Some music industry insights

Hey people.

Because I have no inspiration, and because I have yet to encounter some real news worthy stories to write about, I have decided to give you 5 links to articles, rants and whatnot I fell upon today and found particularly interesting. I’ll kick start with the myspace of an awesome band I just discovered so you can check it out while reading the articles.

Enjoy! (click on titles to access links)

• http://www.myspace.com/firevibes by the great newly discovered Belgian intrumental prog-rock band, Fire.

• Are fans telling friends? If not, improve, don’t promote. by Derek Sivers posted in Music Think Tank.

• There’s Still A Place Where Albums Outsell Singles posted on Hypebot.

• My thoughts on what to do if you’re a new / unknown artists in this climate by Trent Reznor posted in the NIN forums.

• Good Guitar Stuff Or Stereotypifications? The Evolution Of The Guitar’s Use in Pop Music by Frank Zappa

Bark

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Where are you hiding your band’s email address?

I haven’t been very active on the blog these two past weeks. Greg and I have been fairly busy partnering up with Emergenza, that international battle-of-the-bands you probably might have heard of. We contacted them about a month ago asking if they would be interested in  trying out our Fanteraction service. I pitched the idea to one of the organizers, and he said they would give it a shot for the finals in Paris.

So about 3 weeks ago we focused our efforts on getting an “Emergenza profile” fired-up, discussing features with the organizers, handling many other logistical tasks, and making sure all the bands created accounts and filled-up their profiles.

Since the organizers kinda took way too much time to give us all of the bands’ emails (in order for us to invite them to the site and get certain technical formalities handled specifically for the Emergenza event), we decided to fetch those email addresses ourselves. Well I’ll be damned ’cause what I thought would be an easy one or two hour task (there were 24 band in total divided in two dates) took me twice that time. You see, I thought finding a band’s email address was easy thanks to basic searches on myspace and facebook. I discovered to my grand demise that many bands like to hide their emails – not hide in the sense “I’m afraid of spammers, so you’ll just have to myspace me”, rather hide as in “let’s see were the most incoherent place to hide my email would be, just because I don’t quite grasp the concept of being easily contacted”.

Because seriously, let’s face it, bands don’t really reply on myspace anymore. Well some do, but myspace has really become this virtual junk yard were bands barely even update their shows anymore. Maybe it’s not the case for you, or you, but I can confidently say that it’s the friggin’ case for tons of bands. Facebook generates a bit more reaction in terms of messages and replies, but not always. It seems to me that most bands believe that just by creating a fan page and creating a group for each show, they are mastering social media.

To get to the point of this post, put your band’s email, or primary band member’s email where you want people to see that you exist!

There is this one solo singer songwriter playing in the Emergenza Paris finals who has an active myspace, an active website, has apparently sent out press releases about his gigs, or has at least had some press coverage for his events, and who just doesn’t want people to email him. It’s crazy. This guy is in the top 200 charts in France, and by the way he promotes himself online you can see he’s screaming to get noticed, yet I can’t get a hold of his email address, at all, and of course he is not replying to my myspace message either.  I could be U2′s manager wanting to put him up as an opening act that I wouldn’t know how to reach him.

I just don’t get it.

Mruff

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Trent Reznor: the first case of “Twitterazzi syndrome”?

Mr Reznor is one of the last artists you could expect to put his web-based networking activities aside. He is one of the most influential and inspiring social gurus out there, and now he seems to have officially announced that he’s taking his leave from it all:

“I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there’s a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I’m not what you projected on me. All expected. I’m not as concerned about “breaking” your idea of NIN at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am. The relationship between artist and fan is changing if you haven’t noticed, along with the way we consume and experience music and even communicate since the internet arrived.The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It’s tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time. Example: on nin.com, there’s 3-4 different people that each send me between 50 – 100 message per day of delusional, often threatening nonsense. We can delete them, but they just sign back up and start again. Yes, we are implementing several changes to address this, but the point is it quickly gets very old weeding through that stuff.”

