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!While a whole lot of hype is building around The Search for the Next Great American Band, a report from the Fox [...]
I was talking with a musician the other day about why it’s so hard to find places to play lately. We’re in another real estate surge nationwide, which means that all the cheap spaces and run-down buildings that are great for rock and jazz venues can suddenly fetch double or triple their current leases upon [...]
Nekesa Mumbi Moody chronicles a common complaint, especially among high-ranking women in the music business:
If you don’t look better than you sound, the recording industry doesn’t want you.
And it’s true. Armchair quarterbacks are already noting that Melinda Doolittle and LaKisha Jones both got bumped from American Idol because they don’t “look” like a superstar, whatever [...]
How many ways can you possibly pitch a talent competition to a television executive? According to the producers of America’s Hot Musician, a series airing on the Oxygen Network this spring, FremantleMedia and 19Entertainment are just copying the idea they came up with a few years ago.
The thing is, there have been plenty of [...]
American Idol’s producers have already told us how they’re going to spending the fall looking for “The Next Great American Band.”
What they didn’t tell us was just how bizarre this contest is shaping up to be.
According to this report from MeeVee, there will be the customary audition rounds, followed by competition among ten semi-finalists and [...]
The New York Times Magazine looks at the various ways that musicians connect with fans in order to make a living. Although the carrot of super-stardom still dangles (the article mentions that Justin and Beyonce are creatures of and for the mass market), the Times reveals that even major label acts still need to connect [...]
As subscribers to our newsletter learned earlier this afternoon, I’ve heard plenty of comments from newer readers about challenges regarding the price and/or overseas shipping of our music career success books.
Therefore, I’m trying another experiment. I’ve just loaded a bundle of all four of our books in e-book form into our online store. And, to [...]
19 Entertainment wants us to stay glued to our screens all summer as they search for the Next Great American Band. Looks like the Idol format, but with bands instead of solo performers. The biggest questions I have right now… Will they be coming to my town? Will they help me party it down? More [...]
It’s not the first time we’ve covered the issue here, but amidst the horror story that has become the chart of overall music sales, there’s a quiet confidence among the owners of America’s finest record stores. The Columbia Free Times devotes an exceptional amount of space to the truth that a record store owner who [...]
CNN catches up with Michael Penn on the occasion of his “best of” collection’s release — which is, in itself, a curious story of how corporate consolidation can actually benefit the kinds of “dropped” major label acts I wrote about in Grow Your Band’s Audience.
Even more interesting, from a purely artistic standpoint, is Penn’s desire [...]
