100 Resources for DIY Musicians

Greg Rollett of Gen-Y Rock Stars and Label 2.0 sent me an email this morning letting me know that he had just published a new report called 100 Resources for DIY Musicians, and that he had been kind enough to include Creative Deconstruction as one of those resources.

The report is a follow-up to last year’s much downloaded ’100 Social Media Resources for Musicians.’ Greg has expanded the focus a bit to include the full range of platforms, services and information sources that an independent band can utilize to build their careers.

I spent some time with the report this afternoon and from what I’ve gotten through so far it looks to be a pretty complete list. The resources Greg has included range from the obvious (hopefully, anyway) – MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, CDBaby etc. – to the more advanced such as tools for email marketing, online collaboration, building online communities and mobile apps. I found services that I hadn’t come across before, like WishList which allows you to turn your WordPress site into a membership community.

New artists or bands that have yet to fully explore the range of online options that are available to them will benefit from spending some time with ’100 Resources.’ It can take a lot of time to research the tools your band should be using – time better spent actually writing, performing and promoting your music. Greg has done the hard work of sifting through the multitude of different sites and services and narrowed it down to a few solid options in about 16 categories.

My Picks

I’ve selected a few notable resources from the report that I strongly suggest you check out:

1. Indaba Music – Very cool site that allows musicians to collaborate and make music, remix it and showcase the finished product. This has the potential to open up great possibilities for producing music with other artists at a distance.

2. TubeMogul – It’s sort of like a beefed up ArtistData or Ping.fm, but for videos. When you upload your videos TubeMogul will aggregate them to all the important places, like YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, etc.

3. Mobile Roadie – Allows bands to create custom iPhone with social and mulit-media content.

4. Live Music Machine - This service gives bands a widget that can be placed just about anywhere online that allows fans and venues to book them with a single click. Also includes a full tour schedule, availability calender and a map of the different stops on the band’s tour. I’ve been working with Live Music Machine for a few months now and I can tell you that this tool has the potential to change the way bands are booked.

5. Plugo.la – Run by a fellow Chicagoan named Erik Peterson, Plugo.la is a music community and marketplace with a cool twist. It allows fans to ‘plug’ their favorite tracks and earn affiliate fees when those tracks are sold.

You can download the full report here. You have to sign up, but it’s free. If you do, you can find the blurb on Creative Deconstruction on page 15.

What do you think of the report? Is it helpful to you, or do you feel like you knew all this stuff already? Let me know in the comments.

This piece originally appeared as a guest post at Audiolife.com.

Social media has brought us into an age where consumers, not companies, determine the market’s perception of brands. This can be frightening for those who are accustomed to doing business at arm’s length with the masses. But there are huge opportunities for those of us who don’t know any better.

Consumer driven marketing is one of the most powerful tools out there today, whether you’re a billion dollar corporation or a five-piece band. Each artist has multiple fans (hopefully.) It’s only logical that your fans would be capable of spreading the word about your music much farther than you can by yourself. Social media provides the tools to harness that word-of-mouth promotion.

The key is to stay involved by managing fan experiences. The old way was to try and shape consumer perception of brands through large-scale marketing. In other words, trying to attack entire demographics at a time. That takes money, and a whole lot of it. Most independent bands have to scrape up the cash to fill the gas tank of their tour van, let alone spend thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign.

Mass perception is expensive to effect, but every band can work to make sure that each fan they touch has a memorable experience. These experiences are what fuel fan-driven marketing – enough positive experiences and you have the chance to go viral. Too many negative experiences (or a single high-profile one) and you might find your band name on the Twitter trending topics list – and not in a good way.

Managing Fan Experiences

There are two simple ways to begin creating positive, memorable fan experiences. The first is to learn how to listen. Pay attention to what people are saying about you or your band – both to you directly and when you aren’t around. Set up Google Alerts and TweetBeeps for your band name and read each one. Watch for patterns. If you notice a significant number of people remarking about how rude you come across at your shows it may be time take a hard look at how you’re acting on and off stage.

That’s number two – learn to respond and adapt. Criticism is never fun, but it is a valuable resource. It exposes weak spots and gives you the opportunity to work them out. If you come across a fan who has had a negative experience, reach out. Let them know that they’re a valuable part of your community and turn it into an authentic interaction. Chances are the fan will walk away from that experience with a much higher level of respect for you as an artist and as a person.

