Actually, yes you do!

And it is the single most annoying issue that I have to deal with time and time again with every musician, apart from perhaps those who refuse to listen to constructive criticism about their material.

I think it stems from the misplaced belief that when you believe that what you’re doing is great, you think that every opportunity will come to you. Sure, you must be great, but you still have to work to build a fanbase that will help you get to your goal.

Endlessly I have musicians sit in front of me and explain that they haven’t got a website because they have a Facebook page and they don’t have an email list as people won’t give up their real email, or because they don’t want to spam their fans.

Two facts

1. You have no choice. Owning and controlling your own website with your own domain means that you are no longer at the mercy of Facebook or MySpace (see what happened there?).

CD Baby's reasons why you NEED a website

Facebook really messed up your plans when they introduced Timeline the other day I’m sure. We’ll tell you more about how to combat that soon, but there’s the rub – if you don’t own your own real estate on the web, somebody else can change the game on you.

You absolutely should have a presence for your band and music on Facebook but having your own site means that you dictate how it looks, what the content is and what you want a fan or someone dropping by gets to see and hear. Your ability to design and make this space feel how you want it to and put across your image is unmatched by any social network.

Then there’s the fact that because you own it you get to use it that way….forever. No-one can take that traffic away from you and no matter what game gets changed, you’ll still have a place that your fans will want to come to. And that’s where you build the core of your relationship.

Of course, put all your videos on YouTube. But when you email your fans or tweet a link make it to the video that you have embedded in a post on your site, not to YouTube. That’s to the post on your site where they can also sign up to your mailing list, buy music and merchandise or listen to a stream of your new EP – all the way you want them to.

2. A mailing list means that you can interact with more of your fans more of the time – asking them to do whatever you want – come to a gig, buy a single, listen to a song. Whatever….you want.

People always moan to me about how people won’t sign up to a mailing lust. That’s because you’re doing it wrong. If you’re good and they like your music and you make the offer to sign up to your mailing list a good one, guess what, they’ll sign up. And they’ll stay signed up and they’ll open your emails.

If that’s not happening either your music isn’t up to snuff or you’re doing something else wrong.

And, when they want to hear from you, your emails aren’t spam.

Here’s why

I was inspired to write this post because of two things I read today. One was an old post from Ariel Hyatt on how to write an effective newsletter and this post from CD Baby about why your website is better than Facebook, from which we borrowed the image above.

Then there was this very lengthy business post about the future of the web in general and blogs in particular that completely debunked the myth that email is dying out to be replaced by messaging on Facebook and similar services. Utter rubbish.

If that’s your reason for not building a mailing list of fans, I’d urge you to read the whole thing. It’ll take half an hour, but about half way through it explains why building an email list is now more important than ever.

So, hopefully, that rant will inspire you to take on both these tasks. Every musician needs both.

Just imagine, if you have a mailing list and your own site, life can be really simple. You post something that you want your fans to see to your site and then you email them asking them to take a look. They open your email, click a link and go to your site. They like what they read, take the action you want them to and maybe buy your music or a ticket to a gig. If you’re really smart they might share it on Facebook or tweet it and spread the message further.

Rocket science apparently to most musicians. But not to you – just simple marketing.

Here’s how

We’ve written about this lots before – most recently in ’7 steps to break your band in 2012′. See steps 2 and 3 for everything you need to know about building your own website and setting up a mailing list for about $20 per month. Really.

I don’t really care whether you use the services that we recommend for web hosting and mailing lists. As long as you buy your own domain and build a website and use something to build a mailing list, that’s a massive step forward.

Check that post for all the ‘how to’ info and we keep adding stuff to our section on ‘Fan mailing lists’ here.

But, more than anything else I can tell you, do these two things as soon as you have some music that you are convinced the world will want to hear. You’ll be astonished at what you can achieve.

My return to the front line of music management and major label artists has given me a number of insights into how things have changed over the last five years.

Some of the changes are the same for every artist, from the DIY musician to the global superstar – digital downloads, social media and increased ‘fan engagement’, and a hitherto unknown reliance on brand partnerships are all good examples.

But, perhaps the biggest change of all is to what we used to call the ‘album cycle’, wherein an artist would disappear from view for 12 months or so following the last single from an album and reappear that year later with new singles leading up to an album and a tour to sell that record.

That’s now been flipped on it’s head for many artists, especially those from the pop mainstream.

Singles as marketing tools

Singles are now marketing tools, both for the artist themselves and for the live tour. The music now sells the tickets rather than the old paradigm that was the other way round.

The fear of your fanbase evaporating in the ‘off cycle’ between albums means that more artists than ever are staying continually in the public eye with marketing driven by regular single releases. In many cases the albums that result from this activity are merely collections of the singles that went before. And, the gap between albums and the first single from a notional new record may be non-existent.

There are obviously other factors at play. Global radio seems to have become homogeneous in support of pop derived from dance music, with pure R&B and Hip Hop suffering something of a decline. New mainstream artists in Rock and Indie have almost completely failed to materialise and although there is still a level of support for established acts in those genres from mainstream media, that isn’t guaranteed if the act has been out of the spotlight for some time.

There’s plenty of heritage rock acts still making great money playing to their ageing audience on US tours, but those more recently successful acts are finding it harder to keep their audience with them between album releases.

The worst thing is not being in the marketplace

So, in order to keep the career momentum going many artists are now ‘Always on’.

The perfect example is Rihanna. Six albums in six years and thirty singles. And that’s not including appearances on other artist’s tracks!

It clearly works on a host of levels. There’s always a new track at radio which fuels press and media coverage. Although tours are scheduled there is always an opportunity to do a small run of shows outside of a full touring schedule where demand presents itself. A dip in chart success of a particular single is steamrollered by the arrival of the next record.

In this article, her manager Jay Brown notes that, “Kids want new material all the time” and that “I think you become disposable when you put out an album every three years”.

It’s also very important to recognise that he believes albums had become ‘bloated’ as record companies sought to get the most from the available running time of CD’s and that in the digital download world, an album needs ‘no filler’. Having too much music on the album dilutes what an artist is aiming to do. He says that he wanted her latest album to be ‘all hits’! Interestingly Adele’s ’21′ and Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’ have similarly short running times.