Reading Reznor’s quote made me realize that being in his position reflects an awkward situation.

Bands or artists or whatever who are “unknown” and who enter the social media game will put in time and effort to get online exposure. Whether it be via Myspace, facebook, Twitter, Bebo, blogs and what not, networking not only takes time, but requires know-how, and a good deal of creativity. Seeing how every single platform has its own social-mechanisms, once you start getting into it you realize the amount of work it represents to start grasping just for an couple of extra “true fans”.

For some people, like Trent, the whole process is very natural, and social networks became popular after he did, so he just surfed a wave that suited him well.

Now he is taking a step back because he’s been chocked by “Twitterazzies” to the point where he just can’t take it any anymore. As in show-business, where an unknown actor or singer dreams of being harassed by photographers, the social-networking-inclined band or brand ravishes the idea of getting re-tweeted, mentioned, linked, pod-casted, blogged etc.

Trent Reznor’s statement just goes to show that, past a certain point, being too “social” just ain’t worth it.

Woof.

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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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How to grab the attention of key people inside the industry (part 1): Publicity and Press

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.

Today’s post is about Publicity and Press, and what bands should take into consideration when attempting to promote themselves through local media, social networks and A&R scouts.

Enjoy!

Publicity and Press

How to stand out, and what you need to do to get and keep the attention of key people inside the industry

A note on “reviewers”

These are the folks with major and indie labels who ‘scout’ new music. It’s notable that many start-up web sites and companies make wild claims about getting their music in front of these reviewers. The simple fact is that, EMI for instance, records has just one reviewer employed for the entire east coast. Most labels have 1 reviewer per region (4 regions in whole country), and those reviewers aren’t hanging out in bars, waiting for you to show up. This is not necessarily as depressing as it sounds though, keep reading.

Advice from publishers, reviewers, writers, and broadcasters:

- First and foremost, you absolutely must have a hefty catalog, 50-100 original songs / jingles / whatever it is you do. Songs should have strong hooks, and AVOID all possible drug-out beginnings to songs. They want to hear a verse and a chorus (with or without a pre-chorus) with a good hook. They promised us, that they generally won’t make it past 7 seconds in a song if they haven’t heard any vocals yet, unless it’s the greatest intro ever… They admittedly have short attention spans and want you to get to the point, fast. Production value means almost nothing to them, it’s all in the vocals, musicianship, song arrangement, and HOOKS. Don’t send demos with instruments out of tune or bad vocal recordings. Make sure the performance is there, regardless of whether the production is there or not.

- Any contact with any communications industries (TV, radio, etc) is a GOOD thing. Build relationships. A publisher or licenser who knows who you are and has a “relationship” with you will always choose your music or project over any other artist who just sends emails and demos. Talk to them, keep it nice, don’t ever burn bridges (no matter how much you think they ignored you, or insulted you – often it’s a case of mis-read sentiments), send demos, press kits, and schedules of shows, live footage. ANY press kits or reviews, newspaper articles, TV/radio coverage and reviews are fantastic ways to get a publisher’s attention.

- Make sure to include contact information, especially your name and phone number. They are not going to bother digging through the internet to find you. They pretty much said “have your sh*t together”. Music reviewers and writers (many local and regional music magazines exist) should be a huge focus, many of them know TONS of inside publishers and even some reviewers, and if you blow them away, it can make all the difference. Develop personal relationships with them, and the people they know.

Embrace social networks

- Myspace bios should be:

• short, to the point
• factual
• address key points
• list accomplishments, use bullets to list and define them

!!Note!!: They also spoke about their hatred of these grandiose myspace pages that take forever to load, and how a simple and to-the-point page is far more positive than a page with dozens of videos, custom art, picture galleries, and widgets or whatever that slow it to a grinding halt. They pretty much said if it doesn’t load right up, they move on.

