The Independent Musician Sweepstakes includes a prize package worth over $15,000 in audio recording equipment, prizes, and more from Disc Makers, CD Baby, HostBaby, Antares, iZotope, Apogee, Gobbler, Aphex, Sonic Reality, MAGIX, Rain Computers, Audio-Technica, AVID, and Auralex. Read more.
CD Baby has launched CD Baby Pro, a new service for independent music artists that helps collect the songwriting and music royalties you’ve earned worldwide. Even if you’ve registered your works with a PRO, it’s virtually impossible to collect all the publishing royalties owed to you every time one of your songs is purchased, streamed, or played in a public setting. CD Baby Pro solves this problem and makes it easy for you to get paid what you’ve earned. Read more.
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." Read more.
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. Read more.
If you sing without a vocal warm up, you can encounter all sorts of problems. Warming up is very much about relaxing and preparing the muscles and mechanisms for what they are about to do, and it is also about getting your mind and body into the flow of breathing correctly – which will ultimately help you sing better.
Read more and download your free guide today.
Here’s a pretty random list of six albums we recommend for 2013. We’re not claiming these are the best albums of 2012 – some were released years before – but we’re loving them and thought we’d share. Read more.
It’s the end of the year – time to make a Top 10 list and stir up some controversy. If you’ve got an opinion and time to kill, you’re sure to get embroiled in a the debate. There are hundreds more where these came from, but here are ten lists for the 2012 wrap up. Read more.
When recording in your home studio, it’s possible to create depth when mixing audio tracks. By adjusting the order of the various signals from front to back, you can create depth in your audio mix and make it more transparent. During mixing you can simulate various distances and achieve a placement of the instruments in space. In this way the instruments can be effectively separated in space. Read more.
Hypebot.com recently posted about a panel from TAXI’s 2012 Road Rally titled, “Are You Leaving Money on the Table?” Disc Makers’ CEO Tony van Veen was on the panel, along with Michael Laskow (TAXI), Dave Cool (Bandzoogle), Lauren Danzy (SoundExchange) and Gooding (Indie Artist/Songwriter). Read more.
For all of you bloggers out there – and those of you looking for blogging tips or wondering how to start a blog – our good friend Chris Rockett at PromoteYourMusic.net just published a massive post that answers the $10,000 question: “What are the secrets of entertaining blogging?” More than 20 indie music movers and shakers weighed in with their music marketing advice, and Rockett assembled all the answers in his post. Read more.
Today we announced that in October we broke two of our all-time disc replication records, proving that — as much as ever — physical media is a crucial part of any musician’s product offerings and the CD is not yet dead. In October 2012, Disc Makers replicated 4,380,296 CDs, an increase of over 600,000 units from October, 2011. This figure outpaces Disc Makers’ prior all-time monthly CD & DVD replication record of 4,013,000 CDs, which had held since 2008. Read more.
An independent artist has to constantly put out material that is going to interest and evoke a response from your audience. So it’s not just releasing music, though certainly you can do that pretty easily – the tools are there for you to put out a song a week if you wanted to. Be it video content or blog content or tour diaries, there are plenty of avenues for you to consistently produce content that will draw your audience in and keep them engaged. Read more.
All of the tools to do anything and everything – including things you never even thought of – are online, available and waiting for you to put them to use. Dropbox, Hootsuite, and SoundCloud are three services that indie musicians are using to help manage and promote their careers. Read more.
In addition to your microphones, DAW/console, and room, an essential part of any home music studio set-up is your audio signal processing gear. From the dynamics control of compressors, limiters, and gates to the effects processing of reverb and delay, these tools are integral to producing a professional-sounding audio product. Read more and download your free guide today.
Can we call it a trend? In March we posted that overall album sales were up in 2011, and now we’ve received news from our comrades at CD Baby that physical CD sales for their independent artists are up from this time last year. Read more.