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Indie Music Resources

21 Ways To Do Everything Better

Indie Music Resources

Today’s required reading: 21 Ways To Do Everything Better by Dumb Little Man
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Indie Music Lacks Access to Radio, But Why Worry?

Music Marketing

According to a recent survey, independent musicians have no more access to major market radio now than they did before major networks agreed to settle over charges of payola.
What I can’t figure out is why, in the year 2008, when radio is a declining force in the way Americans learn about new music, do we [...]

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Resource Rundown: Health Insurance for Musicians

Featured Article

Just spent most of the last week on the couch, recovering from a really freaky infection of the sinuses and inner ear. Plenty gross. And on top of that, it caused my tongue to swell up, so I couldn’t even speak! Probably the worst thing that can happen when you’re a professional trainer and speaker, [...]

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How to Call Attention to Your Music

Indie Music Resources

It’s an unassuming title for a free e-book, but Derek Sivers has created the most important piece of literature you will read this year, hands down. In it, he documents the shift in indie music culture from “Do It Yourself to Decide It Yourself,” and he uses real world examples of music marketing and promotion [...]

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Pigs vs. Sharks

Tips

I love that Derek Sivers is blogging his experiences as a music business mentor, if only to see him live through some of the same experiences I enjoyed on my first few “book tour” appearances.
Derek gently reminded an audience of musicians that “pigs kill more people than sharks” to point out how obscurity threatens more [...]

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Nick Lea sings “Several Thousand” by Jim Boggia on “Men in Trees”

Television

Just one of those neat things… You know how when you hear a song you love so often that it just resonates with you, and it doesn’t surprise you when it pops up other places?
I’m working on an article in the office, and I can hear Lori watching Men in Trees from the living room. [...]

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American Idol Songwriting Competition Back for 2008

Songwriting

This week’s sponsor:

With not a whole lot of rumor or speculation, the fate of the American Idol Songwriter contest for 2008 was up in the air until this week, when officials reopened the contest site to the public.
By all accounts, this year’s contest is just like last year’s contest. Key points:

You have just under ten [...]

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Music at SXSW is just the afterparty for tech bloggers on their way out of Austin.

Concerts

It’s tough enough to be a record executive these days. Your budget’s shrinking, your staff keep leaving to join tech startups, and you keep having to figure out which one of your interns is the one who’s leaking your biggest acts rough mixes to BitTorrent.
At least you always had SXSW to look forward to, right?
Apparently, [...]

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What happened to subtle marketing?

Off-Topic

Are we so transparent about marketing these days that it’s okay for NBC to just slap a box on their pages that blatantly says, “CROSS PROMOTE?”

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David Archuleta Referencing Eva Cassidy’s Arrangement of “Imagine”

Television

Ann Powers writes longingly of the “wave of Eva-mania” in the late 1990s, and I remember it well. So it surprised her and others when American Idol contestant David Archuleta won compliments from the panel for his “original” cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
It’s a peculiar thing about music that you internalize the first time you [...]

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