Hypebot’s In-Depth Interview With Amanda Palmer: a must read

Hypebot’s interview with Amanda Palmer is a must read for basically anybody, so I highly recommend you take some time here and there and check out all three parts (as well as the comments!).

Posted exactly as on Hypebot’s blog:

“If the point is to find meaning and fulfillment but the very idea of staying connected is causing you eternal anxiety, it’s defeating the purpose… I simply feel blessed that I’m an emotional exhibitionist right around the time is seems to be expected and en vogue.”

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Thank you Bruce for this wonderful interview, and of course for Hypebot! (Follow Hypebot on twitter @hypebot)

Oh and here’s Indaba’s interview with Amanda (this time it’s a video!) talking about Twitter (yet again), her crazy success stories, and other music 2.0 stuff – very interesting as always.

Mruff.

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Indie Artist X making headway

Last week I wrote a post on the new Indie Artist X project, devised by a group of music industry insiders, who’s main goal is to launch the career of an anonymous musician by applying all DIY techniques and music 2.0 tools available in today’s day and age. In other words, these music insiders will act as consultants for Artist X for a period of 4 months, recuperate and publicly announce concrete results for X’s progress, and basically just attempt to use this experiment to create a custom business plan for indie, DIY bands and musos.

In this spread - http://gigdog.gy/_indie_projectX_spreadsheet – you can see the project’s main objectives and strategies, as well as that list of advisers.

One thing I either didn’t notice for my previous post, or that simply wasn’t there yet, is the set of different sheets at the top of the document where each adviser details his/her plan for X, and generally explain the highlights of their mission (as well as the tools they intend on using to accomplish it). Having just read through it, I decided to share this tid bit of info because this simple sheet, which is most likely going to evolve and get more detailed as the project goes on, is a great starting point, or a healthy break-down of what any musician can, and even should do, while trying to market his/her self.

Check it out, and bark us, and more importantly them, some feedback.

Woof

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Bandize is now out of Beta: organizing your band from the ground up

Bandize is finally out of Beta!

Bandize is a logistics management platform for bands that offers a whole set of practical tools to organize their contacts, tours, tasks, products/merchandise and whatnot. It’s a complete package solution for all bands who wish to organize their activities in one single place, bypassing the many logistical struggles they have to deal with.

Although I can’t fully utilize the site since I am currently not in a band, I can tell you I would have my whole account filled with info if I did. Slick interface, very complete set of tools, nicely implemented messaging system, possibility of importing content from other music social networks, Bandize is probably the most comprehensive management solution for bands out there. Do Check it out.

Mruff

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The Indie Artist X Project is on the go!

A set of key music industry peeps, that you could know about (or maybe should) if you are a musician or in a band and that you spend some time online trying to perfect your music 2.0 skills, are getting together to focus on helping an anonymous hard-working indie musician get out of his day-time job and start a full time career. The project is called the Indie Artist X Music Marketing Plan. Bellow are cited its participant:

• Andrew Goodrich from ArtistsHouse (great and prolific Twitterer – follow him @artistshouse or @VisualAlchemy). Andrew will be overviewing Fan Developpment strategies for ArtistX.
• Bruce Houghton from the Hypebot (brings us daily music news through his truly inspiring Hypebot blog, and is probably very active in other realms of the music industry – follow Bruce @hypebot). Bruce will be taking care of Commerce.
• Cameron Mizell from Musicianswages.com (A funky jazz guitarist and a regular writer/contributor on musicianwages.com. Check out his Myspace at http://www.myspace.com/cameronmizel) Cameron is in charge of Awareness
• David Rose from Knowthemusicbiz.com (a great resource for all musicians. You can follow David on Twitter @dbrose67) David is in charge of the website.
• Heather MacDonald from the music careers section over at About.com. Check her tweets @mountflorida.
• Martin Atkins from Revolution Number 3 that I have never heard of but that I am sure are great at what they do. Martin will be taking care of live show and touring strategies.

