From the category archives:

Tips

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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Does your band offer health insurance?

Tips

The Houston Chronicle profiles the extraordinary benefits package that you get if you join Robert Earl Keen on the road as a member of his band or his crew. And while most of the musicians who read this blog on a regular basis rely on a spouse or on a day job to maintain health [...]

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The Difference Between a Music Business Manager and a Business Manager

Tips

Deborah Neville offers excellent insight into the various roles of your support team, especially the distinction between your manager (who helps shape your overall career strategy) and your business manager (who tells you when you can and can’t buy that pink tour bus). It’s always a huge issue with my clients when I discover that [...]

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Tip: Write The Press Release First

Inspiration

I was in a meeting at the day job today when one of the marketing folks mentioned an awesome, mind-exploding idea that fits perfectly with setting music career goals: write a press release, then work backwards.
The idea is to sit down and write the ideal make-believe press release for your project. It’s a powerful, imaginative [...]

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How to get a guitar on an airplane. (Or any other musical instrument, for that matter.)

Tips

I know that we’ve covered this topic in passing over the past few months, but with today’s news of a foiled airplane bomb plot in the U.K., airport security’s going to be on condition red for at least the next few days, if not weeks.
I often advise clients to carry guitars and valuable instruments with [...]

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Mapping Indie Music Around the World

Growing Your Audience

Jennifer Layton posted a great article at Indie-Music.com about the challenges that independent musicians face when playing outside the U.S.A. She covers more than the usual territory about stringing together some pickup dates in Europe and Asia — she digs deep with the help of some expats and discovers what life is like for folks [...]

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How to Stay Healthy on the Road

Tips

Erika Luckett’s got an excellent article in the new issue of Stave Magazine. She shares “Five Rules for the Healthy Musician,” and she couldn’t be more right. If you’re working the zone strategy now and you can’t wait until you can get out on the road full time, Erika’s five tips should be at the [...]

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How to take your own publicity photos (that will look good in the newspaper).

Tips

Joan Stewart passes along advice against “execution at dawn” photos, and suggests that you take some publicity photos at angles other than eye level. Here are some other tried and true tips to create a photo that won’t get your band laughed at:

No photos in front of brick walls (oldest cliche ever).
Remember to take close-ups, [...]

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5 Questions With Tom Dorsey, Nice Promotion

Interviews

Today’s 5 Questions interviewee is Tom Dorsey of Nice, a promotional firm specializing in print and radio, headquartered in Portland OR. Starting only a few years ago with a handful of local bands and singer-songwriters as clients, the Nice roster past and present boasts acts like United State of Electronica, songwriter Luke Temple and math-rockers [...]

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More good inbox etiquette

Growing Your Audience

If you use email newsletters to announce gigs and communicate with your fans, you should read Jakob Nielsen’s new article entitled Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion. Some interesting revelations from Nielsen’s survey:

most people spend less than one minute reading a newletter
they only read 19% of the content (wow!)
67% of readers completely skip introductory text

It’s no [...]

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