- Twitter:

• fans want MORE, you have to give it to them.
• keep them updated regularly
• If they get dis-interested, they will move on.

Have defined goals for yourself / band

• Charity events are media gold. You can’t do wrong by playing them.
• Anything else in the area of public interest that makes a difference
• Add these events, and write-ups to your press kits
• Always grow your press kits, show you have a history

A little note on digital distribution

-Tunecore was strongly recommended by several panelists and industry folks.

That’s it for today’s post on Publicity and Press. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on Protecting your Music where we will have a look at what assets bands must preserve to shell themselves from legal issues.

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Audiolife: a very embeddable e-commerce solution for bands

I have been playing a little with this new e-commerce solution for bands called Audiolife. It’s a custom online store where bands can sell their music (albums, downloads and ringtones) and their merch very easily. Through their widget you create and display your goods, then you proceed to place that widget everywhere you want on the web. In contrast to other e-stores like Nimbit or Zazzle , Audiolife’s widget can be embedded on a multitude of social platforms and is therefor not only limited to MySpace and Facebook. Bellow are all the social sites you can place your widget on, and of course, as always WordPress.com isn’t on the list. Still, pretty impressive for a widget of this caliber.

Its nice clean interface and easy navigation make it fast and simple to get your stuff online in no time.

To check out what the store looks like, go to our Facebook profile and scroll down a little to ‘My Stuff’.

Mruff

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What musical genre defines this past decade?

Click to enlarge

It’s only March 2009 but I feel it’s time to start making premature judgments on the decade in music. After the horrid 1980s and the relatively weak late-90s, this decade has rejuvenated rock and roll for a new generation. The likes of The Killers and Coldplay have topped the top-forty and a multitude of smaller bands such as the Black Keys have dominated the college radio charts. I have been unable to keep up with the surplus of bands that have made it onto the pages of NME, Q, Spin and the rest of the major music publications. However, I don’t see this decade as defining a genre or music scene of particular importance. Instead I see a decade that will be defined by its technological contributions to music.

From 1998 to 2001 it seemed like rock and roll would never come out of its tailspin. Grunge was long dead and Britpop had run its course and become a catchphrase rather than a thriving music scene. Boy and girl bands smiled at you from magazine covers with nauseating regularity. Nu-metal bands such as Limp Bizkit and Korn went platinum singing about breaking stuff and hating their parents. In this four year period I was introduced to The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and the countless others who made the 1960s a time of immense musical importance. I was left wondering what happened to my own generation and why the girls were content dancing to manufactured pop and the boys head-banging to teen-angst ridden nu-metal. I love Oasis and The Verve but by 1998 they had been swept away on a cloud of cocaine induced overindulgence. Meanwhile, Robbie Williams had co-opted Britpop and grunge bands had injected their success up their arm.

Those four year of audio-induced-torture came to an end when The Strokes released their debut album, Is This It. That album made simple garage rock cool again. They sounded good and had the don’t-give-a-fuck image that had gone AWOL since the mid-90s. Is This It kick started a decade in which guitar bands would regain their prominence. Immediately following the Strokes’ debut, The White Stripes entered the mainstream with their classic White Blood Cells and The Vines released their Beatles/Nirvana infused debut. The new decade began to look promising and that nauseating feeling subsided.

I’m still impressed by the multitude of bands  emerging on a weekly basis. The vast majority of new bands become disappointing fairly quickly, but that is to be expected. The music business – particularly in Britain – has a habit of drumming up enthusiasm for the “next big thing” before realizing they aren’t the band of our dreams. Subsequently it tears them down. At least when I read music magazines I’m thinking “I want to hear that album” rather than, “why is there so much crap.” The problem is that there is no genre or music scene that will define the current decade for future generations.