Here’s the initial pitch for the ArtistX project:

The goal of the Indie Artist X Project is to develop a basic, actionable music marketing plan designed around simple strategy, prioritization of tactics, tools and a reasonable budget that can be implemented by any indie artist who has the inclination to follow it. A group of like minded people (us and the other sponsors) interested in helping foster the success of independent musicians have banded together to create this community based music marketing plan. It’s our hope that any hard working, talented musician can utilize this plan to grow their fan base and help lay the foundation for a sustainable career in music. We will be working with one anonymous artist to design and implement this music marketing plan then track and report the actual results over a four month period. All the details of the plan are publicly available in this document.

“This document” being a Google Spreasheet you can view here.

This artist must stay anonymous so publicity from the project will not skew any potential results.

Seems like a very interesting idea. If I understand correctly, the six influential music industry peeps above will chaperon artistX’s music career for the next 3 month and attempt to determine what the best strategies to leverage it are. Seems like the first market study conducted on an indie musician. Result promise to be intriguing and most certainly up-lifting for the DIY crowds. I’ll keep you updated on their progress.

Woof

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How much do bands REALLY want it?

The other day I wrote a post called “Where are you hiding your band’s email address“. While browsing through the web in search of bands’ email addresses I realized that many unknown or unsigned bands seem to conceal them in the most awkward places on their Myspaces, Facebook pages and websites, not to mention that most of the time their email addresses just aren’t available anywhere.

For some bands who say that they “want it” (as in “some form of success”) , this can seem pretty paradoxal.

One regular reader of our doggy blog posted a rather interesting comment that we felt would constitute a nice little post that goes along the lines of “How much do bands REALLY want it?”

It’s interesting to me, but sometimes I don’t think bands are even eager for promotion. For a while I was doing interviews for unsigned bands that I liked on an unsigned band website. Curiously, some bands would not respond for weeks to a request for an interview. Similarly, after agreeing, sometimes they would not respond to the questions I email them for perhaps months. Often I’d have to follow up with them to ask if they’d gotten a chance to look at the questions. Sometimes I’d have to email the initial questions again.

Arrogant rock star comes to mind, but I don’t think it’s arrogance. I think they’re just clueless half the time. Heck, they’re unsigned nobodies (albeit talented nobodies imho) if I was trying to get in touch with them. I just think they don’t understand that it’s not always about the music, that there’s a promotional element to getting their name out there.

There’s so much good music out there, and it’s so difficult to be heard above the throngs.

Bark?

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How to lose money at a gig: a recap on the Gigdoggy Showcase!

Ok so as some of you may know, we hosted our first Gigdoggy Showcase on Saturday 18th at the Club Lambi in Montreal. I am now going to take the opportunity to do a little recap on the event, how we organized and how it played out.

The context of our Showcase

Before launching our Fanteraction™ platform (which by the way still hasn’t officially launched – we will open it on May first so stay tuned for Friday’s post on the matter), we were working on a gig management platform to help gig-swapping bands coordinate their efforts to set up their shows. This project is on hiatus for now, meaning we have stopped developing it, but you can still set-up an account at www.gigdoggy.com/gigs and use its existing features.

Anyways, the whole idea of the Gigdoggy Showcase originated with this gig-swapping website as we planned to use it to organize the event. It did help a lot as many logistical tasks were discussed and centralized within our showcase profile.

Once we decided to shift our focus on the Fanteraction™ service, we just took advantage of the gig to promote our up-and-coming idea and to deliver a party full of sonic delights.

Finding the bands

Well that wasn’t that hard actually. We found one band through this blog, 2 bands from Montreal via personal acquaintances, and the three other bands through Craigslist. For Craigslist we just posted an add in Montreal saying we were looking for gigs, and in the days to come we had filled our bill.

