It's about the music, Stupid.

I am sitting at the edge of the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon trying to fill it in. That’s what marketing and self-promotion can feel like in the digital age or at least, that’s the way it feels to me.

I walked into a cavernous Barnes and Noble last night. They just opened another location by me on East 86th street in New York. I can’t begin to describe how big it is. I’ve lived in Manhattan my entire adult life so I do a double take when I see wasted space- but this? This place is ridiculous. It completely freaked me out. I felt a primal fear that I haven’t felt since Sylvia Rhone (former CEO of Elektra) used to scream at me but that’s a whole other blog post.

I’ve spent considerably more time than I originally thought I would writing and creating content for my website and to realize that this one store contained a million or more books and these were just the books that were deemed the best by major publishers meaning the total volume of writing out there is… staggering.

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Do all new music ventures have to be digital now?

The web is wonderful. It has done the most remarkable things for music. I haven’t read one of his novels, but I couldn’t say it better than Nick Hornby when it comes to what the web has done for music and for music fans.

But, as Hornby alludes to in his piece, has the web been good for the music business? In the new vanguard – the wild west of web commerce – look at how many music related ventures have come and gone, with barely a trace left to learn from. At the start of this year, MusicAlly listed no less than 200 music start-ups from 2008 (not an exhaustive list) and I can’t bring myself to skim that list now to see which of those are still in the game. Nor do I want to get into any kind of music-web investment thesis here. If you want to read a good one though, see Bruce Warila’s wonderfully concise thoughts on the subject recently on Hypebot, MTT or his site, Ricewall.

Back in my IFPI days an early PR line on digital music’s success was the number of digital services in play, which reached close to 1000 worldwide before the IFPI decided it maybe wasn’t a good idea to keep up with the stat. At one point, for every new service launched, at least one other entered the great elephant’s graveyard of dead digital music stores. You could almost hear a Jay Z rap in your head along the lines, ‘1000 digital music stores but ain’t a profitable one’. Yet still they come. Every week I get e-mails from newly launched services and read about maybe two or three, weekly.

I don’t blame them for giving it a go, but wish them more luck than anything – oh and to have a quick read or two of Bruce’s thesis.

But my point here is this: why is the universal assumption now that all new ventures involving recorded music have to be digital? I know it’s a dumb question. But then it’s not that dumb. Any investor or entrepreneur will know that a contrary strategy is always worth a look.

Prevailing market trends point to online, mobile and gaming platforms for sure – particularly with apps invigorating the mobile sector – a true breakthrough there. However, the assumption that music – or any content for that matter – will migrate from physical to digital in a steady linear fashion (at whatever speed), is just plain wrong.

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“What is going to happen to the music business?” Pt. 2

SomeRandomAddressThatIDon’tWantToPublish@yahoo.com wrote me an email that said among other things:

“What is going to happen to the music business?”

This is what I wrote back and none of it is rooted in anything other than stream of consciousness so debate if you will… 

Nobody really knows for sure.  The major labels (Sony, Warner, EMI and Universal) are all rapidly trying to diversify their business so as not to be tied solely to the sale of recorded music.

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What do you want to ask?

Hey Everyone,

Music Without Labels is doing an interview on WXPN in Philadelphia next tuesday with Jasmine Sacarello, who used to be a host/reporter on numerous BET shows. She is a very close friend of ours. This blog is set to reach out to independent musicians to see what they would like to ask about the current music industry issues. Music Without Labels will also be recording this interview to post on many different sites for people to see and hear about the reality in the music industry today. Please let me know what questions you’d have for her and we’ll put them into consideration for our interview on Tuesday.

Thank you for everything

Keep Makin’ Music!!!

Why We Steal Music

This month the British Government said they would start penalizing music thieves by jacking their internet accounts.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090825/ap_on_en_ot/eu_britain_downloading

You don’t have to scratch your head too much to recall that Jim Carrey or Schwarzenegger got about $25 million to perform in their movies, or to remember the $280 million dollars it cost to make Titanic. I’d like you to ask yourself a question: why in the hell do you know these facts? They are not important to your day-to-day survival, yet they are part of pop common knowledge.

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“What is going to happen to the music business?” Pt. 1

I got this question emailed to me by someone who never responded to me when I sent a reply.  He said he wanted to know because he wanted to be in the music business but never said what part of it he wanted to be in…

I never deter people who want to be in the music business although I’m constantly surprised that such people still exist.  I mean, really – there is now probably a statistically decent chance that kids being born today have grandparents who participated in a mosh pit or pass the dude or whatever the hell you want to call that kind of band appreciation behavior – and people still do that stuff…  I mean, I was a child of the 80s- we weren’t out there doing the twist.

Shouldn’t we be due for another musical revolution? 

