MusicThinkTank.com | October's Most Popular Posts

MusicThinkTank.com takes great pride in being a renowned resource for all who comprise today’s music industry. We appreciate the conversations you start, the advice you share, the projects you promote, and the feedback you share and we want to encourage your continued efforts.

Thanks to our loyal readers and contributors, October was a great month for MusicThinkTank.com - so today, we’d like to share that success with you by highlighting October’s most popular posts. On behalf of MusicThinkTank.com, thank you for your support. We enjoy providing a unique platform where the music industry really can think out loud!

Laura Schneider, MusicThinkTank.com Community Manager

34,708   MTT (Journal) 4,685   MTT - 49 Ways to Get Free Music Promotion (Journal Entry) 4,606   MTT Open - 10 Awesome Independent Record Labels [LIST] (Journal Entry) 3,967   MTT - A&R Tips: The Art Of The Press Kit (Journal Entry) 3,755   MTT - Top 10 Rules For Better Songwriting (Journal Entry)

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Promotion for the Independent Musician

In a market saturated with the music of aspiring musicians and already well established acts it can be difficult for new acts to gain exposure. This begs the question, how does an artist stand out and get heard over the masses of music uploaded to the web each day? This guide was written as a follow-up of sorts to our blog “treating your band as a business” and also ties in with our online marketing crash course. The article will be split into two sections: the first pertaining to more traditional “physical” promotion techniques and the second focused on marketing your music online to listeners around the globe.

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49 Ways to Get Free Music Promotion

There’s no shortage of lists on how bands can get free music promotion, but I’d like to add one more. My hope is that this one is a bit more up to date, and shines light on some of the great free tools that have emerged in the past 2-3 years. If you have any other great tips for promoting music for free, feel free to add them in the comments below!

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The 4 Places You Should Be Entering All Of Your Concert Dates To Increase Concert Attendance

Entering concert dates is one of the most annoying parts of playing live. It’s both time-consuming and annoying to keep up with. Thankfully, it gets easier and easier each year to do this menial task. Entering dates into the services we have outlined below increases the chance of getting both fans and potential fans to your shows. Some of them can put them in the places where your fans go to hear and discover your music, where as others alert your fans who have liked you on Facebook that you will be in their town. Entering your dates into these services also increases your chance of being added to local concert calendars in local papers and radio stations. Making sure your dates are always up to date in these four services will increase the likelihood of getting fans out to shows and we will explain why.

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YouTube's Dirty Little Secret

Ever spotted a terrible video on YouTube with an inconceivably high view count? Of course you have. Would it make you feel better knowing that most of those “views” were completely automated and only lasted 30 seconds with the sound turned off?

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What’s The Story? The Value Of Storytelling In Music Promotion

Mark Knight is the founder of Right Chord Music, a management and consultancy business. The company was created with the aim of helping independent artists like The Daydream Club promote their music using insights gained from the wider marketing world. In this article Mark introduces the concept of story telling in brand advertising and shows how creating a story can help independent artists promote their music more effectively.

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How to Stand Out: Go Really Big or Get Really Small

Most of the time, playing in the middle won’t serve you well. You blend in or stay stuck in a homogenous pattern. Sometimes, playing the extremes can help you cut through and serve the needs of a different audience.

Let’s consider what people use to watch television. In the middle are a lot of average-size TV screens. But on the edges you’ll find extremes. On one end are the huge flat screen TVs and home theater systems. On the other are iPods and smart phones with tiny screens that play video. They all serve a need and appeal to certain people at different times.

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Rich Band, Poor Band - Why You Should "Invest" in Pull Marketing

There is a very famous (and powerful) book called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, by Robert Kiyosaki.  In the book, Kiyosaki explains that “poor parents” will recommend buying your home and “investing” $2,000 a month in your equity, instead of throwing it away on rent.  “Rich parents”, on the other hand, would encourage you to find a property that you can buy for $2,000 per month, and rent to someone for $2,500.

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5 Non-traditional Ways to Promote Your Music

Artists tend to be creative people. We write music, create dazzling visions of art, and express sentiments in the most unique ways. However, when it comes to promoting our art, something else happens. For one reason or the other, most artists fail to express any creativity in their business endeavors.

Here are five easy (non-internet) ways that you could promote your band. I hope that more than anything else, they get your brain going and inspire you to create ideas that work specifically for your art.

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5 Easy SoundCloud Music Promotion Tips

SoundCloud continues to be a terrific location for music promotion. Taking advantage of SoundCloud’s growing community of music lovers should be a strategic practice of all musicians, big and small. Sharing tracks, creating sets, and interacting with other users are all essential parts of good SoundCloud promotion. Add to that commenting, following and group joining, and SoundCloud becomes the online pulse of social music.

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What Publicists Need From Musicians – Guest Post by Anne Leighton

Posted By: Michael Brandvold (Michael is a 20 year music marketing veteran who has worked with unsigned indie bands and international superstars. Michael owns Michael Brandvold Marketing a site dedicated to providing tips and advice for musicians.)

This is a guest post by Anne Leighton.

The best, savviest musicians listen to their publicist’s expertise.  Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and Tower of Power’s Emilio Castillo pay attention to what I tell them when I disagree, find a wrong fact in their bio, or if they NEED to do an interview during a vacation.  They also tell me when something needs to be fixed.  We’ve never had an argument.  Sure, we’ve all made mistakes that were based in misunderstood e-mails or my faulty research for an address. All my artists have missed interviews, but we rebound and reschedule.  We’re human.

Your publicist interfaces with you: the media, other world and industry tastemakers, or gatekeepers to get you more known in your career.

We work together.  Whether it’s you or Ian, artists have to realize the type of coverage (radio, print, TV, internet) they will receive in conjunction with where they are at the time of their album’s release.  If you’re at Lady Gaga’s level, most everyone will devote space and time to you.  If you had hits more than three to 40 years ago, selected national outlets might be interested, but chances lie more in local print and radio. If you’re still determined to wake up early in the morning, you could get some local TV coverage.

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How A Major Label Markets A New Artist

Recently, ASCAP’s Daily Brief included an article by David F. Carr entitled, “How Warner Music Turns Social Media Fans Into Customers”. I thought there was one paragraph in there that was extremely insightful that some readers may not have caught. It needed to be expounded upon. If you’ve always wondered how a major label goes about building a fanbase for a new artist - as far as their overarching philosophy on it - there it was!

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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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How a Lyric Website, a Memorable 'ah' Noise, and Drake Helped Promote Chase and Status

Okay I thought it was about time for another one of my ‘thinking like a fan’ posts! Last time I posted on Music Think Tank I analysed how a combination of boredom, time, and talking videos converted me into a fan of Jason Mraz, and today I’m going to analyse my most recent ‘becoming a fan experience’ – how I became a fan of a song using a combination of lyric websites, remixes, and ‘ah ah ah’ noise related Google searches.

Typically, most of what I hear about lyric websites (the sites that just list song lyrics) is pretty negative – they’re just dodgy sites set up to profit on advertising when people are practicing for karaoke, but I think there’s more to it. Truth is they’re well optimised for search engines and they’re often what appears in Google when I’m searching for a song by lyrics that I’ve heard for songs that I can’t remember the name of – that makes them pretty powerful music promotion resources.

Sometime in October I was driving to a house party in my friends car and he played a really cool song that I started humming to, I had no idea what it was, but I loved it and foolishly didn’t think to ask what it was (but if I did this blog post probably wouldn’t exist!).

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