If you can learn to harness the power of fan-driven marketing your band will be much better equipped to generate lasting buzz and build your fan base through word of mouth and social media referrals. Use the tools at your disposal to ensure that your fans are getting everything they need to become effective ambassadors for your music.

A goal is only as good as the strategy put in place to reach it. In my previous post I talked about Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans concept, and expanded it a bit to include the three other groups that make up an artist’s fan base: active, passive and potential fans.

This model may not be perfect, but I think defining these sub-groups is helpful because it allows an artist to have a different approach for each different kind of fan.

I’ve put together a series of posts with some practical tips intended to get you started in finding fans and moving them up through the pyramid. The goal of course is to cultivate as many true fans as possible so that you can eventually quite that day job (if you haven’t already) and develop a self-sustaining career in music. This first post deals with finding and evangelizing potential fans.

This series is just intended to get you started and is by no means comprehensive. Hopefully you’ll have some additional ideas – please feel free to share them in the comments section.

Start Local

The hardest part of building a fan base is often finding an audience in the first place. The best place to start looking is in your hometown. You don’t have to travel, which means you have little to no expenses. You probably have a decent idea of where bands play and what kinds of bands play there.

You also have the added benefit of a community that wants to get behind you. Everybody wants their city to have a thriving music scene. Sure, if you live in New York or LA you might find that nobody cares whether your band lives or dies. But in the rest of the country most people want to support their local bands.

Here in Chicago I met recently with Mike Sosin who manages a talented local artist named Dick Prall. We spent much of that meeting talking about ways we could have a positive effect on the local scene. I can think of so many others – Erik Peterson of Plugo.la, for example. Supporting local artists is his business. There are people in your community who want you to succeed. Find them and you will have an incredible resource at your disposal.

If you can get to the point where you can consistently sell 300 tickets in your city then chances are you’ve got a strong enough base to begin exploring the surrounding region. Find bands that are selling those same 300 tickets in neighboring cities and ask them to gig swap. You open for them in their city, they open for you in your city. You expand your reach and build your network in the process.

Utilize Online Tools

Beyond conquering your local scene you also have access to the entire world online. The internet has made it easier than ever to target the potential fans at the bottom of the pyramid. People wear their musical tastes like a badge of honor online. If you find people who listen to music similar to your own you’ve got a great place to start making inroads.

Search Twitter, join relevant Facebook groups. Set up Google alerts  and TweetBeeps for not only your band name but the names of your influences as well. Figure out where these people are and go after them. Send them free tracks and if enough respond from one particular place, make sure you can set up a show nearby to invite them to.

Martin Atkins, author of Tour:Smart, calls this ‘pouring gasoline on sparks.’ Find out where the sparks are and begin penetrating that city, or that region until you’ve turned those sparks into a bonfire.

Live Performance is Key

Notice that both of these examples revolve around live performances. Yes, you can distribute your music online and acquire new listeners and potential fans that way. And you should – maybe it will cause a few sparks to spring up in unexpected places. But the live performance is where the connection happens. Potential fans become actual fans at the show.

Where these tips helpful? As I said in the beginning this post is in no way designed to be comprehensive. It’s still very much a work in progress. What have you been doing to find and evangelize new fans? What has worked, and what hasn’t? Share the wealth in the comments section – you never know who might benefit.

Modest Mouse recently released an album comprised of 7 previously released singles

The way listeners enjoy music has changed drastically in the past ten years. Technology has completely reshaped the marketplace through file sharing, single track downloads, online music streaming, etc. Yet, the way that music is compiled, released and marketed has remained largely the same.

Most artists still spend months and years producing full albums, pouring the majority of whatever marketing budget they have into a single event – the album’s release date. Despite this, most listeners will only download two or three songs. After that, they have another two years to wait for new material.

In an increasingly competitive market where fan engagement is at a premium, artists can’t afford to continue following this model. Modern music marketing is about the artist-fan relationship. Along with live performances, new music releases should be considered the backbone of this relationship, not simply a product to drive revenue or attendance.