Of course, if you’re going to move on to the next album quickly, you can keep this one short and make another too.

In this Billboard article this attitude is summed up in another quote from Brown – “The worst thing is to not be in the marketplace”.

You can see this paradigm working for The Black Eyed Peas (and Will.I.Am), Katy Perry, David Guetta, Jay-Z, Kanye West and many many more.

Always on for the DIY musician

So where does this leave the DIY musician, who doesn’t have the endless opportunities to promote a new single on a global scale or tour the world in style?

Well, follow that lead and be constantly making and releasing music. It doesn’t have to be reaching everyone but it can reach your fanbase and build them into an army.

I have sent so many of my readers to this presentation by Ian Rogers of Topspin. It’s not quite saying that every musician should be alway’s on, but approaches the same idea from a different direction.

Ian is talking about building a fanbase and having 2000 fans before you try to sell them anything. His presentation is a brilliant roadmap to do exactly that and I’d urge you to read it all.

But, the key concept is that every artist should do ‘one small thing every week and one large thing every month’. Small things might be a blog post or a video to YouTube and a large thing might be a big show or a release of some music, but the concept is clear – be ‘always on’ for your fanbase…..and it will grow.

Going forward as an independent musician you can have the same type of opportunity that major label artists are given. The internet and scoial media are great levellers. Sure, they may have way larger budgets and an army of people to help them, but you can compete by constantly and consistently giving your fans something that stems from your creativity that keeps you and your music ‘front of mind’ – another saying I’ve heard a lot recently in label meetings!

It is a tragedy that so many DIY musicians sit at home perfecting and honing their work in the belief that they will be able to release it with no fanbase and no prior awareness. This doesn’t work. You must make great art but you can do it with your fans and comtemporaries watching on.

Growing and developing in public is one of the great changes that the interent has brought for artists. Early adopters will find you when you’re still raw and others will join later as you become the finished article. But do document that journey in public. Make more music, put it out however you can. Build a tribe and lead them in other ways that your art inspires.

The winners will outwork the competition and they’ll do that by being always on.

Everything you ever wanted to know about music industry agreements, all wrapped up in a free pdf.

I’d always intended to write something along the lines of this guide, but now there’s really no need as this is great piece of work and does the job as well as I could – probably better.

Whether you’re resolutely DIY and never intend to sign a record deal with a major label or an indie or whether that elusive major deal is your first goal and step to global success, you’re going to learn a huge amount by downloading and reading this. Most successful artists will need a manager and do a publishing deal and these are covered in the guide.

It’s written by leading music industry lawyers in the UK, Lee & Thompson, who know their stuff inside out. Obviously it’s written from a UK perspective but the vast majority of the guide is great advice and factual detail that applies in any part of the world. They claim that it is written in a way that is more ‘practical than legalistic’, but you’re going to find it dry!

360º deals

What you’re also going to find is that it’s amazing. The explanations of the various agreements and how they fit into the overall structure of the business is detailed, comprehensive, accurate and up to date. This last point is crucial. The guide was updated for 2010 so it has a few MySpace references to date it a little but, importantly, it was written after it became usual for record companies to offer what is known as ’360º’ deals.

In such a deal the record company will require an artist to share the revenue from the other ways that they make money with the record company – such as from touring, merchandise and songwriting.

The reasoning is that the label provides the platform for the artist’s success and, with dwindling income from the sale of records in the modern download music economy, they need to have a share of the remaining healthy and profit making parts of an artist’s career in order to justify the investment that they make.

Whether a 360º deal is a good idea or not for any particular artist is a massive ongoing debate as many predict the oncoming demise of the old major record companies – but if you’re going to sign a deal with a record company they will be looking for these ‘ancillary rights’. The guide covers this in detail.

Management as a ‘joint venture’

The other area that shows the understanding of the latest trends in the music business is in the section on management agreements.

Traditionally, a management agreement is simple and the artist pays the manager 20%of all revenue (with some exceptions), but, again due to the changing nature of the business, it is becoming more and more common for the manager and artist to enter into a ‘joint venture’ creating a company that owns all of the artist’s rights and receives all their income from all sources (records, publishing, touring, merch, sponsorship etc…everything) and that is then split. These days that split might be greater than 20% for the manager.

Whether those joint venture deals for artists are right for you or not is another ongoing debate. The reason they have become more normal is that many artists now need a lot more financial support for longer before they can earn enough to sustain their career and reach their potential.

This applies in the world of the DIY musician just as much for those artists shooting for the mainstream, perhaps even more so. Understanding that this non-traditional management structure might be right for you will be helped by the guide.

The guide to Music Industry agreements

The guide covers the following agreements:

•  Management Contracts
•  Recording Contracts
•  Producer Contracts
•  Publishing Contracts

In each section it looks at the commercial and personal reasons behind each deal an artist will do – for example, how to choose a manager, or why you may need a team of people in place to help you get a record deal, and it then looks at the framework of each type of agreement, going through them in detail.

So, regardless of how you plan to build the career you want, DIY or signed to a major, going it alone or with a team to guide you, you’ll be well armed if you read this guide.

You can read the guide to music industry agreements online here.

You can download the music industry agreements guide here.

I’ll try to keep this short as you might not care at all but I felt the need to let our regular readers know what we’ve been up to!

You might have noticed that since the Christmas break we have posted far less on the Make It In Music Daily and have been tweeting less than usual.

That’s because there have been changes in our day to day business that we have been trying to accommodate and now we have a plan to not only keep it up but to expand what we do and are able to offer.

New beginnings

For years we have been a stand alone management and label company and in the last three years we’ve run this site as an add-on to pass on our knowledge and to try and help aspiring musicians.

However, I have now taken up a full time position with a forward thinking management and label company, Three Six Zero Group, whose clients include Deadmau5, Calvin Harris and Swedish House Mafia as well as a host of independent labels. It’s an amazing place to work and use my industry experience but I also get to apply the digital marketing knowledge that I have gained over the last 5 years or so.

I’ll do my best to report back on the further lessons I learn in music marketing at that level.

Meet Steve

This site is still very much my passion and will continue much as before, but the changes mean that I have passed some of the running of it to an old friend and very experienced musician, Steve Travell.

