BitTorrent is a dirty word in the music industry, as pirated copies of full albums and many other digitally downloadable files make their way on to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks every second. What BitTorrent can also do, along with other similar services, is enable the further spread of music education to the masses. Hypebot reports that Berklee Online released a series of online videos and eBooks for people to download and use for free (you can download the Berklee Online Musician’s Guide here). The online division of the Berklee School of Music, Berkleemusic, also providesfree music lessons via Coursera, an online education platform that partners with many notable institutions to provide courses in a variety of subjects including music.

Even brick-and-mortar universities are getting smarter about online education. They know that not everyone will be able to afford, and might not even be selected to attend, a school like Berklee School of Music or an equivalent style of college. Although the move to online education, and occasionally giving away some free material, won’t be bringing in immediate revenue, it’s a somewhat inexpensive marketing maneuver. An act of goodwill also helps spread the word. Maybe it leads to new students at Berklee School of Music or paid courses through Berklee Online, and maybe it doesn’t.

“Free” is the new marketing. You might think, “Well, free is the old marketing too.” And in a way, you’re probably right. But what savvy artists started doing by giving away their music for free to market other revenue-generating products like merchandise and concert tickets, high-priced educational institutions and universities will have to replicate in their own business model. Online is not only the quickest distribution channel for content and education, but it will also level the playing field over time. Higher education in music is the next hurdle.

Comedian Jon Lajoie racked up a quarter million hits in the last couple days for his YouTube video outlining his idea for a Kickstarter project. The YouTube parody king is known for such works of art as “Everyday Normal Guy” and “Show Me Your Genitals.” Lajoie wants to piggyback off the success of Kristen Bell’s "Veronica Mars Movie Project" and Zack Braff’s "Wish I Was Here" Kickstarter projects. Those two projects raised $5.7 million and $3.1 million, respectively. How much does Lajoie want to raise? $500 million! Why? To become super rich!

Kristin Bell and Zach Braff have caught a decent amount of flak for their Kickstarter projects. Critics say that well-known names don’t need to raise money from fans; they can easily find the funding for their creative projects in the industry since they have the contacts that many up-and-coming indie filmmakers don’t have. However, what Bell and Braff want is creative control over their works, what people often refer to as final cut in the movie biz. Kickstarter even wrote in their blog that Blockbuster projects like those of Bell and Braff actually increase the funding to indie filmmakers on the site, bringing people onto the platform who previously never backed a Kickstarter project and who later browse the site to back other projects.

Unlike the real Kickstarter projects that are housed on Kickstarter’s website, Lajoie isn’t directing viewers to a Kickstarter page. He is directing people to his website to pledge hypothetical money to him, of which he has raised over $10 billion so far – not too shabby! His original goal was only $500 million and he still has 88 days to raise more money from his Internet audience. It helps that you can put in an amount under “other” instead of a measly $50 or $10,000 pledge. Many will think this whole gimmick is stupid, but it’s as smart as Internet marketing gimmicks come.

When you pledge, the “send me email updates” and “send me text message updates” boxes are default checked, meaning that Jon Lajoie is happily collecting thousands of email addresses to add to his growing online presence separate from any ad revenue he splits with Google on his YouTube video plays. Tricky? Yes. Genius? Of course. Lajoie is big enough in the YouTube and comedy world to get people to spend the time to donate fictitious amounts of money, but it’s harnessing that wasted time into marketing value that takes the cake for innovative online business prowess.

The Wall Street Journal just tweeted: “Breaking: The Yahoo board has approved a deal to pay $1.1 billion in cash for the blogging site Tumblr.” The acquisition was rumored for days now, as Tumblr struggles to make money off their huge userbase and Yahoo attempts to become relevant again by scooping up the teen-heavy blogging network and its billions of pageviews full of cat gifs, Bieber fandom, and soft-core pornography. 

Tumblr does house many sophisticated blogs and has redeeming content, but Yahoo is making a big bet that they will be able to bolster their future prospects on Wall Street by catering to the younger demographics that spend their days sifting through their Tumblr dashboards.

The acquisition, though not final, will be met by a vocal backlash of teensters and other social media addicts who don’t want to lose their sense of community by being bought out by an aging, albeit massive entity. Tumblr users have already started a petition to stop Yahoo from buying Tumblr, so far with over 150,000 digital signatures and climbing, and I don’t think they care whether somewhat newly-minted CEO Marissa Mayer is trying to turn a new leaf in Yahoo history. 

Every community faces growing pains and backlash. The Instagram community threatened to boycott the app after the company finally released their Android app (yes iPhone users wanted Instagram all to themselves). They also threatened to boycott when Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars in cash and stock. You know what happened? Instagram kept growing. I assume the same thing will happen with Tumblr.

The true test will be when Facebook and Yahoo try to monetize Tumblr and Instagram, respectively, to their fullest extent. The “cool” factor might not be there anymore if there isn’t a balance between sponsored content and organic content. Facebook has been slowly ramping up their advertising on their own platform with a long-term reluctance to degrade the mobile experience (ads only appeared on mobile more recently when compared to their desktop experience). Yahoo is desperate to pick up talent to improve their mobile footprint and Tumblr is one bold move they’re betting over a billion in cash on. 

The New Music Economy is upon us. Independent artist duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis made a guest appearance on “The Colbert Report” to discuss their decision to stay independent and not sign a 360 deal with a major label despite their megahit status with their song “Thrift Shop”.  Apparently, not only do you keep your creative freedom by staying independent, but you can also make more money too. 

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, instead of signing an onerous contract with a  major, “rented” Warner Brothers to help them get radio airplay. As much as the digital age and YouTube make radio feel obsolete, it’s still a big force in mainstream America—outside of the subways of big cities and Spotify-filled speakers of young company offices, terrestrial radio dictates chart-toppers. 

Radio is just one slice of the pie though, so Macklemore and Ryan Lewis really didn’t need the all-inclusive deals the major labels thirst for up-and-coming artists to sign. The successful indie artists now have the leverage in negotiation and major labels aren’t as relevant as they once were. Expect the major label and big studio dominance to corrode even more as artists like Amanda Palmer crowdfund full album recordings and tours on Kickstarter or Zach Braff (“Scrubs”) and Kristin Bell (“Veronica Mars”) raise their own money from fans to create full-production movies. 

The answer for all the artists still trying to gain a footing in this crazy industry? You no longer have to ask permission to succeed. The cost of doing business is coming closer to zero, so no more asking big-wigs at major labels (or even small indie labels) to take a chance on you. The world now has to take a chance on you and the best way to do it is to release stuff early and release it often: for everyone to see. Now.

1) “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

This isn’t about buying bling or spending money on Ferraris, this is about going cheap at a thrift shop. And it’s got swagger to boot.

2) “212” by Azealia Banks 

If the lyrics aren’t too fast for you to catch, you can tell Azealia Banks oozes attitude but with a smile the whole time.

3) “Gangnam Style” by Psy

With over 1.5 billion YouTube hits, you haven’t tuned in to the Internet or TV in the last year if you haven’t caught on to this track yet. Although it’s easy to be sick of this overplayed track, it doesn’t quite feel dated yet like the past generation’s “Macarena”.

4) “Harlem Shake” by Bauuer 

With a  few hundred million hits spanning all the “Harlem Shake” joke videos, this beat is hard to forget. If you listen to the whole track, you might think it’s a bit repetitive, but for some it might be hard to resist a few nods of the head and a shake of the entire body.

5) “Make It Bun Dem” by Skrillex & Damian Marley

Skrillex has the groove, Damian Marley has the rhymes. This track lights up EDM floors worldwide while merging a variety of styles.

6) “Bad Girls” by M.I.A.

A little desert flavor and a beat and lyrical hook to bring you back for more each time. M.I.A. keeps attitude high with “Bad Girls.”

Nothing helps define a time, a decade, or a moment like a perfectly crafted song choice for a TV show or movie soundtrack. The hit show and not-so-underground cult favorite “Mad Men” comes back to AMC for its two hour Season 6 premiere tonight (4/7/13), and I’m sure the music will suit the scenes just as much as the suits on the characters. No one knows how to strike up the atmosphere for a period in time like the writers and directors for the show—song choice included. 

Lionsgate, who produces “Mad Men”,  paid $250,000 to license the Beatles’ song “Tomorrow Never Knows” for an episode in Season 5—by then it was obvious that the show was a huge hit so they could afford such an extravagance, but it shows how important music is to define a necessary aesthetic. Movies have much bigger budgets than single episodes of a TV show, so it’s even more important to get the period music just right. “Son of a Preacher Man” and “Misirlou” made appropriate appearances in director Quentin Tarantino’s movie Pulp Fiction as did “Fortunate Son” and “All Along the Watchtower” in Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump happened to beat out Pulp Fiction for Best Picture in 1994 so I guess that year really knew its period theme music!

What will be the songs that define our current generation? It seems like the YouTube hits come in one day and go out the next, so it’s hard to imagine songs like Psy’s “Gangnam Style” or Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” playing in our movies 30 years from now. Perhaps they don’t evoke the necessary atmosphere, but something like Adele’s “Rollin’ in the Deep” in a drama or Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” in an action flick  could very easily make a future soundtrack that wants to wax nostalgia over the as-of-yet unnamed decades between 2000 and 2020. Oh and if the song is about New York, I’m sure Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” will find a way to make an appearance if it’s not a Frank Sinatra with “New York New York” kind of movie.

Spain is now proposing a law that would make it illegal for companies to advertise on sites that infringe on copyright. If the government finds a site to be a major distributor of copyright infringing material, like an mp3 hosting site for instance, they could fine advertisers who pay to advertise on that site. 

The story, reported by Digital Music News, notes that Education and Cultural Minister Jose Ignacio Wert is heading a major initiative to put a stranglehold on piracy in Spain with a bill that puts the onus on advertisers to help stop the lucrative business of Internet piracy. Wert stated: 

“This is about a philosophy of going after large-scale distributors of infringing content.”

Advertisers don’t have to be too worried just yet, as the government wants to put a stop to distributors more so than advertisers. There’s no question that Spain and many other countries want to be proactive about piracy. One-off takedown notices just aren’t cutting it, so governments want to hit infringers where it hurts (i.e. by stopping those who help pay the bills for these sites). 

The FBI in the United States hasn’t been shy about seizing certain website domains, only to find later that the same website has been copied over to a new URL. Of course, awareness is a big part of web traffic, and not everyone will follow the trail to find the new version of an infringing site. Many people pirate music, movies, and TV shows simply out of convenience more than anything. Not all content is easy to acquire legally as fast as people want to consume it so they turn to piracy. 

Should we be punishing the companies who host these files? I’m sure there are many illegal files hosted on Dropbox, YouTube, SoundCloud, and many other popular platforms that host content. It’s inevitable. While I think it’s a bit harsh to put the onus on the advertiser to control where all their ads are being shown online or for websites to be responsible for every file that crosses their servers,  if a site that hosts thousands and thousands of infringing files is complicit in the activity or at the very least takes very few steps to prevent this kind of activity, the government should be able to step in. 

Unfortunately there is a large gray area here where the right answer might not be evident, and we have to trust that technology and government can play nicely together so no one overreaches their bounds both in terms of following the law and enforcing it.

 

Nothing can replace the live concert experience, but not everyone can be in Miami and shell out a few hundred bucks for a weekend of EDM and partying. Because of this, the YouTube live concert series has gained popularity over the last couple of years. But it’s not just about the music, it’s about the video and feeling like you’re part of something. Ultra Music Festival was smart enough to put a chatbox on the right-side of their concert stream on their website so you could talk about set times, what song a DJ is playing at any given moment, or just make fun of the crowd for not showing enough energy. You weren’t there sharing the experience with audience, but you were sharing the experience with others in a completely different way.

While some concert promoters might not like the idea of live streaming a show because they’re going to make money off ticket sales more than you getting a free look into the concert from home, it’s hard to believe that online streaming will cause ticket sales to go down. If people can see what they’re missing, they’ll make sure to get out to the next concert when an artist or festival is in their area.

From a mental standpoint, it would be interesting to find out whether live streaming a concert from home makes you feel like you’re part of the event or an outside peeking in on something you’re missing out on. Even though you might be missing out on the true physical experience of a concert, at least you don’t need to earplugs to save your hearing for 20 years down the road (unless you have a really powerful sound system at home of course and understanding neighbors).

by Jonathan Jaeger

South By Southwest, aka SXSW, hit Austin with a groundswell of enthusiasm this weekend, with thousands of musicians, techies, and people looking for a party. Everyone is swamped with places to go, bands to see, digital gadgets to use, and new tech startups to checkout. “Who is having the best launch party,” “Who is giving out the greatest swag?” and, “Where can I recharge my iPhone?” are probably thoughts on a lot of people’s minds this weekend.

Many artists and tech startups come to the promised land of digital overload to get a piece of the action. But is this the best place to go right now? Regardless of whether you break out at SXSW, you’re probably going to have a solid time and make some good contacts, but maybe it’s not the time to put your hopes and dreams into the hype. 

The geolocation app Foursquare that took SXSW by storm just a few years ago took advantage of the situation in the best way possible. They had a location-based app that allowed people to show (and show-off) where they were in real-time. It was perfect for SXSW because it created value while also making for the best possible launch—a ton of people all in the same location trying to find places to go. In music, Janelle Monae, The White Stripes, Foster the People, and The Strokes all got some extra PR from their performances at the fest.

These cases are all outliers. They found a good thing and took advantage of a situation before it was everybody trying to take advantage of a good situation. Perhaps there’s nothing to lose by going to SXSW, but the lesson might be to strike while things are just about to get real hot because then once the secret is out everyone will be on the bandwagon. Time to find the next hot place and cleverest tactic to get discovered.

Many social media critics (and skeptics) are warning people to not rely too heavily on social media or expect it to deliver your hopes and dreams on a silver platter with a nice pink bow. Jon Ostrow of CyperPR notes: “Social media is a conversation tool – that’s it,” and as Wes Davenport claims on Hypebot, social media won’t write your press releases, plot your tours, make your live performances better, or help manage your finances.

All these claims are true. Social media helps spread the word and isn’t the “answer” to saving the music industry from low record sales and pirating. However, there’s a flip-side to all of this. Think about all the businesses and companies that help artists from creative to financial matters that wouldn’t be possible in their current state without social media.

Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects. While it is a social network in its own right, it’s first and foremost a tool to help you raise money from an extended audience of people interested in your work. Artists like Amanda Palmer are known in the music industry for raising tons of money to help fund touring and album production, much of it done with the help of Kickstarter’s platform. She leveraged her existing social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks to bring fans to Kickstarter. If social media didn’t exist, it would be a lot harder for sites like Kickstarter to thrive because the users of the site are evangelists of the platform itself, bringing droves of people from other social networks onto the funding platform. It’s all a virtuous cycle, and the same is true for many other sites.

Other online services that can do things like manage your finances (think Mint orBetterment) or help you book gigs online (think Sonicbids or GigMaven) are all part of a growing number of services that leverage social media to grow. Without social media, many of these sites wouldn’t exist because people simply wouldn’t know about them. So, sure, as Wes Davenport argues you can’t have your career handed to you by merely having social media skills. However, social media is often the glue that helps the whole ecosystem grow. Of course at the end of the day all these tools that help us get things done also need to keep a sustainable career going, but that’s another discussion altogether.

It might be a little premature to call it a hit single, but lately everything Avicii has touched has turned into EDM gold or at least was met with some fanfare from the Swede’s rabid fanbase. Partnering with Ericcson, Avicii launched Avicii X You to be the “world’s largest collaboration,” a crowdsourcing project that Avicii is using to bring in DJs, fans, and songwriters from around the world to work together on a new song.

The move is brilliant. You can see crowdsourcing with popular remix contests on sites likeIndaba Music with famous artists and brands and crowdsourced funding projects on sites like Kickstarter. While crowdsourcing is a valuable tool to invoke the masses from the ground up, it’s also a brilliant marketing tool. It will be interesting to see if the collective minds of thousands of DJs will come up with a track that is better or more diverse in sound than something Avicii would come up with himself. Either way, it’s going to get tons of attention and will get people excited about participating in something that will probably be heard by millions. As he mentions in his YouTube promo video for the project, wouldn’t you like to hear your melody, your beat, or your little synth sound on an Avicii track even if it’s for only a second or two? 

To keep it organized, Avicii is breaking up the project into steps, with the first step as the melody. Nothing gets a song going like a good hook, as many know from Avicii’s summer anthem, ‘Levels’, which hit its stride in summer of 2011. Now Avicii has the fame to really make a huge crowdsourcing project work. However, you don’t have to be famous to try to get help from others. The Reddit community had their own take on crowdsourcing a generic hit single, which got a lot of community engagement. Clearly the tools are there, whether you’re famous or not, but Avicii is making a statement by opening up his creative process to everyone. Who knows, maybe this will catch on as a legitimate source of songwriting, or maybe it’ll just be a fun experiment in music marketing.

“Gangnam Style” was the perfect storm of continuous and monstrous daily and weekly view counts on YouTube as Korean pop-sensation Psy climbed his way to a historic one billion plays, a record for any single YouTube video and all that in less than six months. Other than having an insanely infectious beat and a hook with ambiguous yet highly memorable lyrics, what catapulted Psy to one billion plays? 

You can point to the well-produced video, the catchy song, and a imitable dance akin to the last generation’s “Macarena”, but it’s a little more than that. Psy had no massive presence outside of South Korea before “Gangnam Style” hit its viral stride, but the track met the sensibilities of pop suitable for any culture. Some American pop doesn’t sit well all over the world, and much of the East Asian pop doesn’t make its way overseas to the States. “Gangnam Style” was met with curiosity and was just the right amount of familiar and mysterious. As YouTube commenters joked, what is Psy chanting during the chorus? He’s singing “oppan Gangnam style” repeatedly. As the annotated lyrics encyclopedia

RapGenius points out in a further elaboration of the lyrics:

“Psy is saying in third person he is boyfriend material, or an attractive guy. Gangnam is a wealthy district in Seoul, where the young people are known to be very prim, proper, and professional during the day, but get crazy at night. ‘Gangnam Style’ connotes not just wealth, but the aforementioned lifestyle.”

Psy mixes just the right amount of mainstream pop with silliness and over-the-top theatrics in the video, all the while leaving himself ripe for parody of his unique style. Part of YouTube viral engine of views is the ability for viewers to make reaction videos. Just like “Call Me Maybe” had the perfect lyrics and hook to be parodied ad nauseum, “Gangnam Style” adds the quirky dancing element to it where copy-cat videos can throw in choreography as well as altered song lyrics to suit their parody’s intentions.

Even for artists who don’t expect to hit a billion or even a million views, in their first go-around, there are a number of strategies to attempt the ultimate viral package: 

Mainstream: Catchy song that is dynamic but still adheres to a pop or rock format.
Video: Unique video concept with enough production and slick editing.
Hook: A chorus that can be sung by anyone even if they don’t know the native language.
Edge: Just enough edginess and innuendo while still maintaining a PG-13 rating and a sense of humor.
Parody: A format, in terms of song and video, that opens itself up for parody or strong reactions of some kind.

With so many artists vying for your ear, it’s tough to cut through the noise. Sometimes it helps to have a unique persona that is not separate from your music, but complements your artistic goals. In the metal world, bands like Slipknot, Gwar, and Mushroomhead use masks and over-the-top theatrics to enhance their live show. For Slipknot, wearing masks is a part of their message but it’s not a defining characteristic—from what I can tell, the music is the most important part to them and their fans. What they gain from the masks is immediate recall from the masses who automatically associate Slipknot with “masks”. When done right, this can be great for viral marketing purposes. Gwar, on the other hand, wears grotesque costumes and shoots random liquids into the crowd while in concert. Part of Gwar’s allure is the gimmick, though I’m sure many like their sludgy riffs and abrasive vocals too.

The question then becomes whether the persona or “image” you create for yourself will define you as an artist, will be a gimmick, or will be a logical extension of the music. When people think of Deadmau5 or Daft Punk they might think first of the onstage attire, but for the most part the two artists have risen to electronic music stardom with popular dance-ready tracks. The costumes merely put a visual stamp on the music. 

Then there’s the name to think about. Regardless of whether you’re going to don the strangest of attire or just put on a t-shirt and jeans for your live shows, a name goes a long way in establishing yourself as someone quirky, weird, funny, or just plain ordinary. When you hear the band name The Tony Tapdance Extravaganza, you can’t help but laugh a little. A play on words like Mord Fustang or Com Truise is a little more subtle, and equally hilarious, but doesn’t connote the same absurdity that a dance dedicated to former actor and “Who’s the Boss” TV star Tony Danza seems to contrive.

Be mindful early on about how someone interprets your name if you’re trying to make a statement or get attention. Ask some friends, some fans, and some random music enthusiasts what words come to mind when they hear your name. The worst thing you can do is attach a certain idea or image to yourself as an artist that is in direct conflict with your intentions. I can’t remember the last time I heard a jazz fusion artist with a band name like Hon Jamm or The Doogie Howser Merengue Party.

I recently wrote a news blurb on HypedSound about the 25 highest paid artists from May 2011 through May 2012. Dr. Dre topped the list with $110 million in gross revenue, before accounting for taxes, fees, overhead, and related expenses. That’s a lot of money for someone who hasn’t released in album in over a decade! 

Dr. Dre’s been meaning to release his album Detox for some time, but probably got sidetracked with selling a 51% stake in his massively popular company Beats By Dre for $300 million. You know, those headphones with the letter ‘B’ on it that you can’t help see all over the subways in New York City (and probably in your suburban high schools too, I just wouldn’t know about that those).

So what does this all mean? It means hip-hop moguls like Dr. Dre and Jay-Z are more business moguls than anything else. They leveraged their music fame to create branded businesses centered around their larger-than-life personas. This might not be something the average indie musician can do, but they certainly can take a couple lessons. 

When it comes down to it, don’t sell your music—at least not at first. The reason Facebook, Instagram, and many other social networks didn’t focus on making money at the beginning was because they knew they had to get the eyeballs before they could get advertisers interested. The same is true in music. If people don’t want to listen to your music for free, at first, do you really think they’ll pay for it? It’s hard enough getting attention with the word ‘free’ let alone getting someone to open up their wallet for someone they don’t know about. 

I’m not saying artists shouldn’t sell music, but their should be a strategy behind selling. If you give music away for free and increase your fanbase to the point you sell more merch or concert tickets, then perhaps you’ll make more money than if you sold your music straight out of the gate.

EDM and dubstep phenom Skrillex released an advergame, SKRILLEX QUEST, that is promoting his single for ‘Summit’ by having players experience the song rather than merely listen to it. While creating an advergame (advertisement + game) is probably out of the budget or skillset of an up-and-coming artist, that doesn’t mean they can’t a) come up with something interactive to boost record sales, or b) come up with something interactive to boost awareness about you as an artist that will turn into revenue later. 

What we’ve seen with advergames, Kickstarter campaigns, Google Hangouts, and other promotional tools is that it’s no longer just about the music. It’s about an experience. Invest inyour experience.

Now more than ever is when you need to make each post count. Facebook status updates and shares, tweets, and email marketing newsletters are all important to maintain your fans, followers, and userbase. However, it’s getting harder and harder to cut through the noise. As more artists embrace social media 24/7, more companies bring their marketing online, and more “stuff” tries to get in your inbox or in your feed, which makes it harder to distinguish between the good and the fluff.  

Facebook is trying to take a proactive stance for quality. Their EdgeRank algorithm sorts what comes into your News Feed every time you login to Facebook. If you login every few minutes, you’ll see the best stuff from the last few minutes. If you login once a month, you’ll only have some of the best stuff over the last few days or the last few weeks. If you, as an artist or a brand, want to make it into that News Feed to reach all the people who already liked your page, then you have to tone down the number of posts that people don’t care about or are unlikely to get any engagement (i.e. likes and comments). You need to focus on quality. Once people stop engaging with your content, you’re almost lost from the News Feed entirely. 

Many Facebook page owners and marketers were up in arms when Facebook introduced the pay-to-promote option. If you pay a certain amount, you can reach a certain number of your followers. So instead of the EdgeRank algorithm deciding which 10-30% of your followers would see your post, you can guarantee views to your post and reach a lot more people. The conclusion was that many people paid Facebook for their likes through Facebook advertising and now Facebook was asking for money to reach those followers (double taxation, if you will). Some felt duped. 

Facebook is grappling with two different pressures: the pressure to increase revenues to perform well on the stock market for their investors and employees and to maintain the user experience for their users. Even if you think what Facebook doing is in part to increase revenues, which it is, they are also combating the increasing amount of noise on the platform.

The story? Facebook gets huge. Marketers flock to the platform for cheap advertising or for “viral” and organic ways of reaching more people. Facebook has to deal with all the noise and turns down the noise of not only the bad actors but also legitimate actors who can’t fit all their content in the News Feed. As social media gets flooded, social networks will turn to algorithms to chop down the noise or add in expert curation to pick out what’s the best content. No matter what the method is that prevents posts from being seen, you have to make sure you focus on quality to get through the clutter and actually stay visible to your audience and your potential audience.

Most musicians approach their craft from an auditory level. How does this production sound? What melody is appropriate for this song? Or on an even more granular level, what kind of filter should I add to give this intro a contrasting sound from the rest of the track? Oftentimes, artists who think of music first are so enveloped in the songwriting and production process that there is no consideration for the visual aspect, at least at first.

As much as humans love a nice catchy melody, we are visual creatures. While we’re not going to be thinking about how something looks when we listen to music with our earbuds tucked neatly in our ears and our eyes on the road (or on the treadmill, or in our bedrooms), it can be a great exercise in creativity to think about the visual aspect of your work first. 

As the cliché saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. I’m not sure how many words a musical note is worth, but I can venture to say visuals are pretty important in expressing creativity as much as sound. If you think of what kind of visual and emotions you want your imagination to convey, as you would with the music you create, you can get a good sense of what atmosphere you’d like to evoke.

For fun, start writing a song by drawing a picture or recording a video. Maybe take a couple pictures. Find the visual first and then craft a song as if that visual was the summary of your song. This can be a powerful tool to cure writer’s block or it can just be an interesting project. On the plus side, if you like the music you create after creating your visual, you’ve already got your album artwork, music video, t-shirt design, or a concert stage prop ready to go along with your composition.

Duff McKagan tells you how to say no to drugs. At one point in time, drug use in the rock n’ roll scene was not only expected, it was a given. McKagan, of Guns N’ Roses fame, writes for Seattle Weekly: 

“Rock and roll definitely has the stereotype of being connected to drug use. I get it. The cliché has been earned. But in our modern era, it seems like drugs have finally lost the status of being a mystical and romantic part of the rock persona. Maybe we've seen too many people implode, with public meltdowns, and worst of all, death.”

This mentality goes back to the days of wild nights in L.A. and NYC. McKagan notes:

“Places like The Viper Room--and the old CBGBs, come to think of it--only have one set of bathrooms. Everyone shares. Your columnist went into the men's room at the Viper Room in L.A. Your columnist simply has to urinate. Your columnist is nervous for the show, as he patiently waits his turn for the urinal. Your columnist gets offered a bump of cocaine right there--dick in hand and everything!”

It’s funny to come across this article at around the same time I watched a documentary on the old days of New York city in a VH1 documentary called “NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell.” The infamous Summer of Sam was also a time when NYC hit rock bottom, going through bouts of crime, unemployment problems, a city-wide blackout, and the beginnings of the disco craze, hip-hop birth, and punk rock underbelly. 

It’s easy to look back on an era in a favorable light, despite its problems, romanticizing the excesses and the newness that is now nostalgia. Rockstars from records labels and punk bands like The Ramones and Blondie reminisce about the early days of CBGBs and how 42^nd street was crawling with drugs and hookers. As one put it, the days when it wasn’t safe in Times Square for women and children, those were actually the best days for the arts.

In the same way that modern day New York City might be bland for a punk band from the late 1970s, drugs are often seen as the alluring and commonplace part of the artist’s lifestyle. Clearly McKagan doesn’t think it’s necessary even though many of his fans offer him joints at shows as if its second nature, thinking that it’s a given that a rockstar would partake in drugs handed to him (or her). Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, was open about his experimentation with LSD, so even in other fields than rock n’ roll a drug can be described as providing a spiritual or creative awakening. However, all the coke, heroin, or pot in the world won’t help you write the next “Sweet Child o’ Mine” or “Welcome to the Jungle.” 

As musicians scramble to find new ways to make money in the digital era, Jakprints released data on the profit margins for a variety of popular merchandise options for artists (see photos). Digital Music News broke down several merch selling strategies, including everything from partnering with distributors who organize drop-shipping, sales, and merchandise printing to organizing touring inventory and merch giveaways.

In an age where the top DJs don’t sell many records, the modern day musician needs to professionalize the rest of their trade (i.e. stuff other than recording music) and concentrate on diversifying with alternative revenue streams. When people think merch, most  think of t-shirts first because fans proudly sport the latest in their favorite artists’ fashion. Artists know people need to wear clothes, so fans might as well support artists at the same time as they pick their wardrobe.

T-shirts provide a good profit margin, as Jakprints’ data shows, but there’s no reason to ignore little knick-knacks that are fun for fans and easy to produce cheaply. This means everything from stickers to magnets to patches. These are all items that fans can easily stick on clothes, laptops, and their local indie club’s stall doors (disclaimer: I’m not condoning graffiti, but some clubs dig the grungy vibe provided by a sticker-covered bathroom). This all means getting free marketing as you would with a fan wearing a t-shirt, except that fans can’t wear the same shirt every day, assuming they have some sense of proper hygiene.

Not only should you look at other options other than clothes, but you should think about what fans can wear year-round. A t-shirt is good in the summer, but hoodies, hats, and maybe even a wool scarf is something your fans could be into. If you’re pinching pennies, ask your fans what they want via an online survey before making an investment in merchandise—use a site like SurveyMonkey if you have an email list of your fans all ready to go. Alternatively, run a presale for items on your website or an online store widget and only commit to charging your fans for an item once you’ve sold enough of a specific item and can commit to ordering the item from a manufacturer.

Merch is just one of a varied number of ways to make money as an artist, but even within that one category of sales, dig deeper and find new ways to take advantage of product offerings. 

Check out the profit margin of each product type below:

Songkick, a music concert discovery service, is going into the business of helping artists crowdfund their concert experiences. CEO Ian Hogarth wrote a blog post about how Songkick helped electronic artist Tycho organize a gig for 500 people in London.

Ian wrote about the process of spreading the word for Tycho’s crowdfunded concert: 

“We chatted to Tycho and his team and it seemed like they’d need to sell a few hundred tickets to make it feasible to come to London, so we created a simple website, Detour to allow Tycho fans to pledge. What happened next was pretty insane! We emailed the fans on Songkick who were tracking Tycho, and over 100 of them pledged money for a ticket. Gideon was pretty thrilled to see how many other people shared his passion for Tycho. But 100 or so wasn’t enough to get the show confirmed so the Songkickers took it into their own hands & started to contact friends and music fans who were either into Tycho or should be! Within a short while we hit our target and the gig was on! Wow.”

This isn’t the first foray into crowdfunding events, but Songkick might have the technology to take it up a notch. Kickstarter, the most well-known of crowdfunding sites, helps artists raise money for album releases and tours, helps film-makers shoot documentaries, helps product designers release their newest project, and enables many others to realize their dreams. However, crowdfunding a concert is only one very small chunk of the Kickstarter platform for creative projects. Songkick, which ties into Facebook and other social media sites to help get the word out about concerts in your area, is perhaps the ideal location for bands to raise money for  tours they don’t know they can afford.

