Archive for October 2005

Touring = Revenue

Oct 10th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Editorial

Welcome to spinme.com, where we help working musicians make more money making music. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or our weekly newsletter. Thanks for visiting!As usual, Lefsetz speaks only truth. “The ship is leaking at the bottom” is one great quote, plus the refrain that my [...]



Covers

Oct 10th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Recording

Gerd has picked up on an interesting thread… Using the coversproject database as your jumping-off point, you cover a song by someone. Then, someone’s got to cover one of your songs. And so on.
As hard as you work on writing your own songs, never underestimate the power you can bring to breathing a different kind [...]



Pale Beneath the Blue is on FIRE, y’all*.

Oct 10th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Inspiration

For everybody that gripes at me about how long it takes to make a recording for an EP or for a full length, check out the session log that Pale Beneath the Blue racked up this weekend. That’s thirteen songs tracked — which shows you what you can accomplish when you put a lot of [...]



The New Tastemakers

Oct 7th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Growing Your Audience

Web sites like Pitchfork, Tiny Mix Tapes, and cokemachineglow have made being a passive indie fan that much easier.

Track these topics: music+business

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Are your street teams doing more harm than good?

Oct 6th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Growing Your Audience

I’m almost ready to post the recording of our first Street Team 101 call to the members area, but I want to reiterate something I mentioned on the call:
A lot of folks are using the term “street team” to mean lots of different things. I use the term to describe a group of volunteers that [...]



INXS Booking Agency (and slick middlemen)

Oct 6th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Booking More Gigs

All that posting about Rock Star: INXS has given some folks the impression that my company is the booking agency for INXS.
Uh, no. Just a fan. You can stop e-mailing me now.
But you can find their current itinerary at Pollstar and you can contact their business office by e-mail for information about booking corporate events.
This [...]



Your Competition IS The Real World

Oct 6th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Growing Your Audience

We talk a lot on our member conference calls about the things that you’ve got to do to build an audience big enough to make financial sense for talent buyers to book your band. Remember, there’s no longer (in 99% of places) any such thing as “loyalty to the scene.” Talent buyers and club owners [...]



The Shift

Oct 6th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Editorial

Mike Matney realizes he’s buying most of his music in digital form. So do I. So are lots of folks, especially the kind of tastemakers that can spread the word about your songs.
So, why are so many independent musicians so hung up on recording and releasing full albums, when a string of singles can still [...]



Could Your CD Be the Next “Da Vinci Code?”

Oct 6th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: Editorial

Bob Baker has unleashed even more of his most outrageous music marketing ideas, and one strikes me as having tremendous potential for the right artist.
Have you noticed the thread in popular culture right now that audiences love looking for clues? Look at how folks obsess over the numbers and the endgame scenarios in Lost. Sci-Fi [...]



New Fiona Apple — Was it a triumph of buzz over content? And does that even matter?

Oct 6th, 2005 | By Joe Taylor Jr. | Category: News

The new Fiona Apple record is finally hitting the streets after six years! As we’ve discussed here before, it probably wouldn’t even have seen the light of day without significant support from her audience, even though many of the parties involved are downplaying that to save face.
So here’s an interesting question — does rock criticism [...]