If you had told me ten years ago that the country’s biggest proponent for an aggressive independent music community would be Hanson… I can’t even think of what I’d do.
Yes, it’s true. The boys are back, they sound great, and they’re touring campuses across the country to evangelize the power of running your own music [...]

And good riddance.
What most consumers didn’t know is that artists have to take an even bigger hurting on sales from “record clubs” than they do on regular retail sales. Ostensibly, being included in a record club was considered a good trade-off, since you would probably make up in volume what you lost in raw [...]

I just uploaded three great recordings from last week’s live calls to the member area.

One of our members wants to know how to run the zone strategy of booking more gigs without eating up his profits.
Another member has lots of commitments, his own record label, plus the desire to break out on his own. [...]

Newbury Comics in the Northeast U.S. is testing out custom mix-CD technology, similar to what the folks at Starbucks are rolling out. I’ve been saying for some time (to paraphrase Dan Poynter) that record stores are pretty lousy places to sell records.
That’s because retailers have only a limited amount of “bandwidth” at listening posts [...]

The Churchills are doing better with a self-produced album that cost $10,000 to record than the one they made for a major label that put them $270,000 in the hole.
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Members get to join me tomorrow (Tues., 8/9) at 9pm ET for a special conference call class where I’ll share some of our most effective tips and techniques for selling more albums at your gigs. We’ll also talk about using some untraditional methods for selling more discs online. The answers will surprise you, especially since [...]

Matt writes about big media’s constant focus on “big opening weeks.” Books, films, and especially albums get judged and/or dismissed based on a big splash. Bands get dropped from labels if they can’t muster a gold record in their first weekend on sale at Best Buy.
Of course, you know about this. It’s a constant frustration [...]

Turns out, one of the biggest search phrases that land folks on this site is “what is the difference between gross and net,” which I answered flippantly before. For the benefit of newbies, here’s a quick primer in record label accounting 101:
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I’ve had more than a few conversation this week with clients about how selling compact discs in a coffee shop, a diner, a paint store, or even a day care center is more profitable than trying to get sales at a record store. Now the WSJ backs that up with news that some top albums [...]

Bob Baker runs down some of the most effective ways to pump up a flagging merch table.
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