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.

I’m very short of tech skills!

That’s an issue today as I need to make sure that I don’t fall foul of the overnight Facebook Fan Page SSL changes.

If I do, come tomorrow, parts of our Fan Page will be disabled.

Maybe yours will too?

It made me think that it’s worth bearing in mind that it doesn’t matter if you’re lacking in the geek department. I so often hear from artists that they can’t get a website built or maintain it as they don’t know HTML or WordPress.

That’s bollocks.

I don’t know much about either but I manage to run several websites and give advice on the tech side of music marketing as well as the creative side!

Why and how?

Well, I know what I want to achieve on a site and I know what the technology can do – then I have a bunch of people that I can turn to who have the skills. Some help me out for free now and then and some are paid website designers or coders. You can find these people everywhere online – places like Fiverr, Elance, oDesk.

So, don’t use that as an excuse – find people to help you and get a website launched!

But, back to today’s issue – this problem has raised it’s head as there is a VERY BIG change occurring at Facebook overnight tonight.

And, I don’t know how to make the necessary changes myself – I have to get the help of my ‘helpers’!

What is SSL / HTTPS?

SSL stands for ‘Secure Sockets Layer’ which is a system that allows the secure transmission of private or sensitive data on the web. That’s as much as I know!

From tomorrow (October 1st), all Facebook applications need to use a secure SSL connection. This is part of the new roll-out of features on Facebook and is being brought in to beef up security on the site.

At the moment users can surf on Facebook as a secure (‘https’) or non-secure site (‘http’). I don’t know if it’s been announced or not but it seems clear that the reason Facebook are forcing this change on Fan Page owners is that eventually Facebook will be secure only.

So, if you’re a musician who has built a clever Welcome page or what people call a ‘Like’ page (or ‘Fan gate’), where there’s a custom tab on your Fan Page that people have to like to reveal free music, then you may well have an issue to resolve. If you haven’t got a clue what I’m on about go and read this post about using ‘Reveal tabs’ by Michael Brandvold)

What your fans might see if your Fan Page isn't SSL!

In fact, any tab or part of your Fan Page that is using an application that has content hosted off Facebook in it (such as images in your Welcome tab) won’t be displayed as from tomorrow or users might see a message like the one on the left.

It’s actually unclear how Facebook is going to deal with the Fan Pages that it won’t show (because they aren’t SSL secure) but if a casual fan comes to your Fan Page and sees that security warning, most of them will just leave and that’s going to directly effect your success!

For most musicians who are deep into Facebook, you’ll probably be using an iFrame app on your tabs (such as Static HTML for iFrame) and it’s only the image and video elements that are embedded in that and hosted off Facebook that you need to worry about.

As far as we’re aware, all the dedicated Music Page apps, like RootMusic’s BandPage and FanBridge’s damntheradio are already compliant.

How does this effect me?

So, what do you have to do to make sure that your Fan Page and all its tabs keep working properly come tomorrow?

Well, most developers of applications have taken this on board and have made the necessary changes to their apps so that they are SSL compliant. And Facebook itself has obviously done what is necessary.

But you need to check:

• Log into your Facebook profile & click on ‘Account Settings’.
• Go to the ‘Security’ tab on the left and ‘Edit’ that setting to enable secure browsing.
• Log out and then log back in again.
• You should now see that the URL in your browser reads ‘https://www.facebook.com….’ – the all important ‘s’ meaning that you’re browsing the secure version of Facebook.
• Go to your Fan Page and view any of your tabs that have outside hosted content.
• If you can see them, all is well, if not, read on.

Setting your own profile to use Facebook's secure browsing setting

What do I do now?

So, this is where it gets tricky.

The short answer is that if anything on your Fan Page doesn’t display properly as of tomorrow then this SSL issue is almost certainly going to be the culprit.

Here’s a few pointers that may help:

• If you use the Static HTML for iFrame app, they are upgrading their app to be secure and to host images within it. See their Facebook thread about that here.

• If all you have hosted off Facebook that you need to deal with is video and images then check out Free VPS, move your images there and rework any relevant code in your app using the new image URL.

• If you have your site hosted by the lovely people that we recommend – Hostgator – read this post and see how you can create a secure SSL connection for free.

If you can’t deal with fixing it, then you need to get hold of your friendly geek and get them on the case asap.

We’ll look at using iFrame apps and building your own tabs on Facebook very soon on the blog for those that found this all way too confusing.

In the meantime, if you lose bits of your Fan Page tomorrow, hopefully this will help you work out why and what you need to do to make your Facebook Fan Page SSL secure.

Good luck!

If you want to learn how to use YouTube, it would be nice to learn from the people at YouTube themselves.

You already know that every musician can benefit from having a lot of video on YouTube, whether it’s traditional videos, lyric videos, simple videos of audio against a sleeve image or backstage/rehearsal footage.

You film it, upload it and hopefully it’ll attract attention, be spread by existing fans and lead people to discover you and your music.

That’s the idea. And it works – there can be no doubt.

YouTube is now the world’s second largest search engine and learning YouTube music marketing skills can only lead to more people hearing your music.

