July 2009
14 posts
3 tags
Qualities of an Artist Entrepreneur
I invited a guest speaker to class the other night and he showed a video about entrepreneurship. It was structured around the eight characteristics of an entrepreneur:
• Wants to work for themselves, doesn’t want to work for someone else • Can communicate and is organized about it • Isn’t afraid of taking risks • Sees opportunity and takes it • Understands the need for innovation and...
6 tags
Ten Most Popular Artist/Musician iPhone App...
Chris Terschluse of the blog Interactive:Incite posted a review of the most popular musician iPhone apps available today. Some seem to offer enough value-add to justify their existence, others seem to miss the mark totally. What I think Chris understands, and what I think is valuable about this article, is that everything you do in your music career must be value-adding. This seems to go without...
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Music Business Weekly Wrap-up
There’s a lot of information flying around out there, and I’ve picked some highlights from this week in music business news and artist advice that I think you might find interesting and helpful:
Artists House Music:
Last call for votes on the poll - have you ever purchased music through an online widget? http://twtpoll.com/y0520w
Business Formation Issues for Indie Musicians - Part I (Sole...
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Business Formation Issues for Indie Musicians -...
In order for an indie artist to have a legitimate chance of being successful in the long term, it is crucial for that artist to treat his or her music career as a business. The same holds true for bands. Thinking like a businessperson, however, does not come naturally for most musicians as they are more attuned to and focused on their creative side. Nevertheless, the music industry is a...
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Poll: Do Fans Buy Music Through Widgets?
There’s certainly enough hype about widgets and seemingly innocuous suggestions that they are the future of music distribution and that they allow music to ‘go viral’. You can stream your music, collect fan e-mail addresses, allow fans to embed the widget on their own websites, share the music on various social networks, etc. That’s all great, but these sound more like...
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Get Paid for Giving Your Music Away with...
When most artists opt to give their music away for free these days, they do it with the acceptance that the music will primarily become an impetus toward a “greater good”: heightened notoriety, increased ticket and merch sales, etc.
But what if you could have the best of both worlds? What if you could make your music available for free and still generate income from the resulting...
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Artists House Founder John Snyder
Here’s a little insight into our community - in this video, we turned the camera around for once and focused on interviewing one of our own. John Snyder is the founder of Artists House, and here he gives a candid and informative interview about the art of producing, how to work effectively with big egos and inexperienced musicians, how to prepare yourself for a life in music, and much more....
3 tags
Music Business Weekly Wrap-Up
There’s a lot of information flying around out there, and I’ve picked some highlights from this week in music business news and artist advice that I think you might find interesting and helpful:
Artists House Music:
I recommend every single person that I’m following for good conversation about the music business: http://twitter.com/artistshouse/following
How Outsiders Drive...
5 tags
MIDEM 2009 Conference Videos
Here are four interesting videos you should watch from the Midem 2009 conference. These videos are a good insight into what people who are in the game are talking about. Many of the speakers here are involved with more popular musicians, but you can see that even the big boys aren’t quite sure what is going on in the music industry. I point this out only to quell your anxiety that maybe the...
4 tags
More on Music Industry Stats and Relevance
Just after I finished posting Are Music Industry Stats Relevant to You? I read a post over at Bandcamp’s blog called RSS and the Greatly Exaggerated Rumors of the Album’s Death. Go read it right now. Case in point.
On Bandcamp, albums outsell tracks 2 to 1. Put another way, 66% of paid downloads on Bandcamp are for albums, compared to only about 6% for the greater Nielsen-reporting...
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Are Music Industry Stats Relevant to You?
If you haven’t had a chance to download and browse Nielson’s 2009 presentation at NARM, you should check it out now. If you’ve been keeping your finger held to the pulse of the music business at all, none of this will surprise you. But it’s still good to keep yourself informed with the latest information available so that you can decide how to interpret it and how it might...
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Why Are We Doing This In The First Place?
I just wanted to turn you on to a short video of an incredible musician, spokesperson, and humanitarian, Wynton Marsalis — based right here in New Orleans — defending the arts and arts education before a Congressional Committee back in March.
On March 31, 2009, Arts Advocacy Day, Americans for the Arts gathered a panel of acclaimed artists and experts to call on Congress for...
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The Indie Artist X Project – Fan Development
I’d like to introduce a project that Artists House will be involved with for the next several months. Spearheaded by David Rose at KnowtheMusicBiz.com, the Indie Artist X project will address the current need for some kind of real-world, transparent information about creating a strategy for an independent artist that can show some measurable and material results. I think this will be a...
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Songwriters, Meet Your New BFF
Fact you may not know about me: As a teen, I dabbled with songwriting. … Then I quickly realized that judging other people’s songs is much easier than writing hits of my own, and I decided to focus on the business side of the industry. Nonetheless, my brief foray into the songwriting world led to the discovery of MasterWriter, one of the most useful tools a songwriter can have at their...