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!I would love to be a fly on the wall when Scott wakes up and sees that Kevin Kelly has linked to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
While Nancy at Online Fandom covered this nearly a month ago, the guys at 37signals have a pretty thorough recap of the tremendous marketing campaign behind the new Nine Inch Nails record. It’s a great example of the kinds of things you can do to get your fans really excited about something while allowing them [...]
UPDATE 4.9.07: Some experienced buskers brainstorm about ways Joshua could have upped his collections that morning — some really great ideas!
For anyone who’s ever made more money from subway busking than from a club gig, here’s a fascinating experiment from the Washington Post. To see if average working Americans would make time in their [...]
Merlin Mann offers three really insightful guests on The Merlin Show:
The last week or so of The Merlin Show has featured three fun interviews with independent musicians — talking about Macs, handling email, and figuring out how to get paid. Stop by for visits with John Roderick, Chris Wetherell, and John Vanderslice
Definitely note that [...]
You might not know the name Dick Dale, but I guarantee you’ve heard his music if you’ve lived in the U.S.A. for more than, say, a week. And he’s got some compelling instructions for young musicians in this short video, like:
“Johnny Cash sold records right out of the trunk of his car…”
[Thanks, Derek, Scott, and [...]
Wired editor Chris Anderson finds music biz veteran Bob Lefsetz a little exasperating, but points out yesterday’s post about sweat equity among independent musicians. Labels don’t understand the economics of online music, because there’s not much in it to support their current overhead costs.
To make the accounting work, major labels need acts that can [...]
Nancy’s got some great coverage of artists who are discovering that they’ve got to migrate their audience away from MySpace onto their own websites so they can really start to benefit from their relationships with fans. Here’s one funny story of an artist who cloned his whole MySpace page on his personal domain, and here’s [...]