As Hogarth notes, social media sites are filled with comments from fans asking artists to come to their city. Sometimes it’s very hard to know whether there is enough demand for an artist in a particular city if the artist only sees a few comments. Artists can use data and analytics sites like Next Big Sound to see what cities are most interested in them or can look at song and album sales to gauge some idea of where to travel next. For independent artists or bands on a budget, this might not be enough to commit to an expensive gig in a faraway city. 

If Songkick can not only provide the platform to help artists raise money to play in different cities, but also help spread the word about a concert, there might be a whole new market for concerts all over the world. Kickstarter already proved the power of ecommerce, patronage, and donations all wrapped into one platform. If Songkick has the formula to reach more people who like to attend concerts and helps fans put their money where their mouth is, we might start to see a much more efficient market for artists who don’t find themselves on the Ticketmasters of the world.

The most damage you can do to yourself is to treat all numbers alike. Social media is not a number. The race to some elusive goal (3K Twitter followers, 10K Facebook likes, or 500K YouTube views) is just a goal. But not all numbers are created equal.

On the one hand, a high social media count for one page can certainly give you a perception of importance. If my Facebook page has a million likes, people will come to it and view the page more seriously than a page with just a few likes. Big numbers do matter, but context is everything. Having a large presence online can act as a snowball effect, so as your numbers get bigger they continue to get bigger faster and faster. This is the viral effect, whether it be an increase in credibility that leads to more sharing by people or it’s a boost in a website’s algorithm that floats you to the top of the stack and gets you many more views. This can be a great form of free marketing. 

At the end of the day, the goal of obtaining a high number of social media followers should be more than just for ego-stroking. Ask yourself why these followers are important. How did you obtain them? Did you spend thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign that got you thousands of “fans” in a day or did you shake a thousand people’s hands at gigs across the country that led them to following you online and telling all their friends about your music? Or did you pay someone $5 to give you 1,000 Twitter followers that turn out to be mostly fake? Each kind of follower is different and increasing your following only matters insofar that the followers are there to stay and engage with you or your community.

Many music and business folks talk about 1000 fans. All you need is 1000 true fans to have a solid career doing what you love in the arts. Having 1000 true fans doesn’t mean having 1000 Facebook likes. The 1000 is for the truly devout fans that do more than press a button (be it to follow or to like). Even if someone is not that invested in you as an artist, you shouldn’t turn them away if they happen to follow you on a social media site. No one is saying that. However, think of where you are putting your energy to reach your goals. Are you being authentic in obtaining fans? Time spent on the business side of things is time spent away from the creative production of your art (be it music or otherwise).

If you’re just rigidly optimizing for a certain number instead of trying to create genuine relationships with your fans, growing revenue for your career, and making lasting connections, perhaps it’s time to consider that not all numbers are created equal.

Apple has become synonymous with simplicity of design and ease of use with their iPod and iPhone products. The way we experience music and related applications will never be the same after Steve Jobs helped make it possible to “fit your whole music library in your pocket.” While it’s hard to argue with the quality of Apple’s product, there is no question that the marketing and hype machine surrounding Apple’s product launches is nothing short of genius. The Apple fanboys and fangirls of the world will buy anything Apple, and even if competing companies build a worthy product, many won’t turn their heads.

Digital Music News wrote a piece on the new iPhone 5 and how it is an evolution of the iPhone 4S but is not revolutionizing the way people use smartphones—most of that work is already done. Other than making the device much faster and lighter, there aren’t that many new bells and whistles unless you consider a new headphone name (EarPods) to be exciting. While the kind of headphones that comes with the iPhone is not a big selling point, the audiophiles of the world will see their audio experience very differently based on different types of headphones. 

With smartphone choice, other than noticeable differences in speed, app selection, and other core parts of the iPhone experience, the Apple branding has a strong psychological influence on one’s perception of the product. Whether it’s the marketing or the fact you expect quality when you buy an Apple product, there is still a subliminal desire to think highly of an Apple product regardless of all the factors at play. Then there is the case of headphones, where one would think that quality trumps branding (since we trust our ears to tell us what sounds goods, how can branding have an effect on what we perceive to be good sound quality?).

Enter Beats, the company that makes the headphones that command 51% of the premium headphone market that’s worth about a $1 billion in the U.S. alone (according to Digital Music News). In the professional audio community, Beats sometimes gets a bad rep for being overpriced—that is to say the quality is not so great, and you’re paying double a normal sticker price just for the association with Dr. Dre and the Beats name. It seems that Beats is not just a headphone choice but also a fashion choice, with the trendy headphones easily spotted in New York City subways and on college campuses across America. This might be one of those times that branding gets ahead of product, unlike with Apple products that seemed to impress a smaller core group of Apple fanatics early on before hitting the masses. The NPD says:

“Thirty-eight percent of premium headphone owners say their device is part of their personal style and one-in-four say it is important that their headphones are fashionable.”

For audio geeks such a statement seems egregious and that sound quality should be the first thing people think about when deciding how to listen to music, but our devices are more than how fast or how well they get us from Point A to Point B. Products that we wear every day are also a reflection of our personalities and how we want to be perceived by other people. That’s where branding just beat out product, even if the product itself is in fact of sound quality.

As reported by New York Times and many other news sources, Apple will be launching a Pandora competitor within the next few months. While Pandora already has many streaming Internet radio competitors, with the likes of Slacker and iHeartRadio, and other music listening platform competitors like Spotify and rdio, Apple is the behemoth that could put Pandora in a shaky situation. 

Pandora’s stock dropped nearly 17% at the news, Hypebot mentions. This comes at a time when Pandora is still having trouble reaching profitability, as its spending is tied heavily to current regulation that requires a payment for radio streams to record labels and other sources that seems to prevent it from being in the black.

While Pandora expects to turn a profit sometime in the coming year or two, the allure of switching to an Apple product might be too great for some and could stifle Pandora’s growth. With the upcoming iPhone 5 release, and the design-focused company that is Apple, consumers will soon have a choice between what service they want to use and how tied it will be to the device in their pocket. 

Is this time for Pandora to panic? Perhaps not, considering so many consumers’ daily office experience is related to the customized radio stations Pandora offers them, catered directly to their tastes. Many companies know that the switching costs of leaving a service that knows so much about you to a competing service is high. What that new service has to offer must be 10 times better than the old service, otherwise most are too lazy to switch. Who cares if Bing is better or worse than Google—we’re used to Google and we’re going to keep going to that homepage or using that Google search toolbar until some cathartic experience with a new search engine causes us to switch.

However, if Apple provides a service that seamlessly ties into your devices, whether it be through the all-too-familiar iTunes, iPod, or iPhone, it’s going to turn a few eyebrows. Apple will easily bring the fanboys and fangirls on board, but will they have the music discovery ability to snatch away a growing Pandora userbase? We’ll have to grab some popcorn (and our nicest earbuds) and wait to see.

What is it about musicians and politics that gets the mainstream so intrigued? If you oppose the artist’s political philosophy, then you’re probably saying to your friends, “Why do musicians have to talk about politics? No one cares about their opinion, they should just play music and shut up.” If you agree with the artist, you’ll probably tolerate the mixing of politics and music. Perhaps, you’ll be drawn to the music even more. Is it that we hate politics in our music or that we just hate politics that we don’t agree with?

Take Dave Mustaine for instance—he’s been taking a lot of flack for his recent accusation onObama for staging the recent massacres at Aurora and the Sikh temple. Mustaine is free to speak his mind, even if metalheads across the world don’t agree with him. Much of his music and lyrics is politically-charged, so does it make sense for Mustaine to share political opinions in the middle of a concert? If you don’t agree with a musician, is it possible to separate their opinions from their music? I’m sure there are many Mustaine and Megadeth fans who despite enjoying the music have a hard time embracing the artist behind the music—maybe they give up on the music altogether. While his lyrics might be political in nature on occasion, Dave Mustaine’s music is appreciated for the guitar riffs, hooks, and overall metal sound. When one thinks Megadeth, one doesn’t think politics. If there is no definitive connection between the medium and the message, it isn’t in your best interests to alienate fans with your politics.

On the other hand, there are artists like Tom Morello, who recently spoke out against Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan and his affinity for Rage Against the Machine’s music. Music and politics are at the heart of Rage Against the Machine’s music, so it’s hard to believe their fans resent the band for bringing in politics outside of their own song lyrics. Political activism and Rage Against the Machine’s music go hand-in-hand, from the distorted riffs of “Bulls on Parade” to the public statements of protest. When you listen to the music you know what you signed up for, and that’s vital to the social contract between the artist and the fans.

So if your politics isn’t core to the music and one of the most identifiable bonds between you as an artist and your fans, it probably is wise to drop any politics you have from the public consciousness. Making a difference is important, but if you forget why your fans made you successful in the first place, you could start a divide in your fanbase that can’t be fixed. Next time you want to mix music with politics, think about why your fans listen to your music and whether mixing in your own political viewpoints will add value to the discourse or just ruin the excitement of the music.  

Not one to stray from the provocative, Marilyn Manson showed up at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) with profanity written across his face in the hopes he’d prevent paparazzi from selling his photograph to the highest bidder. A witness of the encounter, who goes by the name j_patrick_12, wrote:

"I just went through the LAX security line with Marilyn Manson. He had 'F---' scrawled in large letters across the bottom half of his face, with what appeared to be a grease pencil. As we each removed our boots in the security line, he kindly explained that it was not directed at me or anyone else in the airport, but rather at the paparazzi, so that they couldn't sell any photos of him that they took. He was really apologetic about it, and covered his mouth around young children while apologizing to their parents for exposing their child to profanity."

While many celebrities try to seem anti-establishment by doing something controversial, Marilyn Manson puts thought behind what he does—perhaps a lesson many should take in celebrity. Some celebrities will take the spotlight when they can get it, some will shun their celebrity despite fighting so hard to get it, and others, like Marilyn Manson, just do whatever they want. Manson doesn’t go for shock for the sake of shock. His name came up in the media after the recent The Dark Knight Rises shooting—parallels to Columbine were all too apparent. Manson’s open letter to the public after being blamed for Columbine by the media shows the artist’s true colors: 

“When it comes down to who’s to blame for the high school murders in Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who’s guilty. We’re the people who sit back and tolerate children owning guns, and we’re the ones who tune in and watch the up-to-the-minute details of what they do with them. I think it’s terrible when anyone dies, especially if it’s someone you know and love. But what is more offensive is that when these tragedies happen, most people don’t really care any more than they would the season finale of Friends or The Real World. I was dumbfounded as I watched the media snake right in, not missing a teardrop, interviewing the parents of dead children, televising the funerals. Then came the witch hunt. Man’s greatest fear is chaos. It is unthinkable that these kids did not have a simple black-and-white reason for their actions. And so a scapegoat was needed.”

There are celebrities, musicians, and artists of all sorts who look for controversy. They live off of it. Marilyn Manson, on the other hand, is equal parts business savvy, thoughtful artist, and outspoken in appearance and words. Perhaps that combination makes for fame, intrigue, and relevance. Or perhaps the man behind the makeup, Brian Warner, is smart enough to appear all those things when and if he wants.

A study coming from Spain uncovered the not-so-surprising truth that pop music all sounds the same nowadays. Reuters wrote that a team of artificial intelligence specialists led by Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council took music from 1955-2010 and ran it through complex algorithms to determine various musical attributes. The team discovered that music has not only become louder but also more repetitive in chordal structure and melody. Serra told Reuters:

"We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse. In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years."

There seems to be two forces working in tandem making music sound all too familiar: the notes themselves and modern day recording practices. The four-chord song, parodied so aptly in this YouTube viral hit, is simple enough to write and makes for a Billboard chart-topper. There is no need to experiment outside of this convenient box if you’re looking for pop stardom. That doesn’t mean your song doesn’t have to be catchy, it just has to fit in the right box. Notes alone aren’t responsible for the sameness that is modern pop music—the way sound is treated also plays a key role. 

Sound engineers dubbed the blandness of the sonic structure as the ‘loudness wars.’ Every record is competing to be the loudest record possible, whether it be rock, pop, or metal. On the radio or on your mp3 player, the band wants their sound to pop out at you. By compressing and limiting tracks, producers and engineers are able to minimize the dynamic range of a song and push the overall volume of the entire track up. While this has its benefits – when playing music in the car or on the subway, you don’t have to do much fiddling with the volume knob – it also makes many recordings feel the same sonically, whether or not the music is unique from a melodic standpoint.

The database of music for the study stems from the Million Song Dataset, so the results seem to be statistically significant. But can the next million pop songs change this pattern? Perhaps due to the proliferation of iPods and iPhones, it will be hard to ever reverse the trend of pop music blandness. With music on-the-go, the convenience of homogenization in the sonic spectrum is almost necessary. However, it will take away from the music’s ability to breath and deviate from the norm. The expressivity of a note played at any point of the dynamic range is important for artistic integrity, although this has increasingly become an afterthought in pop music. When it comes to creativity, on the other hand, that must be the initiative of the pop star and his/her respective mainstream fanbase to change the trend of music, and that might be an even bigger impossibility. 

Some can use Skrillex to both defend and accuse those who merely put on their hit records and push play (or at least mostly push play with some added pizazz). Skrillex is a producer. He produces original music that is loved by millions and his longtime roots are not in mixing live music, spinning vinyl, or taking advantage of complex MIDI systems to perform. On the other hand, purists for live DJ music can use that as a criticism for the exploding EDM scene.

One of my favorite DJs from Europe, Alex Kenji, recently wrote on his Facebook Timeline:

“wow sometimes i miss minimal, techno and tech house. i like EDM but too many idiots in this scene... jesus christ”

The post gathered many more likes than his average posts and created some back and forth in the commenting. Clearly people have opinions on the matter. And it’s partly true—I’ve very much enjoyed live concerts where you know the DJ is putting in a ton of effort to get an original once-in-a-lifetime sound across, a sound you don’t get by playing the original tracks off of YouTube. Compare this to the party atmosphere where people are in it for a different experience rather than reveling in the DJ’s spinning prowess. 

The question I sometimes ask myself is whether either experience is inherently better. Perhaps if you’re not performing I feel like I shouldn’t pay exorbitant ticket prices, but at the same time, I’m going to a show to have a good time. Have I had less fun at a DJ show where I knew in the back of my head the DJ wasn’t actually doing that much? Not really. It plays a role in the consciousness, but it’s not a dealbreaker.

This might be a crude analogy, but take the business world as an example. You use services like Google and Facebook for free, but what you give up in return is your information. These companies must make money by selling your information to advertisers, plain and simple. Do you still want to use the services for free rather than paying? Most people would say yes despite having a slightly grossed out feeling in the back of their throats about the whole situation. I think the same is true for many electronic music concerts. You know what’s really going on in some cases, but you just don’t want to think about it. You just want a good time. Ignorance is bliss.

To cap a fireworks-filled July 4^th here in the U.S., what could be more appropriate than a little nostalgia for your Independence Day celebrating. Check out music videos that display fireworks! 

Muse – “Starlight”

Animal Collective – “Fireworks”

Katy Perry – “Firework”

Drake – “Fireworks”

Kelis – “4^th of July (Fireworks)”

Audioslave – “Cochise” 

Diddy – “Dirty Money”

“Amazing Fireworks Music Video” 

Despite being arrested for criminal copyright infringement, Kim Dotcom has been resilient in his efforts to bring his new service MegaBox to the masses after the shutdown of Megaupload and Megavideo in January 2012. Kim Dotcom tweeted to his followers:

“The major Record Labels thought Megabox is dead. Artists rejoice. It is coming and it will unchain you.” 

What is MegaBox and what is its answer to the current woes of the music industry? Dotcom described the almost too-good-to-be-true business model:

"We have a solution called the MegaKey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free. Yes that's right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The MegaKey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works."   

Dotcom expects to not only pay artists 90 percent of all download earnings, but also to compensate artists for free downloads. It’s too early to tell how much artists will actually make and which major label artists will support the new service. Despite having artists

like Kanye West, will.i.am, Jamie Foxx, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Alicia Keys, and Chris Brown defending Kim’s business in their “Megaupload Song,” without major label backing the future MegaBox service might not get the traction it seeks. It does however have beta users like 7digital, Gracenote, Rovi, and Amazon MP3. So even if it doesn’t have Universal Music Group (UMG) on board, it has some goodwill from other important names.

According to Digital Music News, there are already rumors that artists are making money off of MegaBox: 

“…we’ve heard that some major rappers were already making money off of MegaKey, and rumors also point to development efforts by incoming CEO Swizz Beatz. Which sort of corresponds to what Busta Rhymes was angirly tweeting a few days ago. ‘1^st of all I am sooooo proud of my brother @THEREALSWIZZZ 4 being apart of creating something (MEGAUPLOAD) that could create the most powerful way 4 artists 2 get 90% off of every dollar despite the music being downloaded 4 free…’”

Regardless of its future success, and whether it will even see the light of day amidst ongoing litigation, Dotcom is showing the feds and the music industry that he doesn’t take a fight sitting down. He clearly has a chip on his shoulder, wants to challenge the status quo, and is willing to do so by jeopardizing his freedom—whether it’s on a quest for revenge or the Almighty Dollar.

1) Songkick: The site and app provides a dead simple way to track your favorite artists and sends you notifications when one of your tracked artists books a gig in town. The site also lets you browse through your location to find out who’s playing in your city on a particular day. Other than the tracking feature, which works great, the site also recommends you similar artists to start tracking. When visiting their browser site for the first time, it’s much easier to find artists you already know about than to discover new artists that happen to be in your town. If you download their iPhone or Spotify app or integrate with Facebook, Songkick will scan your music to find artists you listen to who have concerts scheduled nearby. 

2) Bandsintown: This app works similarly to Songkick, where you can track artists that you like for upcoming shows. Bandsintown has a very deep integration with Facebook, with many artists keeping a tab on their Facebook Timeline specifically for tour dates through Bandsintown. One great feature included on the website is a “Concert Cloud”—just like a tag cloud, the Concert Cloud tab includes a list of artists with ones that you track in bigger and bolder typeface. Even better, there are three sliders that let you select the date range, distance from you location, and maximum ticket price to narrow down the search results. If you happen to be in a city like New York, where a lot is going on, the list can be a bit hard on the eyes. The customization on the left, however, makes it easier to tweak your searches without navigating to a new page. 

3) Live Nation: The LiveNation Concert Calendar app pulls in your data from Facebook to recommend you shows in your area via Ticketmaster’s concert and comedy show listings. Although it’s not as snazzy as apps like Songkick and Bandsintown in terms of its functionality, TechCrunch’s review says the graphical interface is worth checking out.

4) ConcertCrowd: This app works mostly on your Facebook ‘likes’ to give you concert updates in your area, but you can also follow what your friends are interested in to get more recommendations. ConcertCrowd works off of new music you discover through the app, your current ‘likes’, and your social graph.

5) SeatGeek’s Columbus: Not to be confused with Columbus, Ohio, SeatGeek expanded their product offering to give you personalized live event recommendations. Submit a few of your favorite artists and performers and they’ll do the rest. SeatGeek provides interactive maps of venues to give you the best deals and information on ticket purchases—now they do live event recommendations as well.

1) Come Up With a Clever T-Shirt: Sure, not everyone can be as Internet famous as Amanda Palmer (or real-life famous either), so you might not be able to make $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter and sell more than half of that from merch alone. However, people like buying band t-shirts. At your next gig, make your t-shirt more than just your name—make it clever, funny, or even shocking. Whatever it is, make it memorable.

2) Sell Track Stems: If you’re a DJ and you have a following, or even if you’re a rock band with fans looking to morph your music into a new sound, try selling the stems of your music on sites like Beatport. This way people can get a hold of separated tracks of your songs and can much more easily remix your music.

3) Fan-made YouTube Video Contests: Have your fans upload their own music videos for your song. Since you, the artist, owns the rights to the music you can make money on advertising showed before each video (see more info about licensing here).

4) Raise Money Online: Use crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, IndieGogo, or PledgeMusicto help bring family, friends, and your online following into the mix (pun intended).

5) Create an Interactive App: Know someone who codes? Make an app or use OneSheet Mobile to have an on-the-go app to promote at your shows. Collect fans and try to up-sell fans whenever you can.

6) Teach: Know how to sing, play guitar, or even DJ? Don’t think it’s below you to teach some cool kids how to do what you do. Keep yours creativity going and funds your next tour or album! With apps like BANDHAPPY, you can even teach from the road.

7) Sell the Rights: Have some music that would fit well in a commercial but not on your next album? What about something perfect for an indie soundtrack? Lend your music or take part in recording sessions for some extra dough between gigs.

8) Give Yourself Away: Time isn’t scalable. You only have so much time in a day, but if you want music to be your job, then on occasion you should look for music-related gigs outside you main duties as an artist. Keep money flowing in along with your creative juices. 

Amanda Palmer, part member of musical duo Dresden Dolls and part solo artist and social media extraordinaire, raised a whopping $1,192,793 on Kickstarter from 24,883 backers who supported her project with contributions of $1 all the way up to $10,000 (with rewards appropriate for the amount given). Palmer set her funding goal at a more modest $100,000, but a tidal wave of support from her cult fanbase and the very word-of-mouth online community helped her smash all notions of what a music project could raise from crowdsourced fundraising and what a record deal means in the modern music industry. To top it all off, the money is going to fund the project, so the lion’s share won’t even end up in anyone’s pockets, just invested into getting rewards to backers. 

After parting ways with her former record label Roadrunner Records, and calling herself a “major label refugee,” Palmer decided to take the conventional idea of a record deal into her own hands. Palmer proved that if you have the right idea and enough of an online presence, you can essentially ask your fans to be your record deal (not your label). I often talk about how up-and-coming musicians should forget about record deals before they even lay as much as a digital footprint. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. You want the record deal to help you get promotion and build a big following, but you can’t get the record deal unless you have a big following. And if you do get a record deal, well.. you can just read this long piece about how you won’t make any money anyway.

If you have the DIY mentality, you don’t need to raise $1 million on Kickstarter, but it’s very possible to raise $5,000 to get things started. Many companies have been bootstrapped off of the gracious lending of family and friends—now you have online platforms like Kickstarter, IndieGogo, and PledgeMusic to give you that same nudge with the added benefit of an online community to get you over the top.

What made Palmer’s Kickstarter campaign work? Other than her prior fame, Palmer set up the campaign for success. This wasn’t JUST a record release or JUST a tour—she was selling an experience. Everything from music to signed memorabilia to concerts to custom painted turntables to house parties to paintings of you on a canvas. This is intimacy, art, and entertainment at its best. This isn’t an impersonal stadium tour, you’re meant to feel part of something. This is a lesson for all musicians out there: people want to be included. Up-and-coming artists without a fanbase might not have as much to offer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bend over backwards for the fans you do have. 

As Amanda Palmer so aptly put it, “This is the future of music.”

Digital Music News wrote an interesting piece on giving away music in the days of declining music sales and illegal pirating. Often times, the mantra these days is to give your music away for free. Since there are more and more artists using readily available equipment to get music into the world and online, it’s harder to cut through the noise as an artist. So the next logical conclusion would be to give your music away for free to get it into the most hands of as many people as possible and to “spread the word” quickly. Apparently that’s not always the wisest decision when it comes to the lessons of supply and demand that Economics 101 taught us so long ago.

One DIY artist commented on Digital Music News: 

“But it's funny that even when I used to give away [my music] for free, there wasn't much traffic nor many downloads, almost nothing. Then we decided that we should put it up for sale so that we might be able to recoup some of the money spent on making the music videos (when it's your brother making the videos, I still consider it DIY). Anyway, as soon as people saw that the music was up for sale, the website and other related social media gizmos received much more attention. Also, people began looking for ways to download it for free, which isn't always a bad sign."

So the people who are willing to pay for music perceive the music from this artist as having greater value because they are charging for it. If a brand name is willing to charge more than the no-name brand, then certainly an artist who charges for something rather than giving something away is brand name caliber too.

The people who don’t pay for music are still interested because of the perceived value of the music and will seek the music out through illegal channels—but there is still a demand there that might not have existed if the music was free from the start. If your goal is to get into the hands of as many people as possible, perhaps having that price tag makes your music seem worth it, regardless of whether someone actually pays for it in the end.

In a world of branding and image, sometimes it’s important to start off with a level of perceived quality. Of course this strategy might work out differently for different artists. If you can’t actually deliver on that quality, perhaps putting a price tag on your music won’t actually tip the scales in your favor (rather you’ll be digging yourself just as fast into obscurity). But if you know your production value is there and your songs are what people are looking for, the right strategy could be to charge. If you notice charging for music in the conventional sense is slowing you down, see if you can give away your music for free but charge for extra perks like bonus packages, behind-the-scenes footage, meet and greets, signed memorabilia, merchandise, or other unique items that go beyond just a digital download. If the money’s not in the music, it might be in the experience you’re selling. 

The popular technology and startup blog TechCrunch posted an article today that claimed “Plays Can Increase iTunes Sales. Here’s Proof!” The beginning of the article reads as follows: 

“Despite fears that streaming access cannibalizes sales, classical music record label X5 tells me when it launched an app within Spotify and saw streams of one album increase 412% in a month, that album’s iTunes sales shot up 50%. The Swedish label’s “The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music” soon reached #1 on the iTunes Classical charts, and broke into the iTunes Top 200 album charts for the first time, hitting #152.”

This example is clearly just one of many potential case studies, both pro- and anti-Spotify. Paul McCartney and The Black Keys both publically pulled their music from Spotify and other streaming services due to lackluster results from their point of view. In the comments of the article, many TechCrunch readers were quick to note that classical music is a very different kind of genre than the rest on Spotify and caters to a different kind of listener. So while Spotify might be great as a discovery tool of classical and other forms of music, people who already know a genre or artist in-and-out might be more reluctant to buy albums off of iTunes if they know they can stream it off of Spotify for a fraction of the price (or for free).

Another tech blog AllThingsD, had a realistic (although a bit more sobering) outlook on the Spotify effect compared to TechCrunch: 

“Some people who weren’t buying any music at all start shelling out a monthly fee for subscription services, turning pirates into profit centers. That still won’t be enough to replace the dollars the industry has lost since its pre-Napster party days. But it is much, much better than nothing.”

Clearly the pre-Napster days are a dream far gone, but artists want to know whether Spotify helps or hurts their bottom line (compared to the current status quo). Spotify CEO Daniel Ek obviously has been open about defending Spotify and their business model, which he says does not cannibalize music sales. Regardless of the cause of album sale decline, Ek told Evolver.fm in February:

“You're talking 10 million active users, 2.5 million subscribers - most of them paying $120 a year, which is double the amount of your average iTunes user. Do you really want to hold back your album from people who are finally paying for music again?” 

To be fair, most aren’t paying for Spotify’s premium service, but their absolute user number is increasing by millions as the months go on and their integration with Facebook’s Open Graph deepens. The question now becomes which audience is more affected by Spotify: an audience willing to go out and buy albums but is currently not doing so because of streaming services or an audience that is now paying a monthly subscription cost when they would otherwise being paying nothing or close to nothing for music. What do you think’s more likely?

Digital Music News wrote a story about further signs of record label erosion:

“Thursday was an extremely crappy day for the crew at Roadrunner Records. That's because parent Warner Music Group chose Thursday to slash substantial parts of the sub-label, with complete shutdowns happening in several offices outside of the US.”

The hard rock and metal label under Warner Music Group is feeling the pain, with Billboard saying 36 were let go. While not every label is downsizing to such a dramatic extent, it’s definitely a time when record labels need to be lean and prioritize their biggest leads for cash returns. This means not only adapting to the changing economics of the music industry, but also not taking risks on artists who they don’t think can make them money under this new model.

Other than digital piracy, social media has changed the game for up-and-coming artists trying to get that once coveted record label deal. For many, a record label deal won’t make sense – even big name artists can get screwed when it comes down to the nitty gritty of a record label contract – but for those who are deadset on getting signed, social media has created the landscape to prove yourself as an artist.

A huge marketing push by a label is no longer the end-all-be-all of album release and touring promotion. Record labels now want to see social media traction as an indicator of independent success. Social media, although not foolproof, is easier to track than old school marketing campaigns. At the same time, labels want to see significant social media traction BEFORE they sign you. The way labels see it, if you don’t already have a big social media following, somebody’s going to have to build one from scratch. Quite possibly, there might not be enough fans who like you. Unless you’re already on terrestrial radio, which is more so the case for major label artists, you’ll want to start online.

Record labels are like investors. The more indicators of success they can see, the more likely they are to fund you. If you have great music, that’s like a company having a good idea for a product. Until an idea, or in this case music, is turned into a business, then it’s still just an idea.

So as labels continue to cut staff and costs, don’t think which labels will still sign you. It’s not time to shop for a record contract, it’s time to shop for fans. 

 

As Mashable pointed out, the user Indubitable_Smoo came up with the idea for Reddit to crowdsource a  hit song after “listening to an urban music station, which plays generic music that all sounds the same.” The effort now has its own subreddit called REDDITTOTP. Musicians who frequent Reddit started posting submissions, beginning with the background instrumental track that would provide the ground floor for the generic poppy sound they are striving for.

So far, the voting has narrowed down the instrumental track to one by Random Insight, who posted his generic pop idea on SoundCloud. The reactions in the comments? Everything from “I can literally hear a Pitbull verse here. This is brilliant.” to “It seems as generic as can be.” But that’s the point! With such a strong community, it wouldn’t be surprising that almost anything the Reddit puts out as a single could somehow make its way onto the charts. In this kind of record industry environment, it really doesn’t take much to chart anyway. Although Reddit’s strategy of piecing together tracks might not yield the most cohesive or polished of pop hits, it has the potential to be infectious nonetheless.

On the UPDATED PLAN OF ATTACK: page you can see a continuation of the original mission, with links to all the areas that need help for finishing the song. Other than having a decent amount of time on their hands, the Reddit community shows that they can actively get things done once again. Many people are idea-makers or stand behind an issue, but it takes an active person or group to actually pursue something rather than passively letting it slip by the wayside (a problem often seen among political dissenters and people trying to start projects from scratch). Although the song is not completed yet, Reddit shows the power of crowdsourcing behind something as simple as an idea.

Funny or Die wrote a hilarious, and quite accurate, article entitled 7 Types of People at Coachella. From Hopeless Drug Addicts to Bro’s to Industry Assholes, you’ll find a variety of folks at an increasingly mainstream music festival like Coachella. You’ll see similar types at other festivals. At Electric Zoo Festival you’ll see more of the Kids on Ecstasy but you’ll get fewer of the Dirty Hippies and People With Babies. Every festival has it’s own signature groups, and as festivals invite a greater variety of artists, you’ll get more distinguishable sects of festival-goers that tend to pop up out of the woodwork and make themselves known. At some point, you reach a tipping point where a music culture no longer belongs to one type of music fan (and most certainly doesn’t comprise solely of Music Lovers, the last remaining of the “7 Types”). 

So what is the shelf-life of cool? When do the early adopters give up on a scene that’s no longer their own? I already see cries on the Internet about how EDM (Electronic Dance Music) is not the same. Bro’s in their yellow wifebeaters and scantily-clad young women in tutus are the norm now. Perhaps drug culture is now the mainstream, as more reports of Ecstasy use are alluded to (even by Madonna), and a scene becomes more focused on its excesses than its music. That doesn’t necessarily mean the music is any better or worse, it just means some fans don’t feel the same connection to the movement as they did before.

