Archive for March, 2009

One of the problems involved with effective social networking and online promotion as a musician is the amount of time it takes. If you have a profile on all the relevant sites, and update your shows and news on relevant listings sites then you’ll slowly find yourself spending more and more time online and less time doing what you love; writing songs and developing your music like you should be. 

So what’s the answer? 

Well in most cases you’ll find that the general advice to you would be to employ someone to take care of your online sites, or get one of your fans to help you out in a ’street team’ capacity. However, chances are, if you’re just starting out in the music industry you’re not going to have the cash available to pay anyone as every spare penny you have will be used on your music, and you may not have a fan you can trust with your online presence. 

So what happens then? Well, you can either carry on regardless and split your online work between yourselves or you can have a look at www.artistdata.com. By the way – it’s free! 

The people at ArtistData are working tirelessly to build solutions to automate as much as possible of the monotonous tasks of updating your social network profiles as well as your artist website and local and national concert databases. The idea being that you input all of your information once, and they update all of your sites in one go, therefore taking the hard work away from you and giving you more time to be creative. 

Below are some examples of things that ArtistData allows you to do through their site. Have a look and see how much time this could save you: 

They can automatically update your MySpace calendar with new shows and when you post news, blogs, or shows, links to these updates will appear on Twitter and Facebook. They also post a reminder each day-of-show about where you’re playing that night. 

The ArtistData Concert Syndication tool allows you to automatically promote your shows to fans everywhere using an ever-growing list of concert databases. And when you announce a date in a new town they can automatically notify local publications of the show, and provide them with your show and contact information. 

They provide simple solutions that help you keep information up-to-date on your official artist websites, so you don’t need to worry about learning HTML, or forgetting to update your site, and they can give you your own RSS feed to give to fans, supplying bite size pieces of news, blog and show information. In addition to this they can help you create effective eBlasts to enable you to email your fans directly with important news, shows and information, by applying your ArtistData content to your existing mailing system. They’ll even remind you to do it. 

If you’re about to embark on a tour, or find touring hard, then their tour management tools allow you to organise your dates quickly and easily making sure that you’re completely organised on the road. They also generate a formatted list of pertinent information for each day to print out and hand to band and crew, making sure no one misses sound check…or the van. 

Unfortunately this isn’t a perfect solution yet as there are some sites that they are unable to work with at the moment. However, in these cases they will endeavour to help you keep these sites updated through the use of custom formatted CSV files.  They are also working on a more thorough solution for Facebook which they promise will work seamlessly to integrate your profile and artist page, so that any info you input to ArtistData will be published directly into Facebook. 

ArtistData has been in beta testing for a while but has just rolled out a brand new dashboard and is linking with more sites daily. It could revolutionise the way that artists promote themselves on the internet so is definitely worth a look if you haven’t done so already. 

We’ve started using it with our clients and they love it. We can’t recommend this highly enough and think this may well become a de facto tool for all musicians. And, seeing as it’s free, how can it not be worth a shot.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Last week in the UK, the International Live Music Conference took place, at which 1000 attendees from 57 countries debated the health of the live sector. It is, as it turns out, in very rude health.

One speaker delivered an amazing fact, something that we all probably thought was coming. Live music revenues in the UK outstripped revenue from recorded music sales for the first time ever. £1.28bn in live income versus £1.24bn in record and digital sales. You would be safe to assume that the same division of income is now applying the world over, or soon will be.

So, what does this mean for you, the aspiring artist?

Well, it would be very easy to crow about the shift of power away from the record companies and into the hands of promoters, agents, managers and artists, which is undoubtedly happening. But, don’t forget that the majority of the acts who are benefitting from this swing towards increased live income are the very ones who have also benefitted from the long term investment of vast sums from the major record companies over the last ten to thirty years. That investment is what has made these acts globally attractive as a live draw.

No wonder that the record companies are desperate to find a way to share in this revenue in their new so-called ‘360 deals’.

But would you sign to a major record company now under those terms (which would be a share for the record label in all your streams of income – live, merchandising, publishing, sponsorship etc)? The answer depends on how events play out for you and where offers and opportunity come from. But it also depends on what you want from this business – do you want the global superstardom or would you prefer the DIY ethic and lesser success?

Both are still available to you, but now, the source of the investment money may come from a variety of sources – your manager (perhaps!), a venture capital firm, a promoter or agency, or even a brand.

When you get your act to the point that you are good enough to appeal to a mass audience, you now get to choose whether you want to do that through a record company, or whether you want to make your own way. The record company still does have appeal – many years of experience and experienced staff, connections, and cash, just for starters.

