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Rockstar2.co.uk

www.rockstar2.co.uk
ROCKSTAR 2.0 | NEXT-GENERATION INDEPENDENT MUSIC
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© 2007 ALEXANDER CAMERON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. [email protected]
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introduction
The Rockstar 2.0 Project was created in 2007 by Alexander Cameron.
You need to practice what you preach, and for that reason this report is
produced and distributed free of charge under a Creative Commons License
(http://creativecommons.org/) to anyone who wants it. You should not be
paying for this or any of its accompanying materials.
Free feel to copy it, share it, tear it up, send it, quote it, reference it, re-print it
in part or in full in any way you like at any time on any device anywhere in the
world for as long as you want.
Only one condition: please include a link to the original report materials
somewhere and credit Alex Cameron as the author. If you roll it up and
smack a promoter with it, please include a photograph of the scumbag
concerned with you doing a victory salute in triumph.
The views expressed in this document are those of Alex Cameron and NOT
also indicative of those who have helped or contributed to it. These guys didn’t
write it, so don’t get pissy with them or assume they always think exactly the
same things as i do. A lot of the time we disagree, and they wouldn’t dare be
as blunt as i am in public.
This may not be comfortable reading. It is for open-minded and intelligent
people who understand the world has changed, and is still changing. You may
not agree with a lot of it.
If you support the idea of prosecuting music fans for “illegal” downloading, or
think you can make editorial demands , as well as persecute, control and
censor with impunity, put this down and do something else. It is not for you
and you are wasting your time.
If you’re a promoter, you really won’t like it.
If you’ve managed to be brave enough to face up to the fact that things may
not be the same as the way they were before, read on, and let’s get started on
showing you what a lot of people don’t want you to know, because it would
mean they couldn’t charge you and/or rip you off like they are doing now.
Alexander Cameron, Digital TX Limited/Devils Lane Media
[email protected]
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thank you to everyone who contributed and helped:
Bruce Elliott-Smith, Archangel Music Group Limited
[email protected]
Virgilio Fino & Natalie Plessis, Use Your Ears Limited
[email protected]
Tristan Maguire, Native Tongue Limited
[email protected]
Nina Naran, Media Bitch PR Limited
[email protected]
Richard “Bateman” Powell, Presswire PR Limited
[email protected]
Alan Cowderoy, Alan Cowderoy Management Limited
[email protected]
Ben Woolf & Andy Dean, The Boilerhouse Boys
[email protected]
Katie Holland, Handle Recruitment Limited
[email protected]
Steve Somerville, 7 Digital Limited
[email protected]
Marcos Alegria, Photography
[email protected]
Marcel Kornblum, Marcel & Limited
[email protected]
Chris Vine, Intellisoftware Limited
[email protected]
Dan Milne, Dirty Hobo Pictures Limited
[email protected]
Bruce Selkirk, Apt Media Limited
[email protected]
Debra Downes, Dawson Breed Music Limited
[email protected]
Clare Westby, UKania.com
[email protected]
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thanks to the artists who let us cause chaos:
Some Velvet Morning
http://www.somevelvetmorning.co.uk/
Mancini
http://www.manciniband.co.uk/
Alzir
http://www.myspace.com/alzir
Thinking For Tuesday
http://www.thinkingfortuesday.com/
and very special thanks: kitty brooks
Kitty should rightly be credited as the co-author of this report and as such is
the silent partner in what you’re reading. Without her help, resources and
input this project wouldn’t have been possible. She is truly one of the rising
stars of this industry and a multi-talented force that is under-appreciated and
under-applied.
What is written here vastly comes from everyday discussion and debate with
her almost on a cellular level and there are few people who understand this
new world, and its traditional pushy older brother, better than her.
[email protected]
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contents
introduction
new rules for the next generation
filesharing is not a problem
setting up and tripping out
nice to meet you, whoever you are
producing almost for free
the content production line
websites are software applications
a little innovation goes a long way
communicating with fans
cutting out the middlemen
music: the original social network
making some damned money
sharing your music with the world
online tv and video
the show must go on
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there are 6 million bands registered
on MySpace.
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the music industry is the only
industry with a 90% failure rate.
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only 1% of the 100 billion
downloads last year were legal.
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new rules for the next-generation
As this report is being written, Radiohead have released their latest album
with open pricing on the Internet, Madonna has abandoned Warner Music for
a concert promoter, Ash have declared that they will no longer be making
albums, Prince has given away his album and made $11 million from it, and
David Gray has decided his entire production process has changed.
Ladies and gentleman, a stampede is beginning. And it’s about time.
the world has changed
Sorry if you don’t like hearing that, but it has. You can’t go on like before, and
things are done differently now. That means they are no longer the same as
they were before. Change is very, very hard and is always resisted before it
becomes the norm.
The change in our new world is about control – who controls what and who
loses control. The Internet has made us a global village, empowered the
ordinary person and is cutting out the unnecessary middlemen. As we will see,
it is like a wave you can surf, but if you stand in front of it pointing your finger
and complaining, you’ve got seconds left.
Nothing changes instantaneously. It takes time to adjust. But be under no
illusion – things are not the same anymore, and the failures are part of the
larger
failure
to
recognise
the
larger
change.
london: the place with no dirty secrets
London is a really crap place to play if you want to make any serious progress.
The music scene in our capital is pathetic at best and genuinely a shadow of
what it was. The same city that put out all the great bands of the last few years
is slave to the dreadful pop pap the labels now promote as their core product.
The advantage is that you get seen; the down side is that you get treated like
crap. The audiences are apathetic, exhausted and lazy, the market is
saturated, the promoters are as corrupt as they come, and you’re just noise in
amongst the thousands of others. The arrogance of the live industry has made
the whole environment a cynical place to inhabit.
As a band, you’re better off staying out of the capital and being a diamond in
the rough in the smaller cities. A following can be built from those smaller
places and the Internet, and you can work towards a label deal by selectively
networking into the business.
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europe and asia – the new frontiers
Increasingly, artists are travelling further afield to make a living. Access to the
globalised world through the Internet has brought music from all over the
world directly to fans’ living rooms.
The UK isn’t a great place to play simply as we are more tolerant of the
rubbish labels force on us. Once it was America you wanted to crack, but the
simple truth is that you get treated a lot better, and paid a lot better elsewhere.
If you’re a rock act, that specific genre of music generally sells well in the US,
Canada and Germany. In Europe the promoters and publishers are more
welcoming and less cynical than those in the traditional markets. Your tour
expenses are fully paid for, the personnel are polite, and it’s a hell of a lot
easier to build up a following there.
Indeed, ask yourself this. If a UK band that commands audiences of several
hundred can regularly travel to China and play stadiums for 10x the response
AND be paid for it, why stay in the UK?
“Music sales at lowest since records began”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article
2045335.ece
stop trying to make money out of bands
If there was one simple command you could give all the sharks, crooks and
cynical money-grabbers in the music industry today, it would be to stop trying
to rob bands of their money.
THEY DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY.
And they’ll have even less by the time those sharks have finished with them.
Art and business don’t mix too well, and musicians aren’t designed, although
they are now required, to be businesspeople. In business you follow the
money as a cardinal rule. Nobody is quite getting it.
A few of those people are:
•
•
•
•
•
PR companies charging bands £500 - £3,000 a month for “exposure”
and adding friends on MySpace
Promoters charging bands if they don’t bring enough friends to their
gig
Pluggers charging bands to send out their material to mailing lists of
radio stations
Music video networks charging bands to wire EPKs and sample videos
to radio stations
Tour operators charging bands to come on as support acts
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•
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Web designers charging bands up to £5,000 for crappy websites that
don’t work, are never finished and a nightmare to upgrade
There are so many more. Being in a band is hard work, and it’s damned
expensive. You have to buy your way in with all the little expenses and
nobody reimburses you for them later. It has its rewards of course, but the two
things are grossly disproportionate.
our licensing laws are archaic
There is no way around it – the UK’s alcohol and live performance laws are as
ridiculous as they come. Regulation kills art. Fact. You can stop your internal
dialogue. As soon as you restrict creativity or performance, you are retarding
culture. Responsibility for encouraging the growth and propagation of music
begins with local and central government.
Currently a venue needs a licence to hold performances with more than two
contributors. Why exactly is that? If it is a health and safety issue, then the
regulators need to refine the law so it is a general-purpose event license, not
one that specifically restricts music. What on earth do they think will happen if
we allow music to be performed wherever and whenever? Residents can still
complain if the volume levels are high, but we must not penalise and restrict
from the start.
Thankfully the drinking laws have been changed, although the paperwork is
even more intimidating to make up for it. The British culture of bingeing for
three hours a night from 8pm to 11pm is unbelievably dumb, and stems from
emergency laws instituted in World War I. The change in the laws is actually
meaningless because travel and policing resources still correspond to the old
system. If the last train is at midnight, you can’t spread your drinking out until
2am. Research shows that most people get tired and go home around 1am.
labels are now venture capitalists
A 90% failure rate. That about sums up how little fun it is to be a record label.
Out of 10 punts, 7 fail, 2 break even and 1 makes it big. But that’s the risk. If
you don’t want to play the game, start a company somewhere else.
Don’t complain the weather’s changing, get new clothes. You can only blame
“piracy” for so long before the game is up and everyone sees exactly the
problems are. “Piracy” is a boon for music PR departments – it can be used as
a scapegoat for almost anything.
Anything other than the fact that the crap coming out of the majors is just that:
crap. The public have been unhappy and not bothering to buy for years on
end. They’ve been screaming about what they want so loudly that they’ve got
fed up and gone their own way to create a market without the majors.
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In our new world, bands do the first stage themselves instead of being handed
out the 6-figure advances that fuelled their drug habits and paid for bedsits.
Smaller indie labels are getting bigger in scope and far more flexible.
Middlemen aren’t the exclusive distribution chain anymore. Once they reach a
nice small to mid size, then they need to go to a major to get proper backing.
What does that remind you of? A company that is seeking funding through the
normal venture capital (VC) and angel routes. Bands are small businesses
now like indie labels. They have to spend capital, earn revenue, innovate
multiple products and monitor their successes to ensure their strategy is
working. Once they have enough foundation, they need extra cash to fund
their growth.
Ask yourself – what does the label actually do? Merchandising, management,
touring and recording are all separate deals. Advertising sponsorship are
directly with the artist. Distribution and publishing are semi-separate. What
reason is there for the band to sign up with a label if they can do deals
separately with the others, all on a global scale?
And that cash is predominantly for marketing – to get widespread coverage on
TV, radio, print and posters on the wall. It does buy more complex and quality
recording, plus make doing everything a lot easier when cash is running
through the machine, but is it strictly necessary for the luxury of getting
screwed by your royalty rate?
The labels’ answer is the concept of 360 degree deals – where they organise
everything around the artist, including all merchandising and publishing. What
on earth can they add to the situation that is worth what they will take from it?
The pain of doing the deals separately is arguably worth it when it comes to
how much revenue is lost through adding a middleman manager. Only
ignorant or lazy artists will get caught out on that one.
chart and collection agencies need to upgrade
As more and more bands and digital content arrive and saturate our lives, the
greater our need is for mechanisms to sort and filter what we like from what
we don’t, and what is any good from what is not. The charts could not be more
relevant. However, they are increasingly irrelevant.
What we actually need is a chart that counts exactly how many copies of a file
are available illegally on P2P networks, as that would give us a genuine and
accurate idea of popularity. Labels have been fiddling the charts for years and
it’s well known. Sue me if you like for saying that. “Buying back” singles and
albums from designated stores and forging downloads is so commonplace
that it’s virtually institutional.
Why can’t a band submit sales of their own material through their own online
store for inclusion in the mainstream charts?
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Don’t tell me – it wouldn’t be reliable. Just exactly how reliable have record
stores been in the last 20 years? If an artist can supply verified records that
have been certified by a credit card company, an e-commerce gateway, a
merchant bank and a receiving high-street bank, and then accurately
compared to web server logs, individual payment data (card numbers), unique
entry codes and application servers, exactly how is a physical store going to
provide the same level of absolute security that the sale was 100% genuine?
Now saying all that provokes the response that it would be impractical for
every band to do that – it would be chaos! Oh yeah? Maybe if staff had to
hand-sift paper records but that’s why we have computers. E-commerce
systems are fully integrated and automated, with a verifiable and secure paper
trail. They are just databases talking to one another, and it’s not hard to do.
The truth is that to do something as useful as that would put the middlemen
right out of business, and that’s a serious vested interest that it threatens.
The answer is for the agencies to integrate their systems with e-commerce
providers and license them to collect and register data officially. The PRS
cannot afford to offer blanket licenses in a globalised world splintered into
multiple devices and platforms. When music files are portable, rights need to
be attached to people, not people. Where you formerly licensed materials to
countries, platforms, devices and time periods, now we need to look
elsewhere.
copyright will change eventually
The system of intellectual property licensing we implement today was
formalised in the early part of the 19th century in reaction to the invention of
radio. Because copyright uses the term “moral and ethical rights”, labels have
gone to town with the guilt-tripping and decided that sharing music is “theft”
and “criminal”. Define it as you like. If it is criminal, then send police into every
third house in Britain. Laws are made by the people, for the people.
When a new technology or business model fails, it is inevitably because
someone has decided to try to put old rules on a new innovation. It never,
ever works. You cannot put an old head on new shoulders. You cannot expect
a new world to be able to work with old ways.
Copyright law ultimately has to change whether we like it or not, like all laws –
what is happening now is the industry is procrastinating to serve its own
interests and draw it out for as long as it can. We don’t have a viable
alternative so the resulting chaos is again down the violent nature of change
being forced on a collective of fat companies who don’t like it.
An
example
of
a
new
model
are
the
GPL
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html)
and
Creative
Commons
(http://creativecommons.org/) licensing agreements that are part of the
Page 15 of 95
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“Copyleft” movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) and used by open
source software organisations and collaborative artists. Neither of these allow
work to be re-used or claimed by someone else, and most stringently adhere
to author rights. Where they differ is in distribution – they do not require
royalties and allow the media to be shared, modified, mentioned and used
fairly as long as the author credits are intact.
This document is a prime example of that methodology. It is released under
Creative Commons licensing, meaning you can do whatever you want with it
as
long
as
you
credit
copyright
to
the
author.
protectionism: a relic of a bygone era
Back in the days when every part of the music industry was strangeheld by
different corporate in the chain, everything an artist did or a fan received was
strictly controlled. Recordings were private, exclusivity meant you had to pay a
premium, silence and surprises for marketing campaigns were always
safeguarded and the big boys called the shots.
Not anymore. Those dreamy days are long gone. You’re screwed.
Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking you are in control. The Internet has
changed everything and now the consumer is. They control the playlist, the
distribution, the sales, the marketing – everything. You cannot manage it, you
cannot control it and you had better not try, lest you go insania, as Peter
Andre might say.
Think you’re a big rock star? Think again. You’re 1 in 6 million now. You’re not
special, and you’ll be next week’s chip-wrapping. Think you can hold back
your album release because scores of fans will be waiting outside the record
store for just a glimpse of your incredibly talented debut? You’re delusional.
Everything just got harder. You cannot control distribution, so don’t even try.
You’re not making albums anymore, you’re doing a constant flow of tracks that
come in moods, custom compilations and seasons.
Don’t patronise your fans, and don’t be over-sensitive. They don’t care about
your feelings, and they will forget you easily. Don’t try to hold back or protect
what you have just because that’s what you read about in pretentious label
driven rock magazines and saw your favourite stars go bankrupt for. If you’re
producing for free, you have to give it away for free. Music isn’t about money
or greed, it’s about music and it’s time you remembered that.
You can prosecute every one, and neither can a label. You change and adapt,
or you perish. Engage or you die. Very simple and easy to remember. You
have no choice. Next time you sit around the kitchen table pontificating about
what “the kids” might think and how it will affect your potential sales, just kill
yourself.
