The prevalence of online videos brings up new questions when it comes to engaging with band mates and fellow artists. What’s appropriate to post and when? Plus, you never know what clips will show up where – say, an unflattering, low-res, audience-shot video of that embarrassing moment when you had a coughing fit and fell off the stage. Here are some tips from seasoned independent musicians to help you figure out how best to manage your own online video presence. Read more.
From the category archives:
Your headshot is the first impression many new fans and the press will get of you. If the headshot just totally sucks or doesn’t successfully convey your brand, you lose out on so many opportunities right from the beginning. And when you’re trying to make your way in this industry, you simply can’t afford to miss even one opportunity. Having your photo taken can be stressful – I know how that goes – but if you follow some of these simple tips (as well as be flat-out determined that you won’t rest until it’s right), you’re bound to end up happy with the end result. 
The blog at Venture Harbour posted advice from 30 people in the music industry for aspiring entrepreneurs. Of course, most everything included translates to building a music career and is definitely worth a read. Echoes’ Andre Calilhanna is among those polled, and his insights are to "continually re-prioritize." 
Working with an established, professional publicity firm might be the ideal, but unless you have a few thousand dollars available, you may need to design your own music PR campaign. A self-propelled campaign can be effective if executed properly, which means effectively managing the Pre-, During-, and Post-PR phases. There are several pitfalls that can derail the success of a campaign. 
In our experience working with artists from Ben Folds to the Beach Boys, we’ve found that fans want to be a part of a journey — the entire journey. If I love your music, I don’t just want to pre-order your new record. I also want to get a signed copy of the record and possibly a painting you made just for me. I may also want to meet you for dinner or see my name in the album credits. 
You’ve spent countless hours writing, revising, and rehearsing, and now it’s time to take your material to the stage. While a tour bus, road crew, and booking manager are helpful when it comes to worldwide musical domination, gigging locally and building a live following, honing your chops, and refining your performances comes first. Here are music promotion strategies to help you get attention on a local level. 
As an independent musician, digital publicity can be a fantastic way to set yourself on a path towards success. But like much of digital marketing, the process and results can feel a bit nebulous if proper goals aren’t set in place. Setting goals for your publicity campaign can help you to do two critical things: 1. Hire the right kind of publicist, and 2. understand the value of the work. 
As an independent music artist, what can you do to maximize your music promotion and overall revenue? At last year’s New Music Seminar, Disc Makers and CD Baby president Tony van Veen shared nine music promotion lessons he’s learned that every artist can easily implement to maximize gig sales, drive download purchases, and increase overall music sales. 
Are you a songwriter who needs to co-write, but don’t take the time to do it on a regular basis? Is there a group of songwriters in your community facing the same songwriting dilemma? Songfinishers is a songwriting workshop idea that may be right for you and your community of writers to help build friendships, encourage one another, and co-write songs. 
The most important thing to do when dealing with money is to make sure to write EVERYTHING down. A good way to keep tabs is to put all the info in Excel. We divide it into date, gas, food, lodging, salary (how much we pay our musicians), pay (from the venue), CD sales, t-shirts, tips, extra. At the end of each day we total it up. There are two main ways to make money as a band: 1) Guarantees/door/bar percentage, and 2) Selling merchandise. 
The night of your CD release show should be the biggest music performance of your career to date. The show will be packed, if not sold out. The reason more people typically come to album release concerts than your Wednesday night four-band bill show is because it’s an event – and should be hyped up as one. Having a packed club with people there actually to see YOU is something that won’t happen very often early on, so you have to make sure you go about this right.
Many people have asked us how we transformed our band into a sustainable business, touring 250 days a year. We’ve created a series of videos to help explain what we’ve learned over the past few years in the hopes that it will help you learn how to get gigs and get more good bands out on the road. We’ll explain how to book music gigs that are well attended and pay guarantees, promote your shows, make extra money, build a following, and describe who wants to take your money (and why you shouldn’t let them). 
If you give someone your disc at a show all they should have to do while driving home is remember they have it and with one hand on the wheel slide the disc out from it’s case and pop it into their CD player (you don’t want to cause them an accident do you?). The same goes for the journalists getting your disc in the mail. They see five discs on their desk. four are shrink wrapped and one is not. Which disc do you think they’re going to start with? 
Whatever your instrument or genre, as an independent musician, I bet you’ve probably spent time gazing at the arts section of your local newspaper or favorite music magazine and wondered, “How can I get there?” While talent, hard work, business chops, persistence, and luck have a great deal to do with it, there’s another tool that can help — a good publicist. 
In business, return on investment – or ROI – traditionally translates to “How much money did we make on that promotion or venture?” This doesn’t translate so neatly to a social media campaign, or your general social media efforts, because at its heart, social media is a conversation tool, not a sales tool. So the question becomes: “If social media has no direct relationship to sales, how do I measure its ROI?” It will help if you start by defining realistic expectations of your social media campaigns so you can effectively measure the ROI of your social media efforts. 
