Musicians are no longer looking to the major labels as the silver-bullet they once were in order to launch careers.

Tonight I am on a panel discussing marketing for musicians, and I thought I’d put some of my ideas on this blog to centralize my thoughts.

1. Put Google Analytics (GA) on your website.  It’s free, and it’s a great way of tracking how many people go to your website, how they got there, which pages engaged them, and a lot more.  Ask your webmaster to install it, and you can log into GA to view a fanastic world of information.
2. Make sure your website looks professional - if it looks bad, you appear lame.
3. Send your music to online distributors.  You can use Community Musician for this.
4. Send your CD to Pandora - they require a unique submission process.
5. Use social networking sites.  I’m not going to go into the details here, but I highly recommend reading The New Influencers by Paul Gillin.  You’ll learn a lot about how to work with bloggers and social networking sites.
6. Send out press releases.  You can do so for as little as $80 on PR Web.  PR Web has tutorials on successful press releases, but I also suggest researching the topic online or buying a book.  You will want to not only use PR Web, but also send releases directly to journalists.  Make sure you understand how to write a good press story (hence the research).
7. Make friends.  Whether these are other bands, journalists, club owners, or engineers - everyone you befriend becomes an asset.
8. Have a newsletter and use a real service.  I suggest Vertical Response.  Again, research email marketing so you leverage the power of email.
9. Hire a stylist.  Image is more important than it should be.
10. Consider raising money through your fan base.  Check out what we did for Spencer Day.  (Go to the homepage and look at the left column for two ways to fund Spencer).
11. Consider writing a song about a topic with high profile.  For example, my band wrote a song about Al Franken. I sent the CD to his radio show, and I saw hundreds of visits per day for weeks after he apparently played it on his radio show.
12. Use Wikipedia.  The bass player in my band has a famous grandfather (Arthur Hailey).  We edited that page to note the fact that Ryan is in a band in San Francisco.  We get traffic every day from that page. The more you associate yourself with topics that are searched for online, the more traffic you can siphen.
13. Use paid search to bid on names of bands that might share a common fan base with you.  If this sounds confusing, research it on Google AdWords.
14. Be honest with yourself.  Some musicians are destined to be obscure because of their esoteric music.  Ask people you trust for their honest opinion about your music so you can set your expectations.  Maybe you need voice lessons.  Make sure you have someone you trust giving you the brutal truth.  At the same time, believe in yourself.
15. Having money helps.  If you choose a low-paying job so that you have more time for music, you have less money to move forward.  A musician I know rented out a high-profile club for $6000 so he could play on a Saturday night.  He spent money on marketing and nearly broke even.  After the event, he realized it cost him about $1000 to play a high profile club in front of hundreds of people.  That might pay off in the long run, if it doesn’t he still doesn’t mind spending $1000 to play gigs other musicians dream of.

That’s all for now - I have more ideas but I just wanted to start off with a quick list of things you can do for your career.

music to listen to at work

I can’t remember the last time I put a CD in my stereo. I say this knowing the irony that I spend a lot of time and effort optimizing Community Musician for cd duplication.

Here are a few tips for music to listen to during the day.

Germaine Greer: poetically in touch with reality

This is one of the few posts I make off the topic of search that drove me to naming the blog, “Craig’s Mostly Search Blog”.

I really love Germaine Greer. She rules.

If you don’t know who she is, I suggest reading her books. You might also want to check out her quotes for a quick taste of her wit.

Music Sales Resumed Decline in 2005

but did it really?

An AP article today reported that music sales “resumed their decline in 2005…despite a threefold increase in digital music revenue to $1.1 billion from $380 million.”

Statistics like this can be very misleading. Why? Because the study does not take into account the changing profit margins on gross sales.

For example, in the 80s and 90s, CDs were basically the only media option. Now, however, digital music (as cited above) has tripled. Think for a minute about the different manufacturing and distrubution costs between these two models.

With CDs, a label must not only manufacture the disc, print paper inserts, and have them packaged, but they also must pay for shipping, warehousing, and the tracking and invoicing of the physical media (note: packaged CDs are about $1 / unit for most runs of 10,000 and over).

With digital music, these costs do not apply. While there is a cost of distributing digital music, it is tiny compared to the costs of dealing with CDs.

While my knowledge of the costs of distribution is limited to my experience running a CD duplication company, it seems obvious that gross sales can remain static, yet profit can increase due to the reduced costs of getting product to market.

My new band’s name is Erogenous Jones

Yea, I like that name. Says it all doesn’t it?

Well, in case you are wondering what we sound like, check out this mp3 from our upcoming album:

Big Time - 3.9 M. Right click and save to hard drive.

For those in love with the music and desparately in need of more, please note that the band is new, the website is being built, the cd is still being recorded, and just check back here for updates. We’ll be playing live soon and the EP will be out in early December.