When a genre of music is not known typically as “mainstream” but then quickly rises in popularity, you’ll get a greater diversity of fans and concert attendees. At Coachella, a festival that invites all kinds of music from electronica to rock to hip-hop, the disparity in the crowd is widens every year. This can be interesting for some and off-putting for those who feel like they enjoyed the music before everyone else and don’t want to taint their scene with non-Music Lovers. Growing pains!

It’s an amusement park where some are there for the rides, some are there for the games, and some are just there. When a theme park  has too many themes, some people might not even know where to begin (or whether at some point, they should ever be there at all). This is in no way a knock on diversity. But when things are no longer about the music, how long do they stay cool?

"Since our inception in 2000, we have incurred significant net operating losses and, as of January 31st, 2012, we had an accumulated deficit of $101.4 million.  A key element of our strategy is to increase the number of listeners and listener hours to increase our market penetration. However, as our number of listener hours increases, the royalties we pay for content acquisition also increase. We have not in the past generated, and may not in the future generate, sufficient revenue from the sale of advertising and subscriptions to offset such royalty expenses.

As a result of these factors, we expect to continue to incur operating losses on an annual basis through at least fiscal 2013 [ie, January, 2013]."

And it’s not just Pandora that gets the brunt of difficult licensing structures and demanding major labels. With only around a 20% conversion rate from free to paid subscriber, Spotify is facing an uphill battle to justify their massive funding rounds totaling $189 million. Michael Robertson, always the contrarian in the music industry, went as far as to say Spotify can never be profitable. Factors including deal structure, labels demanding equity of companies, and up front payments all the way to more technical issues such as non-disclosure, data normalization, and reporting needs all work against massive scale streaming apps like Spotify (where content is licensed, rather than artists uploading music to the service on their own profiles). 

How do services get out of this mess? Well it’s difficult since it comes down to supply and demand. As Robertson continues:

“The sale of EMI to other music companies means there will shortly be only three major labels. If a music service rejects terms offered by a label, then that service’s offering will have an enormous hole in their catalog of 25 percent or more of popular songs.” 

Unlike Spotify, Pandora abides by U.S. laws based around terrestrial radio, and does not face some of the same problems Robertson lists as business obstacles for Spotify. Clearly, both are going to have a tough time hitting that coveted goal of profitability as record labels don’t always feel like budging and consumers don’t always feel like paying. 

More Best Buy stores are closing their doors. A store that used CDs as a loss leader to get you in the door to buy more expensive items is now losing the battle on the big ticket items as well. People go into the store to browse, but ultimately people are buying off Amazon and other online retailers. Best Buy can’t compete.

The CD store hasn’t been able to compete for years. Walmart’s music section has shrunk. Apples iTunes takes a 30% cut of your sales and expects you to sell singles one at a time rather than the more lucrative deal of selling your whole album to a consumer who only wanted to own one or two songs.

Is there an answer to this. David Lowery, founder of Cracker and Camper von Beethoven, said no at this year’s SF MusicTech Summit. As Digital Music News summarized: 

“Record labels and artists don’t need to reinvent their business model to match the new reality. THEY ALREADY DID. That’s what we’ve all been doing for the last ten years. AND WE NOW KNOW IT’S ACTUALLY WORSE FOR THE ARTIST.”

Lowery argues that artists used to use touring to boost sales, rather than using touring as the end-all-be-all of revenue generation. However, there is more than one possible revenue stream that bands are trying these days. While many will struggle to make a middle-class income, many are embracing new models to make the industry work for them. Gabe McDonough, vice president, music director at Leo Burnett in Chicago said:

"It used to be pretty rare to hear an indie band on an ad. It's not that rare anymore. Somebody's got to pay the bills.…In 2012, brands are one of the few entities in human culture that are willing to pony up." 

In many cases, the corporation has replaced the individual as the source of income. For some bands, this might equate to selling out. When your band’s song is playing on a Lowe’s commercial, are you still hip and trendy? Facing the reality of the music industry, it’s probably time to stop worrying about selling out and start worrying about whether you can devote 24/7 to your music.

Would Lady Gaga be popular even without her award show entrances where she’s covered in meat or hatched from a giant egg? Probably. Would 50 Cent be famous if he didn’t get shot nine times? Most likely. Regardless, it’s all the little things, whether it be a unique upbringing or controversy hitting the headlines, that add up to celebrity. Constantly being front and center is what helps you gain share of mind.

I don’t think anyone denies that Deadmau5, the popular DJ, has serious musical chops—but  his mouse hat and costume and his onstage persona help add to the allure of his music. The performance and the visuals surrounding the artist fill in all the gaps for listeners when they’re listening or not listening to the music itself.

This doesn’t mean that artists should fake controversy or create a ridiculous image for themselves that doesn’t fit their music, but it does mean that artists need something more to latch onto than just music if they want to reach an iconic status or help spread a certain message. Kurt Cobain did this exact thing by trying to be the anti-image. The plaid and jeans were a statement against 80’s glam rock, but that in itself was an image. It was radically different and people could relate to it. 

Some latch onto trends. That can work for a little while. Being different is what lasts.

Five Seconds

Bam! Have you grabbed your audience’s attention in the first few seconds of your video? You have to. If you didn’t, edit your video until those first precious seconds are the most compelling few seconds of any viewer’s day.

Digestible 

The most viral videos are short. Yes, even 30 seconds short. If you top out at a minute, that’s fine too. Music videos for full-length songs tend to be longer than a minute, so you’ll have to keep the attention of the viewer through storylines (think Lady Gaga) or through visual mastery (think OK GO). Without plot or a visually compelling piece of work, you’ll just be relying on the music. Music is great, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll go “viral” unless you’re a famous artist or just really lucky.

Social

As Kevin Allocca mentions in his video “Why videos go viral,” tastemakers can help start the snowball effect that creates a viral video.  A tweet from Jimmy Kimmel or a mention on Tosh.O can all help start the ripple effect. But once a tastemaker gives a video an initial push, it’s up to social media sites and the blogosphere to keep spreading a video. Even if the tastemaker is just a prominent player in your industry (or your music genre), there is some beginning step to getting your video into the community you want or even to the masses.

Replicable

Does your video lend itself to parody? Can others respond to it on YouTube with commentary or potentially interesting follow-ups? Another option is for others to make a mashup version or their own cover of the song. The more people that can spread your video through their own videos, the better chance your video has of going viral.

Controversy

What helped make Kony 2012 the most viral video of all time? Not only was it well edited and helped show an emotional story, but it created controversy. Did the creators of the video put too much emphasis on awareness over action? That’s a subjective matter, which created a firestorm of debate that helped make a viral video gain even more heat.

No matter what you do, you won’t be able to dictate whether your video goes viral. However, if you follow the previous patterns of viral videos – in terms of optimal techniques, not predictability – you’ll have a much better shot.

See how Adam Dadowsky engineered OK Go’s virality in “This Too Shall Pass”:

1) Do NOT update your status with your music profile links every day, it’s gets old and people will start ignoring you. 

2) Do NOT go searching for a record deal before you’ve established a large following and have many shows under your belt. Even then, a record deal might still not be the right move for your career. 

3) Do NOT expect a fanbase to come find you. You need to find them.

4) Do NOT skimp on producing your music—a well-produced track is the first step between you and a potential fan.

5) Do NOT think you are above engaging with your listeners.

6) Do NOT delay playing your music live in front of as many audiences as possible, even if your set isn’t perfect yet.

7) Do NOT say ‘no’ to opportunities early on in your career, no matter how small they are. 

8) Do NOT promote too many songs at once. Focus on your best couple songs and market those to a new audience first. 

9) DO NOT be afraid to reinvent yourself.

10) Do NOT charge people upfront as a new artist. Embrace the power of free.

Much has been said about the supposedly dying music industry. What many people don’t distinguish between is the music industry and the record industry. While the record industry is dying in many ways, the music industry is as alive as ever. Tunecore founder Jeff Price said at the Digital Music Forum East in New York (via Digital Music News):

“This was not a fucking golden age. Artists did not swim in money in the traditional music industry… This concept that the music industry was so fucking great is just wrong! It was great for like, one band!”

And the Price is right (pun intended)! In the past, the industry relied on the hits, while artists who couldn’t come up with a successful first or second album were quickly forgotten. As Price notes, these days artists can fail on one album and go straight into making their next album because the price of recording and releasing music to the world has dropped immensely.

Without gatekeepers, it’s anyone’s game. Now you don’t need to ask anyone’s permission, you can just make your art. Whether your art will later be accepted and will help you launch a career is another question, but you don’t need a label’s check to tell you if you can or cannot at least attempt to have a career. 

Hypebot does a good job of showing how MC Lars gave away his music for free so he could jumpstart his merchandise and ticket sales. As you can see in the chart above, 87% of his music income arose from merch and tickets (not CD sales). And instead of getting a label to fund the recording process, he used Kickstarter to help raise the money. MC Lars commented on the changes in the music industry:

“Being a musician no longer means simply being a songwriter and performer. One must also know a little about business, branding, t-shirt design, social networking, production, publicity, accounting and tour managing."

The music industry is now one of long-tail economics. There might be smaller riches in it for the anointed few, but there are certainly many more who have a shot at a piece of the pie.

VEVO was caught illegally streaming the Super Bowl after some investigative journalism by Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch. VEVO, an entertainment company owned in part by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, is openly against piracy. That’s what makes their illegal streaming of the Super Bowl even more ironic in the eyes of consumers, artists, and music businesses that have bore the brunt of the record labels’ wrath over the past decade.

VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff wrote a post explaining the mistake, which can be read in part below:

“A guest of our lounge asked for an NFL game to be aired. We said no. There was a laptop hooked up to VEVO.com that fed into the large TV screens around the bar. Unfortunately, the laptop was easily accessible to the public. That was our mistake for not making sure the laptop was more secure. While VEVO staff was in other areas of the venue, the game was put on – via a website transmitting ESPN’s broadcast of the NFL game – without our permission or knowledge.

As soon as we realized the game was airing to the room, we removed it and went back to playing VEVO videos. The game was not aired in its entirety. Rest assured, we rectified this mistake as soon as we became aware what was going on.”

I’m going to give Caraeff and VEVO the benefit of the doubt, they probably did not intend to illegally stream anything. It just happened. But I think this event puts many current technology issues into perspective. Clearly some people at Vevo’s event wanted to see the Super Bowl and coming across a legitimate streaming source for the game probably isn’t easy if you don’t have the proper TV setup.

What consumers want is ease of use and access, even if it’s at a price. Apple’s iTunes made music consumption easy—their catalogue is fairly robust and provides music at a decent price and in a way consumers favor (i.e. you can buy one track instead of the whole album, and you can do it quickly). The entertainment industry as a whole needs to come up with a viable model for distributing all forms of content at the click of a button in order to curb piracy. 

I’ve listened to several technology podcasts where very wealthy individuals admit to piracy even though they are more than willing to pay for content. In many cases it’s not about paying for content, it’s about accessing content. Between Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, and many other content providers, consumers still can’t get everything they want. Until technology catches up with the demand for readily available content when and how people want to consume it, then piracy will be the fall-back option for a sizeable percentage of consumers (regardless of ethical considerations). Now all we need to do is replace decades of backroom deals and outdated corporate structures so we can aggregate all the content as we please.  

Electronic and DJ music is sweeping the Grammys, apps let you tag audio at the Super Bowl, sites like uJam let you manipulate music with nothing more than your browser, and people record sound straight to their mobile devices. The lines are getting blurred when it comes to music creation. I had to defend the art of DJ-ing to a coworker of mine, who thought that DJs just made a playlist and pressed the play button on their console or laptop. Simply put, that’s not the case (most of the time).

It’s clear that music creation is much easier now than it was in the past. Clearly it’s no longer about how you make your music – you don’t need a guitar, piano, or a mic to be considered a musician – it’s what kind of music you make that determines your success, not how you made it. Any person in their room can consider themselves a DJ, but why are certain artists relegated to the bedroom while others find themselves performing in front of thousands? Simply put it’s the nuances of a mix, a vocal melody, or a beat that make a song what it is. Original creation is still a must. Even still, two different DJs can play the same song, but one somehow gets a little bit more energy out of the tune. It’s all about dynamics. 

As technology improves, the cost to run an online business, create an application, store files, or create a song all decreases. But creativity is a constant. More creative people are enabled to make something that we call music, but we still need the creative people in the first place. What changes is how we define music. Some define music as any sound, others fall into a more rigid, traditional criteria for what constitutes music. As you see more and more categories pop up in the Grammys and more genres getting their own cultural piece in The New York Times, the more accepting people will be of all forms of new music.

This generation’s rock n’ roll might be rock n’ roll. But it’s also electronic music, hip-hop, and everything in between.

In recent years, the game of poker has skyrocketed in popularity due in part to televised poker.  Shows like the World Poker Tour and the WSOP on ESPN did for US poker what MTV and later VH1 did for rock and roll.  With the popularity of the game, it shouldn’t be any shock that many rock stars have decided to take up the game.  Today let’s look at a few of those stars.

Scott Ian is best known as a founding member and lead guitarist for 80’s supergroup Anthrax. In addition, he helped pioneer the rock/rap genre with in 1991 when they did a crossover with Public Enemy.  In addition, Ian hosted The Rock Show on VH1 and is currently rhythm guitarist for The Damned Things.

Ian made headlines in 2007 when won an entry in the Aruba Poker Classic and then started taking lessons with various poker pros.  Soon after, he showed up and played in the World Series of Poker.  This eventually led to him being signed by online poker site UB as a featured pro.  Ian loves the game so much that he worked his tour with Anthrax around the 2009 WSOP Main Event.  He literally flew back and forth to gigs on off days of the event.

There are many other players that enjoy the game as well.  For example, Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, Slash of Guns N’ Roses, and Vinnie Paul of Pantera and Hellyeah all play the game.  Granted, they are not as into the game as Scott Ian, but they all regularly play.  They are all very busy with their music and have to find time to squeeze in a game.  That is where the internet helps.  It has been well reported that they all regularly play Texas Hold em poker online and often host their own home games.  This allows them the time to play without having to make significant changes in their lives or schedules to do so.

Playing in front of a hot crowd is an adrenaline rush like no other.  Poker may not be played in front of a massive crowd as concerts are, but it can still give a great rush.  Considering that many rock stars live for that kind of rush, poker would seem the obvious hobby of choice.  

Sometimes it seems artists like to stir up controversy just because they can. The idea that all press is good press. I often wonder if there’s any need to single out one particular artist when you’re trying to bash radio-friendly music. The Ting Tings did just that. NME reported that the band is straying from their first album sound and don’t expect everything to turn out so hot on the charts:

“The band said they would rather ‘puke on their own feet’ than sit alongside the likes of Guetta on radio playlists and that they aren't after ‘cheap nasty hits.’”

Many would find it noble that a band like The Ting Tings are willing to sell fewer records in the hopes that they won’t have to water-down their music to fit some mainstream ideal for pop chart success. That’s perfectly fine.  But why single out David Guetta? Is he even the most cookie-cutter you can get? While very pop-friendly, Guetta still appeals to a whole scene of electronic dance music fans outside of the mainstream radio audience. It’s too easy to bash Nickleback or Justin Bieber, so The Ting Tings picked the next rung of music celebrity.

The comment section in the same NME article has several references to Noel Gallagher, formerly the main songwriter of British rock band Oasis. One says: “What does Noel Gallagher think of this?” Gallagher is  notorious for controversial statements about fellow musicians. His outspoken personality has garnered him a lot of press, for better or for worse. At the same time he is also a veteran of the business. The Ting Tings are still up-and-coming, so their reputation can help propel them or hold them back. It seems like they have to make a decision what kind of reputation they want to embrace.

One-off comments will probably come and go, but some musicians keep adding to the fuel and build a reputation of critiquing over time. Kanye West didn’t just interrupt Taylor Swift’s speech at the VMA’s, he built his reputation of controversial actions over time. They all added up to what the public now perceives of Kanye. For some, the controversy creates an allure—an intangible quality that makes many artists seem less human but all the more unique. Other artists might fall into the category of bitter, jealous, scornful, or just plain mean.

The question is, is this a risk worth taking? Or maybe it’s not calculated and you just speak from the heart. Audiences reward authenticity, so if you’re going to call someone out based on something you believe in, you better mean it.

Some tech savvy individuals are decrying the shutdown of MegaUpload, the file-sharing site that allowed for numerous public file transfers (both for legitimate and illegal purposes). The FBI seized MegaUpload on charges of conspiracy to commit racketeering, conspiracy to commit infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and criminal copyright infringement. Many worry that the FBI’s seemingly calculated move after the SOPA/PIPA protests to shutdown MegaUpload represents a slippery slope that will lead to other file-sharing sites like Dropbox or SoundCloud getting the brunt of the government’s wrath. 

The problems happen not when sites like MegaUpload make it too easy to put up files, but when they make it too hard to take them down. Sam Rosenthal, owner of Brooklyn-based Projekt Records, wrote on Digital Music News about the takedown policies on sites like MegaUpload that operate under the DMCA:  

“Your file will be gone within 24 hours. If not, file the complaint again with your next batch of illegal files. Because yes, you will be doing this same thing next week. And the next week. And the next week.... it's a never-ending process. The DMCA puts the burden on you. Thanks, Mr Senator.”

Unlike YouTube, which works with rights-holders and their own algorithms to take down copyright infringing files along with any duplicate files, MegaUpload does not remove every file that is the same as the original copyrighted file that was taken down. Instead, the onus is on the rightsholder to keep issuing takedown notices after new versions of the original copyrighted material pop up again and again. This kind of burden for artists and other creative authors does not offer a balance between the freedom of speech the Internet provides and the fairness intellectual property owners deserve.

Some argue that we shouldn’t blame MegaUpload or other file-sharing sites for piracy. We don’t blame car companies for drunk driving accidents or for people exceeding the speed limit, so why are we holding file-sharing sites accountable? I believe the analogy holds true, but we must also recognize that some nefarious actors in the business want you to share files illegally because it helps their bottom-line (i.e. more activity nets more premium account subscribers or advertising revenue). It is not illegal for a company to WANT something, but if they are willfully disobeying the law to promote illicit activity, that’s a different story. It’s unclear exactly where MegaUpload falls under this legal umbrella, but maybe the FBI knows more than we do in this situation. Or maybe they wanted to assert a little control after the Internet pointed a big middle finger at Congress over SOPA and PIPA.

Update: I recommend reading "MegaUpload Could Spawn Caselaw More Destructive Than SOPA" for all those interested in getting more opinion on the legal matters.

Here at HypedSound we appreciate a little creativity. If you’re willing to pour your heart and soul into your music, and then name your band something outrageous or downright farcical, well we’re on board. We put together a list of 20 weird band names from bands you might have heard of (i.e. they sold an album or two, got some press, swung by your town on a package metal tour, or just downright blew up).

1. The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza

2. Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

3. The String Cheese Incident

4. Dog Fashion Disco

5. Rumplestiltskin Grinder

6. Butthole Surfers

7. …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

8. Colonel Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade

9. We Were Promised Jetpacks!

10. Throbbing Gristle

11. Meat Puppets

12. Iwrestledabearonce

13. Death Cab for Cutie

14. Between the Buried and Me

15. Mr. Mister

16. Jesus Lizard

17. Anal Cunt

18. TV on the Radio

19. Gov’t Mule

20. They Might Be Giants

So how many of these 20 bands have you heard of?

Listening to the stories of the most legendary bands, you often get the sense that not all bandmembers were created equal. There often seems to be one bandmember or a couple whose ego or power outshine the other members. The members of Metallica were notorious for hazing Jason Newsted when he entered the band after Cliff Burton’s death and clearly Jason didn’t have an equal say in matters. UrbanDictionary even has a term called Lead Singer’s Disease (LSD): “The tendency for the lead singer of a rock band to become egotistical and impossible to work [with].” Tags for the term include Axl Rose, David Lee Roth, and Liam Gallagher.

But does a band’s rise to fame create the inevitability of LSD or other frontman equivalent? Not with Zakk Wylde and Black Label Society. In a recent interview, Wylde presented an alternative style of bandsmanship, where all members are equal and free to do as they please. An excerpt from the interview reads:

Wylde: If anybody wants to leave Black Label for those reasons or you get a higher paying gig if you go out with Celine Dion, I’m not gonna stop you. It’s like, ‘Steve, you can always come back here.’ I’m not gonna stop you from makin’ more money. Go and make the dough and if one of the guys wants to jump onboard a Whitesnake tour or something, you can always come back here.

Ultimate Guitar: Black Label is a real democracy. 

Wylde: That’s the way we roll and that’s what makes it unique. ‘Cause we all still talk and hang out and I mean even the guys that aren’t in the band that are playing in other bands.

Being a leader doesn’t necessarily mean you’re The King. In the case of B.B. King, well you’re known as The King, but you can still be diplomatic. In Soul of the man: Bobby “Blue Bland”, author Charles Farley writes about blues great Bobby Bland:

“Bobby Bland was also a leader easy to follow. He deferred to Scott in almost all matters musical and was fair, calm, and evenhanded in dealing with all members of the group. Unlike other stars who were infamous for their inflated egos and hair-trigger tempers, particularly in dealing with band members, Bobby was firm but always a gentleman.”

Farley goes on to write that even after jazz musician Glenn Miller disappeared in bad weather over the English Channel, the band still was able to move on. Just like a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you want your band to live on despite your departure or passing away. Obviously a major organization and business runs differently than an artistic band that only holds a few members, but why not at least provide an opportunity for the legacy of the band to remain? Some bands break up even during their peak because the inflated egos of its bandmates (or one singular bandmate) ruins it for the rest. Tensions rise and things fall apart.

1) Learn the classics

Ever feel like you’re so absorbed in your own music creation that you forget about the tunes that started it all? Go back and learn a few classics on the instrument(s) of your choice. They’re great for around the campfire singing or possibly sparking your own creativity for new music.

2) Support local music

Show up to a local show, or if you’re going to see your favorite headliner then show up early to see some local talent. Everyone could use a little support sometimes. 

3) Donate to a Kickstarter music project

Help fund someone’s record production or local concert! With your help, they can make their project happen and you can get a CD, concert ticket, or other incentive the band wants to give out. Electronic music group Late Night Alumni recently completed their own Kickstarter.

4) Listen to the whole album 

Haven’t listened to a whole album from start to finish recently? We’re all busy, but try to find that artist that you really enjoy and listen to one of their albums all the way through. Sometimes listening to a whole piece of art puts you in a mood where you see things differently.

5) Thank everyone

Have an email list of fans you’ve been neglecting? How about some bloggers that could use a quick ‘thank you’ for covering your work or the work of your favorite artists? Whoever it is, send them a short (or long) thank you for their support of the music scene.

6) Practice everyday           

Don’t let a day slip by without practicing. Maybe you can’t fit in two hours today, but you could slip in 15-20 minutes before bed or set your alarm so you can play before leaving your house in the morning. The minutes add up over time.

7) Warm up

Sometimes we get overzealous and don’t warm up properly before playing. For vocalists, this could be dangerous, for those with an instrument, it could be hurtful as well. Don’t forget to warm up every time. Electronic artists might not have the same physical constraints as other musicians, but it can help to get the creative juices flowing to spend a few minutes messing around. 

8) Discover ‘The New’

Go out and find a new genre that you’ve never listened to or gave a chance. Try to understand the nuances of the genre. Or if you want to really test your boundaries, find at least one song you like in a genre you normally hate. Maybe you’ll find a new guilty pleasure.

9) Use a new music tool or application

There are hundreds of music apps and tools to help you share, discover, or manage music online. Find a new one and take it for a test run. This year I started using ex.fm to help me aggregate music I listen to from across the web.

10) Network in the physical world

Most artists probably do a fair bit of networking online, but don’t forget to network in real life and make some lasting connections. If you don’t play live much, consider joining a meetup in your area based around the kind of music you like. 

According to a recent poll by ReverbNation and Digital Music News, musicians believe Facebook “likes” are three times more valuable than any other social connection with fans, be it email list signups, Twitter followers, or Youtube subscribers. Facebook likes eclipse MySpace friends and Google+ subscribers by an even greater margin, though those statistics don’t seem to be as much of a surprise at this point—MySpace has steadily gone downhill in attention and Google+ has yet to make its definitive mark on the music world. 

Based on the time people spend on Facebook, I am not surprised at the degree to which Facebook Likes beat Twitter followers. Twitter is a broadcast medium that doesn’t play as well with video, music, and sharing as Facebook does. But what about email list subscribers? Is an email address three times less valuable than a Facebook like? I’m going to argue ‘no’. Keep in mind, the poll was for what artists think is better based on their own perception, not a measured study on where value is created (be it in engagement or through monetary results).

My comment on Digital Music News for why email addresses beat likes goes as follows:

When you have someone's email, you have them for life (assuming they don't change their email address frequently or you manage to get unsubscribed/lumped into junk mail). With Facebook, if someone stops engaging with your page for a little, you'll quickly be replaced in the algorithm that determines someone's news feed. There are many liked pages that I never even see anymore in my feed. For email newsletters, I might ignore you for a while, but you might get me back a little later when I have more patience or interest to click on your email.

Even if your fans spend more time on Facebook than in their email inbox, you’re always going to be at the whim of Facebook’s algorithm for showing stories, the security of your Facebook fan page and potential spam, or worst case scenario Facebook could lose popularity over the coming years. Do you believe people will stop checking their email three years from now? Whose going to be around longer, Facebook or email? Maybe everyone will be using a Facebook email address eventually, although at this point, that’s a little hard to believe given Facebook’s track record of privacy concerns. I personally don’t have too many concerns with my own privacy on Facebook, but I generally like to keep my business email separate from my personal email and separate from my Facebook messaging. Each one has its own purpose.

If you want to have the closest relationship with your fans, with the least amount of competition from competing marketers, brands, and other musicians, email is probably your best bet. Coming from experience in the lead generation business, there is a reason brands are willing to pay more for an email registration than a Facebook like—in e-commerce, emails are more important. I’m willing to bet the same is true in entertainment, especially if as an artist you’re trying to sell music, tickets, or merchandise to fans sometime down the line.

Louis C.K. decided to sell his latest live DVD, Live At The Beacon Theatre, as a DRM-free DVD download on his website for only $5. What are his intentions? What will be the result of this foray into online distribution? The reasoning for this he explains below:

So how bold was Louis C.K.’s move? After a post on TechCrunch, a commenter named Sean Hammons replied, “The publicity he’s getting is worth this decision alone. I didn't know he had a new special coming out anytime soon, but because all the nerds love how he's doing it, I am aware and he has my $5!” The self-deprecating comedian also made it to the top of Reddit with the news and gained publicity all over the Internet with his appeal to the good graces of the masses.

Radiohead attempted a similar gesture back in 2007 with their album Rainbows, where they used a pay-what-you-want-to pricing scheme. For their subsequent album The King Of Limbs, the band decided to go back to a regular flat pricing model. Radiohead’s idea for music downloading was an attempt at getting goodwill and a reasonable return. Will Louis C.K.’s decision succeed with this same philosophy? Definitely. All the publicity Louis C.K. gets for his album is free marketing. If you take away the need to pay for this kind of marketing, then you significantly increase your margin (even if you’re charging much less to buy the DVD than you would otherwise). Also factor in the benefit of not having to cut in others on the profits.

Now fans, or prospective fans, don’t have to think to themselves whether paying $19.99 for a live DVD of Louis C.K.’s comedy is worth it. Now they can pay the equivalent of an expensive cup of coffee, and even if they don’t enjoy the DVD or think it’s “worth it” in the conventional sense, they can think to themselves that they did a good thing by buying into Louis C.K.’s business model. It’s win-win for Louis C.K. and the consumer.

When an artist gets their 15 minutes of fame through American Idol, a controversial news report of some sort, or comes out with their one hit wonder single, you can expect a healthy surge in search traffic for that artist on Google. Not Skrillex. As Digital Music News cleverly pointed out, the dubstep artist has slowly risen in popularity in terms of his Google search growth (this is based off of the search keyword “skrillex” and Google’s trend algorithms).

While some of the search growth can be attributed to American dubstep’s rapid rise in popularity in the last year or two, it is also a good sign that Skrillex is not just a flash in the pan sensation. There is no one-off press mania around Skrillex and there is no sharp spike that indicates a particular new story breaking and gaining some extra search juice before tapering off.

This healthy and steady growth is promising and hopefully will continue for the  artist, who started his career early in an emo rock band called From First to Last under his street name Sonny Moore.

So what does this mean for up-and-coming artists who haven’t yet made their name? Well it means you can hope for the pipe dream of quick success and get a lot of mainstream coverage right off the bat, or you can grind away and slowly build street cred over time. Even Skrillex had a boost because of his connections from producing music under his name Sonny Moore and playing in a popular rock band before that. That’s years and years before he reached the success he has now.

Up-and-coming artists probably shouldn’t hover over their computers tracking search traffic of themselves on a daily basis, but it might be the time to start slowly building your fanbase and online presence (thanking each fan individually for their attention). One day all those small little gains will add up to a career or better. Every overnight success, as they say, is 10 years in the making.

 From Tumblr to Google to Facebook to eBay, companies and citizens are up in arms over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that is up for a vote in Congress. Wikipedia summarizes SOPA as follows:

“The bill expands the power of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online traffic in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.”

 While major labels, Hollywood, and other big businesses centered around copyrighting content favor the Congressional bill, there is growing opposition to SOPA. As Digital Music News puts it:

“The question is whether a more reasonable, middle ground can be forged. Shutting down sites with minimal due process seems like a recipe for disaster, though the status quo is increasingly being viewed as unfair and stacked against content interests.”

The bill attempts to curb “rogue” websites from copyright infringement and allows the government to seize websites before those websites see their day in court. This essentially inches America closer to a police state that seeks protection over due process and technological innovation. For example, Youtube is a platform that works hard to curb piracy and should not be held accountable for every wrongdoing on the site. Should a company like Youtube be deemed a threat?

Even House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted that we need a better solution to the problem of intellectual copyright protection than is currently planned through SOPA. An initiative by social blogging platform Tumblr helped bring in 87,834 phone calls to representatives to protest the bill. Along with ads in various media, the biggest names in tech banded together to write a joint resolution to Congress expressing their concern with the bill and how it will affect innovation and stifle job creation.

While everyday artists and content creators are trying to protect their work from the infringing hands of pirating businesses and consumers, there are less nefarious ways of going about change. Tech pundits and industry experts are assuming this law won’t pass, but at that same time, that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t do everything they can to stop the worst-case scenario from happening.

The Patriot Act might save lives in some instances, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come at a price. The same is true for the Stop Online Piracy Act—although lives might not be on the line, the future outlook of our society might be. 

Popstars have officially embraced the edges of mainstream music. First Britney Spears took a foray into dubstep music on her track “Hold It Against Me,” and now Rihanna is sampling Metallica. According to Blabbermouth.net, Rihanna will be incorporating a sample from the metal legends’ track “Wherever I May Roam” from the band’s self-titled album (also knows as “the black album”). While 1991’s the black album ended up selling almost 16 million copies worldwide, it still is no mainstream pop album in the same vein as Britney Spears or Rihanna and doesn’t cater to the faint of heart.