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Nobody cares. You need to be different. You are wasting your time clinging on
to an old idea from an old industry that isn’t relevant anymore. If you carry on
doing that, you’ll be irrelevant too.
and now it’s over to you
The Rockstar 2.0 report and program was designed for the next-generation of
independent musician. It was conceived to show people directly that they
don’t need this complex array of service providers, sharks, middlemen and
hangers-on to do something world changing. Thanks to the Internet, the world
is on your doorstep.
You can do it all with your bare hands by working smart instead of working
hard.
And the great news is that you don’t need a label, agency or anyone else to
do these things for you anymore. Everything is out there, pretty much for free.
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filesharing is not a problem
Music fans have spoken. They are not willing to pay for music anymore.
Read that again. You have absolutely no choice in the matter. You can’t fight
it. You can’t win. You can only adapt, and the sooner you get used to it, the
easier it becomes. So if you can’t beat it, you need to exploit it.
give them what they want
The outrage about these services is because they violate current copyright
law. Laws are paper absolutes, not moral ones. If copyright law changes (as it
most probably will), the setting up of these services will mirror the birth of
radio, which the music industry tried to suffocate but now relies on.
People use P2P filesharing because it is:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Completely free
Without annoying DRM
Very fast
Very easy
A massive library
A way of discovering new music
A way to tell which music is most popular
Learn from that list. That is what they want. Listen to fans, and listen to what
they demand. Give them what they want. Surf on the wave rather than trying
to fight it and being drowned.
get out and try it for yourself
If you haven’t used a free P2P (“peer to peer”), filesharing service, stop what
you are doing and download all of these now:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Limewire (http://www.limewire.com)
Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net)
Emule (http://www.emule-project.net)
Morpheus (http://www.morpheus.com)
Soulseek (http://www.slsknet.org)
Bearshare (http://www.bearshare.com)
Shareaza (http://www.shareaza.com)
Azureus is widely considered to be the best program for BitTorrent. To get
music, video and software you need to search for and download “torrent” files
from torrent websites like BT Junkie (http://www.btjunkie.org), IsoHunt
(http://www.isohunt.com), TorrentSpy (http://www.torrentspy.com) and
Mininova (http://www.mininova.org).
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technical cat n’ mouse
The moment you release a CD onto the market, it will be “ripped” using a free
program like CDex (http://cdexos.sourceforge.net) and released onto a
filesharing network. Anything that is streamed on a website can be recorded
(“stream
ripped”)
by
a
program
like
StreamRipper
(http://streamripper.sourceforge.net) and turned into an electronic file.
Even despite encryption, DVDs can be
copied and converted by something like DVD
Decrypter (http://www.copy-hdripper.com/software/dvd-decrypter.html) onto
a hard drive.
Microsoft’s DRM has been cracked with FairUse4WM
(http://www.videohelp.com/tools/FairUse4WM).
Even the new ultra-secure HD-DVD encryption is finished, before it’s even
been released by BackupHDDVD (http://www.backuphddvd.net).
time to listen and understand
So let’s get right into the issue.
Digital music is about portability. Music lovers want to carry their music with
them everywhere – on their home stereo, their computer, their laptop, their
TV, their games console, their iPod, their PSP, their mobile phone and their
car. They want to share their new discoveries with their friends, just as they
did when they recorded a cassette for someone.
The strength of the Internet is that it is viral, meaning it is the most powerful
word-of-mouth system the planet has ever seen. You cannot control the
spread of digital files, and they stay high quality forever. If you try to control
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access to those files with encryption (or DRM – Digital Rights Management),
you cut off that viral engine off at its source,
The people who are downloading 100 billion files a year are NOT criminals,
they are music lovers and YOUR FANS. It is not “stealing”. They are
searching for music they love. Why would they bother doing it for the sake of
it? They’re looking for you, and want to hear you. They have massive music
libraries on their computer.
Criminalise your fans, and you lose them. Copyright is not a moral issue, it is a
business model issue.
Granted, a small minority are organised crime reproducing material for profit,
as has always been the case, but ask yourself this simple question. Who are
those professional pirates going to sell their warez to when their “customers”
can download free like they can? They have no market. No market means no
demand, which means no piracy.
A download does NOT equal a lost sale. This is a fallacy perpetrated by a
dying industry desperate find a scapegoat to blame its self-destructive failings
on. It is a change you must adapt to rather than fight. Read statistics for
yourself and decide. The facts are that one download equals a new sale.
So-called “illegal” downloading is an established distribution market, with an
incredibly compelling business model. You can’t compete with it, you can’t
stop it and you can’t run away from it. You have no control whatsoever. It is
the future of music distribution.
For more information, visit Downhill Battle (http://www.downhillbattle.org).
To learn how to deal with it, read on to “sharing your music with the world”.
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setting up and tripping out
mapping out resources and streams
The very first thing you need to do before embarking on a major acceleration
project is to determine who is available to help, what their skills are and how
much time is available. It is simply a small list on a piece of paper that needs
to go up on the wall, along with their contact details.
When you’re a small operation, you have to do everything and it can get
chaotic. The answer to the chaos is to divide the things you have to do into
work streams and visualise them.
An example of a set of work streams would be:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
ADMINISTRATION
(accounts, paperwork)
REVENUE
(merchandise, fees)
IDENTITY/IMAGE
(logo, branding, costume)
EVENTS
(gigs, venues, promoters, booking agents)
CONTENT PRODUCTION
(music, video, podcasts, magazine)
DISTRIBUTION
(downloads, PRS, iTunes, P2P)
MARKETING/PR
(promos, advertising, word of mouth)
FANBASE
(competitions, special releases, messaging)
DEVELOPMENT
(new ideas, partnerships)
Mind-mapping is a powerful technique to plot out
and understand all your goals and objectives.
Programs
like
FreeMind
(http://freemind.sourceforge.net) and Personal
Brain (http://www.thebrain.com) can help automate
the process.
The best business diagram software you can use for visualising projects,
information and goals is the magnificent SmartDraw
(http://www.smartdraw.com)..
If you don’t have Microsoft Office, use the free and feature-rich Open Office
(http://www.openoffice.org)..
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email software and spam control
Everyone in your band or entourage needs an email, as the primary method of
communication. Make it formal. Don’t use Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail
addresses. The format should be [email protected].
Encourage fans to email you directly.
Most web hosting packages and domain names (.com, .co.uk) come with free
mailboxes in the format of [email protected]. Stir clear of using
a “catch-all” email alias, as you will be almost certainly be bombed with spam
when the spammers see that all email sent to you is received and read.
Email comes in 2 forms – POP3 and IMAP. POP3 means emails are
downloaded and stored on a computer, whereas IMAP stores the email
remotely and centrally on the mail server. Because you potentially have 2-5
people accessing the same mailbox, choose IMAP if you can.
It will also mean you can access all emails
from any computer in the world from free
webmail
software
like
SquirrelMail
(http://www.squirrelmail.org) or RoundCube
(http://roundcube.net). Naturally you can also
use PC software like MS Outlook, Outlook
Express, Eudora or Mozilla Thunderbird.
As your email will be made public, spam is going to overwhelm you as time
goes on. One way to counter it is to create a mailbox specifically for catching it
when it comes in (called a “spambox”). You could also install something like
SpamAssassin (http://spamassassin.apache.org) on your mail server.
The 3rd is to sign up with a mail filtering provider like SpamArrest
(http://www.spamarrest.com) or the fantastic FastMail
(http://www.fastmail.fm). .
Each person who has an email account must set up an email signature that
displays information about their role in the band, their contact details, the
band’s contact details and the website addresses of where the band is online.
online collaboration tools
The chances are that you will have 2-10 people working together on the same
types of things – accounts, promotions, research, answering messages and
so on. What you are doing is collaborating (just as you do when you’re
songwriting), and the web has the biggest list of social collaboration tools
available anywhere. Most are free.
The first thing to do is create a band Gmail account (http://gmail.google.com)
for the whole band to use, as it will be used for accessing all Google’s online
tools and registrations on websites.
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Get everyone to use the same “start” page
when they go onto the Internet. Netvibes
(http://www.netvibes.com) is the perfect
place. Sign up for an account and give
everyone the same username and password.
Set up tabs, feeds, modules and widgets that
everyone can use simultaneously. This is the control admin panel you all use
and update.
For managing project milestones and to-do
lists, use the magnificent Basecamp
software
from
37
Signals
(http://www.basecamphq.com).
SugarCRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm) is
an incredibly useful business system for
managing customers (venues. Licensees etc)
that is free and easy to install on your own
private website.
When you are researching or Googling away,
everyone will need to know what has been
found and whether someone else is already on the case. Create a free web
bookmarking service using Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) and integrate it into
your Firefox web browser instead of keeping the information on your PC.
Use “My Maps” in Google Maps (http://maps.google.co.uk) to plot out gigs
and venues geographically for everyone to see, and use Google Notebook
(http://www.google.com/notebook) and Google Docs (http://docs.google.com)
to note things down centrally so everyone can access them at any time no
matter
where
they
are
in
the
world.
music business networking sites
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. If you’re working in the music
industry, you’re running a small business and you need to start networking to
meet other music industry professionals. Use these online communities to be
introduced to labels, consultants, press and more.
The top sites to create profiles on and actively use every day for business are:
•
•
•
LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com)
Use Your Ears (http://www.useyourears.com)
Ecademy (http://www.ecademy.com)
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•
•
•
•
•
24
Viadeo (http://www.viadeo.com)
Xing (http://www.xing.com)
Marzar (http://www.marzar.com)
A Small World (http://www.asmallworld.net)
Qube (http://www.qubers.com).
the essential electronic press kit (EPK)
Every artist needs a press kit. An EPK is either a ZIP file or secure online
website that is a summary of information and materials given out to industry
contacts.
You give out your EPK to promoters, venue managers, booking agents,
journalists, labels, researchers, marketing companies and anyone else who
wants to publicise you in some way.
If you can, try to use a secure website where
you can control access to the information, and
record who is accessing it. The more you
know about who wants the information and
what they want, the more you can refine and
perfect what you distribute.
It must be simple, easy, organised, accurate
and useful. Ideally, your EPK should contain all these things:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
biographical & contact information
monochromatic, high resolution, press photos (for easy reproduction)
performance requirements
rights policies and restrictions
market research and demographic information
press reviews and interviews
promotional videos
contract and/or technical riderTo view examples, visit
http://www.music-epk.com.
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nice to meet you, whoever you are
You can never be too close to your customers or fans. Listening to them and
giving them what they want is paramount. Maybe you’re wrong about a few
things. Maybe you’re right. There’s only one way to find out.
defining success and progress metrics
“Metrics” is a big mathematical business word, but all it means is the way you
measure how much progress you’re making. It could be any number of things,
but you need to know if what you’re doing is having any effect at all, and if so,
how much effect.
All it takes is for you to ask “how do we measure how successful we’ve been?”
Here are a few ways:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
How many hits and unique visitors your website is getting
How many people turned up at your gigs to see you specifically
How many people are on your mailing list
How big your membership club is
How much money you’ve made
How many free and paid downloads you’ve had
The number of friends you have on MySpace
How many of your files turn up on P2P networks
How many CDs you’ve sold
How much merchandise you’ve sold
How many phone calls and offers you get from promoters, booking
agents and venue managers
You can choose one of them, or all of them. Once you’ve decided how you will
measure your success, you need a way to record the information and
visualise it.
This is as simple as noting down numbers on a scrap piece of paper and then
putting together a small spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. Once the information
is in, you can easily create graphs and charts that go up and down. There’s
nothing better for morale that seeing you’re going up and up.
survey your fans for market research
Surveygizmo (http://www.surveygizmo.com) is a beautiful and extremely
powerful online survey service that allows you to create free surveys that can
take up 250 responses, which is more than enough to spot trends and
opinions. Setting it up takes around 30mins and it can stay open forever.
Once you have created your survey, offer a prize draw to pull people in, with a
little mystery behind it. Send out an email to your mailing list, add it to your
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MySpace page and tell everyone about it at gigs. You will invariably be
surprised what you find out.
Here are some of the results we received after keeping the offer open for
around 6 weeks.
The PDF was created by saving the web page and converting it to PDF with
the free and open-source printer program PDF Creator
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator)..
rewarding the people who love your music
Another great way of subtly getting feedback from your fans is to hold
competitions that they can enter. The prize can be different each time – free
entry to the next gig, signed merchandise, parties to spend with the band and
more. The list is infinite and up to you.
Competitions are also a very clever way to get a lot of work done for you for
free. Imagine a competition to design the best fansite for your band – every
single fansite has a link back to your main site, increasing your Google
ranking.
Get fans to re-design the graphical layout of your website, to hold the best
party for you to play at, tell the most people about you, distribute the most
flyers, get the most venue hand-stamps and more. In this business, you can
turn almost anything around to work in your interests and appear to be for
your fans only, simple due to their passion for you and your music.
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producing almost for free
Personal computing has revolutionised the professional production of music –
to the point that it is no longer necessary. In the old days you needed a record
contract so you could use the advance that came with it to pay for a producer,
an engineer and the studio time that cost thousands of pounds a week.
Even with the advent of digital systems and the industry standard Pro Tools
from Digidesign (http://www.digidesign.com) did not have the same effect the
small town computer store has.
just do it yourself
Obviously musicians still need to buy
instruments and amplification, but a few
hundred pounds will buy you a great quality
condenser microphone (e.g. MXL 990 –
http://www.mxlmics.com) and sound card
(e.g. M-Audio Audiophile - http://www.maudio.com). Digital inputs mean that the
original sound is preserved and there is no
need to buy a bucketload of Shure 57s to
mic up amps as was done before.
Instrument effects processors are increasingly
orientated around home recording. The highly
portable Pod X3 unit from Line 6
(http://line6.com/podx3) can handle vocals,
guitars and bass, and supports two instruments
at once. It has a USB connection built-in that
acts as an independent PC sound source that can be directly into audio
programs, bypassing the need for a sound card.
You don’t really need to pay for high-end mastering
either. Using VST software from T-Racks
(http://www.t-racks.com), you can have it with a few
hundred dollars.
If you are recording straight into a PC you will quickly run into the problem of
latency, which ideally needs to be less than 10ms to avoid echo and timing
issues. Steinberg’s ASIO technology was designed to overcome this, but if
you don’t have proprietary drivers, you can use everyone’s favourite
independent brand, ASIO4ALL (http://www.asio4all.com/).
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software piracy is empowering
The immediate and obvious way to start producing on a PC is to download a
pirated version of a professional multi-tracking recording program like
Steinberg Cubase, Propellerhead Reason, Adobe Audition, Apple Logic Pro
or Sony SoundForge from a BitTorrent site like BT Junkie
(http://www.btjunkie.org). “Cracks”, “patches” and “keygens” are easily
available and disable any mechanism the developers has embedded that
makes a hardware unit necessary for them to work. All require enormous
amounts of RAM to perform properly.
A more profound solution is the freely
available Reaper (http://reaper.fm/),
which many producers claim is as good
as, if not better, than most of the pro
programs on the market.
For individual track editing, the free and
open-source
Audacity
(http://audacity.sourceforge.net)
is
extremely useful.
plugins and libraries
All music software supports VST and DirectX sound effects and digital
processing and can output music that is as good as what a professional studio
would create. Most provide tools for professional mixing and some even allow
mastering.
Large libraries of these “plug-in” extensions can also be downloaded from
pirate websites, and there are hundreds of websites offering free sound files.
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the drum kit problem
In the recording process, drums are typically
dealt with first and played next to a click track.
There are few ways to get around the fact that
a studio is needed to do a high-quality
recording where each percussion unit is
individually captured on a single track.
The home professional has 2 choices – a) use
a VST drum program (like Steinberg Groove
http://www.steinberg.net/945+M52087573ab0.html)
or
XLN’s
Agent
Addictive Drums (http://www.xlnaudio.com/products).
or b) record the output of an electronic drum kit (e.g. Yamaha DTX range http://www.yamaha.co.jp/english/product/drum/dtx/index.html) directly into a
track.
the world is your studio
Websites
like
DopeTracks
(http://www.dopetracks.com),
JamNow
(http://www.jamnow.com)
and
JamGlue
(http://www.jamglue.com)
provide
online
workspaces for producers, songwriters,
composers,
engineers
and
production
professionals from all over the world to
collaborate together.
