MUSIC INDUSTRY BLOG

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.

This is a guest post by Brian Mazzaferri

My name is Brian, I’m in a Nintendo-Pop-Rock band called I Fight Dragons, and we currently get over 200 new fans signing up for our email list every week.

We officially launched just under six months ago, with 0 fans on the list.  As I write this, we have 3656 subscribers.  We didn’t add a single fan ourselves, these are all people that have signed themselves up, that we now know, love, and interact with on a regular basis.  They are our biggest champions and a constant inspiration to us to keep working harder and pushing ourselves.

Note: there has been no label investing in us, no management company pulling the strings, no 800-pound gorilla confusing the issues.  While I appreciate the creativity of endeavors like those of Radiohead and Trent Reznor, let’s be honest; it’s not rocket science to make the internet work for you when you already have legions of fans.  That’s the easy part.  Offer them stuff to buy, and they will buy it.  Tada.

But how does a new band go about getting fans when starting from scratch?  Most advice on the subject is sorely old-hat (just play as many shows as humanly possible and never stop), or hopelessly impersonal (add 500 targeted MySpace friends every day).  The problem is that it all revolves around impressing the industry and getting to the point where someone will drop a big chunk of change to buy you a fanbase.  And there’s the root of the problem, because in the internet age money just can’t do enough.  So unless you get on TV or become famous for some other reason, the key is finding a real way to establish and grow meaningful relationships with an ever-growing number of fans.

So I humbly submit our method, which so far has been going pretty well.  For the sake of brevity, I’ll boil our online strategy to three core steps:

1. Give your music away, but don’t throw it away

We’ve given away a free digital copy of our debut EP to everyone who signs up for our email list.  For people who don’t know us, it’s a free and easy way to learn about our music for free.  And then we’ve got their ear.  Note, this is VERY different to just posting it online for free download.  The price may seem the same, but the result is 100% different, because we now have a foot in the proverbial door.

2. Regularly give away stuff that’s way too good to give away

Next, we send an email to our list every Monday at 11AM (for the most part).  More weeks than not, that email contains free music.  And not just some off-the-cuff track, it’s a track that is up to our personal standards, which I’d like to think are very high.  In holding ourselves to that standard, we give our fans something new that they really want to show their friends.  And when the next new track goes out, the new converts get to become the evangelists.  But they need new music to do that, and not just any new music, YOUR BEST new music.

3. Be real, be available, and be involved

This seems like a no-brainer, but it actually takes a LOT of work.  We’re on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, our Blog, and TheSixtyOne every day, talking with people and being involved in conversations.  I’m NOT talking about one-way, blast-yourself-out-there stuff like MySpace adding.  I’m talking about joining in conversations on Twitter that you have something to add to.  About commenting earnestly on music you like.  About joining a community, not trumpeting your own message.

Of course, you’ve still got to play live (and put on as great a show as you can muster), you’ve still got to have great music and high standards (in whatever context you choose), and you’ve still got to get out there and network, to become a part of the physical community as well as the virtual one.

But ultimately, in the early stages it’s not about the money.  Or I should say, it’s not about the marketing money.  It’s about you, your music, and your willingness to put in the time and energy to develop real, deep, and meaningful connections with fans.

In a press release distributed today by ReverbNation’s own Jed Carlson, ReverbNation, the all-under-one-roof music marketing portal with almost 400,000 users announced the pre-launch of a new product dubbed Site Builder, a collaborative effort with Bandzoogle, a custom website building service for indie artists.  Site Builder enables artists with no technical know-how to easily create their own websites in just a few clicks and automatically integrate their content from their ReverbNation accounts and connect their websites to other supporting ReverbNation features such as FanReach, the popular newsletter client.

“It’s critical for Artists to have their own ‘home’ where they can develop fan relationships, grow their brand, and conduct business directly with their fans,” says ReverbNation Co-Founder Lou Plaia.  “Site Builder is another step in creating a true, turnkey solution for the DIY artist.   Soon we will be adding a comprehensive direct-to-fan store that will allow artists to sell merchandise, music, ringtones, and tickets to their fans through all of their fan touch points online.”

The addition of Site Builder to ReverbNation’s comprehensive, one-stop service brings the company even closer to its 360-degree vision for DIY artists.

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“When we launched our free digital distribution service, we knew we would be able to provide our users with new possibilities to help them expand their own marketing. With Jango Airplay, our users can freely invest into getting radio promotions and establish unique social interactions with new fans to help drive music sales. We are very excited to be working with Jango to provide an effective marketing avenue to our users.” said Kevin Rivers, Founder and CEO of WaTunes.

“We designed Jango Airplay to give emerging artists an affordable and effective way to get their music proactively played to real listeners who like similar music. Thanks to WaTunes and affordable technology it is cheaper than ever to produce and sell music – but getting your music heard is the first step. We are very excited to bring WaTunes users in front of our 6 Million listeners. ” said Mattias Stanghed, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Jango.

Related Posts: Spotify, Grooveshark Artists

P2P streaming music service, Grooveshark, has launched an artist promotion initiative – much like the track placement scheme Jango conceived of – as a means for artists and music promoters to purchase plays on its platform, a direct advertising approach that makes sense.  The Gainesville, Florida, company of approximately 40 young entrepreneurs has created a music service that rivals that of Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming.

Grooveshark claims to have deployed a legal music discovery and consumption model, providing its users with a financial incentive to share music, compensating artist/labels for their respective share of ‘broadcasts’, and maximizing illegal file sharing by financing its original sources.  Whether this service is actually legal or not is questionable and it appears that the company has created an expensive model to sustain on ad revenues alone.  However, they’re coming through on some very interesting marketing features for small budget music marketing campaigns.  At its core, Grooveshark Artists offers pay-for-play audio realestate matched to its existing track recommendations and provides analytics tools for track placement optimization. 

In addition, it has partnered up with some of the most talked about music tech startups for music retail, licensing, funding, and more, including Bandcamp, Sellaband and TheNextBigSound, all under the Grooveshark banner which already includes a number of subsidiary services including Tinysong, a track link generating tool for viral distribution, and  Twisten.fm, a Twitter crawler that finds music-related tweets and links them to playable tracks.  All of this put together amounts to a powerful enterprise of do-it-yourself marketing and a 360 indie approach akin to ReverbNation.