Call To Indie Artists: Stop Giving Your Music Away Free

Artists are giving away way too much free music. The belief that giving away free music will result in future sales are too far-fetch. Also with the advancement of new distribution models cutting down the dollar value on music (Cloud/Subscription models), we are entering a stage where the public is becoming too accustomed to free music. Sure illegal downloads are here and will continue to be here, but artists must not fall into the trap of allowing their fans to dance to the tune of music is a free commodity.

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CELEBRATING DEREK SIVERS’ NEW BOOK: "Anything You Want - 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur"

“The illiterates of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read and write,but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” - Alvin Toffler

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Online Music Licensing Resources

Music licensing is the licensed use of copyrighted music. It also ensures that the creators of musical works get paid for their work. In layman’s terms it can be viewed as leasing your property out to someone for a fee, based on how and where they intend to use it, and for how long.

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What are you waiting for?

What am I waiting for? As a musician you live in a hurry up and wait world. You hurry up to travel to a gig and then you wait three hours to hit the stage. You hurry up and make contact with a booking agent and then you wait 3 months for them to get back to you. If your lucky you hurry up and record and then you wait for your label to release it six months later. Plain and simple, it sucks! One of the main reasons why artists don’t have success is that they wait on others to do what only they can do.

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Why the Confusion? It Has Always Been About the Business

So much talk about the success, or lack of, making it in the new music business industry. But it really comes down to treating your musician career as a business. Let’s look at some statistics. History shows that…

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The Musician’s Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools and Sites – NoiseTrade

Welcome back to the Musician’s Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools and Sites. In this second edition, I’d like to turn you all on to a very cool site we, here at Ariel Publicity, have been familiar with for some time now; NoiseTrade (www.noisetrade.com). Like I said, we’ve been hip to this site for a little while now, but a few weeks back Brannon from NoiseTrade came to our Brooklyn office to give us a sneak peek at their newly designed site, and we were very impressed. NoiseTrade is a platform for both artists and fans to discover each other. For the fan, it provides a fantastic and easy way to find new music. The fan is not obligated to pay for this music, but has the option of ‘tipping’ the artist when they download the tracks.

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Redefining Success In Music

Success in the music Industry has long been measured by landing a recording contract, but with the ever-increasing digital distribution outlets available, and the shrinking physical market, the goal posts have certainly shifted. In reality, as 90% of those who had the (mis)fortune to find out first hand will testify, securing a record deal was never an indication that you had actually “made it”. It was a temporary influx of much needed cash, but any perceived luxury came with insurmountable overheads. With every limo ride and big city showcase offering free booze, your ever-expanding expense account would ensure that your musical career was never going to be a viable long-term business. A re-evaluation of what actually defines success in music is much needed. Especially as new artists take steps to build a working business model in the constantly changing digital world.

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What are the odds of succeeding without a record deal?

I found an interesting Blog post the other day that seemed to cause major disagreement between musicians on the subject of record deals, specifically whether musicians needed a record deal at all nowadays. The original Blog was entitled, Do Social Networks Really Help Musicians? It makes the point (in a round-a-bout way) that social networks create so much opportunity for musicians that overcrowding, by and large, negates the benefits for the masses.

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Preparing For The Studio

So you’ve finally saved up the money to record your masterpiece. You’ve found the perfect producer that “gets you” and you’ve set the date to start recording. Life is good! Now what? You know there is more to it. But what is it that you should be doing from now until your project starts? Do the people who make amazing albums just get lucky? No they don’t. Being prepared means everything. Football player and Super Bowl champion Ronde Barber has this to say, “There is no such thing as luck. Bounces go either way. Every day and you have to take advantage of those situations. You call it luck and I call it being prepared”.

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Andrew Dubber & Monkey On The Roof

Recently music industry strategist, consultant, teacher and original MusicThinkTank co-founder Andrew Dubber helped launch an online music project that deserves our support – Music Basti’s ‘Monkey on the Roof‘ album.

In essence, Monkey on the Roof is an album featuring recordings of Delhi street children singing songs with professional musicians. We’re selling the recording online to raise money for the Music Basti charity. The album was produced by our own Ian Wallman and was made possible through a research project by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research.

Best thing about it is that the website is full of videos where you can see how the album was made, meet the children, learn about the amazing work that Music Basti do, and learn just what an incredible impact that music has on the lives of these kids affected by poverty.

Go explore the website and make sure you get yourself a copy of the album – for whatever you think it’s worth. And if you can help spread the word, we’d really appreciate it – and so would they.

Tagged: Delhi, Music Basti

Pandora- What's In A Name? Does The Music Service Walk Its Talk?

One of the interesting aspects of the Rethink Music conference back in April was hearing MOG CEO David Hyman and (separately) Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy discuss the present and future of online music subscription services.

MOG is all about access. Outside of the usual holdouts, MOG’s catalog contains just about everything, including most of the releases on our Static Motor imprint. For fans, it makes for an intelligent (Echo Nest-driven) music discovery experience that seamlessly blends the mainstream and the independent. For artists, getting your music onto MOG is a cinch. As long as you’re distributed via an indie aggregator (CD Baby in our case) your music will soon pop up on MOG. For fans and artists alike, MOG is an excellent platform. Easy access for all, with top-notch audio quality to boot (and no ads!).

A different business with a very different model, Pandora certainly talks a similar talk, which is why I was struck when Joe Kennedy commented (paraphrasing):

Pandora is all about connecting people to new music.

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On Innovation, Flying Deloreans & Explosions In The Desert

Innovators are a strange breed. What makes them move ahead against all odds? Especially hopping over the road blocks and avoiding the potholes placed there by zealous department heads who are managing according to company policy and frameworks, plans, etc. The very fact that a plan is notated and written places it firmly lying down in the past, while the innovators are working in the present, edging toward the unknown of a future.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest New Yorker article, “Creation Myth - Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation” is a must read for all those in a business that fosters creativity for both fun and profit. While Gladwell details the failings of the day-to-day managers who ran Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and the bigger corporate brass of Xerox, to fully understand the future of personal computing as a mega-billion dollar industry, the article does impart a different view to the oft-held idea that Steve Jobs stole his future Macintosh while the giant of a Xerox slumbered away. Basically, Gladwell asks, what did Xerox know about computers and building a whole new industry based on the cool things their engineers had created in Palo Alto?

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Do Social Networks Really Help Musicians? Revisited

This is a response to Dan Morgan’s post “Do Social Networks Really Help Musicians?”, a post questioning how useful social networks really are for musicians. Funnily enough, I was actually planning on writing a similar post on my own website just days before. After seeing Dan’s post however, I thought I would share my views on the matter on Music Think Tank instead. There were some very good points raised both in the article and in the comments, but here’s my take on things. In short, I think social networking websites can be useful if they are used right. Having said that, I don’t think a lot of musicians use them right. Let me explain.

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One Easy Way to Sell and Share Music on Facebook

This past week — completely by accident — I discovered a surprising way to use Facebook to share and sell music. I’m sure some of the more astute Music Think Tank readers already know about this, but I bet most of the musicians who browse these pages have no clue. So as an author, teacher and fellow musician, I feel a duty to pass on this valuable tip. What’s this all about? Well, if you’ve used Facebook at all, you know that the site allows users to easily upload and share photos and videos. That’s great. But there’s no built-in mechanism to easily share audio files — meaning your music!

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