“We have come to an age where a core product — recorded music — is no longer differentiated by price.”

Alicia Yaffe argues in a recent article that music industry suffers because everything is a commodity.  Established bands and first timers all charge the same amount for their music, regardless of quality. Breaking free from the abundance of music, and creating something truly unique will create value in this product, and in turn, make people interested in buying it.
Kickstarter is a great example of a place where value can be added. There, fans are asked to preorder albums, often before it is recorded. Bands can have multiple price points by inserting merchandise, videos, or personalized messages, all of which create value by adding something unique to the buying process.

The same idea can be applied to a band’s live shows. If a group has the same show, night after night, their performances are a commodity. Making each one different will create a unique product, one that must be seen now, or it will never be seen again. Bands that do this will have fans who want to see them more often than those who have a regular routine or setlist.

Read the full article here

“The time of the Record Label has passed. Artists do not need a record label to survive, and in fact, most artists would be better off as a hot indie group than one desperate to sign with any label.”
This and other great advice comes from an article by Simon Tam outlining “The Most Overrated Thing’s In A Musician’s Career”.
Simon goes on to describe other “overrated” things, like paid Electronic Press Kit or EPK services, booking agents, and professional music gear. Especially overrated are big music industry festivals like SXSW, which just finished in Austin, Texas. Bands who get asked to play these festivals are already on their way up, and do not come with any guarantee that you will be noticed by the right people.
Simon also takes aim at Kickstarter, which has been in the news recently for large sums paid out to artists. Without an existing fanbase already willing to pay for your music, your campaign will not be funded as we recently blogged about here.

Read Simon’s full article here on Music Think Tank

Artists, labels, venues, websites, pretty much anyone in the music business these days is involved in social media to some extent. Everyone knows it’s important, but knowing what the best parts are can save you hours, achieve better results, and streamline what you do online.

Set Goals

In order to decide where to focus your energy, you need to focus on what you expect from a social media campaign. “I just want to get my name out there.” is not enough anymore. You should have specific goals, ideally centered on making money.

What makes the most money for your band or company? Is it selling CD’s or music downloads? Selling merch? Ticket sales for your shows? Whatever it is, exploiting it should be the focus of your online presence, and will make the most effective use for your time. Expanding in the areas you are lacking should be a secondary goal.

If exposure is your goal, not money, try narrowing it down further. Who do you want exposure with? More fans? Labels or company executives? And what will this exposure lead to?

Know Your Networks

Once your goals are in place, knowing the differences between social media sites can tell you exactly where to go to achieve them. It is also important to respond to what is working differently on each site, and not waste time with things that aren’t. Understand, I am not suggesting that all your posts should be “buy this!” or “share this!”, but keep your goals in mind as you craft each page and persona.

Facebook

Facebook is a good place to start; it is the most popular network in most parts of the world. Facebook’s best asset is that it is the most likely to have all the people you actually know. First of all, this means building an initial fan base should relatively easy. Also, having a network of people you are already friends with and that live nearby gives you a great crowd to advertise shows to. Other sites that are more likely to include people from across the country may not help you much selling tickets to your shows. Facebook is also becoming the standard for informational, “like”-able pages, perhaps the first place someone might look that hears of your band or company.

Twitter

Twitter is a much harder place to build your network, but that network can be very rewarding. It is full of music industry people, and no matter how small your genre or specialty, they are easy to find. However, unlike other sites, you will only get followers by having good content, and saying truly interesting things. Your profile does not have the same fluff of the other sites, such as a bank of photos, a place to have your music, etc., but Twitter users are very active and like to share what others like them are involved with.

Your followers on Twitter will be all over the country, and more likely, all over the world, so don’t expect to gain a lot in ticket sales. On the other hand, tweets about new products, music, and especially press and blogs you are featured in will get a great response.

YouTube

YouTube is the best way to get lots of plays for your songs and people listening to your music. More and more big names started by doing frequent cover songs to sell their own original music. An embedded link in a video can be seen thousands of times if a video has enough plays, whereas reaching that amount in one post on Facebook and Twitter can be almost impossible.

YouTube’s major drawback is that it is not as good for conveying information. You would never click on a band’s YouTube profile to find out if they had shows coming up, read their biography, or see their past discography. But it’s a great way to be discovered by random stumblers or old fans who just want to listen to your latest music.

Balance

In all, one social media site will not accomplish all of your needs as an artist or company. And any social media site, listening service, blog, or network can have a benefit. But it is a better use of your time to have clear purpose for each one you become involved in, and limit what you do, rather than try to use all of them for everything, and end up with not enough.

