Growing Your Audience

How Much Do Musicians Really Make from Record Deals?

Growing Your Audience

After yesterday’s mailbag entry on royalties, our friend Ken Muse pointed me to a great breakdown of the current record deal math done by Cord Jefferson at The Root. By the math in the article, the average “signed” musician makes $23.40 for every $1,000 of revenue earned by the label. Think about it in terms [...]

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“Help, I Need to Buy $1,200 Jonas Brothers Tickets”

Growing Your Audience

Here’s a coda to last week’s kindie rock story: Salon contributor Kenneth Rapoza flashes back to his Bon Jovi youth and wonders how cool it would be to treat his kids to VIP tickets and a meet-and-greet at a Jonas Brothers concert, until his wife sees the $1,200 per person price tag. Regardless of what [...]

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Did the Live Concert Business Push Jane Wiedlin Off That Hill?

Growing Your Audience

Lori and I just came back from a family vacation at the Jersey Shore. We snuck away for a night to Atlantic City, and we’re either the worst gamblers or the best gamblers ever, because we ended up spending about four hours at the Borgata with $10 more than we had when we entered. (I [...]

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Keep Your Eye on the Goose

Growing Your Audience

Now I know the music business has turned upside down, since I just learned about an OK Go video from a science magazine. (I probably would have been on this way sooner, but I’ve been on vacation!) Discover Magazine’s blog calls out the new video for “End Love,” and despite the time-lapse wizardry, it’s what [...]

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Climbing Aboard a Sinking Ship

Growing Your Audience

Run into any burning buildings lately, even though you’re not a firefighter? So why are you so worried about getting your song on the radio, getting your band signed, winning that battle of the bands? Every week, I get e-mail that asks how emerging musicians can accomplish any or all of those tasks. Any one [...]

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Kindie Rock

Growing Your Audience

Have we all been using “Kindie Rock” to describe hip records for families for a while now, or is the term bubbling up from Anne Hart’s great blurb about the genre in the Savannah Morning News? Like most overnight sensations, kindie rock took decades to come together. One of my jobs when I was at [...]

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NACA Schools Block-Booking Live Music

Booking More Gigs

Every time I write about booking shows on college campuses, I get two kinds of e-mail. One burst of e-mail comes from artists who are so frustrated about how difficult it is to nail down dates through college activities boards, especially at schools who belong to the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA). The other [...]

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Forbes: Jill Sobule Raised More Than Public Enemy

Growing Your Audience

Katie Evans uses her entertainment column in Forbes to explore some of the ways that bands raise money from fans beyond traditional CD sales. (And, as I’ve been writing about for the last ten years, CD sales are just about the last thing you want to rely on as an artist to keep your bills [...]

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The World Can’t Go On Without CBGB’s Bathroom

Growing Your Audience

If you saw any of the live seminars I’ve staged in the last decade, you’ve probably seen me reference CBGB’s bathroom as everything great about rock and roll–and everything wrong with live performance venues. Long before YouTube comments, there was CBGB’s bathroom. As a visitor, it was your duty to leave more than just the [...]

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Don’t Underestimate the Power of an Audience

Editorial

It seems like the music journalism community has decided that this is the week they can finally pile on Taylor Swift. In the past 36 hours, I’ve read headlines about her “career-ending” Grammy performance, bloggers and columnists have called for her to hand back the statues (not just the one that broke) or retire altogether [...]

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