Whatever your next music project is — be it an album, tour, video, single, or anything else — the first step is always planning. These four steps will get you off on the right foot. Read the post.
In life, and when making an album, things happen. The more you understand about the process and the more detail-focused you are, the better your chances for success. So here are some things I wish I had been told before I started putting together an album’s worth of material to be pressed and distributed. Read the post.
Music metadata is the information embedded in a digital audio file that is used to identify the content of the song, including the song title, band or artist’s name, the name of the album on which the song appears and which number track it is, the genre of music, and year the song was released. Read more.
Testing and feedback should be part of the process of getting your music products into releasable form. Testing material on your most likely fans, and making necessary improvements and decisions before committing your time and money to the recording, manufacturing, distributing, and promoting it. Without market research, you could easily spend hundreds (or thousands) of your hard-earned dollars recording music that’s unmarketable to music supervisors, labels, radio stations, and even your own target fans! Read more.
Most bands do a traditional media campaign (newspapers, magazines, radio), as well as a new media campaign (podcasts, music blogs, MP3s). Music publicity is not just compiling lists and following steps mechanically, it should be fun and is a chance to channel the same creativity you put into your music to build a buzz. Read more.
If you’re sitting down to tackle making an album, there’s a lot to think about; from clearing the rights for your cover songs to converting the cover art to the right format. When you get your manufactured CDs in hand, there are still a lot of things you need to do – namely, releasing the album for sale to the public. While your music is at the heart of what you do, your identity, image, brand, website, web presence, merchandise, and publicity is what you use to connect with your fans. Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan have revised our popular Planning Your Album From Beginning To End guide. Here’s an excerpt from the revised guide. Read more.
Before we can mass produce copies of your disc, there are a few legal issues to clear first. You are required to sign a release form declaring that all the music on your album is original and “owned” by you. If all your music is original, you’ll check that box and move on. However, if you record any cover songs or incorporate any copyrighted samples or loops, you have to provide proof that you received the proper permissions. Read more.
The holiday season, especially the golden month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, is the most lucrative time of the year for retail sales. As an independent musician, it can be a time for you to move a ton of product – professionally manufactured CDs, merch, and more. There are many ways to take advantage of this time of the year, and our new guide answers questions about how to prepare your order and make your new release something special for the holidays.
Read more and download your FREE PDF.
Before scheduling your album release, plan for the steps that lie between songwriting and CD manufacturing. This DIY album release checklist will help. Read more.
The first quarter of the year (Jan to March) is often the best time of the year for a new artist to release an album, as it’s the least competitive. Plus, the Valentine’s Day period is one of the biggest sales periods of the year. Read more.