MUSIC INDUSTRY BLOG

In 2007, Detroit-based rock act, Schaeffer, were selected as the winners of Breaking the Band 1, our international band competition.  As part of their prize package, they embraced the opportunity to work with We Are Listening’s TV and radio guru, Jon Delange.

Jon, who continues to mentor the band to this day, helped them achieve national awareness, first at radio and then with television networks by scoring placements in their original programming.  Annually, they have preformed during Austin’s SXSW event.

Eventually, the group emerged as America’s favorite in the FreeCreditScore.com band search which began with a shortlist of more than 100 hopefuls showcasing nationwide.

Now, The Victorious Secrets, the band’s new alias, are engaged in a $30 million advertising campaign.

As the new face of FreeCreditScore.com, they will be featured in a series of television commercials slated to debut during the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards next month.  They will also receive a $10,000 check, a Gibson Guitar prize package and Pearl drum kits, and a studio session with the music industry’s best of breed.  They will also walk the red carpet at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards and have the opportunity to perform on the 2010 VMA Tour.

Here are The Victorious Secrets, in all their glory:

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“Quit your day job.  Start a label.” has to be the stupidest blog post I ever published.  And yet, it’s the second most visited post on this blog.

(For your information, “Katy Perry” is the most popular post on this blog but that’s just because Google picked up on the image tag so when Katy Perry fans (of which there are many) search for Kary Perry images, my blog shows up.  There’s no value in it for me whatsoever.  I’m confident that zero Katy Perry fans care about this blog.)

But with “Quit your day job.  Start a label.“, there’s no fabricated traffic.  It’s all real visitors searching for authoritative content which, to my disgrace, leads them to the worst post on this site.

How do you explain it?

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“With 300 million people in America, you can fail to impress 299 million of them and still go platinum.”

Seth Godin, best selling author and popular blogger, writes:

If you have a book to write, write it.  If you want to record an album, record it.  No need to wait for someone in a cubicle halfway across the country to decide if you’re worthy.

I think Seth is suggesting that, if you’re waiting for a so-called music biz whiz to tell you that your band rocks, you’re giving too much power to someone who doesn’t care about your music nearly as much as you do.

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Can your current music sales really support you?

Probably not, but you’re definitely not alone.  The days of artists earning their income through the strength of song sales alone are growing dimmer by the day.

Music fans don’t want to pay for music anymore, and they’re getting less willing to do so all the time.  Teenagers today have grown up in a world where they can download, stream and share anything they want, and all for free.

And they’ve never known anything different.

If even the most recognized artists in the world are having their songs downloaded for free, how are you supposed to make any money?

Believe it or not, you already have everything you need to make money.  But even though your recordings are the least likely commodity to generate a strong income, there are plenty of other things you can sell.

We’ve teamed up with our good friends at MusicCareerMasters.com to show you exactly what you can to do to drive your income outside of music sales.

MusicCareerMasters is a website created to help independent artists make a living from the music business.  It is run by Mark Smith, a veteran band manager of over 13 years.  He teaches musicians time tested and highly effective strategies to truly make it in today’s rapidly changing music ecosystem.

For We Are Listening members only, Mark has created an exclusive 6 minute video that walks you through exactly what you need to know to make the maximum money for your products.

Let Mark Show You His Instant Money Making Ideas >>

Not as many as you’d like, I suspect.

It’s not because your music is ‘bad’.  In fact, people talk about bad music just as much as they do about good music.

So why isn’t there a larger conversation around you and your art?

Because you’re relying on your music.

There are 13 million music profiles on MySpace but only 4,000 artists on the rosters of the major music labels.

It’s fair to assume that a lot more than 4,000 artists are writing, producing and performing great songs.  Some of them are making ends meet on indie labels or on their own…

…But the sad truth is that most of them are working day jobs and you will probably never hear of them.

The competition is fierce.

If your strategy for success hinges on great songs, awesome production, and a tight live act alone, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Here is an example of an artist who made it easy for music fans to talk about her, but she did NOT center the conversation around her music.

Instead, she created this video …and it worked!

I used to be.

I couldn’t handle the rejection.

And worse, help in the form of critical – sometimes brutal – feedback on my music would leave me licking my wounds for days.

You see, it takes a lot of courage to ask for help and welcome criticism as well as praise.