In a recent report on the music industry by the Forrester Research Group, author Mark Mulligan argues that to spend the time and resources releasing full-length albums only serves to “put speed bumps in the continual artist-fan relationship.” Instead, he encourages artists to “think outside of the confines of the album and maintain steady, continual streams of creative output.” The report has a lot more to say about releasing music, some that I agree with and some I don’t. I cover the full report here. But I think that Mulligan is spot on in what he says here. It’s what fans want, and it can pay big dividends for the artist.

Releasing smaller amounts of music more frequently will keep fans engaged with an artist much more effectively than larger batches every year or two. Not only will that artist’s music stay in listeners’ playlists longer, it also gives those listeners a reason to check in more often to see what’s new. That’s huge from a marketing perspective – it’s a lot more effective to promote your products and services to a customer that seeks you out than one that you go out and find yourself.

This “continual stream of creative output” doesn’t have to be limited to new music, although I do believe that music should remain the primary source of content. Music videos and merchandise are obvious options, but other content could include behind the scenes footage, individual files track files for remixing, interviews, mobile apps, even games. Allow fans to submit their own content and handpick the best for official release. Anything that you can think of to give fans new ways of interacting with your music is fair game.

Adopting this type of release strategy doesn’t mean you have to toss out the album format entirely. For all the ‘Album is Dead!’ headlines there is still quite a bit of life left in the full-length as a creative construct.

Still, there are many non-traditional ways to put together an album. Once you’ve released seven or eight individual tracks, there’s no reason why you can’t compile them along with a few unreleased songs and put it out as an album. Design special-edition packaging and market it as a collector’s edition. We’ve already been seeing a move in this direction from bands like Modest Mouse who recently released seven vinyl singles before gathering them into a larger full length album. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins just anounced plans to take that much further.

The main takeaway here should be never to allow what has ‘always been done’ to prevent you as an artist from doing something better. The changing market has opened up incredible opportunities to increase listener engagement. Take a hard look at your current release strategy – does it serve that goal? If it doesn’t it’s likely time to rethink your approach.

Originally published at Audiolife.com.

Time for our recap of what went on in the music industry this week. Make sure to check out anything you might have missed and leave your comments. Of course our coverage of music news is by no means exhaustive, so if you know something we don’t submit a story.

Most Popular:

• Imogen Heap shows us that DIY pays off – and takes a lot of work – Taking an objective look at what some are calling the ‘new music business model.’
• What the music industry and the credit crisis have in common – Greed is greed.

This Week:

• What makes a great live performance? – Guest post by Andrew McMillen.
• New Music Releases: August 18th 2009 – New music by Temper Trap, Cave Singers, and Choir of Young Believers.
• What will it take to unite artist, industry and fan? – An editorial on the future of the music business.
• Imogen Heap update, plus full streaming of new album – Check out free streaming of Imogen’s new album Ellipse.

Other News:

• MySpace buys iLike for $20 million
• iTunes captures 25% of all music sales, 69% of downloads

Music Video Picks:

No new videos this week. Check out the archives.

This Week in Music History:

1963 - Stevie Wonder became the first artist ever to score a US No.1 album and single in the same week. Wonder was at No.1 on the album chart with ‘Little Stevie Wonder / The 12 Year Old Genius’ and had the No.1 single ‘Fingertips part 2′. This was also the first ever live recording to make No.1. (This Day in Music.com)

A few days ago Heap posted an update on Twitter linking to her website where she has her new album Ellipse streaming in its entirety. The record doesn’t officially drop until August 25th in the US.

Heap’s new work is full of her trademark quirky sentimentality. Her breathy, incomparable voice provides an anchor throughout the album’s different textures.  Ellipse begins with the bubbly, synthesized ‘First Train Home.’ In ‘Earth,’ Imogen’s multiplied vocals call to mind an assembly line of robots singing a cappella. ‘Swoon’ injects a bit of energy and and attitude into the middle of the record, giving way to an almost anthemic chorus. The breezy, sentimental ‘Between Sheets,’ and the manic ‘Aha’ finally lead the listener to the album’s dreamy anti-climax ‘Half Life.’

You can listen to the complete album for yourself below. Let me know what you think. Actually, you can feel free to let her know what you think.

It will be interesting to see the kind of buzz (and sales) that this full-album preview generates once the album is available for purchase. It has the potential to be pretty powerful. Listeners have made it clear that they like to try before they buy, and more  than 900,000 fans now have the opportunity to experience her new tracks before they hit stores. Remember when artists had to rely on radio for that kind of exposure?