Unscrambling tracks from multi-track sequencing software is simple as the
raw digital recording can be manipulated at will and will not lose quality or
require physical distribution media.
So, you can record your entire album in your spare room, but you will always
need to pay to have it professionally mastered and to consult experienced
engineers. But for the working band, it means an album can be recorded for a
few hundred pounds and the barriers to market entry that were there before
have been firmly eradicated. Now anyone can make music literally for free,
and
to
survive,
studios
need
to
get
specialist.
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the content production line
In case you hadn’t realised yet, you’re a content provider. Artists now pump
out all manner of multimedia content, not just music. Fans don’t just want to
listen – they want to watch, to read, to feel, to experience, to get addicted, to
become a part of you.
The difference is that you are the one who operates the factory line. And one
rule applies: the more you throw at them, the more they want. So if you’re
going to get into it, you need to really be into it because it’s going to take up a
lot of your time.
Examples of the types of content you need to feeding to them are:
•
AUDIO
o Songs
o Albums
o Special releases
o Remixes
o Podcasts
o Karaoke
o RIngtones
o Commentary
•
VIDEO
o Music videos
o Live gig footage
o Vodcasts
o Backstage footage
o Mashups
o Animations
o Screensavers
•
EDITORIAL
o Photographs
o Posters
o Blogs
o News
o Lyrics
o Competitions
o Journals
o Articles
o Newsletters
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an example content pipeline
In the diagram below, we take camcorder footage from a gig and funnel it
through a 30min production process that generates a pile of different content
that any artist could distribute in any number of places. Most of the tools are
free, but the ones that cost are priced similar to a round of drinks in a pub.
Here we plug the camcorder into a laptop using a Firewire/DV/1394 cable so
it shows up in Windows as a normal camera. We capture the footage on the
PC as an AVI file in high quality DV format, using Windows DirectX (or a video
card if we want to use composite inputs).
Alternatively we can skip editing and encode it directly into MPEG-2 to go
straight onto DVD or broadcast TV.
Once we have our (very big) imported DV file, we pop it into a video editing
program like Adobe Premiere or Song Vegas Pro to chop it up and make it
pretty. Once we’re done, we can export it from there as a new AVI file.
At this stage, we can choose to use MainConcept MPEG Encoder to
compress the video for DVD. In the settings, we create 2 elementary streams
(audio and video) that we add into the amazing DVD Lab Pro as a single
track. A few clicks later and we have a working menu, which we save as an
ISO disk image – ready to print multiple copies of the disc, or to upload onto
the website for people to print their own.
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We save individual frames from it as new JPEG images for the website and
MySpace, or for adding them to a special photoset, screensaver or DVD
slideshow.
Then we strip the audio from it using Audacity, and publish it as a new MP3
download and an MP3 podcast. For convenience we can also output to
Windows Media, iTunes and Real Audio if we need to.
We can take a small sample of the audio and use SUPER to convert it into
AMR and SMAF/MMF formats for use as a ringtone.
Our AVI needs watermarking if we haven’t added it already in the editing
software, so we add our logo in VirtualDubMod and save it out as a high
quality xVid AVI ready for distributing on the web.
Our xVid (MPEG-4) copy is good quality and small, so we FTP it up in its raw
file form to the website as a high quality download. We can also open it in the
free VLC Media Player, which allows us to take even more still frame
snapshots and convert to any other video format “on the fly”.
For mass distribution, we use Google Video Uploader to import it to our
Google Video account, and Brightcove PublishPod to automatically convert
to Flash Video (FLV) for our online TV station which we can suck down later
as a permanent copy with the VideoDownloader Firefox extension.
In 30-60mins, we have built an entire new library of content simply from a little
camcorder footage. It’s about now that you should be feeling like you are quite
a lazy person.
it’s all about the consistency
An artist’s image is everything. In the digital world, identity is everything.
Marketing fluffies call it “branding”, but to the rest of the world it’s about
everything being in sync – a smooth flow of information that’s controlled,
managed and fits together perfectly. Anything that sticks out and/or confuses
people causes a problem.
Consistency is about discipline, and it’s about having steady policies that don’t
change. If you’re projecting one image in one music video, and another in the
next, ultimately you’re confusing people. Who are you? What kind of music is
it? What kind of people are you? If your MySpace profile has 20 different
images slapped all over it that look different to your second music video,
where are you going with it exactly?
The very first step in managing your digital content is having a solid idea of
your image in the real world. Next comes extending that into people’s digital
lives. You can’t do anything online that isn’t planned offline. Don’t even bother
to start unless you have that – a simple black and white page is better than a
chaotic mess of different themes, images and messages.
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But most importantly, consistency is about scheduling. You need to decide
daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, bi-annual and annual schedules for when
and what you publish. Podcasts go out on this date, videos on that date.
content protocols and policies
OK, so we know you’ve decided that you
will be disciplined and consistent. What
next? Time to get a little formal about it,
and set the rules for everyone. Get out a
piece of paper and write down how things
must be done – by everyone in the band,
anyone who works with the band or is
associated with it somehow.
Once you have your list, send it to
everyone and demand they read it. No
excuses should be tolerated.
Here’s a few example points that should be mandatory:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Every piece of content needs to be approved and checked (who?)
1 person checks and authorises
Every digital file must contain as much metadata as possible
File names must have the artist name, title of the file and the website
address
Every photograph, audio and video circulated must be watermarked.
Photos are stored in the photo folder with the month or date as the
folder name
2 versions of every image/photograph must be kept – a low-res (72dpi)
copy for the web, and a high-res for print (360dpi)
Each track released must be encoded in 8 different audio codecs
3 versions of every video must be kept – the original source (DV/AVI),
the edited DVD-quality copy (PAL, MPEG-2) and the web version (SIF,
FLV/xViD/AVI etc)
Be highly anal and uber-military about forcing this on people. It will pay off in
the end, even though you will sound like a tit at first.
preparing for an infinite library
You’re going to have a LOT of content. Potentially thousands of photos,
dozens of videos, hundreds of graphics, god knows how many MP3s,
podcasts and vodcasts, and after that there’s blogs, mailings and website
applications.
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You need to get prepared and organised from the outset. If you’re not, you’re
in for trouble and some long nights of coffee-drinking.
First, decide where the
vast majority of your
content is going to be –
your digital “hive” or
“vault”, if you like. For
most artists, it’s their
website. For others, it’s
their MySpace page.
This place is where
you publish everything.
Next, you’re going to be in as many other places as you can find, so these
other “places” (websites, blogs etc) are what we might call “satellites” of the
main publishing point. When you distribute new content (for example a new
music video or blog article), you’re going to have to update all those different
websites. That’s not a good idea at all.
So you need to choose only the top 10% of what you have to put on these
“satellite” sites. A little goodie pack of the best stuff that acts as a summary to
attract people to the main website. Doing it this way means you only need to
do global/mass updates every 3-6 months and it’s a lot more manageable.
Spend an afternoon picking out your top 10:
•
•
•
promotional photos
music videos and backstage movies
MP3 music files (320k high quality and 128k medium-quality)
Then write your artist biography and put in a Word document to copy and
paste from.
This forms your digital “kit” that you can spread wherever you want. What you
should be left with is a folder on your PC containing 10 JPEGs, 10 video files
(AVIs, MPGs, WMVs etc), 20 MP3s and a Word document.
watermark absolutely everything
Watch what Hollywood studios, porn companies and stock footage companies
always do when giving away previews of their content. They watermark it with
their name or logo. It is one of the most important things you can ever do.
Once again it needs to be consistent – how big the logo is, where it is placed,
and that is placed on EVERYTHING.
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For graphics, use Adobe Photoshop to add an
additional layer with 3 items of information:
•
•
•
•
Your artist logo
The name of the artist
The address of your website/MySpace
Contact details
Every single JPEG you put out anywhere needs to have the same watermark.
You’re going to have to go through a few thousand pictures and add it, so the
most efficient way to do is use a batch “Action” or macro/.
For video, the free VirtualDubMod (http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net) is
fantastic for quick post-processing of motion frames and can also do
compression at the same time for producing smaller web video.
The process is fairly simple. Create
a black canvas in Photoshop that is
PAL dimensions – 720 pixels wide
by 576 pixels
high,
which
represents the video itself. Add the
same information:
•
•
•
•
•
Your artist logo
The name of the artist
The address of your website
The address of your MySpace page
Contact telephone number and email address (optional)
Save the file as an IBM-Compatible Bitmap (.bmp) at maximum quality. When
you open your video in VirtualDubMod, apply the “logo” filter and set the
Bitmap image you created where it needs to be. Make sure to include
transparency settings, and then just save it in your chosen format.
VirtualDubMod has a massive amount of functionality included that can also
help you to change luminance, chrominance aspect ratio, cropping, rotating
and many more.
Every single video you release must be watermarked.
meta-data and file naming
Nobody ever thinks about the detail of digital files, but it is critically important.
Consider these 2 files and choose which one is most likely to get found on a
hard drive, indexed by a search engine, as well as being played and passed
around more:
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a) Song-1.mp3
b) BandName-AlbumName-Music.Track.Name-website.co.uk.mp3
Or maybe:
a) Bandname.avi
b) BandName-Gig.Venue.Name-16th.Oct.2007-website.co.uk.avi
Seems simple huh? And here’s why it works: nobody
ever changes the file name once they’ve
downloaded it. Make people’s lives easy.
All digital files contain “meta data” – information about what they are and
what’s inside them. That’s how Windows Media Player and ITunes can
provide listings in your music library by artist name, song name, album name
etc.
The meta-information in a JPEG is known as EXIF
(Exchangeable image file format) data, and describes
the camera used to take the picture, its resolution,
exposure, focal length and so on. Free software like
Exifer
(http://www.friedemannschmidt.com/software/exifer) can add and modify this information.
The meta-information inside an MP3 file is known as asset of ID3 tags, and
they come in 2 flavours – ID3v1 and ID3v2. Unsurprisingly, they describe the
sound file itself and explain who the artist is, what the song is called, how long
it lasts, what album it’s from, what year it was published, what the lyrics are
and a thumbnail picture of the artwork. IDv2 is considerably more advanced
that it’s predecessor (v1) and can hold more information.
Every single type of music player software can
read and edit ID3 tags. The easiest way to
change it is to right click the file in Windows
and choose “Properties”. A more advanced
way to create and modify ID3 tags on your PC
is
to
use
AudioShell
(http://www.softpointer.com/AudioShell.htm)
which is slightly more helpful. Add everything
about
you
into
every
file.
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AAC or MPEG-4 (M4A – the format iTunes uses) meta information is virtually
non-existent. Ogg Vorbis uses “comments”, Monkey’s audio uses its own tags
and so on.
Video meta-data is somewhat more complex as there are so many different
types of format. The concept to grasp with video files is that the file “container”
and the actual video itself are 2 different things – the video is put inside a
container. AVI, MOV, OGG and MP4 are just file containers that can store any
type of video in any format. The meta-information is embedded in this
“container”.
AVIs can be edited in Windows like MP3 ID3 tags or by using something like
abcAVI Tag Editor (http://abcavi.tk/). QuickTime MOV files don’t use a
standardised format, but you can use Metadata Hootenanny
(http://www.applesolutions.com/bantha/MH.html) for the job. OGG containers
can
be
edited
using
WinVorbis
(http://winvorbis.stationplaylistcom.qarchive.org). The easiest way to edit MP4 metadata is through iTunes,
or you can use Lostify (http://lostify.com/about) on the Mac.
Only one exception is prudent to mention – Flash Video (FLV), or the web
video format that YouTube uses. For this you need Flash MetaData Injector
(http://www.buraks.com/flvmdi/).
If you wanted to tag your artwork, editing PDF files is as easy as it gets – use
Windows
again,
or
something
like
PDF
ShellTools
(http://homepage.oniduo.pt/pdfe/shelltools.html).
iso images and digital packaging
The standard way to back up and archive the CDs and DVDs you own is to
put the physical disc into your computer and use software like MagicISO
(http://www.magiciso.com) or PowerISO (http://www.poweriso.com) to create
a mirror “image” of it.
This disk “image” comes out a single file, and there are 5 main types:
•
•
•
•
•
ISO image (.iso)
IMG image (.img)
BIN/CUE image (.bin)
NRG image (.nrg)
DAA image (.daa)
The most universal format to use is ISO. All CD
and DVD burning software understands what an
ISO file is and what to do with it. When the ISO
“image” is loaded into the burning software like
Ahead
Nero
Burning
ROM
(http://www.nero.com), it will take a blank disc
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and directly copy what is in the “image” onto the physical disc in the drive, bit
for bit.
What this means for artists is that if consumers can burn their own CDs and
DVDs, you don’t need to make the discs and packaging, and can just
give them the ISO file to do it themselves. Once you have created the
master copy of your CD or DVD, you just create an image file, upload it to
your website, and your fan burns it on their PC at home.
If you want to take this further, you can also give them the artwork too, in the
form of a high-resolution (360dpi min.) PDF artwork file. This can be taken to a
photographic shop or printers so fans can have the artwork on their disc and
in their jewel case insert. The person who designs your covers and inserts can
easily export it from Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign in a way that print
shops will understand.
Ultimately what the industry is heading towards is smart software processing
that personalises artwork and the disc image dynamically “on the fly” so that
every fan gets their very own unique copy.
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40
websites are software applications
Most band and artist websites are worse than dreadful. They are ugly,
awkward, unusable, pretentious and just downright irritating.
Long ago websites were simply brochures. Now, they are software
applications that do things, rather than just look pretty. They personalise
themselves for each viewer, take in and manipulate information from forms,
send emails and text messages, publish/syndicate their content via RSS,
stream music and video, make calculations and more.
Your website is your front door to the world. It is the central hub of information
about everything you do. It is the distribution point for your music and creative
ideas. It is your shop, marketing area and moneymaking engine.
You need to get it right. No band has yet.
general guidelines
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Always have the look of your website professionally designed.
Develop a regular weekly/monthly publishing schedule for regularly
updating all the content on your site.
If they can’t use it, they won’t use it.
Leave your vanity and ego at the door. The purpose of your site is to
get people the information they want as quickly as possible. Most will
not spend more than 5 seconds there. Keep simplifying it every day
and don’t waste people’s time.
Do NOT pay for someone to create a technical “engine” for how it runs.
Pick a CMS like Wordpress, JoJo or Joomla, and add your
theme/layout/graphics to it.
For the love of God, DON’T use Flash. It may look swanky, but it’s
irritating and search engines can’t “read” the content inside it.
Always sign a contract with your web designer based on
time/materials, and make sure you agree an end point, complete with a
limit on the number of changes after the final draft.
registering .co.uk and .com names
A simple .co.uk domain name costs around £6.50/2 years if you use a well
known registration agent like 123-Reg (http://www.123-reg.co.uk). Other
domains (.com, .net, .fm, .tv etc) can also be bought at the same time but are
around $35/year. Hosting packages generally start at around £5-30/month,
but if you have a friend who runs their own server, use that if you can.
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don’t pay for little changes
Websites are built in HTML, Flash, CSS and JavaScript, all of which are very
easy languages to learn if you spend some time Googling them (a good
source of information is W3 Schools at http://www.w3schools.com). The
industry standard tools you need to teach yourself are Adobe Dreamweaver
(website layout), Adobe Photoshop (graphics and pictures) and Adobe Flash
(animation), which you can buy at http://www.adobe.com/ or download free on
piracy networks like BitTorrent and Emule.
transferring files
To transfer files from your computer to your website
and vice versa, you need an FTP program. Download
SmartFTP (http://www.smartftp.com) as it is free and
easy to use, or use the FireFTP Firefox extension
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/684).
If you don’t have the time or inclination to learn them, you need to find a
volunteer (fan, helper etc) to do the updates for you. Design companies
charge hundreds of pounds for small changes that you can do yourself in a
matter of minutes.