Guest post by Kyle M. Bagley

Many artists these days are using Kickstarter or similar services to raise funds for their next album, which is a great idea.
But they often fail. Why?

According to veteran music industry consultant Tim Sweeney, one simple reason: You don’t know your fans.

One strategy Tim has taught artists he mentors for the last 30 years is the following: “Whether you want more fans at your shows, greater sales or want to raise money for your new project start having social events with your fans. Instead of only inviting them to your shows, invite them to come hang out with you at a movie, a festival, another artist show or some other event based upon on a common interest. Too often artists want people to blindly support them because they wrote a good song. As we wrote in our last post, it’s not about the music.

“Give fans what they really want, a chance to talk with you and build a bond.”
Would you do that with your fans? Well, maybe that’s why you have to work so hard to promote and sell your music.

While social events offer you a chance to get to know your fans, they more importantly create an opportunity for your fans to get to know each other and develop friendships. That way when your future shows come up, they will call each other and come together so they can hang out with their new friends. This is why Facebook is so popular: it allows people to do this online.

Tim’s Artists have sold millions of CDs and downloads with this strategy with selective fans and have found it the best way to sell out shows in advance. He says, “Think of it this way, if your favorite artist invited you to an event where you can hang out with them and make new friends would you go?”

Invest your time into your fans instead of only social media campaigns and your show money and sales will increase along with “pre-sales” of your next project where you may not need to do a Kickstarter campaign.

And then when your ready, you may want to try Pledge Music, the Kickstarter for music that we really like.

It’s 2013, a new year! We survived the impending end of the world, and a brave new world is ahead of us.
A new opportunity to get closer to that dream of success through your music, your art, your passion.

There’s one problem though. People don’t really care about your music.

We live in a time where there are not only increasing amounts of people releasing music due to the internet and home production tools, but endless distractions for people on all sides.
When music appreciation peaked in the 1980′s, people had little else besides a TV and their music player or stereo to distract them.
Now people have, in their hand, mobile internet, video games, video cameras, instant messaging, social networking, and endless super cool apps to keep them occupied.

This makes it increasingly difficult to get attention for your music and art.

More and more, to get people’s interest, you must have a great story!
THEN they will be open and interested to listen to the music.

People tell us all the time. ‘I want to promote my new album’
Well, people aren’t really interested in your album. They are interested in YOU, the artist!
This has been the case for many years now, and is the essence of how the new music industry works, so to be successful you must understand it, accept it and embrace it!

‘Well I don’t have much to write about’ is something we also hear. Well, Everyone has a great story, but most just don’t realize it.
Radio stations love to be able to give the 10 second explanation of why you stand out.

When was the last time you read a review about a band in your local newspaper that talked only about the technicalities of the music rather than what was sent to them in a press release?
They don’t and that is the disconnect and the reason publicists and managers exist.

You need to find the most interesting story for your project you possibly can and go with it to promote your work everywhere.
It’s the “he was discovered busking on the streets of NY and now has a top radio hit” story. ‘He had no job and went on to win The Voice even though he was the underdog next to the attractive young singers’. Adele’s breakup album. Taylor Swift’s love life. Lady Gaga’s behind the scenes songwriting career. Deadmou5′ disguise, the giant, electronic mouse head.
You need something that every newspaper reviewer wants to write about. The story every fan tells their friends when showing them your YouTube video. Gimmicks are ok if you really feel you have nothing; performing in costume or focusing on your weird instruments or hairstyle.

A great song helps, but great music with an amazing story is what really makes you memorable.

Accept it and you won’t have to work as hard to get your music heard.

This is another question we often get asked, especially by new artists.

Here’s our answer with some wisdom from Andrew Dubber of New Music Strategies:

In most instances, the answer to this one is a firm YES. In fact, We struggle to think of an instance in which the online presence of a musician, band or music enterprise would not be enhanced by the addition of a blog.

The most common counter-argument against musicians blogging is the idea of the ‘aloof artist’ – the notion that the mystique of an inaccessible and ineffable artist adds to the value of the work itself. We disagree, though of course, there are exceptions. You pretty much have to go into hiding to make that strategy worthwhile.

But the main reason to blog is not, as you might expect, that it’s a great way to promote your music. It’s more that the blog is now part of the way in which you do what you do.

Let me put it another way. Just as copying simply happens online, so does communication.