The 1950s invented rock and roll and be-bop. The 1960s invented modern rock, blues rock, jazz rock, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, soul, hard-bop and free jazz. The 1970s create stadium rock, disco, funk and punk. The 1980s created the music video and many metal-related genres. The 1990s had grunge, Britpop, boy/girl bands and hip-hop. So what’s our decade’s claim to fame?

The one new style of music that could be called original is danceable rock and roll. I have yet to hear it given a proper name but what I am referring to is the current guitar bands that incorporate elements of dance and rave music. Examples would be Franz Ferdinand, The Klaxons, The Killers, Hot Hot Heat, Kasabian, and the Kaiser Chiefs. These bands wear their influences on their sleeve but have managed to create something relatively new. You can hear everything from the Bee Gees to The Jam and Joy Division up to Pearl Jam and The Stone Roses. I don’t necessarily like all these bands — I thoroughly dislike the Klaxons — but at least they are doing something slightly original.

The one element of the 2000’s that will be remembered is the utilization of the internet. Online music communities are forming without any influence from the corporate music world. That is a truly exciting occurrence in new music.

The influence of Myspace and the internet in general was on display in January 2006 when the Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not became the fasted selling debut in British history, surpassing Oasis’ Definitely Maybe. The Arctic Monkeys’ meteoric rise was attributed to fans sharing their demo tape over the internet. They were playing sold-out shows around England and kids were singing every skilfully crafted lyric before the band had released a single. This phenomenon was not possible before the advent of Myspace and file sharing. Now every person I know who owns a guitar and has some lyrics in a notebook has their own Myspace page.

The 1990s saw the initial sign of the internet’s potential to redefine music marketing. However, it took a new generation of artists and fans who have never known life without the internet to fully grasp its potential for new music. I don’t want to get into a defense of file sharing – it’s a topic large enough for its own article and Lars Ulrich might have me assassinated – but I will say it is the greatest innovation to ever happen to young bands.  I have bought albums and attended shows because I was able to download the band’s songs first. File sharing hasn’t been a hundred percent positive innovation for some; it certainly has its cons for larger bands. The point remains that Napster and others turned the music business on its head. It may be another decade before the long-term repercussions of rampant downloading becomes apparent.

I’m interested to know what Gigdoggy readers believe will be the bands/scenes/innovations that will dominate the collective memory of the current decade. There have certainly been some great bands. I love new music and that is something I couldn’t say eight years ago. But do any of these bands constitute a new era in music?

As far as I can tell, the answer is no. The one thing has made this decade exceedingly important in the grand scope of music history is the utilization of the internet. It has nothing to do with the songs but it is one hell of an important innovation.

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Promoting your gigs with video flyers – a web 2.0 approach to gig promotion

Check out what this band did to promote their latest gig:

I noticed this video while checking out my comments on my MySpace page. The band is called Super Lite Bike, they come from Austin Texas, they write amazing tunes, and they make kick-ass video flyers for their gigs. Found this second promo vid produced for one of their previous shows (it’s not on youtube so I can’t embed it in wordpress). Check it out here.

Yeah, I think it’s an awesome idea too. I sent a mail to Super Lite Bike asking them how they got the idea and how long it took to edit the whole thing, and here’s what Jackson (bass and backings) responded shortly after:

The video game one took us about 4 hours. It was loads of fun. We ended up putting it out 2 days before the show, but we got a great response from it. The effects were all done by Jim Jones, a friend of ours who does the videos. The green screen was a fun shot: I had to run in place for about 2 minutes making weird faces. The guy that gets shot had to stay dead on the couch for about 30 mins.

The idea was really just to find a different way to get our shows out to as many people as possible. We all decided that the usual paper flyers are cool at the venue you’re gonna play at, but putting them up all over town is a waste of time and money.

