Another great post from Seth Godin, this time on the Beatles’ rise to megastardom:
At the beginning, they were playing two or three clubs a day, dives, making a few pounds if they were lucky. Not for a month or two, but for years and years.
One of the most misunderstood and misused phrases in marketing (okay, [...]

…at least your tour van didn’t spontaneously combust on the road.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Over the weekend I saw a post on Craiglist by a guy offering to sell databases of music press contacts for between $50-$75 a pop. Not a bad way to make some cash I suppose, but with a little bit of work, indie musicians can probably create their own contact list in a weekend or [...]

I plucked this bit from the website of a guy I sorta-kinda know, attributed to another guy I sorta-kinda know: “It’s not about luck. It’s about managing risk, so in the end it looks like luck.”
Q: How do you convince someone to do something for you?
A: You manage the risk. In fact, you take as [...]

It’s tax time in the US, which means it’s also the season for what I call the “$400 Myth” to start circulating in musician circles.
Here’s the myth as I hear it goes like this: “If I made less than $400 last year, I don’t have to report it on my taxes.”
Wrong. You are required to [...]

Here’s a cool article on Brit Daniels and his band Spoon, and his workman-like approach to music:
The singer-guitarist-songwriter says his years intently listening to radio hits were like “extensive research.” Knowing from the beginning that he cared most about music, he set out with realistic, step-by-step ambitions. Now, he even treats the studio like an [...]

Like its pop counterpart American Idol, the show Nashville Star has failed to produce country superstars as first expected. Second season winner Brad Cotter was dropped from his label after his post-NS release only sold 128,000 copies. (Is it me, or is a reality show maybe not the best way to build a lasting music [...]

Coolfer points out that the new music business still needs money to function, and references two articles about the unseen overhead of promoting a single in the age of MP3s and MySpace.
Cheap technology and internet may have eliminated some of the barriers to getting your music distributed to potential fans. Getting people to actually notice [...]

In the mid-90s producer/engineer Evan Brubaker founded Cake Records as a boutique label, producing and collaborating on records by artists such as Holly Figueroa and Kym Tuvim. Since then, Cake has undergone a dramatic growth spurt, embracing a wide range of musical genres, securing national distribution and garnering lots of press interest as the Little [...]

I was flipping through the online version of entrepreneur Bruce Judson’s book Go It Alone! and came across an interesting concept: “relentless repeatability.” In a nutshell, Judson beleives the ability to reduce your activities into a process you can refine and easily replicate is a key to success.
I think this is particularly relevant to performing [...]