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…
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scott
5 Questions With Mary McFaul, artist management, McFaul Live Music
Mary McFaul has directed the music career of songstress Laura Love since 1991 and has 30 years of experience in artist management, publishing and licensing, booking, tour management and more. In addition to Love, Mary’s consulted for artists such as…
Audio flyers?
Kathryn snapped this photo of a CD-R stuck to a telephone pole: Gotta admit it’s a cool and aggressive way to get your music “out there.” (Via BoingBoing.) My only criticism: there’s nothing on the CD to describe what the…
Spreading the word vs. inspiring action
Virgil Dickerson of Suburban Home Records is asking his blog readers for advice on how to (cheaply) promote a tour for one of his bands. He’s already got a partial list of ideas posted and a few responses (mine included)…
5 Questions With Tom Dorsey, Nice Promotion
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…
More good inbox etiquette
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…
Stay safe on the Web!
Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself that, for a lot of musicians, the Web is a brand-new place. And with more and more indie musicians trying out services like eBay and Paypal to sell CDs and merch, a…
Using zone strategy with your mailing list
If you’re a practitioner of Joe’s zone strategy for booking gigs, here’s a tip that’s served me well: incorporate your zones into your mailing list for more accurate mailings. It occurred to me that it doesn’t always make sense to…
Ready for the road?
We’re having an early summer heat wave here in Seattle, and the sunny weather always turns my thoughts to…touring! Roadtripping , playing in different cities to new audiences, living on fast food and floor crashing at the homes of host…
Preparing your Flash website for IE7
(This post contains more web-geekery; if you’re unfamiliar with things like HTML and JavaScript, you’ll want to get your webmaster or a web-savvy friend to help you out.) I was messing around with my website a few days ago when…
More on Flash players and visitors without Flash
(Warning: this post gets a bit geeky, so make sure you involve your webmaster if you’re unclear or uncomfortable making changes to your music website.) Yesterday I mentioned that if you’re using a Flash music player on your music website,…
Free Flash music players
For embedding streaming audio into webpages, I prefer to use a Flash music player. The main reason for this is compatibility; I don’t have to worry that the listener doesn’t have a particular audio player installed, and the Flash plug-in…