And this is the mark of an independent artist and entrepreneur that music fans and professionals want to listen to and associate with.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help

Professional songwriters, label executives, music supervisors, venue promoters, and die-hard music fans are all around you.  Take a big breath, approach them, ask a question, and even offer to play them a few seconds of your song.  Do this at every opportunity…

…You’ll be surprised how easily you shed your fear of dismissal.

And though you may not always like what they have to say, their willingness to help you – listen and share their thoughts with you – may drive your career to new heights.

Not everyone will be willing to help you.  But don’t let that put you off.

If you learn to ask for help and be open to receiving it in any form, you will discover that most people will go out of their way for you.  That’s a promise.

I hope this helps.

Five months ago, I began working with Audiolife, an exciting company at the forefront of the Direct-To-Fan revolution.

Direct-To-Fan is a popular business model adopted by independent artists.  As the name suggests, artists cut out the middlemen (labels, distributors, retailers etc.) and promote and sell their music directly to their fans.

Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows and Nine Inch Nail’s release of Ghosts I–IV are popular examples of the Direct-To-Fan paradigm.

There are many benefits to Direct-To-Fan.  There are many challenges too.  Audiolife provides both the technology tools and the product fulfillment solutions to make Direct-To-Fan possible and affordable.

There are a handful of other companies with a Direct-To-Fan approach, including Topspin, Bandcamp, and Nimbit.

I want to ask you this:

If you’re doing it, is Direct-To-Fan working for you?

If you’re not doing it, what’s stopping you?

Please add your comments here.

This is a guest post by Dave Kusek

Again and again, I have heard this sage advice when asking producers, label executives, and publishers about artist development.  Take your time.  The first and most important thing to do is to get the music right: love your music, immerse yourself in it, and live it.

As an artist/writer, your coin of the realm is your songs, and they need to be great, polished, and professional.  The worst thing you can do is go to market too soon.  Without careful preparation, practice, understanding, listening to others, testing your material, developing its quality, and crafting and articulating a unique story to tell, you will probably enter the marketplace too early and will most likely fail.  Start out slowly.  Practice.  A lot.

Another critical component of artist development is live performance.  Any venue will do to get started.  Play the smallest clubs to get used to performing and being in front of an audience.  Everybody gets better over time, and live performance in front of a crowd does many positive things for your career.  When you play live, you develop sets of songs that you play and expand your repertoire.  Don’t be afraid to play other people’s material mixed in with your own.  Covers create a sense of familiarity that you can use to build your audience.  You are also learning by playing the songs of other great artists.

Performing live helps you build your confidence and song quality, lets you interact with an audience, and experience their reactions to your songs.  Also, when you play live, you can test out different material and approaches to your songs.  You can experiment and find out new things about the song, tempo, bridge, chorus, lyric, etc.  You can see which songs are the most popular, what should be the rhythm of your set, where the audience loses its attention, and how best to open and close a show.

Live performance and touring is a major cornerstone to any artist’s career and is one of the best ways to develop an audience.  Over time, your audience will grow with you as you refine your art.  Superstars Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, James Taylor, Paul Simon, and countless others all played small clubs for very minimal dollars at first, refining their approach, music, and brands to small audiences that grew over time.  Just look at the size of their audiences now.

Many successful executives have told me that good music finds an audience and is very difficult to keep under wraps.  If you want to have a long career in the music business, take a good look at yourself, who are you, and the package that you bring to the table.  Do you have the songs, do you have the talent, do you have the charisma, and are you really ready to go to market?  Develop, refine, write, practice, play live, listen, and collaborate.

Listen To Others

Great artists and writers take the time to develop, but they also listen to people around them who they can trust to give them feedback and keep them honest about what they are trying to do and how well they are accomplishing it.  This is role of the A&R person, record producer, publisher, and artist manager.  You simply cannot believe your own press and expect to be successful.  You also cannot rely on your mother or family to be objective about what you are doing. You need to get honest opinions from a lot of different people who will tell you the truth.  Listen carefully to them as a sounding board for your career and ask hard questions like the following: Do you like my songs?  How do I look on stage?  What do I need to do to improve?  What advice can you give me?

Your fans are the ultimate source of feedback.  Set up a blog or some other means of creating two-way communication. Encourage people to tell you what they think.  Hand out postcards at your gigs, collect your fans email and cell phone numbers, and ask them what they think of your set, your songs, your performance, etc.  Don’t be afraid of what you might hear, and use the feedback to learn, refine, and further develop your brand and music.