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choosing the right technology
Each hosting plan will come with an option for “server-side”
software, usually CGI/PHP/MySQL if the server is Linux, or
ASP/IIS if it Microsoft. Occasionally there will be JSP, Ruby and others. Use
PHP/MySQL as it is free, immensely flexible, open-source and there are
enormous amount of developers and help resources available if you want to
add new features or need to fix problems.
You can also simulate your website on your computer using packages like
XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html). If you need to get
raw access to the website database, you need to upload and install
phpMyAdmin (http://www.phpmyadmin.net).
updating your site dynamically
A good website has its content stored in a database (typically MySQL), and its
design is driven by a single graphics/layout template that has been
professionally designed. There is no sense in creating 100 separate individual
HTML pages because that means you have to edit 100 files when you change
a spelling mistake. A dynamic site means you update one template and the all
100 pages change at once. An example of a very efficient template system is
PHP Smarty (http://smarty.php.net).
To add and change the
information
in
the
database, your website
needs to use a Content
Management
System
(CMS) which you get into
via a “control panel” or
admin screen. You are
insane if you don’t use
one, and there are literally thousands available as free software (see
http://www.opensourcecms.com). Most are total overkill for what you need, so
pick something that is lightweight and flexible.
Do NOT let a developer or designer create your own custom CMS. It will take
forever, be impossible to upgrade and never do its job properly. Create a
theme for an extendable system like Wordpress (http://wordpress.org) or use
JoJo (http://www.jojocms.org ).
The people updating the information on your website
won’t be technical. Make sure all the screens that they
type information into have a Rich Text Editor (RTE) like
FCKEditor (http://www.fckeditor.net) or TinyMCE
(http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/). That way typing in
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news updates and blogs is like typing in Microsoft Word and they don’t need
to learn complex HTML. Your granny should be able to do it.
mod_rewrite: technical alchemy
If you have hired a web designer and are using PHP/MySQL as your
technology, the chances are you are also using the Apache web server.
Apache has a gorgeously brilliant (but badly named) piece of software built in
called “mod_rewrite” that allows you to do a lot of very funky things with the
page addresses on your website without changing anything. It can be very
handy to make the addresses look tidy and neat, and for tricking search
engines into pushing you up the rankings. Ask them about it.
finding out who’s visiting
For finding out how many people are
visiting and using your site, sign up to the
simply amazing and free Google Analytics
program (http://www.google.com/analytics/).
Analytics will give you a small snippet of
code to invisibly include on your website,
and then give you very detailed results
about how your website is being used.
The other very innovative provider to sign up to is
CrazyEgg (http://crazyegg.com), who give you a
visual “heat map” of your site showing you how
people navigate around it.
don’t get ripped off
A website, like software, is never finished – it is a living, breathing “engine”
that keeps evolving all the time. Batch and prioritise changes on a regular
cycle. Designing a graphical theme/template to be integrated into an existing
CMS should cost no more than £500 and take no longer than 10 working
days
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44
a little innovation goes a long way
serve up in every format
MP3 (MPEG 1 Layer 3) might be the default sound format for computers and
portable players, but it is comparatively old. You should also make your music
available in the following alternative formats:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
MPEG-4/AAC (.aac, mp4, .m4a - iTunes)
MPEG-2 (.mp2)
Dolby Digital (.ac3)
Monkey's Audio (.ape)
Ogg Vorbis (.ogg)
FLAC (.flac)
Musepack (.mpc)
RealAudio (.rm, .ra)
VQF (.vqf)
Windows Media (.wma)
Use the highest quality source file
you can (usually a PCM WAV). A
good
all-purpose
tool
for
converting into most of these is
Xilisoft
Audio
Converter
(http://www.xilisoft.com/audioconverter.html) or DBPowerAmp
(http://www.dbpoweramp.com).
For Windows Media, use Microsoft’s free Windows Media Encoder
(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.ms
px), and for Real Audio, use RealNetworks’ free RealProducer Basic Edition
(http://forms.real.com/rnforms/products/tools/producerbasic/index.html).
be there when the computer sleeps
Creating a screensaver for a PC is incredibly easy, and great ways to keep an
artist in a fan’s mind as the vast majority of home computer users don’t know
how to uninstall it once they have added it.
The professional and easiest tool to use is Axialis Screensaver Producer
(http://www.axialis.com/ssp) which can incorporate picture slide shows, digital
music, live RSS news feeds from the Internet and even 30-day trials that
expire so the screensaver itself needs to be paid for.
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You’ll look very, very technical and very professional.
Either that or you can pay your web designer a few
thousand pounds to convert the obnoxious flash
movie they dreamt up one day over a cappuccino
into an .exe file. Don’t bother. Just use Producer
instead.
audio & video podcasting
Podcasting and video podcasting (“vodcasting”) may seem very technical and
mysterious, but it’s actually incredibly easy. All a podcast comprises of is an
mp3 file you put on your website, and a special “news feed” XML file that fans
“subscribe” to.
Once you know the web address of the XML file (because you tell everyone
where it is, doofus), people add it to ITunes or other podcast receiving
software (e.g. Juice - http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net) and you’re done.
Every time you put a new MP3 file on your website, iTunes is alerted
automatically and it downloads onto someone’s computer or iPod. Nobody
needs to download anything, it just arrives magically every time.
Video podcasting is the same, but instead of an MP3 audio file, you upload a
video file. Usually it’s in MPEG-4 format (.mp4) but it can be pretty much
anything the receiving software can understand.
You can write the bits yourself, but the
easiest way to get podcasting is to use
free podcast publishing software like
LoudBlog (http://www.loudblog.com). All
you need to do is create the content, and
the software does the rest automatically.
Once you have set up your podcast news
feed and alerting service, there are 50+
main podcasting directories you should submit it to for people to find and
subscribe to. Odeo (http://odeo.com) is a great place to start.
This goes without saying, but you have to have a regular podcast publishing
schedule. Fans come to expect things to arrive at the same time, just like a
fanzine in the post. You can put anything you want in your MP3 file.
bringing back crazy frog
Millions have been made out of creating and selling ringtones, and most
mobile service companies will do their best to tell you that the process is
massively complicated. It’s not.
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The problem is that there are so many different phones on the market that can
play different formats. If you want to check each one, you need to look at a
compatibility list like this example found in a few minutes using Google:
http://cellphones.about.com/od/ringtoneshowto/l/blringcompi.htm.
Most modern phones now have the capacity to play
music and use MP3 files as ringtones. So that’s pretty
easy – just offer a few MP3 downloads, and you have
ringtones.
Older phones are a bit trickier. There are effectively 2
formats you need to provide that most phones can
understand. The first is AMR, and the second is MMF/SMAF. If you want to
punish yourself, you can go back to basics and offer MIDI files. Don’t.
You can use a free online service like Media Convert (http://mediaconvert.com) to turn your WAV/MP3s into this format, or a program like
SUPER (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html). Your fans will have to
download the file to their computer and then transfer it to their phone, or you
can send it to them as a text/picture message where their phone will autodetect
the
ringtone
attachment.
bombing with bluetooth
If you’ve been walking past an advertising board in a mainline station or high
street and heard your phone go mad, you’ve almost certainly been attacked
with the marketing fluffy’s currently fashionable weapon choice: Bluetooth. IF
you’ve never heard of it before, Bluetooth is a way for electronic devices to
talk to each other, and works in a range of about 10-20ft.
Most teenagers and younger kids have been brought
up with complex mobile phones that also act as music
players. Most of those have Bluetooth connectivity, and
it’s a simple, quick and free way to transfer pictures,
music, ringtones and videos from your phone to
someone else’s.
If you want to be swanky, you can bomb fans at gigs
with your music and pictures without even talking to them. Using a Bluetooth
Access Point (a hub device that’s similar to a Wireless Internet transmitter),
you can broadcast anything you like to any phone in range. An example is the
AnyCom model (http://www.expansys.com/p.aspx?i=145988) that costs
around £160.
So that means when fans are at a gig, their phone will buzz and tell them
you’re sending them an incoming item (e.g. an MP3 file), which if they accept
will be saved onto their phone. The limitation of this broadcasting is that most
Bluetooth Access Points can only talk to 7 Bluetooth device (e.g. mobile
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47
phones) at once. To do 200 at once, you need to “daisy-chain” more together.
It’s ideal for putting by the door as an electronic souvenir when people are
leaving.
video blogs and guestbooks
Coming straight on the heels of the blog craze are video blogs, or “vlogs”.
Yes, it’s a very stupid name, but it’s compelling content. Filming a 5min journal
update or a snippet of your rehearsal jam is a great way to keep someone
coming back for more. It saves you writing too. Using the free vlog software
like that on Sourceforge (e.g. http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlog/) you can
easily integrate a video blog into your own website.
The latest generation of the Adobe Flash
(SWF) technology allows programmers
to write animations and software
applications that can talk to your
microphone and webcam. That’s made
way for the most fun application of
websites that make extensive use of
“commenting”, like MySpace.
Using
free
software
like
that
from
FlashCom
(http://www.metasphere.net/video_guestbook.html) and some web server
storage, fans can leave video messages on your site saying anything they
want.
Everyone
gets
to
be
famous
for
5
minutes.
in the right direction
And if you want to go a little crazy, why not create your own TomTom profile
theme for your fans to put on their in-car GPS?
Recording your own voice profiles and exporting them
using the Win:Vift tool is very easy and explained stepby-step in many places on the web, an example being
Graeme Lucas’ guide:
http://tomtom.graemelucas.co.uk/.
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communicating with fans
People want to reach out and touch what amazes them. They want to feel
you, worship you and discover your world. Everything you do should get your
fans closer to you and hook them like a junkie craving for their next fix.
get with the messaging program
Almost all your fans have an instant messaging
program on their PC that they use to talk to their
friends. The most popular by far is MSN Messenger.
Why should they have to go to your website or your
MySpace to talk to you or find out when the next gig is,
when they can just ask you directly?
Having a band or artist instant messaging account is a
very powerful tool, both for advertising and
communicating, so make sure you get on MSN,
Yahoo, Skype, Google Talk, MySpace IM, ICQ,
Jabber and AIM.
Managing all those different systems at once can be
difficult, but using a multi-protocol tool like Trillian
(http://www.ceruleanstudios.com) or InstantBird (http://instantbird.com)
makes life a lot easier.
don't mention myspace
MySpace is dreadful. Truly dreadful. It’s badly designed, technically inept,
crawling with paedophiles and just a really terrible website to visit when every
page is a monstrosity of flashing backgrounds and text message language.
It’s great for building up an audience quickly, and record
labels often browse through the site judging your success by
the number of friends you have. In fact it’s so awful and so
obvious that there’s no more to say on the subject. Just
make a band layout for people to use on their own profiles,
and get them to put your flash music player on their page.
word of mouth blog firepower
The so-called “blogosphere” of Web-logs (“blogs”) is a powerful beast, and it’s
not just for teenage girls to pour their angst-ridden hearts out through. Blogs
are a form of personal expression, but importantly, they are viral, addictive
and infectious. They work brilliantly in search engines, and they are
completely free.
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Technorati - http://technorati.com)
(http://wordpress.org).
49
Every member of a band
needs one, and it needs to be
updated every single day with
a little news. There needs to
be a main artist blog on the
official website, but whatever
you do, make sure that the
software is not built by
someone you hire – use an
existing
blog
software
package that does “pinging”
(to a central “hub” service like
and commenting like Wordpress
You can use free blog sites to create “dummy” or “landing” pages all over the
net that point back to your official site, increasing your Google ranking. Most
blogs come with RSS/Atom news feeds, which means your fans can
“subscribe” to the updates you publish automatically.
There are just over 20 high-profile blogging sites, but the best places to start
are Blogger (http://www.blogspot.com), Wordpress
(http://www.wordpress.com), LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com), Xanga
(http://www.xanga.com) and MSN Spaces (http://spaces.live.com).
If you have a lot of blog accounts, you can use BlogJet
(http://www.codingrobots.com/blogjet/) to update them all at once.
one number to rule them all
If you have 4-6 people in your band, who exactly takes the phone calls from
venues, promoters and industry people? You need a central phone number,
so that means buying a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) or pre-paid mobile phone to
use as the “band mobile”.
Alternatively you can buy a free redirection service, or if you are really clever,
use a smart internet telephony (VoIP) service that automatically redirects to
the first available line, works on your computer and is geography independent,
like one of the services you can get from Gradwell (http://www.gradwell.net).
Services like Jaxtr (http://www.jaxtr.com)
and JaJah (http://www.jajah.com) allow you
place links on your website that people can
click and call you for free, or vice versa.
If for some bizarre reason you want a fax
number (a fax? What the hell is that?), it’s
easy to get a free web service that will
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receive them for you and send it to your email. The most famous one is eFax
(https://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/signupFree).
the mailing list: backbone of everything
No artist should be without a mailing list. Fans expect it, and sending regular
email is the best way to re-prompt people into checking your website, or
getting them to a gig in their area at the last minute. More importantly, it shows
them you’re not dead. The mailing list is the single most important form of
communication an artist can use, short of televising their own suicide live
across the world on TV.
You need some serious software to manage an email list (often called
“newsletter management”), and the whole process needs to be easy and
automated. Most packages available on the Internet aren’t free, and
understandably so. It will be an investment, and a wise one. If you have your
business head on, you can earn back the money you spent by charging other
artists £20 or so to send theirs out for them too.
Sending out 500 emails is fine. It’s when you get to 5000, 10,000, or even
30,000 when it becomes a problem as it can often take 2-3 days to queue
them all up and send them successfully. Then you need to deal with
bounced/bad addresses.
People are very sensitive about spam, and Internet mail servers are
programmed to spot it and put suspicious parties onto “blacklists” like those
operated by Spamhaus (http://www.spamhaus.org).
Most people start by BCCing large lists of their friends, then they use
something
in
their
hosting
package
like
Majordomo
(http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo)
or
Dada
Mail
(http://mojo.skazat.com). From there it’s a short trip to the free PHP List
(http://www.phplist.com)
and
paid-for
Constant
Contact
(http://www.constantcontact.com), but when you need firepower, you go for
something like Absolute Newsletter (http://www.xigla.com/absolutenl).
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The clever way to running a great mailing list is to treat it like a fanzine that
was often sent in the post years ago. Give it a name, design a layout and
have regular features.
The key things to remember are:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
spending money on a decent mailing system is a good investment;
make sure your recipients opt in and can easily opt out;
your web host/ISP won’t like you sending out masses of emails;
lists over 2000 subscribers need intelligent queue management and a
component to deal with bounces or delivery errors;
the emails sent need to be personalised to the person receiving it;
you may very well get blacklisted by a grumpy recipient;
emails need to be sent regularly at the same time each week.
online gig calendaring
Most of an artist’s life and career is spent travelling and playing gigs at
different venues, and the success of that is getting a crowd to follow you
wherever you go. One of the most under-served cornerstones of a tour
schedule is actually keeping people informed of where you will be and when
so they can plan their own social schedule around yours.
The “Web 2.0” craze has brought
forth an entire genre of productivity
tools, one of the best being online
calendaring. The king of online
calendars is Google Calendar
(http://www.google.com/calendar).
You can publish an unlimited
number of different calendars and
people can view them online or
subscribe to them as RSS. With a simple bookmark in their browser, there is
no more need for any fan to go out of their way to work out where you are
next. Just tell them to check out the calendar.
If you want to take it to the next level, you can even use a php class like
SimplePie (http://simplepie.org) to parse the calendar’s ATOM and iCal feeds
to embed them in your website as an automatic gig schedule.
your backstage is now a website
Managing your digital audience can be very hard work – dozens of software
packages, scores of different websites and even just being at the gig itself. A
new generation of music management platforms are being marketed as
“backstage management” or “audience management” tools.
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These services manage your
event calendar, your fans/friends,
mailing list, text messaging list,
music
and
video
files,
merchandise selling and more.
You put a link to your customised
“backstage” website on your
MySpace, blog or other online
page you have and fans sign up in
one
place.
