For the past hundred years, the conventional wisdom about marketing your music has been about building a brand and sticking to it. Think about some of the classic stars of the last century: Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Elvis Presley. It’s tough to see them outside the context of the carefully crafted personas we now find [...]
I just came back from running an errand at the Plaza at King of Prussia. The whole mall is crawling with girls lined up to catch a glimpse of Robert Pattinson from the movie Twilight. 300 fans lined up in some crappy weather this morning to buy $30 shirts and wristbands for a meet-and-greet event. [...]
Is your audience hyperconnected? Are you?
One of my lightbulb moments happened a few years ago when I was still booking gigs for bands. A club owner I had a great relationship with wanted to know more about one of my new clients. MySpace was just emerging, and hadn’t really impressed a whole lot of talent [...]
I would love to be a fly on the wall when Scott wakes up and sees that Kevin Kelly has linked to him.
OMFGLMAOBBQ!!1!!11eleventy.
Seriously, though, it does seem that the research Kevin’s doing for his new book is touching on an area that readers of this site have been struggling with for a while. Since 1999, [...]
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 [...]
Jon: haha coincidentia ly i am also going to california in july and was very skeptical about bringing my guitar. im still nervous, but thanks a lot for the tips.
One guy: CD baby said they had digitally distributed my music to 14 digital retailers but after a year I searched each one and came up short on 4 accounts! They sent me emails saying 'sorr...
Ptack: After reading all these articals Jim is the only one that has it right.