YouTube Creator Playbook

So, when I first discovered that YouTube were releasing their own ‘how to’ guide – called the Creator Playbook – I was intrigued to see how it would help all musicians develop best practice techniques for getting the most out of their videos.

And the YouTube Creator Playbook doesn’t disappoint.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s essential reading for every musician. Your music needs to be on YouTube, so you need to apply the lessons that they are happy to pass on!

YouTube has always been keen to help it’s users make and promote the best videos that they can with great support and tutorials, but the YouTube Creator Playbook goes way further.

They do, however, make a crucial point in the introdcution to the Playbook that you’d do well to bear in mind:

“The Creator Playbook is not a collection of rules or guaranteed ‘tricks’ to get more views. Instead, it presents best practices, optimization tips, and suggested strategies for building audience and engagement on YouTube.”

In other words, don’t expect to read this and get vastly increased numbers of views of crap videos. The content and quality of what you post to YouTube remains paramount and then adding what you learn from the Playbook will magnify your success.

The Creator Playbook is 70 pages broken up into 3 sections:

The Playbook Icons tell you how long a tip will take to implement

• Programming and Producing
• Publishing and Optimization
• Community and Social Media

How long & How effective?

Each section is very well written and laid out and there’s a time estimate for how long each tip should take to implement, what it will effect and how much it should impact your overall presence and views on YouTube.

As an in-depth manual for using YouTube it’s really awesome and the fact that it’s free to everyone is worth a grateful nod to the folks at YouTube who put it together.

Of course, some of the topics covered might seem like common sense to some musicians but I defy you not to learn some very valuable stuff.

In particular, I learnt a lot about Metadata optimization so that videos will rank well in searches both on YouTube and on all the search engines, and also about how important annotations and ‘calls to action’ to subscribe can be to long-term success. I’ll be adding annotations to all my videos in the future!

You can download the YouTube Creator Playbook from YouTube here.

You can also find it below (let me know if the link here is broken!) and download it from the menu in the embedded document.

I urge you to get it, read it and apply it. If you want to learn how to use YouTube, you’d be an idiot not to!

Image courtesy of 'hillary the mammal'

You may well have heard about this guy – Jonathan Mann.

Most likely it’s for his song about the iPhone 4 antenna that’s had well over a million hits on YouTube.

He set out on January 1st 2009 to write a song a day and upload it to YouTube – and he’s stuck to it. His channel videos have over 5 million views and he’s getting on for 10,000 subscribers on YouTube.

The point of talking about him is not to reference the way that he has built a niche following – although I assume that it has been successful enough to give him a sustainable DIY musician income from the YouTube partner programme and the opportunities that it has created for him. And I applaud him for that.

And, it doesn’t matter whether you like his songs, his music, him or what he’s trying to achieve.

No, the point is simply to highlight that he must have learnt a lot about knocking out songs. The ‘how to’ of what works and what doesn’t. And, also to see what else he’s learned that any musician can apply to their efforts to succeed – whatever that means to you in your life as a musician.

10,000 hours

I believe that nothing is as important as putting in the hours to learn how to be good at something – Gladwell’s 10,000 hours that we’ve talked about before.

A large part of our message on this site is that as an aspiring musician you need to spend a lot of time learning how to create great material (as well as learning how to promote and market it).

This guy’s level of dedication to getting a song out the door EVERY day is going to have caused him to learn a huge amount about the craft. He’s well past 1,000 songs and he must be putting in a few hours a day. Combine that with the years he studied music as a child and he’s got to be past the 10,000 hour mark.

In the video below he talks about how he actually goes about writing a song a day. I thought it was great that the first thing he talks about is his fascination with learning how other great songwriters go about it.

So, he’s practising by doing it, but he’s also studying and learning from people whose talent and skill he admires – and then he can model their methods.

He also states that he tries out any approach that he can think of or hears about – and he concludes that the experimentation is all part of the process.

In the video he then looks at various of these songwriting methods that he uses – giving you some songwriting tips that you can apply immediately.

He concludes that there’s no right or wrong way to write a song – you’ll find what works for you through trial and effort.

But, the constant application of effort must improve your skill – that’s what Gladwell’s book is all about and study after study shows that ‘genius’ is built by practise rather than being an innate gift.

The more you practise and apply yourself to mastering the art, the better you’ll become. The more you slack off, the lesser your chance of success.

Take action and persevere

There are two other things that he displays that I think are also crucial to your success in music.

1. He took and continues to take MASSIVE action. It cannot be easy to live a normal-ish life and get this task completed every day. But, taking that kind of action will inevitably have results. You’re doing so much, and creating so much stuff that something must get noticed somewhere.

2. He’s committed and he perseveres. So, whilst he is improving his ability every day, he’s also not letting the prospect of failure raise its head because he just keeps going. And that feeds back into the massive action.

What’s the point I’m making?

You don’t have to copy Jonathan Mann. His path is his alone, but you can learn a lot from his commitment to his plan and you can give yourself the best chance of success with your music by working to improve your talent as hard and with as much dedication as you can.

When your music is undeniably great, then we can tell you how to get people’s attention with your promotion and marketing efforts.