Steve has been a working musician, producer and DJ for over 30 years and now also works in digital marketing as well as making music and teaching production for one of the leading physical and online music colleges in London.

Steve will be writing some posts for this site and will be dealing with the majority of the daily tip posts. I will be writing feature posts on this site and will continue digging up and adding tips as I have always done, so this should expand our output and maintain the quality that we know you have come to expect. I’ll still be monitoring our Twitter and Facebook profiles so, generally, it’ll be me your talking to. You’ll just see more photos of me in interesting places!

Amanda has been working remotely for some time and will continue to be on board and using her knowledge in the background.

I’ve also spoken to some other members of the musician blogging community who you’d already know and they will be writing some material for us as well in due course.

DTF-Base

The final piece of the puzzle will be revealed in more detail as and when Steve can build a new site for it – DTF-Base.

We’ve been asked on numerous occasions in the last year to take on specific projects for clients from both the DIY musician world and from indie or major labels. This might be a website build, Topspin integration or a whole digital marketing campaign.

We have just completed the first few of these projects and Steve will be adding to this in the next few months – and building a dedicated website! The services that DTF-Base can offer will not generally be necessary, appropriate or affordable for artists in the earliest stages of their careers (that’s what this site is for in many ways) but we can take on pretty much anything of any scope from basic online music marketing advice to a full digital marketing campaign for a release including building websites and social media presences from scratch. If you’re interested, just contact us.

So, as you were. Lots of helpful and informative posts to come and more options for how we can help you. Just say ‘hello’ to Steve if you are so inclined.

Thanks for your support so far.

Another year over and what have you done?

That imperfect Lennon quote is the question that every musician will be asking themselves as this year ends and the next starts.

If you feel or know that you didn’t achieve what you wanted with your music in the previous year, what are you going to do to change that in 2012? What can you do to break your band?

“How do I make it” is the question that we get asked all the time and the one that we and lots of other bloggers try to spend a lot of time answering.

Reading our blog and the others like it will give you lots of great ideas on methods to market and promote your music and some insight into how to be a better musician.

But, we are asked this question so often that we felt the best thing that we could do on this last day of the year is make the most basic plan possible for every musician.

Step 1. Make sure your music gets a reaction!

This is the starting point and you will only have any chance of success if your music is good enough to attract some kind of audience.

This doesn’t mean that you need to make some commercial mainstream dross that isn’t true to your art. Far from it. Your music can and probably should be targeted to a small niche. It just means that you need to be able to tell whether you’re on the right path. This is VERY difficult and we wrote more about it here – Is my music good enough?

The second step in that process is constantly improving your art until what you do is so good that people can’t help but become fans – some more on that here – Never give up.

Step 2. Build a website!

We get bored telling people this.

Facebook and YouTube are essential to spreading the word about your music (see below) but you need a ‘home base’ – a place that is completely in your control where people can come and discover your music and you can control all the elements.

To begin with it can be simple and can grow with you but as soon as you have material that you know is good enough, build a site.

The other thing we get told all the time by people is that they don’t have the skills or can’t afford to build a site.

We understand – it looks expensive and difficult, but most people can build a website for an initial outlay of $13.94 and an ongoing cost of $3.96 per month. That’s the cost of a domain name and the first month’s hosting for a site.

Although it might seem daunting, pretty much anyone can learn how to launch a website. And learning how will seriously help your online marketing skills and therefore your chances of music success.

There’s loads of info and videos on the web to help you learn how to do this yourself. Give it a go. If you mess up, you can still find people online who will fix it for you for pretty small amounts of cash.

Try first and call for help if it doesn’t work out!

Buy your domain name from Namecheap here. Just use the name of your band if possible and buy the ‘.com’ if you can. If ‘yourband’ domain name is gone, get something like www.yourbandmusic.com or www.yourbandband.com.

Buy your hosting from Hostgator here.

Buy the $3.96 ‘Hatchling’ Plan if you only plan to have a single domain name. A lot of musicians will have a later need for a second domain and therefore buy the ‘Baby’ Plan.

Don’t buy the domain and the hosting both from either Namecheap or Hostgator. There are good reasons for not doing so – trust us!

There are loads of hosting options but Hostgator has a great reputation (we use them) and some of the training links below are about the Hostgator set up.

Once you’ve bought a domain and hosting, the simple choice is to build a site using WordPress. Again, there are loads of reasons why and we’ll look at those in detail another time but it is easy to use, simple to update the design and lots of people are on hand to help.

There’s a video below that shows you how to get your WordPress site live on your Hostgator hosting. In this video Chris Rockett buys the domain at Hostgator as well. As we said above, we’d advise you against that, but the rest of the video shows you how to actually get the site live.

Once it’s live there are a bunch of things you can and need to do. Go and look at the series of posts that follows Chris’s video in his ‘music marketing challenge’ series, where he shows you a lot of the steps you need to take to improve the site you’ve just launched.

Alternatively, there’s a great video from serious music marketers Michael Brandvold and Brian Thompson for $5 that deals with all the steps in launching your own WordPress site. Get that here.

Of course Google or YouTube searches will help you find an answer to almost any issue that you find when setting up a WordPress site for the first time.

Once you’ve launched a site, you’ll want to find an easy way to make it look great to represent you and your music. When you first launch the site it will have a default design – which can then be altered.

The design of a WordPress site is controlled by the ‘Theme’. You can get lots of these for free and there are endless ones available to buy.

Check out these two articles, both of which have a great list of Themes that you can use for your site.

• Free WordPress themes for musicians -  A great list from Chris Bracco’s great site.
• Best WordPress Music Themes. Loads of great themes – all paid rather than free but starting at $20.

You can also find loads of themes by Googling for things like ‘band wordpress theme’ or ‘music wordpress theme’. Have a go and see what’s out there.

Lastly, there is a great WordPress theme designed by music marketer Greg Rollett called Band WP Theme.

This is a custom designed theme that is specifically set up for musicians to build a website using WordPress and is also designed to work with our favourite email software, Aweber.

The training videos for this theme are superb and easy to follow and the sites look great and work well. It costs $47 but if you want to avoid some of the learning issues with building your own site this may well be the right solution for you.

