Joe Taylor Jr. advises musicians that want to book more gigs...
Over the years, I’ve had plenty of arguments with musicians and with music management professionals about the importance of maintaining a website under your own domain. Their responses often included: * 1996: I don’t need my own domain. AOL gives me free web page hosting, and I’ll always have my AOL account! * 1998: I [...]
I’ve been teaching some workshops on social media lately, and one of the questions that comes up very often involves how to keep Twitter and Facebook status updates from taking over your life. In the new edition of Grow Your Band’s Audience, I updated my advice about staying accessible and available. To stay focused on [...]
The alarm clock woke me up with the news that a senior News Corporation executive hinted about the possible closure of MySpace within “quarters, not years.” Even if MySpace manages to avoid a total shutdown, independent musicians should worry whenever company executives change the focus of a service from “community” to “celebrities.” For years, I’ve [...]
Lots of friends and colleagues from abroad have hyped up Spotify to me, and I don’t doubt that it’s an awesome service. As we hear more about Spotify, especially involving mobile apps and in-car services, I fear we might be getting ahead of ourselves. Specifically, I worry that users’ fervor for the system overlooks the [...]
Scott Andrew and Bill Wilson are riffing on some tools that we could use in the independent music community to get more meaningful artist promotion work done. I like Scott’s idea of automating gig swaps — the kinds of things that used to be organized by booking agents and by clever managers could easily be [...]
Mark Cuban notes in an e-mail to Nancy Baym that if YouTube had sprouted up two or three years earlier, the RIAA would have toasted them for s’mores in a heartbeat. (Those are my words, not his, because it’s getting close to dinner time on the east coast.) If YouTube is considered Web 2.0, let [...]
While technology lets you do some amazing things on stage, the power of your songs can sometimes be muted when your audience focuses too much on the gimmick. It doesn’t sound like this is the case for Pamela Z and other attendees at the Edgetone Music Summit, profiled on Wired News this morning. What little [...]
