Archive for the ‘The Future of Music’ Category

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.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I wanted to stick up a very quick post to bring hope to aspiring artists, yet also hammer home once again our core argument.

Maybe we’re finally getting to the time where a few artists really can break ‘big time’ without the record company machine, thanks to their own online efforts. Maybe.

Adam Young – he is Owl City – is an inspiration to the DIY musician using MySpace (still….) as their primary marketing tool. The story goes that Adam started recording in his basement and posting material to his MySpace profile with no real plan to speak of. (I’d heard the buzz and then Bob Lefsetz mentioned him today – and I got to thinking!)

Soon enough, people began to take notice and word spread – in the viral and natural way that online music discovery has long promised and only occasionally delivered. Two self-released albums and mammoth MySpace attention led to the moment of truth, and Adam, understandably, went for the old-school record deal with Universal.

Did he need to?

I think we’re still at the point in time that an international Major record company can push an artist with a groundswell of support far more successfully than they can on their own. Whilst the internet was fundamental to his early success and awareness, the world remains a big place in which to ship physical stock (and more than half the people still want CD’s!) and to drive radio and TV exposure. Sure, a lot of kids find new music on the web, but many don’t and all sorts of people still rely on the mainstream media to push things at them rather than discovering for themselves. Add to that, ‘offline buzz’ and personal recommendation, both of which can be amplified by the cash injection and expertise offered by those dinosaur record companies.

My view – they still have a lot to offer.

On the other hand, what he was doing to get noticed by those companies is exactly the same stuff that needs to be done to build the online buzz about your band and build a real fanbase – so do it anyway.

What can we learn from his experience?

1. He’s very talented and his material is great – you know we bang on about this a lot, but all the web promotion and Social Networking in the world is pointless if your material is crap. Study your craft, hone your skills and then present to the world.

2. He’s very prolific – Owl City was the third or fourth project that he had worked on. And he didn’t just sit there and do it half-heartedly. He finished songs, finished recordings, put them on the web. All the time perfecting his art and learning skills to promote himself – through experience.

3. He engaged with the feedback that he got – honestly and openly. If you’re seeking to build a following these days, you need to be available to your fans in a way that old school stars never were. It’s a mutually beneficial journey now – not you and the fan divided by awe. Look at how Imogen Heap talks to her artists and revels in their intense feedback.

4. Now that he is signed to Universal, they have amplified his web-presence with a light but skilled touch. Have a good look around his official site and see what they now offer – loads of information, his personal blog, streamed music, buy links, radio request telephone numbers, links to all his Social Networks, Street Team sign-up, mailing list, a forum, wallpapers and banners…… The site is a lesson in how to do it right. Not too flash, just nicely designed and stuffed with content that shouts out his appreciation of his fans. The only thing I’d add is a dedicated YouTube channel and Flickr page.

So, look & learn – be great at your art, push it out there, communicate and climb higher. If you do and the Major record label A&R guy comes calling, it might be the right thing to do, or, maybe, just maybe, you’ll decide to keep going it alone – and soon that really will be an option.

Read about Adam Young and Owl City below:

Owl City Official Site

Owl City Wiki

Star Tribune – article on Owl City success

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

You already know that having your music available digitally is becoming more and more important in today’s DIY musician environment – essential really.

As owners of an extensive music catalogue that we have for sale in a whole load of places, we can tell where our digital sales come from by looking at traffic and our monthly digital sales reports. A very important site to us for generating the interest that leads to sales is Pandora, and it’s one key place that we would suggest you make your music available.

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help people listen to and enjoy music they already know, and to help them discover new music they’ll love using the Music Genome Project. On the site, you tell them one of your favourite songs or artists and they’ll launch a streaming radio station to explore that style and genre of music for you. The system recommends other songs and artists that they think you’ll like based on what you tell them and your listening behaviour.

When Pandora accepts new music they painstakingly tag it with a whole load of identifying keywords to make the Genome engine put the right type of music in front of the right type of person to whom it will appeal. Unlike Last.fm, this is done by employees to a set of criteria (Last.fm does it by algorithms based on member’s behaviour). More info on the Genome project can be found here: Pandora Music Genome Project

So, if you have commercially available records, then clearly, having them as part of Pandora will lead people who like similar bands and styles to hear your material. Such is the nature of the Pandora community that the people who use it are very open to finding new music – all good for you, the aspiring artist.