Rihanna is also incorporating music from Chase & Status’ “Saxon”, which features electronic sounds and heavy dubstep drops. Both Metallica and Chase & Status will have their music on the tune “Red Lipstick” on Rihanna’s new album Talk That Talk. What does this mean for the state of mainstream music? It means pop artists, those  who in the past were more accustomed to bubblegum sensibilities, are pushing the envelope of musical exploration. Sure it might not “be good enough” for the fringes of music society (those who stick to their niche genres like a badge on their respective niche jackets), but it does mean a melting pot of ideas for the mainstream.

As of now, it’s tough to tell whether this was a conscious decision by Rihanna or a calculated move by her managers or a producer cluing Rihanna in on some new sounds. But does it really matter? The fact is that it’s getting done, and whether sounds are watered down or butchered, there are going to be a lot of streams online for songs that otherwise would not have been found. Metallica has solidified its fanbase long ago, so they won’t need any help from Rihanna to introduce news fans to them. But look at the Youtube video for “Saxon”, embedded below, and you can see that there are already comments about how Rihanna’s album tracklisting brought her fans to a dubstep song from 2008. How could that not mean good exposure for non-mainstream music? 

Recently Hypebot has been reporting on potential class action lawsuits against Universal Music Group. Chuck D and other artists are alleging they got stiffed on song and ringtone royalties. One statement on the claim reads:

"According to Ridenhour's claim, under UMG's current method of accounting, artists and producers receive $80.33 for every 1,000 downloads, when the correct amount should be $315.85 per 1,000. On the ringtone side of things...The suit claims that UMG's current accounting method yields $49.89 per thousand downloads, as opposed to the $660 per 1,000 that the suit claims is actually owed."

Regardless of the legitimacy of the statement, it is not unheard of for record labels to play hardball with paying artists (even more so when they are struggling to keep their businesses viable).  However, it is not only the big labels that are hearing complaints from artists.

In a recent spat with progressive rock legends King Crimson, Grooveshark has repeatedly been unable to stop copyright infringement of King Crimson’s works on their popular streaming service. While Grooveshark has taken down King Crimson songs from the application, the same songs reappear within hours of them being removed (you can read the heated email exchange on DigitalMusicNews).

After the King Crimson emails, other complaints have popped out of the woodwork. Lisa Thomas Music services wrote:

“I am the publishing administrator for the main songwriters of the Eagles and have spent hours upon hours serving DMCA takedown notices on Grooveshark’s designated agent demanding the site remove all of the compositions owned and controlled by my clients. I have cited specific url’s of each infringing post in the notices. To date, Grooveshark has not removed any of the material.”

Above are two examples of artists getting the raw end of the deal from two different businesses: one the old school establishment (UMG) and one digital music service (Grooveshark). I can attest to the fact that many users love Grooveshark, and I’m sure many artists do too, but often there is a fine line between creating a great product and playing fast and loose with other people’s property.

Spotify seems to be the darling child of Facebook and many new users of their product in the U.S., but even they have seen record labels leave them due to ambiguous terms and small royalty checks. Whether you are the entrenched industry companies or the up-and-coming digital innovators in the music space, sometimes it is hard to please everyone when it comes to pleasing the artists and the listeners. Can everyone be happy?

1) No Auto-start

Don’t have your music start automatically! There are so many reasons why this annoys the average visitor, even if the visitor wants to hear your music. Hypebot outlines a few of the reasons in this article.

2) Share Buttons 

Integrate social sharing buttons such as those for Facebook, Twitter, and AddThis (which contains sharing capability for tons of social websites all in one button).

3) Social Profiles

Some listeners just want to come to your site, but others might prefer to visit you on the music site of their choice. Make sure your social links are prominently displayed for others to follow you elsewhere and where they spend more of their time.

4) Mailing List

Email is king! Provide easy access for someone to join your mailing list straight from your homepage. Fans are much more likely to see your messages if they come through email, rather than a fleeting tweet or Facebook post. Make sure you provide relevant content because you want to create an email relationship with your fans where they click-through to your message every time.

5) Call-to-action

What is the most important thing for you to communicate to your fans? Where they can buy your album? Where you’re touring next? Where they can find you elsewhere online? Whatever it is that you feel is most important for you to build and maintain a fanbase or make money, make sure that that is the most prominent thing displayed on your website.

6) Video

Don’t underestimate the power of a video. Many companies use introduction videos to explain how their site works. About two out of every three new visitors that come to a site watch those introductory videos. You can explain yourself as an artist in your video or put a promo.

7) Mobile Access

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. This might not mean making a dedicated app for you as an artist, because that can be pricey, but make sure that visitors can still use the basic functionality of the site within their mobile phone (play music, sign-up or buy things, etc.).

8) Personality

Good design is good design, but since this is a website that represents you as an artist, don’t forget to inject your own personality into the design. This might be tough if you’re not the one designing the site or doing the coding, but make sure that whomever is in charge of that has your frame of reference as an artist in mind. If you’re using a pre-built template, consider paying a small fee for a more personalized design or one that is more unique. Either way, know your personality before you go into the design process.

The world of technology and music are both witnessing their own stories of fragmentation but are merging into one long tail. In some instances this will mean more (but smaller) winners and in some instances it might mean very few winners at all. Chris Anderson coined the term the “long tail” as a means of “describing the retailing strategy of selling a large number of unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities.”

The long tail is applicable both in music and technology. For example, in the world of online business, more and more startup companies are getting funded as it has become easier to start companies (Amazon EC3 cloud services for scalable web development, open-sourced programming software, etc.). Eventually there will be too many companies and not enough follow-on investment or talent to help take these startups to the next level. As a whole, however, these companies manage to create software that enables consumers like you to discover, listen to, buy, and download music in a much easier fashion than in the pre-Internet days.

What does this mean? A lot more music by a lot more people with fewer and fewer high-selling records or singles. In a recent post, Digital Music News asked Apple how much artists should expect to receive from streams off of Apple’s music streaming service iCloud. While Apple mentioned that iTunes receives a 30% cut of sales and declined to comment on streaming rates, Digital Music News says artists can expect royalties in the range of $0.0007 to $0.0035 per stream. One can assume that regardless of volume, even bigger names will have trouble making as much money through streaming as they did on album sales before the digital era of music downloading.

This long tail of music downloads paints a grim picture for artists looking to scratch by.  At the very least, royalties grew 9.1% in 2010 to a total of $1.6 billion globally (via SoundExchange figures). With streaming services like Spotify breaking into the U.S. and leveraging Facebook’s massive userbase and Pandora finding more distribution channels for their music services, we can expect streaming music to keep gaining steam. However, more streaming won’t mean much more in terms of financial return for artists. The winners will be those who ride the coattails of the digital music revolution by gaining exposure and finding new ways to monetize their content. The music industry has always been a story of few winners, but now it’s going to become a fragmented story where we’ll have to piece together the spoils amongst a larger number of players and smaller bits of data.

Everything is moving to simple. The Internet is barely an adult, but despite having more and more experience online every year we all gravitate toward the simple. Simple means products that create value in the most user-friendly and intuitive ways. Clean design and utilitarian beats out complexity and feature creep any day.

What made the iPod and iPhone so popular? Of course viral commercials helped a lot,  they were a pop culture phenomenon, but it was the easy-to-use interface and storage capabilities of the iPod that started the most recent digital revolution. Solving a real need in the simplest way possible. Steve Jobs did everything he could to take away features, not tack them on. You want an extra USB port on your computer? Sorry. You want a bigger keyboard on your iPhone? Sorry. Not. Going. To. Happen.

The new online era follows the same philosophy. Pareto’s Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, dictates that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This means, for example, that 20% of your product’s features account for 80% of the time spent using that product (or 80% of the value of the product, or any other metric that you deem important). The fact of the matter is that companies like Apple are not successful for adding more and more features, instead they highlight the features that dictate 80% of the customer’s needs.

One problem that arises is separating the majority of people from the individual. If you try to appease everyone by fulfilling every individual’s request, you’ll end up satisfying no one. You’ll end up with a laundry list of things that you need to change and ultimately hurt the user experience. This is as true for a technology company like Apple as it is for a touring artist. You can’t give every fan what they want. You can give them your undivided attention, perhaps, but you can’t always give them what they want. Whether you’re designing a website to highlight yourself as an artist, planning how you will turn music into a business, or building a tech product, know that everyone wants something simple. Bite the bullet and get rid of “that one more thing” you wanted to add because you thought it was necessary. Most people probably won’t need it or want it.

Focus on the 20% of the things that will take you 80% of the way. The rest you can focus on after you nailed that first 20%. And if doing extra in some way hurts what you accomplished with that first 20%, then forget about it.

Digital Music News reported an interesting statistic: based on songs counted in the Gracenote database, there are 97,000,000 songs in the world. MusicHype’s CEO Kevin King presented this stat at the Digital Music Forum West in Los Angeles last Thursday (10/6/2011). The number 97 million seems a bit arbitrary given the number of people who play music and never unleash it all to the world. Of course there are millions and millions of songs that don’t see the light of day outside of a band’s garage, but the number puts a somewhat tangible grasp on the amount of noise (both good and bad) online and in physical music form.

As an up-and-coming artist you’re probably thinking this is a lot of competition. Who’s going to hear my song? At the very least, you have one-leg up on a great number of the 97 million simply because there are millions of songs in the world that seek no promotion. The songwriter might want the song to reach the masses but in most cases is creating only as a hobby or without any will to market the music. Small but meaningful measures on your part to promote your music will get you past much of those millions.

In the land of free (free music downloads, free music hosting, free video hosting, free recording software) this is only going to become a more crowded space. Music creation has little barrier to entry and the only thing separating you from artistic notoriety is the extent to which you can utilize these free tools and get your message out.

Of course the more you can invest in improving the whole music experience, from production to distribution to marketing, the more viable your music becomes (in terms of sound quality and awareness surrounding your name). What 97 million teaches us is that you’ll need a little bit of luck and a lot of perseverance to be discovered. Sometimes you’ll have to discover yourself, meaning you’ll have to believe in your music and push it out into the world before anyone else does the heavy lifting for you.

1. Exclusive Photos Inside Your CD

The band The Good Natured posted their marketing idea on their Facebook page. They took 100 limited edition polaroids to go inside 100 of their EP’s. Exclusive, creative, and fun.

2. Countdown Clock

Got a big announcement, contest, or giveaway? Try a countdown clock to increase the suspense for your announcement or giveaway end date. But remember, you don’t want to be anticlimactic, so make the countdown worth it at the end. Try It’s Almost as your countdown clock or find one online that you can embed in your site.

3. Live Streaming Concert

Not able to do a show everywhere in the world and at the same time? Stream a live concert online via the many live streaming services (Ustream, Livestream, Justin.tv, Youtube, Google+, etc.). Play in your garage, in your room, or record a gig at a venue. Either way, get some live piece of your music online and in real-time.

4. Curate the Best Content

People don’t want to follow you on Twitter or Facebook just to get updates on your latest tour or music release. Curate the best content on your social networking feeds for music article links or songs you dig – if people trust your taste, they’ll probably follow you and check out your music udpates when it organically meshes into your stream.

5. Number Your Albums

Once again, it’s all about exclusivity. If you number your albums, fans will have a unique CD that is not a 100% duplicate of someone else’s purchase. Also, the lower the number the greater sense of value for the fan.

6. Remixes

Include remixes of your favorite song on your album. Perhaps this means using different effects, changing up the mix, or even changing the genre of the song entirely. Experiment! If you have a wide audience, you could even consider holding a remix contest for the song. With a top-notch remix, you can include it on the CD or a subsequent release if the album is already finished.

7. Track Analytics

Where do you want your fans to go? If it’s your website, make sure you have Google Analytics installed and track what sources are providing the most (and best) traffic. Once you find those sites, double-down on the amount of time you spend on those sites. If you use other websites to share music with fans, see what those sites offer you in terms of analytics.

8. Flash Mob

Organize a flash mob based around one of your songs. Then hope it goes viral once you post the video on Youtube!

9. Segmented Email List

Don’t you hate it when people invite you to events and concerts on Facebook or other social networking sites when you’re not even in the same city? It feels spammy. Make sure that when you’re building your email list, segment your emails based on your desired target for each specific email. Services like Mailchimp help you manage large email lists and segment your audience.

10. Limited Edition Vinyl

Because all the cool kids have it on vinyl.

Sources that inspired this article and fuel for more ideas:

Music 3.0

Hypebot

Hypebot 2

Buzzsonic

After witnessing the onslaught of updates by Facebook this week, I started to notice an influx of real-time updates regarding my friends and their Spotify listening habits. I personally don’t use streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, or Rdio because I like to browse the more artist-centric social networks and music aggregators that aren’t assaulted by record label constraints and rampant advertising, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see how big of an impact this will have on the average music consumer.

Facebook has done something interesting here. Many people live off of music recommendations from their friends and family, so isn’t it an organic fit for Facebook to update you on your friends’ current playlists in real-time? Yes and no.

I remember the days when Facebook bombarded your notification stream with gaming updates (so-and-so leveled up in this game, downloaded this app, etc.). It got to a saturation point where you would just want to ignore notifications entirely. Facebook needs to make sure Spotify and other music updates stay at a comfortable level. You don’t want to get to the point where there is so much that it makes the experience as a whole into a burden, and even worse, irrelevant. Of course, users can customize their updates in a very granular way as to prevent repetitive updates, but the average Facebook user doesn’t want to go to such lengths to modify their experience. This is an instance where the machine (i.e. the algorithm) needs to be fully aware of who you interact with and whose music you interact with on a regular basis. The two might or might not be the same.

Getting music recommendations from your closest friends is an important element of music discovery that a machine can’t replicate. You trust your friends, share some similar tastes that you are already aware of, and you know the number of close friends is limited (thus preventing an overload of information). Facebook added their lists function as a way to keep up with people in your news feed that you actually care about. Let’s hope the same stays true for music.

Sometimes it’s more than just the music. It’s a conversation. Are you following any well-known artists on Facebook or Twitter? Big names are not just sharing music, they’re sharing their lives. You might not be at the stage where fans are fawning over your every move -- that often takes somewhat of a celebrity status in your niche to achieve that sort of following -- but that doesn’t mean you can’t create value outside of just promoting your music.

As much as everyone might love your music, if all you do is PUSH PUSH PUSH your song embeds, your profile links, and other “me-oriented activities,” then soon enough your following will be ignoring your updates if not outright unfollowing you. Instead, create value by starting a conversation. Whether directly or indirectly related to your music, point out interesting topics about music, art, or media that will inspire. If people trust your voice and opinion, they will most likely give your music more thought and feel closer to you as an artist.

What are some ways to make things interesting? If you make music, why not attach music to a visual? Album cover art is becoming less relevant in the digital age, so start an Instagram or Flickr profile where you can create a tone of visual aesthetics that match your music and gets you in front of a new audience. Like sharing a mixture of videos, photos, and short writing snippets that appeal to you? Start a Tumblr blog that others in the community can reblog and share. Are your lyrics political or controversial in nature? Start a Posterous blog describing your stance on issues that are important to you. Whatever it is, start it now.

There are dozens of sites that have already hit critical mass or a meaningful enough scale where you can help build an audience for your content (with the end goal of creating new fans and opportunities). You can do this by being a voice for a certain segment of the community that matches your artistic message or sound. At the very least, your content will all link back to your main website or online profile, thus creating more link juice for you to appear higher up in Google search results. Just remember to be authentic and mean what you say, what you share, and what you believe in. The rest will follow (and hopefully so will the fans).

Cheers.

"Without music, life would be a mistake." - Friedrich Nietzsche 

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." - Decca Recording Company rejecting the Beatles (1962) 

“When words fail, Music speaks.” - H.C. Anderson 

"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain." - Bob Marley 

“Music is not a matter of life or death...
It's much more important than that.” - Unknown 

“Play the music, not the instrument.” - Unknown 

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve." - Xavier Cougat

“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” - Mark Twain

“Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.” - Richard Strauss 

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century to have made giant strides in reverse." - Bing Crosby 

“Videos destroyed the vitality of rock and roll. Before that, music said, ‘Listen to me.’ Now it says, ‘Look at me.’” - Billy Joel 

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side ..." - Hunter S. Thompson 

"I don't know anything about music, In my line you don't have to." - Elvis Presley 

"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." - Johann Sebastian Bach 

"Music is love in search of a voice." - Leo Tolstoy

The audio industry has been abuzz over the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m With You, because it has three mastered versions including one made specifically for iTunes. For those who don’t know, iTunes uses an AAC file format that is superior to mp3 but still contains some audio degradation compared to the normal CD format.

Despite the lossy format’s sacrifice in quality, many claim that the AAC format used in iTunes has its own peculiarities that can be sonically interesting. In a NYTimes article back in 2007, Robert Levine described the mastering process for Ry Cooder’s My Name is Buddy and the influence of a supposed iTunes mastering sound:

“When he burned a copy of the album using Apple’s iTunes software, it sounded fine. He didn’t know why until one of his younger engineers told him that the default settings on iTunes apply a ‘sound enhancer.’ (It’s in the preferences menu, under ‘playback.’) Usually, that feature sweetens the sound of digital music files, but Mr. Cooder so liked its effect on his studio recordings that he used it to master — that is, make the final sound mixes — his album. ‘We didn’t do anything else to it,’ he said.”

We are now living in a generation that is being brought up with iPods and iTunes—and that means audio engineers across the world have to make production choices as a consequence of this phenomenon, whether borne out of necessity or choice. Vlado Meller worked on the Red Hot Chili Peppers master with Mark Santangelo at Masterdisk studios. In an interview with Digital Music News, Meller stated that:

“With an iTunes optimized master, the listener will be able to enjoy more clarity and an overall better sound quality than is otherwise currently available… With iTunes optimization during mastering, the AAC files are much closer to the sound of the commercial CD.”

While many audio purists might decry the generation of Apple earbud headphones and degraded audio formats, there is still the hope that technology will usher in an era of new audio formats that do not sacrifice on sonic characteristics in the same way. Right now audio engineers are making the best out of a bad situation, where consumers choose convenience over optimal sound quality. The sacrifice might be worth it for most, but all convenience comes at some price. Hopefully we’ll all be able to have it both ways in the future. Until then, expect more albums like the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album to get mastered specifically for iTunes and digital downloads. 

Remember that shiny record contract you’ve been salivating over since you were four? What! It’s not coming? The record industry is in shambles? Digital music has taken over?

Now you CAN’T sell out! You have no choice but to make the music YOU wanted. You have no choice but to communicate directly with your listeners, picking up new fans one by one as they dissect the nuances of your unique craft. You have no choice but creativity.

Yes there will be followers. Cookie-cutter remixes of the sound one artists discovers. But it all started with an idea, an extraordinary tone, inflection, nuance, and melody. The start of something new! A signature sound.

The newness will wear off, and the new trend will begin, but the motive is still there. Unbridled freedom of expression! A crowd that will turn away at first glance of selling out. Fragmented music! Dictatorships gone and we are left with a bunch of city-states. Powerful nonetheless, made up of early adopters and distribution fiends. “Share share share” they all cried in unison! Anything short of force-feeding is fine. Cause it’s all good in this game.

It’s all good! Even the bad is good. And if not, it’ll be gone tomorrow! Because why not? Transaction costs are small (and getting smaller), the noise is tough, but we’ll get through it. Cream still rises to the top last time I checked.

TV killed the radio star. Digital killed what was left in its path. Hurry up before the cycle begins again! You have no choice but creativity. 

In the United States, sometimes we all need a little reminder that we live in a place where freedom of speech and freedom of expression are so commonplace that they are second nature. Of course there are instances where lawmakers try to pass laws that inhibit those freedoms, but for the most part, we live in a pretty “free” society.

After reading an update on Ultimate Guitar, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Nergal, frontman for extreme metal band Behemoth, was found innocent after being arrested for tearing up a Bible on stage at a show in Gdynia in 2007. The concert where Nergal ripped apart a Bible was in his native Poland, where there are strict laws against anti-religious actions that might offend others.

Regarding the verdict, Nergal stated:

"I'm so glad to see intelligence won over religious fanatics in my home country. There's still so much work to be done to make things right, but I'm sure I'm on the path to ultimate freedom… The battle is won but the war ain't over."

Ryszard Nowak, chairman of the Polish Committee for Defense Against Sects, accused Nergal and Behemoth of promoting Satanism. Fortunately Judge Wiechowski sided with Nergal, claiming that no one in the audience was offended by Nergal’s act and that it was a form of artistic expression.

Even in the U.S., some cases slip through the cracks and people go to jail for seemingly minor offenses that don’t warrant serious jail time or significant taxpayer dollars to cover inmate incarceration. Nevertheless, some countries get it wrong most of the time and getting arrested for speaking your mind is not an aberration. Luckily in the U.S. and in many other countries, we are able to judge a piece of art or music based on its quality, no matter how extreme, without the fear of any excessive repercussions. Whenever you add extra filters to what you can or cannot do in society, you water down the culture. The verdict for Nergal is a small bit of liberation for Poland.

“Friends don’t let friends use Apple headphones.”

I’m not sure if that’s an actual phrase by someone other than me, but it’s the statement I’ve lived by since my early years of iPod use. The earbuds that come with iPods never seemed to match the audio fidelity of bigger headphones or smaller noise-canceling earbuds that seem to keep a lot of the pleasant frequencies flowing into my eardrums.

Since I listen to a lot of mp3s and don’t have a vinyl player sitting in my apartment, I’m not sure if you can consider me an audiophile or music snob in the High Fidelity sense (if you haven’t seen this scene with Jack Black and John Cusack, then you need to). However, I’m very particular when it come to my daily portable music player listening experience.

So when I found out that Dr. Dre sold a 51% stake in his audio company Beats Electric for a cool $300 million (read about that here), I thought to myself: “Damn, those must be some nice headphones.” The popular product in Dr. Dre’s audio line is the Beats By Dr. Dre headphones that apparently sell like hotcakes. People still like hotcakes, right?

Question is, is the Dr. Dre name and hype worth the price tag to pay between $100-300 for earbuds or studio headphones? Lady Gaga and other artists also have their own custom headphones as part of Dre’s product line (also at a high cost). The price would be hard to justify for the casual music enthusiast hitting the gym three times a week, and the audio fidelity would have to be exceptional for a studio producer to pay for high-tier products.

Unfortunately I have yet to try the headphones out, so don’t make my skepticism out to be a product review. But I always like to engage the Reddit community with my news posts, and a conversation actually started around Dr. Dre’s headphones (see comments here). While Amazon’s ratings can be quite solid if you have enough data points, you can often find some straight shooters on Reddit telling you the real deal about a product or service without to much hassle. The expected answer to the question was that Dre’s headphones are heavy on the bass and don’t offer too much more in terms of quality than some of your cheaper more run-of-the-mill headphones.

If that’s the case, buying the earbuds for daily use comes down to personal preference and whether you’re willing to fork over the extra money for a popular name attached to a brand. For studio musicians and engineers, they’ll want a flat sound that accurately resembles the frequencies and range of music as they recorded it. I’m not sure if the Beats By Dr. Dre headphones delivers on that end, but I’m sure professional studio engineers don’t want to pay for a name.

Sometimes with name brands you’re actually getting a superior product (as true with sweet-tasting cereals as it is with quality guitar craftsmanship). The company that bought a majority stake in Dr. Dre’s brand, HTC, will use the audio technology for their smartphones. That makes it seem like there’s more to it than just a name, but you never know . However, if a celebrity is attached to a product in any way, you can be sure you’re paying a premium for that product no matter what the product or industry vertical.

In a recent study, Pollstar charted the top grossing US tours for 2011. As you can see in the chart above, older acts are earning the majority of the touring revenue. Digital Music News brought up an interesting question about the future of the music industry: what will the touring industry look like in the near- and long-term? 

Rock bands with deep-pocketed fanbases continue to rake in the big touring money—acts like Bon Jovi, U2, and others never fail to fill the seats. Even if the dynamics of the concert industry always favor older acts with long-standing followings and more disposable income, will the younger generation be able to fill in the gaps in a decade or two when they become the legacy artists? The question then becomes whether the Generation Y audience is a more fickle bunch. We are used to downloading songs off the Internet, putting it on our iPods, and having access to an unlimited amount of music. We’re often exposed to so much but give back so little (in monetary terms, that is).

What might result is a more fragmented system of music and allegiances to artists that won’t last for decades to come. Paul Resnikoff wrote:

“Instead, younger acts are probably making their biggest impact at festivals, a huge growth category that could represent a massive shift in future concert-going (and probably wouldn't be well-represented in this study).”

Younger audiences have the endurance to go to concerts for full-day shows with dozens of acts. The thirst for endless choice in music directly at our fingertips is translating to the concert experience as well—Lollapalooza, Coachella, Electric Zoo Festival, and many other annual events are staples of the younger generation of music listeners.

For the concert industry as a whole, the sum of all its parts might make up for any future shortcomings in legacy acts that bring in large sums of money on an individual basis. Hopefully, younger artists will still be able to make touring work without losing steam as they mature into Generation Y’s future legacy touring acts. 

After somewhat of a riot in downtown Los Angeles at the Electric Daisy Carnival film premiere, sparked in part by a tweet by the famous deejay Kaskade, a couple popular blogs brought up the subject of electronic music becoming the new rock n’ roll for the current generation (those articles can be found here and here). While there are some elements of the rock n’ roll movement of past generations, this electronic music movement has very different cultural implications – while it is easy to see some similarities between the two, this is not a new revival of the “rock n’ roll” mentality and atmosphere of the 1960s and 70s.

As we know from Los Angeles sports events and famous jury case verdicts, LA is prone to rioting and the most recent “riot” is not representative of a broader social movement in the U.S. The electronic music scene, while it has built up steadily in the clubs and festivals over the last several years, is culturally disparate from rock n’ roll. Electronic and deejay music is not a particularly rebellious form of music that fights against the tyranny of war and governments or espouses a counter-culture lifestyle. While some deejays might certainly include political messages in their lyrics, most opt for lyrics centered around a fun, party atmosphere not too unlike pop (although often slightly more nuanced in feeling and intention).

Electronic, house, and dubstep music is gaining mainstream acceptance and is rising in the ranks of music in the same way that rock n’ roll did decades earlier, but its cultural references are fewer, its drugs of choice are much different, and its intentions are to mash up and remix every other genre one can imagine. It is a cultural amalgamation of sorts, and while it might be here to stay in all its hype and glory, it is not your parents’ rock n’ roll and nor should it be.

If you haven’t been living under a music discovery rock for the last month, you’ve probably tried (or at least heard of) the new social music discovery site Turntable.fm. The site allows users to become virtual DJs, where people take turns picking songs from their queue to play to listeners in rooms for specific genres. Everybody has an avatar and the ability to chat with others, fan different “DJs”, and make playlists. A fun idea, though it’s important for casual listeners to distinguish between a DJ who plays their favorite songs all in a row and a DJ who carefully crafts and manipulates songs in new and unique ways. But I digress.

In the never-ending quest for more music, I’m always trying the latest music apps so I can stumble upon a new artist or song that I might come to love. My personal preference for music discovery in the last couple years has been to browse artist profiles on various music social networks, whether that’s on my own site HypedSound or on the various other platforms (SoundCloud, ReverbNation, MySpace, YouTube, etc.). Streaming music websites that have restrictions in terms of song selection, too much advertising, and other limitations never interested me much. I tried out Pandora a couple times but I couldn’t find the consistency in song quality for what I was looking for.

The passive music discovery channel that is Pandora and other streaming sites, that let you press the play button and stop worrying about what song to put on next, never met the quality I was looking for in a more personalized experience. Turntable.fm bridges that gap by letting you discover music alongside like-minded people. For funk, jazz, electronic, and dubstep I found that the songs being played were consistently up-to-par with a song that I wouldn’t press the skip button for on Pandora. If appropriate, it can also skew to the underground or more up-and-coming artists.

What is evident to me now is that the future of music, or at least for the more diehard music fans, is not a passive music discovery channel but a constantly evolving one that allows for a number of different options to discover music within a social environment. While I prefer music websites where artists are the ones broadcasting their music profiles themselves, rather than an algorithm choosing a song from a catalogue or a virtual DJ putting up their favorite tracks, I see the merit in every different type of model.

Turntable.fm offers the intimacy of a social environment with few options for direct-to-artist interaction. Pandora offers simplicity with little of the social factor. HypedSound and similar sites offer more complexity and the ability to reach artists directly, but they require more from the users in terms of interaction and searching. Every platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, but so far, I’ve benefited off of many different models of music discovery.

  credit: William Brawley

Do it Today, not tomorrow or in a week...your website is a leaky bucket if you don’t have a way to follow up with your people.

Article Source: 26 Email Marketing "Hacks" For Musician

Forbes released a list of the 25 highest paid artists of 2010 last week (see below), which got me thinking as to why certain artists make the list on a reoccurring basis. While I normally don’t dwell over lists like this, I came across a question on Quora that made this list even more relevant (side note: Quora is a Q&A site that seems to have hit a stride amongst the techie/early adopter crowd). So what makes U2 perfect for high earning potential?

As the answers on Quora suggest, U2 is able to reinvent themselves throughout their career while still staying true to their core sound. They stick to an environmentally-friendly, socially conscious message that is not too divisive that it alienates a major ethnic or demographic group. There is also a huge market of older fans with deep enough pockets to pay premium prices for greats seats at their concerts.

Daniel Rosenthal, co-founder of Exercise.com, put it this way (and in narrative form): 

“Earnest, melodic, Oprah-endorsed U2! $200 a ticket? No problem. You get a sitter. Your wife is excited – this is going to be great! You invite some friends from college to join you. On the way, you listen to the “early stuff”. Joshua Tree pumps through the speakers of your Lexus SUV (no judgment - you have two kids!). The harmonies soothe. The lyrics are straightforward.”

The complete answer can be read here and is worth an entire read if you enjoy humorous, somewhat cynical but 100% dead-on commentary.

And who is after U2? It’s Bon Jovi, a less adventurous artist in terms of sonic exploration, but just as appropriate in terms of pinpointing that ideal age and demographic that will not only come to a show but also shell out the big bucks for the experience.

Of course you’ll get newcomers on the list when they hit it big for a stint or two, like Justin Bieber or Rihanna, but to make it to the Top 25 on an ongoing basis for years or even decades, you need a degree of predictability in music. The ability to keep pumping out radio-friendly hits without crossing the border into stale, boring, or even worse outdated is key. There seems to be a happy medium between taking risks and staying true to what the broader mainstream audience wants. If you can make sure that your songs are just as catchy as they were 20 years ago, then at least you do not have to rely 100% on the “nostalgia act” (ahem ahem, Margaritaville).

Forbes’ list of the world's 25 highest-paid musicians:

01. U2 ($195 million)

02. BON JOVI ($125 million)

03. Elton John ($100 million)

04. Lady Gaga ($90 million)

05. Michael Buble ($70 million)

06. Paul McCartney ($67 million)

07. BLACK EYED PEAS ($61 million)

08. EAGLES ($60 million)

09. Justin Bieber ($53 million)

10. Dave Matthews Band ($51 million)

11. Toby Keith ($50 million)

12. Usher ($46 million)

13. Taylor Swift ($45 million)

14. Katy Perry ($44 million)

15. Brad Paisley ($40 million)

16. Tom Petty & the Heartbreaks ($38 million)

17. Jay-Z ($38 million)

18. AC/DC ($35 million)

19. Sean "Diddy" Combs ($35 million)

20. Beyonce ($35 million)

21. Tim McGraw ($35 million)

22. MUSE ($35 million)

23. Rascal Flatts ($34 million)

24. Kenny Chesney ($30 million)

25. Rihanna ($29 million)

by Jonathan Jaeger

This weekend I came across a Business Insider article that described why buying Pandora stock doesn’t make financial sense. The key takeaways? More listeners are using Pandora on mobile, which in turn hurts ad rates, Pandora won’t be making much money on ads anyway, and the costs of paying music royalties are getting higher and are eating away half of Pandora’s revenue. The outlook is bleak and as music label royalty rates increase through 2015, and possibly beyond, one can only imagine the difficulties lying ahead for Pandora to turn a profit.

