10 Principles Of Great Music Web Design

Guest Post by Melanie Kealey from the Bandzoogle Blog

It’s no secret that in order to appear professional, your own website with your own .com address is essential. So what ingredients make for a great musician website exactly? You’ve got the music of course, some images, videos, and show dates.  

Pulling together content is an easy first step. The part where many musicians get stalled is with the website’s design.

Click to read more ...

MusicThinkTank Weekly Recap: A Relationship While Touring

• Robert Lanterman | Maintaining A Relationship While Touring
• Rachelle Wilber | How Real Entrepreneurs Update And Manage Their Music Hall
• Lisa Occhino | How To Advertise Your Music On Facebook
• Jennifer Paterson | How To Return To Music After An Extended Break

Maintaining A Relationship While Touring

Many of my friends at this point in life are touring musicians, and many of them are dating people they are not touring with. It’s no mystery that dating on the road can be hard. I mean, how many songs have been written about the subject?

Any podcast that has to do with DIY touring will tell you that in the 90s there were a lot of stop-and-go, using the payphone, sending letters and postcards, paging significant others, and other stressful situations happening in those days.

Click to read more ...

How Real Entrepreneurs Update And Manage Their Music Hall

Did you know that music halls date back to the 18th century? Yes. According to history, music halls can be traced back to coffee houses and the inns where people met to do business, eat, and drink. Artists entertained while the audience watched and sometimes sang along, ate, drank, and had a good time. Later on, these inns created rooms devoted to music. The music rooms soon became very popular through music performances being scheduled twice or thrice a week to become what we know today as music halls.

Click to read more ...

How To Advertise Your Music On Facebook

This post was written by Lisa Occhino and originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog

Having a Facebook fan page for your music has so many benefits besides displaying your “like” count to the world. Some advantages of fan pages over personal pages are rather obvious — such as separating your personal and professional life, having no fan limit (versus the 5,000 friend cap on personal pages), using Insights to get key metrics about your fans, and getting taken more seriously as an artist overall.

But for any musician who’s trying to get more fans and figure out how to better engage their audience, Facebook Ads Manager is invaluable.

Click to read more ...

How To Return To Music After An Extended Break

You may be curious but nervous about the idea of returning to playing music after such a long break. Is it even possible, or have you lost years of valuable skill building?

Click to read more ...

MusicThinkTank Weekly Recap: Engage

• Sudhir Singh | 10 Ways To Engage And Motivate Students In Music Lessons
• Andrea C | Did Led Zeppelin Steal Stairway To Heaven?
• Jeremy Young | Photay On Being Terrified By ‘Flight Of The Bumblebee’, How To Mess With Song Form
• Justin Ralph | Crowdfunding Your Album: 11 Dos & Don’ts

10 Ways To Engage And Motivate Students In Music Lessons

As with any subject, positive reinforcement will keep your students striving to perform more and perform better. Throw student parties the day after a great concert or recital. Reward students for doing something outside of their comfort zone with “extra credit,” or a use a “point-system”. Even a good old, run-of-the-mill, gold star/name chart will do wonders when encouraging students to help their peers and work hard

Click to read more ...

Did Led Zeppelin Steal Stairway To Heaven?

I don’t think that any respectful musician should be proud of violating the copyright of another one. With all the social networks that exist nowadays, if someone makes a plagiarism, the news will spread worldwide in a matter of minutes. It is far too embarrassing of a place to put yourself in.

Click to read more ...

Photay On Being Terrified By ‘Flight Of The Bumblebee’ And How To Mess With Song Form

On his latest release, Onism, Photay’s Evan Shornstein combines his study of West African percussion with a heavy grounding in ’80s and ’90s beat-driven electronic music. And in the process, he diverges from popular, tried-and-true song form through a series of irreverent arrangements, arresting textures, and a radical withholding of the conventions of the “drop” and “release” that the uninitiated might expect from contemporary dance-inflected music.

Shornstein’s charge is, as he says, “to explore unfamiliar musical realms,” and he manages to do so with respect and reverence for the myriad traditions he’s moving through, resulting in music that’s both “incorrect” and deeply informed.

Click to read more ...

Crowdfunding Your Album: 11 Dos & Don'ts

This post was written by Justin Ralph and originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog.

Over the past few posts, I’ve covered how to decide if you’re ready to record an album, tips for writing songs, and how to handle the pre-production of your recording. Today I want to talk about one of the most popular ways to fund production for your album - crowdfunding.

When I decided to record an album this year, I knew I was going to use crowdfunding to raise money. I was fairly certain I would be successful with it based on the pool of people I could reach, and I liked the idea of my fans being engaged in the entire process of recording.

Click to read more ...

MusicThinkTank Weekly Recap: Gumption

• Zach Bair | Gumption, Ambition And The Music Business
• Wallace Collins | Time Running Out For Artists, Writers To Exercise Their Termination Rights 
• Emma Sturgis | In the Music Business? 3 Tips To Safely Relocating
• Alex Cowles | The Process Of Releasing Electronic Music In 6 Simple Steps
• Emma Sturgis | Music Maniac: The 4 Safest Concert Venues To Add To Your Bucket List

Gumption, Ambition And The Music Business

I’ve been lucky enough to run several successful businesses. VNUE, along with its partner DiscLive, has grown to be the global leader in recording live concerts and releasing them in high quality to fans on limited edition CD sets and USB drives, immediately after their performance. We’ve worked with venues and artists all over the world, from Father John Misty and The Pixies to Blondie and 3 Doors Down. I also own and founded both RockHouse Live venues in the great city of Memphis, offering live entertainment every single night (as well as some killer grub).

Click to read more ...

Urgent Warning!: Time Is Running Out For Artists & Writers To Exercise Their Termination Rights Under U.S. Copyright Law

The 1976 Copyright Act provides for the termination of copyright transfers – but authors need to act within a limited timeframe. Creators are entitled to reclaim their copyrights regardless of any contract stating otherwise after certain time periods. Therefore, even if an author, artist, musician, photographer or songwriter signed a contract which purports to transfer all rights in a work for perpetuity, the Copyright Act provides that the author of the work can terminate that grant and demand that the rights revert. Authors and creators are now entitled to terminate their contractual transfers and demand back control of their copyrights; authors can terminate their book publishing contracts, songwriters can demand return of their musical compositions from music publishers and recording artists and record producers can demand return of their sound recordings from the record companies.

Click to read more ...