We’ve also found that not only is the feedback about new artists very positive, but Pandora users also go out and buy music they have discovered on Pandora and evangelise about it to others – spreading the word about you even further.

However, the bad news is that getting your music onto Pandora is not as straightforward as it sounds.

First off, they don’t take everything that they’re sent – they have a subjective quality control threshold that you are going to have to satisfy – not all our records get approved!

And, secondly, Pandora can only stream songs to users in the US due to licensing laws, and as such, users from outside the US will find themselves blocked if they go to the Pandora site. Still, the US is a very significant part of the world market and worth targeting – even if you don’t live or tour there.

If you’re outside of the USA, you’ll never be able to stream music from Pandora as a user – it’s not possible. (Actually, if you’re a bit of a geek, you could do it by hiding your IP address or other things that we don’t understand!) However, you can still use the Pandora site for promotion of your music, without a fully functioning user account. How? You just need to sort yourself out with a US-based email address. If you’re in the States, obviously this is no problem to you, however outside of the States this is a whole other matter.

When we decided to put some of our catalogue up on Pandora we asked a friend who lives in the States to set us up a US email account, which we now use specifically for Pandora. It’s just a Gmail account that he set up from his US-based IP address.

So, if you have any friends or family in the USA then that’s the perfect route for you to get access to Pandora. Other options include doing it whilst on holiday to the States, or finding someone who is going and getting them to log onto a computer long enough to set you up an address. If you have no contacts in the US, ask around (try forums that you should already belong to!) and see if anyone can help you. This may seem like an annoying thing to do, but it will be worth it in the end.

So, once you’ve sorted out your email address, here’s how to submit your music!

• Using your US email address sign yourself up at http://www.pandora.com

• Once you have signed up you will be able to submit your music through your profile by going here: http://submitmusic.pandora.com. This is now the only place that you can submit your music to Pandora, so make sure that you have the following available to you before you start the submission process:

* A CD of your music

* A unique UPC code for that CD

* The CD to be available through Amazon. Pandora cannot accept music available only as downloads through the Amazon MP3 store; you must have a physical CD for sale.

* MP3 files for two of the songs from your CD

* The legal rights to your music

Anything that you want to submit must be available on Amazon and you will be asked to provide a UPC barcode on submission. This is a 12 or 13 digit unique number that identifies your release. If your release does not have a barcode then you can get one from here: Nationwide Barcode. There are other places that you can get a barcode that satisfies Amazon – Google “upc barcode for my CD release” or something similar for the latest information.

This page is worth a read as it tells you a load about how barcodes work – http://www.cd-fulfillment.com/bar-code.asp.

By the way, we really like the service that that company (CD-fulfillment) offer. One at a time CD’s, made on demand – so you can have a commercially available CD without a minimum stock quantity. Have a look around their site here – www.cd-fulfillment.com.

If you don’t already have your stuff for sale on Amazon then the best way for you to do this is through Amazon Advantage. It is the simplest and quickest way to get your CDs up for sale through Amazon sites and is targeted at self-publishers. For information on this head over to Amazon Advantage UK if you’re in the UK and Amazon Advantage US if you’re in the States. There is a significant charge (approximately $30 per year) but it’s a good system and that fee applies across all your stuff for sale on Amazon – it’s not per CD.

If you tie that up with on-demand CD manufacture from CD-fulfillment (or other companies that are out there offering that service), you can get CD’s on sale at Amazon for less than $50 all-in.

To start your submission process you will need to send the two mp3’s from your CD via the Pandora site to their approval team. You will be told that your upload has been successful and then it’s all a case of waiting. It may take a while before you hear from the submission team again as they get a huge amount of music to process but eventually you will get an email telling you if your submission has been accepted or not.

An updated status message for your submission can always be viewed here:
http://submitmusic.pandora.com/submit/status and you’ll need to sign in with the same Pandora account that you used to submit your music in order to see the status.

If it has been accepted you will then be sent an email providing you with a link to download a full submission form which you must then complete and sign before returning to Pandora with a full, finished copy of your release for them to add to their catalogue.

Once this has been received, your music is uploaded onto their systems and becomes available for everyone with a Pandora account to listen to, with the option of buying if they like it!