Finding the Venue

We needed a nice room to rent that could contain more or less 150 to 200 people. We found Club Lambi via one of the bands on the bill, The Angry Parrots that had already played there before. The venue was $350 for the night, for three bands, and $25 for any extra band (sound engineer fees). So basically we were preparing to cash-out $425 just for the room.

Organizing the logistics of the gig

By logistics I’m referring to promotion, pre-sale tickets, handling compensation between bands, setting up the technical rider for the sound-guy, selling merchandise and employing a DJ and some VJs.

Pre-sale tickets:

As mentioned above, we used our gig management platform to deal with some logistical tasks. Everything that deals with tickets sales and ticket pricing is in our showcase profile (http://www.gigdoggy.com/gigs/paisible-2009-02-04-03-52-07 – click on “12 comments” on the top right side of the “Ticket/Presale” section to expand the conversations).

Compensation:

Well we decided to divide everything evenly between bands at the end of the gig. Not much else to add here.

Promotion:

Offline promo:

• We depended a lot on word to mouth to get people attending. We didn’t do the offline flyer routine at all, and I just put up 20 posters near the venue to grab people’s attention, but apart from that, with six bands on the bill we were pretty confident we would have a good turnout.
• We wrote two press releases (one in English and one in French) and sent them out to major media listings. Don’t think it bared much fruit but we did get featured in some concert listings online and offline. You can download the english press release here.
• Thanks to a close friend who had a contact at CBC news, Greg got interviewed in front of the Club Lambi, and the clip was broadcasted on the CBC channel right before the 7pm news. Check out the clip here.

Online promo:

• We made a facebook event just to get the word out, and used it to have an overall idea of who was attending.
• I also wrote a post on the gig on this blog and promoted it via Craigslist.
• We subscribed to a very cool site called ArtistData that automatically updates a band’s gig schedule on all major social networks and calendars.
• Geoff Marshall from the Angry Parrots produced a great video gig flyer for us that we promoted via Facebook ads with a CPM model. We made it run for three days at $20/day (you choose your model and the your threshold price). We got something like 400 000 impressions for a total of 100 click-throughs. Don’t think it’s really worth the money :)
• We also used twitter to get a couple of people to attend.

So all in all, I would say that probably 95% of the people who came were close friends and relatives of the bands that played, and I’m leaving 5% out just to pretend that most of our efforts maybe helped out. The turnout was around 120 people at the peak of the event and felt a little disappointing. Also I would like to add that on that particular night, the frigin’ Montreal Habs were playing and most certainly contributed to a few dozen people not coming. Plus Boston totally owned them that night…

Technical Rider

Now this was a tough one. Having six bands on the bill obviously doesn’t help. All of it was done via email and an excel sheet that you can download here. One thing I thought of doing on the day of the gig was printing the tech rider for the sound guy just in case (I had only sent it by e-mial beforehand), so I had to re-arrange the spreadsheet in order for it to be displayed nicely on A4 sized pages. This may seem like a detail, but its an important one. Only 15 minutes before sound-check had I realized that my beautiful color-noted tech rider was dismantled into twice as many A4 sheets ’cause of this printing issue. In Excel you can of course set your borders as you wish for printing, but for the sake of the sound-guy it’s best to give him something nice with clean normal-sized font letters.

Selling Merchandise

Before the gig we had set up a big table with all the merch right by the main entrance. Most bands had merchandise, and most of the merchandise were comprised of t-shirst. I don’t think the bands did to well on that front, at least we didn’t although we had a pretty cool design. So yeah, we lost money on with the shirts and we’ve decided to blame the recession.

The DJ and The VJs

We thought that having a DJ perform during downtimes we keep the party going and it did. We got very lucky with the VJs as they accepted to come over the day of the gig! That was cool: they set up their projectors and white panels around the stage and did their thing all night long. It truly added a nice atmosphere to every set.

