The Music Business Source

Social networking is still a huge wasteland of conflicting information, but I am starting to feel a little encouraged that the dust is finally settling and people are figuring it out. More and more I am hearing people agree that you must choose your battles wisely and that you can’t go chasing after every new social media phenomenon that comes along. That alone is a full-time job and does not leave much room for music.

So to help encourage some focus, here are my top five tips for musicians dealing with social networking.

1. Your website is still king (or queen)! Despite all the hype about Facebook and Pinterest, your website should still be viewed as the center of your efforts. It’s the one place where you have the most control over look and feel. You can run ads or not, blog or not, video or not. And you can optimize it to suit your needs and feature the keywords and content that works best for you. No other online platform can offer you that. If you need some advice on optimization, call me!

1. Email is still king (or queen)! Yup. That too. It is still the best way to reach your fans, and a recent survey of marketing execs indicates that some 61% find it the best way to market (meaning they make the most money from it). My emails usually get around a 30% open rate. I can’t count on that many eyeballs from anything else.

1. It’s a two-way street. If you only post on your blog, or post on other people’s blogs only as a transparent attempt to get people to your site, then you are missing one of the points. Social Media is confusing and still has a lot of questions, but one thing it is proving is that it’s all about niche marketing. Find a select group of blogs where you can really contribute and post without asking anything in return. Build quality relationships…not quantity. Quantity just wastes a lot of time and ultimately backfires and then you are left with nothing but wasted time and maybe a few enemies.

1. Choose your battles. I mentioned it above. I mention it every week, in everything I do. I’m sure I will mention it again. Be selective and focus on just a few platforms that work for you. Social Media is the greatest time suck the world has ever seen. We can’t afford 50 hours a week online and still expect to make music.

1. Don’t forget the original social networks existed offline. Go out and meet some people  please! Sure you should have a CD or card/flyer or whatever with your web address on it. But go out and talk to some people in person would ya!?! I still correspond with people I’ve met 10 years ago at a music seminar, gig, coffee shop or in a class I taught. There is no substitute for offline real world interactions. You’ve heard of work-life balance? How about digital-organic balance?

That’s it for now. Enjoy and stay focused!

Music Business Networking

NuMuBu , which stands for New Music Business, is a relatively new online music networking platform which is starting to create a bit of a buzz. I just signed up a week ago, and I must say I like what I see.

NuMuBu is essentially a networking site where musicians and music related businesses like mine can network, share ideas and help each other generate some revenue from their efforts. There are community tools, revenue generating options, business tips, advertising options, song downloads, and a whole lot more. The company was started by music industry veteran Rob Taylor and guitarist extraordinaire Elliot Randall, two guys who know the business well and are very focused on the addressing the challenges faced by indie musicians.

Although the platform is still developing it looks clean and easy, and it delivers no-nonsense relevance and functionality to the user…something you just don’t get on MySpace or Facebook.  I think it is something to get in on at the early stages, so be the first on your block to join! I’ll keep you posted on how it develops for my business and I’ll report on my progress as I go along.

Just a quick update on a recent post about financing your next CD. I was on the fence about fan funding methods like Kickstarter, where you essentially solicit donations to fund your album. Mostly I have seen these efforts fall short. But one colleague, Christian Finger (who posted a link on this blog to his Kickstarter account)  just succeeded in raising over $8,000 to fund his album, Ananda.

Click here to see the details and get a look at Kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/770056379/ananda-the-world-is-bliss-an-album-by-christian-fi

It’s nice to report good news in the music business, and I look forward to hearing more!

This post is to address questions I get on other blogs and in the online groups I belong to. Just some quick facts and figures from a class I teach. I thought it might be a good idea to put up some stats on the music business, so then I can refer people to this post and then we can really begin to have a conversation on how to proceed to make a living in this business. If you believe that a major label deal will save you from toiling in obscurity, then I can’t really help you…unless you read this:

Good News first:You can compose and record heavy metal acoustic disco tuba music sung in ancient Greek and find someone who will play it and somewhere you can sell it.

 Now the Bad News: It ain’t easy.

• Most of what all of us have learned is wrong!
• Like no other business in the world, the music business is full of myths, incomplete and unintelligible information, PR, hype and enough nonsense to fill an encyclopedia.
• The industry has really split into two separate businesses: the entertainment business and the music business. No other business has a model that will permit such a high likelihood of failure.
• Let’s take a look at what that means.

Most of what all of us have learned is wrong! Like no other business in the world, the music business is full of myths, incomplete and unintelligible information, PR, hype and enough nonsense to fill an encyclopedia. The industry has really split into two separate businesses: the entertainment business and the music business. No other business has a model that will permit such a high likelihood of failure. Let’s take a look at what that means.

