibly not a lot of talent), to ‘know-it-all’ self-promoting artist with commercially viable and critically acclaimed material, bound either for direct-to-fan success or the sometimes still pursued record deal.

That’s a big undertaking but we have the plans to make it a reality. Amanda is a long way into her eBook on how best to use Facebook to promote your music – which will be an essential tool for all. (We still think a MySpace profile is a necessity – Amanda talked about why MySpace is still relevant in this post back in March, but although users depart daily, ‘the industry’ still likes to go and check out that profile for every new band).

I’m writing our Twitter methods down, and am doing the same for YouTube, and we plan to do another piece of training that ties all four sites together and deals with the other web presences you need to have and how best to use them to promote your music.

However, we have felt for sometime that our expertise is about more than handing out training on how to promote your music in the Web 2.0 world – our training is and will be class-leading on those topics, but our knowledge goes far wider and deeper. There are people who espouse that online promotion of your music is the be all and end all of how to make it in music today. And some of their training is fantastic. But they are missing a lot of very important things out that our years of frontline success in the music business makes us uniquely placed to divulge.

After all, we spend a lot of time telling you that you and your material need to be great before you spend ages promoting it – no-one wants to listen to music that isn’t good enough, no matter how much you try and stuff it down their throats.

So, we’re going to be looking at that aspect of your career development as much as possible and our cornerstone product will be training that teaches you everything you need to know to succeed as an artist. Whether you do or not will be down to how much effort you put in and how much of our training you take on board. I’m not saying that you’ll be able to make it if you haven’t got enough talent – but if you haven’t, we’ll tell you how to make the most of what talent you do have and how to find those with talent to spare to help you (and them) on their way to the top.

I’m really excited about 2010 and what we can achieve for this site, the business that I want to build and, ultimately and more importantly, for your career and life as a successful artist in the music business.

What we both need is the much-touted fireworks. No better time to plan for your own than when watching the last ones of the year set off at whatever celebration you’re at today. Just remember that when the clock strikes 12, there’s another year of challenges and goals ahead.

So, Happy New Year and let’s work together to make 2010 the year that you achieve everything you always wanted to in music.

Apologies for the distinct lack of posts over the last month or two.

Rest assured that we are working very, very hard to get to the next stage of what we’re hoping to achieve with the site. With that will come very regular blog posts and emails to subscribers and a lot, lot more usable information. Believe me, we have been busy (creating and launching the world’s greatest football gift – yes, nothing to do with music, but we felt like it!), but, in the New Year, we’ll bring our attention back to this site and it will be a massive priority for 2010 – we have some great plans and ideas that we hope will truly help you succeed in your efforts as a musician.

However, for now, I wanted to roll out a nugget of wisdom that I remember very clearly from the day that I heard it and which I have trotted out as a piece of second hand advice for many years as well.

Reason being is that there is a whole lot of truth in it, although it won’t take me that long to recount it here.

Oh, and the title of this post has given the game away anyway already!

So, what the hell do I mean by that statement – “You’re not in a band – until you’re in a band!”, and what positive effect can it have on your career?

Well, it means what it says. But, let’s go back to when I heard it – probably about seven years ago.

We were managing a band that were getting really ‘hot’ as the industry phrase says – meaning that they were playing gigs to a growing number of clearly very committed fans and their name kept being heard by people who worked at record companies, press and promotions people, agents and various bits of the media – magazines, radio and such. They were (and still are) a blisteringly good live band with a really unique sound and plenty of exciting performance elements. And they had a lot of good material – although, in hindsight, they possibly lacked that killer ‘11 out of 10′ song that we often bang on about (Subscribe at the box on the top right and read the ‘10 Key Steps…’ eBook if I’m not  making sense!).

Anyway, all the A&R men in the UK started to come to the shows and talk about offering the band a deal and we ended up being offered record deals by several of the major record companies and signing to one of them – this being the days before the possibility of the DIY approach and selling music over the internet – yes, really.

Shortly before the band were signed I was having a conversation with a very old friend of mine who had become an A&R man at a Major and he was telling me that he had decided he was going to ‘pass’ on the band. Although he liked them, he didn’t feel that they were ‘real’ or that they had an interesting enough ’story’. Now, I don’t agree even now that that was the case, and we can look at those two words which industry people will use about you a lot, but that will have to be another time. He went on to say that the reason they weren’t real was because they weren’t a ‘real band’.

These guys had already been playing together for three years – having met up up as soon as they went to college at the age of 18 and playing on and off with the same line-up all the way through those 3 years. We were managing them less than a year after they had left college and all of them had day-jobs. They lived together and had recorded an album at home in a very low-fi way and released it on a small indie and had begun to attract attention. They played regularly locally, maybe totalling, say twenty times a year.