Conclusions

Well on the party side of thing, the night was a success and everybody seemed to really like the ambiance as well as the bands. Me and Greg spent the whole day more or less managing stuff so it wasn’t really a night out for us, but still we had a blast. Now on the budget side we were in the red. All bands got paid $85 (including us), so if you only consider the venue cost, which originally was $425 but got priced down to $300, we were already loosin’ money. Add to that the cost for the t-shirst ($200), pre-sale tickets ($12), DJ ($40) and VJs ($40) and you realise we are indeed newbies in event organization.

But hey, we weren’t in it for the money and this was our first gig. Take away the Habs game, two bands on the bill (six is a lot…) and level to entry price to 10 buck and we might have broken even. Maybe by selling more shirts we could’ve of made a profit. And besisdes, for a six-band bill, all bands were pretty satisfied with their $85 (although one very big hassle was to know who sold how many pre-sales – this is certainly something we’ll keep in mind for our future shows).

So there you have it. If you have any questions on how to lose money at gigs, give us a hollar. And if you got any suggestions on how to become profitable, please let us know.

A warm mruff to all the bands present at the gig and to all our readers.

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NIN iPhone application: a new band-fan interaction model

Trent Reznor (NIN) and Rob Sheridan (art director for NIN) have publicly released their brand new NIN band-fan interaction iPhone application. A video is worth a thousand words, so behold the wonders of 3g enabled mobile technologies:

I also recommend reading Underwires’s post on the matter to see how it works in further detail.

It’s quite possible that Reznor, Sheridan and Rose are up to something bigger with their platform. They could easily open up this kind of system to other bands. Behind all the image gimmickry of their app. lies amazing possibilities for bands to interact with their fans.

Mruff to that.

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A band’s ultimate cellphone success story

The advancements in cellphone technologies are making a big difference in everyone’s life, and bands are starting to seriously feel the hype. The story behind Los Pikadientes‘ success is nothing short of amazing. Before their song ‘La Cambia Del Rio’ got recorded by a cellphone and became wildly viral, the band had no aspirations of becoming one of 2008′s biggest Mexican acts. Once the song got shared between a couple of friends, it “quickly went viral, and its grass-roots popularity led to heavy rotation on radio stations across Sonora; before long, cellphone videos of people dancing to the song were flooding YouTube”. Sony Music invested in the famous track and catapulted the single and the band at #1 on Billboard’s Regional Mexican chart, leading the song’s ringtone to sell more than 150,000 copies in the US alone.

Such an achievement is due to many factors colliding harmoniously – not every band can hope getting this popular just by performing in front of their swimming pool, but still, as Francisco Gonzalez of Los Pikadientes notes:

We have to be honest – we wouldn’t exist without cellphones and ring tones

The NewYork Times has more.

Mruff.

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Automatically update your profiles’ data with ArtistData

If you actively manage your band’s profile through different social networks, and if promote your gigs on more than one gig listing, chances are you’ll find a service like ArtistData quite helpful. Its concept is to automatically update websites you use to promote your music. ArtistData seems to focus particularly on concert listings, which is a good thing seeing how boring it is to place your gig info on the many sites that allow you to (mostly when you are planning a tour) but it also allows you to update other profile data helping you save time. For users in the US, ArtistData can automatically send out a band’s gig listing and information to local media.

From their home page’s description:

ArtistData tirelessly works to give musicians more time to be creative. We’re building solutions to automate the monotonous updating of artist websites, social network profiles, concert databases, Twitter, official news feeds, iCal, local press, fan newsletters, and even tour books. When an artist updates our site, we update all their sites. Our current users save hundreds of hours, giving them more time to do what they love: creating music.

ArtistData looks promising in a world where bands get easily overwhelmed by the many web 2.0/promotional tools at their disposal. The service is still in beta and its founder Brenden Mulligan is hard at work adding features and perfecting the system.

I tried it out with our Gigdoggy Showcase that’s taking place in Montreal (on the 18th of April – six bands and lots of doggies on stage!) and it works great.

