Joe Taylor Jr. advises musicians that want to book more gigs...
Ever since attending last Saturday’s interview with John Oates, I’ve been talking to folks about the pros and cons of working on albums vs. EPs. There’s a school of thought among music promotion professionals right now that you might not even want to focus on EPs, choosing instead to release a steady stream of singles. [...]
Folks have been talking to me a lot lately about “gamification.” It’s a popular business trend that hopes to leverage the video game habits of recent generations into stronger workplace productivity. Take a set of tasks that would otherwise sound pretty boring: making phone calls or filing TPS reports. Then, turn it into a game. [...]
When I ran Handwritten Records in the 90s with my friend Kristen, indie labels still had a clear role in the music business. I was a production geek with access to a studio and a mass CD duplication machine, and Kristen handled the A&R. It was pretty clear, back then, how we could add value [...]
The Philadelphia Chapter of The Recording Academy welcomed Temple alum John Oates back to campus last Saturday night, for an intimate acoustic performance and an interview conducted by my friend and former colleague, Gene Shay. Mississippi Mile is Oates’ tribute to the songs that shaped his songwriting and performing career, and it lands in retailers [...]
Artists sometimes ask me why I focus my books on earning revenue from touring and merchandise sales, instead of from boosting album sales. In response, let me introduce you to Arizona State University Economics and Finance major Hasan Siddiqui. The school’s newspaper just profiled the website he created, SongCatch.com. It’s a search engine that hunts [...]
It’s hard enough to find music managers you can trust. Once you’re earning enough money from music to think about helping others, you’ve got to find managers from other disciplines who can carry out your mission without embarrassing you in the details. That’s the frustration Madonna’s dealing with right now, having sacked the management team [...]
Fred Wilson shares the story behind Airbnb (a great startup that I’ll write a full post about soon), especially the strategy the founders used to raise $25,000 in emergency funds to keep their business afloat. Whenever someone tells me that they can’t figure out how to raise the first $25,000 they need to get their [...]
Techcrunch profiled Nimbit, a “band-to-fan” e-commerce platform that seems to roll up all the services from CDBaby, HostBaby, and Fanbridge into a single service. According to Rip Empson, the service has already rolled up $5 million in venture capital it plans to use to hire application developers and other key team members. The company that [...]
Jay Frank and I were chatting not long ago about concert ticket pricing and margin for large touring acts. He and I have both managed bands, booked bands, and booked venues, so we’ve seen this from both sides: Nearly every venue contract sets revenue share based on a fixed set of ticket prices. (For instance: [...]