The leader of these new platforms is currently the Australian Usync
(http://www.usync.net), which offers no set-up fees and is growing rapidly.
don't bother with forums
Sorry to say it, but forums are dumb. They are yesterday’s news. If you really,
really have to have one, use the free phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com) and
customise it so it fits in with your site. Don’t waste your time promoting it or
using it as an indicator of your popularity. The same goes for free “chatrooms”.
The rest of the world are now into commenting on social profiles and blogs.
text and picture messaging
The mobile phone will become the remote control for our lives – the latest
models now have GPS built into a SIM card. Your fans all have one and carry
it with them wherever they go. The trouble is that everything you do on one
costs money – both sending and receiving.
Bulk sending of SMS and MMS/picture messaging costs money, but it’s also
often built in with mailing list packages. Mobile shortcodes are generally
shared by the use of “keywords” that need to be sent in the text message, and
cost up to £200/year. Services like BulkSMS (http://www.bulksms.com) and
iTagg (http://www.itagg.com) are a good place to start.
If you want to receive picture messages, just
tell your fans at the gig to send the pictures
they take on their phone to your email
address. Eh Voila. You have a picture
messaging system.
There are literally dozens of mobile service
providers that are based online and join up
web software with mobile networks. Using a
provider
like
IntelliSoftware
(http://www.intellisoftware.co.uk), you can get
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your web designer to build a simple web application that can send and receive
text and picture messages direct from your website that is paid for using
“credits”.
None of this is complicated, and if someone tells you it is, they are about to
empty your wallet.
rolling news everywhere with rss/atom
30% of a fanbase will know what RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is. If you
don’t, you need to find out right now. Every blog and website that contains
news and articles produces a “feed” of their site content in the form of a
special type of webpage called XML.
RSS is a way of connecting news headlines, blogs, photos, podcasts and
other artist information into other websites and computer software. It is the
engine behind podcasts, vodcasts and new Web 2.0 services. You can take a
feed and add it into different websites and software to keep up to date with
what’s going on with your favourite artists.
Using
free
software
like
SimplePie
(http://simplepie.org) it’s easy to create and
integrate RSS feeds. If you have your news,
blog, photos, videos, podcasts and more into
multiple feeds, you can also create an OPML
file that allows people to add all the feeds at
once rather than one by one.
Most people add RSS news feeds to an RSS reader (a “news reader”) like:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader)
Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com)
Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com)
Newz Crawler (http://www.newzcrawler.com)
Feed Demon (http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/FeedDemon)
Awasu (http://www.awasu.com)
steer well clear of mobile phone applications
Nobody uses mobile phone applications, as much as the providers protest
they do. What was the last thing you downloaded and installed on your
phone? Precisely. Its snake oil and hype – utter rubbish. If someone offers
you the chance of putting your music and material on one of these
“revolutionary” new services, they are morons, plain and simple. Avoid them
like the clap.
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And the reasons nobody does it? It’s a bloody phone.
You use it to make phone calls and send messages.
Internet connectivity is slow and irritating. Networks
charge you for the traffic exchanged when you
download something, so that “mobisode” you didn’t buy
or want to watch actually costs you double when you
take the data transfer into account.
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cutting out the middlemen
The internet allows artists and musicians to cut through the endless fog of
intermediaries and speak directly to the people they need to, all over the
world. Being dis-intermediated isn’t fun, and you can guarantee those
middlemen will bitterly fight to the last man to avoid being made irrelevant.
The great bit is they are already irrelevant, and they don’t know it.
finding places to play
Every venue in the UK that hosts live music must be licensed to do so. As
stupid, pointless and asinine as this law is, it has its advantages. What it also
means is that every county council has a list of licensees that is publicly
accessible to anyone who wants to look at it, complete with contact details.
Getting gigs is a telesales activity, which means calling up a list of people and
persuading them to give you a slot. All sales processes start with databases or
lists of potential customers. Using the web, you can find those venue lists and
build yourself a sales database of places to play using a free online CRM
system like SugarCRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com).
When you do contact them, send a template email that includes a link to your
online EPK (electronic press kit), an online video of one of your best
performances and your contract terms that must be signed and agreed to.
If you want to be ultra-efficient, you could
also hire a specialist telemarketing agency
to work on your behalf to generate leads for
you to follow up separately.
A good place to start would be someone like
Talk Telemarketing
(http://www.talktelemarketing.com).
what is the point of promoters?
No matter where you go or who you speak, everyone
seems to universally hate promoters. If there was one
group of people who no-one would miss if they dropped
off the earth tomorrow, it would be them.
It’s easy to see why they are hated. The vast majority are
rude, disorganised, arrogant, greedy and utterly clueless.
They exploit bands so arrogantly that it’s an absolute
wonder they have any acts to promote.
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Interestingly though, they are the architects of their own demise and have
made themselves extinct. What generally happens at a gig is that a promoter
will demand a band bring 20-30 fans of their own to the venue or face paying
a penalty fine. This is known as the “pay to play” scam.
So it’s up to the bands to promote the event for themselves. They then have
to market the gig to their fanbase. Promoters are incredibly stupid and haven’t
quite realised yet how they’ve screwed themselves out of a job. If the bands
are promoting the gig, what is the point of having a promoter in the first place?
Their entire job seems to be hiring the venue and sending a big email out the
night before.
If you’re in a band, sack your promoter and do it yourself instead. Team
up with a few other bands of the same genre and put on events yourself.
Combine your mailing lists and petty cash to market them. Share the door
money, and negotiate with the venue manager for a cut of the bar takings.
Doing that can shove it to booking agents too as they are 2nd up from
promoters in their scumbag rating.
If you absolutely have to deal with one of these scumbags, always ALWAYS
sign a contract. Get professional and invoice them for your performance. If
they don’t pay up, spread the word and send in a debt collector.
However there are exceptions to the rule. There are promoters who run free
entry gigs, can pay you a fee and help to develop your sound without
screwing you over in the process. These guys are few and far between
(especially in London) but they are out there. A good place to begin?
Songwriters and bands who are just starting out should try Native Tongue
http://www.nativetongue.co.uk.
plugging into radio stations
There are over 600 radio stations in the UK. Only a few are mass media
broadcasting (e.g. Radio 1, XFM etc), so most are either local coverage or
specialist (military, specialist). There is nothing to stop bands from mass
emailing them and thereby contacting them all instantly from wherever they
are. Most have a general contact address, and a studio email for listeners to
contact the DJ when they are on-air.
Most are quite archaic and ask you to send in a CD, but many will be happy
with an MP3 file attachment in your email. The trick is to get the name of their
Head of Music and find out how they are interconnected. Big corporate like
GCap Media have regional bosses that make playlisting decisions that are
passed down to regional stations.
Every company that wants to broadcast in the UK must be licensed by Ofcom
who maintain a list of stations and their bigwigs, and the information is freely
available on their website: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/radio/.
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The Guardian Media Guide every year which costs less than £20 and also
documents every contact you will ever need. You can have it on your desk in
less than 48 hours by buying it from Amazon:
killing off the pr dahlings
PR companies are hilariously crap. They are experts in bullshitting and getting
away with charging people astronomical amounts of money for doing almost
nothing. Their rates start from £700 month and some bands pay in excess of
£3000.month for virtually nothing. The “Foo-Foos” are having a field day with
musicians right now and ripping people off.
These fees allegedly buy you “coverage” and “awareness”. But if there is one
thing the dahling hates, it is figures and maths. If you want to challenge them
and hold them to account, stick to the figures. Get them to give you numbers.
It’ll be hard, and the chances are they’ll choke on their cappuccino when you
bring it up.
If you are paying for your PR company to do any of these things, you are a
moron:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Sending your CD to editors and radio stations
Adding MySpace friends
Sending out press releases
Registering you on social networking sites
Collecting press cuttings about you
Etc etc.
You don’t need to pay a PR company to do any of these, as complicated as
they make it sound. They will talk about the value of the “Long-term
relationships” they have with media pals that you can’t get by calling them
cold.
You don’t need a PR fluffy to tell you what your fans want, or how to sell
yourself. All you need to do is ask them yourself directly. Papers and
magazines want attention-grabbing news and headlines that make people
pick things up and read them. Give them something to print.
Use a service like Marketwire
(http://www.marketwire.com) or PR
Newswire (http://www.prnewswire.com)
directly to do your press releases and
your
media
monitoring.
Allocate
someone in the band to do your social
site registrations for you, as we
describe later on.
For specialist music PR advice, start with Nina Naran at Media Bitch
(http://www.mediabitch.com).
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a bleak future for producers
We’ve already seen that recording studios are becoming increasingly
irrelevant with home production, but what is to become of producers?
Producers have always been valuable to
the industry because they tidy up and
refine raw music material, as well as
controlling album production, for which
they share a percentage royalty of record
sales. But when nobody is paying for
music, who pays them?
The likely path this sector of the industry is that their up-front contract fees will
get larger to make up for fewer royalties. Bands are producing their records
themselves, but to make it large, they need professional help. It’s likely that
money will only come from an advance that is paid by a label.
What that means is that only the best bands that are invested in by the labels
will have access to the best producers, so the triangle of success and wealth
will be much smaller.
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music: the original social network
The online and digital world is currently obsessed with social networking web
applications. “Web 2.0” is now about connecting with other people online, not
just other machines. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and others are all
examples of community-led businesses and projects changing the way we
communicate together.
But they are just doing what we have always done – live in packs and share
our social lives with those who have the same interests as us. Music fans are
the original specialist networks and entire sub-cultures have sprung up in
reaction to genres, trends and artists themselves.
An artist’s fanbase is a social network congregated around one thing – the
artist’s music. The key to stoking the fires of that concept is making that
network more intelligent and prolific. Word out mouth is now automated.
launching from somewhere
Music industry executives will tell you from bitter experience that “breaking” a
band is very hard work. There are millions of bands available and hundreds of
artists pushed out by record labels every year. Most don’t make it, and some
don’t even hit the headlines.
Image is important; as are fashion trends, launch timing and music quality,
The secret of breaking a band is in having a story as to where you’ve
come from – a story that is interesting, unique and attention-grabbing for the
press. Labels come up with stories all the time, and everything else (image,
style etc) is there to back up the story.
Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys were “found” on MySpace and turned into
an urban legend as a result. As an artist, you need a background. You need to
be launched as people who came from somewhere. The story is everything.
The next story you will read will be about the first band to come from Second
Life. It’s called playing the game – music execs do it, journalists understand it,
and the public are gullible enough to swallow the marketing because it
amazes and fascinates them.
Get yourself a launch story for journalists to write about.
the clichéd street team
You don’t need a street team. This is something labels do to pass the work
they should be doing onto other people. All a “street team” is can be summed
up easily by titling it “the 20 most obsessive fans” of the artist.
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It’s stupidly named, patronising and a weak idea. Hopefully you’ve worked out
by now that handing out flyers in the street about a band or gig is essentially
pointless and ineffective.
Having a “street team” doesn’t make you look big, popular or professional. It
makes you look pretentious. Being part of a street team doesn’t give kudos
or make fans feel special, as much as some bands think it does. If you need a
street team, your music isn’t exciting people or generating enough word of
mouth on its own.
Offer incentives to fans who bring multiple
friends to gigs or a program that rewards
them for telling people about you. Pick out
the most loyal and committed to help you
manage your MySpace profile or website.
But for goodness sake don’t call it a “street
team”. You’re not a charity mugging people
in the street for surveys. You are the
essence of cool, not try-hard desperados rallying teenagers round a good
cause.
social networking sites
It is estimated that over 900M people are registered on social sites, and it just
keeps growing. Not all of them are paedophiles. The first in the UK was
Friends Reunited, and dating sites quickly followed. MySpace broke through,
and now Facebook is the hot property.
Gone are the days where growing a promising fanbase was about slepping
around the country playing 5 gigs a day. Now there is a much smarter way to
do it.
That way is create and aggregate a multitude of online communities that act
as an international fanbase. You don’t need to gig somewhere to get fans
anymore.
There are over 70 high-profile social networking websites that allow you to
create a free profile page. You need a profile on every single one, for 2
reasons.
1) To create an online fanbase.
2) To maximise the chance of people coming into contact with you and
your music, particularly those from other countries, and,
3) These sites register highly in Google and put you further up the search
engine rankings.
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This is where your media kit comes into play, as these sites are the “satellites”
that orbit around your main website and direct people to it.
At the top of those 70 + websites are:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
MySpace
Facebook
Bebo
Windows Live Spaces
Friendster
Hi5
LiveJournal
Nexopia
Classmates
Each allow you a free profile page where you can put your biography in the
“about me” section, upload your photos, music and videos, and connect with
new fans who like your page, interests and music.
Crucially, these communities don’t have to be music-related. Any site that
offers you a free profile page is viable. Some are better than others, and you
will
come
to
see
which
ones
with
practice.
managing multiple social sites
Your communities are organic creatures that are always growing and evolving.
They need constant attention and updating, and that isn’t easy when there are
so many of them.
You need to register on these sites with your central band email address, and
the profiles need to be updated every few months with new fresh information.
Create an organised Excel spreadsheet to monitor who updated them last
and what they did. Take it in turns to add new friends every day and answer
messages and friend requests.
In 12 months, you should have 500-1000 friends on each, meaning that you
have a new listener base of 50,000 people.
ning: your very own myspace-style community
If you’ve got real style and panache, you go nuclear. In the online world that
means that you decide that MySpace is just the start, and it’s time to
electronically organise your fans into their own social network.
You can create your very own version of myspace, just for your band and
fans, using the fantastically clever Ning.com (http://www.ning.com). Ning
allows people to set up their own social networking website, just for them. As
an artist people can join your community, create their own profile page,
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communicate with other fans, upload their own music and videos, and it’s all
centred around you.
hours
and
you
have
all
the
You run the website, you control
everything. Your design, your
features, your very own artist
community, completely for free.
This is the next evolution of what
you do with your website, only you
don’t have to pay for programmers
to build a “members area”. Nine
gets you going in less than 24
features of MySpace and more.
f8 and website “plug-in” extensions
Facebook took the social networking madness to an entirely new level in 2007
and it seems MySpace is following suit. As an extremely technical but
beautifully-executed website, Facebook positioned itself as a “platform” that
3rd parties could create their own software for, and subsequently offer to its
users. Its genius thinking – the viral nature of the applications is unbelievably
attractive.
If you thought MySpace’s
“layout” culture was bad, just
wait until you develop a
Facebook application. Profile
junk is at an all-time high and
looks like it’s only going to get
a lot worse. If you want to
create your own Facebook
application, you need to
register as a developer
(http://developers.facebook.com), create it using their own HTML-ish mark-up
language (FBML) and website API and have it approved so it can go live.
After that, you need to make it as viral and annoying as possible.
opensocial: the future of the social network
The trouble with social networking is there are so many of them.
Before you know it, you’ve got profiles on 10 or 20 different
sites. So that’s 20 usernames and passwords, 20 sets of
friends, and 20 website accounts to manage and update. After a while, you
give up and only check one or two.
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So the natural evolution is to do what Google Labs are doing with the
OpenSocial project (http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial): create a central
database of your social networking information, combine it with OpenID
(http://openid.net), and make it the central source of information for all the
websites you are registered on. When you change the OpenSocial account
information, all your accounts are updated in one go.
The success of the program will depend on getting a critical mass of social
networking brands to give up control of their own unique user database and
use the central Google one. So far the list is impressive: Engage.com,
Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo,
Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING and more.
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making some damned money
What? We’re supposed to make money? Yes. That’s when the money goes in
the other direction – towards you, not away from you at great speed. Making
money doesn’t come as easily as spending it. It is also somewhat
incompatible with art.
You need a business manager to deal with these things day to day. No money
= no travel, no gigs, no merchandise, no instruments, nothing. You need to
make money from what you’re doing to insure you can continue doing it. It’s
not sexy, but it’s essential.
getting the paperwork in place
Before you embark on your crusade for financial domination, you need
paperwork to record it all and understand the way money is flowing through
what you’re doing. No, you can’t pass it to anyone else. Naturally, if you have
an accountant or other mathematical types about, that’s great news.