In order to install a theme, go back to YouTube and look for a recent instructional video with a search of ‘install wordpress theme’. Just bear in mind that WordPress is constantly improving their software so if you watch a recent video it will look like your dashboard of the site you’ve just launched – and hopefully won’t therefore confuse you!

The last thing to remember about Themes is that you can always change them in the future.

The key is to get your site up and live!

And, if this part scares you and defeats you, just got to Fiverr and search for ‘wordpress’. You’ll find lots of people who will help you get your site launched. Look for people with at least a few good feedback comments.

The other place to look for help is elance.com. It’ll cost more – $100 or thereabouts – but you’ll get a more specific service.

Step 3. Build a permission marketing list!

Why permission marketing works for spreading your music and making sales!

I would say build an email list, and that is the key, but it’s not the only ‘list’.

Permission marketing is where you send marketing messages to people who have given you their permission to contact them – i.e. it’s the opposite of spam.

These people want to hear from you again and again!

So, as well as an email list, you need to be building real engaged fans on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – these fans, followers and subscribers are another permission marketing list that you can promote and market your music to.

But, the daddy is your own email list.

Despite the claims that email is dying and that messaging over social networks will take over, everyone I know still has an email address and still checks it.

Build the other lists and communities, but don’t ignore a list of fan emails. This should be primarily built by collecting those addresses on your new website by using an opt-in form.

We have written more about this in our Fan List section of this site. All the main email list software systems have lots of ‘how to’ videos to show you how to set up the opt-in form and trade the future fan’s email address for free music.

Our preference is to use Aweber as it is the very best email software that you can get and it will grow with you and your career. The more you learn to use it, the more you realise how powerful it is. Some feel that Aweber is overkill for some musicians though and so we’d gladly recommend FanBridge as the musician focused alternative.

We also love Topspin as a full website solution that builds music players, shop buttons and more on your website. Its email element is, however, its weakest part.

It does the basics required of it but often we use Topspin as the main engine of a website but move all the emails that we collect using Topspin into Aweber. There is a free starter option with Topspin but the basic plan cost is $9.99 per month.

To encourage people to join your fan mailing list when they come to your site you MUST give them something in return. Some music is the default option but don’t give them one poor demo track. Give away a 3 or 4 track EP of some of your best stuff. Why would people want to become a fan and come back if all you want to give them is your cast-offs?

It’s been proven by many DIY music leaders that the more you give away when starting to spread the word about your music the greater the effect.

Have a look at those three options and decide which is best for you. At the outset we’d recommend any of them.

If you’ve used Namecheap and Hostgator and now choose Aweber, their first month costs $1 and is then £19 per month. So, if you’ve managed to do it all yourself with a free WordPress theme (and we think you can with some YouTube help!) you will spend $14.94 in the first month to launch your site with an email list building tool built in and then $22.96 per month as your ongoing hosting and email software costs.

That is a sum that every musician NEEDS to invest in their career!

Step 4. Build a presence and following on social networks.

We just mentioned that you need to build a permission marketing list on the three biggest social networks – Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

But you need to do more than build lists of followers and fans – you need to engage them and create music and videos for them to discover, enjoy and share.

We have for a long time held that you ought to still have a presence on MySpace – there are Google search benefits and it still has a lot of traffic – but 2012 might be the year that we decide it’s no longer worth the effort. It’s definitely not worth a lot of time even now. Current advice is to build a quick simple page with basic info and some music and send people from there back to your new website.

The ‘Big 3’ are a different story – they are now central to all your music promotion and marketing efforts.

Why YouTube is ESSENTIAL for music discovery

This article tells us two core things that ought to inspire you to be an avid YouTube creator!

YouTube is the second biggest search engine and 80% of the searches are music related. Not only that, but people are 3 times more likely to listen to music on an audio & video stream (i.e. YouTube) than they are to buy a download.

Just last week a UK artist, Alex Day, had a number 4 hit, largely propelled by his long term building of a YouTube fanbase. Read more about that here.

Put everything you write, record or perform on YouTube in as many forms as you can!

YouTube isn’t just the best place to have your music discovered – it’s also a social network and you need to learn more about building friends and subscribers. Until we write more tips for YouTube make sure you read their own free guide on how to make the most of all your videos.

We’ve already written the definitive guide to using Twitter as a musician. It’s really good and you can be become a Twitter master if you read the whole thing.

But, it’s Facebook that’s the king for social interaction and the viral spread of your music. We’ve got some great posts on Facebook music promotion here but will be giving some more detailed step by step advice in the near future.

Build a Fan Page, offer some more free music and engage your fans is the basic plot!

Step 5. Play live as much as possible

Hopefully there’s a live element to what you do. If you’re making dance music, this might mean DJ’ing to build a following and to road test your tracks, but in any other genre you ought to be able to have some kind of live performance.

If your music is good enough (see point 1!) and you play locally and promote your shows properly you will get a reaction and the beginnings of a fanbase.

Have a look at this post about getting your first gigs.

And this brand new free eBook from Seth Jackson gives some great advice on how to make sure each show is properly promoted and therefore well attended. Get it here.

For the very best advice on how to get the most out of live shows there’s no better book than Martin Atkins’ ‘Tour : Smart’. I’d recommend it to every artist. Check out his ‘Five pointed inward facing Crush Strategy’ video below to see how this simple touring advice can help you build a following.

I also highly rate Jeri Goldstein’s book, ‘How To Be Your Own Booking Agent: The Musician’s & Performing Artist’s Guide To Successful Touring’ (rightfully considered the ‘how to’ live bible for DIY and indie musicians) and her more recent course on the same subject. You can check that out here with a discount that she offers for our readers.

Lastly (and every time I recommend him I have to point out that all his training is expensive) if you know your live show needs to be improved the acknowledged expert is Tom Jackson. He consults with some of the world’s biggest artists and his experience shows. Have a look at his training here.

Don’t feel that you need to invest in Jeri or Tom’s training – it really isn’t necessary for everyone but if you recognise that you need what they’re selling, we vouch for the fact that you’ll get value from it.

The key is to get out there and play live and build a local following. Expand the area and do the same thing. This is how a live fanbase is built.