If you choose to go your own way, you can buy in the expertise and you can far more easily play outside the rules. You would find inside a record deal that some forward thinking strategies and ideas that you might want to employ (such as giving away music for free to get people interested in your band) wouldn’t wash with them. If, on the other hand, you own all your rights, you can do what you like.

Many managers that I speak to regularly are convinced that they have done their last deals with major record companies and that the future is brightest for those that can embrace the web and the opportunities that ‘direct to fan’ marketing through modern technology offers.

My final comment has to be that you should take great heart from this piece of news. The fact that the average music fan is happy to spend significant sums on seeing their favourite band means that the music industry, and therefore your dreams and your shot, are very much alive. Maybe not how you had envisaged, but the opportunities to succeed are there – just make sure you have learnt how to perform!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

What’s the best way to get the attention of a music industry executive when sending in a demo? 

Just picture their usual response – a cursory glance at a web page or a CD tossed in the bin without being listened to. I can’t begin to tell you how many thousands of demos I’ve not listened to – and I’m confident that I have never missed a great demo in doing so. 

If you’ve sent us a demo or a MySpace link in the last few months, you may well be reading this post. That’s because we have pointed all people approaching us in our usual job as artists managers to this blog as a shorthand way of telling them some of the basic, but often hidden, information that we think all aspiring artists need to know. If you haven’t already, you should sign up for and download our free guide in the sidebar on the right. It’s really very good and will speed your journey to fame and fortune immeasurably! No, really it will. 

It was only when I started writing the blog posts for here that I realised that one of the things that we get asked all the time is whether it’s OK to send us a demo, how should we send it in, who to, is a web link OK, and all possible variations on that theme. 

So, not only does that question need answering, but unique amongst Internet Music Marketing folk, I can answer it from the perspective of the submitter and the receiver of the demo! 

Is it OK to send a demo? Well, yes of course, and you should be pitching your demos to as many people as possible. But, the failing that we most often see is that what we are sent just isn’t good enough. The two main flaws are that, firstly, it simply isn’t good enough in terms of songwriting and performance. The recording quality shouldn’t matter too much if the material is good enough, but everyone in this industry does suffer from not hearing past the production to a degree, even if they deny it. So whilst it’s not a killer, try to make the production good too. 

Secondly, it’s always too soon. Again, almost without exception, we get sent demos or MySpace links to material and a band that haven’t been playing together long, have recorded a hasty demo and don’t really know themselves yet what they are aiming for. The main symptoms include the aforementioned poor quality songs, appalling photographs (see our MySpace guide for what to avoid!) and a general lack of focus. A band that have been playing together for less than a year or so are unlikely to have worked out a world beating line-up, a catalogue of quality songs, a blistering live show and some sense of where they fit in the pantheon of rock and pop. These are the things you need to succeed and it’s what we and all of our ilk are looking for. 

So, assuming you’ve got that stuff straight, how should you approach a manager, an A&R man, an investor (just as likely these days), or anyone who can raise your career a notch or two?

Well the most important thing is to do your research and make sure that the person you’re sending something to will receive it and have some kind of affiliation to your genre. That means, in short, there is no point sending your Rap demo to a Metal manager. Obvious, but so rarely followed. 

I, and my kind, don’t want to see an email that doesn’t address me by name and that I know has been sent to 100 or so people at once. I want to see that you know who I am and what I do, who my clients are etc. If I can tell that you have bothered to find out why we might be able to help you (you are similar to a band we rep, or something), then I am immediately more likely to listen. This is going to hold true for all people that you approach. So, use a name to address the mail or letter, and start off with a reference to what makes us interesting to you – not ‘we like your roster ‘ but something like  ‘we loved what you did with Nine MM Slayer X and how you broke them through MTV’ ….’and we think you might be able to use similar tactics to help us out’. It not only shows me that you’ve done your homework but also that you’re thinking about how to win the game. 

Next, send me something that tells me all I need to know. And, as I have already had to defend on the blog, I need to know what you look like as well as how you sound. I’m not going to dismiss you out of hand if you look like the back end of a bus, but I need to know so that I can balance all the factors. Please, please, please have photographs that aren’t laughable. 

Let us hear the best song first – ask your mates what that is and tell them to be honest. And then ask a few people in your age and peer group that you don’t know – test it at random on people in the mall to get an honest feel. 

Although I want to know how many friends and plays you have on MySpace, I also want to know where you play, how often and what kind of crowd you get. Virtual numbers can be manipulated, which I’m all for, but real world numbers need to be real. 