READ THIS: Make 1 person in your band/entourage responsible for the
money, and the person who is best at it. Don’t argue about it.
You will need to register your band as a
limited company at Companies House
(http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk), and
open a business bank account. All your
dealings will take place via your company.
The easiest way to register a new company
is to use a web-based registration service
like
Companies
Made
Simple
(http://www.companiesmadesimple.com). If
your band is called “We Suck”, your
company name needs to be “We Suck
Music Limited”.
Specify the company to open with 1 million individual ordinary shares and
divide them equally. 5 members means each member gets 200,000 ordinary
shares. Each person must also be a shareholder, but agree to relinquish or
reduce their shares if they leave the band. The secretary is responsible for
dealing with paperwork, so make it the person who is dealing with the money.
Make sure you take time to understand exactly what you have to do with a
limited company: annual returns, accounts, change of directorships etc. If you
are working 9 to 5, there are tax implications.
For billing people like promoters and venue managers, use MS Word to create
a letterhead and these documents:
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•
•
65
A quotation form
An invoice form (inc. bank details, payment terms and information
about what happens if they don’t pay up).
Create the following documents in a spreadsheet program like MS Excel:
•
•
•
Basic Cash Register (what’s been spent, when, by whom)
Profit & Loss Account (what you’re making and its costs)
Cash Flow Analysis (money in and out of the bank)
ways of making money
This is obviously one of the most important things to take on board – things
you can do that will make you hard cash.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Live performance (fees, revenue sharing etc)
Selling merchandise (t-shirts, electronic downloads, printed materials)
Media subscription (private club fees etc)
Charitable donations
Private hire (e.g. playing at someone’s party)
Advertising
Sponsorship
knowing when it is right to pay out
Handling and processing a flow of money through your enterprise requires
thought, research and discussion so it’s disciplined. There will be no end of
people wanting to sell you things and charge you for anything they can. It’s
very, very easy to spend money, but a lot harder to make it.
This is when you need to exercise business acumen. When you spend
money, it cannot be an indulgent frenzy like what you do in the high street.
Every outgoing payment must be justified by a business case and be an
investment that is paid back somehow, i.e. it will earn money to pay itself
back.
DO NOT pay out on anything that doesn’t give you some kind of return,
whether it be financial or some intangible reward (e.g. more fans, exposure).
You can set it up to provide a specific return, but the key is to have a way of
measuring it (i.e. a metric). If they want an answer now, the answer is “no”.
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setting up your own e-commerce store free
There are a thousand ways to do it, but all cost a fortune. PayPal
(http://www.paypal.co.uk) and NoChex (http://www.nochex.com) are legitimate
services, but they take forever to transfer funds. The easiest web application
to use to take payments is Google Checkout (http://checkout.google.com).
It’s unbelievably simple, and also completely free until early 2008.
Sign up to the service using your band
email address. You will need to fill in your
business bank account details and limited
company information, so have it to hand.
Once complete, Google will make a small
deposit in your account (50p or so) to
connect and validate with your bank
account.
After that, it’s painless. Use the Google website software to add all the
products you want to sell and generate the right buttons to put on your own
website. If you’re feeling cocky, you can also get your web designer to
completely integrate the store invisibly with Checkout so there isn’t a Google
logo in site.
Your fans will need to have a Google account to buy, but Google does all the
payment collection and transaction processing. Once the money is through, its
in your business account within the week for you to fulfil and dispatch.
printed merchandise on-demand
The American web service Cafepress (http://www.cafepress.com/) has been
around for years and is a very flexible and reliable service that can dispatch
almost anything you want anywhere in the world. All you need is a high
resolution copy of your artist logo that they can print onto the materials.
You can print onto virtually anything – tshirts, mugs, cups, posters, buttons,
caps, boxer shorts, journals, mouse
pads, notepads, fridge magnets,
calendars, stickers, clocks and more.
It’s ultra low-cost and you can do 1
thing at a time, as there is no minimum
order.
You can set
up your
own free storefront
on the site
(http://www.cafepress.com/cp/browse/allproducts.aspx) or integrate into your
own website.
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exploiting the ebay effect
10,000 people in the US have given up their full-time jobs to work 9 to 5 at
home as eBay traders. Ebay as a company has created enormous
opportunities and personal wealth through allowing anyone to start their own
store and giving them an audience to visit it.
The secret is in the audience they already have. Like MySpace, you can build
a big presence very quickly.
A
simple
online
eBay
store
(http://stores.ebay.com/) is around £6/month
and you get to put almost anything you want
on it. Add your music downloads, t-shirts,
posters, DVDs, show tickets – anything. It
doesn’t have to go on as an auction either –
using the “Buy It Now” facilities, a fan can just
pay right there and then. And there’s no
reason not to have it in conjunction with your main store as it can reach out to
a lot of other people who haven’t necessarily seen your website yet.
Integrating your eBay listings can be as easy as reading in your shop’s RSS
feed (http://www.rssauction.com/), or you can be snazzy and get your web
designer to use their specialist eBay API (http://developer.ebay.com/).
memberships and subscriptions
More and more bands have online “members only” areas to their websites, but
their popularity is dubious. The trend started with porn sites who offered
previews for free that were put out as an incentive for new customers to
subscribe to their premium services.
If you can’t get people to pay for music,
this is a viable option. But it has one
caveat – you have to deliver value for
money. Subscriptions are a fantastic
source of the right type of money, recurring
monthly revenue. Getting it right requires
you strike a good balance of the right
price and the commitment needed to
keep the content pumping so their bill is
worth it.
Again, remember – nobody gives a shit
about you or your music. Every fan you have subscribes to 10 other bands. If
they all offer subscriptions, those fans aren’t going to buy them all. You have
to work damned hard to get them to part with their money and give them a
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good deal. They may pity you and make a charitable donation every month to
help, but pity isn’t great for seeming cool.
The ideal subscription is around £3-10 per month, and absolutely no more.
Forget pay-per-view events (e.g. live broadcasts) as nobody cares and there
won’t be enough money coming in to justify the outgoings. You’ll typically find
that around 30% of your fanbase will be willing to pay to subscribe to your
music club.
To get them to do it, you need to publicise what’s available in that package
and hype it up. The content needs to flow non-stop all the time and be
plugged everywhere to wind up people as to what they’re missing.
Some examples of things to put in a £4.99/month package:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Exclusive previews of new tracks
Odd tracks that won’t be released widely
Rehearsal and personal camcorder footage
Ability to vote and suggest new songs, shows, ideas etc
Video archive of previous shows
Personal contact details for the band members
Weekly newsletter/diary from the band
Cheaper show tickets and free passes for friends
So if you get 100 people subscribing, that’s £500 per month or £6,000 per year
towards your costs. The cost to you is time and attention, because you’ll need to be
constantly publishing and feeding content into your subscription arena to make it
worth
their
time
to
continue
paying
the
subscription
itself.
playing private parties
Oh yes. Your fans will just love you for it. And you’ll make a lot of money – far
more money than you would at a normal gig. If you really want to, you can
hang up a sign saying you’re available for weddings and bar mitzvahs, but the
secret to lining up those smaller gigs is to let people know you will play in their
front room if they want you to.
Charging for private gigs is hard to get right – you don’t want to spend hours
getting there and setting up your gear just to play to 5 people, but in front of
200 or so is a great opportunity to recruit new fans. In general, you should
charge £50 – 200 or so, working reverse. A large party with lots of guests
costs the least (as you’ll get lots out of it), compared to a small gig that should
cost
a
lot.
.
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taking the advertising dollar
It’s hard to approach this without most bands throwing up, but the truth is that
you have a very, very attractive and niche audience that advertisers want to
reach. They pay thousands of pounds to put posters above urinals, and as an
artist, your fans have your attention for 30 straight minutes, complete with
emotional engagement.
The first program to consider is Google AdSense
(https://www.google.com/adsense), which puts text
and banner adverts on your website according to
the material it contains. Some sites make big
bucks, most don’t. AdWords isn’t the only option,
believe it or not.
A handy list of alternatives can be found at Tech HQ: http://www.techfaq.com/google-adsense-alternatives.shtml.
You won’t be able to charge a lot for offering ad space to local advertisers on
anything else, so don’t get excited. But you may just be able to cover some of
the smaller costs that add up. You can generally charge around £20-50 for a
month’s worth of your gigging schedule, which should be enough to cover a
few petrol costs.
Some of the places to consider are:
•
•
•
•
•
T-shirts you wear on stage
A banner behind the drum kit
Back and sides of your rental van
Banner stands laid out at the door queue
On promotional literature (flyers, hand-outs etc)
It’s important to profile your fans so advertisers know who they are reaching –
their age range, interests, musical tastes, general social life etc. Once you’ve
done that, you can target specific types of companies who might want to reach
those types of people. Be professional and offer a rate card, and get your 2nd
on board by showing them that the first client did it (although you gave them it
all for free, which they don’t know).
For example, if you are a rock n’ roll outfit, you need to speak to the “sex”
market (fetish, bizarre, crazy etc). If you are modern folk or 12 bar blues, it’s
going to be a lot more appropriate if you talk to gardening companies. Your
fans will understand so don’t get hung up on being too cool to take the shilling.
Just explain to them you are an independent unit and you need the support to
keep moving.
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getting a sponsor on board
The difference between sponsorship and advertising is that the former is
exclusive, and the latter caters to many. You take on a single sponsor on a
permanent basis for a considerable length of time (e.g. a year). They have a
lot of influence as they associate their products and services with you and
your performances. Carling are a good example in that they fund busking
points on the London underground.
The good news is that big companies have their sponsorship schedules and
budgets carefully planned, and those offering sponsorship opportunities also
list them. Your best chance is to find a local sponsor, and get a list together of
how they will be exposed to your audience on a regular schedule. You can
see
examples
at
the
UK
Sponsorship
Database
(http://www.uksponsorship.com/).
So who do you approach and what do you approach them with? The best
thing to do is to work out what you need sponsoring. It will almost certainly be
your travel costs (e.g. van rental, petrol etc), instrument maintenance
(strings, sticks etc), gig personnel (e.g. sound manager) and other fixed
necessities. You should work out how much you pay out for these things and
then times it by 12 to get a yearly amount you can charge.
So with very average costs of £200 per month, you could realistically charge
£2,400 for a year’s sponsorship package.
Don’t try and profit from a sponsor when you’re a young artist. Bear in mind
that it will reflect on you and choices need to be made carefully. You will be
plugging them on the mic at every gig and adding “brought to you in
association with...” on your promotional literature. They get to look like they
are supporting local artists, and you get your costs subsidised.
community investment: slicing the pie
A new model for funding bands has arrived,
courtesy of the web. Slice The Pie
(http://www.slicethepie.com/) is a very
different type of music community that
encourages fans to directly invest in a
band’s development so they can fund the
recording of an album. Investors can trade
on their success, and the artists pay a small royalty to the site.
Another American service called Sellaband (http://www.sellaband.com) offers
a similar idea where artists sign up and recruit 5,000 fans who each put in $10
dollars, raising a total of $50,000. Once it is raised, the artist is allocated an
A&R person to supervise the recording of a special edition CD.
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sharing your music with the world
Time to get to the core of the enterprise and the reason for it all. You may not
like this, so get a helmet and strap in. You need to be concentrating and
listening.
People share music they like. If your music sucks, you won’t have a
piracy problem. The amount of copies of your material turning up on “illegal”
networks is a fairly good indicator of your popularity. The market is
established, and there is nothing you can do about it.
You only have one option when it comes to online music distribution. Once
you release a CD or provide a live stream, it’s out there in the wild for
everyone to share. It’ll be put on phones and copied across devices using
Bluetooth, it’ll be burnt to a CD-RW, played on stereos and swapped between
hard drives.
You DO NOT solve this problem by holding back distribution. You can’t.
You use it and exploit it. As a young artist you need your music in as many
places you can get it. The only reason protecting your music by withholding it
worked before was due to the stranglehold of middlemen like record stores.
That is no longer possible.
Better to surf the power of the Internet rather than try to stare down the tidal
wave. Before you go any further, you need to accept this basic fact. You are
not in control of the distribution of your music.
Read that again.
When you release your music, you are doing it so it is spread everywhere for
free. If you don’t get that, you’re in for a whole world of frustration and
paranoia.
what not to do
Almost every band you have seen has got their distribution model completely
wrong. Do NOT do any of these things, as much are you tempted.
•
•
•
•
60 second “preview” clips
Only releasing the 3 worst tracks
Releasing DRM-encrypted files
Streaming-only previews
The net result of doing any of these things is that your music doesn’t get any
exposure, your listeners will get frustrated and not bother, the music will get
pirated anyway, and you will look incredibly stupid.
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the secret of the audio upgrade model
If you want to sell your music, there is only one reliable way to do it. You need
to get people hooked, encourage them to share it with their friends and to
drive them crazy for buying it.
Here is the secret.
Release all of your recorded tracks full length. Every single one. Spread them
onto P2P networks, put them on your MySpace page and every single site
you can think of. Send them out via email, Bluetooth them to phones wherever
you can. Go nuts. Offer prizes for your fans who distribute them the most.
But those tracks are ultra-low quality.
You create a set of your music files that
are encoded at less than radio sound
(for MP3, less than 64k) to be sent
everywhere.
In each one, cut a 3 second blurb with
a voice saying “to get the full quality
version of this song, go to yourwebsite.co.uk”.
People get to “try before they buy”, you can distribute them worldwide to
harness the viral power of the net, and you create an incentive for people to
buy the high-quality versions of your songs. Everyone gets what they want.
the desperation of digital rights
management (drm)
Don’t touch DRM with someone else’s barge pole.
Under any circumstances. Consumers hate it, and so
should you. It makes life complicated, it criminalises
fans before they have even had the chance to hear
your music, and it’s ultimately technically pointless.
DRM is broken every time a new version is released,
and Internet hackers relish the cat and mouse game they play with software
manufacturers.
DRM comes from sloppy thinking – the music industry worked out a long time
ago that it wouldn’t be able to control the spread of digital files, but it would be
able to govern when people could access (play) them. All DRM does is
encrypt a music file, and talk to either a central Internet server or your media
player giving it secure instructions on how the file can be used. The EFF have
an excellent guide: http://w2.eff.org/IP/DRM/guide/.
But the most compelling reason not to use DRM is that it negates the core
strength of the net – its viral nature. As the Silicon Valley saying so rightly
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goes, never make a bet against the Internet. Learn from the industry’s multibillion dollar mistake portfolio. Do what jungle commandos do, and turn what
you see as your “weaknesses” into strengths.
increasing mp3 quality
Sound compression is a harsh process that strips out a
huge amount of audio information in order to maintain a
smaller file size. There are a number of audio processing
software packages that do their best to put it back in real
time through acting as a “plug in” to software media
players.
The best known and most impressive is the DFX Audio
Enhancer (http://www.fxsound.com), which works for Windows Media Player,
MusicMatch,
Real,
J.
River,
WInamp,
Yahoo
and
DivX.
music discovery services
Discovering new music you love is a spiritual experience. In the old days, you
heard about new bands from your friends, TV, magazines and labels. You still
do. The Internet has automated the process and make the world a local place.
If you have produced a CD, the album
information needs to go onto the online CDDB
(Compact Disc Database) databases, which are
used by music software to look up information
about the disc they are playing.
The originator of the service is GraceNote (http://www.gracenote.com/) but
the open source equivalent is FreeDB (http://www.freedb.org).
Other online services analyse the audio material in music as it is experienced
and heard by the human ear (e.g. Music Genome Project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project), and provide meta-data
information as well as suggestions as to which other artists it is similar in style
to.
Some examples are:
•
•
•
•
•
MusicBrainz (http://musicbrainz.org/)
Pandora (http://www.pandora.com)
MoodLogic (http://www.moodlogic.com/)
TuneDNA (http://www.tunedna.net)
Midomi (http://www.midomi.com)
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indie download stores
The next evolution of the digital music community after finding new artists you
like, is buying their music directly from their website or a trusted middleman.