Step 6. Spread the word on the internet

Now that you have a website as the hub of your online promotional activity and you have made sure that your material is getting a reaction, you need to do more to spread the word.

That means adding to your network of sites where people can find you. SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Flickr are obvious candidates.

But, the killer promotional outlet that most musicians just don’t spend enough time applying themselves to are blogs!

No need to repeat ourselves on this though as we have already written about Music Blog Promotion. Read that post and think about spending $2.99 to buy Chris Bracco’s eBook – it’s worth it!

Step 7. Have a plan for the year!

I keep meaning to write a detailed post about the need for a plan, but here’s the sketch.

If you get steps 1 to 6 all set and your music is ready to be embraced by a wider audience, you need to devise a plan.

It’s not very artistic and sounds a bit like a job (or being an accountant!) but the last piece of the puzzle to breaking your band is to outline all the steps that you are going to take and make sure that you have all the tools and ‘assets’ ready.

Take a year long diary and schedule the releases you plan to use as promotional and marketing hooks and levers for the year, Not just traditional single releases on iTunes – in fact these should be the final and largely irrelevant aim. More importantly the timed releases of free tracks, YouTube videos, picture sets on Flickr, SoundCloud tracks and remixes etc.

On top of that schedule when you will make videos (lyric videos, rehearsal videos, in the tour bus videos, as well as the more traditional music videos), write posts on the blog of your site (and what they will be about), contact other blogs for reviews, play local shows and shows farther afield, make major Facebook posts and how and when you are planning to make every major step in your band’s year.

Only if you make this kind of detailed plan and work out with your band members who is going to do what can you hope to achieve the success that you, your music and your marketing set up is capable of.

You need endless amounts of music and video to keep your newly acquired fans engaged and to have for them to pass on to build more fans….and it all needs to be made!

If you plan it and share the workload you will have a chance of keeping up with it. If you don’t you are way more likely to fail.

Will these steps work for me?

Yes.

Right at point 1 we made the most important point – if your music makes people sit up and take notice you’re on to a winner.

All the other steps are ways to make sure that your music gets in front of people online and in the real world. Obviously if you make amazing music but it just sits on the hard drive of your computer, you cannot succeed.

The more concerted your promotion and marketing efforts are the greater chance you give yourself of building a fanbase that can support you and spread the word about you further.

Follow these steps and put your own website at the heart of your music and your music promotional efforts and you will give yourself the best chance possible to break your band 2012.

Bublé & Kay - mates who both put in 10,000 hours and more

I’m not a Michael Bublé fan.

It doesn’t matter though, because he is an example of effort and application that you can follow regardless of what you think of his music.

Nonetheless, I have enormous respect for what he’s achieved and how he kept going to get to where he is today. He never gave up!

It’s that determination that often makes the difference.

We’ve written before about Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule from Outliers: The Story of Success. In it, he says that you don’t get to be a winner without lots of practice and he has all the evidence to prove it.

I’d recommend that every musician read it.

Bublé’s 10,000 hours

Bublé definitely put in those hours. He played everywhere – bars, cruise ships, business conventions, weddings – you name it, he’d come and sing whether he’d come out with a small fee or even a loss. He didn’t care.

Bublé loved to sing and it’s the only thing he ever wanted to do. It’s true that he got a few lucky breaks, meeting the right people who could propel him to the superstar level just at the time that he had the goods and the opportunities opened up.

But the truth is that he only got lucky because he worked so hard.

His live performances became so slick that when he sang at the wedding of the Canadian prime minister’s daughter he stunned the guests including a fabled record producer whom he then hounded relentlessly. The power manager came soon after.

It’s true that he doesn’t follow what we’d call ‘best practice’ with Twitter and Facebook – they are done by someone on his team and are all old school ‘push marketing’ – but at least he has a presence. And to decry that is to miss the point, since he is one of the last people to sneak into the old school music industry whose massive marketing dollars and muscle built his global career.

The point is that his career was only made possible because he kept perfecting his art – in his case predominantly his live performance – and he never stopped chasing his dream.

He might have been appallingly bad when he started – I don’t know. But the sheer volume of shows made him great.

Improve your live performance

In the GQ article that made me write this post is this quote that Bublé tells of comedian Peter Kay:

“Peter told me always to remember how lucky I am. How special this is. How the audience spent all that money, hired the baby-sitter. Don’t ever coast and go through the motions. Even when you’re 60 shows into a tour”

Clearly, for Bublé and Kay (he did his 10,000 hours before any meaningful recognition as well!) that means not letting down an audience who have paid top dollar to see a star.

For you, it’s just as relevant.

You never know who is going to catch your show (as with the Canadian prime minister and the record producer for Bublé) but also every show is a chance to improve. Another chunk of minutes experience towards the magic 10,000 hour total.

It’s equally important to realise how much you can learn about performance. How often do you go to a gig and the band just get on stage and play? That’s not enough. Performance is an art that can be taught and every nuance can improve the overall effect.

Don’t just shamble on stage and put it out there. Plan the whole thing from entering the stage to the moment you walk off – what you’ll say in the gaps between songs, how you’ll move, the way your set ebbs and flows depending on how you order your songs.

There are countless things you can do to improve your live show. Study what you do on stage and force yourself to improve. Tom Jackson is the acknowledged expert on this – his training material is superb but not cheap!

Bublé knows this and works his audience (who are fiercely loyal because of it) with great skill.

He put in the hours and never gave up.

You should do the same.

I’ve been looking at how to promote music on Spotify.

There’s a couple of things that I needed to sort out for artists that I work with relating to their presence on Spotify. That led me to start to make some decisions about the basics of using Spotify for promotion as a musician – so this is what I have uncovered so far as it applied to the issues I was having.

This is just about getting the basics right to start with – I think I’m right, but it’s a work in progress, so let me know what else you know!

The obvious issue is that with Spotify getting serious traction in the UK and the US, any artist would be a fool not to use it, have their music on there and work out how to maximise that exposure.

