Music Licensing Workshop in Nashville

Over your career, it’s likely that your long term wealth will come from music publishing and royalties. Folks in Nashville have a chance to register for a seminar that will take you behind the scenes of “music clearance” — the…

The New Breed of Indie Musician

Thanks to Suzanne at Indie-Music.com for catching this great article in the Denver Post which neatly summarizes the new breed of “indie music” — artists who have been dropped (or liberated themselves) from major labels, only to bite them in…

The Snapster Model

Tech journalist Robert X. Cringely posits a clever model for a legal music sharing business. It’s a surprisingly workable idea, which just requires a whole lot of lawyers and a few million dollars. On the down side, there’s no room…

Does Your Club Owner Sound Like This?

When I first wrote Grow Your Band’s Audience as a series of magazine articles in 1998, one of the things I discovered was that this animosity between bookers and bands was mostly show. Posturing. Folks acting like that was the…

Adios, Tonos

News coming to us from different directions that Tonos is shutting down this week. As pedigrees go, that site had one of the best, but they couldn’t make the thing make money.

Why Newsletters Are So Important

Mini-rant time. I am on the road quite a lot. And even when I am not on the road, I have a tendency to drop in at Kinko’s (or such)and use borrowed terminals. If I happen to surf across a…

RAVE Act is in effect…

One of the first examples of the legislation-formerly-known-as-RAVE. This is a pretty extreme example, but as local authorities become more aware of the powers of this law, musicians are going to have to take a leading role in educating audiences…

You could be in Billboard

An insightful commentary from Slate, which points out that the new Billboard digital download chart could be toppled with only 1,500 paid downloads. Who’s gonna mobilize their fan base to make that happen?

Taste Tribes

I’ve been talking a lot about tastemakers lately, and now here’s a REQUIRED READING article about the evolution of that concept into Taste Tribes.

Natalie Merchant Pre-Order E-Mail

Folks, here is a textbook way to do this. Build up your database, then send a simple pre-order announcement with a little “somethin’ extra” to make the register pop. I can’t wait to see how this works… Natalie Merchant –…

Hot Music Career: Process Server

Seriously, if the RIAA would put this much energy into helping its members recruit stellar A&R staffs and invest in real artist development, we wouldn’t be in this mess.