Heap has also made it very easy for the stream to be shared by offering code for website owners to embed Ellipse with no strings attached. That means that with no additional cost or effort to herself and her team Heap has allowed the larger online community to promote her work on their sites. And why wouldn’t we bloggers take her up on it? She’s given us something that goes beyond self-promotion and actually adds value to our readers’ experience. Without the ability to embed Ellipse in this post I would have probably just retweeted the link to the stream and called it a day.

All hype aside, I think this is a nice move that is consistent with Heap’s marketing strategy up to this point. Not every act is going to be able to reproduce what Heap has done in the promotion of Ellipse, (nor should they try – come up with your own strategy!) But there are a lot of good lessons to be learned.

What are you doing to promote your music? How are you using social media and the web to engage with fans? Do you have the help of a label or are you doing it on your own? Let me know – it’s easy to get wrapped up in the buzz surrounding high profile acts but I’m interested in stories about artists at all levels.

Also check out last week’s post Imogen Heap shows us that DIY pays off – and takes a lot of work.

Photo by kk+

Spend enough time online and you might begin to suspect that some media folks want you to think that the DIY approach will somehow be less work than then a traditional career in music. Strange, given that the term itself implies the opposite. ‘DIY’ does, after all, stand for ‘Do It Yourself.’ More rewarding? Less artistically limiting? More fun? Yes, yes, and probably. But less work? No.

Better does not always equal easier. Creating quality music and running a business are both challenging tasks on their own. Put them together and you’ve got your work cut out for you. The artist/fan relationship is the lynch-pin in today’s music marketplace and that relationship also takes a lot of time and energy to maintain, let alone grow. As much as you might want it to be ‘all about the music’ there are many other responsibilities vying for your attention. One artist who has learned this lesson – and who has experienced its sacrifices and rewards – is Imogen Heap.

An article called The New Music Business Model: Imogen Heap has been getting a lot of attention lately. Any article with a headline like ‘The New Music Business Model’ is likely to get a lot of attention these days, but this one is worth reading. The author, Colette Weintraub of Deep Dive Marketing, describes the sometimes novel ways Heap utilized technology and fan engagement in the making and marketing of her upcoming album Ellipse.

Imogen Heap wasn’t starting at square one when she began promoting Ellipse – she already had a committed fan base thanks to a host of films and TV shows featuring her music. But with Ellipse Heap has expanded her reach exponentially, and has truly done the bulk of the work herself. She refinanced her house to fund recording, she communicates constantly with her fans, even crowd-sourcing song titles and album artwork, etc.

She does SO much, in fact, that it’s hard to see how she has any time left to create music.

I didn’t really think of it that way until I read a recent Lefsetz post about his reaction to the Weintraub article. Here it is:

I uncovered the essay … delineating everything Imogen had done to sell her new album.

And my first reaction was, is it worth it?

Now the activities took two years to unfold.  But suddenly, you’re no longer a musician, but a personality.  And so much of what Imogen was doing was generating no revenue.  It was all leading up to a single sales event, the ultimate release of an album.  Huh?

He goes on:

Do you have to be a newfangled self-marketer to have success in today’s world?  If that’s what it takes, if you’ve got to do everything Imogen did, how many will say no?  What about practicing, gigging, getting good? … Just about everything Imogen has done here has nothing to do with music … There’s got to be a better way to reach fans.

It was refreshing to see a different perspective on the ‘New Music Business Model’ buzz, and it got me thinking about something I had seen from Heap herself a few days before the Lefsetz post. In responding to one of her followers on Twitter, Heap indicated that she was feeling the strain the process was putting on her. The DIY model that she had embraced was leaving precious little time for what she loves most: music. You can read her updates in the screenshots below.

Building a successful career in music on your own terms and with your own two hands is a difficult task, more akin to the life of an entrepreneur than to the iconic lifestyle of a rockstar. You’re the CEO, the content creator and PR coordinator all rolled into one overworked and (usually very) underpaid package. It’s not for everybody. Not everyone is going to enjoy that kind of lifestyle, and let’s not kid ourselves – not everyone is cut out for it.

I appreciate all of the excitement Imogen Heap’s story has been generating recently, and I hope that her new album launches to enormous returns. It’s great to have such a compelling example of DIY success. Those who do choose to go for it would be wise to study her experiences.

