Getting your music out there!

This is a great interview from the Music Making Month series made by Propellerhead software - the wholeset is an awesome resource!

In this episode they have a chat that's well over an hour with the folks fromn Nimbit - the DIY musician's 'direct-to-fan' system.

I know that most people won't watch this whole video - and that makes me sad!

When some people who really know their shit sit and pontificate for over an hour about things that you can do to get your music out there and make a difference to your career, you ought to listen!

Watch it below or at this link.

 

Getting Gigs and Agents - what you need to know

I already tweeted one of these articles last week but when I came across another two it became perfect sense to put them all together in one place.

The first one from Grassrootsy gives 4 tips on what a booker is looking for when booking a band - and it's really insighful.

While hashing things out in the group, I took note of how a booker decides who to book for his venue. Now the following list isn’t set in stone and will probably be different for each individual booker, but these 4 factors (in order of importance) will guide a venue into booking you.

Go here to see what those 4 tips are.

That piece itself links to an interview on the same site with a booker who goes into detail about his own experience booking bands and promoting the shows:

The more people you can bring, the more leverage you have. You gotta give something before you take it. So when emailing venues, talk about how you can team up with a local band or two and bring 30 REAL people. Don’t BS and lie to the venue. We have a 25% rule. Whenever a band says they will bring 50 people, we just assume it will be 12 or 13. Then we don’t usually want to do business with them again because they exaggerated their draw when we could have put on another like-minded band with a draw that could have made the night profitable for everyone.

It's long but well worth a read.

Lastly, there's this piece from Dave Cool - and it's a must read.

It talks about how you find a booking agent, but almost the whole piece is great advice for how to be better live and get more gigs - like this nugget:

Get your live show to the point where people are going home blown away and talking about you when they leave the venue. So rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse again, then play as many shows as you can. And be sure to build your set list in a way that makes for a great show, not just a series of songs played one after another.

Read the whole thing here.

The definitive book on this subject is Jeri Goldstein's 'How to be your on booking agent'. It's spot-on and WILL help you get more gigs. Not cheap these days though as it's in demand and currently sold out. You can get it on Amazon or for a Kindle. I recommend it.

A vinyl record crowdsourced label

I love the idea of this new label/site from the people at Plugola.

I'll let them explain it:

After roughly a year and a half of bootstrapping and slowly building, we are finally able to announce a soft (beta) launch of Hifidelics.What we have here is essentially an online record store built on top of a crowdsourcing platform. Our focus is to release limited edition, creative vinyl records from some of the freshest, up-and-coming talent. When I say ‘creative’ records, I mean something extra special in the packaging or the record itself.

Go and read their post about the idea here.

And, you can check out the Hifidelics site here.

It might be that it's a great place for you to release a record, or it might just inspire you to make an extremely creatively packaged record - these resonate with true fans very well.

 

3 tips for your fan-funded record

We've looked at fan funding a lot - such as in this great post full of tips here.

But, this post on Digital Music News reduces the advice to 3 great points that you NEED to know.

Today, as we watch the labels shift and recorded revenue streams dry up, the idea of patronage has resurfaced.  Platforms like Kickstarter and Pledge Music market themselves as direct financing engines and have helped artists raise some serious cash.  And this can work: I just raised more than $10,000 on Kickstarter, but not before learning some surprising lessons.   

Read them here.

Keep your band website simple!

This is a GREAT post from @cbracco on his TightMix blog.

Basically, keep your website design simple - that's what your fans want - to be able to find what they're looking for.

As you can see, an overwhelming 76% of participants want their web experience to be easy.

A lot of musicians want their website to be a work of art, with noisy header images, Flash animations, splash pages, automatic music players, and other gimmicky things. While they can seem cool at first, all of that stuff just ends up getting in the way and degrades the experience your fans want to have when visiting your website. Do you think your fans will be able to access your gaudy Flash website from their iPhones? Think again.

Read the whole thing and see examples here.

Make It In Music - Seminar

I posted this yesterday when the people that I'm doing it for sent me the link, but it deserves a post!

I'm doing my first ever speaking gig as Make It In Music on 13th July in Bristol.

It's called 'How to break your band using the Internet - methods, tools & tips'.

I'm really looking forward to it, although, like most people, I don't relish public speaking!

If I get enough time before the event I'm hoping to turn it into a pdf that I'll make available afterwards - to all our readers, not just those that come to the event. Given that I am always overworked, this might fail to materialise!

Here's the blurb:

An in-depth and interactive seminar on how to use the Internet to build a fanbase for your music. The latest and best practices that every musician should know and use including what you need to know about the artist website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, music blogs and more.

The seminar will give you a workable plan that you can apply to stand out on the web and attract a fanbase that can underpin your success.

We will look at:
Building an effective website for pennies
Why you need a mailing list
How to best use Facebook
Why Twitter is a key tool that you need to master
Effective promotion using music blogs
How, why, where and when to sell your music for maximum sales
….and more.

And, you can find out more and book tickets here.

Like I said yesterday - no heckling!

Topspin and RootMusic sync up a beauty!

I use Topspin and RootMusic BandPage for my clients.

When Topspin announced this yesterday, I added a New BandPage (from scratch) to a client's Facebook Fan Page and had it installed and with a Topspin store selling 10 different records / CD's / downloads within 10 minutes!

Sure it needs tweaking and more doing to it, but, that, my dears, is the future!

Read the post on Topspin's blog or watch the video below. In short, this shows why Topspin are at the leading edge of Direct To Fan - sharing API and looking to offer the best functionality for promoting, marketing and selling your music.

I know I sound like their salesman - I promise I'm not! - but it works for me.

Someone asked me yesterday if I didn't think it was too expensive. No, I don't. I come from an old school background where my artists were paid maybe 15% of record sales. So paying $9.99 per month and 15% to the distributor and keeping 85% feels pretty good to me!

Watch the video here.