As Hypebot pointed out in a recent post, analyst Rich Greenfield of BTIG had some sobering remarks regarding the impending Pandora IPO:

“As consumers we love Pandora. It is free, incredibly easy-to-use, works across a growing array of platforms in/out-of-home, and has a de minimis amount of advertising compared to terrestrial radio…Investing in Pandora is a whole different story. While Pandora is creating a large active user base, its reach/frequency continues to pale in comparison to terrestrial radio, as does its profitability….We recommend investors do not participate in the Pandora IPO.”

Ouch! With every article I come across, people question the future of Pandora and its ability for financial success. They almost went under in 2007 and we don’t know what’s in store in the coming years. While there is still the possibility that Pandora finds its way into more devices and even into every new car, there are no guarantees that Pandora will be able to penetrate the market to the extent it needs in order to become a profiting juggernaut.

This disconnect between the love people have for the product and its ability to monetize is a problem faced by many digital companies in recent years. Facebook struck gold with their ad platform and other strictly online sites have been able to succeed off a freemium model (meaning free for most users with the premium, paid accounts carrying the financial burden for the rest). Unfortunately for Pandora, not enough users are willing to pay $36 per year for a premium account to make the freemium model work on a large scale.

For many digital companies, if you build a compelling enough product then you can expect a small but meaningful percentage of your users to pay to use it. By allowing people to try it your product for free and only upgrade if they want premium features, you can build a large enough userbase while still getting enough loyal subscribers on the premium side. With Pandora, on the other hand, the users tend to be listeners who are passively listening rather than engaging in multiple ways (as you would find on other more social sites). Most listeners expect music to be free and don’t gain much utility from the product otherwise, so it’s harder to get them to pay when they can look elsewhere for music (Grooveshark, Spotify, etc.).

The lesson from all of this: no matter how many people love and use your product, you don’t have a guaranteed road to financial success unless you can find a model that works for both the company and its users. With Pandora fighting an uphill battle against increasing royalties and content costs, the future remains shaky. Until then, many will probably hold off on purchasing Pandora’s stock when IPO time rolls around. Of course in a hot market like we’re in right now, many won’t be able to resist.

Sky News recently posted an article explaining AC/DC’s firm stance on online downloading and how the legendary rock group would never allow their songs to be available for download.

Says guitarist Angus Young:

"I know the Beatles have changed but we’re going to carry on like that... For us it’s the best way. We are a band who started off with albums and that’s how we’ve always been… We always were a band that if you heard something (by AC/DC) on the radio, well, that’s only three minutes. Usually the best tracks were on the albums."

It’s interesting to note that AC/DC’s stance on making music available for download is based on the idea that they want their listeners to hear the album all the way through from beginning to end. While this makes perfect sense if you’re listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, a concept album, or any progressive rock band, AC/DC’s music strikes me more as the short rock single that makes for a perfect radio spot.

Either this hard-line position on legal online downloading signifies a severe lack of economic judgment and willful ignorance to the way the music world currently operates or it represents a principle that the band wants to keep at any cost. Prince claimed that “the Internet’s completely over” in what appeared to be a streak of sheer stupidity. AC/DC, on the other hand, might be less afraid of technology and are just purists when it comes to the consumption of their music. Obviously they know that many people will just download their music illegal anyway, but they prefer to remain steadfast nonetheless out of respect for themselves and the music they created.

On the other hand, I think an artist should pick their battles and this doesn’t seem like a battle that needs to be fought. People who buy AC/DC albums the conventional way, in a store or online and in CD form, will often listen to the music on a track-by-track basis with no adherence to song order or album flow. For something as commonplace as an iTunes store or other online download location, AC/DC could be raking in a lot more money while providing their fans and would-be fans a convenient way to consume their music without resorting to illegal measures. At the very least, that appears to be the courteous thing to do in the current music industry climate and in a time where everyone carries around their iPod or smartphone to download and listen to music.

by Jonathan Jaeger (credit to Kyle Bylin of MusicThinkTank and Hypebot for the clever new title)

The new Britney Spears video for ‘Hold It Against Me’ got me thinking about product placement and monetization possibilities for the music industry. The video has overt references to Britney’s fragrance Radiance, Makeup Forever, Sony, and the online dating site PlentyOfFish. I have no idea how much it costs to get into a video that will most likely garner tens of millions of views over time, but I can imagine it is not insignificant (UPDATE: it's $500K, not insignificant by any means). Britney Spears isn’t the only one to include product placement in videos either—Lady Gaga didn’t shy away from video advertising in Telephone and even some rock musicians are starting to go with the trend to make up for lackluster CD sales. Clearly it’s becoming a staple of the music industry just as it has been in television for a long time. I always enjoy a good product placement bit on 30 Rock.

As Youtube increases video traffic more and more by the day, you can expect product placement to become more prevalent in the music industry and to start getting money from all those eyeballs that never seem to look down at their own wallets to fork over the dough. While advertising and product placement will help some get a few extra dollars for the stars, it won’t save the rest of the music industry from starvation.

Unlike Google Adsense or other advertising opportunities offered to people with only a small number of hits on their videos, product placement requires a calculated inclusion of an object in a video—something clear enough to get the message across without seeming too obtrusive to the actual content (the degree to which that is possible is subject to argument). The smaller artists who won’t be able to negotiate product placements with a  brand’s sales team simply won’t be able to incorporate products in their videos for small amounts of money. An efficient marketplace for product placement in music videos just isn’t feasible at this point (note: if such a marketplace exists and I’m just ignorant, please email me at jonathan@hypedsound.com and I will eat my words).

Even if product placement was possible for the more middle-class artists, that doesn’t mean it actually makes sense in a video’s context. Some artists would consider product placement to be selling-out and others would not be able to incorporate it into the style of video they produce. Could you imagine a Tool video with product placement?

No matter how much it makes me cringe, I can deal with product placement in pop music videos to the extent I can deal with pop music itself—just a little bit. However, it’s not right for everyone and certainly won’t save the music industry. For now it’s just one small tool in the arsenal of big artists. It will not save the music industry or the record labels.

by Jonathan Jaeger

Every so often, someone comes along and writes a song, makes a witty t-shirt, records a video, writes an article, or uses some other medium to poke fun at pop music and how simple it is to write a hit song.

“All you need to know is four chords to write a hit song!”

“Pop music is formulaic!”

“Pop stars don’t even write their own music.”

Many of these assumptions are completely true, and I can’t even begin to name all the horrible pop music out there. Nevertheless, I’d like to argue that pop music gets a bad rap sometimes. There is plenty of music in any genre that doesn’t make the cut as “listenable”. With pop music, however, some of it ends up floating around on the airwaves so it’s a little more visible for the 15 minutes it gets on our nerves.

A couple more comedic videos make light of the straight-forward structure of pop songs.

You can make a hit pop song in eight hours, apparently:

Does every pop song use the same four chords?:

For all the people who decry the popularity of some of the more simple hit songs on the Billboard charts and iTunes Top 10, I sympathize. I too see the beauty in the technicality of progressive metal, the musicianship and melody of jazz, and the soul in a blues guitar lick. But in pop music, there is something that separates a song that is a hit for a month with a song that stands the test of time as a pop classic (no matter how cheesy it is). There is an elusive catchiness that is often missing in the genres that many artistic folks consider more reputable or refined.

If you can make something appealing to the masses with just four chords, you’re doing something special to those four chords that someone else couldn’t do with the same resources at their disposal. Sometimes pop stars who already have had a hit song get by with another hit that is mediocre at best, but their careers don’t usually last long.

Abba, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, and other pop sensations are remembered because they transcended the typical duration for a pop career. Why? Because sometimes a persona mixed with just the right hook, over and over again, is just enough for us to keep coming back for more.

This blog, more like a stream of consciousness, is an attempt to bring out the futurist in me. It is fun to speculate as to how the music experience can be a collaborative one, especially since deejay culture and music often invokes almost tribal-like sentiments.

Technology to sync songs, beats, and various tracks in a live setting is integral to the often seamless electronic music experience we enjoy at our local discotheques. Mashups and remixes are standard fare for your average house deejay who can put together the latest and hottest tracks in beautiful succession, with tight overlaps and timely bass drops.

I wonder when technology will get so advanced that the deejay is no longer the only one in on the craft. Imagine a concert experience where there is reciprocity between the deejay and the audience – while this already exists in some intangible sense through audience feedback and the deejay adjusting tracks accordingly, it would be a step further for the rhythms of the crowd  to be algorithmically calculated and fed back into the deejay’s equipment for further manipulation. Whether this is done through rhythm sensors or other technology, the room or environment itself would be able to calculate the intensity and motions of the crowd and feed the information back to the deejay to help provide music that would fit in unison with those dancing.

Usually it is the deejay who adjusts the rhythm and the crowd dances to the predetermined beat. In our little thought experiment though, once the general beat is established for a given track, the room would then pick up the nuances taking place on the dance floor and then help to mold the music to the specific circumstances at that moment. If a person in the crowd shouts, maybe the room picks up on it and throws out an effect or noise that would not normally be there. When many people start jumping up and down at a more bouncy section of the song, then maybe the bass increases its focus on a given frequency and really pounds at the speakers. A deejay could manually react in a similar way, but one person would not be able to keep up with the number of calculations a computer could automate in real-time and simultaneously across the entire environment.

To take this idea to another level, we could incorporate sensors throughout the music environment that have corresponding musical sounds. You lean against a wall or jump on the ground and then the force is measured and adds a musical embellishment synced to the beat of the song that is already playing. If a cluster of people form in one specific area of the room, the intensity of the sound is magnified in that area or there is an increased bass resonance filtered and targeted to that place in the room.

An environment that incorporates such advanced technology would be very expensive, but might also make for the most interesting club or concert environment one could immerse themselves in. A place where like-minded people dance the night away as if they too are on stage with the deejay. Check out the Emulator for Traktor Pro, arguably the coolest thing at the 2011 NAMM convention (according to popular house deejay Kaskade). The inspiration for more thinking on the future of electronic music and the live experience:

While perusing the latest articles on Digital Music News, I came across a new article that discussed why artists should be compensated for their work. Executive director John Simon’s departure from SoundExchange brought up the question of artist compensation. His statement explained public sentiment in regards to artists today:

"I am very concerned about the apparent disrespect shown by many in our culture to those who pursue artistic endeavors… One recent survey showed a surprising number of Americans who believe that artists should have a second job to support themselves – as they should not expect to be paid for their art!  We must educate the public and eradicate these extremely destructive beliefs."  

I would like to bring up the old argument that claims that teachers should make just as much as professional athletes. People think teachers make a difference in other people’s lives and have a hard job, so they should be rewarded for their efforts – athletes, on the other hand, get to have an arguably fun career with many perks and a fat salary. Why should they be rewarded disproportionately?

The reasons athletes get (and even deserve) more is because only a select few make it to the upper echelons of sports stardom. People love watching sports and a small number, that is the best, are rewarded for their abilities, their hard work, and the industry they create around their jobs. The same is true for musicians, although one of the music industry’s primary business models is being destroyed by digital piracy. Therefore, fewer and fewer artists can make it to the elite class of well-paid musicians who are disproportionately compensated for their work. That does not seem fair to the many musicians with talent who are looking just to make a small living, not a seven-figure stipend.

Although my personal stance on the music industry might shift over time, I remember having a discussion about copyright with a former college friend in which I was arguing on the pro-copyright side. I argued that copyright was important to ensure artists get what they deserve, partly because I knew how hard artists worked to create their art. I wanted my favorite artists to spend all their waking hours worrying about their craft rather than worrying about paying rent by working at Walmart or Home Depot.

Regardless of the ethical questions surrounding the consumption of pirated music, I wonder if the quality of music will diminish over time because artists will be spending more time searching for money elsewhere than honing their performing and recording chops. I think it is too early to tell from a macro perspective – there is still good music coming out every day – but I am sure piracy has an effect on the length of a musician’s career as well as the ability to output music in the most effective way possible. The problems are already too pervasive…

A few days ago I covered a news story about a pending lawsuit against Apple and how some big name apps like Pandora sell personal user information to third party ad networks. Instead of just repeating the news story, I would like to analyze some of the ramifications that go along with using apps that contain your personal information and whether it is acceptable and necessary for app-makers to sell information in order to make the finances work out for their companies.

For music services specifically, it is hard to create a profitable business even if you are as big a name as Pandora. Former CEO and founder of MP3.com Michael Robertson did a guest post on the popular tech blog TechCrunch in which he described Pandora’s financial situation for the 2010 year. One interesting tidbit, and possibly sobering piece of information, is that “the per user royalty rates Pandora has agreed to pay will go up 10% per year for the next 4 years,” making it tough for Pandora to hit and sustain breakeven or profitability in the coming years.

While I do not know all the financial particulars of all the various companies selling personal consumer information to third party ad networks, because there are many, I think it is safe to say that many of these companies need that extra money to help make their budget balance (or at least be less in the red). So the conclusion that consumers need to think about is whether their apps are worth the extra loss in privacy; that is to say, in order to keep their favorite services running, people have to give up a little bit on their end. We give up our privacy when we have our bags checked at the airport or we cross the border into another country, but this behind-closed-doors selling of our personal information is more subtle, and for some, it borders on nefarious.

Facebook ran into problems with their privacy policy and the same can happen with other services that carry data for a variety of consumer characteristics and preferences. Companies will claim that they are using your information irrespective of your name, but that does not mean they are not still using personal information without your explicit consent.

As consumers we can easily say we do not want our personal data compromised, but it is a whole other story when it comes down to sacrificing convenience and pleasure. If you took away all the capabilities of companies to store and use your information in ways they see fit, then it might also stop you from getting the best recommendations for products and services you are looking for – personalization would be much harder and you would have to go through a lot more legal hoops to set everything up as fast as you can now with your online networks.

Personally, I usually opt for convenience over privacy, but that is probably because I am not a very private person with specific things I want to keep hidden. However, some people in some circumstances have reasonable needs for privacy in everything they do online (even those not using the Internet for “sketchy” purposes). Just because I want my convenience – sometimes at the expense of my privacy – that does not mean others are not entitled to the full extent of their privacy. It is not a clear-cut case of right and wrong and in the future there will hopefully be more concrete opt-in and opt-out policies online to maintain consumer privacy and security.

A couple months ago a band by the name of Atomic Tom played their song “Take Me Out” live on the NYC subway using just their iPhones. The video went viral and the performance seemed like a fun use of tech gadgets. But is this just a novelty?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say music performed on gadgets will become the norm at some point. Maybe not in the next decade, but what about in the next century? The next 50 years? Twenty years? We already have electronic and dance music that strays from using conventional instruments, so now all we have to do is make the jump to playing all other types of music with electronic gadgets as well.

The new Gorillaz album was composed mostly using apps on the iPad—although they are not a normal four-piece rock group with a guitar, bass, and a person behind the kit, they are certainly more mainstream than many electronic artists that don’t use “normal” instruments. I don’t see why many other artists won’t follow suit with similar production styles, if they are not starting to do so already.

So what is currently stopping people from ditching the instruments? Well, the technology is still ways away from mimicking guitars and violins to perfection. Nothing can replace the sound of a real stringed instrument, although in a couple decades, who knows how good digital modeling technology will be. It will probably be pretty darn good.

There is also the heartfelt connection one has to their instrument that digital gadgets have a hard time competing with. However, just as consumers forgot their tradition of waiting outside of stores to buy a new record, they are also probably willing to forget about conventional instruments (over time).

Moore’s law says that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. Even if this law does not hold true forever, we experienced exponential progress in technology over the last several decades and will experience similar technological growth in the near future. Growth in technology means progress in electronic music potential. The technology will get better and slowly replace regular instrumentation, at least to some significant degree if not entirely.

More and more people will forego learning conventional instruments like the violin, piano, guitar, and bass because they can model those instruments using digital technology. With increasingly cheap recording software at the disposal of the average garage musician, most people will eventually have a band in their pocket ready-to-go and unconstrained by any sort of lack of daily practice. Maybe the moms and dads  of the future won’t be shouting at their kids to keep practicing ‘Für Elise,’ but instead their children will be learning how to sequence MIDI files and picking just the right reverb tail to make their Steinway grand piano modeler sound like its in Carnegie Hall.

The music blog at guardian.co.uk did a piece on musicians and depression, looking into the idea that musicians are more likely to experience depression than people in other professions. In fact, creative artists are actually fifth on the list of top 10 professions with high rates of depression. The question then turns to whether people inclined to depression are more drawn to music or the profession itself brings about depressive illness. One might also want to think about whether depression translates into the creation of more emotional and memorable music or whether it stifles creativity.

Let’s use the example of the homeless street musician Daniel “Homeless” Mustard to explore these questions. Daniel Mustard went on the Opie & Anthony Show and delivered an emotional performance of Radiohead’s “Creep” in a video that went on to receive 1.7 million views on Youtube. As Hypebot point outs, Mustard even scored a record deal off that performance. Although the story itself is very uplifting – being that Mustard was an alcoholic who went through his fair share of hardship – a second video and sneak peak of his EP debut does not seem to have the same sense of urgency or poignancy that the original Opie & Anthony performance had. There might have been a shift in Mustard’s performance based on his emotional state. One may argue that depression itself creates a void that later envelops itself into very heart-wrenching, but effective, songwriting or performing. Without those tough feelings, the music might take on a different form, for better or for worse.

The original blog post I mentioned argues that “the reality for the sufferer is that depression is so debilitating it’s impossible to create anything at all.” While depression can outright stop creativity in the average individual, for some it might be the dark impetus to musical exploration. I am not trying to encourage or romanticize the idea of depression in any way. Depression is an unfortunate and hopefully treatable illness in many cases. However, there is always the curiosity in music lovers of whether their idols would have created the same music had they not been depressed. Kurt Cobain is an obvious example of this given his drug addiction and clinical depression that ultimately led to his suicide. How did it affect the music? What would have Nirvana sounded like had Cobain embraced his stardom and enjoyed the limelight with all its perks? Maybe the music would have been worse or maybe he would have lived to create even better music – we’ll never know.

If nothing else, one should be aware of the potential hazards of a lifestyle that glorifies artists in a way that can encourage activities that lead to depression. Hopefully one artist’s hardships, expressed through music, can encourage others to seek help or make it through their own difficult times. If people who are more susceptible to depression are also more inclined to enter a creative field, then maybe that artistic profession can act as an outlet that helps to cure (or cope with) depression.

Last week I read an article on the popular music tech blog Hypebot that stated that indie artists account for 50% of the Grammy nominations this year. According to the indie trade group A2IM, independent artists are nominated in 88 of the total 108 Grammy categories.

Before we make any conclusions as to what this means for the state of the music industry, we must define what we mean by “indie” artists. Director/producer Dave Cool, of the documentary What is Indie? A Look into the World of Independent Musicians, defines an indie artist as an unsigned artist. Cool says that everyone has their own interpretation of what an indie artist is, but at that end of the day an unsigned artist is an indie (independent) artist no matter what their stature in the music business. He goes on to say that he does not discriminate against Paul McCartney or Robert Plant, who in their own way, are also indie artists if they wish to claims themselves as so.

Regardless of the fame attributed to the indie artists nominated for Grammys, the nominations still give you a clear picture of the trajectory of the music industry. Even if by Cool’s definition of an indie artist we also include famous artists who happen to be independent, we can recognize the fact they were nominated for the Grammys despite lacking a major label backing.

Perhaps in the future the record labels will be so fragmented or completely different in the way they operate now that we will not make such distinctions between signed and unsigned artists. Distribution deals and promotion will be less and less about whether you are signed to a major label and more about how well you can reach your audience no matter what the medium you engage in with your fans. As mobile adoption increases and online technology becomes more seamless, expect the lines between indie artist and "famous" artist to blur further.

Although the Grammys are not respected in the underground scene to the same extent as with the mainstream pop artists that receive most of the major awards, they are progressing in a way that is friendlier to the independent or more underground artists. Back when they first started giving away awards for best hard rock/metal performance, people were shocked when Jethro Tull (a much softer sounding band) beat out Metallica for the award in 1988. In part because of that controversy, the Grammys now offer awards for hard rock and metal separately. You can see bands like Lamb of God, Shadows Fall, Slayer, and others gain notoriety for their heavier-than-normal music in the metal category. Although not all these bands are independent, many of them share the same mentality as independent artists and worked their way up the industry ladder.

Going along with Dave Cool’s definition of the indie artist as the unsigned artist, it might be a bit overzealous to lump more underground artists (whether signed or unsigned) into the same category as indie artists as a whole. However, I think it is equally important to notice that both unsigned and underground artists are receiving more Grammy support than in the past, which is a partial recognition of the evolving music industry where smaller-time artists can work their way into mainstream consciousness. If the Grammys are noticing the changes in at least a partially significant way, at least we know the rest of us are beginning to experience the era of the indie artist more fully.

What does "indie" mean to you? A genre, style, or only a distinction of independent status?

“Rubber Skunk is not an entree you happened upon at a traditional Ethiopian restaurant, nor is it a new breed of the mephitis genus.  It's not even the exotic strain of weed you got offered from that backpack-clad hippie at the last music festival you went to. Rubber Skunk is a Manhattan-based funky, high energy band, eager to claw, spray, and jam its way up to heights never attained by its predecessors. 

The band is comprised of Thomas Mintel on drums, Grant Fisher on guitar and vocals, Ricardo Rodriguez on bass, and Jordan Vincent on keys and vocals.  The band was birthed, and grew a strong following, amidst the academia and keg-induced indulgence of the University of Delaware.”

HypedSound has a talk with these now NYC-based renegades:

Tell us exactly how Rubber Skunk got to be so rubbery? How do two engineers take the leap from the world of functions to the world of funk?

Bob: Instead of explaining in engineering terms, lets flesh this one out from the biological description. A rubber skunk does not occur naturally. There are two ways that one can produce the rare rubber skunk.  The easier method is to genetically engineer some stock lab skunks. This is done by replacing a key gene in the 4th chromosomal pair. The result is a skunk with the consistency of silly putty. This skunk is funkier than an unmodified skunk but does not hold up under heavy Parliament type funkitudes.  

The more hearty and reliable breed of rubber skunk is very time consuming to produce but is highly stable even when the mother ship encounters high g forces. One must make an encampment near the home of a male skunk in the wild.  One then needs to practice various historically funky bass lines from James Brown, The Meters, and the like.

Over a period of about 40 days the skunk will start to move and sway to the bass.  This process is actually activating a combination of dormant genes in the male's reproductive organs.  Once this "groove skunk" successfully mates with a willing partner the elusive Rubber Skunk will be produced. This skunk does not need to be trained with the bass lines nor does it suffer from "funk fatigue" like its laboratory counter part. This skunk will funk all night long.

So we've heard that you've moved the band to the promised land and relocated from Delaware to Manhattan. Was this a difficult decision to make amongst the members? How does the scene relate to your music and how does it differ from the local bar scene you used to play?

Jordan: Three of the four of us graduated last year from the University of Delaware, and Grant, the guitar player, decided to go to grad school at NYU. He basically asked us if we wanted to come, and we were like, "Hell, yea we'll move to the big apple and rock out!"  Our beloved bass player stayed behind, though, and we were sent into a terrible craigslist bass player joining-and-then-being-wishy-washy-or-turning-out-to-be-a-shitty-player-from-clown-town infinity loop.

The scene up here frankly dominates most other places I've been in terms of size and depth. You can find anything here, and the level of ability in the performers is ridiculous.  You can walk in to a tiny nowhere bar and see some guys ripping jazz standards to shreds or discover some wild traditional ethnic music from some place you've never heard of. 

The old scene we played at in Delaware was fantastic. We knew everybody- we had FANS, we knew the guys that could get us in to venues, we had a built-in network.  Up here we're starting from scratch, and trust me, getting new people to come see your show for 10 bucks when they've never heard of you is really tough. But we knew it would be trial by fire!

So much of your music has quite an eclectic feel to it, combining funky rhythms with jazzy rock and roll. Is this a direct reflection of the mix of members in the band? Where do you draw your inspiration from? Who are your greatest influences?

Yea, yea we know. We're thinking about calling this first EP we are recording "Genre Confusion" and putting a hot girl in a bikini on the front with a huge bulge in her bikini bottoms. We're fans of all kinds of music, and we're still developing our sound; but we all love those funky rhythms, rocking on the sweet spot, and jazz of all sorts. 

The difference is, like you said, the mix of members. I like to write groovy, easily expandable things with interesting lyrical content, Grant likes to find little pieces of the musical universe that haven't been explored yet and see what we can do with them, Tommy is a phenomenal group player and loves to jam on anything. Our bass player Bob just joined a few months ago. He's already taken all of our songs to new places. But we all generally love a lot of the same music at the core, so we get along just fine.

You've got a new LP releasing soon....tell us more, tell us more.

We're really excited about it.  It's actually going to be an EP at around 7 full tracks, plus whatever textural stuff we can put in between. We've gotten to a point musically where we are ready to put together a piece of work, and what a great feeling! We will release it amidst an all-out wild and crazy release party in the Spring. Wanna come? 

Whats your guys take on the state of the music industry right now? Do you think social media is helping artists or fragmenting music?

I think you have to be an idiot or label exec to think that this isn't one of the most exciting times for music. We are totally free again to capture, produce, and distribute sound however we want to. I think we will see people's expectations and attractions to the song, and especially the "album", slowly grow and change drastically to encompass all the new things artists are doing with the technology at hand. 

So what if music is becoming more fragmented? All that means is that the older generations can't complain about how shitty music is now, because we don't have big money organizations  jamming pop culture radio fads down our throats so much anymore. There will always be good music, now we're just starting to hear it again over the roar of the corporate machine, as it sputters out and start to look for more financially fertile territory. 

It's publications like yours and bands like ours that will build the new framework on top of the ashes. 

Jordan's fear of tidal waves---childhood tragedy?

No, he's just being a bitch.

You can check out Rubber Skunk at http://www.myspace.com/rubberskunk

The Peace are a well layered "jam band" hailing from the Northeast.  Their roots are in the deep, cultural spirituality inherent in ALL folk music - from 2Pac to Bob Dylan to Bob Marley. In short, Kendes and his mates, "sing for the people." We had a great chat with Bob Kendes to talk about The Peace and his inspiration for writing music.

In your bio, you describe your music as centered around God. Did your inspiration for your music’s message come from going to church as a child or was there some other trigger? How has your message evolved over time?

I never went to church as a child! I've been able to experience that blessing as an adult ;)

My message is the message of the Bible, period. Love your neighbor as yourself and serve God with your whole heart. 

Though it has certainly evolved, it has remained rooted in the spreading of peace and love, always.  

You say your music draws comparisons to Bob Marley because of the spirit and lyrical message behind the music. Other than Bob Marley, who are your favorite lyricists?

Well, Bob's lyrics are fantastic due to their simplicity and profundity. I also thoroughly enjoy: Dave Matthews, Ani DiFranco, K'naan and Curtis Mayfield - eclectic, I know!

What is your favorite way to go about writing music? Do you come up with your songs by jamming with other people at practice or are you more the pen-and-paper in your bedroom type?

Wherever has the right vibe is where I'm writing the song; there could be one -or ten - musicians in the room; I could be solo or surrounded by a group of fans/friends. The vibe is the key.

What was your favorite live concert moment that you played?

We did a show in Vermont with Jon Fishman that was a lot of fun. I did a great duo show with my producer/drummer Aaron Katz (Percy Hill/the dejas) at Southern New Hampshire University for their Spring Fling one year which was a total blast. I ended up jumping off the stage into the lawn area during one of our songs. Great times, great times.  

What are your five desert island albums?

John Scofield - A Go Go

Bob Marley - Babylon By Bus

Dave Matthews Band - Live at Red Rocks

Sublime: Sublime Acoustic - Bradley Nowell and Friends  

John Lennon - Acoustic

If you could go back in time to see one artist who you never got a chance to see live and who is no longer with us, who would it be and why? Feel free to choose an ideal venue too, if you’d like.

Bob Marley and The Wailers - Live in New York City at Madison Square Garden circa 1977. In this "Babylonian" city of greed, deception and ruthlessness, Nesta brought a righteous blend of spirituality, reggae, folk and most important of all, Love.

Your influences are heavily rooted in the jam band aesthetic and mentality. Do you think the Internet enables you to spread your message in the most effective way or do you pick up more fans by hitting the road and meeting new 

Each has it's own purpose, I think. I enjoy meeting individuals face to face and subsequently buttressing and strenghtening the artist-fan relationship via the net. Both are excellent, though. 

Do you have a passionate stance on music piracy and illegal downloading?

Yes. Respect the artist. We can't change people - they've got to change themselves. We can only lead by example. So, if you're an artist, and you think music should be free, give away your own music for free. Example. 

What are the plans for the future of The Peace? More music and touring?

We will be performing at colleges, amongst other venues (cafes, amphitheaters, festivals, etc) in 2011. The sky is the limit because we have Faith!

Editors note: You can visit www.thepeacemusic.com/loveyou/ to download the new live record from The Peace titled "Love You," for FREE right now! 

by Jonathan Jaeger

After recently doing an interview with GrungeCake, I decided to go on a little online scavenger hunt for nifty websites. What makes a good music website? Some websites combine a love for art and music with simple and aesthetically-pleasing design, some have really cool premises, and some are just about the content. Here are a few websites I came across that offer a variety of music and artistic indulgences:

GrungeCake

GrungeCake describes itself as “an independent, inclusive New York based printed art publication that deals with social issues in a thematic manner, expressing and showing views-resolutions through art.” GrungeCake lives up to this description starting with its tagline “Where Art Lives!” all the way to the large-sized, high quality images on its pages and in-depth music interviews.

The site is fun to navigate with its Flash interface, but it doesn’t jump in your face or distract you like some other Flash-based sites. The site is built with Wordpress – it is elegant in its layout but not formulaic like many other blogs using the Wordpress software.

The website is pretty new and updates on a frequent basis. Try GrungeCake out if you have an interest in not only music, but also cherish an artistic lifestyle in all senses of the word. The name of the website alone warrants a visit, no?

http://www.grungecake.com

Mo ‘Gravy

This one is another one of those hip tumblr blogs (not being too sarcastic, tumblr is cool). Unlike many of the cat-infested, and arguably useless, blogs, Mo ‘Gravy is practical, fun, and has a search capability to boot.

What’s the premise? Take those cool funk tracks from back in the day and display a list of artists who sampled the songs. Why is this useful? If not just to satisfy your curiosity for music’s rich sampling history, you might want to check out some of the newer tracks and see if you can pick out the samples yourself. When artists sample other artists, there is the possibility that the newer songs add something new and interesting to the mix. Time for a warped sense of nostalgia.

