Just Plain Folks
September 25th, 2008We just spent the last few days spending some time with Brian Austin Whitney of the organization Just Plain Folks. Brian was a pleasure to spend time with, and we can’t thank him enough for all of his advice and help in music, his earnest words about the Indie Band Survival Guide, and his knowledge about the nature of the indie scene.
If you are not yet a member of Just Plain Folks, you should join. It’s free, is well-established with over a decade of history, and has a massive community of musicians that are organized around Brian’s simple tagline: “We’re all in this together.”
The site’s most active part are the message boards where musicians are constantly sharing information, trading gigs, commiserating on topics that are of interest, and organizing themselves in local areas. Indeed, there are chapters of JPF that’s local to many metro areas, and they often have showcases, one of which Randy attended last night and met some very interesting musicians.
Beyond these meetings and showcases, they also have their own awards for music that is free and unrestricted to join. They have over 100 categories of music, and have to date received over 500,000 albums. If you can believe it–and we can now that we talked with Brian–they really listen to all of them. The ceremony is a big event that brings musicians all over the world to LA, where it’s held.
Members of the organization get discounts at companies like Discmakers, and Brian writes a regular newsletter that is well worth reading every month, as he covers news and information that are of interest to musicians all over the world.
We’re members, and considering that it’s completely free we think that it’s a no-brainer to join as well.
Rock the Net
September 24th, 2008We just got back from attending the Chicago ‘08 edition of the Future of Music conference: “What’s the Future For Musicians?” Not only did we meet a lot of great people, we learned of the status of many issues that affect musicians. We’d like to talk about one of them that’s of great concern to all of us.
This blog’s focus is on practicality, and so while we are talking about a policy issue here, we’re covering it here because issue of Net Neutrality will have a direct effect on you, and it’s being discussed now in legislation in the US. We’re going to tell you what it is, why it matters, and how to act.
Net Neutrality, in short, is the concept that none of the traffic on the internet should be favored above others by the network carriers, which is the regime that currently holds sway. Those network carriers are the ones that handle your internet service like AT&T and Comcast. Today, you can visit any website or download anything from the internet, and it costs the same. Without Net Neutrality, these large carriers could charge different amounts of money depending on where you get the content.
Now, imagine that we lose neutrality, what does it mean to musicians? Well, large labels, and other media companies will work with internet carriers to be exempt from any special charges for their own content to be delivered at high speed. But a user might have a limit of the amount they could download of anything else. And if they went over that limit, she would either get much slower access, or start getting charged similar to the way that your cellphone charges you by the minute once you use up your minutes. Even more troubling, some visions of a world without Net Neutrality have carriers deciding which websites you can visit, and which ones you can’t.
This would mean, in effect, that your own music will cost people money to download, whereas the large media companies, labels, and content creators would be free to download. The internet has been the reason why all musicians are finally coming to a level playing field. If Net Neutrality disappears, this will evaporate.
They want to turn the internet into pay-for-play.
Don’t let this happen. All you need to do is go to the Future of Music Coalition Network Neutrality site, Rock the Net, to learn more and stay informed. When the time comes if this comes up for a vote, join your voices with the other musicians on the site, and show them that it’s an issue that means something to you. Tell them how this will impact the arts. So far, the ones controlling this message are the large carriers, and they only talk about the business opportunities that they will be opening up. Naturally, they don’t talk about the ones that they are closing as a result.
Your job is to get that message out.
Indie Band Survival Guide Episode 1: Intro (Link)
September 19th, 2008
Seems some of the syndications are blocking the videos, so please click on the image above to watch the video.
The IBSG Video Series, Episode 1: Intro
September 17th, 2008
Stay tuned for a new episode every week!
A PR Megaphone: PR Wires
September 16th, 2008By the time you’ve already gone to the trouble of creating a press release, you should also use the free PR Wires available to you in order to broadcast it. Now, it’s true that by far your most effective campaigns will be sending press releases directly to journalists. But you never know who is reading those wires, and who might pick up a story.