We can get a video-flyer done for cheap and then just put that up on the net. We get way more people to see it than a normal flyer (about 1200 views for each video). If someone could guarantee us that a 1000 people would see our flyers on the street, we still probably wouldn’t do them. We’re in a more visual world nowadays: people just like to sit at their computers and take note of random crazy stuff. It’s also like giving someone a little gift from us. Our fans get to see something different – they get to see who we are, what we look like and get an idea of our personalities. It creates a much stronger bond with people than them just seeing a poster or a flyer on myspace.

Our good friend, Jose Jones got the idea for the videos. He films and edits (the editing process is usually a day or so). The guy is an up-and-coming director/genius here in Austin. He’s great and we’re just lucky to be good friends with him.

Yup, although traditional gig promotion is still a must in some respects, we are indeed in a visual world now, and interactive content is key to attract the increasing number of geeks on this planet.

Check out Super Lite Bike on MySpace: www.myspace.com/superlitebike

and Jose Jones on MySpace at: www.myspace.com/josejonesfilms

And while I’m on cool promo vids, here’s one from the very talented hip-hop/music 2.0  activist Wax (from www.myspace.com/waxandherbalt). Also check out his youtube channel – the dude has made around 20 handy-cam home-made vids and generated around 800 000 views (rough estimate), probably more.

Mruff.

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The world wide web as the new record label

Here’s a blog post I encountered on the MySpace profile of a very talented folk/americana musician called Hang Jones. He goes on to express his feelings about the music 2.0 phenomenon and how it has affected his career as an artist who has been active on the DIY front these past years.

I really appreciated his simple, sober and truthful approach about this topic, so I sent him a mail and asked if I could post it to Gigbloggy. He humbly agreed.

While you’re reading it, I encourage you to listen to his tracks. Beautiful songwriting:

Hang Jones

MySpace: www.myspace.com/hangjones

Website: www.hangjones.com

There is a lot of hub bub out about the web replacing the traditional music label.  This news has been heralded by many indie artists (myself included) as the savior of our kind.  The web has leveled the playing
field between artist and corporation, empowering us indie musicians to make our own destiny within the music business by connecting directly with our fans.  While this is true, and I am a huge fan of the tools
the web has to offer, I want to stress something to my indie colleagues – the web, while it offers us a way around the traditional record contract, is no more of a savior than that elusive record deal ever was.

Many of us artsy types aren’t so good at the business stuff (or refuse to embrace the mindset as we view it to be too “corporate” or some self-defeating bullshit like that).  We think if we are the best at our craft, and stay true to our artistic vision, some suit will swoop down and rescue us from obscurity.  We know we will eventually have to fight the corporate machine for our creative freedom, but in that model, the worst case scenario is we come out a martyr for our art, which fits nicely within the narrow confounds of our suffering
artist self image.

What I am stressing here is this: do not allow a web marketing strategy to become the new savior of your music career. While a web presence is a crucial element, it is just that, ONE element.  Endlessly adding friends on myspace does not mean these people will show up at your gig.  Spamming every media contacts inbox with press releases ain’t gonna do much but piss people off (and so on and so on).  See, I write today’s little rant because I found myself expecting the same thing from my web strategy as I had of a record deal some years back.  I had a great concept album and a cool viral strategy for the video series, time to start printing the tour tshirts.  While I am proud of how far things have come over the last year, there is a lot of ground to cover, and I know now I was avoiding some fairly tough decisions (as I had in the past) waiting for my digital ship to come in. Life would be a whole lot easier if we could just be more honest
with ourselves from the get go.  Stupid brain.

Reminds me of a Langhorne Slim song:

I’ve always been waiting for something
someone to come pull me through
now I see that it’s all up to me
there ain’t nothin’ no one else can do

Thanks Hang!