Accessibility is the norm online

If I find it difficult to locate you, listen to your music, find out what you’re up to and where you’re at, then it’s far easier for me to find an alternative source for what you do than it is for me to go digging in order to find out what’s going on.

If you’re trying to get work, sell your music, gain clients, gather fans, promote a record or a gig, or connect with the online environment in any way, blogging is the first step towards that. It is, at the very least, evidence that you understand that your online presence should be a conversation and not a brochure.

So what actually is a blog?

Well, actually, allow me to broaden the standard definition a little. Generally speaking, the term comes from an abbreviation of ‘web log’ – a continually updating ‘diary’ of events and occurrences. But it really just needs to be some regular form of communication that can be easily updated by you.

In that respect, I’d put a ‘micro-blogging’ platform like Twitter on the list, and a voice-based message system like Utterz on the pile as well. Mostly though, it’s somewhere you can post the latest news, thoughts, events, and interesting things as they come to mind, so that visitors to your site can see the latest, go back through previous posts – perhaps respond, and spread the word.

And the best reason to blog?

A smart friend of mine once said that the best music in the world is the sound of someone’s insides on the outside (yes, he was an old punk – how did you know?). His point was one about self-expression. That music, at its best, is something we can identify with on a human level. And we tend to like music we can relate to, because it expresses something of ourselves.

And because music is self-expressive, we are more positively inclined towards music by people we know and like – because if we like them, we’re likely to appreciate expressions of their ’self’.

So by logical extension – removing the curtain, engaging with your audience and actually letting them in on your day to day life will allow people to feel that they are getting to know you (in a ‘managed’ way), and will therefore be increasingly inclined to appreciate your music on that basis.

To put it in narrative terms – you become a character they care about. Whether you’re a musician, a label manager, a promoter, a venue owner or a music teacher – starting and (more importantly) maintaining a blog creates a story (remember this idea — we’ll be coming back to it). People love stories — and want to know what happens next — and if it’s a story they like with characters they can identify with, it will start to become meaningful and important to them.

Everybody must blog! Why do you think Twitter is so popular and pretty much any company that matters is on it?

The idea that the world is divided into content creators and consumers is increasingly redundant. What’s important is the quality, frequency and ‘engageability’ of your content – and that’s no longer restricted to your musical output.

The fact that you make music is unremarkable. The quality of your communication — musical content included — is now the measure by which you will be judged. This is not a call to pick over the mundane minutiae of your life. This is a challenge to be interesting.

And really, this is not such a radical or transformative idea. Your music has always been communication. Your music business has always been a communication business. This is about using the online tools to enhance that communication.

Another more technical reason to blog is related to one of the more important but less important ’20 things you must know about music online’ which you should read if you haven’t already and that’s SEO: Search Engine Optimization.

Everything you blog about gets catalogued by the search engines. So that means a lot of ways for people to find you and hear your music. Often things totally unrelated to music which is fine – people love to stumble upon things accidentally and ‘discover’ them for themselves. Some of our artists greatest sources of traffic to their website have been related to playdough, hiking, religious oppression and video games!

So think of blogging as an indirect way for people to find out about your music.

Ok, So what should i write about?

We hear this one a lot from artists, what should I write to my fans and mailing list subscribers?

Well, since it’s essential you send a message out to your list at least once a month (you DO have a mailing list don’t you?) Here are some ideas of what you can write about:

- Details of the creation process of your latest musical works and otherwise

- Upcoming shows

- Recapping recent shows (telling funny stories if there are any)

- New music (either full CD releases or just new songs posted online)

- Info about upcoming releases

- New merchandise

- updates to your website, new blog posts, photos etc.

- great music, books, videos, foods and other things you’ve appreciated lately

- Funny/interesting stories and events that happen during your downtime

- Any other artist news

- Anything really. Fans signed up to YOUR list to hear what YOU want to say!

And you thought you had nothing to say!

It’s important to write something at least once a month, but no more than once a week.

But I really don’t like writing!

Ok, sure there are some of us who will just never get into or want to do this, fine, that doesn’t mean you don’t blog… Here’s a supplementary list for you:

- post photos you’ve taken or that you’ve found that you love [and credit the photographer]

- post your favourite videos you’ve found online

- post videos of your own, embedded from your youtube account [vblog]

- post some artwork you’ve created and mention the inspiration behind it or something

- post your own podcast [let us know if you want help setting one up]

We could go on… there are easy and quick ways to do this now using mobile technology and such, again, let us know if you need help.