I know some people think the royalties are too low and you’re better off not being on Spotify – that might work for Coldplay looking to maximise their ‘week one’ sales, but I see no justification for a DIY or indie artist not being on there. Exposure = fan attraction and relationship building. I don’t care about the ‘missed sales’ or low revenue from those plays. I want to see an artist build a long-term sustainable fan base who will pay for the ‘fan experience’ in a multitude of ways – downloads and streaming of the artist’s music being just one of those!

Get your music on Spotify

In order to use Spotify to promote your music, the first thing you need to do is get your music on there!

It’s actually pretty easy to get your music on Spotify. See their own page about that here.

If you have a deal with someone that gets your music on iTunes, then you’ll likely be able to get on Spotify easily. For example, Tunecore have you covered.

Spotify Artist Profile page

All Music Profile with biography and images

The most obvious issue that I had was that some of my artists don’t have a biography or pictures on their Spotify Artist Profile page. As far as I can tell, the Artist Profile page is generated from the metadata that is supplied by your digital distributor (or aggregator) to Spotify and then added to by pulling information from the All Music Guide.

If you have a biography and images on the All Music site, these will be pulled wholesale into Spotify. If you don’t, it looks like you need to go to All Music and submit information (although they will write the bio themselves rather than using what you submit directly). This can take a month or so but will then be pulled into Spotify. If you have any evidence that this can be done directly with Spotify, please let us know!

Send fans to your Spotify Artist Profile

I then realised that I wanted every artist site that I work on to have a prominent link in the sidebar (where you have your links to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc) direct to the artist profile on Spotify. I’d suggest that this is now a ‘de facto’ addition to the networks that you should link to.

To find the URL of your artist profile in Spotify, search for your artist name and click through to the Artist Profile page. Directly under the band name you’ll see a ‘Share’ link. Click on that and if you select the Twitter option it will bring up a pre-prepared tweet including the URL. Just cut the bit that begins with ‘http’ and that is the direct link to your Artist Profile page. (Don’t bother with the actual tweet!)

Find a Spotify icon by searching for that in Google (image search), download it and add it to your sidebar. If that makes no sense – time to ask your web nerd to help you out again!

Why do you want people to go and check you out on Spotify?

Well, it’s another place where they can listen to your music and with the addition of Facebook integration, everything they listen to on Spotify will show up in their Facebook Ticker feed (unless they bar it, which I know a lot of people have!). That could be a lot of exposure for your music to their friends.

People tend to highlight (star) or add to a playlist music that they discover on Spotify – which should encourage them to keep coming back to it. As I said at the start of this piece, I’m not bothered about the small royalty (although you will earn a little by people listening to your music on Spotify) but I am interested in them becoming fans!

Nonetheless, an obvious advantage of being on Spotify is that people can buy your music from within Spotify with one click and add it to their library.

Promote using Spotify playlists

There’s already been a lot of stuff written about how you can use Spotify playlists to promote your music once you have it on there. It’s a simple idea and one that you ought to be trying to see if it works for you.

Creating the link to share a playlist works the same way as we set out above for finding the ‘http’ link for your Artist Profile. Just go to the playlist that you’ve created in your Spotify account and ‘click ‘Share’ to get the URL.

My Chemical Romance using a Spotify playlist in a blog post

You’ll notice that the playlist will be from your personal user profile. Now that you must have a Facebook profile to open a new Spotify account, it might be worth setting up a ‘fake’ Facebook profile using your band name as the first and last names of your new Facebook profile. That way your Spotify account will have your artist name and that’s what will appear in your playlists as ‘Created by…’. NOTE – Facebook frowns on fake profiles…a lot! So, you’re probably better of just having the playlist come from the Spotify account of one of the band members. As with Facebook, this problem is obscured for singer/songwriters who perform under their own real name!

Simple playlist rules are that, unless you’re already very successful, you don’t want to just make playlists of your own material. Make up lists of your influences, your genre or your local scene. They don’t necessarily have to have your music in at all on occasion. Just having music to talk about by referencing a playlist can give you something to engage your fans with. For example, a short blog post on your influences with a short playlist for your fans to listen to as they read could prove very popular.

Then, of course, you can leverage other online coverage by offering your playlists to other sites. How about what you’re listening to on the tour bus that you send to all the local ‘what’s on’ blogs for each town you’re visiting on tour?

There’s plenty of other ideas for promoting your music on Spotify if you have a quick search – such as ‘piggybacking’ and recording covers as discussed in this article on Ditto Music.

Advertising on Spotify

One other option is to advertise.

You can do this to people who you know have Spotify by using a Facebook ad that is additionally targeted to Facebook users who ‘like’ Spotify.

Or, you could advertise on Spotify itself. This can be surprisingly cheap and you’ll no doubt have noticed how an element of Spotify advertising is now de rigueur for all major label releases, whether that takes the form of the audio ads that non-premium Spotify users hear or the various banner placements that you see within Spotify. You can learn more here.

I’ve been lucky enough to see what Spotify can do with their in-house promotion when working with major label acts. They post on their blog, mail to their newsletter (over 2 million strong), post to their Facebook page and so on. It can drive awesome amounts of traffic and interest to an artist.

Of course, that’s generally available to internationally recognised acts, but they do offer this ‘Platinum promotional package’ to bands that they take a shine to. Remember that Spotify is run by music lovers and they want to be seen to be helping grass roots acts.

How can you get spotted by them and offered this kind of help? Well no-one says that’ll be easy but do the things we always recommend – get some great music locked down, build a presence online and offline with a live following and drive attention to it. If you add a little bit of focus to Spotify’s blog and their Facebook page (by commenting there etc), who knows if that might help you get lucky!

Before you count on that though, get your music on Spotify, send your fans to your Spotify Artist Profile and creatively promote your music and your scene through playlists.

That’s the basics of how to promote music on Spotify. More as it develops!

Image courtesy of 'letthesunshine'

“How do I get noticed?”

We get asked that…. a lot.

People approach us all the time – both as a result of writing the posts on this site and in our day jobs as managers and consultants.

And then, about half of the people who ask that, follow up with a second question.

“Is my music good enough?”

The first question is what we aim to spend the majority of our time and effort on this blog answering. It comes down to using best practice methods for marketing and promotion.

We favour a particular systematic approach to build momentum and to try to achieve a critical mass that will sustain your career.

But it’s the second question that actually really matters.