Something that people don’t often think about, seeing as most now email a link, is when to send the email. Over a holiday or at the weekend is just dumb. My inbox and everyone like me, is so full on Monday morning that I reckon you have halved your odds before you start. For me, make it Tuesday early afternoon. I’ve just got to grips with the week and I’m predisposed to hearing something new. 

I’d also recommend reaching out when there is good news to report. You’ve got a self financed single coming out, or you’ve made it to the last three of a local Battle of the Bands contest. These days, I’ll also be impressed if you have a track being used on a commercial or in a TV show, or if your weekly podcast is getting 5000 listeners. 

At the very least, I’ll be hoping that you’ve contacted me when you have three or more shows lined up within a fortnight that you know are accessible for me. That way, I have a real chance of coming to see you before I forget about you. Don’t ever send someone an email if you are a live band when you don’t have shows coming up – that’s just stupid. 

Lastly, and this is the killer, can you get someone who knows your target person to pitch it for you? This is the harsh reality. The reason that I am fairly sure I never missed a diamond in a demo pile is that 99.99% of the things that hit are picked up by a recommendation. Managers, promoters and A&R men are to some extent filters of what is good and bad and one of them can filter out acts that will never make it so that only the half decent ones even get in front of people who have decision making power. 

You need to get your stuff in front of one of these people at some point, so you need to cultivate relationships with people who can help you do that – all of the above applies to getting even those people to listen and help – it’s like a vicious circle in reverse – in fact it’s a vicious funnel! 

But, when someone they trust recommends that the people in power listen to your demo and that person’s view has some weight, then you are getting somewhere. Whose opinions count? – venue owners, small-time promoters, local indie record shop owners, music store owners, bloggers, anyone at the front end of the music business. 

Go and find them, polish your act and make your pitch!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Is MySpace still as effective and as essential for musicians as it was a few years back?

My honest answer is ‘yes’. I think it has passed its most dominant moment, but I actually do think it’s now more important than ever in the part that it plays in your career and promotion of that career. How can that be if its moment has passed?

Well, that’s because MySpace is no longer the hot new thing but has become the establishment. Odd, because it has happened so fast. But now, you absolutely have to have a MySpace page, as it is the first place that every day folk and the music industry guys go to find out about a new band. A few years ago a MySpace page was an option and made you look cutting edge. Now, if you haven’t got one, you aren’t going to get found. But, this is probably preaching to the converted! If you are web savvy enough to be looking up our Blog, you’re going to know that MySpace is your first calling card in the online presence stakes.

There are a multitude of social networking sites currently available to you and chances are, if you’re reading this, that you will have heard of, or have a profile on, several more of these. However, despite this, if you are a musician, people will always ask you if you have a MySpace. Why is MySpace so important to the aspiring musician?

MySpace has undergone a lot of changes within the past few years, changes that are continually making the site more beneficial to those currently in the music industry, or wanting to get into the music industry. With the launch of MySpace Music at the end of last year we are now definitely seeing a shift from ‘MySpace: a place for friends’, to ‘MySpace: a place for music’.

One of the main reasons that MySpace is so important is that, when used properly, it basically acts as a one-stop shop. You can direct people to your profile page to listen to your songs, look at pictures and read a brief bio of you, before sending them on to your website for more detailed information if they are interested in you. In this way MySpace is acting as a kind of electronic press kit for you, taking away the need to make demos CDs and print out endless press packs to send to record companies in today’s beleaguered industry.

Having a MySpace page also makes it easier to be a DIY musician. The ability to make contacts on MySpace is obviously amazing and the possibilities are practically endless. Anyone and everyone you could ever need to help you record and release your music are literally just a click away!

By making sure that your site is optimised, user friendly, eye catching and informative and the songs you have available are as good as they can possibly be, then you are pretty much guaranteeing that the next time someone stumbles across you page, whether they’re looking for a new act to sign, or just looking for a new band to be a fan of, they’re going to stick around and see what you’re like.

If you are prepared to use it properly then MySpace is a quick and easy way to get yourself into the public consciousness, but it is by no means a guaranteed way to turn yourself into a multi-million selling artist, especially in today’s market. For you to do that will take a lot of hard work, both on and off MySpace. However, there are things you can be doing with your MySpace profile to make sure that, out of the millions of artists and musicians who currently use MySpace worldwide, you are among the handful that people sit up and take notice of. We’ll look at what those things are as often as we can on this Blog.

As we move forward it’s clear that you’ll need to control a presence on many sites (Twitter and Facebook in particular) and on your own site, as well as your MySpace page and that will be just one place that fans can connect with you. However, we aren’t there yet and for now your profile on this most important of Web 2.0 sites is key to your success.