What’s a press wire? Imagine, for a moment, that you are a journalist. You want to write a story about something new, not something that other news sources have written about. So instead of trolling news sites, you will end up trolling news wires to see what’s up-and-coming, rather than what’s already out. These wires supply them with an endless amount of possible leads. There’s no reason your press release can’t be one of them. Especially if you can make it really enticing to them.
Make sure to make your title a strong tease. That title is key. If you want to see what a wire looks like, check out Flashnews, and pay special attention to how these stories present themselves. Flashnews is slightly different in that their own staff writes the releases here, although they might get the idea to write it from press releases submitted to flashnews itself. Because they wrote those stories, you can see the punchy language they use for each one. And the stories that they write, which you can’t read unless you pay them, are exceptionally short. They have just enough information to give the journalists that use it the idea for a story. If you can’t imagine your press release standing out against the other stories on this site, you’ll need to work on it some more.
Using free wires yourself is usually as simple as just cutting and pasting your press release into a box, and hitting submit. The pay wires vary quite a bit in what they do for you, and you will need to explore each one. Note that one of the publicists that we interviewed for the book, Janelle Rogers, has said that she often gets the same results from the free ones as the pay wires, so a lot of times will just skip the pay ones. Still, at times, some of the pay wires have features that you may wish to explore.
We have a list of PR wires, both free and pay, here at the IndieBandSurvivalGuide.com. We recommend at a minimum using Mi2N.
The place to start
September 15th, 2008The Music Think Tank had an interesting post by Rhodri Marsden called Please Buy My Record: The Futility Of Flogging Music, and I couldn’t resist talking about it. My comment is below.
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An interesting post. I’d like to add some comments about some of your premises below.
First of all, I think that the only reason why, in the past, you never had to do marketing and PR for yourself is that labels would do it for you…for the rights to your music. Now that, as you state, those middlemen are out of the picture, you need to do it for yourself, or it just won’t get done. I would suggest that the right answer isn’t to pretend that Marketing, PR, and any of the other non-music parts of your music career don’t exist, or even need to be done. Rather, I’d like to quote Derek here for a moment: “Find people that like to do what you hate, and have them help you.” Personally, I love programming, and am happy to work on our website. But I hate anything to do with design. So how do I get T-shirts, logos, or images on our site? I work with a friend who is a fantastic graphic artist.
Second, I don’t think that you can use “whether you’ve heard of a band” as a bar for success in today’s music environment. I just wrote a blog post about this that readers of this discussion would find interesting. To summarize the idea, in a new media environment where mass media is shrinking, and the internet means that people can listen to or get any piece of music that they want (”niche media”), as you mentioned above, superstars are no longer likely because people aren’t forced into limited choices. For example, Jonathan Coulton, while you might not have heard of him, is incredibly well known within certain communities. Enough so that two of his songs is in the game Rock Band, and he’s making his living at doing music.
And, finally, I think that there’s an underlying premise to this that needs to be uncovered, and discussed separately. Since we’re talking about whether a musician can make money at music, we need to talk about a music career as a business model. A lot of indies, I think, try to copy the major label formulas that are no longer even working for major labels anymore. This model is to try to make money primarily off of their recordings. Indies will not survive by following the majors now-defunct business model. Even worse, it doesn’t make sense for them to do so, because the major’s model was based on limitations that they had, rather than strengths. They generally only had rights to their recordings, but not the song publishing, merchandise, live show revenue, music licensing, songwriting-for-hire, music teaching, and…the list goes on. They are only now trying to get “360″ agreements that try to get into these other revenue streams. But indies already have the rights to these streams, and need to think about them the same way any business would need to think about how it makes money. The most successful musicians that we talk about in our book are very aware of where their money comes from, and manage it well.
It would seem that we keep trying to re-create what success in music meant in the past. We need to rebuild our thinking from the ground-up–in today’s music environment, not the reality from the past that meant that music could only be sold as plastic, tapes, or acetate, and there was only limited media, and limited shelf space. So, lets start with the premise that transferring recorded music around the world costs nothing, but is hard to make money off of. I would suggest that this is the place to start, not the place to stop.
Your Band Name in the Sky: Gracenote and Freedb
September 14th, 2008When you pop a CD into your computer, ever wonder how your player knows what CD it is, and all of the track information? Not only can you add your own band’s CDs into it, you should do so yourself rather than leave it to chance. In this post, not only will we explain how this works, we’ll well you how to enter that yourself for your own band’s CD.
There is not just one, but rather two separate services that handle this functionality. One is called the Gracenote Media Database, formerly known as CDDB, and now owned by Sony. The other is called FreeDB, which is a free and open service. Both of them can show you the track information of a CD when you send them a signature of a disk, and players subscribe to these services to do so.
If you have released a CD, and have found the information for the disc pop up when you put it into a computer, that means that a fan did it for you. Hopefully they got all of the information right. If not, you can send in a correction.
Although this information might eventually get entered into the system by your fans, they may not spell everything right, or get all of the information correct. This is one of those times that you want to take things into your own hands.
Entering information into them is fairly easy, actually. You need to have an MP3 player on your computer that is set up with those services. Both of them allow you to use the player to both enter the track information, and upload it to the services.
Here’s an example. For Gracenote, you can upload the information using iTunes by putting in your CD, and then update the “get info” of the CD itself, and also for each track. Once you’re done, just select Advanced/Submit CD Track Names. It’s really that simple.
For FreeDB, you need to just install a freedb aware application, which are listed here. Each of these applications have a different way to update, but they are equivalently simple as the iTunes method.
If you already have CDs, we suggest testing them in both systems, and make sure that all of the information entered it correct, since you can easily update them.
ID3 Tags: A Band’s Business Card
September 13th, 2008It always surprises us when a band neglects to ID3 tag their MP3 files, especially when they give away their own MP3 files of their music. In a lot of ways, a band that doesn’t use ID3 tags is like a businessperson that doesn’t use business cards. How can anyone contact them afterwards without them? And even some bands that use them don’t end up using ALL of the fields that could help them out. With just 10 minutes of work, they are missing out on a much better chance of getting more potential fans to visit their website, especially when they are going to all of the trouble to give away their music.
ID3 tags are where MP3 files, AAC files, and even other formats store the band name, song name, album title, and other information about the song. When that information scrolls by in your players, it’s getting it from those tags. There’s two versions of that format, ID3v1 and ID3v2, and minor variations on those, as well. You can set them up using most any MP3 player on your computer. iTunes does a good job of it, but any recent player will allow you to set both versions of the tags. You should, at a minimum, enter the ID3v2 tags. To see if your player does it, try opening the properties on any of your song files in your player, and see if you can edit them.
Many bands remember to at least enter the song, artist, and album information, but you are missing out if you don’t use other fields too. For example, if you don’t import your album art, you’re missing a great chance to plug your band’s imagery and name. Most players on both computers and even personal players will display this art. Each time it comes up, your fans will get your band name and imagery reinforced (and, remember, some people who downloaded it might be just checking it out, and might forget where they got it.) But the art is just one area that you want to implement. You can also set up a website tag, contact information, and more. Skipping these might result in a fan that can’t find you. We just downloaded a song ourselves that we ran across somewhere, and now can’t find the band that did it.
Some MP3 players will tag files in large groups without overwriting the information that you want to keep (such as updating the website without touching the song titles). If you have a lot of files, like our own, you can use programs like Tag and Rename. We’ve used that to help us tag the over 450 song files that we’ve released. We purchased this because the MP3 players turned out to be less powerful when it came to mass updates, and we found Tag and Rename handy. Naturally, that tool is aimed at music fans with large libraries, but it’s also just as useful for musicians that are trying to organize the files that they want to release.
Link Love
September 12th, 2008Jason and I were talking to someone yesterday answering a question of how to get bloggers, podcasters, and the like interested in your music. The answer is not hard to come by, once you frame it right. The conversation went something like this:
Q: What do bloggers want?
A: An audience.Q: What do podcasters want?
A: An audience.Q: And what do you, as a band want?
A: New fans.
The currency of the internet is sometimes called attribution, and is more affectionately called link love. Bloggers that talk about a post in another blog usually add a link back to their own blog in the comments to show them that they are talking about the same topics. What this does is introduces each readership to each other’s audiences. The same is true for podcasts, or between podcasts and bloggers, for that matter. Or between podcasters, musicians, and…you get the idea.
This is just one reason why musicians should always have a blog. If a podcast plays your music, or a blog writes about your song, you should call it out to your own fans. This gives the blogger a reason to write about you again, since it could increase their audience.
So, in that tradition, we want to call out all of the blog entries, podcasts, and websites that have written about the Indie Band Survival Guide. We took an extra step after the book came out to send every website, service, blog, or podcast that was talked about in the book a copy, so that they can see where they are talked about. Some of them gave us personal thanks, and others gratefully wrote blog posts about it, which we call out here, thanking them in return.
There’s another benefit to you based on this. Those of you that like to reasearch the books that you buy thoroughly can find out what other people have been saying about it, and even hear author interviews.
- Mogulus - A wonderful online video service that we not only talk about in the book, but that we use as a band blogged about the IBSG here.
- Jamendo - A music sharing site blogged about us as well.
- Brad Sucks - Brad Sucks is an artist that we hold up as an excellent example of an independent musician. He just released an album, and also talked about us in his blog.
- ccMixter - ccMixter is an active community of musicians that allows you to remix other musician’s work, or post your own tracks. Victor Stone from ccMixter reviewed the book, and asked that Jason and I do a followup interview of Brad Sucks which we were happy to do.
- We Heart Music - The We Heart Music podcast covered the Indie Band Survival Guide in two separate episodes. (WHM019 and WHM022) The second episode has an extended segment on it.
- The Command Line - The Command Line is a fascinating podcast which explores where the rough edges of technology, society, and public policy meet. Not only did Thomas Gideon run the copyright panel at Dragon*Con, where he invited us to appear the second time in a row, he also interviewed us for 40-some minutes the next day. It’s the second interview that he’s done of us and, like last time, Thomas had pertinent questions and comments for us that really got to the heart of many issues that are of importance to musicians. Here’s the 2007 Interview, the 2008 Interview, the 2007 copyright panel, and the 2008 copyright panel. All four were engaging discussions.
- CreativeCommons.org - We talk about the Creative Commons in the book, and Cameron Parkins from the CC wrote a insightful blog entry about it. They have an upcoming Q&A of us as well.
- Groklaw - Groklaw is a blog about legal matters related to open source software, copyright, and related issues. Pamela Jones published an article about the Indie Band Survival Guide, for which we are very grateful, especially because Randy is a long time contributor to the discussions there, and admires PJs work.
- Recording Industry vs. The People - Ray Beckerman, a blogger and an attorney that has taken on the misguided legal campaign of the RIAA against their own customers, wrote a blog entry about the Indie Band Survival Guide. He also showed up for the book release party. We could have spent the entire party with him. He’s a fascinating person.
- Carlos Killpack, a musician? - Thought that, most likely the website, is the most awesome thing he’s ever found. Of course, we can’t agree more. We like the tagline of his blog: “It’s so indie it makes indie look…not indie.”
- Blogcritics Magazine - Eric Whelchel had a very cynical, on-target review of the IBSG. We salute him for not only coming up with a great example of a niche that we never would have thought of, but also for catching some the subler jokes that we scattered through the book.
- Coverville - Brian Ibbott has been running this entertaining music podcast for years that features cover songs only. Our band has been on it, and I can tell you that being on his podcast makes a difference in the sales of your songs, and gives your band some solid exposure. He’s, er, covered in the book, and he blogged about it here.
- Sonicbids - Sonicbids is a site with a multitude of useful services for musicians, including Electronic Press Kits, booking tools, and much more. The Sonicbids founder Panos Panay gave us a must-read post about us here.
- Julian Hill Tech - This blogger noticed the Groklaw article, and mentioned the Indie Band Survival Guide.
Wow. I feel like I should be out of breath after posting all of these. A big thanks to all of you!