If your material is, in fact, ‘good enough’ to garner an audience, then a lot of the promotion and marketing will naturally follow. The music itself will also do a lot of the work for you on its own and you can miss a lot of opportunities and make a lot of mistakes and still reach the level of success that you deserve.

Let’s be clear.

The phrase ‘good enough’ is taken here in the context of your material being sufficiently good to appeal to a set of music fans. Generally I’ll say that ‘good enough’….isn’t.

The distinction being that actually to be of a high enough standard to appeal to a measurable niche, your music is going to need to be way better than ‘good’. It’s going to need to be truly special.

And, almost by definition, the fact that you’re asking us (or anybody for that matter) whether your music makes the grade, means it very probably doesn’t.

How can you tell?

You’ll know you’re good enough because when you play your music for people, you’ll get a reaction. If the crowd at the gig or the person you trust who you play your new song to wants to hear more, then you’re on the right path.

The effect that you need is for your friends to react with shock when you play them your music and beg you for a copy to pass to their friends. Not a mild and polite statement that ‘it’s good’. That won’t cut it.

Think about what makes you pass along a link to a video on Twitter or Facebook to your friends. It’s an instant emotional reaction to the clip and you feel compelled to share it. That’s what you need to get from people who hear your songs.

Raving fans - the reaction you're looking for!

Asking your friends to pass your material on as a favour to you isn’t enough either. They must need to do it for their own sake, not yours. So that they can be the person who gets the credibility within their own circle of friends as the person whose musical taste and judgement should be noted.

If there’s no reaction or indifference, then you’re on a heading to nowhere.

And if you are heading in the right direction, it’ll start to grow. When the music is so good that people beg you for more, then those first few people will tell their friends and so on and so on. It’ll be spontaneous and they won’t actually be able to stop themselves.

You know this to be true because you’ve done it yourself countless times!

What if you can’t trust anyone’s opinion?

Well you can…or you should.

True, they could be wrong. Especially if what you’re doing is very specialist or very niche. But, actually, most people can give you a pretty honest emotional reaction even if they aren’t well versed in your style of music.

If you’re playing songs to people of roughly the right demographic and you’re not getting positive feedback, there’s probably something that’s not up to scratch.

I’ve proffered a couple of methods in the past for those that truly feel that they aren’t getting an unbiased opinion.

They’re options that you shouldn’t need to use, but I’ll give them again, just in case.

Firstly, there are online sites (such as SoundOut) where you can submit music and get a report from about 100 or so random listeners. Is it worth the fee? Perhaps, but you’ll still need to read between the lines of what they say. Many music-focused forums (Taxi, Harmony Central and endless others) offer threads where you can ask for opinions too.

Or, go to a mall and put your song in a set with those from established acts that are in your genre. You should already understand who your music should appeal to, so spot members of that tribe in the mall, ask them to stop and take part in a survey and get their genuine feedback. Takes balls of steel and I only know one artist that has actually followed through!

As I said though, you shouldn’t really have to go about ‘checking’ whether your material is getting a good reaction. It should be plain from people at gigs, at your rehearsal room, from the online communities where you post your music and from anyone who hears it.

It’s not ‘good enough’

If you discover that you’ve been deluding yourself and the real reason that you’re not getting anywhere is that your songs are just average and your gigs are a shambles, is it time to give up?

Not at all.

It doesn’t mean it’s over and you have no chance, but it means it’s time to alter your course. Look at what you think isn’t good enough and change it.

You need to offer a new ‘product’.

If you’re songwriting or live performance sucks, work out why and take action to make it better. Whatever the problem, find a solution rather than forging ahead with a mediocre band and material.

Mediocre won’t cut it. In fact, ‘good enough’ won’t. You need to be great to rise above all the noise.

And, when that’s right, all the promotion and marketing is as simple as A,B,C.

I used to be a music lawyer and I was a bit of an authority (for a while) on sampling and sample clearance in the early ’90′s.

Then I ran a bunch of dance labels and worked with a lot of electronic artists.

I have cleared a lot of samples but I have released way more records with samples in them that we didn’t bother to clear.

Why?

Because we thought that no-one would notice that we’d used their music – these were generally small specialist underground records – and that if they did, we would be able to agree something after the event, if the need ever arose.

The reality is that it was too much bother and too expensive to try and clear a sample of an obscure and hard to find piece of music or of a snippet of a big successful tune when you knew that your record was going to sell just a few thousand copies – i.e. we felt at the time that the risk was well worth it.

And hundreds of thousands of records have been released with uncleared samples in them.

Will I get sued for using a sample?

There are very, very few cases where someone who samples a record ends up in court – and there’s two reasons for that.

If your record containing an uncleared sample goes from being an underground momentary thing of interest to a limited audience to about to become a radio/commercial hit of any scale, you will quickly clear or remove/replace the offending sample(s). Well, you will, or the indie or major label that have come to sign your record will do it for you.

It’s when a record appears on everyone’s radar that it becomes time to clear it. At that point, if you don’t, you’re going to be in trouble.

Remember the adage ‘”Where there’s a hit there’s a writ” – it is the absolute truth.

Secondly, if your record contains a sample and you didn’t clear it, you are infringing the original owner’s copyright – and they have you ‘bang to rights’. If they do discover your small scale release and if they care enough to contact you and point out your infringement, then in most cases they can see that going to court is pointless as you, the sampler, won’t have any money worth suing you for! So, generally they approach the sampler and point this fact out and you work out a deal.

Hence, court case avoided.

What is sample clearance?

When you sample another person’s music you are reproducing two different copyrights – the recording itself but also the underlying musical work (the song – that part which a music publisher deals with, rather than a record label).

Leiber & Stoller go over a song with Elvis Presley

For those that find that a difficult distinction, think of the days when all pop stars sang songs written by songwriters. Think Elvis and Leiber & Stoller.

Leiber & Stoller create the copyright which is the song – it can be written on sheet music before it is ever performed and recorded. Then, when it is performed by Elvis, he (or his record company) have created another different copyright in that recording of that performance. Every new and different recording is a new copyright.

Hopefully you can see that these two copyrights give rise to two income streams – one for the song and one for the recording.