And this was his point – they weren’t a real band as they were living by Plan B rules (they had jobs) and they weren’t living and breathing being in a band. I thought that they’d actually achieved a hell of a lot by that stage and had done a lot of DIY momentum building before it was the norm for every aspiring artist.

But, he did have a point.

They did all have a Plan B – their day jobs. One was a very much in-demand engineer who was offered jobs by Formula 1 teams but decided, in the end, to be a drummer. However, they were all looking at two possible outcomes – maybe the band would get a deal, they’d get a shot and maybe they’d make it….or, maybe, no chance would come and they’d have jobs to fall back on. Maybe if you have a Plan B, that ends up being Plan A and just that safety net prevents you from really reaching for the stars and making it happen.

That’s one part of the reason. I’m not suggesting that he was absolutely right, nor that you should jack in your job right now and be the aspiring rock star or hip-hop mogul 24/7. But then again, maybe if you live it, you’ll be more likely to make it.

Obviously, there are massive upsides to not having a day job – you’ll have more time to write, record, rehearse, build your web presence, network, hang-out, pester people and so on. And, naturally, you’ll be more committed because of that available time and because you’ve dropped your safety net.

And then there’s the aura that you create around you by being a full-time musician – the people that you deal with on a day to day basis (friends & family, but also those who move in the music industry circles) will take you to be a more serious proposition – because you have laid out your hand for all to see.

Is this going to make it easier for you to get signed or at least attract the attention of those people who can help you further your career, whether DIY or traditional – well, maybe. And it would seem to be the case just by logic. That extra time and more solid commitment ought to amount to something, right?

This also ties in with our thoughts on what we call the ‘Talent vs Drive’ curve, covered in part III of the ‘10 Key Steps….’ eBook. All well and good to have all that extra time on your hands if your self-belief has lead you to give up the distractions of the daily grind. But, you’ve still got to find the application and the drive to use that time profitably. I keenly believe that very few people have spectacular levels of talent and very often those with the most drive and determination are the ones who get to where they set out to reach. This is often true with musicians. Sure, talent is a jumping off point and has relevance but it is not, always, the defining factor.

Before I add my big caveat at the end (It’s not my fault if you give up your job, OK!), there’s another thing.

I’ve just finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s book, ‘Outliers’, in which he talks about the real causes behind the achievements of exceptional people. I won’t precis it here, but he discusses how the most successful people in many fields have put in 10,000 hours of practice or learning. He relates this to music by discussing the Beatles phenomenal achievement and relating it back to their extended stints in Hamburg learning their craft. Not only did they play close to 2000 hours of live shows before they were noticed (has any contemporary artist got close, even many years in to touring?), but they had also learnt how to deconstruct and play every R&B standard of the time as their shows then were mostly comprised of covers. That might have helped a little in developing their songwriting craft, don’t you think?

I’m a slightly stronger believer in the need for talent than Gladwell, but practice, and development of skills and learning from failure are key to becoming great. Can’t argue with that.

It’s weird that we expect our artists, by which I mean music artists / performers, to be at their creative peak in their teens and twenties. We don’t expect it of authors, sculptors and painters – the other creatives. We expect them to have time to learn and grow.

So, how does a musician get that practice and learn the skills? Well, start young for sure, and, like my A&R friend (now a very senior global label President!) said – be in a band ‘for real’.

Every show you play and every song you write and discard is a step nearer the place you need to reach.

Going back to that band we managed. I see them play now, probably 200 or more shows later, and they are unbelievably good. I always notice the guitarist. He was good at the start – an interesting style and plenty of talent. But now he is incredible. His playing is immeasurably better and just so much more natural and innate. But,he struts too, like he really means it. If they were the band then, 7 years ago, that they are now, they would have conquered the world. Whether they’d had an 11/10 song or not!

I hope that this makes some sense.

I’m not telling you to tell your boss to stick his job and live in a squat being the epitome of a 70’s rock god – really, I’m not. You still have to make it to earn that right and it really isn’t my place to put that emotional burden and financial strain on you (you might be free all day, but you’ll be skint!).

But, maybe, if you really are going to be the one to make it and if you really do have the desire and the drive, well maybe you need to be in a band, on the road, being the part 365 days of the year.

Like her or not, it seems that Lady GaGa put in the time to make it – all those videos surfacing online of her paying her dues,seem to prove it.

So, really, don’t walk out of work on my say-so, and, if you do, be sure of your talent and your will to succeed.

But whether you become the unemployed-by-choice wannabe rock star or not, realise that you need to put in a massive amount of effort to make it. That’s what this really means.  And these days, it’s not just musical practice, song-writing and performing – it’s all that web promotion and DIY self-marketing as well. It is a full-time job just getting noticed!

On the upside, there is now a way to be a self financing working musician – like my old favourite, Corey Smith, and my newest discovery, Pretty Lights. If they can find  the way to be full-time musicians without a record company and driving it all themselves, then maybe you can too.