If you’re too lazy to compare songs, you can still enjoy the funky grooves already playing on the site. Make my funk the P.funk!

http://mogravy.tumblr.com/

The Black Cab Sessions 

Ever wondered how music would sound if performed in a moving cab? No, me neither. If you were one of the few people waiting for someone to create a site where you got to see intimate performances of cool artists playing in the back of a black cab, then your wait is over. I found the site for you!

The Black Cab Sessions sticks true to the taxi cab theme with a black and yellow color scheme and a long list of artists with close-up pictures linking to their taxi cab session. The videos are hosted on Vimeo, ensuring superior quality to the YouTube embeds that are ubiquitous on the web. YouTube is a little more convenient to reach a wide audience, but if you want an artsy destination site like The Black Cab Sessions, then Vimeo is the way to go.

With great artist and design choices, The Black Cab Sessions will impress those looking for a unique music site that is also visually and sonically rewarding.

http://www.blackcabsessions.com/

Have you come across any music websites with unique concepts or designs? Share them in the comments below.

We go in depth with one HypedSound artist. Check out Ignacio’s new EP "Live at Lincoln Hall" recorded 8/23/10 in Chicago (listen and fan him at http://www.IgnacioNYC.com and download a couple songs here). You can also find him on Twitter (@ignacionyc) and don't forget to hype him up on his HypedSound profile! 

Video for “Miles Away” on YouTube

Tell us a little bit about how you got started with music. You said you were in the Metropolitan Opera Children's Chorus, did this set the stage for the years to come?

I'd say that I always had a passion for music but being in the Met certainly nurtured my growing obsession with it, especially with performing.  I would use all the money I made from the performances to buy CD’s down at the Tower Records down the street  I think it was on 67th -- remember actual record stores? By far my three favorite first bands and biggest influences were the Clash, The Beatles and the Beach Boys, and I remember buying every single one of their albums I could.  Other than that, I'd say the Met taught me how to teach myself music, because being around other great musicians has always inspired and taught me how to push myself to be better.

Tell us a little bit about your influences. Growing up in Westchester, how does one become such a huge fan of British music?

Well it's the suburbs, not Siberia, but it's certainly true that most of my favorite bands are British. I think the British culture just has an openness not seen here in the states that really cultivates musical invention. I don't try to limit myself in any taste except liking "good music" -- it just so happens that the British make a lot of good music. But I also love a lot of classical music, Spanish guitar music (prob from my father playing those songs over and over again) and hundreds of American musicians and groups.

We hear you just released an EP in June, tell us a little about it. If you could go back and change one thing, what would it be? What was the greatest strength of the release?


The EP consists of five catchy, well written songs. It's like five singles.  I think there is a song in there for everyone, a ballad, a mid-tempo song with high Bflats, which consequently has become the bane of my existence. There are also fast-tempo rock songs.  The songs are about love, life, nights and romantic fights.  I'm a perfectionist when it comes to my music, so unfortunately, I don't know where to begin.  The greatest strength would be the songs themselves, particularly "what it takes" and "miles away". 

You have a full length album you are working to get released soon... how would you best sum up the spirit of it? Any favorite tracks to look out for? 
 


I am releasing a live EP in November which will have some new songs. I'm also working on another EP to be released in February. I'm messing around with different voice timbres, writing styles and experimenting with different beats, specifically dance beats.  The song we are working on right now is "the queen" and it definitely represents the direction we'd like to go, I'm really excited to see what it becomes.

What do you think is the greatest pitfall as an artist right now, in the digital music era? What are your thoughts on social media and music?


Obviously as an artist you wish it were the days when people sold a million albums in a week, but those days aren't coming back anytime soon so why dwell on the pitfalls? I think the thing to look at is that now more than ever you can get new music to the widest audience possible in a matter of minutes. I guess, the idea of a cohesive album could be in jeopardy because you can preview the songs you like, or just download the ‘hits,’ but at the same time it allows music consumers to avoid buying bad albums. I’ve benefited from the digital era as both a fan and an artist so its a difficult thing to answer, and its also not something I think about very often. I just try to use social media as much as possible to expose my music to more people.

Saddest song you've ever heard?


ERIC CLAPTON 'TEARS IN HEAVEN'

I recently came across a great article by music industry and PR expert Ariel Hyatt on how to write engaging newsletters (take a look at the piece on MusicThinkTank). Hyatt points out a study that found these interesting statistics:

“Overall, 86% of survey respondents said they used email to share content, while just 49% said they used Facebook. Broken down by age, the preference for email is more pronounced, as users get older. And only the youngest group polled, those ages 18 to 24, reverses the trend, with 76% sharing via Facebook, compared with 70% via email.”

Email newsletters, as she argues, provide a lot of opportunities to effectively target your audience by keeping up a relationship while also providing many possibilities for bringing in revenue. What distinguishes email newsletters from your stand-alone website or blog is the ability to maintain fan relationships over time. If you don’t have the time to blog on a daily basis, chances are you won’t be able to keep people coming back to your website because they know content won’t be updated on a consistent basis. When you finally want to ask your fans to buy your new single or t-shirt, you might have already lost part of your audience. The beauty of an email newsletter is you don’t have to send one out every day (and if you did, it would probably be too much for the average person—they would unsubscribe or delete the messages without even opening them). If you send a newsletter out every week, you know the people on your email newsletter list will be there because they check their email all the time.

One important thing to remember for email newsletters and other content you produce online is maintaining the right blend of personality, information, and calls to action. As Hyatt explains, calls to action involve asking your audience to help spread the word about you as an artist or they are for asking fans to buy something from you. You don’t want to seem like you’re just trying to sell to your audience and you don’t want to desperately ask for their help either. Asking your fans for something is best done after you’ve already engaged them on a personal level. You probably connect to your favorite artists on a personal level, not just through music, so why not do the same with your fans. Make sure your fans already know you personally before you try to solicit them for cash.

Each medium of communication has its own rules and etiquette for engagement. On Twitter, most of your tweets should be geared towards communicating personal anecdotes or links you find interesting—selling and promotional tweets should be used sparingly. When you are using Facebook, you should be aware of the dynamics of people’s news feeds. The more actively someone participates in a fan page, the more often updates from that page will appear in their news feed. If all you do is promote the same music profile and links over and over, chances are your audience will get bored and you will have a smaller and smaller presence on their Facebook news feeds. Keep a close eye on how people participate and communicate in each different medium (email, social networks, YouTube, mobile, etc.) so you can reach them in the most effective and non-spammy ways.

If you want to start an email newsletter, I suggest using Mailchimp for their incredible features, ease of use, and analytics. It’s free to use up to 1,000 subscribers!

1. Reverend Run of RUN-DMC fame is an ordained minister with the New York Pentecostal church Zoe Ministries.

2. Termites eat wood twice as fast when they are listening to heavy metal.

3. Sonny and Cher originally called themselves Caesar and Cleo.

4. The harmonica is the world’s best-selling music instrument.

5. The composer John Cage wrote a piece called 4’ 33”, which is four minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure silence.

6. The song “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” by Wham! was inspired by a  sign Andrew Ridgeley used to place on his bedroom door to remind his mom to wake him up before she went to work.

7. Leo Fender, the inventor of the Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars, did not actually play the guitar.

8. The only hit song that is both a palindrome by title and artist is “SOS” by ABBA.

9. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” was the first CD pressed in the United States for commercial release.

10. The song “I Write The Songs” was performed by Barry Manilow, but ironically it was actually written by Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys.

Sources:

Music Radar @ http://goo.gl/mgKSW

Musicouth @ http://goo.gl/uhJv2

Eugene Portman @ http://goo.gl/0ahx1

MUSIC TRIVIA, MUSIC FACTS!! @ http://goo.gl/RCh4u

At some point musicians and songwriters will inevitably get a brush of writer’s block, which is the all too familiar feeling that you will never be able to write another good riff, lyric, or melody again. Every time I wrote a new song on guitar as a teenager, I thought to myself, “Hey! I really like this, how am I ever going to come up with anything else?” Sometimes that “anything else” didn’t come along for days or even weeks. For successful artists with hit records, the standards are even higher so writer’s block can be a severe distraction to the creative process. Here are a few tips to help you muster through it:

1) Acceptance – Mimic Alcoholic’s Anonymous! I’m not saying go out and apologize to all those you have wronged (although that can be cleansing in its own right), but you have to come to terms with the fact you have writer’s block. Curing your writer’s block means accepting its stranglehold and doing something to proactively combat it.

2) Be spontaneous – Do something spontaneous that doesn’t directly relate to your songwriting process. Adventure, new surroundings, and general curiosity of the world might lead you down a path of inspiration that will later reflect itself on your music. Maybe this means going to see an artsy movie, listening to street musicians, or spending a few days in the wilderness taking in the sounds of nature.

In the words of the hit TV comedy Family Guy: “Peter, inspiration doesn’t have a schedule.” Your next best song could be right around the corner.

3) Collaborate – Sometimes it’s tempting to sit in your room and bang on your guitar or computer until you get the riff, beat, or song you like. You figure the more time you put into trying to make music the better the outcome. This is often antithetical to the creative process. Sometimes you just have to take a break. When you’re ready to return to songwriting you could benefit from outside help. Go out and find other musicians to collaborate with in the real world. If you want to stay at home, there are a number of options online to collaborate with other musicians. Reach out to someone to bounce ideas off of or take advantage of all the free music online that you can either remix or use as inspiration for your next work. Change someone else’s music little by little and you might end up with a completely different song that’s your own. You can also piece together music using samples that are licensed under Creative Commons.

4) Switch It Up – Part of curing writer’s block is getting out of your comfort zone. If you usually write trance music, try giving dubstep a chance. If you’re into electronica, how about adding a tinge of industrial? For the metalheads out there, add a synth or two to beef up the mix and give yourself some added flavors. Try new chord progressions and melodies that you normally wouldn’t experiment with. If you tend to be very melodic, experiment with dissonance and enter new sonic territories. Doing the opposite of what you normally do could lead to something better when you transition back to your normal sound. Knowing what else is out there in the music world will make you a more well-rounded musician and will help with writer’s block.

Have you noticed that the new iTunes logo is a circle with a musical note and no longer has an image of a CD? Did you hear the new Macbook Air won’t have an optical drive? All signals point to the fact that Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) thinks that CDs are a thing of the past. While many are quick to point out CDs still have their place as a cheap mode of storing data, I can’t help think of past mediums for storing music that were replaced over time.

The physical CD will inevitably be gone like floppy drives at some point in the future and we will consume all our music via downloads—music will be transferred exclusively through bits not atoms. There will be no mass distributed physical form of music. The question we can’t answer is how long the shift will take, but Steve Jobs and Apple seem to want to push this gradual shift along at a steady pace, inserting a dagger into the life of the CD at any possible time. Apple’s tendency to embrace minimalism in design will keep moving us one step forward in technology and away from CDs. The iPad doesn’t even have a USB port, so we can’t be surprised that optical drives are no longer a requisite for computer hardware in Apple’s new product lines.

If artists can’t convince fans that music should be purchased in the physical form, then the price of music makes its way down to zero. Because people don’t think of music as a physical object in the same way they did in the past, there is a gap in the market for what artists can sell to their fans in the physical form. This means artists have to become innovative in their marketing techniques. Either you have to sell other physical goods like merch or you have to sell access (e.g. backstage passes, exclusives, etc.).

In an interview this week with musician and entrepreneur Chamillionaire, venture capitalist Mark Suster discusses with the rapper the various ways to market to a fanbase. Despite music moving from CDs to online data transfer, there is still a viable market for physical goods for music fans. This doesn’t just mean merch like T-shirts, but also unique items that can make stand out as an artist—one example of this would be a flash drive with your music, but the flash drive is designed to look like a machine gun. Anything that looks cool and makes fans keep a physical item will make you better able to attach your music and image as an artist to a physical object. If you can somehow connect your music and DVDs to a physical item that cannot be replicated through peer-to-peer sharing sites or iTunes, you will have a better chance of selling your work to your fans. Provide an experience!  

I came across an article on Music Think Tank that addressed 20 ways to have a lasting career in music. The list includes the various methods of forming a sustainable career without necessarily striking it rich as the next hip-hop phenom or pop star, a goal that many musicians aspire to (and often times rightfully so). However, just like it is difficult to get a business off the ground, becoming a successful musician does not happen overnight. In music, every overnight success was more than likely a 10+ year process of learning and struggling to hone one’s craft.

Here are some examples from the article and why I think they are suitable alternatives or complements to your ultimate pursuits as an artist:

1) Music Teacher:

As the article I mentioned points out, many music teachers need a degree to have a well-paid career for teaching private lessons or teaching at the high school or college level. For those just trying to make a buck while pursuing other music goals, picking up some lessons on how to teach music properly can help you prepare to instruct students. With the right tools, you can teach many students per week and still make a decent pay. Even Joe Satriani, the world-renowned guitarist and shredder, taught Kirk Hammett (lead guitarist of Metallica) and fellow guitar virtuoso Steve Vai at one point. Teaching an instrument will in most cases help you become a better player of your own instrument as well.

2) Music Producer:

Many successful musicians tour for the better part of the year but often have some downtime where they can return home to their studio and produce other artists’ music. Adam D. of metal band Killswitch Engage is well-known in the hard rock and metal community as a producer for many of his close peers and recorded artists such as All That Remains, Unearth, From Autumn to Ashes, Underoath, Every Time I Die and many more. Hip-hop artist and producer Timbaland is as well-known for his career as a studio producer and collaborator as he is for his own work. For the deejays and rock musicians who have mastered their skills in the studio, they might want to lend a hand to the less experienced artists who do not have the resources or skills to record a finely polished album. They can also help the pros who want another set of ears outside of their own helping with the recording process. Producing music can help pay the bills in between your live performances and can help you gain exposure for yourself as an artist. You will at some point want to have an extensive network of artists who you collaborate or converse with so you have more opportunities in the future no matter what the end goal.

3) Film/Video Game Scoring

A lot of the money artists used to rely on to make a living is gone due to poor music sales and the collapsing music industry. Although the situation is grim, there are still avenues for music composers to still make a living creating art. Whether you are an electronic artist, rock musician, or in any other genre, there are possibilities for making music for movies, television, or video games that enable you to still enjoy music while making money. You might find the constraints of working for someone else to be anything but liberating, but you could at least be making money creating something that will provide value for the end user (i.e. film/TV viewers or gamers).

Some other alternative career possibilities listed in the article include licensing music, live performance, band manager, studio/session musician, pit band for off-Broadway productions, instrument repair technician, gig booker, house band, page turner, music transcriber, ghost songwriter, and freelance music journalist.

Many people complain about the tendency of modern music to sound too polished. The proliferation of increasingly more sophisticated and precise recording tools allow artists to make everything sound perfect in the studio: auto-tune, click tracks, drum triggers, pitch correction, compression, and effects are all examples of tools that help artists sound cleaner and more powerful in their musical delivery.

The question that music enthusiasts debate is whether these tools make music better or they strip away some of the natural life that used to be present in older records—that is to say that over the years music has lost its soul. I think there is a happy medium between the two extremes where you can satisfy your need to sound polished with the desire to keep your music from sounding too mechanical or processed.

In a recent article I read, the drummer from the metal band Lamb of God describes the process by which the band records albums and maintains the natural essence of the music they write. Instead of choosing a tempo for a song and setting up a click track that the band plays to, the band records the song first and defines the click track based on what they already played. Lamb of God does not conform their playing to the click track, the click track conforms to the music. In this way, Lamb of God gets the benefit of playing in time with a click track when recording the final tracks, but they do not let the tool ruin their original intentions and vibe. It is not really a compromise, rather it is the best of both worlds.

Lamb of God’s recording strategy can be applied to all of the potential “shortcuts” of using studio tricks to make artists sound more polished. Some artists, unlike Lamb of God, will go to any length to make their records sound as mechanical and processed as possible. Many fans want an idealized version of their favorite bands because they will be listening to the songs hundreds of times. Even if the band cannot live up to its studio sound, does that mean the band should sacrifice sounding good in the studio for the sake of managing expectations for their live performance?

Many fans complain that vocalists are often unable to hit the same notes in concert as they do in the studio. I, on the other hand, would prefer to have the studio track (which is recorded and imprinted into physical or data form for eternity) to sound as good as possible. Sometimes and for some bands, sounding as good as possible means being a little sloppy, dirty, or “not perfect.” That is perfectly fine if that is how your band should sound in your mind. I am not the first person to say music is subjective, so I will leave you to decide how far you want to mutate your sound in the studio.

In the last couple days I’ve been listening to the audiobook Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin. Throughout the book, Godin describes the passion and risk-taking needed to truly lead your own tribe. The tribe that you have the ability to create is analogous to your fanbase. Think of the droves of people who flocked to Grateful Dead concerts, called “Deadheads”, who kept buying tickets even though the Dead were not Billboard chart-toppers. The Grateful Dead created a tribe out of their fans, that is, a loyal group of people who followed the band throughout their career. The same goes for Slayer, Phish, and the Dave Matthews Band because they created an aura about them where fans felt like they were part of the tribe.

One of the key points that Godin makes in his book is that you don’t need to have thousands or tens of thousands of followers in your tribe. The magic number Godin says is 1,000. Imagine if each one of those 1,000 dedicated people could convince just a few friends to come to your concert or buy your music or merch. Those 1,000 people could make a true difference—admittedly, that many followers is still a big number for new artists. 

Start off small! No one said creating a tribe (or fanbase) would be easy. Create value where there was no value before. Distinguish yourself from the pack by adding things that most people don’t spend the time to release to their potential fans. Here’s a few ideas to get things rolling:

1) Make remixing easy

If you have a song with many different and interesting tracks (whether  with electronic music tracks or conventional instruments), offer the stems for each track in separated files. That way if other artists or music enthusiasts with access to recording software really dig your song, they can play around with each individual track on their computer and maybe even post a remix of your song online. I know I’ve found many good songs after first discovering a memorable remix. You can widen your audience with just a little extra work.

2) What about the gear?

Some gearheads and DJs really like to know how you recorded your music. Depending on the genre of music you produce, there might be many people in your fanbase that are hardcore recording geeks. Let them in on your tools of the trade! It’s not like it’s a secret.

3) The power of art

Many up-and-comers are quick to upload their music online, but often never put in any time thinking how they want to present their music BEFORE a listener actually presses ‘play’. Most people are drawn in by a visual, so if you don’t put a picture on your profile or create some sort of representation of your image as an artist, chances are many potential listeners will ignore your music. If you had the choice between listening to someone’s music who also had an interesting display picture on their profile or to someone with a stock photo or blank image, who would you listen to? Who is probably the more serious artist?

4) An engaging bio

Keep it short and sweet. If it’s not, then at least make it entertaining along the way. Thanks!

With musicians scrambling for new ways to monetize their content, some companies and artists are creating new ways to interact with their fans and make music a viable career. A subscription plan for fans to build relationships with their favorite artists is an interesting concept for future business models in the music industry. As more and more artists decide to go this route, we will see if it becomes an efficient way for artists to make a living.

Last year I came across a website called MyBandStock that promises exclusive access to your favorite artists. Fans become shareholders in the artists of their choosing and are then given perks and preferred access to exclusive media, meet and greets, mobile apps, pre-sale concert tickets, and more. Although they have not yet finished developing the entire site or making deals with some of their first artists, the MyBandStock team have secured an undisclosed amount of funding for their project and opened up a Los Angeles office. One question that comes to mind is whether this is something the fans actually want to participate in.

Touring musician and recording artist Matthew Ebel has already been using the MyBandStock model for quite a while without help from an outside music platform. He successfully manages to keep music as his prime passion and also his full-time job (not a small feat). On his website, fans can pay to get access to a subscription section that offers new live recordings every month, invitations or free tickets to special events, members-only downloads, and a chance to win custom-written songs. There are a variety of pricing options, starting at $5 per month, depending on the level of access you want. If Matthew Ebel can make this model work in combination with other monetization streams, many other artists will follow suit.

Personally I like the idea of a subscription model on band websites. However, I feel that this “new” model for gaining access to artists is just a glorified version of the outdated fan club. Street teams are still a good way to galvanize your fanbase, but fan clubs in the conventional sense have not been popular for a long time. MyBandStock adds game mechanics as a way to spur fan engagement—now that you can own shares in your favorite artists, you have a way to compare yourself to other fans who may or may not have as many shares as you. Those with many shares in an artist can maintain a sense of prestige that goes along with showing your commitment to an artist. Time will tell if the model gains steam or if it remains a niche in the music industry.

With all the music floating around online, it’s hard not to think that much of it all sounds the same. The average hip-hop and pop songs follow the same formulas as the chart-topping hits but sacrifice on catchiness, dance and house music use the same underlying bass beats for every song, and metal bands throw in predictable screams and breakdowns whenever possible. This is a gross generalization, but it holds true for a large percentage of newly released music. How do we change this?

Now that I think of the much-anticipated TRON: LEGACY soundtrack by Daft Punk and their ensuing world tour, I wonder if there would be more good music out there if bands thought of their music as a soundtrack. Many bands, regardless of whether their music is ever used for a film, write concept albums that follow a certain lyrical and musical theme to keep the flow from track to track fluid. If artists focus on the shifting dynamics of scenes in a movie, they might be able to transfer the same emotional impact of a film’s storyline to their music.

Think of your favorite movies and the way the music contributes to the overall cinematic experience. Some of my favorite movies get the music just right—Dazed and Confused, Pulp Fiction, and Run Lola Run each have a soundtrack that makes you feel the right emotions at the right time (suspense, tearfulness, nostalgia, and poignancy are some words that come to mind). Often times when I listen to a particularly powerful song I picture how it would fit into a movie scene. Are the ebbs and troughs perfect for the shifting dynamics of an action or suspense scene? Does the emotion in the vocals mirror the feelings in a climactic scene of a love story? Is the production on this song retro enough for a Tarantino film?

My suggestion to artists, whether as a true way to create music or merely as an experimentation into their own creativity, is to watch a movie and ignore the music that is already in it. Think about how you would make the soundtrack to a horror film, romantic comedy, or action flick. Since dynamics in music play a key role in the emotions we feel while listening to a song, we might find new ideas in how to approach songcraft by taking a nod from our favorites movies.

So you might love the artistic music videos from Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Britney Spears, Madonna, or any of the other artists who can afford to drop more than a dollar or two on their production budget, but you’ve come to realize that you don’t have the time or money to pull off something as elaborate as the superstars. On the other hand, you want something that you consider Youtube-worthy and up to the standards of your personal brand. After all, you still want those hits! Instead of just playing your song to a static image like many artists do on Youtube, try out these simpler music video strategies that might be interesting to your viewers:

1) The Split-Screen

The split-screen video, if done well, can create a seemingly complex video that draws in viewers much faster than a single shot of a band playing their instruments in unison. While it is not as visually stimulating as a high budget music video, the split-screen technique can work well if you have few people that you can use to shoot the video (as with this one-man band). For songs that are more technical, the split-screen is a great way to show off your guitar chops or any of the other many instruments you might be playing in your video.

2) Live Footage

If you have footage of some of your past concerts, you can edit sections from each concert that are from the song you want to make a full music video for. Unlike with live footage, you can maintain the sound quality of your song by just having the concert footage muted and playing the studio track in sync with the live footage. By using footage from a variety of live shows, you can give your viewers a better flavor of what your live show has to offer. When you incorporate more than one show’s footage, you will keep the video interesting because the lighting will probably vary from concert to concert as well as the personality of the audience and your stage performance.

3) If You’re Willing.. Be Outrageous!

If you come up with some outrageous premise for your music video, you can probably get hits just out of the sheer audacity of putting yourself out there and thinking outside the box. Whether this means being a cross-dressing virtuoso bass player or just being yourself, originality (and shock tactics) often work wonders in getting hits for your video. Just remember to stay true to the message of your song and refrain from going too crazy if it doesn’t fit the image of yourself as an artist.

4) Hit an Emotional Nerve

Appeal to more than one emotion and you will draw in more viewers to your video. If I’m scared and curious, then you’ve got me hooked. If the video is tranquil, moving, and sad, I’m probably going to want to listen and watch attentively. A fan-made video of Rusko’s “Cockney Thug” is equally disturbing as it is playful and interesting. Rather than relying on a large production budget, the creator uses his production and editing skills to create a visually provocative work. The more time you invest learning the tricks of video production and editing, the more complex you can get with your lighting and effects. Regardless of the production value of your music video, you don’t want to leave your viewer feeling nothing midway through the video. It’s better for your viewers to love or hate your video than for them to be completely apathetic, so be willing to take chances. You can’t win over everybody, so don’t try.

5) Have Someone Else Do The Work For You

Fans on Youtube often spend a big chunk of their time making remixes of videos or posting their own videos for their favorite artists’ songs. If you have a big enough fanbase, try to run a contest that asks your fans to make your video for you. Choose the best video from all the entries and promote the video all over the web and give credit to the creator. Alternatively, you can dedicate your video to your fans and make a sort of collage of footage that includes your fans in the video itself.

Feel free to post any of your own homemade video techniques in the comments sections below!

Jaxx Nightclub in Springfield, VA is located in the suburbs of Washington D.C. in a non-descript shopping center that is shared by a 7-11, gas station, Afghan Kabob restaurant, and a number of convenient stores. In my teenage years, Jaxx was the club I obsessed over—checking the club website to see if any new shows were posted and to check ticket availability was probably as frequent an occurrence as visiting my Yahoo! homepage. Jaxx was my childhood venue, the CBGBs for my neck of the woods.

As I remember it years ago, Jaxx had a metal detector at the entrance (although almost never in use), a bathroom without a door for the stall, band stickers that littered the walls, and an unforgiving PA system that would challenge your hearing for days if you weren’t smart enough to wear a pair of earplugs. Its shortcomings, however, became its greatest strengths. The fans relished in the character of the venue because it made you feel that much closer to the bands, the music, and the community.

At the more popular shows there would often be a line of 100-200 metalheads waiting for the doors to open in the early evening. The owners of the Afghan Kabob restaurant would ask the eagerly waiting metal junkies to move to the opposite side of the doors so as not to scare off potential customers to their restaurant. I don’t blame them—a couple hundred long-haired dudes wearing Iron Maiden shirts with Eddie the mascot on them probably would strike fear in the average unsuspecting family of four looking to have a nice dinner.

The proximity of the venue to my house at the time made going to Jaxx convenient and was a little easier to swing on a school night then going to a concert in D.C. (which was not even worth a discussion with my parents). I guess there’s something about having a venue in the middle of nowhere that attracts a fair number of consequential hard rock musicians that peaks my interest. 

For music fans who don’t have a club like Jaxx to look back on with nostalgia, then I think they are missing something from their music culture. If you don’t outgrow the venue, move to a different city, or lose your interest in the type of music from your childhood, then your musical inclinations will most likely be intertwined with your favorite local venue. I remember the venue being as integral a part of my concert-going experience as the band itself. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen many bands who I wouldn’t have gone to see otherwise had it not been for the built-in Jaxx “aura”, as grimey and rundown an atmosphere as it was. After moving out of the area for college, I haven’t had the same concert-going experience since.  

1) Fan Testimonials

Testimonials are not exclusively for infomercials and movie reviews—why not get your most loyal fans to write something they like about your music and then show it off on your fan page or website? If your fans show how much they love your music, you don’t have to do it for them. When someone visits your website or fan page, they will be greeted with what OTHERS say about you, rather than the other way around. I would be persuaded by your passionate fans more than your label or yourself showing off why you’re the next big thing.

BE cReaTiVE! Okay, you probably shouldn’t confuse people with weird fonts, misspellings, or other gimmicks, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make more creative testimonials than the typical short written statements of praise. If your fans are willing to put themselves out there for you anyway, maybe they would do it through different forms of media to help attract more attention. When a fan makes a Youtube video passionately discussing your latest concert or CD, get their permission to embed it on your fan page and website. Your loyal fans will be rewarded for helping spread the word by having their video on display and potential new fans will be drawn in by the buzz around you as an artist. Instead of a static page, your showcase will come alive through your fans.

A fan of yours takes a picture of themselves wearing your T-shirt in an exotic location? Post that too! The metal news and blog site MetalSucks happily posts loyal readers showing off Metalsucks schwag in crazy locations all across the globe. Not only does it make the loyal fans feel rewarded, but it acts as social proof to outsiders. The outsider might think, “These people are such big fans, there must be something good going on here. I’m going to check this out.”

2) Limited Time Offer

Time is of the essence! Suddenly there’s a sense of urgency. I might not be able to come back tomorrow and get what is offered today. If I know my time is limited, I will probably work harder to get what it is that will soon disappear. When infomercials claim that they have a limited time offer, most people don’t believe them. They will probably offer the same two for one deal the next day, so the more astute television watchers disregard the exclamations in the commercials altogether. However, many people employ the limited time offer in an effective and believable way. For example, some famous artists offer autographed CDs, but only for people that buy the pre-sale album or come at a certain time for an in-person signing. The fan will know that they have to order the CD before it comes out or show up on a certain day, so they take action. If they know they can get the autographed CD at any point, they can take their time and maybe even lose interest before they ever make the CD purchase at all. Even though you might not have long lines of fans waiting for your autograph at this point, you can still employ the limited time offer technique. Those who join your mailing list may be offered limited time downloads or sale prices on CDs or merch. If the fans know these offers are time-sensitive, joining your mailing list will keep them in the loop so they don’t miss an opportunity for a freebie. Make sure to point all these things out clearly so your fans know that it’s in their best interest to keep in close contact with you rather than returning to your website months later.

3) Exclusive Rewards

Exclusive rewards work in a similar way to what I described in fan testimonials, but it applies more to the loyal fans who follow you consistently than a  random passerby. Exclusive downloads, merch, and concert incentives should be reserved for the biggest fans, those that go out of their way to spread the word about you. If you have a street team, you need to give participants something you give NO ONE else. There needs to be something special about being on your street team and you should reward those who work hard for you by giving them something that you don’t just give away to anyone who’s willing to visit your site or give you a quick listen. Exclusivity and scarcity are highly valued commodities. When your free download or exclusive t-shirt is only available to a select few, it suddenly is perceived as a higher value item and might persuade some people to go the extra mile to join your street team, mailing list, or buy your album directly from your website.

Have any other tips to gain fans or reward the loyal ones? Please share them in the comments.

How can we apply a business strategy to the intra-personal dynamics of a rock band? In Keith McFarland’s book, The Breakthrough Company, McFarland describes a key component in making a company truly extraordinary—the founder(s) need to “crown the company.” Crowning the company means putting the company first, rather than only following the preferences of the founders or whims of the CEO in determining the trajectory of the company’s future. Founders must make choices that benefit the company and not themselves. The same holds true for artists, regardless of who the main songwriter is or who is the frontman of the band.

The main songwriter or vocalist might feel above the rest of the bandmembers simply because he/she appears front and center in concerts, in CD reviews, or in any photograph of the band. If the frontman appears superior in any way, not only will the band resent the frontman for this but also the music will ultimately suffer. Does Axl Rose ring a bell?

Crowning the band, or putting the band first, is not just the job of the frontman. Even backup vocalists, drummers, and bassists have to check their egos at the door and do what is best for the band. Do you think the drummer for AC/DC is not able to play more complicated beats than the simple patterns he plays over and over in almost every song? My bet is that he can, but it does not serve the purpose of the band to add any complex embellishments to the straight-up rock music that makes AC/DC who they are. Even if you have the guitar chops of Yngwie Malmsteen, that does not mean it serves the purpose of the song to break out with 200BPM arpeggios every time it is your turn for a guitar solo. The best songs are made because the interplay between the bandmembers trumps the technicality of each of its individual members. Unless you are in a technical death metal band, save the blast beats for your garage and stick to the vision of your band’s music.