Leiber & Stoller get paid for every radio or live performance of the song (whether that is a spin of the recording or Elvis singing live) and they get paid for every record made (that’s called a mechanical royalty and is paid by the record company – more on that another day as that get’s confusing!).

Elvis only gets paid for every record made and sold – that’s the record royalty. (Just to confuse you some more, many countries, but not the US, do have an airplay royalty for the recording as well).

So when you sample a piece of that recording, you are also sampling the underlying song and you need to get the permission (or ‘clearance’) of all the owners of the copyright in the recording and the song.

That means contacting the record company that owns the recording you have sampled but also all the songwriters and/or their music publishers.

Generally the record company will take a fee (perhaps tens of thousands of dollars) and a per unit royalty for every record sold and they may well impose limitations on the use. The songwriters and music publishers will usually take a percentage share in your new song that has sampled theirs. The amounts being down to negotiation.

The thing is, they have you over a barrel.

'Bitter Sweet Symphony' was one big sample!

Once you have sampled their work and told them, they can ask for whatever they want.

The Verve gave 100% of the song ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ to Jagger and Richards as it sampled a version of one of their songs. Interestingly the recording that they sampled wasn’t the Stones, but an orchestral version by someone else. Read more about that case here.

Once you have the agreement of the copyright owners of the song and recording, you’re set.

This existence of two copyrights also explains the very common misconception amongst musicians that they do not need to worry about sample clearance if they ‘re-record’ a sample.

True – if you re-record the sample that you lifted from someone else’s record, you don’t need to clear the recording, because you have made a new one and you own the copyright in that.

But, your new recording still reproduces the underlying song and therefore still infringes that unless you clear it. Re-recording deals with half the issue, but don’t forget the other half.

How much is too much?

Usually, any little bit is too much.

In fact, the law and exactly how it is applied depends on where in the world you are. There are treaties between countries that aim to apply essentially the same copyright laws throughout the world but there are specific differences.

In very general terms you are infringing the rights of another person’s copyright if you ‘substantially reproduce’ their work. And the definition of what counts as being ‘substantial’ is usually not set out in a country’s relevant copyright law (the Acts or Statutes) but is based on interpretation by judges in cases that go to trial. Then future cases refer back to the decisions in prior trials – this is what is called ‘case law’.

However, since most cases don’t go to trial and get settled or negotiated long before a judge gets to deliberate, there are very few cases that a judge can refer to for guidance. Those few that have gone all the way in the UK and US have led lawyers to err very heavily on the side of caution and that is upheld by the way and the levels at which all involved negotiate clearances on a day to day basis.

In other words, the person being sampled whose permission you are seeking has all the cards.

If you have sampled a single recognisable note, this may well be seen to be ‘substantial’. If any reasonable person listening to your new record could tell that you have used a sample, then it is almost certainly a substantial use and legally requires clearing.

But you can take the drums only from a track and that’s fine, right?

Err, no. Probably not.

If you have sampled a recording you fall at the first fence since you cannot deny that those drums (or whatever part you’ve taken) come from the other person’s recording. Given that admission, even the smallest section is probably enough to require permission.

I can’t be sure, as it takes a final judgement in a court case to get the definitive view, but should you risk it?

In the real world, if you’re a small-time artist, you may well do just that. And I wouldn’t blame you. As I said above, hundreds of thousands of records have been released without clearing samples and almost all ‘get away with it’ – particularly so if the release is small-scale and no significant money is made.

But, it is extremely important to note that if you get sued the amount of a claim by the person you have sampled, in most countries, need NOT be related to how much you made from releasing your infringing record. The decision by a judge to award damages to the person you sampled is usually equated to the loss they have suffered rather than the money you made. And that loss can be based on anything that they can argue.

Sure, often it does refer to the amount you made from releasing your infringing record, but not always.

The cautionary tale

So, this is where you get to see what happens when it all goes wong!

At the end of last week a Danish court case concluded that two musicians who had made a record in 2003 by using a sample had infringed the rights of a songwriter and a record company and ordered them to pay damages approaching $150,000 – way more than they ever made from the record.

This is enough to finish their careers and affect them for the rest of their lives.

Read all about the Djuma Soundsystem case here.

This case could be reversed on appeal and, depending on where you live, it is unlikely to be used as ‘case law’ in your country and therefore it won’t lead to a swathe of sampling cases against the little guy.

But it is a reminder that any one of the hundreds of thousands of records that have been released (or are going to be released in the future) with uncleared samples and which the artists think are going to be small scale successes, could lead to you being sued.

Should you worry?

No, I don’t think you should, but you should be aware.

I think the Danish case is unlikely to be upheld and the guys were very unlucky that it didn’t get negotiated to a settlement that they could afford before going to trial. In almost all cases this would have been resolved before going to court.

And, of course, if your release is likely to be a commercial success, do deal with any sample issues before release. Success brings attention and people will then sue and they will push hard for a very stiff deal if you ignored their samples!

Just remember that if you sample a record then the basic position is that you are infringing the rights of two sets of people and that could come back and bite you in the ass. Sample clearance is the answer but we all know that in the real world that’s not always going to happen.

Hopefully, forewarned is forearmed!

Want to know the state of the music industry right now and where it’s headed?

Want to know what some of the sharpest marketing minds in the world think are the things that matter in the future of music?

If so, I’d take the time to read this presentation from J. Walter Thompson.

These people know their stuff seeing as they are the leading marketing agency in the world.

The presentation covers a very wide range of topics, starting with looking at where the music business is right now. It then looks at the sea changes that are occurring in the consumption of music (streaming being paramount) but also in music production and promotion.

It looks at length at all the internet platforms and services that we are all using to spread the word about the music we listen to as well as about the music we make. There are services discussed that all DIY musicians will be aware of but there are also plenty that were new to me.

Of particular use to aspiring musicians are the sections towards the end on such subjects as ‘Motivational objects’ (non-traditional physical releases), ‘Artists doing it for themselves’ (discussing direct-to-fan), and  ‘Fans in the front seat’ (about the latest ways to engage fans in the process of creation). These should inspire you with plenty of ideas for your own music and how to use the latest methods at your disposal to spread the word.

As a roundup of everything that is impacting on the future of music this is a must-read.