It can only help spread the word about your music to a receptive audience – and once done it’ll sit there giving you a little exposure all on its own – not like all the Social Networks that you should be beavering away at day in, day out!

It’s as easy as that. So, if you’re music isn’t on Pandora, go get it on now.

For further discussion on the Pandora requirements have a look at this topic on Artists House: http://community.artistshousemusic.org/forum/topics/the-new-pandora-requirements

If you like the idea of this, you can get some similar listener driven promotion at www.last.fm. Have a look here and read this great blog post about it.

http://www.last.fm/

http://www.jimmyshelter.nl/blog-75-Using-Last.fm-to-promote-your-band-in-6-easy-steps.html

http://www.knowthemusicbiz.com/index.php/BIZ-BLOG/BIZ-BLOG/How-to-Promote-Your-Music-on-Last.fm-by-Fiona-McLaren.html

And here’s a pdf on how to promote on last.fm. It’s a few years old but still worth a read. http://www.quaxle.com/ebooks/quaxle-ebook-lastfmpromotion.pdf

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

A Guest Post by Bas Grasmayer

To the readers of the Make It In Music blog, I would like to present my paper looking into some of the best practices of the online promotion of new music releases.

The paper identifies trends at play in the online practices of music promotion, looks at five different case studies and draws some observations and conclusions based on these case studies.

With the great, and some times not so great, examples set by Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, DangerMouse & Sparklehorse, Mos Def and Groove Armada, the paper aims to show very simply what works well when promoting music on the web and what does not.

Are you familiar with the phrase ‘freemium’ yet? Where you give something away for free, only to give yourself more opportunities to sell your premium content (fan packs, high quality versions, bundled packages, etc.).

Something else the paper discusses is that when you give something away, you should really give it away. So no DRM (copy protection), no sub-par quality versions (anything below 128 or 192 kbps), or other things which might actually disappoint people expecting to be delighted.

Without further ado, I present to you my paper about the online promotion of new musical content, click the link to download: Online Promotion of New Musical Content by Bas Grasmayer

This article was written by Bas Grasmayer, an International Communication Management student at INHOLLAND University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He’s currently writing his thesis about successfully using the web for monetizing music and wrote this paper as a side-project.

As part of his studies, he’s completed an internship with the Bulgarian National Radio in Sofia with excellent results, studied new media and PR at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, Turkey for a semester and has combined two of his biggest loves, new media and music, into one research objective for his thesis, which will be finished and made public somewhere within the next few months.

Bas regularly tweets about innovation in the music industry on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spartz

Bas’ contact info can be found on his blog: http://www.basbasbas.com/

You can also find him on LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Facebook. Be sure to check out his Google Reader shared items for many more interesting articles about the music industry and web 2.0!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

You can’t argue that when Radiohead announced the release of ‘In Rainbows’ a matter of days after it had been completed and just days before it was made available and announced that fans would be able to get the mp3 download for whatever they wanted to pay, they sent shockwaves right through the recorded music part of the industry.

It was groundbreaking in two ways – obviously the choosable pricing was a first, and headline grabbing, but time will perhaps show that the fast turnaround from album completion to being made available to fans might yet be the bigger revelation. The band made much of it at the time – wanting to be able to get their music to fans as soon as they had created it rather than going through a 6 to 12 month build up in an old school label approach before release.

Nonetheless, the pricing initiative turned out to be very profitable for the band, but, of course, they were already a world class act with a massive and rabid fanbase – would that approach work for you?

Well, now there’s a new service that will allow you to find out – anjuno.

If you know how the Radiohead release worked, then you pretty much know how anjuno works.

It’s free to join and anjuno then takes a percentage of any income from sales of downloads. You upload your stuff (I say stuff, because the system works for music or ebooks – so how about doing a tab book or lyric book for your fans at the same time?) and then set the system to accept payment at a level that a fan wants to pay – including free.

It’s brand new, and who knows how this is going to work for new artists. Personally, I think it’s a great idea and I’d follow the Radiohead model and use anjuno for an early release blitz followed up by a physical release  (with superior packaging or otherwise of collectable value) and continued availability on itunes etc.

Of course, you’re going to get some people going for the free option, but as the Radiohead release showed, faith in human nature will pay off and a record will find a natural price level if its good enough!

