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.

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.

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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?

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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.

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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 are definitely 'in the band' - no Plan B!

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.

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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

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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

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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!

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We love Nimbit.

It’s been around a while offering all sorts of amazing ‘direct-to-fan’ marketing tools (email list capture, analytics, social media tools etc) and ‘direct-to-fan’ selling tools (widgets that allow you to sell all types of stuff from all sorts of places). In fact, we’ve been recommending it to our clients for a very long time and many have chosen to use it for it’s ‘all-in-one’ ease of use.

And now, they’ve moved the game on and managed to bring their functionality to facebook.

It’s important to realise what a powerful tool Nimbit is before you can really see what their new extra tools for facebook can mean for you as a do-it-yourself artist.

Nimbit allows you to manage your direct-to-fan activity pretty much all from within Nimbit’s site. Meaning, for the most part, that you can deal with all your Social Networking pages and your own blog all from one place.

And what can you do with it?

You can:

• build your fan mailing list, find out more information about your fans, mail them in loads of cool ways
• sell pretty much anything direct to fans – digital tracks, merchandise, CD’s, tickets
• sell that stuff from loads of different places where you can drop their widget – MySpace, your blog etc
• control your Social Network presence from one place and build your ‘music brand’

But that’s not all – they’ll also get your digital tracks for sale on all the major sites, such as iTunes and Amazon.

So, why is this update to what Nimbit can do on facebook a big deal? – because it has all their functionality in one easy to switch on App! It’s so simple – literally switch it on and you are selling to your fans on facebook.

What does it cost?

Well, maybe nothing!

In order to have the MyStore application running on your facebook page, you have to have a Nimbit account – but it can be the basic free Nimbit account. There are limitations on what you can use it to do, but you get most of the facebook App functionality for free.

In truth, if you get it, you’ll probably end up falling in love with how easy Nimbit can make your music marketing and to get all the functions you’ll have to upgrade to one of their two membership levels – either $9.95 or $19.95 per month.

But, it’s well worth it.

Click here to go to Nimbit and have a look at the MyStore App.

Or, watch the video about MyStore below.

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I just got back from two weeks holiday and cleared out my inbox – well over 1000 emails, including over a hundred from artists asking me to check them out.

I try to check out all the bands who send me mail – both to us for this site and also people checking in with us for management.

But, more than half those emails had either no link or what they thought was a link, but it wasn’t ‘clickable’.

Now, I care more than most who do my job, and I also spend time advising artists here and one-to-one, so I know how it feels to get no response to a demo or email. But, most people in this business are sharks who are too lazy to do anything you want of them. They’ll claim that they’re too busy (most aren’t), but whichever way you look at it, when you’re asking them to do something, you need to make it as easy as possible.

So, make sure that in every mail that you send, you have a link, to your MySpace, band website, Facebook Fan Page etc.

Despite the title, I’m not going to give you the full rundown here on how to make a link in your email or Biog / Press release (both because it is really easy to work out and because there’s some links at the bottom), but I am going to reiterate the point of this post – that you need clickable links!

Remember to put the link in and make it clickable.

In most cases, all you need to do is put ‘http://’ before your ‘www.ourbandsite.com’ bit of your web address, so that you have ‘http://www.ourbandsite.com’. That will make it clickable in most email applications.

In some mail programmes, you don’t even need to do that (Gmail, for example) as the mail programme will make the link clickable for you if you just put the www in.

I’m not going to go in depth on what else you might need to know – the links below pretty much cover that (as well as making a text phrase clickable) – as almost everyone reading this will know how to do it anyway.

At the risk of overdoing it, the point is – don’t forget!! I know I’m right when I tell you that if a link isn’t clickable maybe half the people who would’ve checked your site or MySpace page out, won’t bother.

Did I make my point? Sorry to bang on, but it’s important!

Useful links on how to do this in many programmes below:

Copying & Pasting hyperlinks in email

How to Insert a Link in an email using Microsoft Outlook

Hyperlink your Gmail content

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This is essential reading.

I came across this the other day and rather than just tweet it, it’s one of those things that needs to be on here for people to go off and read in the longer term, as it’s so important. I was impressed that a group of respected Musician Resource Bloggers had come together to pool their knowledge and skills in such a way. And I am very impressed by the content of what they’re doing.

Spearheaded by David Rose at Know the Music Biz (itself a great resource site), this is what it’s all about, “the goal of the Indie Artist X Project is to develop a basic, actionable music marketing plan designed around simple strategy, prioritization of tactics, tools and a reasonable budget that can be implemented by any indie artist who has the inclination to follow it”

What this means for you as the aspiring artist is that these folks have gotten together and written down a blueprint of their current thinking as to how an artist, aspiring to a major label ethos or fervently DIY, can get themselves noticed. There is a wealth of information and this will be updated over the next four months as they apply their ideas to a currently secret test case artist. They’ll be filing reports as they go.

Read David Rose’s full explanation here – he puts it better than me!

Then you can check out the very cool Google Documents workbook that lists all their plans split into easily digested sections here.

As I said above, I am impressed by the content, and, if you’re not up to speed on all the latest ideas on how to market yourself as a musician or band, then this sets out a very easily followed plan.

As with a lot of what we comment on, I would always caution that before you rush into a new phase of marketing your band, you have a critical re-appraisal of your material and where your band’s development is at beforehand. In order to get the world to take you to its bosom, you need to be really good, really great songs and a polished performance. It’s that simple, but, of course that doesn’t make it easy.

If you can assess your current state of development disp[assionately, and if you’re ready to earn the love of a noteworthy fanbase, then go and read the Marketing Plan and you will get better results than 99% of wannabee rock stars.

These days, if you’re good and you have a web savvy marketing plan and you stick at it, you will succeed on your own terms.

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