That, and after following Imogen for while now on Twitter and in the media I can’t help but root for her. I suppose that means that what she’s been doing for the past two years is working.

Photo by Jeremy Cowart.

The new real-time media culture has brought with it many incredible opportunities, but when you take a closer look it quickly reveals itself to be a double-edged sword.

Platforms like Twitter make it possible to stay frighteningly up-to-date on what’s going on in the world, whether it’s the death of a pop legend or a civil uprising across the world. The same goes for trends in music. If a band or a sound gets big, it’s likely to get big fast.

Faster is not always better, though. In fact, when a band comes out of nowhere and makes a big splash it can create unrealistic expectations, or worse, consumer fatigue. So, while generating buzz may be easier than ever, it may do more harm than good.

Too much of this business (and business in general) is built on promising consumers the world and giving them mediocrity. It’s much better to under-promise and over-deliver. How many times have you un-followed an artist on Twitter after the fifteenth time they tweet “Check out my awesome new record! It will blow your mind!” No, it won’t. How do I know this? If it was really going to blow my mind you wouldn’t have to warn me before hand. Somebody else – someone whose mind your record had already blown – would be telling me all about it instead.

Word of mouth used to take months or even years to spread. Now, I can send an update to hundreds or thousands of people all at once telling them how much I like the new Foreign Born record, or how much I’ve been listening to Phoenix. That update joins with a larger stream of conversations around those bands and the resulting buzz can be remarkable. That’s real-time, and it’s nearly impossible to manage effectively.

Yet, the faster word spreads the faster it risks losing its power. Even worse, what once was a lot of positive hype can quickly become a stigma. As Lefsetz recently put it:

“The mantra of the Internet age is slow and steady. [Its] the dreaded Pitchfork Syndrome. The site makes you, you sell product and tour to many, then the site says your next album is not as good and you’re OVER! Be careful what you wish for.”

So take your time. Build your fan base through honest, humble interactions and hard work. PR is good, and certainly don’t stop marketing your music. But remember that you’re an artist first. Buzz will come and go. The majority of your energy should be poured into crafting great music that gives your listeners something to tell their friends about. That is the only way to achieve lasting success.

Free markets are cyclical. Economic trends will start out slow, pick up speed, boom, plateau, BUST. Take our current recession – three years ago even someone like me could afford a McMansion and a four car garage (boom,) and now we’re losing sixty-thousand jobs a month (bust.) The same can cycles can be found in the cost of goods and services.

Apply this principle to the cost of music and you end up with what Seth Godin has coined “the new free.” Here’s what he writes in a recent post to his marketing blog:

Free online has two distinct elements. Breakthrough free, like the first free ebook or the first free email service, and sample-this free, which decreases the cost of trial and lowers boundaries of the spread of an idea.

As the market for free gets more crowded, we’ll see more and more people promoting their free products, stuff that people used to have pay for. A complete shift from ‘you will pay’ to ‘it is free’ to  ‘I will pay for ads to alert you it’s free’ to ultimately, ‘I will pay you to try it’.

Mr. Godin is not a prophet – this cycle has already begun to run it’s course in the music industry. In fact, as we reported several weeks ago, at least one band has reached what Godin might call the final stage of free. The industry should have seen this coming a long time ago when CD’s began climbing higher and higher in price until they became downright ridiculous. A bust was always imminent.

Where does this leave musicians?

I’ve been telling people to give their music away for a while now, and I don’t plan on stopping. Regardless of where the market cycle is taking us most indies don’t have the resources to stand alone as the sole band still charging for their recorded music. If you don’t give your music away you won’t find the audience you need to fill venues and build a solvent career.

On the other hand, more progress needs to be made in the search for ways to add value to recorded music. We really can’t get to the point where everybody is pulling an Officer Roseland and paying fans to download – where would those resources come from?

I can tell you right now that the first place bands should be looking as they evaluate how to elevate their music above the din of a saturated market is the quality of their songs. It sounds simple, but in the social-media driven world we live in it can be easy to focus all of our energy on marketing and PR and forget about quality all together. Are your songs really all that good? Are they better than the thousands of other songs freely available to the same listeners you are trying to hook? That may sound harsh, but it’s what it will take now that you can’t price your music any cheaper.