 Of  the 115,000 albums released and tracked by Nielsen/Soundscan in 2009, here is how well they sold:

 34 Albums sold more than 500,000 units

 110 Albums sold more than 250,000 units

 1,500 Albums sold more than 10,000 units

 6,000 Albums sold more than 1,000 units

 107, 356 Albums sold between 1 and 1,000 units

 That’s about a .03% success ratio. About 70% of these releases were from major labels.

OK and who sells the most music? iTunes of course! Here’s the breakdown.

So then the important lesson for us is to forget about those top 34 CDs and the 4 major labels and WalMart, Best Buy and Target. But what is left is a pretty big market and one that we can all share and be pretty happy with. But it takes real, actual, no-nonsense marketing smarts and some hard work. That is the reality of today’s music business and it should be good news if you are ready to adjust your thinking.

If you are looking for jobs in the music business, you may have already discovered that they are not easy to find. For one thing, these companies don’t tend to post their jobs on Monster. Career Builder or Simply Hired. You would be better off doing a little research and zeroing in on some companies a that you might like to work for and visiting their websites directly.

I subscribe to some general economic news type newsletters, and the consensus among the job seeking experts is that you will have more luck looking in the “hidden market” than you will by sending out resumes via online job sites like the ones I mentioned above.

Also (and you should do this anyway) you might subscribe to music industry newsletters that include this kind of info. One that I like is Digital Music News. Click on the link to go to their job board. Here you will see jobs for Digital Sales Manager at SONY, Interactive Marketing Manager at the Orchard, Manager of Web Design at Wind-up Records and a Marketing Associate at Smithsonian Folkways.

I don’ think you can find any of these on Monster, but even if you can, it’s a lot easier to go right to the source and get your info from the business directly.

Good luck and let me know if you have any other good sources.

I’ll be honest. If you need money to finance your next CD, then you might consider re-examining what business you are in. If you have money, no problem. But if you don’t and are considering a loan, an investor or d like Kickstarter or Pledge Music then tread carefully.

*Sweeping generalization alert!* Almost all CDs lose money.

 OK I know that doesn’t sound very statistical, but of the 70,000 plus CDs released every year (those with a bar code) about 60,000 of them sell less than 100 copies. In other words, they lose money. The crowd funding thing has always bugged me a bit. Yes, it seems a little like begging, but more importantly, I don’t see it work too often. Sure it works sometimes (please don’t remind me about Amanda Palmer – she’s one in a million), but usually not.

Loans carry interest and credit cards even more interest. Investors want a piece of the pie, which is not such a problem if there is going to be a pie. But in the likely scenario that there isn’t then you have probably just lost a friend and maybe even made an enemy.

So what to do? I know this is not going to be popular, but I’m trying to be helpful in this blog. Get to work, save up your money and pay for it yourself. Then every dime that comes back belongs to you.

I’m certainly open to opinions so let’s hear it. Does anyone have a story of crowdfunding that worked? Do you still think it’s a good idea several years later? Opinions please!

This kind of freaked me out so I thought I’d share it with you. I came across this article which should make us all pause and take note. Here’s a few excerpts (scroll down to the bottom for the scary truth):

“A decent- looking young man of thirty-four or five, sober, self respecting, yet a tragic spectacle. A trained musician playing in the street. It is the last resort, and not unusual. There are hundreds of these street musicians strolling about the cities, shivering in winter, playing for pennies as best they can with numb fingers and running noses. Good players, indifferent players, poor players, but with some training, all of them.”

 “In general, the violinist, pianist, or cellist trained for orchestral work is not fit for other occupations. He is not an artist in the higher sense, but a more or less skilled artisan in his own narrowed field. Music is his business, his trade. Take it away from him and he is technologically unemployed. Musicians, as a rule, are not easily adaptable. Temperamentally, long association with specialized art unfits them for other kinds of work. Two-thirds of them, rank and file, march misfit and workless today. One I happened on is working gamely but inefficiently as a house painter. Another is canvassing as an insurance agent.”

 “… after the actual performers have been paid (at a minimum of from $15 to $20 for an evening’s performance and two or three rehearsals), there is comparatively little residue …. Even that little runs into snags.”

OK there is plenty more. But this article was written in 1933 during the Great Depression. It could have been written yesterday. Have we still not gotten past tyis point? Yikes!

 Here is the link to the rest of the article. It’s only 2 pages and very worth reading.

I am the last person to advocate anything that decreases the value of music. It’s hard enough to earn money from this business. File sharing, music libraries, internet radio and a host of other ways to obtain and use music all seem to be gradually devaluing music. Once upon a time, a composer might get a few thousand dollars to have a piece of music in a commercial. Now producers go to a music library and get a track for $20, and hopefully the composer gets half.