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Q: How to make a music video on a tight budget? A: www.99dollarmusicvideos

For a couple of years now, the musician community as a whole witnessed the uncompromising rise of the DIY era. Not so long ago, almost every element in the production, promotion and distribution processes of an album cost non-negligible amounts of money and time. Now all that has changed thanks to advancements in technology and the growth of sharing communities. Music recording and production is probably to most notable example. Needless to say that booking a recording studio for a couple of days is a fortune – depending on the studios it can amount to easily 500 to 1000 bucks for 12 hour sessions. Add some mixing time and your budget is gonna be making you eat pasta for the rest of the year. Now with decent audio knowledge and a reasonable set-up (lets say about $2000 without counting the computer) you can work wonders.On the video front, with the development of Youtube we are seeing an increasing number of bands hosting their music videos.

What astonishes me the most I suppose is that the sentences I just wrote above sound cliche to me, as if I had already read about and witnessed these evolutions many times before – we all know about this DIY phenomenon, but taking a step back helps us realize that, damn, all this stuff is only a couple of years old.
Let’s see. In the music production field, communities started sharing software only about ten years ago, but “a cubase in every home” started maybe no more than 4 to 3 years ago, and now even your grand-ma is probably producing music.
Home-made music videos and youtube uploads of live gigs on the other hand is something much newer (due to digital camera prices plummeting these past years). I remember that, a year and a half ago, I was delighted to see a band have an embedded youtube vid of a gig on their Myspace. It was still something pretty uncommon to see on a band’s profile. Now, only a dozen months later, it’s the exact opposite – bands that don’t have vids fall into the uncommon category.

To stop my blabber-mouthing and to get to the point the point of this post, I introduce to you www.99dollarmusicvideos.com. Founded by Fred Seibert,  ex-director of MTV’s Network Online and founder of Next New Network, it’s a site that encourages any band to send their home-made music videos produced for no more than $99. The idea is for bands and directors to collaborate on something original and creative and to submit it to the site for a weekly feature (subscribe to their Youtube channel here to be notified of the releases. I think there is one every Tuesday and every Thursday).

Here are the simple set of rules bands and directors must follow:

1. It must be made for $99 (or less).
2. It must be shot in one day (24 hours).
3. It must be edited in one day (this doesn’t include rendering, digitizing, or exporting — just the creative part of editing).
4. It must be a collaboration between the band and the filmmaker.

The launch has been a success if we take into account the number of emails flooding their gmail account, and they already have 6 videos scheduled (some of which who were probably planned before the launch) but this does little to surprise me seeing how $99′s launch was orchestrated.

Verizon is also in the picture – probably sponsored the servers and the website’s creation in exchange to capitalizing on up and coming bands or something (oh, and also to promote their FiOS cable connection:-). They have  been very active these past years integrating the music scene. They have their successful V Cast digital music store with whom they promote monthly subscriptions for phones and computers to downloaded unlimited music. Last year they gave a bus fully loaded of audio equipment to Timbaland so he could roam around the US in search for the next big hit. They partnered with many top selling artists such as Timberlake, Shakira, Prince, Madonna, AC/DC etc. for album and concert promotion deals.

Whatever the reasons and  the means behind $99, I’m happy to see such a website launch and am planning on following-up on their growth and activity. Even thinking of producing a $99 video of one of my tunes. I don’t have a band at the moment, nor have I even opened up my Nuendo these past months, but I do got a dozen completely produced tracks I would love to visually illustrate, even if I don’t count on extensively promoting myself with it.

What I particularly like about the idea is that it doesn’t really help you do anything (well $99 does have a creative team that will produce one video a week) yet only the concept that promotes the idea that it is possible to produce a music video for les than 100 bucks, and that people can do it, is enough to get people to do it. Because of that, $99 has great potential (this kind of makes me think of Songpull.com’s concept – it’s just a website that encourage musicians to write a song in less than a month, get together for a house-concert and record the show, and it works).

Here’s the making-of of the very first $99 video of the folk Brooklyn-based band, La Strada:

MTV 2.0?

mruff.

Side-note: I think $99 probably would benefit going down the social network route. Done tactfully, a classified-ad site/social network for bands and film-makers could have the potential of creating a big niche in no time. A penny for your thoughts?

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