Collaborate

Having a band is a great way to collaborate, and hopefully you will find other musicians to play and write with at various points in your career.  Another hallmark of great artists and writers is that they work with different musicians to write songs, perform together, cover each other’s songs, and most importantly learn from one another. Collaboration and the exchange of ideas are the life-blood of creative artistry.

Collaboration does not mean that you are joined at the hip with another artist forever.  You can move in and out of collaborative partnerships when you need something new to spark the creative juices or just get you going in another direction.  Working with other talented musicians can be a challenge.  Quincy Jones has great advice for when you walk into the studio to work with other artists.  He says, “Check your ego at the door.”  Find people you can work with, who you enjoy being around, and who make you feel good.

There are many examples of great songwriting collaborations, including Holland, Holland & Dozier, Lennon and McCartney, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin.  The list is long.  Don’t be afraid to cowrite with other people or to record other songwriter’s material.  This can help you reach a broader audience, develop your talents in new directions, and potentially open up your brand by association with other great artists.

One of the most successful songwriters of the last 30 years is Don Henley of the Eagles.  He talks about identifying your strengths and weaknesses through collaboration with great writers like Jackson Brown and Glen Frey, and being willing to put someone else’s songs on your record if they are better than your own.  Seems to have worked for him.

Many of the most successful songs of all time have come out of collaborative partnerships that were organized on a formal level at some of the songwriting factories of the past, including the Brill Building, Motown, and Philadelphia International.  Collaboration helps you to stand on the shoulders of others and to peer over a horizon that you might not be able to see on your own.

About The Author
Dave Kusek is the Founder and CEO of Music Power Network and Vice President at Berklee College of Music.  He is also the co-author of the best selling music business book, The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution.

Owning a Gibson guitar is like owning a BMW.

It’s a statement.

For BMW, the “German Engineering” stamp is impervious to Lexus.

For Gibson, “Made In The USA” is just as sacred.

It takes decades to establish the reputation that Gibson has achieved.

Yet only minutes to flush it down the toilet.

Gibson, like many heritage brands, engaged itself with a young spunky marketing consultant that dazzled its management team with social media catchwords like “viral”, “buzz” and “tweet”.

How the conversation went down:

Spunky Consultant:  “You’re doing everything wrong.  Everything!”

Gibson Management:  “We are?  Sales are up.  Overhead is down.  What do you mean?”

Spunky Consultant:  “Sales Shmales.  It’s not about the money, it’s about your brand equity!”

Gibson Management:  “Sales Shmales?”

Spunky Consultant:  “You want to connect with your fans, engage with your customers and create a conversation around you, see?”

Gibson Management:  “Will that increase sales?”

Spunky Consultant:  “Forget sales already.  I’m going to get you buzz.  You do want buzz, don’t you?”

Gibson Management:  “Does buzz increase sales?”

Spunky Consultant:  “Look, do you want followers or not?”

Gibson Management:  “I… guess… that… we… do…”

Spunky Consultant:  “Great!  Make the check out to…”

So what happened the next day?

Gibson launched a new website that displays each of its exquisite instruments in the light that they deserve.  Best of all, on every page of the website, beneath the featured instrument, they included threaded comments (like on YouTube) where visitors can comment on the featured guitar and the community can vote the comment up or down.

This is spunky, dynamic, web 2.0-ish online social media marketing at its finest!

Except for one thing…

The most popular comments, those that received the largest number of votes, make Gibson look like a Buick, not a luxury premium.

One comment in particular, truly struck a chord with me.  Here it is at No. 1 with 452 votes for the Gibson Les Paul Dusk Tiger:

I can see the salesmen at Guitar Center now: Salesman: “Hey man check out the new Gibson Dusk Tiger! It’s got all of these amazing features!” Customer: “It looks kinda stupid.” Salesman: “Yeah but it tunes itself! You can dial in any tone you want on this baby!” Customer: “Can you dial in a less stupid looking finish? My band will laugh at me if I turn up to a gig with that thing” Salesman: “It only comes in the one color, but it’s LIMITED EDITION! There’s only gonna be 1000 of these made!” Customer: “I think it’s a limited edition because there’s a limited market for these things. Even then I doubt that there are enough guys out there wearing the leather pants, wolf t-shirt and eye makeup necessary to look as stupid as this guitar. And those guys usually don’t have $4000 to waste on what is basically a gimmicky Les Paul dressed as a gay tiger, so you’re going to have a hard time selling these, aren’t you?” Salesman: “Like you would not believe”

Where do you think Gibson went wrong with its online marketing strategy?

Leave me your thoughts please.