Because most artists and their business
people aren’t amazingly savvy when it
comes to creating and running their own
retail stores, a whole new genre of
independent digital music retailers have
appeared. You can sell your music through
any number of them.
The king of these is IndieStore (http://www.indiestore.com/), which is run by 7
Digital (http://www.7digital.com).
There are a lot of them. Start with these.
•
•
•
•
•
•
E-Listening Post (http://www.elisteningpost.com)
Arnie Street (http://amiestreet.com/)
FloTones (http://www.flotones.com/)
Indistr (http://www.indistr.com/)
MTraks (http://www.mtraks.com/)
Sideload (http://www.sideload.com/)
Do NOT agree to selling your music exclusively through one distributor. There
is no reason to do this, it is not in your interest to restrict the distribution and/or
sales
of
your
music,
and
it’s
just
plain
greedy.
online music sharing communities
Social groups form with music as common ground, and just as you have
online communities based around different topics and themes, there are
absolutely dozens of websites dedicated to discovering and sharing music.
Most combine social networking (personal information) and compare musical
tastes between individuals to create recommendations and new suggestions.
Your plan is to get on every single one and get recommended by as many
people as possible to the other people who share their same music tastes.
There are 50+ music communities that accommodate tens of millions of music
fans, helping them to discover new artists they come to love. You need to take
your publishing kit and register on all of them.
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The archetypal music community is Last.fm (http://www.last.fm), which is the
most widely known. Others of interest include:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Band Buzz (http://www.bandbuzz.com)
NME (http://www.nme.com)
Overplay (http://www.overplay.co.uk/)
Garage Band (http://www.garageband.com)
XFM (http://www.xfm.co.uk)
ILike (http://www.ilike.com)
Indaba Music (http://www.indabamusic.com/)
Music Nation (http://www.musicnation.com)
Reverb Nation (http://www.reverbnation.com/).
playlisting: the new mix tape
Everything is a playlist. TV and radio stations put their broadcasting schedule
into a playlist, but they control it, not you. The next wave of on-demand
broadcasting revolves around listeners creating their own mix of music and
having control of the playlist handed to them. Software music players revolve
around playlists and they use text files that tend to end in either M3U or PLS.
When you have 10,000 tracks on your PC
or iPod, you need to organise them. New
Web 2.0 websites like Anywhere.fm
(http://www.anywhere.fm) or even programs
that can connect to your stereo like
Slimserver (http://www.slimdevices.com/)
appearing on the market that allow you to
stream wherever you are in the world.
Music fans can create and share their
favourite playlists through more than 50 different sites and applications:
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
76
Deezer (http://www.deezer.com/)
Project Playlist (http://www.projectplaylist.com)
Finetune (http://www.finetune.com/)
Music Mobs (http://www.musicmobs.com/)
Music Strands (http://www.musicstrands.com/)
Project Opus (http://projectopus.com/)
Slacker (http://www.slacker.com)
your own online radio station
Rather than putting your music on external sites to be mixed in with others,
you can of course create your own radio station on your own website. The
bandwidth bill won’t be as massive as if you did it with video, but you still have
to be careful. MP3 streams relatively quickly over most connections into music
player software.
Podcasts are similar in nature to a radio station,
but they are different in delivery. Radio streams
straight away, whereas podcasting involves
subscribing to and automatically downloading a
whole audio file on-demand.
The most widely used free software for creating
an online radio station is the free Shoutcast
Server (http://www.shoutcast.com), made by
Nullsoft,
also
the
authors
of
the
Winamp
music
player
(http://www.winamp.com). Installing Shoutcast on your server is relatively
easy and requires no high-level access to the machine itself.
jamming with your fans
Your version might be sitting round in
someone’s kitchen, or ending the gig with
the support band playing 12-bar blues, but
when the Internet allows people from
countries
all
over
the
world
to
communicate, things get very interesting
indeed.
If you put out the raw sequencing information to your tunes, your fans can
collaborate with you to write new songs and remix the old ones.
Some of these next-generation web applications and communities are
JamGlue (http://www.jamglue.com), StickAM (http://www.stickam.com),
Splice
Music
(http://www.splicemusic.com),
Loop
Labs
(http://www.looplabs.com) and CC Mixter (http://ccmixter.org). Imagine writing
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your next album with 60,000 other people who love what you do.
butchering your art for karaoke
Yes, it’s pretty tasteless and vomit-inducing, but you too can put out vocal-less
versions of your music for the masses to destroy in public. A lot of karaoke
software works by stripping out the mid section in your recordings where the
vocals are traditionally placed (vocal removal software like that from AnalogX:
http://www.analogx.com), but if you can re-produce your tracks from source
minus the vocal channel, all the better.
Producing Karaoke-ready (CDG) music
files is relatively simple using authoring
software
like
PowerKaraoke
(http://www.powerkaraoke.com) and AV
Video
Karaoke
Maker
(http://www.audio4fun.com)
Some examples of free Karaoke sites are:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Sing Me (http://www.singme.com)
Singsnap (http://www.singsnap.com)
Internet Karaoke (http://www.internetkaraoke.net)
Bix (http://www.bix.com)
Singshot (http://www.singshot.com)
KSolo (http://www.ksolo.com).
don’t forget the lyrics
What do you put on CD artwork and always forget about putting anywhere
else? That’s right. The lyrics to your songs. What do search engines like?
That’s right. Text.
Search for the lyrics for your favourite artists and
the results are absolutely jam-packed with lyric
sites advertising your material completely for free.
Some add their submissions only from labels and
official sources for high profile artists, others
accept whatever they are given.
There are more than 30 major lyrics sites for you to submit your songs to.
Start with some of these:
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
78
All The Lyrics (http://www.allthelyrics.com)
A-Z Lyrics (http://www.azlyrics.com)
E-Lyrics (http://www.elyrics.net)
Hot Lyrics (http://www.hotlyrics.net)
Lyred (http://www.lyred.com)
Lyrics Spot (http://www.lyricsspot.com)
Lyrics Spy (http://www.lyricspy.com)
Lyrics 007 (http://www.lyrics007.com)
Lyrics Bay (http://www.lyricsbay.com)
Lyrics Freak (http://www.lyricsfreak.com)
Lyrics Kid (http://www.lyricskid.com)
your very own web music player
Creating a little music player of your own as a Flash/SWF movie that can be
embedded on your fan’s MySpace pages and their blogs is incredibly easy.
Your web designer will almost certainly insist they make it themselves, and it
will take forever, look crap and never get updated.
Use the famous and incredibly
reliable JW Music Player, you can
have a widget running in a matter of
hours. You can change the colours,
layout, shape and anything else you
want to. It plays video too, and the
titles you can add can be loaded in
from a web RSS, XSPF or ATOM
feed.
Once you have it the way you want you want it, you can provide a small piece
of “embed code” just like YouTube does that your fans can put on their
MySpace.
(http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=jw_mp3_player
nuclear content distribution
If you’re getting popular, your website is going to get seriously overloaded.
Music will hurt, but video will kill you. Almost every web hosting package
comes with a specific bandwidth allowance that you will easily supersede if
you have materials on your site that lots of people want.
In this scenario, you have 3 options:
a) Use a decentralised/P2P application like BitTorrent
(http://www.bittorrent.com/dna) or Miro (http://www.getmiro.com)
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b) Split your web hosting package over 2 providers. Audio and video
information gets hosted on an account with unlimited bandwidth under
a sub-domain like av.yourwebsite.co.uk.
c) Transfer your audio/video files onto a specialised content distribution
network (CDN). Very, very expensive. Example providers of CDNs are
Akamai
(http://www.akamai.com)
and
Limelight
(http://www.limelightnetworks.com).
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online tv and video
You’re not just producers of music anymore, and video is not the sole domain
of MTV. With the advent of YouTube and Joost, music fans have come to
expect to be entertained visually and for you to pump your social sites and
newsletters with video.
Video is the most compelling medium of all – nothing can beat it for sheer
excitement, emotional engagement or an incentive to buy into what you’re
marketing. And we’re talking material that’s a lot more comprehensive than a
music video to one of your songs.
avoiding the bandwidth problem
The first principle to understand and follow is that whatever you do, you must
NOT host videos as downloadable files on your website. Doing that is
technical suicide and will not only slow down all your pages, but max out your
bandwidth limit very, very quickly.
You can roughly expect 1 hour of video to be around 1GB in size. All you
need is 25-50 people to download a few music videos from your site (directly,
or through iTunes) and you’re in big trouble.
So the moral is simple. Upload your video material to bigger providers and let
them take the bandwidth strain. Once they are uploaded, embed the movies
into your website.
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encoding into different formats
Like audio, video comes in a huge number of different formats. What makes it
more complicated is that a video stream is composed of 3 specific parts:
a) The video file “container”
b) The raw compressed video information
c) The audio information
Video is designed to be viewed in 2 different ways – the first being “streamed”
(watched as its downloading) and the second being “static”.
The video “container” is what puts all the information together and holds it in
place. It records the meta data which describes what the material is, indexing
information about where frames start and end, and also specific technical
information about the format it is in to help media player software to
understand what to do with it.
The main container formats are:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
AVI (Audio Video Interleaved)
MOV (Apple Quicktime)
MPEG (Transport & Program Streams)
MP4 (MPEG-4)
3GP (Mobile)
FLV (Flash Video)
WMV/ASF (Windows Media)
OGM (Ogg)
Matroska
Anything can be placed inside one of these file containers, but most follow a
consistent protocol. AVI is the most widely used.
Audio and video that is placed inside one of these types of containers needs
to be compressed so it can be a reasonable size for streaming and
downloading.
The
material
is
compressed
with
a
codec
(enCOing/DECoding)– a video codec, and an audio codec. All are different,
but broadly speaking they can be classed into lossy and loseless techniques.
You choose the codecs you use according to where the file is going. The
balance you search for is the highest quality picture and the smallest file size.
Getting it right is an art. The more motion there is in the video, the more video
information is needed. The bigger the picture size, the more video information.
The main video codecs that tend to be used on the web are:
•
•
•
•
DivX (MPEG-4 - http://www.divx.com)
xViD (MPEG-4 - http://www.xvid.org)
MPEG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG)
Windows Media (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia)
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•
•
•
82
H.264 AVC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264)
On2 VP6 (http://on2.com/)
Sorenson Spark (H.263 - http://www.sorensonmedia.com/)
The main audio codecs that tend to be used in video containers are:
•
•
•
•
•
MP3 (MPEG-1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3)
WMA (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia)
AAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding)
AC3 (http://www.dolby.com)
Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com)
Most of these compression technologies are developed by commercial
companies from a scientific specification, and subsequently licensed to 3rd
parties. What that means is that if you want to use one in a program, you pay
a royalty for the privilege and then have to charge for your software to make
the money back. Encoding programs are rarely free.
A definite list can be found here:
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/codecs
The quick way to get all of these codecs onto your computer is to install a
codec pack like the Cole2K Advanced Codec Pack (http://www.cole2k.net),
which uses the phenomenally powerful and useful open-source FFDShow
package (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow). Using the free VLC Media
Player (http://www.videolan.org), you watch and convert almost any type of
video available.
The most important part of preparing video for compression is having the
highest quality source material available to work from. Ideally you would have
raw HD video, but DV from a camcorder is perfectly acceptable. The video
itself will almost come in either PAL (720 x 576) or NTSC (720 x 468) format
and have an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 16:9 (widescreen).
Importing the video is relatively easy – using a DV/Firewire cable you can
capture what’s coming out of your digital camera in Windows or Mac natively,
or you can use a composite capture card/usb device.
You will need to have 3 types of video file to archive:
a) High-quality DVD copy
b) Half-size compressed copy for web distribution
c) Small screen copy for mobile phones
Using VLC, you can automatically save a copy of whatever it opens and plays
as a local file or network stream.
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The best free programs to use for video encoding are:
•
•
•
•
•
MediaCoder (http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/)
SUPER (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html)
VirtualDubMod (http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/)
Windows Media Encoder
(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/def
ault.mspx)
RealProducer Basic
(http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/basic.html)
For converting to DVD (MPEG-2), use MainConcept MPEG Encoder
(http://www.mainconcept.com) to prepare an MPG file for archiving.
For your half-size web copy, resize to SIF resolution (half picture size, or 352
x 288) and use the combination of xVid/MP3 in an AVI container.
For mobile phones, resize to 208 x 176 use H.264/AAC in a 3GP container.
building a video sharing network
One technology has completely transformed the Internet so it can become the
video hosting network it is today – Flash Video.
In the beginning, RealNetworks and Microsoft competed for the streaming
media market, and putting up video meant you had to set up your own
streaming server (e.g. RealServer or Windows Media Server) and embed
bulky software in your web page.
Flash Video changed all that.
The Flash player is so widely
used that it is already preinstalled in web browsers all of
all types and across PCs,
Macs and Linux desktops.
Once On2 and Sorenson had video compression that was good enough to run
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at web speed, YouTube picked it up as a format and virtually killed off
expensive web TV services like NarrowStep (http://www.narrowstep.com).
Flash Video (FLV) can be run from a web server, or streamed intelligently
using
the
Flash
Media
and
Communications
Server
(http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/). The developer edition is
free, so you can download it and play around to your heart’s content.
Don’t even think of charging for the videos you produce. Everything you put
out there is given away for free. Nobody will pay for it anyway, and you’ll look
stupid.
Building a video sharing network is time-consuming. Be under no illusion – it
will take a long time. Probably weeks. You will need to get all your videos
ready and watermarked (around 30-60Mb each), and then get on a very fast
internet connection. Uploading 5-10 videos to 100 sites is hard work.
NB: You MUST watermark your videos with your logo and web address
before you send out your videos into the wild. They will be transferred and
shared absolutely everywhere, and anyone who sees them needs to be able
to find your website if they like what they see. Don’t skip this.
There are over 70+ mainstream video networks on the web that allow you to
upload your videos for other people to watch and rate. There are professional
platforms
like
Joost
(http://www.joost.com)
and
Babelgum
(http://www.babelgum.com) that will vett your material, and so-called “usergenerated content” (UGC) websites like YouTube.
Most have their own free
“uploader” tools that you can
install on your computer.
These take the material you
add to them and transfer it to
the website that will host it,
usually by FTP.
An example is the Google Video Uploader
(http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=31701).
The most important sites to make sure you are on are:
•
•
•
YouTube (http://www.youtube.com)
Google Video (http://video.google.com)
MySpace TV (http://vids.myspace.com)
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•
•
•
•
•
•
85
Blinkx (http://www.blinkx.com/)
MSN Soapbox (http://soapbox.msn.com/)
MetaCafe (http://www.metacafe.com/)
Yahoo Video (http://video.yahoo.com/)
Vuze (http://www.vuze.com)
Roo (http://www.rootv.com/)
You will need to keep very detailed
records about who has uploaded what
and when. Video is unlike any other type
of site registration because it takes so
long to finalise. Reviews need to take
place every 6 months and the work should
be distributed amongst all many people as
possible.
your own media download service
The most ambitious artists aren’t satisfied with adding their content to
someone else’s video platform. They want their own, with their logo, their
material exclusively and the kudos that comes with it. Fans should be able to
download and install your own video jukebox and install it in the programs
menu of your PC.
If you’re dumb, you’ll hire someone to make one for you.
But there is a much better way. Using Miro (http://www.getmiro.com), which
was formerly known as the Democracy player, you can launch your own in a
few hours. It even has a website component that will give you a whole video
shopfront.
Because Miro is open source software, you can download the code it’s made
from and alter it in any way you see fit. The easiest thing to do is leave the
functionality intact and simply create your own set of templates that change
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the way it looks as they are loosely based on HTML, the language web pages
are built in. Doing that isn’t for the faint-hearted.
To get started: http://planet.getmiro.com/.
producing your own music videos
This is one of the extremely expensive jaunts that is a classic example of
throwing money right down the drain so you never see it again. Professionally
producing a music video is expensive – the pros spend anything from £30 –
100,000 to get the set, crew and post-production editing right. You don’t have
that kind of money for 5mins of footage.