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Jack of All Trades, Master of None

I hadn’t ever heard this phrase until my first year of college. My drum teacher, slightly annoyed that I was going to miss another drum lesson because I was singing in a jazz festival, used it as a warning: “Specialize now, or always be sub-par”. Until then I had prided myself in being a multi-instrumentalist. I kept busy learning any instrument I could get my hands on as well as learning sound engineering and the basics of carpentry building makeshift recording studios. True I could do a lot of things, but I wasn’t ‘great’ at any of them. Was I ruining my chances of excelling at one instrument by spreading my time between many? This brought me to the big question: Is being a “Jack of All Trades” really such a bad thing?

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Preparing Music Business Financial Statements

I’d like to pick up where I left off with my Music Business Template and talk more in depth about how to prepare your financial statements. I’ve seen many new businesses write their entire plan first, then work the numbers last, wrong move. Once you have established the overall business model in your head, START with the Financial Statements. All of the words, goals and context that are in the rest of your plan should be dictated by how the numbers play out, not vice versa. What happens if your plan proves that you will not make a profit after three years, and the business will fold? I’ll tell you how to address this common mistake at the end of the post.

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Marketing 101 for Beginning/Forgetful Artists

Let’s face it — with all the crazyness that goes along with being an artist, it is easy to forget the basics.

Or if you’re an artist just starting out, it is easy to not know anything at all.

I just got out of an entrepreneurship class at Penn State that reminded me of some really basic marketing principles that may seem pretty obvious, but can definitely be forgotten over time. And they shouldn’t be! These fundamentals are extremely important, especially to indie musicians. If you are one of these musicians out there trying to do it on your own, selling albums out of your car’s trunk (props to Johnny Cash) or going door-to-door like some kind of perverted Girl Scout, then you need to be aware of these!!!

Basic assumptions as to why somebody would pay for your indie music, merch, etc (AKA VALUE PROPOSITION):

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Make Music, Make Money: Upcoming Artist Development Series

The Rights Workshop Presents Artist Development Seminar Series: Make Music, Make Money

Series runs September 29-October 1, 2009

San Francisco — In response to the growing interest in music placement and promotion, The Rights Workshop is hosting Make Music, Make Money, a series of career development seminars for artists, musicians, composers and other content creators beginning Tuesday, September 29 through Thursday, October 1, 2009. Each Make Music, Make Money seminar will be held from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Seminar attendees will learn about the mechanics of the music business and develop strategies to earn more money from their creative work. In each Make Music, Make Money session, panelists will address commonly asked questions about the rapidly changing music industry in a comfortable, artist-friendly environment.

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Singles Strategy Radiohead Style

Radiohead says it’s going to release singles instead of albums. Is the album finally dead? Article examines the roadblocks musicians still face trying to release singles-only into the digital mainstream, and calls for a change.

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So You Want To Get Your Music On Blogs?

The first thing every artist tells me when I begin the talk about Social Media marketing for them is “I want to get on blogs.” Sometimes I laugh because half the time I don’t even think they know what that even means. They just know blogs are big now and they need to be on them.

Well they got the first part right: YES blogs are now the new big thing, and YES they should be on them. Where artist tends to fall short is the HOW do I get on them part.

Scenario 1 for an artist usually is: 1. start Twitter account, Facebook account, most already have a MySpace page; and, 2. begin to consistently BLAST (promote) bloggers their music all day. We in the office call this the “MySpace” way of thinking.

WRONG! Wrong on so many levels!

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How effective are Facebook ads for music bands?

About two weeks ago I decided to do a little experiment with Facebook ads for fan pages. My band Colorless Green Ideas has a Facebook fan page for a couple of months now. Unfortunately, the amount of fans stagnated at a humble 64 fans. I thought we deserved better and tried a Facebook ad campaign. What’s quite interesting about Facebook ads is that you can decide to spend a small budget and that it’s quite easy to target your ad to a specific niche. I targeted my message only to people in the UK who were younger than 37 and who claimed to be interested in drum’n’bass or breakbeat.

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5 Problems That Will Kick Your Butt As An Entrepreneur

Ann Bernard of Yut Media wrote a blog post the other day about how she has made the difficult decision to take her two online startups offline for good. One of the most difficult parts of entrepreneurship is probably how easy it is to become emotionally attached to the success of a project. I’ve grabbed some coffee with Ann in the past to discuss some of these things, and I can personally attest to the enthusiasm and commitment she had for her ideas. However, as Seth Godin might say, equally important to commitment is the ability to decide when something has become a cul-de-sac (i.e. it’s not going to lead anywhere, no matter how much time, money, and sweat you invest into it). Ann has decided that the projects she was working on were cul-de-sacs.

I’m sharing this with all of you mainly to point your attention to five very insightful takeaways Ann listed from her experience.

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