Although DJ’s and electronic artists are often solo acts, it is equally or maybe even more important for solo artists to think less about themselves when it comes to their music. It is even harder for them to debate what music stays and what does not if they are all alone, although this process is somewhat alleviated with the help of an outside producer. Often artists put up a defensive barrier when it comes to those criticizing their music because they are so close to their creations emotionally. If this is not the case, it still might be difficult to get the feedback one craves as an artist. Sometimes artists seek out as much constructive criticism as possible to help hone their craft, but their friends and fans only give them the positive feedback because they do not want to hurt the artist’s feelings. This is why, if it is possible, every solo artist should work with a producer to make an album or at least have a go-to person for candid music advice during the songwriting process and before outsiders hear the music.

If the feedback is coming through comments online, the comments still might not be constructive even though the potential embarrassment of direct physical contact is gone. Many artists want other artists to reciprocate with positive comments so they make sure not to come across as if they didn’t like the other artist’s music. Often times people find it easier just to say, “Your song is SOOO sick brah HOLY sh&t”, than to take the time to give honest advice on how to improve the production values or fine-tune the songwriting. For people who bash other people’s music online, the comments tend to border on trollish rather than helpful. Whether it’s from a producer or your friend, tell people up-front not to spare your feelings and to help you with your music—the music is king, not YOU!

by Jonathan Jaeger

In a DVD for the New Jersey-based metal band God Forbid, lead guitarist and back-up vocalist Doc Coyle made an interesting point about choosing a band name—that is, choose something that the fans can chant back at you when you’re playing live. What can be more exciting than hearing your band’s name being screamed back at you by hundreds or thousands of adoring fans? He points out one example with the chant-worthy band name Pantera. Pan-ter-a! Pan-ter-a! Pan-ter-a! It’s three perfect syllables that any non-rhythmic crowd can chant in unison. The same is true for Doc’s band God Forbid. God For-bid! God For-bid! I know I’ve personally started a God Forbid chant back in my day (okay, I probably still would if the vibe was right). Doc says three syllables works best, but anything in the short and easy pronounceable vicinity of Pan-ter-a and God For-bid and you’re probably good to go.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are bands like Fear Before the March of Flames, I Wrestled A Bear Once, and Between The Buried And Me that go for the longer and arguably more interesting band names. I haven’t been to a couple of those bands’ concerts, but I know Between The Buried and Me are lucky to have a memorable acronym—BTBAM, which is chanted as B-T-BAM in concert. I’m not sure if BTBAM thought that one out in advance or not, but it definitely helps in a live setting when the crowd is getting riled up.

You want your band (or artist) name to be something catchy, memorable, and maybe even fun if it’s suit’s your band’s style. I’m sure The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza get as much press because of their name as they do on account of their actual music. In fact, Tony Danza actually brought up the extreme metal band in a quick segment on his now defunct morning TV show (watch the clip here). If you’re going to go wild with your name, you have to be prepared for the fact you might not be taken seriously. Don’t take picking a name lightly! A party band can have a tongue-in-cheek name that borders on childish, but a serious band should have a serious name.  Who knows, you might become famous one day and you’ll be stuck with that name forever.

Is “The Beatles” that impressive a name? The band is pretty much the biggest band ever, but the play on words with the bug that shares the same name is probably only great because they were the biggest act in town. Many of the most famous rock acts also have the coolest names: Queen, Def Leppard, Rolling Stones, Motley Crue, and AC/DC to name a few. Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that the best bands have the best names. Somehow I doubt it, but it’s still important nonetheless. It might seem as if all the good names are taken, but that doesn’t mean you should have seven symbols and four consonants in a row in your name just because you can. No one will even think twice to remember that. Let it flow.

With online music streaming and distribution, your name is also important in a digital context. Not only do you want your name to look good on a t-shirt, but you also want your band’s website and social network URLs to be easy to remember and spell. Unfortunately with social networks, it is usually first-come-first-serve for URLs. If your band name is a very common term, there is a good chance your desired URL is already taken on the larger networks. Once you come up with a name for yourself or your band, try to join the land grab and scoop up all the usernames you can get on sites that you might use (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.). Go to some of the lesser-known sites and register for those just in case those become more important for you or your band later on down the road. If you haven’t selected your band name yet, it might even be in your best interest to do a quick domain search to see if the band names that you’re thinking about are available on GoDaddy or another domain registrar.

Choosing a band name that is both memorable and that fits your style is a big piece of the puzzle towards gaining marketability. The music shouldn’t be secondary, but no one says you can’t always get everything you want. Well actually somebody did. 

by Jonathan Jaeger

1) The Record Deal

Many unsigned artists still think the holy grail in the music industry is securing that big record deal. Sorry to inform you, but that ship has sailed. Record labels are scrambling to make ends meet, which means if you don’t watch your back, you’ll probably get the short end of the stick (a stick that’s much shorter than it ever was before). When artists do get a record deal, the record labels pay for many of the up-front costs of creating and marketing an album. They end up recouping this money from album sales and other revenue streams where artists hope to profit. Unfortunately, contracts are often setup so you are consistently in debt to the record label, so it’s a never-ending loop where you almost never see a sizeable return. Many mid-level bands are now trying to make due with their own connections in the music industry by doing all the album release work themselves, while still getting some extra help on the distribution side of the business. Some bands like Radiohead are willing to give their music away free, letting fans decide how much they want to pay for their album. Solid record deals are hard to come by, so unless you’re a big-name artist with a lot of leverage, make sure you read the fine print before signing.. Alternatively, don’t sign anything at all.

2) Music sales are down, but touring will pay the bills

To be honest, I actually thought many artists tour so much because they want to make some sort of a living from music. Although there are some artists who make a decent living on the road, many smaller bands struggle to pay the gas bills and the other expenses of the road (click here for a point-by-point breakdown of one band’s touring profits). After splitting merch sales with the venues and record label and living off a small food budget, it’s tough to make a profit on the road. Obviously there are many factors that go into this calculation, including the size of the venue you’re playing and how many people actually show up to the concert, the number of bands on the bill, the price of the merch you’re selling, gas prices, etc. It’s not all bad—for some bands touring is a way of life and they find a way to make things work out. If you’re on tour for most of the year and you don’t have an apartment you’re paying rent for all year long, then touring might mean more profits for you in the end. Make the necessary calculations based around your particular circumstances and try making it work if touring full-time is a goal of yours.

3) Online is the most important place to be

A huge online presence is mandatory for success these days, but sometimes you’re online activity may overshadow the time you spend marketing yourself in the physical world. For many smaller artists, building a strong local following is the most important aspect of beginning success. Just like many businesses start in one city and then branch out (think Yelp, Foursquare), the same is true for artists. You build a following in one place and then use your online activity and a spot on a larger bill to start gaining fans nationally (and then at some point you hopefully go international).

4) If you’re good, they will come to you

If you’re REALLY good, fans will flock to you—even then, it’s no guarantee and probably a long shot at best. The reason we find new and good music every day is that there’s too much stuff out there to discover everything at once. You have to make yourself heard both online and off. Find some of your most passionate fans in cities that you want to tour in and create street teams that will promote your shows and music in exchange for some perks (exclusives, free CDs and merch, etc.). Either all the big names out there in all genres grind it out for years to make a name for themselves or they have some sort of huge marketing force behind them—either way somebody’s putting in the work.

5) Your demo will get you the exposure to record a bigger album

It takes a one-of-a-kind ear to spot gold in a rough demo of a song. If you listen to some of the original songwriter compositions and productions for songs from Madonna and Michael Jackson, you’ll realize it takes a lot of polish to make a hit. Do-it-yourself recording setups are getting better, but an experienced producer in your local area can really help separate you from the rest of the crowd. This advice pertains more towards the rock and pop genres than your average electronic DJ whose main focus is the way they can manipulate sounds on their DAW. For full bands, microphone placement and selection, instrument setup, and the acoustic properties of your recording environment are integral parts of your sound. If you can afford an above average recording experience, the benefits might outweigh the short-term monetary costs. Just make sure everything is within your budget and makes sense for the resources you allocated for your band.

Mailchimp: The web’s most popular email-marketing service allows you to manage your email campaigns and lists. This service is perfect for an artist racking up a long email list at the merch booth during live shows. Mailchimp allows you to build and manage your email lists as well as design HTML email campaigns. They also have a nice variety of ready-made templates for you to work with if you don’t want to go too far into the coding aspect of your layout and design. You can store up to 500 subscribers and send up to 3,000 emails a month for free. If you want to grow your email list out further, there is a tiered pricing system for premium accounts.

Animoto: Sick of making Youtube videos with one static image or a blank screen with a song title pasted on it? Animoto helps you create a video by combining images, video clips, and your music into a seamless work. If you want to get your music online without spending time on making a full video production or you don’t have the resources to make a high quality video, then Animoto might be the right choice. The one catch is that free videos have a maximum length of 30 seconds and don’t provide downloads. You can create a single video for $3 or buy a year subscription to the service for $30. Pro accounts are $249, which might suit record labels or music promoters in need of more robust features.

Hootsuite: Dubbed as “The Professional Twitter Client,” Hootsuite manages all your social networks through one client. The application contains a multi-stream view so you can manage all your artist accounts, like Myspace and Twitter accounts, with one log-in and within the same application. You can schedule your tweets, manage your followers, customize different streams of updates, and track statistics based on the activity on your networks.

Ping.fm: This free social networking and micro-blogging service allows you to post to all your favorite sites with one status update. Instead of logging on to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Delicious, Ning, AIM, Google Buzz, or any of the other social networks you use, you can update them all at once. This is a great service, especially if you’re on-the-go and want to send out a quick message or post via your mobile device.

Posterous: Don’t have an artist website yet? A social networking presence is important, but there is no room for your longer posts on many of the social networks out there, so you might want to create your band’s blog on Posterous. Posterous allows you to post to the web via email or the Posterous website and auto-post to other sites you want to syndicate to. If you own your own domain name, Posterous will host it for free so you can have a more professional website name attached to your blog. Posterous allows you to add separate pages to your blog, attaches a comment section to each blog post, and helps you integrate Facebook and Twitter log-in for your fans to comment on your page. You can also take advantage of the analytics that Posterous provides with your profile.

Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow, is based off the premise that the way to succeed is to stand out. If you saw a purple cow on the side of the road, you’d probably do a double-take. That’s what you want people to do when they see your music videos or hear your music! You’re music needs to be good no matter what, but it helps to go the extra mile to stand out and be seen in any way possible (short of breaking the law). Lady Gaga didn’t get where she is just because her songs are catchy. She also has music videos that stand out in the same way Madonna did in the eighties. She has that unique persona that puts the media in a frenzy, who drool over the next headline featuring the iconoclastic figure.

What could be YOUR purple cow?:

1) Personalized Song

Let’s say you’ve built up your fanbase to the point where you don’t remember all your diehard fans’ names, you have a growing email list, and long lines outside your concerts. What would make your fans feel closer to you? Meet-and-greets have long lines and often offer little time to actually chat and interact with the artist. VIP tickets and backstage passes seem like normal fare to gain access to artists these days, but they often cost some extra cash in addition to the normal concert ticket price. What if the artist created a contest offering one lucky fan a personalized song? The fan with the best fan-made video post would win a personalized song based on the theme of their choice and the song would be dedicated to them. Only one fan would ultimately win the contest, but if fans participate, it would create extra buzz around the artist for the duration of the contest. Once the song is made, one superfan would have a special memento from one of their favorite artists and the rest of the artist’s fanbase would know how much the artist cares about the fans.

I started writing this blog yesterday, not knowing that an Old Spice campaign was starting on Twitter (@OldSpice). Old Spice was a promoted trend on Twitter and the guy from the commercial started posting personalized videos on the Old Spice Youtube channel in response to what many Twitter users and bloggers were writing about him and the commercial. Kevin Rose of Digg and Ashton Kutcher both were surprised and delighted to get personalized responses from the Old Spice man. The personalized ads were not only created for celebrities but also regular folks. One guy even proposed through the man in the Old Spice commercial (supposedly the woman said ‘yes’). This is marketing at its best because everyone is in on the fun. In music, artists are responsible to make their fans feel closer to them, which is way easier to do than it is when brands try to do it through commercials. If Old Spice can do it, you should too!

2) Music Video

A unique music video and something that has viral potential can be a catalyst for recognition, especially if you’re seeking some momentum outside of your core music community and fanbase. Remember that Ok Go music video with the guys on the treadmills doing a choreographed dance? That music video got millions of hits, mostly from people who never heard the band’s other songs. I don’t have all the stats, but you can assume they got a certain percentage of the Youtube audience to click on the videos for their other songs and then converted a certain percentage of that crowd into true fans. While you should be concentrating on songwriting and production for your music, don’t underestimate the visual aspect of your portfolio. Visuals are important to make a live show experience, so why not put the same emphasis on video and images online?

3) Get eclectic! Get Weird! Mix it up!

Every artist has, or should have, a signature sound that their fanbase recognizes and loves. Even if you are a new artist who hasn’t been in the game too long, you are probably beginning to hone your craft and find your own voice. Once you’ve found yourself in a comfort zone with people who like your particularly sound, you should add a little variety. If you can create just one track that deviates from your normal sound and mixes genres and styles in a way that stands out from the other artists in your genre and community, you will develop interest from people you never knew you were targeting. If you’re a band like Slayer, you’re known for staying true to your style and playing the same lightening speed thrash metal over and over for decades. That might be Slayer’s cup of tea, but unless you have a diehard fanbase like Slayer who chants your name at every concert, then a little variety won’t hurt. “Slayer” is the metal community’s equivalent of screaming “Freebird”. There aren’t many artists who get rewarded for being the same for 20+ years, so don’t pigeonhole yourself into one specific sound. 

Run DMC broke into the mainstream after their collaboration with Aerosmith on “Walk This Way”. They were able to incorporate their hip-hop sound with rock n’ roll. These days mashups are the norm, so sticking out in that scene might be more difficult. What you can do is create an original production that uses many different styles to create something that sounds entirely new and not forced. Some mashups are very interesting and some just seem like someone is trying too hard. If you create something entirely new, your creativity will not seem forced.

4) ??? 

What’s your purple cow idea? Put them down in the comments if you’ve got one.

First thing’s first.. is it raining outside? 

You tell me I am sat at my computer all the time

Now that we got the obligatory small talk out of the way, tell the HypedSound community a little about yourself and how you got started in music.

I am 24 year old Englishman who lives in a tiny village called Cheddar about 20 miles from Bristol. I have been into music all my life and my dad has been a major influence in the music I listen too as I have been brought up listening to all genres of music. I started music when I was 14 till about 18 and stopped as there was no one to show it too, didn’t have the internet and my computer was shit. Started again in November last year because I heard an old CD of some of my tunes and was gutted that I stopped. Bought a new laptop and got cracking again so here we are.

Describe your music and style in three words or less (and since it’s dubstep, refrain from using the term “wobble” if you can manage).

Dark - Beat Driven - Melodic

Did living near Bristol help inspire your music and your interest in dubstep or was the online community your biggest influence?

I don’t think Bristol helped inspire me to produce dubstep at all really, its wicked to go out in Bristol but I listen to all music and actually started making Electro as my first choice as I love that shit and still do. My mate and artist MUZZER was well into dubstep and so was I but never made it. Gave it ago and had so much fun I continued to produce it and I am loving every minute of it stillJ

Do you have a personal favorite track of yours?

Yep

Do you have any larger projects in the works or do you plan to release songs as you make them on a track-by-track basis?

I am working on my biggest breakthrough yet but I cant say too much about it but it will be out and up sooner than you think:) I am also working with a sick female vocalist called Lauren Neko on a tune which I have already completed so that will be on a future release at some point.

Who are your favorite artists out now, dubstep or not?

Oliver Huntemann, Nero, Bar9, Stephan Bodzin, early Bad Company when Fresh was part of the team, Fresh, Popof, Parov Stelar, Dunkelbunt I could go on forever.

This one’s for the techies and gearheads. What’s your setup for recording? All computer-based? Do you have any favorite programs or software plug-ins?

I use VST’s like Massive/FM8/Albino/Blue and search for unheard of sample packs.

Other than on your HypedSound profile, where else can people follow you?

http://www.soundcloud.com/cottonmouthedge

http://www.reverbnation.com/cottonmouthdub

http://www.youtube.com/user/cottonmouthedge 
http://www.myspace.com/oliveredgecottonmouth 
http://www.facebook.com/pages/COTTONMOUTH/101726273197758 
http://twitter.com/cottonmouthDub 
http://www.permanentdamagerecords.com

Five quick questions to end this, first thing that comes to your mind… GO!

1) Auto-tune. Yay or nay?

What?

2) Small club show or huge festival?

Small club show

3) Celebrity you want to meet most?

Donny Yen so I can challenge him

4) Celebrity you want to strangle most?

Elijah woods

5) If you could play a show in any country, where would you play?

US baby

There are a variety of ways you can record an album these days, which include recording it for free in software like Audacity and Garageband or dropping the big money to record in a well-equipped studio. No single way is ideal, but they each have their advantages and disadvantages in terms of price, quality, and convenience. Computer-based music has improved to the point where composing high quality electronic music is as simple as owning the right software and plug-ins. Recording a full-on rock album with the right microphone choices, recording environment, and back-up string section on those monstrous choruses will probably take more resources to do the job right. In the last couple of years, many artists have been moving online to help make recording a professional-quality album possible. Thankfully for those cash-strapped artists without a major-label backing, there are a host of “crowdfunding” websites out there to get the word out and help you fund your goal (with few strings attached). Here are a few of the more well-known sites to fund your next album:

Sellaband: Sellaband is designed to help musicians fund a professional album with donations from fans dubbed “believers”. In early 2010 Sellaband declared bankruptcy, although they’ve since been taken over and are now back in full force. Originally, Sellaband helped artists reach a $50,000 goal to record their album. Now Sellaband has a more flexible structure where artists can choose a much lower budget for their album to reach their goal quicker (the range is anywhere from $5,000-$250,000). Once an artist reaches their goal funding stops and believers are locked-in to their donation amounts. Artists don’t set a specific deadline so you can work a long time to reach your goal (as you can see with Public Enemy, who actually lowered their original funding goal from $250,000 to $75,000). In exchange for donating a certain amount of money in fixed parts, believers get rewarded with exclusive releases, goodies, or even a cut of the artist’s revenues. Sellaband also has a host of social features, including an activity stream, commenting, and music players integrated into the artist pages. Sellaband takes a 15% fee from the budget, although they help out on the finances, execution, and administration of the project.

Kickstarter: Kickstarter is an online funding platform for creative projects. Although Kickstarter doesn’t only include artists looking to record an album, they get more traffic than the niche music funding sites and cater to a similar demographic of artistic-minded folks. If you’re looking for a place to fund your next album, it is set-up differently than Sellaband. Jenny Owen Young created a Kickstarter project to fund her “shiny new album,” surpassing her goal of $20,000 with more than a month left before her funding deadline and well over 300 people donating to the project. Unlike Sellaband artists, on Kickstarter you can keep raising money until your deadline even if you already reached your goal (see this record-setting project: Diaspora). If you’re project gets a lot of attention, you have the ability to raise a lot more than you originally intended. If you don’t reach your funding goal by the deadline, all the backers keep their pledged donations and the project isn’t funded at all. If the project reaches its goal, the project creator offers a variety of rewards based on the amount of money you donated to the project. Kickstarter takes a 5% cut from the money raised if you reach your goal.

Slicethepie: Slicethepie takes a similar path to funding artists as Sellaband but provides a more all-encompassing funding experience. Not only can you donate music to help fund an artist’s recording project, but you can also rate music, trade contracts with other users, and follow Slicethepie’s market data. Instead of “believers” or “backers”, people who donate to artists are called “investors” and promised a certain return per 1000 albums sold if a record is made. While this strategy seems enticing from a gaming or gambling perspective, it seems like artists who use the site won’t be on track to sell millions of records and provide any sort of serious return for their investors. Nonetheless, if you are looking to fund your album and take part in a community that involves more crowd participation, Slicethepie might be a better choice. Slicethepie takes a 25% royalty for a two-year period for every track sold, although they use some of this money to pay back users who invested in the artists. They also take a commission from Contracts traded on the Exchange as well as 10% from any artists who reaches their $15,000£ goal in the Showcases section.

I’m not sure what the point of “Social Media Day” is exactly. Do we need a specific day to honor something we do and talk about on a daily basis? In the U.S., holidays like Memorial Day and Veterans Day are there to commemorate the past and the contributions people made for our country (or more cynically, a reason to take off from school or work and take advantage of retail sales). But to get back on topic, regardless of the significance of Social Media Day, what we do know is that social media is a relatively new and important phenomenon. Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable says that Social Media Day is, “A day that honors the technological and societal advancements that have allowed us to have a dialogue, to connect and to engage not only the creators of media, but perhaps more importantly, one another.” Put that way, it’s hard to argue with him. While people can argue the pros and cons of using social media, let’s just assume as professional musicians and amateurs we are all in the same boat and are big supporters of using social media tools to reach our fan base. Rather than discussing the fact that we have to use social media, what are some of the other things we should consider as we make social media decisions on a day-to-day basis?

Voyno of NewRockstarPhilosophy asks whether social media is killing your band. The point that Voyno makes is that before using social media, as an artist you should know how you want to promote yourself using these tools. For example, Voyno mentions that part of David Bowie’s persona is his more elusive and mysterious character—had he been in his prime during the social media boom, either he would have treated his public persona differently or his social media presence would have been a little more cryptic than the norm. How are you going to approach your personal and artistic brand? Some tend to overshare on services such as Twitter and Facebook. With the constant stream and updates going on, sometimes high profile artists might get a little overzealous and reveal things they should not reveal. With video, celebrities might take things to a whole new level (think Tila Tequila stripping on Ustream or Stephon Marbury explaining the virtues of eating Vaseline). Although you might not be a celebrity yet, as an up-and-coming artist, you should think about how you want to approach real-time chat and video because the way you approach things now will set the groundwork for your career years down the road. As much as it probably pains you to read about Justin Bieber, he and his management team seem to understand social media. He actually personally responds to many of his Twitter followers (despite the large amount of noise that appears in his @ inbox per minute). In my opinion, you should follow the 50/50 rule: your Twitter stream should be 50% personal and 50% business. This combination of business and personal will keep you sounding professional and on point while still appearing human. Also, fans get bored just hearing updates about your next tour or when you’re going to drop your next single. Dry facts make for a boring update, so there’s no reason why you can’t write about your day-to-day activities and musings to spice up the more routine business updates.

If you have a large following of fans all over the world, you may want to send out the same tweet or variations of a certain tweet at different times of the day. Some people follow a lot of other people and will only see your specific tweet if you send it out at the exact time they’re on Twitter. If you want to update your fans that you just released your album, sending out a tweet for different time zones can help to reach your followers around the world who are awake when you’re asleep (click for tweet scheduling services). Be careful about tweeting the same thing too many times because some of your followers may get irritated by constantly getting the same information from you if they do read their entire Twitter stream, so be selective about using this method of tweeting. If you think it can be useful for particularly important tweets, just tweet those important things more than once and at different times of the day. Tweeting the same thing in rapid succession is a definite social media faux pas, so never do that unless it serves some real comedic value.

Now that social media appears to be here to stay instead of a passing fad of the 2000’s, the question surrounding social media should change from “should I?” to “how should I?” Social media etiquette will probably become a hot button issue surrounding newcomers to social media who don’t quite “get it” yet. Your fans will more likely respond to you if you truly care about them. Engaging them in a way that is conversational and fun is obviously better than being distant and cold. So don’t bombard your fans and followers with mundane updates constantly linking to the same music page or website, but strike a balance between personal and professional that will keep them coming back for more.

Before you hit Lady Gaga-, Aerosmith-, or Tiesto-status, you might stumble upon many different opportunities to showcase your talents for the rest of the world with a less than optimal monetary return—you’ll be asked to play for free. Many jump at this chance. I’d be thrilled that someone even thought of me and wanted me to play for free! This strategy can serve a genuine purpose if you’re just trying to play a house party with your close friends and want to have a good time or you get the chance of a lifetime to open for your favorite band in front of their fans (who hopefully will love your music as well). With so many artists out there, exposure is key so you think playing for free is part of the game. Many scenarios seem like a genuine opportunity, and some are, but they all come at some cost (literally).

You have to ask yourself what is the opportunity cost of playing this unpaid gig. If I play this gig and don’t get paid, I could have been playing this other gig and making X amount of money at another less-than-exciting venue. I could play this gig over here for free (losing money on gas and other incidental costs), but I will be gaining some much-needed exposure because the headliner caters to the same crowd that I’m targeting. David J. Hahn defines the exposure dichotomy well in his article “When to take an Unpaid Gig” (http://bit.ly/amw7Lh), describing key ways to evaluate a gig’s worth. He explains that there are two different kinds of exposure: general exposure and specific exposure. General exposure refers to playing in front of a group of people who might or might not care about your music, and the music might even be secondary to their experience (e.g. a random slot at an open mic night or playing at a bar on a Friday). At the open mic night, chances are the only people who really care about what you’re playing are the people you came with (friends and family). At the bar, most are looking to have a few drinks and maybe try out a pickup line or two on the lonely damsel in the corner. Yes you might get lucky and some people will really dig your music, but there’s no way to know for sure before going into the situation. Specific exposure refers to a gig where you’re playing in front of your target audience who are concentrating on your every pickstroke and lyric (or at least equally enthralled by your groove no matter how distorted or muddy). Strategically speaking, a band who gets the opening slot for a national act within the same genre is doing a service to themselves by playing for free because of the potential for picking up many new fans. You could even use the gig for merch and CD sales or rack up the number of fans on your mailing list.

The best advice for these two scenarios is this: play unpaid gigs of general exposure very rarely, if at all. Play unpaid gigs of specific exposure at certain points, but don’t make it the norm. If you’re a jazz guitarist playing at a nice restaurant, you really shouldn’t be playing for free because once word gets out that you play for free in one place, everyone will want you to play for free. It will turn into a cycle that will get harder and harder to dig yourself out of because you’re already used to saying “yes” to free. A good rule of thumb would be to offer discounts to first-time or loyal customers. If you want to play a bar or restaurant and have a short resume, offer to play at a discount at the beginning until you establish a relationship with the venue. You can then get a recommendation to play at other places. You can take a different route by offering to play five gigs a month, with the last one being free. If you can establish a good relationship with whatever venue you’re trying to play, you can start to get repeat gigs or branch out to other places. I remember playing a local show at my favorite metal club back in high school. We were supposed to sell tickets for the show ourselves. We did well for the club and then later were able to snab an opening slot for a national act! I was ecstatic! Unfortunately our lead singer messed up his end of the ticket sales and lost me money, but that’s beside the point. In conclusion, I’m not against unpaid gigs at all. In some cases, they are extremely tempting, so it’s important to know your goals and how you want to approach your career before you take an unpaid gig. In fact, many national touring acts pay big bucks to get a slot on festival tours because they want the publicity involved in getting in front of thousands of people every day. On a smaller scale, you should be doing the same. You probably should never pay to get a gig unless it makes financial sense in the long-term. If you’re smart about your unpaid gigs, they should eventually lead to paying gigs.

Building your brand can be hard, especially if you aren’t well versed in the marketing world. Tack on lack of budget and well you might just have a problem here. I want to draw your attention to the music industry in particular, and how well known artists and indie artists are catapulting their brands (yes…an individual can be a brand) to new heights using social media.

Changing Relationships

Before the advent of social media, music artists were able to connect with their fans through a very limited number of avenues: straight through their music, when performing at small venues, interviews/press releases, backstage, at fan meet and greets, etc. Today, however, they can be reached easily and develop a 1-on-1 relationship with their fans. Whether it’s an artist like @IamDiddy on Twitter replying to their followers, music artists chatting it up with fans on Facebook, or making video messages to their YouTube subscribers, artists of all genres are building different relationships with fans like never before. So, as an artist what can you do?

Using Social Media: 3 Tips for Music Artists

There are so many sites out there, so it’s suggested that you figure out which sites you want to focus on. Where are your future fans at? Take into account your genre to determine the demographics of your current and future fans, and go from there. Maybe you know a large number of your fans are on Twitter, some are on Facebook, and others are on YouTube. Then put your focus there, but also look for niche sites as well. It’s important to take into consideration the money aspect as well. While many artists are content with putting all their music on MySpace for their fans to hear for free….it won’t necessarily translate into dollars and cents. That’s why sites like CDBaby, iTunes, as well as some music streaming sites are important to have a presence on, integrated in with your social media efforts.

Develop a proper messaging strategy that doesn’t isolate. Don’t just talk at, but talk with. Listening is a large part of social media, and to be successful you have to understand that it’s not all about you. Reply to your fans directly, answer questions when you have the time, be genuine, respond in a timely manner, and find a way to connect on a deeper level with your fans.

If you have your own website, great, if not….get one and start blogging. Having a hub for your fans to go to is important. You can make that hub your social media accounts, but remember: those are public spaces, and aren’t guaranteed to be permanent. Your own website you have control over, and can utilize/manage e-mail subscriptions, build up a fan base list, and send out e-mail blasts as part of your marketing strategy. Also, fans can add user generated content (i.e.: comments) which you can respond to and use to build relationships.

Do you use social media for music promotion? How has it been successful for you?

About the Author:

@Cliquekaila is a social media marketer and very active on Twitter and Facebook. She represents brands to help with their social media marketing

I love discovering new genres of music that I haven’t really listened to too much yet, so even if some of the music in that genre is repetitive it still sounds new and exciting. What happens if everyone else is in on this same music discovery? Do we get rapid innovation by artists as the style changes or do we get a flood of artists all playing pretty much the same thing? Most music genres are not exempt from this problem. Sometimes too many people get driven to a particular style, more and more bands mimic the innovators of that style, and suddenly there are too many subpar and generic rip-offs of your favorite artists that lead to the whole genre becoming outdated. If it doesn’t become outdated, then it is mocked until one day the music passes for the fad of a previous generation. Everybody remembers what 80’s hair metal was like and how 90’s grunge rebelled against the excess of the preceding generation. I was either not alive or not old enough to enjoy both those music generations, but I think I’ve watched enough VH1 nostalgia shows to get the gist. In the post-boy band era that we are in right now, we might not have the same mainstream music fads, but music genres are still not immune to the bandwagon effect. Now with the presence of online forums and blog commenting, we get an “elite” group of music enthusiasts who are ready to pounce on any new artists within a genre that’s becoming stale and overdone. Even if in the minority, those who criticize the overhyped and overextended artists of the genres they care about foresee the same demise of a music generation that happened in the 80’s and 90’s. Every good thing must come to an end.