Don’t listen to anyone who says it’s over. They haven’t got a clue.

We, as a management company check out bands every day on MySpace and you can bet everybody else in the game does that too. It’s a default setting!

Make it a cool, interesting and ever changing destination for your fans and it will pay massive dividends.

You can learn more about why MySpace is so important to your music career in our book – Make It On MySpace.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Just pointing you to something else to check out.

Seth Godin is a web leader who talks and writes on all aspects of permission marketing, web 2.0 and god knows what else, but he has a particular interest in the music industry. You may well already have heard of him.

He has just given an interview to another great music blogger and source of very valuable advice, David Hooper at Music Marketing.

The interview itself covers a whole load of stuff about the future of the music industry, how to attract fans and lead them, appealing to tastemakers and loads more. It’s worth every second of half an hour to listen to, and if you haven’t heard of David or Seth before, they are great to know about and follow too.

Listen to the interview here.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Very short post, but really very cool and worth thinking about how you can use it.

I just stole this from Frank Kern, legendary Internet marketer (who you should check out if you don’t know him), but he in turn nicked it from Mike Filsaime – check him out too.

It’s just a little bit of html code and maybe you could’ve worked this out or maybe it’s already well known, but I haven’t seen this before.

Basically, what you do is create a hyperlink, ready to go with a Twitter retweet already embedded in it. Here’s mine: Please Retweet This.

And here’s the code http://twitter.com/home?status=XXXXXXXXX, where everything after the ‘=’ sign is the pre-filled message that you want your followers to retweet.

As a band, this would be something like a request to check out a MySpace link, or come to a show, or vote online or whatever you want your followers to get their followers to do. If you put a link in your tweet that brings people back to the original hyperlink, then you get a continuously re-promoting tweet.

Think about it. It’s very powerful.

By the way, click on it and then retweet please.

Thanks!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This is a short post that I could just about have made on Twitter, but I wanted to flesh it out a little.

I found this article about the ‘Future of the Music Industry’ by Mike McCready on the Huffington Post. It talks about a possible future model for the music industry (well, at least what was the record side of the industry) and about how we will all go about discovering new music when the opportunities for record label funded mass marketing evaporate even further. I won’t regurgitate his post here, but do go over and check it out.

All I will say on it is that I agree entirely that our future is about getting the attention of fans and building a relationship with them, in return for, in all likelihood, giving them recordings of your music for free. The pay-off will be that you will then earn by selling concert tickets, charging for related products (merchandising plus 1, if you will) and all kinds of third party endorsements or uses of your work.

Mike may have a certain bias as he is the CEO of Music XRay, a company that hopes to provide one of the systems that may become an answer to how we will all get our music filtered and recommended to us – a bit like a glorified Pandora or Last.fm. What Music Xray does is take your song and give it a specific URL, just like a video on YouTube, and also clothes it in a widget that contains a vast amount of information about the song – lyrics, what it sounds like, a cover image, artist pic and so on.

Putting your song in a Music XRay also puts it into their music recommendation engine, which Mike says, and I agree with him, is going to be the primary way that people will find your music in the future. You will need to be in as many of these as possible.

One added benefit for aspiring musicians right now, apart from the possibility of getting your song picked for a commercial or a movie just because you had it in such an engine, is that you get this very cool way of presenting your songs to people via the web or email.

As a working manager, I get hundreds of emails a week with a link to MySpace or an mp3 attachment. Either is fine, particularly the ever necessary link to MySpace that tells me a lot of what I need to know. But I really get the idea of receiving a Music XRay of a song straight into my inbox with all the info I need right there, but it didn’t clog up my email server.

And I think the (few remaining) A&R men, publishers, journos, agents, promoters etc that you should be pitching too will love it too.

I think you can tell that I love this idea. I believe that they will be charging $20 a pop for these (per song) in the future, but at this early stage, they are running at $2 a go. Sounds like a very sound investment to me.

We have already tried it out ourselves on a couple of sync pitches for commercials and people loved them. If it appeals to you, go over and give it a go at Music XRay.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

What is the number one thing that you need to know in order to make it in the music industry?

It’s the thing that the greatest artists all know and it’s the one thing that all record company A&R guys and managers are actually really looking for – no matter what other bullshit they might feed you.

Imagine what you can do for your career when you actually face up to this fact and this challenge.

And it’s simple. You must learn how to write a great song and also learn how to identify it when you’ve done it. Simple, but I’m afraid it’s not easy.

