andrewsgoodrichNov-18-2009 2:09pm
Being Professional Goes A Long Way
This is not ground-breaking stuff here, but Loren Weisman posted something over at Music Think Tank that I found to be very refreshing. She calls it “Ten Tips That Every Musician Should Apply to Their Career”. I call it “Be Professional or Die”. The reality of making music your career is that you’ll be interacting with a bunch of folks that are relying on YOU to make their own businesses succeed. This means promoters, publicists, venues, etc. They’re all relying on you to bring the goods. You don’t want to let the power go to your head though, because this goes both ways. They are your team, and if you let everyone down, you’ll be locked out of the community. If you make it work for them, they’ll make it work for you.
I’ve seen a lot of people blow big opportunities simply through lack of professionalism. Of course, if you’re whole goal is to be a total rock star god who routinely trashes the green room, none of this applies to you. But you’re probably not going to be able to last for long. If you want to make a career of this noble thing called music, then these simple tips apply to you:
Number 1. – Answer your emails.
Number 2. - Have the guts to address concerns or questions.
Number 3. – If things change, then keep everyone informed and problem solve.
Number 4. - Be on time or give a heads up.
Number 5. Get your gear off the stage when you are done.
Number 6. - Follow up with booking agents, clubs and other bands.
Number 7. - Stop f*%^ng over posting on Facebook and other network sites.
Number 8. - Be confident but not arrogant. Admit when you don’t know something.
Number 9. - Follow the instructions when it comes to sending out packages , calling, emailing distro, etc.
Number 10. - Stop talking shit about other bands, people, etc.
Loren has written short explanations for each of these ten points over at the Music Think Tank blog - which you should go read right now: Ten Tips That Every Musician Should Apply to Their Career
Indie Artist X September Stats
The goal of the Indie Artist X Project is to develop a basic, actionable music marketing plan designed around simple strategy, prioritization of tactics, easy to use tools, and a reasonable budget that can be implemented by any artist who has the inclination to follow it. About.com Music Careers, Artists House Music, Hypebot, KnowTheMusicBiz.com, MusicianWages.com and Revolution Number 3 have banded together to create this community based music marketing plan. We will be working with one anonymous artist to design and implement this music marketing plan then track and report the actual results over a four month period. To keep up with the latest news on the IAXP follow the project on Twitter and Facebook.
Below are the Indie Artist X Project statistics for the month of September:
September Stats:
Band Metrics Score: 241 / Silver
Website Unique Visitors: 979
Website Total Visitors: 1187
Website Sales – CD’s: $0.00
Website Sales – MP3’s: $14.99
Website Sales – Merch: $0.00
Fan List: 774
Live Show Attendance: 215
Live Show Net Sales: $850.00
Live Show CD Sales: $240.00
Live Show Merch Sales: $320.00
Distribution Sales: $1,340.61
Licensing Royalties: $0.00
BMI Royalties: $305.56
Soundexchange Royalties: $0.00
MySpace Royalties: $0.00
Some notes about September’s IXAP reporting:
- Indie Artist X spent much of September in the recording studio so they weren’t able to play many live shows. The new songs sound great but the lack of live shows this month definitely impacted the growth of the fan list, live show revenue and direct-to-fan sales of CD’s and merchandise.
- BMI pays! Indie Artist X received a PRO Royalty check in September from BMI for $305.56. Finding an unexpected check in the mailbox is always a nice surprise.
- Despite regular IAX plays and streams on Pandora, Last.fm, MySpace, iLike and Imeem there are still no royalties reported or paid from Soundexchange.
- The indie label that released IAX’s last two records only pays / reports periodically. In September IAX received a check for $1,340.61 for year to date royalties. Distribution is handled through InGrooves.
- Band Metrics measures activity across several web properties where IAX maintains a presence including iLike, Last.fm, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube. Band Metrics also measures terrestrial radio play but hasn’t picked up any spins to date for IAX. The Band Metrics score for September moved to 241 from 233 in August.
- Direct CD and Merch sales for August were $0.00. The website ecommerce store is not yet set up for CD and merchandise sales since IAX is still waiting on the artwork files from the indie label that released the last two records.
The Golden Age of Music Widgets? Nah.
In response to Hypebot’s “Music Widgets Come of Age” article and the comments that ensued, I decided to poll some of our readers at Artists House via twitter to find out how many of them actually have purchased music through an online widget. So far, the results are not surprising to me, though the sample size is still relatively small.
As of the writing of this article, 81% said they have never purchased music through an online widget, and 4% weren’t sure what a widget is. The poll (which is still open for voting) can be viewed here: http://twtpoll.com/y0520w.
Comments via twitter and e-mail sparked by the poll confirm my own beliefs on the subject. The consensus seems to be that widgets are good for disseminating music (facilitating music discovery), but are not the right place for financial transactions to take place. As always, technology is simply an accelerator. If the product is stellar, technology can help amplify the success it already would have found. For example, the Byrne/Eno project, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, was going to be successful by nature of the creative minds behind it and the ancillary promotional work. TopSpin’s widget allowed the album to see an amplified level of success, but the sales had very little to do with the widget itself. To be clear, a widget isn’t the answer. You always want to avoid basing your business model on a certain technology. So, no need to delay your album release until you are accepted into TopSpin’s beta.