Producing a basic music video for your band should come in around £1,000 –
2,000. The vast majority of the money is used to pay for the video editing time
after it’s been shot, but if you have a friend or fan who can do it for free, you’re
one lucky bunch. If you’re using more than one camera, you will need to
synchronise each with the same time code to avoid chaos.
Hiring a set or venue should cost £200-500 at most and
you will need to produce “release” forms for the venue
owner and actors/actresses to sign that gives you
permission to use their likeness. The day you spend making the video should
be led by an experience director, not some form of group therapy or Chinese
democracy. One person leading makes it easier.
Your first step in recruiting professionals is the well-known and widely-used
Mandy.com (http://www.mandy.com), which is the regular home to
freelancers and small teams that will give you reasonable rates. You should
make sure you own all the copyright to the whole production, and that you are
given the pre-edit material, final drafts and smaller versions in full on a DVD.
Only one rule applies when it comes to shooting TV – plan, plan, PLAN,
PLAN, PLAN and plan again. Storyboard what you have to shoot before you
start there wondering out loud what you are supposed to be shooting, like a tit.
preparing materials for broadcast tv
Digital TV platforms like Sky, Virgin Media, Tiscali, BT and Freeview all
transmit their TV signal in the MPEG-2 format. It’s a common misconception
that MPEG-2 itself is a video codec, when it’s actually an entire broadcasting
system. DVD also uses the MPEG-2 system, but in an entirely different way.
The MPEG-2 specification lists ways of compressing and
distributing video, and the way you distinguish different
interpretations of it is to look at how the video is to be
delivered. Material intended to be sent live over a network is
packaged into a transport stream (as it is being transported)
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and material to be stored permanently on a disk is packaged into a program
stream.
In the UK, we use the PAL resolution (720 pixels X 576 pixels), whereas
others use NTSC or SECAM.
Broadcasters do store their TV programs digitally in their asset management
systems, but most are still using Digibeta tapes. The best way to prepare your
material is to get it written to Digibeta by a TV production services company,
or
send
in
a
very
high-quality
DVD
version.
your own tv station and tv channels
Anyone can put videos on a website and claim they provide online TV.
Unfortunately it’s not so. That’s fine for single files, but when it comes to
managing an archive or a larger broadcast you need to start scheduling. It is
scheduling that defines whether you have a TV station or not.
Creating and managing your own TV station is thankfully very easy and
completely free thanks to Brightcove (http://www.brightcove.com). You can
even make some money doing it, as their business model is built on sharing
the advertising revenue they make from hosting your material. .
Creating an account is simple, and you upload your raw information (“assets”)
with the PublishPod, which converts it to Flash Video format. Once you have
your assets there, you can add TV guide information (“titles”) and then
organise them as “line-ups”. Ultimately what you then do is to create separate
flash “players” for different websites that allow viewers to browse your TV
listings and watch anything they want on-demand.
If you want to jump up a gear, you can start broadcasting on private IP
networks (e.g. universities, offices etc) by using multicast technology. In that
case, you need to speak to a provider like GDB (http://www.gdbtv.com).
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producing a dvd in less than an hour
Nobody wants you to know it, but producing a DVD is actually incredibly easy.
There are a number of programs out there you can use, but most sacrifice the
ability to do complex things for doing all the hard work for you.
The industry standard tool for producing DVDs is Sonic Scenarist
(http://www.sonic.com/products/Professional/Scenarist), but other options are
Apple’s DVD Studio Pro (http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/dvdstudiopro)
or Adobe Encore (http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/encore/).
But for the most powerful and cheap
tool available, there is the genuinely
brilliant DVD Lab Pro from
Mediachance:
(http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/dvdlabpro.html).
Every live gig you do that is recorded can be made into a DVD very quickly if
you use a template structure for producing them. The menu should be a still
shot from the video footage and the songs you perform are chapters/scenes
for selection. You should encode the footage into MPEG-2 beforehand and
demux the resulting file into separate elementary streams (M2V and MP2).
Once you are happy with your previewed final draft, you can burn the resulting
disc into an ISO disk image and upload it to your website for your fans to
download and burn themselves.
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the show must go on
Something every artist eventually learns during their gigging career is that
music is not just auditory, and their performance is actually an act of theatre.
Yes, theatre. You have characters and caricatures, and your set tells a story
as it goes through moods. The audience doesn’t know you as a person so it
relates to you through your music.
The best bands are the ones with the greatest sense of theatre. Just ask Jimi
Hendrix, Queen, Bon Jovi, Madonna, Metallica or anyone else who knows
how to put on a show.
Yes, you need to put on a show.
the secret no bands ever learnt
Go to the toilet in a music venue, and you’ll invariably see graffiti scrawled on
all the walls publicising bands and their websites. That’s their idea of
advertising. If that’s as far as it goes, they are doomed. Now take another
look, and what do you see above the urinal?
That’s right, an advertising board right up at your face. Advertisers pay
hundreds of pounds a month to get 30 seconds of your attention while you
gently answer the call of nature. That’s how lucrative your attention is.
Combine that with audiences that never, ever remember the names of the
bands they’ve seen. Where would love advertisers love to be? Behind the
drum kit on the stage. You have 30mins of their pure attention. That space is
one of the most valuable advertising spaces on the musical circuit.
Put up a very large portable banner at the back of the stage above you
with your band name and website details on it when you play. Tests show
that 80% more of the audience remember the name of the band afterwards
because of it. It’s simple to understand too – having it in front of them
reinforces the details subconsciously in their mind.
Simple, but nobody does it. If the venue refuse to allow you to put up
temporary stands, refuse to play altogether.
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It’s all about the lighting, stupid
The secret to great and dramatic performance in all arts is the lighting. Light
determines what you see and what you don’t see. It can be dramatic, surreal
or ambient. In painting, sculpture, 3D animation and film-making, light is the
element that single-handedly determines how effective the subject is at
eliciting an emotional response. Lighting takes
us to another world and gives us a sense of
the amazing.
So, you need to work out a lighting plan that
corresponds with your show, and spend time
on designing it so it’s dramatic. Photographers
will absolutely love you for it, so if you have a
professional guide to hand out to them they’ll
love you even more. Video operators hate music because getting shots in
such poor and unpredictable light is almost impossible.
Most venues have an equipment list so you can tell what’s available. You
know your own songs so you know what moods they invoke. Spend time with
a qualified friend to get your lighting design right so it electrifies the
show. You need to consider colour, brightness, positioning and frequency.
You can also train up a roadie or crew assistant to operate your lighting/vision
desk, and program lighting sequences in with your click track. Hiring
equipment is quite easy and relatively inexpensive if you buy second hand. If
you know friends with a flair for electronics, you could even go about plating
your guitars with sequenced LEDs to blind the audience.
You are moved through your ears, but amazed through your eyes. Get the
lighting wrong, and you’ll look like a pub act. Get it right, and you’ll look like
superstars.
Investing in your own van
You can only hire a van so many times before you start to get worried about
how much money you’re haemorrhaging in the process. That’s if the rental
dealership will even hire to a band in the first place. Generally you’re looking
at £30-70 for 24hrs, plus insurance and fuel on top, which can easily come to
the same again. If you have to drive far, you’ll suffer extra mileage cost.
Paying £100-150 to get everyone and their equipment to a gig is just not
feasible. 3 gigs in a week and you will be down nearly £500. And the icing on
the cake is that for those 3 gigs you’ll probably get a total of £150 between all
of you to share.
The key to knowing when to buy your own van is orientated around the
business discipline for spending money. The golden rule is that anything you
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spend out on (i.e. capital expenditure) must pay itself back somehow or be
justified. Everything you buy has a shelf life, or “depreciation”.
You need to total up your spending over a
month, and times it by 12 to see an average
for the year. A good second hand van that can
take some punishment will cost you anything
in the region of £1-£7000, lasting around 3-5
years, so it’s a hell of a lot of cash.
Your decision needs to be based on the
idea that it will save you that much over the time it will take to
depreciate. If you can carry some advertising or get a sponsor to help cover
the running costs, so much the better.
don’t buy in to support slots
There is nothing more stupid than people trying to make
money from bands, as they don’t have any money. The
practice of “buying in” as the support slot on a tour is
DISGUSTING. Pure and simple. If you are on a tour or
associated with a company that practices it, leave immediately and don’t come
back.
The industry has grown lazy in regard to this. The tour operator and promoter
takes on the risk of securing the audience and the costs of the show, and it is
not acceptable to claim they need to pass it onto you, the artist. That means
they need to put up your food, accommodation, PA/backline and basic
facilities at the very least. It won’t be glamorous, but it should not cost you to
do it. It’s bad enough not making any money from it.
Do NOT take the excuse that it has been done for years and that it is just
the way it is. The reason these sharks get away with it is because bands are
so desperate for exposure that they’ll agree to anything. Once word gets
round that you’ll pay for anything, your trousers are down and you’re like
lambs to the wolves.
The way this scam works is that you are told you have to pay £2-5,000 up
front to secure your place, and that you will be reimbursed nearly half the total
per gig you play. You have to bring your own equipment and pay for all your
own costs. If you’re going to get reimbursed anyway, tell them to take it off
their up-front charge, or that you want a percentage of the door sales.
Once they see you be a little mean, they’ll try to call your bluff and sling your
hook. Don’t get into this situation in the first place. Explain you don’t “buy in”,
and will only agree to play if your basic costs are covered. That’s your final
offer. If they tell you there are lots of other bands that would do it, make sure
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you tell them in no uncertain terms where to go, and it’s a bit like encouraging
a child to smoke through peer pressure.
Just because everyone does it, doesn’t make it right. You can bet that the
sharks charging you certainly wouldn’t pay it.
If you’re “buying in”, nobody gives a shit about your music or how good you
are. They only want your money. You will be beaten up and taken for granted.
If you can’t get a booking agent and/or you aren’t good enough for them to
want you on it, you need to go back to the drawing board in a big way and
have
a
serious
re-think.
don’t suffer pay to play
The smaller level and equally disgusting scam is indulged
in by promoters everywhere, and particularly in London.
This one is a lot simpler – bring X many people to the gig,
or you have to pay up as a penalty.
“You are required to sell a minimum of 40 tickets including those sold on
ticketweb (there is a mandatory survey question requiring the purchaser to
indicate which artist the tickets are being purchased to see). If you sell less
than 40 you will NOT be paid and will need to make up the shortfall at £6 per
head. People can pay on the door for £8, but these are NOT taken into
consideration in the payment we make to you, so please encourage your fans
to buy an advance ticket.”
It’s hard to really articulate how utterly REVOLTING this practice is. What
makes it worse is how many bands blithely and flagrantly encourage
promoters and their stooges to do it. It is blatant exploitation, bad business
practice, tasteless, spineless, and immoral, not just unethical.
This scam is about greedy and thoughtless promoters trying to pass the buck
and screw everyone in the process. The nature of their industry means that it
is very high-risk and they could crash and burn. It’s not up to you to insure
them from that, it’s up to them to work hard to avoid it.
A promoter hires a venue at their OWN cost/risk and puts on entertainment
that will draw in an audience. They make money from taking door sales and a
cut of the subsequent bar sales. It is up to them to choose the right
entertainment acts to draw in the crowd, and not acceptable to punish artists
for any number of problems that could affect turnout – e.g. weather, travel,
economic conditions etc.
If no-one turns up, that’s their fault for sloppy organisation, the wrong choice
of location/weeknight, and ultimately the wrong entertainment acts. It is their
burden alone, and it is not for artists to contribute to the hire of the venue or
compensate them,
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Do not accept “pay to play” terms, ever. Refuse to work with any promoter
who tries it on with you. Make sure you sign an appropriate short contract (or
terms & conditions) for every single show, and that you are signing it with the
representation of a limited company.
If the promoter fails to pay you after having agreed to your terms, don’t wait
around or ask nicely. Transfer the account to a debt collector with a copy of
your signed contract.
video every show, every time
Digital camcorders are cheap, as are tripod stands. One of you is bound to
have something like it personally for one reason or another. You should video
every single gig you have, and transfer the results to an archive of digital files
on a portable USB hard drive, or as an individual DVD disk (or ISO disk
image).
Yes, it may be a hassle, but it’s
necessary, for the following reasons:
a) Feedback – you’ll get to see if
you’re any good or not.
b) Perspective – you’ll get to see
yourself from the audience’s point of
view.
c) Constructive criticism – you’ll see what’s wrong and what needs to be
improved.
d) Monitoring progress – you’ll see if you’re getting any better.
The idea is to get into a regular feedback-improvement cycle. Watch, get
feedback, improve. Rinse, repeat. You need to be constantly monitoring and
watching yourselves, analysing performances and making them better. The
trick is getting into the habit.
Watching yourself on video is the same for everyone – the first time it’s so
painful that it makes you cringe horribly. By the fifth time, you’re made out of
wood
and
it’s
the
most
valuable
thing
you
do.
know your audience and get the right gig
You will get put on some truly atrocious line-ups with some horrendous acts
that are entirely different genres to yours. Promoters and booking agents are
largely clueless morons who know how to talk shit long enough that some of it
sticks. If you’re a death metal act you really don’t want to be on the country
and western circuit, and if you’re an acoustic soloist you don’t want to be in
front of a thrash metal mosh pit.
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Know your music, know your performance and know your style. More
importantly, make sure others do. Do not trust the judgement of agents and
scrutinise every arrangement for yourself. Manage it carefully. Understand
who you generally appeal to by talking to your fans and seeing what they’re
into. You will waste time and money by agreeing to playing at the old people’s
home down the road – you need to target who you market yourself to very
carefully indeed to maximise what you get in return.
Often it is who you say no to, rather than who you say yes to, that actually
makes
the
difference.
talk to them properly
When you’re up on stage, you are doing public performance on a public
address system. How many times have you squinted to hear what the front
man/woman has been saying because they are mumbling fast into the side of
their mic?
You are doing public speaking, and it is an art and science
that needs practice. You need to rehearse what you are going
to say, when you are going to say it, and analyse the affect it
has. Generally with music you are winding the crowd up and
getting an emotional response. “Hello Luton, how you doin” and
“we have an album out on etc etc” is going to sound slightly
anachronistic and cheesy if that’s all you can come up with.
Contrast that with something like the infamous American band
who announced, “We’ve spiked all your drinks with acid and in
about 10 to 15 minutes we’re all going to be tripping together.”
That’s attention-grabbing.
Consult books and training materials on it. Some general guidelines are:
1) Think about and plan what you are going to say.
2) Have footnotes on your set list with “prompt words” that remind you
what to talk about.
3) Give instructions and command rather than just blurting out information
they will forget.
4) Remember the audience has a 2-second memory. You need to
reinforce your message again and again.
5) Rehearse it over and over and over so you can do it without thinking
about it.
6) Leave room for ad-lid madness.
7) Tell them about the band, how/when it was formed and where to find
information after the gig.
8) Tell them what the songs are about, who they were about, when they
were written and where they can buy/download them.
9) SLOW DOWN.
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10) SPEAK LOUDLY AND CLEARLY.
11) SMILE or look menacing if you need to.
12) Make eye contact with every member of the audience, so they feel you
are addressing them personally
when you’re up there, move
This is the first thing you’ll notice when you watch yourself on video. You think
you’re Mr or Miss cool up there on stage eh? The chances are that you are a
still as a statue. You could be made out of concrete. You think you’re moving
a hell of a lot more than you are, but you’re not. You look boring, mundane
and it’s going to shock you a little.
It’s hot up there on stage. It’s stuffy, it’s crowded, you only have a square
metre to yourself and 3 people watching but you have to move. Dance, crash,
throw yourself about – just MOVE for goodness sake. Excite them. Let them
see you go crazy so they feel free to go crazy.
This comes as complimentary with the excitement of lighting – you are
amazed through your eyes. Being on stage is a time for you to indulge every
teenage attention-seeking neurosis you’ve harboured since you were small.
Compete for the limelight and out-do each other. Cry if you have to. Stagedive if you really want, but give them something to watch and point at.
You’re entertainers as well as musicians. Entertain, perform and amaze.
Page 95 of 95

Rockstar2.co.uk

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