What do you think – do you like the idea? Let us know.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I’m posting this because once again I’ve been inspired by something on Ariel Hyatt’s blog – a new post entitled ‘Increasing the Frequency of Purchases’

If you read our blog you’ll know that we think she writes a lot of great information and that we follow her blog. So, check her post out, but what about the video below?

Well, both are all about how you can find ways to sell more stuff to your fans (not just music) and, in the process, have them become more involved in the process of promoting you to new potential fans.

The video is of a guy called Michael Masnick who runs a company called Techdirt that is very future thinking and all deep into Web 2.0. In it he expands on an earlier lecture he gave that looked in detail at how Trent Reznor has been interacting directly with NiN fans and bypassing the record company model.

However, in this updated talk, he answers the criticism that it’s easy for Trent Reznor with an already massive fanbase, but it’s not for you when you’re starting out. Well, he shows that myth can be debunked by thinking outside the box by reference to four unsigned artists who are doing very well – including one, Corey Smith, who turned over $4 million last year as a DIY artist. Not bad.

Check it out and I’d love to see comments about anything that you’re doing that fits with these ideas to develop your relationship with your fans and gets them to buy more from you. 

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Well yes you can.

I’m new to this issue, and there may well be other ways that I haven’t seen yet, but I was just put onto this today and it looks like a very neat solution – albeit that the people behind it are running to catch up with demand and get the bugs out of their system.

Don’t be discouraged though, and do go and check out Twiturm.

It very simply addresses the issue of not wanting to host your music in one location, needing to create a tiny url and then posting that link. With Twiturm you store, stream and post your music straight into Twitter. Very smooth indeed.

In fact, it’s so smooth that you already actually have a Twiturmaccount just because you have a Twitter account. It drags your info out of Twitter using the same log-in and password. Then the process of uploading a file to their hosting (or linking to hosting elsewhere) is so easy. You can allow people to download the track (or not) and you set the genre description. Then you tweet the link from inside Twiturm. I like this a lot!

Fans and people browsing for music through the site itself can see everything split up by a comprehensive list of genres. My guess is that, over time, it’ll be a destination in itself for really savvy music fans – exactly the kind of people you are looking for to spread the word about you.

Looks like a winner to me, but I’m equally interested in hearing how you are going about getting your music heard via Twitter. Leave a comment and please let us know.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

One of those quick recommendation posts.

I got asked four times last week if we could recommend a good designer for a cheap and simple website for a band who we were exchanging emails with – four separate occasions! At least these bands knew that they needed a site of their own.

I recommended one guy that we use for some stuff, but he isn’t cheap, and I also recommended that people go and use the services of the amazing elance. I love that site. This blog was put together by someone we found on there as was an e-commerce store we have. Basically it’s a site where you post a description of the work you want done and people will bid to give you that service. You get to see what they have done and then you choose someone to work with. You only pay, securely through the site’s system when the work is done and you’re happy. Highly recommended, but I wouldn’t expect a site for a band for less than $500 or so.

The last option and the one that I mentioned to all four of the people was that they learn how to do it themselves.

They weren’t keen as they all claimed to be useless at design and anything technical. I pointed out that they were half my age and had been brought up on computers, so that was largely tosh. If I can manage it, they can. But I don’t use anything difficult. If you know anyone who is a nerd or a geek or have the time to learn Dreamweaver or FrontPage, then that’s a great option.

I didn’t and couldn’t, so I bought XSitePro website design software. I won’t bore you here as to why it’s so good as you can click on the link and read all about it yourself but, take it from me, it’s one of the best investments I’ve ever made and has paid for itself many times over. And don’t think that because their site focuses on Business sites and Internet Marketing that it won’t work for you and your band’s site. We’ve used it ourselves and got others to use it and seen a dozen or more band sites built using it – it’s awesome and great value.

It’s important to remember that you should have a website for your band at your own domain name (rather than just relying on MySpace and other Social Networking sites – and we’ll look at this in detail another time), but your site only needs to be simple whilst you are at the DIY stage, and this software will allow you to do that yourself very easily. In fact, one of our artists ended up using this software and doing most of the other sites for the bands we pointed at him for a decent fee.

It’s not budget software. It normally costs $297 but is currently on offer at $197, although if you come to this post and it’s gone back up, don’t blame me!

If you haven’t got a site built for your band then this is a great way to get it done. Plus you’ll have the tool and the skill to use it, for a load more sites in the future should the need arise.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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