So if you’re band is well versed in the social-networking arts, ArtistData will certainly come in handy. Thousands of bands have already signed up including international acts like Amy Winehouse and Jack Johnson.

Check them out at:
their website: http://www.artistdata.com
on Twitter: http://twitter.com/artistdata

Mruff.

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How to grab the attention of key people inside the industry (part 2): Protecting your Music

A friend of ours, who prefers not to be named, attended the Cape May Singer/Songwriter Conference in New Jersey last week-end. He summarized some very interesting pointers discussed by industry professionals at the meeting and sent them our way.

Yesterday’s post was about how bands could manage their promotional efforts through Publicity and Press. Today will be about how they should Protect their Music when engaging in publishing and licensing deals.

Protecting your music

The differences between a publisher and a licenser are this:

- A licenser just sells for you, basically throws everything at everyone and sees what sticks. Usually doesn’t negotiate high (low-balling as part of the seeing what sticks) and CAN be a good way to break into the scene, but overall is less connected to you and your art, and you would probably not make a living off it. I believe the split is in the area of 70/30 (you get the 70). Licensed music sales are a one-time paid fee to use your art and are not affected by the success of the film they appear in.

- A publisher is part of the ownership and is solidly vested in seeing it succeed. The usual split on royalties is 50/50, but the negotiated price is usually much higher than the licensed sale. Publishers are also more detailed in contracts, so if your music ends up in an indie film that becomes a 300mil blockbuster, you would benefit from the success by the way of sales-volume royalties; it would be built into a publisher’s contract with the film-makers.

A note on Supervisors

Many musicians and singer/songwriters choose to license their art for use in film and TV. The folks inside the TV/film studio who choose and propose the sounds/music for scenes are “supervisors“. Supervisors are also, and more importantly responsible for all legal issues pertaining to the music. They have to worry about the bassist who quit the band 3 years ago, that claims he contributed to the song in the movie. For this reason alone, they tend to stick with mid-level (no start-ups) libraries and publishers with solid reputations, who can deliver ‘clean’ material to them with no legal tie-ups.

What you should think about protecting

For the artist, this means that these publishers will expect you to “have your sh*t together” (discussed in the publicity & press section), by owning the copyrights, not only of the original music, but to the masters. Apparently, the music you wrote and it’s copyright belong to you, but the master recordings are the creation of the studio, and everyone in that studio who contributed to that project. You MUST protect yourself, get an entertainment lawyer and have contracts drawn that give you exclusive ownership of the masters. No studio should have an issue with that, and some of the less reputable ones might fight you on signing such a contract (they will want their piece of the pie), but they really have no justification for expecting such. Protect yourself.

During your studio time you should as the engineer to create the following:

• Master recordings (complete mastered songs)
• All vocal tracks with just vocals and FX.
• All instrumental tracks without FX added.

Publishers will be more likely to sign you on if you have those, and if there are any contributions to the songwriting, just make sure your entertainment lawyer draws up a 50/50 (or other ratio) contract for dual copywright ownership. No supervisor or publisher will want to touch your art without full ownership details (it’s ok to have dual or more people as contributors, so long as it’s all contracted).

A note on contractual exclusiveness

There are exclusivity and non-exclusivity contracts you can sign with publishers. Exclusivity will get you a better relationship and more visibility with your publisher, and he/she will in turn promote you more to the supervisors than if you are non-exclusive to him/her. Non-exclusive contracts can also be valuable, but generally they are less rewarding. Exclusive contracts are much harder to get, simply because the publishers are careful about who they get behind. Your art has to be top notch, and you have to have a consistent relationship with them.

In summary

In summary, there really aren’t right and wrong ways to approach the publishing models, but what’s necessary to get started is solid songwriting, a full catalog (50-100 songs), positive and consistent relationships with publishers, licensers, and writers, critics, sound techs, and obviously – other musicians. The best way to do most of it is to attend conferences and meet these people. They offer mentoring, advice, critiques, seminars, and generally are very helpful and approachable.

Bark

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