So why give away music? Why give away a free eBook? Why offer a free phone consultation?

There are few sure ways to make money in this business, but one way that does work (although it takes patience) is to increase your followers, fans, subscribers…whatever you call them. These are your potential customers. A proven way to do that is to offer something free in exchange for an email address and thus permission to market to the person in the future. 

Numbers really do matter. I mentioned in a previous post that the new model for the music business is to put a bucket under a thousand dripping faucets and collect a nickel from each one. That is the cold hard reality. So let’s say you have 250 fans on your email list. Probably only 5% of them at any given time will buy something from you. That’s only 12.5 people (who is that 0.5 guy?). Ultimately, that is just not quite enough.

The good news is that there are potentially thousands of people who will like what you do, give you their email and become future and hopefully long-term customers. But you have to invest time, energy and you have to give them something first. Don’t expect results in a week, or even a few months. This takes time to develop but it does work.

So to practice what I preach, you can have the first three tracks from my Night Wheel album absolutely free by just clicking on the following link. It will take you to CDBaby, so it’s all secure and legit. Enjoy.  Free Night Wheel Download

Sorry, but I’m not really going to answer that question. Yet I still think it is one we have to ask.

It seems to me that we are in the middle of a story and we don’t really know yet how it will end. I remember around 2001 or so when Napster was all the rage, reading (I think it was on the cover of Wired magazine) that founder Shawn Fanning declared that “music was information and should be free.”  Yikes! First of all, it’s not information and who the hell is he? A musician? I didn’t think so. Then the big labels and the RIAA went on the attack and started suing music fans. It got ugly.

But then, in those days, the horror stories about the big labels ripping off artists and ruining the music business were also pretty prevalent. I had my own indie label by then and was not fan of the big labels. Maybe all this internet sharing was not such a bad idea.

As I said, I don’t have an answer to the question posed in the post title. But I will offer a framework for discussion. The internet, iTunes, internet radio etc were/are all interruptive technologies. In other words, they pretty immediately change the game. We are still in the middle of that story. Big labels wanting to protect copyrights are not “bad.” On the other hand, the so-called good exposure an artist gets in lieu of pay for so many digital broadcasts sure isn’t “good.”

Our right to profit from our creation, from our hard work is essential, and ultimately we need to get paid well enough for it to continue doing what we want. We don’t have to get rich (maybe it wouldn’t suck…) but we can’t be expected to give it all away. 

No matter what kind of music you make, you probably want to increase your number of fans. Even if you are on the business side of things, the more people who know your name and what you do, the more you increase your chances for success. Increasing your fan base certainly takes time, but there are some very easy things you can do right now to keep the fan machine rolling. Here’s my top 5:

1. Keep That Newsletter Going. A monthly newsletter is the minimum required. More  frequent if your fans ask for it, but also don’t forget about announcing special events, letting fans know about a bit of news, gig reminders…any extra communications are typically a good thing. And if someone does not want these communications, they will probably un-subscribe from your list, so don’t worry too much about offending anyone.

2. Always Look for Potential Fans. When you’re browsing the net, checking blogs, going to events, checking your email, look for names that you may not have seen before. Send an email, let them know who you are and if they would be interested in being on your list. Sure, only 1 out of every 10 may agree, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Also keep in mind that in the online world, Reed’s Law is at work, which says that people online are part of networks and as such are much more valuable to cultivate as fans because they bring their network with them.

3. Ask. Deceptively simple but seldom used. In your next newsletter, consider simply asking your subscribers to think of a friend that might be interested in what you do and forward them the newsletter. Most newsletter services, websites, blog software like Word Press, Facebook, Twitter etc. all have share capabilities. But that leaves the decision in the hands of the user and is very easy to ignore. It is more effective for you to ask in a personal way.

4. Be Pro Active. Instead of waiting for fans to come to you, you should go to them. Try an experiment of following 10 new Twitter streams or blogs or whatever each week. Engage for a while and see what surfaces. Above all, don’t try to sell anything at the outset. That is a big turnoff and ultimately does no good for anyone. Give it some time and allow connections to grow organically. It works quicker than you might think.

5. Be More Involved. Depending on the venue, the type of gig and whether you have some help, a  performance may not always be the easiest time to cultivate fans. Make sure there is a way to sign up for your mailing list of course, but what about all the other days of your life? If you get involved in activities that put you in front of people (and you start conversations), you will find new fans. Volunteering at a charity event, going to music business seminars or classes, going to friend’s gigs. Always have a post card or business card with you and don’t be afraid to talk.