Additionally, many of the features offered on widgets seem to me to be characteristic of ‘feature-creep’. Feature-creep is the same thing that plagues your TV and DVD remotes. Too many buttons, most of them never used. But somebody thought it’d be a good idea to have a dedicated button for that specific task. And so, button by button, the remote became unusable. Likewise, while one widget may allow fans to view band photos, read blog posts, listen to albums, purchase music, subscribe to a mailing list, and take a survey all in a 250x250 pixel box, do a reality-check and think about whether this is attractive to fans (or just to bands). You don’t see very many people embedding their favorite bands’ multimedia widgets on their own websites, though many bands seem to think this is a fantastic idea.
When navigating the DIY music business, it’s important that we try to stay focused on only the value-adding endeavors that reflect real-world behavior.
What Areas Do You Need Help With?
In an effort to focus what we do and provide you all with the most valuable resources we can, I want to open up the Artists House to-do list to our community. We’ve been talking here about creating some very hands-on, specific tutorials and how-to videos/articles that will reflect the increasingly DIY nature of the music business. We’ll keep interviewing professionals within the industry and folks who have found success, but we’d also like to address some of the real-world hurdles that you have to face every day starting out…how to get a blog up and running, how to install analytics on your website, etc.
To that end, I put together a little poll here to get us started. What kinds of topics do you think are undercovered, and/or which areas do you need the most help in right now? I started a list of some areas, but feel free to enter your own in the “Other” box.
If you have more lengthy ideas or feedback, please go ahead and write in the comments section. Or, if you’re shy, you can send me an e-mail at andrewsgoodrich AT gmail.com
Thanks in advance for your feedback!
5 Mistakes That Will Kick Your Butt As An Entrepreneur
You may remember one of our live chat guests from this April, Ann Bernard - you can watch the archived video to jog your memory. She’s been behind some online start-ups like Why Go Solo and Tickets With a Twist.
I read her most recent blog post this morning about how she has made the difficult decision to take those two businesses offline for good. The most difficult part of entrepreneurship is probably how easy it is to become emotionally attached to the success of a project. I’ve grabbed some coffee with Ann in the past to discuss some of these things, and I can personally attest to the enthusiasm and commitment she had for her ideas. However, as Seth Godin might say, equally important to commitment is the ability to decide when something has become a cul-de-sac (i.e. it’s not going to lead anywhere, no matter how much time, money, and sweat you invest into it). Ann has decided that the projects she was working on were cul-de-sacs.
I’m sharing this with all of you mainly to point your attention to five very insightful takeaways Ann listed from her experience.
…this time I’m going to avoid fighting the uphill battles that have always kicked my ass:
- Entering a field/area that I have no background or contacts in
- Being heavily reliant on technology and development to get started
- Needing investors to succeed – Success makes getting investors a much simpler process
- Stressing myself with unrealistic expectations and pressures
- Starting a business that I think will eventually be fun. I’m starting something that will be enjoyable and fun from day one.
In lieu of a MUCH longer post explaining the importance of each of those five points, I’d rather have you all share your own experiences about which one of these points strikes the biggest chord with you.
I’ll break the ice. Personally, point 2 is where I tend to get stuck. When brainstorming, I tend to focus on the final, big-picture, and then get stuck on how in the world I’ll be able to find the resources to get there. It usually involves a very complex but sleek website with a massive database of information. Of course, you don’t want the scale of your own vision to be the reason why you can’t see it through. So you have to scale down. Most big-picture ideas involve solving A LOT of problems. Instead, figure out how to solve one - the most important one. You’re resources are thin, so it’s best to concentrate on being the best at one thing. Choose the thing that you can be the BEST in the business at. Otherwise you’re going to wear yourself out.
Remember how Craigslist started? Yeah, it was literally Craig’s list. It was not sleek, it was not elegant, it was not efficient. But it worked. And then it grew from there. I’d imagine if they started out by trying to topple the classified ad industry, they wouldn’t have been able to.
Where do you get stuck in trying to get a project off the ground?
Ten Most Popular Artist/Musician iPhone App Strategies Reviewed
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 saying, but then why do we have so many artists hopping on bandwagons [insert pun here] that they have no business being on (read: vinyl, iPhone apps, trying to build proprietary social networks, etc.).
Best Practices
The apps that I consider to be best in class offer a value to the user that would encourage continuous use over time in terms of community, content, and direct artist contact.
Community:
The Akon, Lady Gaga, and Soulja Boy apps are all powered by Kyte ( an online video-streaming community). This allows for some really great things such as user rated videos, live chat rooms, and exclusive mobile video streamed directly from the artists.
The DMB app allows users to sign in with their Twitter account allowing for easy communication with band and the fan community. The app also allows users to upload user-generated-content such as photos from concerts and contains a fan chat room.
Content:
The Wilco, Death Cab for Cutie, and Black Lips apps provide streaming of full tracks and albums on the app. The app will also function while audio is streamed (a feature that is not found with the iTunes 30sec samples).
Santana offers guitar lessons via the mobile app provide something of true value to Santana fans.
The Wilco application has an extensive selection of podcasts from the band.
Arists-to-Fan:
The Dead and DMB applications offer exclusive content from the band such as Tweets during live shows.
Continue reading the rest of the article over at Chris’ blog, where he goes into a little more detail about each app: Ten Most Popular Artist/Musician iPhone App Strategies Reviewed
What artist apps have you personally used? Do you consider them value-adding or a waste of time? What is working and what is not? What features do you want as a fan? Is creating an iPhone app (or any other gadget, widget, gizmo) for your music a distraction from more important things?
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