Two of my favorite genres have recently been struck by the bandwagon effect: metal and dubstep. Over the past decade, the New Wave of American Heavy Metal (NWOAHM), pioneered by such groove metal and hardcore acts as Pantera and Biohazard in the 90’s, welcomed my generation’s new heavy metal titans—including Killswitch Engage, Lamb of God, and Unearth among others. The mix of metal and hardcore (dubbed metalcore) brought on many imitation acts that decided to copy the style of the increasingly mainstream metal acts. What became of this: the breakdown. The breakdown is defined in one post on UrbanDictionary as, “A style of guitar riff used in Hardcore (punk) music that consists of a single note being chugged slowly for maximum heaviness and brutality.” The breakdown quickly became the cliché of many of the new metal and hardcore acts, resulting in a backlash by metal fans tired of the same old chugga-chugga guitar riffs used as an excuse to start a mosh pit. These fans wanted something they liked to listen to at home too without getting bored! Of course the naysayers are usually the most vocal bunch of the metalheads, so it’s possible that the mainstream metal fans still love the breakdown as much as I do. Either way, when something in music becomes overused to the point of mediocrity (and boredom), I tend to only enjoy it when the music is done well or the clichéd aspects of it are at least done in a tasteful and artistic way. I still swear by the breakdowns in many of my favorite metal acts when they’re actually delivering the goods (reference to old school Judas Priest song intended).

The “wobble” bass sound used in a lot of the dubstep music these days is falling victim to the same overuse and scrutiny as metalcore’s breakdown, although the dubstep scene has not been as saturated as the metal scene since the genre itself has only been around for a little over a decade. The wobble sound, which actually sounds a lot like “womp womp womp wa-womp” (try saying it out loud), was only popularized in the last few years by such dubstep artists as Benga, Skream, and Rusko, with heavy play in the U.K. underground electronica scene. The movement has reached the States, and now everyone and their brother (and sister) are remixing the latest pop or electronic track to make it sound dubstep-y. To be honest, I can’t get enough of it, but really it comes down to being tasteful. This is a lesson for artists who are not currently part of a popular music movement. If you cling to something good, something that’s gaining rapid popularity, there’s a good chance it actually is as good as everyone thinks it is. But maybe it’s too good! Something as wicked as the wobble might get played out to the point that we all become tired, jaded, cynical versions of our past selves. Ok.. that might be a stretch for some, but it is a warning that we should only pepper in the greatest sounds and effects in our music rather than pouring on the whole bottle of ketchup. Don’t let the lid fall off. Moderation in music is the key to perfection. I just hope my favorite genres are not ruined by their excesses.

These are not the best metal and hardcore breakdowns, but it gives you a good idea about the transition from fast guitar riff to slow chugga-chugga riffs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL7MKCAkryY&feature=related

The dubstep wobble starts early in this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvHsQtTjJZw

by Jonathan Jaeger

Due to the proliferation of digital and web technologies in the music realm, there seems to be a convergence of issues surrounding the “pureness” of music and whether we are losing the aesthetic that once made music so special (i.e. if it’s any less special than it ever was).  Digital recording software like Pro Tools, and even the ubiquitous Garageband, allows users to quickly edit their music to mask imperfections, pitch-correct their voices, and make rhythmic patterns so perfect that they reach the point of being completely robotic. Some technologies, like UJAM, the recent runner-up in the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City, allows users to sing or play a musical part into a mic and turn it into a song with a complete band in whatever style they choose. The software detects the key and plays matching chords along with your recorded music part. Not only does the software lower the bar for music production, but it also blurs the line between what is original and what is a pre-defined algorithm for music creation. The definition of music itself is murkier now. Mash-ups, whether a fad or not, have altered the way we view music in the “Youtube Generation” (Generation X à Generation Yà Generation Youtube?). Regardless of the definition of the mash-up and its origins, we know that DJs have been sampling long before Youtube, mixing classics with new electro beats and redefining mainstream music for the foreseeable future. This too puts the “pureness” of music into question, for better or worse. To top it all off, the compression of purely analog sounds created by instruments and voice is compressed into a digital format that we play on our computers, iPods, or god forbid on our CD players. In addition to the technologies that make it easier to record music, the pureness of our music is further compromised by the limitations of the sonic spectrum inherent in digital music. Both the creation and final result of that creation are altered by digital technology.

Have we lost the pureness of music? The electric sounds of Jimi Hendrix and the tonal qualities of a Miles Davis solo will never be captured in the same way again. We can still throw on an old record, but it’s not the norm and, for most, it’s not the way people live their musical lives. But whose to say that music is no longer pure? Everything is derivative. Mash-ups are the definition of derivative, but classic rock is a more subtle derivation and combination of blues and country. The actual soundwave is a different story, though. Digital technology limits the sonic spectrum because it approximates the shape of an analog signal and is therefore not a derivative with a life of its own—it is a limited version of a pure analog sound. But who REALLY cares that much? Teenagers certainly will take the convenience of an iPod over carrying around a clunky record player and an adult’s hearing drops off quickly (they too are going to lose any semblance of a fuller spectrum of frequencies).

Despite the semblance of pureness that still remains in the music of the past, we should also recognize transformational shifts in media that make improving digital technologies for music a necessity. New media is now multimedia. Having a great song is not the only piece of the pie anymore, it’s just the icing on the cake. A visually stunning or satirically entertaining video to match your song is equally important nowadays (in the Youtube Generation). Not everyone can simultaneously produce a top-notch video as well as a hit song. If you can leverage digital technologies that make it easier for you to make a somewhat professional quality song and video, you have a lot better chance at catching those eyeballs on the Interwebs. If I can use software like UJAM’s to correct my voice and add a complete rock band behind it, and then use iMovie to create an amateur yet engaging video, why should I be deprived of such ease and convenience? If it sucks, the better mash-up artists, DJs, and real rock groups will still trump me. If I create something entertaining, maybe I’ll get those Youtube hits, but I’m still not replacing the true artist who creates completely original content. The kind of artists we all go to see in concert. The kind of people we feel somewhat removed from due to their “celebrity”. The paparazzi are not sitting outside of the house of the creator of LOLcats or any other video emerging from an Internet meme. I still think we have real artists making pure music, but lines are being crossed and some are jumping over them and reaching the other side. Now it’s just possible for anyone with some creativity and some virality to make it happen.

Note: UJAM is currently COMING SOON.

I was buying CDs in the store for years before we entered the digital age of music distribution. I might be a dinosaur though because I still, on occasion, visit the store to purchase a full-length CD (usually the ones that I want to listen to all the way through). The satisfaction of struggling to peel back that horrible tape from the CD’s case is priceless.. followed by the satisfaction of plopping that same CD into my computer to rip onto iTunes and then conveniently place on my iPod for consumption. I rarely go back to consult the CD’s liner notes or artwork, so why I even bother with this whole buying-it-in-the-store charade, I am not sure. Maybe it’s for the occasional bonus DVD that record labels use to try to lure fans into buying the real thing—in all honesty it’s probably more an act of nostalgia than anything (young people can have nostalgia too, right?). Rather than extrapolate as to why I do what I do, I’d rather investigate a more interesting question: has music discovery changed for me now that I live in a mostly online music world? Are my motivations for listening to a particular artist radically different than they were when I found new music in the past?

Music discovery is different depending on a person’s favorite styles and how easy it is to find music that is relevant to them, whether it’s in the store or online. In the past, most retailers limited their selection to the “hits”, leaving the average music consumer with a fairly limited selection of what society deemed good music (i.e. what is popular or what record labels thought should be popular and available for the mainstream). However, before online distribution, there still were ways to discover new and exotic forms of music. The more adventurous type would go explore their favorite independent record store or even a second-hand music shop. Nowadays, instead of going to Walmart or browsing the top songs on iTunes, we might leave the mainstream by creating a specialized online radio station catered to our tastes or read the blog on our favorite niche music site for the latest obscure (insert name of new underground music genre) band. The average person might still be confined to the hits, although maybe with some occasional exploration away from popular music if they happen to stumble across something new on their social networks or Youtube. I’m not quite sure whether the way I discover music is different as a consequence of the ease of finding new music online, or because my musical tastes have diverged to the point where I need more than one mechanism to discover new music.

I still find myself looking for recommendations from friends for music or searching for artists I already know about. Whether I find out what my friends are listening to via social networks or by talking to them in person, the source of the recommendation is essentially the same. What has changed is that sometimes I try to fill the void in my music catalog by referring to online recommendation engines. Music recommendation has now transferred from human to algorithm. It’s a pretty powerful concept that we now delegate music discovery to the various filters of the algorithms we employ. The Genius Bar on iTunes or sites like mufin.com provide possible solutions to the music discovery problem, but they are imperfect in realizing the actual essence of a song that makes me return to listen to it frequently. I don’t think it’s just a question of getting the metadata to be specific enough, because I don’t think metadata can truly grasp the emotion someone feels when listening to a song.. at least not yet. I find that for the genres of music my friends and I both enjoy, a song they recommend will probably get me the emotional response I am looking for more often than a song I find from an algorithm-based music discovery engine. The mechanistic tendencies of music discovery engines are useful when I don’t mind a search-and-discard method of finding music (i.e. browsing through dozens and dozens of titles until I find one that I decide is worthy of a download or full stream). Frankly, I’ll probably check out a link from a friend or someone I follow on Twitter before I click on a machine-recommended song. In that way, the way I choose music hasn’t changed that much at all.  

Our social lives are already being played out via the social networks. Our blogs are the extension of that life, when we can’t seem to fit all of our ideas, opinions, and rants into a 140-character snippet on Twitter or an appropriate length status update on Facebook. We’re watching everything float up into “the cloud.” Every industry is flirting with moving what was once their hard-drive based media into the cloud, where everything will be immediately accessible from any computer or mobile device—heck, even Microsoft is in for the ride (see Microsoft SharePoint)! The music vertical is no exception to this, and why should it be, music is the soundtrack to our lives (at least it is for the most engaged of music lovers).

The emergence of radio streaming applications such as Pandora and Spotify signal the dream of easy access to playlists tailored to your specification and the availability of endless amounts of music. If customizable radio stations aren’t your thing, and you really just want to play your own music rather than search for new tracks, that doesn’t mean the cloud isn’t for you. MP3tunes is a perfect example of the convenience of the cloud: sync all your music and video with your designated “locker” on their site and it will be available for your use on any device, be it your iPhone or Android, your computer, or whatever future device you might have. That’s the beauty of it: ANY future device you might have. Their Open Music API allows for any manufacturer or developer to write an interface for use with MP3tunes. Michael Robertson, founder of MP3tunes, joyfully explained on This Week in Startups that their iPhone app was not even written by them—their users wrote it for them (of course they had to wait to get past the Apple gatekeepers and their approval process). The battle between open and closed systems might temporarily hinder the ideal of cloud-based technologies, but we have made serious progress. We are not yet free from the limitations of corporate interests, though those same corporate interests might have propelled us to the source of many innovations in the first place. What a conundrum, but I digress.

How are the leading tech companies reacting to cloud-based technology in music? Well, Apple acquired LaLa, a service that stores your music on cloud servers, so now we know they want to get into the cloud game. The question is who and when others will follow—Google and maybe even Facebook will enter the cloud music terrain in the near future. Technological limitations still exist: we are still not free from the potentially fleeting problems of bad Internet connections and limited bandwidth, but with time those problems will be rectified. You must pay for extra space on MP3tunes if you want to have extra storage for your music and videos, so we are not living in a utopia of unlimited bandwidth yet. Internet connection provides another technical problem with cloud technology, though LaLa has a partial solution to that problem. One unique and vital feature of the LaLa technology is that it keeps the last few hundred songs you listened to in a cache in case you lose Internet connection in a remote or underground location (i.e. subways, tunnels, between mountains, etc.). As technology rapidly improves, these problems will be in the past and we can all live happily in the cloud.

In the cloud, convenience and speed is the name of the game. I don’t know who can argue with that; I’m certainly not willing to experiment with dial-up or getting rid of my very organized iPod. Robertson explains that with music, unlike with videos and other media, you will want to listen to the same thing 100 times. If your music lives in the cloud, you can essentially listen to all your music, whether you are in your car or about to go to bed, from any device you have. Now I’m just waiting for the cochlear implant that gives me access to the Internet and the U.S. Library of Congress read and played aloud to me.

Has the music industry reached the point of oversaturation? Is the web the saturated fat of the music industry, clogging us up and making it harder to trim the fat? How do we separate the good from the bad? The viral and the 24-hour news cycle versus the timeless pieces of rock n’ roll media? It’s not just the web, though. Oversaturation spills over into the music industry everywhere: too many bands on tour during a rough economy, too many artists online fighting for a piece of the viral pie, more bands selling more music to their music-pirating audience, and a glut of copy-cat artists on Youtube and other streaming sites. Consumers are the new producers, so how do we cut out the excess noise that threatens music as a “profession” (in the traditional sense). Is there a breaking point, a recovery, or do we just completely alter our perspective of the music industry and throw the saturated fat analogy out the window? Perhaps my analogy is backwards. The people consuming the music are not the ones who are going to die from oversaturation in the market. The consumer can pick and choose what they want, cut the fat off, and throw away the excess. It’s more likely that the artists will suffer as creation becomes devalued and more artists fill up the music industry, dividing up the parts so thin that it becomes harder and harder to make a living from music.

I have to admit, I am playing the devil’s advocate a bit in my assessment (fancy word for rant..). I do enjoy everything viral, and I am finding more than enough good music to overcome the heaping piles of subpar music floating around the interwebs. Despite the excess “noise”, it is no harder for me to find a good song than before, if not much easier. I guess when it comes to music I am just a hopeless romantic, clinging onto the notion that my favorite bands are swimming in riches. If I value their music so much, I feel like they should be justly rewarded. Instead, many of my favorite artists are the starving poet types, hoping their passion for music will translate into paying the gas bills to tour cross-country and maybe even put a meal or two on their plate. Because the economy is so tough and the record industry is pretty much tanking, the only solution is oversaturation. You have to make the money somewhere, so everyone goes on tour all year long to try to make ends meet and sell some merch, where the profit margins are better than CD or iTunes sales. The problem is that the average music fan can only go to so many concerts. Being forced to choose from many great concerts is not a major complaint I hear from many music fans, but it makes competition between bands tougher when they are all trying to vie for position (market share, if you will).

We are also facing oversaturation due to speed and simplicity. The idea that consumers are the new producers (ala Youtube mash-ups and remixing) makes filling up the music space that much easier. Anyone with a computer and some spare time can test out their chops by remixing the latest Top 40 hit and posting it online. With so much extra media surrounding an original production, are we getting sick of a certain piece of music quicker or is the constant iteration prolonging the attention we can give to an artist’s original work? Frankly, I can’t decide. But hey, even with low barriers to entry and shrinking production budgets, I think many artists are still churning out some quality product. Let us just hope that technology improves at the same rate that music sales decline, and maybe we will always have enough artists making high quality music with good production values at increasingly lower costs. That way oversaturation will only be an after-thought to the music experience. As a music consumer, and omnivore, I’ll have my steak and eat it too.

The rise of digital technology and uninhibited downloading has put the music industry in a precarious situation as conventional revenue streams have dwindled over the last decade. A study by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), in conjunction with Digital Music News, has confirmed this sobering reality. Recorded music sales have dropped 7.2% in 2009, radio advertising dropped 12%, and sales of musical instruments and music-related video games have dropped as well (15.4% and 47%, respectively). Reforming the record industry, as we know it, to conform to these relatively new realities might be a pipe dream (probably because the idea of a record industry is outdated in and of itself). The “record industry” is an antiquated term, in part because of its deference to the record as a main source of income. With the rapid improvement of digital technology, in terms of increased bandwidth, cheaper equipment, and the influx of social media tools, the music industry now must decide on monetization schemes that benefit both the artist and the consumer. Consumers now believe that we are living in the era of “free”—the question for the music industry is how to adapt.

Although the statistics listed above provide a grim look at the state of the music industry, there is still a glimmer of hope in the uncertainty of the digital age. The concert business has gained 4% in 2009 and publishing and performance rights increased a slight amount as well. It seems logical that downloading music cannot replace the live performance—the conventional rock concert experience will not disappear along with the record sales. At the same time, digital technology does allow for live video streaming of concert events with increasingly superior sound and picture quality. Back in October 2009, U2 played to 96,000 people at the Rose Bowl Arena in Pasadena, California, but many more were watching at home and sharing part of the experience in real-time. Youtube streamed the concert live to nearly 10 million people, making it the largest streaming event ever broadcast over the video-sharing site. With millions of eyeballs on this one event, the music industry will surely see the potential for cashing in by replicating such events in the future. Although it would be very hard for sites like Youtube to convince users to commit to a pay-per-view model, at the very least, advertising to such large groups of people will provide alternate revenue streams for the music industry. The music industry, rather than pursuing the losing battle of preserving intellectual property rights, should embrace change by monetizing it. Recognizing the lure of high quality video streaming and other innovative digital technology will help shed the baggage associated with the industry’s fight against illegal downloading and refocus its mission on new revenue models.

Unfortunately for artists, we live in a time of what Chris Anderson calls the Long Tail, where “the future of business is selling less of more.” Music streaming sites like Spotify and Rhapsody obtain revenue by earning fractions of a cent from online streams. The idea is that a large number of streams convert to substantial revenue, but the artist, on the other hand, only sees a small profit even for a considerable number of streams. The artist, just like the suits of the industry, needs to find its own path. Take the Long Tail in your own hands by grabbing as many eyeballs from the many (and free) social media tools available on the web. Extract value from those resources and convert that into real profit that’s for you, the artist. Whether it’s merch sales, exclusive content for select fans, raising money to record an album (e.g. Sellaband), or any other monetary possibilities, the web brings transaction costs down to zero (or close to it). Now there’s no excuse! Maybe some of the bigger bands are not making the same kind of crazy money they used to, but at least with digital technology, many more of the smaller ones have a fighting chance for a modest income if the right tools are employed. Use the technology that took away the profits to create them in a completely new way.

1. Facebook Fan Page: Having a social network presence on the web might be an obvious concept for most bands by now, but many artists are still not utilizing the web to its full potential. As of March 2010, Facebook has amassed 41% of all social traffic on the web. This means you should not only be engaging on Myspace, where many bands send their fans to listen to their latest tracks, but also on Facebook where your fans can post, link, and share your content to their own growing network. Imagine if just one of your friends posts a link to your latest video or song; since the average Facebook user has about 130 friends, the connections you can make as an artist are exponential. The more friends a fan of yours has, the greater the potential reach. Now that Facebook has changed their term for pages from “Become a Fan” to “Like”, it will lower the bar for attracting people to interact with your fan page (since many have deemed it less of a commitment to “like” something than to become a full-fledged fan from the get-go). Most of your fans that “like” your fan page will have your posts in their news feed as well.

2. Twitter: Although Facebook attracts the most social traffic compared to any other site on the web, Twitter has its own advantages in spreading your artist “brand” online. Many people on Twitter feel that it is perfectly acceptable to follow a person that they do not know personally—in fact, it is a social norm and is practically encouraged. This lowers the barrier to entry to communicate with strangers. Many people will be more than happy to interact with you as a band/artist or as an individual (or both!). Because the social norms on Twitter are different than on Facebook, an artist can interact with potential fans in ways that might not be as socially acceptable on Facebook or other networks. Another great advantage to Twitter is the constant stream of information and link-sharing. People might find constant updates on Facebook to be clutter on their news feed because they like to preserve that feed for information involving friends and family. On Twitter, tweeting often is the norm and can open you up to a more diverse audience than just “friends” or “friends of friends.”

3. Artist Website: It is not enough to just be on social networks. It is important to be on the social networks because that is where everyone goes to interact frequently, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have your own website as well! Having your own website means you are in control of your career and, by default, you will appear more professional. In addition, attracting fans to sign up to an email mailing list or fan club on your own website seems a lot less like spam than if you hassled them on their social networks constantly. On your own website you can clearly lay out the incentives and perks of joining a fan club or signing up for a mailing list (think free downloads, exclusive merch, and meet-and-greets). Since it is your own website, you are not constrained by the limitations of a particular social network.

4. Live Video Streaming: Live video streaming sites such as Ustream have gained massive popularity in the last couple years. Many celebrities, artists, and other online personalities use live video streaming to connect with their fanbase in more intimate ways than Youtube videos or posts on their website. Not only can your fans watch you talk to them or play music live, but they can also interact with you via chat. Fans will get a lot more excited about getting a response to one of their questions in real-time than waiting days for an email or response to a blog post. Interacting with your fans online through video (whether it is performing or just chatting) will help fill the gaps between your live concerts and releasing studio-quality material.

5. MERCH MERCH MERCH!: Money will NOT come from music sales… PERIOD! Mashable posted a very sobering infographic (link and image posted below) about how many plays, downloads, or CD sales an artist needs to make minimum wage (and that’s assuming that the artist is only one person and not a five-piece band!). An artist would need 12,399 iTunes sales per month at $0.99 per track or 4,549,020 plays per month on Spotify to make minimum wage. If you want to sell self-pressed CDs, then you would need to sell 143 CDs per month at $9.99 per album—not an easy feat these days. My recommendation: sell merch at your shows and put a tip jar out (maybe some people who don’t want your merch will chip in for your band because they know they will be downloading your music for free online anyway). Merch is where the money is at these days. Printing out custom shirts for a particular tour or concert date will give your fans something that feels rare and increases their incentive to make a purchase. If you don’t have the money to buy your first bulk supply of merch, then use online services such as CafePress or Printfection. Although they take a large chunk of your profits right off the top, you can make your own custom merch without any of the upfront costs. When you have more funds, then you can start printing your own merch to have online and offline.

http://mashable.com/2010/04/15/music-artists-earn-online-infographic/

Tell us a little bit about Alter Ego; where are you from? How were you formed?

Alter Ego is a group of two artists from different coasts, and with opposing personalities (That's where the name Alter Ego plays its part). RDG is from the West coast (California), and DY is from the Islands (Jamaica). Alter Ego was originally formed by RDG. One day he thought to revive his rapping career from California to the state of Virginia, where he met DY (Dynamic). So to speak,  DY requested to join in and take on the journey with RDG to create a lane in the Hip-Hop genre.

When did you get started with hip-hop? Childhood passion? Just grew into it?

Actually RDG has been an artist since the age of 16yrs old. First RDG started of composing tracks for various artists in Apple Valley, California. Then he realized where his passion was, which was to be an artist. He didn't want to be half and half. DY picked up the pen and pad just 2 yrs ago! Yes, 2yrs and he has tremendously grown fast. DY was inspired by a lot of East Coast artists, but his heart really lies with the West coast. Honestly could say West coast over East coast.

So obviously the self-titled EP is pretty hot... tell us a little bit about the spirit of the album.
Is this your first album? When is it going to drop?

The "Self-Titled EP" is our freshman album. Which is out now, you could cop it at: thisisalterego.bandcamp.com. The album is VERY musical, we used our band name in a sense to take our listeners on a roller coaster. Meaning, different sides of what we think of "The Game".

On your band page, it shows quite a mix of different producers you have worked with. How did you get started with them?

Well we was browsing around on the net, looking for talented producers. So I wanted to hit a site where producers really put time, money, and effort to broadcast their productions so we ran across a well known site which was pmpworldwide.com. So clicked on a couple of producers and found Ra Charm. Which we believe one of the most talented producers on the West coast. So requested to purchase a track and he sent us a link to rocbattle.com. So from there on its been magic. Same for Ansane, and Axis. Just browsing the net not settling for non-creative tracks, takes time to actually find a good instrumental, but we believe that's part of the job. Strive Strive Strive for the best.

Has anyone or any group had major influence in any of your works?

To keep it 1000 with you, Slaughterhouse, TopdawgENT, Terrace Martin, etc. Need we say more.

So everyone's got their own opinions on the state of hip-hop these days and where its heading. What are ya'lls thoughts?

We'll we believe hip-hop is not dead for one. It's just A&R's is not seeking talent from the underground as they should. There's a lot of good artists they could be out, and putting the state of hip-hop on a higher pedestal.  I recommend people to start following the West coast underground, because it's NEXT!

What is the saddest song you've ever heard?

The saddest song or should I say songs are from the 90% of mainstream rappers  (Laughing).

Check em' out at http://thisisalterego.bandcamp.com/

Tim is a music composer/producer and engineer working out of his home studio in Montreal. Hes been composing music since 2000 and has done so in a variety of styles ranging from trance, psytrance, dance, electro, disco pop and hip-hop. He achieved a diploma in audio recording and production at Recording Arts of Canada. In the industry, he has worked as a freelance sound engineer, music arranger, composer, producer and keyboard/synth player.

Tell us a little bit about your past and current projects?

I've worked on a variety of different projects. I have recorded and mixed many demos for a variety of bands. A friend of mine is a signer/songwriter and had funding to record an album and so, hired me as an engineer to take care of the recordings. We just rented a bunch of gear, set everything up in a cottage and recorded for three weeks. That was pretty cool, minus the binges they would have while I was trying to sleep. I had songs licensed and used in television commercials from this media company called La Guerilla. I've also had a project to compose a 4 minutes soundtrack theme for the closing parade of the Just for Laughs festival. At the moment, I’m' in the middle of finishing a mix of this rock band I've recorded. I am also working on a demo pop project with a friend who works at Big Fat Truck Production. We have finished 3 tracks complete with vocals and backups but have run into complications regarding the artists, so, we are in search of a singer who is READY to become a pop star... no offense!
 

What is your most favorite track you've produced and why?

Well that is kind of a difficult question to answer as I find myself constantly perfecting, re-arranging and re-mixing old tracks. One day I can feel quite satisfied about a song, and then the next day, I can loose complete interest towards it. But obviously this is a common behavior amongst artists, I would assume. Also, to pick a best out of all the many different styles of music I have composed is not an easy task. Anyways, I guess one of my favorite songs, a recent one I still enjoy, would have to be a remix I've done of Sander Van Doorn's trance track Renegade. It doesn't sound at all like the original, which I'm not to fond of, but I've kept it's melody nicely blended in the mix for the sake of calling it a remix. The remix starts off having a nice mellow acid trance feel, with the occasional introduction of obscure psytrance elements swirling in and out of existence. The first build up introduces the track's classic rolling disco bass line a la Giorgio Moroder (I'm a big fan of his...mustache), which soon after, progresses into a second build up that brings in a raw trancey dancey hook to the track. It definitively gets energetic without being to over the top, driven by some subtle disco elements. For now, I enjoy it and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

What are the major influences in your work and how did you get started making music?

I started playing the piano at the age of 8 by trying to mimic what I was hearing on my parents records. I went on to take piano lessons, learning blues and jazz. I was not able to read music, and so, I played by ear and still do. Now fast-forward a bunch of years to my teenage days where I got into turntable-ism and beat matching. I was young, had turntables ,had hip-hop records, did graffiti and smoked pot. What more did I need? I did a couple of dj gigs at various venues with local hip-hop artists and I ended up playing in the "urban" room of this massive rave which was called Connected, I believed this was in 1999 or 2000, I don't remember. Anyways, that’s where I got a taste of electronic music, specifically goa, and acid trance. I later bought some gear and started composing stuff. I was really into the sound of what Platipus record's artists were producing; clean, casual morning trance. I’m also into psytrance, and so, one of my biggest influence in that genre is Simon Postford and all of his projects; Shpongle, Younger Brother, Mistery of the yeti, Hallucinogen etc. I have spent hours listening to his productions and trying to figure out his techniques, his effects, his tricks heheh. Now I'm more into electro, pop, disco and hip-hop, music I can track lyrics to, cause that's what I'm into doing right now.

Are you signed on to any label and if not are you looking to? Or hoping to stay independent?

I am not signed on to any label, yet! I have a self promoting issue and find it hard to push my music, mainly because of my " I'm sure I can do better" attitude. But I am definitely open to the idea of being signed, why not? It would give me a chance to have some tracks released, increasing one's exposure with the fanatic music devourers of the world. So if there's any labels representatives reading this and interested in some of my work, don't be shy.

Your music seems to have quite the eclectic fusion to it...using electronic production to unfold hip-hop and urban sounds. do you see this as a trending thing in the industry right now?

Well hip-hop (commercial hip-hop) has a definite electronic influence these days, and a lot of it is intricately produced too, just as a lot of it sounds like complete garbage. You know, I'm trying to develop my own sound, my own production techniques, and the more I merge elements of various musical genre, the more I start developping this unique sound. I just hope it showes.
I'm no hip-hop connoisseur but I don't think what is being played in clubs now can be defined as hip-hop. It is filled with elements of trance, dance, electro, disco and whatever else. I do produce sample based hip-hop which I'm comfortable calling it so, but for the rest, I would describe it more as mainstream pop or club.... actually I'm not really sure how to describe it.

You have mentioned that you've been producing in Montreal for quite a while...how long have you been in the city and where do you think the Montreal music scene stands in relation to the rest of the industry?

Montreal's been my home since I was conceived by a women whom I shall call my mother. I enjoy the music scene here, there's definitely lots of talent, but I'm also aware of all the crappy Mile-End indie rock bands popping in existence every second. Wearing cigarette pants and shiny shoes don't make you automatically a musician ya know? But hey... I guess that's the trend. Quite honestly, I'm not in touch with the music scene. I don't go out as much anymore as I stay home and compose music, work (sometimes), study and watch conspiracy documentaries. I have friends in the music industry who try to keep me up to date with what's hot and what's not, and that's how I know where the Montreal music scene stands. Not very effective... I should go out more.

Where do you hope to be professionally in the next 2 years?

Well first, not being a beggar would help! Second, I just really want to do what I love and get my hands dirty with music. I am currently on a quest to find the perfect place to accommodate all of my equipment cause at the moment, I'm lacking sufficient space. And also, I'm starting a production company (Audiphiq Studio) with a friend of mine that will specialize in instrumental composition, production, vocal tracking and the sorts, so I really need to move to get all this rolling. If everything works out, the next couple of years should be busy... I hope. I really want to produce more artists, especially in hip-hop/pop/dance genre. I have composed so much instrumentals ready to be tracked with vocals that it kind of annoys me as they are not being used for anything at the moment. I just have to be patient I guess.

What is the saddest song you've ever heard?

Wow! hmmm... well to tell you the truth, I don't know. My "sad song repertoire" isn't developed all that much. But for sake of answering,  I guess it would have to be that song in the movie Donnie Darko. What is that song again?
Wait I think I got it! Its Gary Jules and Michael Andrews cover version of Mad World. The melody has a definite "I wanna kill myself" effect (I don't really).


Awesome! Check out timburon.com to listen to some of his work!

Ace The Time is a producer and artist based in Washinton DC. A complex individual, leading a crappy life, mad at the world, he uses his music to search for himself... his sanity... and his happiness. 

 Ace's whole purpose in being is to create great Timeless music and stay on the cutting edge. Hopefully inspire a few people, Change a few things and Craft some Classiks.

Alright, lets get the good stuff first...tell us a little bit about your next album and when its gonna drop.

My next album is going to be EPIC!!! lol. I mean, I try to make all my songs epic in some way, emotionally, musically, energetically (Is that a word lol). But its gonna be on-point. This album is what I want from other artists seeing as essentially I'm a fan, fed up with people not delivering lyrically, musically etc. Its going to have a live drum, 90/2000-reinvented/updated, and dramatic sound. Its still in the conceptual and production stages but some songs have been writin and I can already hear everything done.... I dont get excited about much but I'm pretty excited about this!

How did you get started in making music?

Well, back in second grade, I wrote my first rhyme dissing my friend that got together with one of my Ex's. lol I still remember the beginning of it, joint was dope!! lol. I wrote all through high school. Formed a group, dudes became weed heads, couldnt stay sober, we broke up. Won a few song/writing contests etc. My first experience in the studio was with a afterschool program, called Esharp. That was were I learned how to engineer and make beats. At the same time, my homie Justin Holman (RIP) had started his studio so I was makin beats and recording all through the end of high school.

http://www.myspace.com/craftinclassiks