This is an edited version of one of the 10 Key Steps that we talk about in the guide that you can get from us by signing up over there on the sidebar at the right.

I decided to cut it down and use it as our second post as it is the most essential piece of advice you will ever get about how to make it as a recording and performing artist. Period!

This is the golden rule. Make no bones about it – without this you may as well pack it in now and go and do something much more sensible.

I’m really just handing on two of the greatest pieces of advice that I was ever given in this industry about songs:

(i) All the greatest songs are either basically ‘I Love You’ or ‘I Hate You / Don’t Need You / Am Better Off Without You’ etc; and

(ii) There are very, very, very few great songs and most bands / acts / artists only have one, or a handful, and that can sustain them for a career.

These are two pretty strong but simple, perhaps even obvious, statements but they need clarification and a pinch of salt for all their brilliance.

On the first point, if you look at your national music chart I guarantee that more than half the Top 40 or 20 or Hot 100 or whatever you have where you live, will be essentially conforming to that ‘I love you / I hate you’ paradigm. If you include general self-empowerment, I’ll bet its more like two-thirds. Not all of them will have an obvious title containing ‘love’ or ‘hate’ words but the basic lyrical theme will be on that topic.

In most cases, great songs are about raw human emotion.

On the second point, look at a career band once they have made four or five albums, and you are likely going to see something around 50 to 75 songs that they have recorded and released. How many of them are poor, how many are average, how many are good, how many are very good and how many are truly great? The answer is, not many, a handful.

It’s such a hard thing to define, but being truly great must mean that it’s a song that emotionally connects, moves you on a basic level and is so hooky that it’s in your head all day long. You know when you hear one, but they are hard to capture, hard to define, and crucially, really bloody hard to write!

But you know from your own experience that it really can take just one great song to break a band or act, and one per album from then on is enough to sustain the career momentum. If that is backed up with a bunch of very good songs, then even better. We all know of bands that seemed to go on and on for years with mediocre material after one huge smash.

Don’t set out at the start of your musical journey trying to write a hit song. You need to do some practice and it’s going to take time. What people forget is that songwriting is a craft.

Like any craft, experience and learning are key. You should study hit songs and try to take them apart and see why they emotionally touch you and why they work. You should try and identify the tricks of the trade. And then, later, you should set the toolkit that you have built to work at writing great songs.

I’m afraid I can’t teach you how to do it though! Sorry, I’ve been behind the scenes in the Music Industry, not out there being creative. There is good advice out there, but what I would hope you’d take in from this post is that you need to learn and perfect the skill.

I do know that for most songwriters I have worked with, they let the melody come first and let it dictate the flow of the lyrics. A melody isn’t good enough if you can’t easily remember it. Simplicity is a key part of their toolkit too. All too often a great talent fails because they over complicate a song and ruining it. K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple Stupid!

One last thing. Don’t think that a song has to be the way you first came up with it – there is always room for improvement. Smokey Robinson, not content with having written ‘My Guy’ for Mary Wells (fulfilling the golden rule above – unconditional love from a female perspective), then went a year later and wrote the flip version of that for the Temptations – ‘My Girl’. But, so the story goes, he and Ronald White knocked the song out in an hour or two and played it to Berry Gordy at Motown convinced that it was a hit.

He wasn’t impressed and they had to go away, rewrite and re-pitch it at least three more times, spending 50 hours plus on it before he agreed. They changed notes around, moved lines from the bridge to the intro, honed lyrics etc. Maybe it’s a myth, maybe it’s all true, but the lesson is clear. Keep honing a song until you know it’s a smash.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Finally, we get to launch the site.

It’s taken at least three months longer than expected and it may well be a little wobbly and scruffy for a while whilst we get our heads around how Wordpress works!

Bear with us, please. It might not look like we have done a lot, seeing as this is a simple blog with just the one post so far. But, I promise, we have done a hell of a lot of work behind the scenes and have written around 100,000 words of advice to publish here, in email newsletters and eBook guides as we move forward.

Please check the ‘About’ page and the ‘Why’ page for more background about what this is all about.

Then, please go and download the free guide from the sign-up box on the right. In many ways, that is what the work we have done to get this site up is all about. It only exists as an avenue for us to pass on advice and that eBook is the first bit. I’m really proud of it and think that there’s a lot of wise words that you won’t often hear from people in the Music Business. It’s solid straight-forward advice about what you need to do to make it as a musician and artist.

Once you’ve read it, come back to this post and leave a comment. We really value your thoughts and will do our best to find the time to respond and give as much advice as we can.

Go on – download the free Guide now.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites