I have had several conversations recently about the music business. As a musician and wannabe engineer and producer, I’m of course interested in the business of music. I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully to put together a new band recently, and I keep coming upon this speed bump. This article is my attempt to explain what I think works, what’s dead, and where we go from here.

“The Dream” is Broken

I see this on nearly every Craigslist ad looking for musicians. It’s some flavor of, “Must have no ties and be willing to go out on the road and try to get signed.” No ties. I am not sure I want to be in band with someone that has no ties. I am sure that they mean that they don’t have a job/wife/kid/etc. that would keep them from going on the road, but in the real world that just means that you are either a broke dream chaser or you’re getting by mooching off someone else. Neither are qualities you want in someone you have to trust completely.

The first key to surviving in the “New Music Business,” is being independent. This means that you should have a job, a life, and a plan for success that doesn’t depend on star alignment and dumb luck.

The second part of that sentence is also problematic these days. Live music has undergone a massive change in the last decade plus. In the world of the Internet, home theaters, video games, etc., there aren’t nearly as many people that are willing to go to a venue and pay money to see a band they have never heard of perform music they don’t know. That mean’s you’re either playing to a handful of people you already know, or you’re playing to empty seats.

It’s common knowledge that only big names are making money playing live. Assuming that you’re not beholden to management of some sort, you would still be lucky to play a small gig and come home with money in your pocket after expenses, travel and beer money.

There was a time when “paying your dues” was a regular part of the success formula and playing to empty seats and girlfriends was an important part of polishing your live act. I am not devaluing perfecting your craft and becoming a great live band, I’m only saying that you can do that in your home town… especially if your home town like mine. Seattle and other major markets have nearly endless opportunities for a band to play live and build a local following. It’s still “On the road,” you just don’t need to drive very far.

So now that we’ve decided that we should have a job and we don’t need to buy a crappy RV or invest in U-Haul stock, let’s talk about that getting signed part. Also deeply rooted in 70s, 80s and even 90s “make your every wish come true” lore, getting signed to a record label is a dream should probably be left back in those eras with your bell bottoms, spandex and flannel shirts. I would guess that any record deal that you come across as an unknown act nationally, is going to be a deal that you shouldn’t have any interest in signing.

You Can’t Fight Change

I can’t pinpoint the tipping point exactly, but somewhere around the birth of YouTube, the internet officially retired MTV, VH1 and many other media businesses that were built to promote music and an artists image. When MySpace and eventually Facebook came along, the fans who had the desire to discover new music and share it with their friends, also had the tools. While the antiquated music industry was running around throwing lawsuits at single moms because their kid had downloaded a couple Metallica records, a seismic shift occurred in the business as a whole.

When I was a kid, I went to a record store to discover new music. If I wanted to be seen as an equal among the CDs I was buying, I needed to have a professional CD and a reason for them to stock it. When MTV came along, I needed a big budget music video and the money to convince them to play it. Today is a different world entirely. Not only are CDs irrelevant, but even selling music digitally is on it’s last legs. MTV only cares about orange Italian idiots and YouTube has no bias towards music, genre or record label.

We are also in the early dawn of an era where every consumer has a smart phone, data plan and instant access to their friends interests, tastes and often playlists of what they are listening to and watching.

The playing field hasn’t just been leveled, it was repaved and they built a fucking shopping mall on top of it. It’s important to note that this mall does NOT have a record store. There is no Virgin Records, no Tower Records and the Wal-Mart down the street is only selling CDs in their bargain bins.

I despise using the word “viral,” but an artist today is better spending his or her time getting their music in front of communities that they know are interested in consuming it, and let those communities naturally share it through their own users’ network of friends on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The New Road

So if you are only playing out locally, how do you “go national?” You’ve been reading about it already. Your first tactical weapon is YouTube. Although this is your first strike, you’ve got to step back and put in some work first.

If you had planned on making a quick EP with a half dozen songs, working up an hour of filler cover material and get out and play as soon as possible… STOP. You’re wasting your time, and you’re probably shooting yourself in the foot to boot. This is a very simple equation that also requires you to be ready to accept some pretty nasty realities. You don’t have to imagine there is a platform to give you instant, free access to the world, YouTube does. Let’s assume for the moment that you’ve put in the work to understand how to market and promote your band online. You watch your view counter like a hawk. You obsessively refresh your ReverbNation and SoundCloud stats. You even have Facebook mailing you every time your page gets a new like.

Crickets. I know, right? Nobody wants crickets. Stop searching for the secret online marketing sauce you are missing. There’s no $10 eBook PDF that’s going to fix it. It’s quite possible that your product sucks. It’s not YouTube’s fault, and playing in dive bars and sticking CDs under windshield wipers is only going to bring you to that realization slower.

The Product

What is the product? It’s more than a CD or a music video, although they are very important. The product is you! Ask yourself these questions, and be brutally honest with yourself:

• Does this type of music have a large enough following to be marketable?
• Does the original music we have created truly stand up to commercial music in the same genre?
• Do our recordings have the same professionalism of modern commercial music in the same genre?
• Do we have an image that is unique enough that people will identify us by it?
• Do we have a website and all of the associated social media accounts that are properly branded?
• Does our online presence look professional and engaging?

If you can’t answer a confident “YES” to each of these questions, you should be re-evaluating your direction entirely.

The very first sound your band makes should be loud, clear and unmistakable. Your first dive into the pool should make a splash so big that it soaks the people outside of the pool too.

Come Out Swinging

Think about it. The very first time that you or someone you know shares you’re latest song with a friend who doesn’t know who you are, you want them to be so blown away that they can’t help but try to find out who you are. You are not going to accomplish this with an MP3 of your latest masterpiece and you’re not going to pull this off with a shaky camera phone video of your band playing at a pub. You need the best song you’ve ever written, recorded in the most professional quality possible, playing with an high definition music video that you’d expect to see your favorite band make. Finally, you need to put that video in the most conspicuous, easily consumable and conveniently sharable medium available.

That product is going to buy you more than hundreds of gigs for hundreds of people. Let’s work through an example, shall we?

Let’s say that your band plays every weekend this year, for a packed house at small venues of 100 people each. We’ll be incredibly generous and say that half of them really liked you enough to want to hear more. You’ve reached 2,600 people.  You’ve spent every weekend for a whole year to reach 2,600 people. You’ve also reached them when they are arguably the least able to further engage with you. They’ve had a little to drink so their memory is sketchy, they probably aren’t buying your CD, they don’t want your flyer and they sure aren’t going to give you their email address. I’ve actually seen people try that one.

Let’s face it, you don’t want to ever play a show hoping you’ll make fans. You want to play for fans.

Rewind to the beginning of the year. Let’s put the time you spent practicing and learning filler cover songs back in the time bank. Take the money you spent on renting PAs, U-Hauls, etc. and stick it back in the real bank. Forget the concept of an EP or even a full album and refocus our goals.

You want to write an exact number of songs. I can’t tell you what that exact number is, but I can tell you how you’ll know when you’ve reached it. You need to write songs until you’ve gotten a handful of your best songs that all make good on whatever promise your image is making. Leave the sucky ones in the practice room, and save the ones that don’t quite “fit” for another project. When you’ve got enough great songs to satisfy the curiosity of a new fan, stop.

Now take your best song, and I don’t mean your most epic song or the one that means the most to you, and make a video that will grab a new viewer by the throat and make them watch.

The video is the bait. Now you’ve got to keep them on the hook long enough to get them to do a little work for you.  The only first engagement you want with a new fan is “More!” You’ve already gotten her in bed, her panties are securely on the floor… this is no time to go limp.

The only way to get her to tell all her friends how good you are is to deliver.

Delivering the Goods

Conventional wisdom will tell you to send a new fan to your Facebook page, after all, everyone is on Facebook right? Right, but wrong. You can thank Steve Jobs for defining and proving the theory that you have to control the experience to succeed. Facebook is an incredibly ally, I’ll explain to how it’s important soon, but Facebook is an outsider. Facebook has it’s own agenda and you are not on it. The same goes for ReverbNation, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, MySpace and any other site that allows you to create a presence online. Make no mistake, you must be on all of these sites. You cannot neglect them and regardless of the redundancy or headache, they need to be up to date and you must appear interactive on them.

Regardless of where a new fan found your video, you want to do everything you can to compel them to visit your own website. I really mean your own website.

It has to be:

Accessible via an easy to remember, hard to fuck up .com domain name

Has a custom design that reinforces your band’s image and is attractive, professional and easy to navigate and read

Have all of the information and media they expect to find

Finally, make sure it’s fresh!

This website will be your lifeline. Trendy social sites will come and go, but the fans that are willing to spend their hard on cash on you will always know where to find you.

Building it Doesn’t Mean They Will Come

So far, we’ve been assuming that the fan watched your video in the first place. Earlier I said I’d get to where all of these social sites fit in, and this is it. I am going to make a very obvious statement, and you should not read on until it sinks in:

You should already know where your fans are.

It sounds kind of Zen, but It’s not bullshit philosophy. The outside of commerce, the internet is in effect a massive collection of communities. Whatever sound you have is an extension of your influences, friends, tastes, etc. It’s a reasonable assumption that you’ve already connected with like minded people on the multitude of communities online dedicated to whatever particular element played a part in crafting who you are.

It’s pretty easy to figure out that if you like it, and they like it, and it played a part in what you’ve become…they will like you too! Heck, they may not like it but sometimes a good heated debate about it is fantastic publicity. The “Viral” effect is often assumed to just happen. Sure, you can catch lightening in a bottle sometimes, but if you need power you don’t wait for it to storm.

If you post a video on YouTube and wait for viewers you will be disappointed. If you post a video on YouTube and post it to Facebook, you’ll have the potential views of a percentage of your friends who are interested in this aspect of your life. If you post a video on YouTube and post it to a dozen communities of tens of thousands people who have specifically expressed interest in something related to what you are doing, and a percentage of those people post it to their Facebook pages, and a percentage of their friends like it, and a percentage of their friends like it…..snowballs. Snowballs are MUCH better than crickets.

Don’t Forget Existing Fans

It’s not uncommon to lose focus on fans you have earned when you are continually trying to find new ones. There are many things you can do to engage with existing fans, but here are 7 cardinal sins that you just cannot commit by taking fans for granted:

1. Don’t be slow releasing new music, a bored fan is a lost fan.
2. Don’t be too good to respond to them on social sites.
3. Don’t discourage opportunities for them to work for you. Taking a photo with someone who thinks you are cool likely means they will share it. If they tag it, now all of their friends have a new path to you.
4. Don’t dismiss kids or aspiring musicians. These are the most likely to really be enthusiastic about spreading the word about you on all of the communities they actively participate in.
5. Don’t try to charge for everything you release. If you only create albums and only sell them you’ve not only created an arbitrary lull in your ability to engage existing fans with new music, but you’ve also kneecapped your ability to capitalize on their enthusiasm and share it with their friends. While we are on that topic, don’t put “samples” on your site. It’s better to give them one complete idea and ask them to buy the remaining album than give them a dozen 30 second snippets of incomplete thoughts and expect them to connect with it.
6. Don’t betray them by spamming them. Getting them to “Like” you on Facebook is actually quite an accomplishment. Constantly reposting the same information, asking them to join virtual events to vote for you or share things for you, and sending them personal messages to promote things is not being respectful to their time or attention. The relationship between an unknown band and a fan on social media sites is fragile. Fans will be forgiving of people who they consider famous, they’ll just unsubscribe to you.
7. If they are also active musicians, don’t treat them as inferior. You want their fans. Their fans like them. This isn’t a zero sum game. When other local bands express interest in yours, check them out, and engage them back if you like them. Keep your big mouth shut if you don’t.

Success Isn’t Looking For You

I sure hope this has helped you. I’ve had these thoughts in my head for quite some time and I’ve articulated different parts of them at different times. This is the first time I have documented them to hopefully benefit the people who haven’t quite caught up with the changes yet.

If you take anything away from this, let it be that

• A&R agents aren’t hanging out at clubs looking for the next big thing anymore. They are having trouble selling the things that are already big.
• Record labels aren’t doing development deals anymore. Any record deal that you have to go looking for is one that you don’t want.
• Technology has made the biggest Aces the music industry has ever had accessible to anyone: High quality recording, high quality video production, marketing, distribution, merchandising and promotion. These are all things that a go getter can find ways to afford themselves without what amounts to a sucker’s loan from a record company.
• Don’t every play a show that costs you money. That goes for both pay to play venues AND a gig that isn’t profitable. You’ll simply gain more fans and listens by having your members spend that time online interacting with communities of known interested listeners.
• Whatever person you see playing to sold out arenas in your imagination; be that person from day one.

It all sums up to that. You are not going to trip over success. Success isn’t going to make you a rock star. Being a rock star is going to make you a success…

Just don’t be a dick… nobody cares what your favorite kind of water is or what color M&Ms you like!

Peace!