'Pleased to MISS Me'

Have you ever looked at the tour schedule for one of your favorite bands and gotten excited when you saw you state’s abbreviation in the right hand column but then scrolled left only to find they’ll be four or five hours away? Not only will the drive cost two or three times the ticket price, but you’ll need an entire night or half a day off from work, which translates to you slowly accepting the fact that you can’t go. I imagine this is a re-occurring nightmare for many who reside in upstate New York, and inland California, whereas music fans in the Dakota’s are probably so frustrated that they can’t stomach to check on that kind of thing without a liquor bottle and box of tissues handy. For instance, how many people do you think will be bitter for how many years after missing the insanely rare/overdue three reunion performances from The Replacements (band referenced in title) this summer?

I would hope that you've already accepted your band as not being half as good as The Replacements, but what you may not have realized is that you may be someone else’s favorite band and chances are that they won’t be seeing you on your next tour. In fact, the official estimate is that roughly 75% of your fans won’t be in attendance. The good news is that you can use social media to do one of the things it does best…give you (and your fans!) options. To find out what some of these are, follow the link below:

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'Anyone Can Play Guitar'

As easy as it is to trust a vintage Radiohead song (such as the one referenced above) as legitimate career advice, it’s unfortunately not as easy as many would have you believe. The hard and fast and somewhat predictable truth is that there really aren’t any particularly good short cuts unless you live somewhere near a certain intersection in the South and have no specific use for your soul. But even that method is yet to be scientifically proven.  It’s tempting to think that you can teach yourself how to play guitar. It’s pretty likely that many of your favorite musicians have touted their ‘self-taught’ credentials but equally likely that they aren’t telling the whole truth. The fact is that unless the extent of your aspirations end with Sid Vicious or Dee Dee Ramone (yes, I know they were both bass players) you’ll probably never be as good as you imagined yourself while flailing around with a tennis racquet in front of your bathroom mirror. To read more about this and ten other mistakes guitar players make while trying to develop their skills, click on the link below:

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Don't Let It Bleed, Let It LEAD (To Success!)

So you’ve spent months – maybe a year, maybe more – writing and recording your masterpiece. It’s easily your best work yet and if this doesn’t break you into the mainstream, you already have a stack of real estate exam study books sitting under your bed. But before you make this impeccable offering to music fans everywhere, make sure it’s released properly, especially if you’re on a small budget. If you’re sloppy and/or careless about it, people will be able to tell. It’s like the difference between releasing a once-injured bald eagle back into the wild or a murder of crows into a children’s daycare center. They can both get you on the local news, but there will be some very important differences in context. For a checklist detailing the best way to make sure your release campaign is successful, follow the link below:

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'Hail To The Thief'...But Not The One You Think

Throughout the tireless and often fruitless debate over intellectual property rights and Internet piracy, the ‘main attractions’ so to speak have generally been the legal and monetary issues involved. There has been a consensus for at least a few thousand years, spearheaded by Moses and some famously flammable shrubbery, that stealing is wrong. Even among the people who do pirate music, many do so with a heavy heart over the idea of stealing from their favorite bands. When streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify came along and piracy plummeted, it seemed like the debate may have been resolving itself. The financially handicapped fans still got their free music and bands got paid.

But now things have gotten more complicated since word has gotten out that the reimbursements that streaming services offer is pretty much negligible. If it’s money musicians are after, they’re probably better off fashioning their guitars into shovels and picking a spot to dig for something universally valuable…treasure, oil, Jimmy Hoffa….whatever draws the highest bounty these days. But is it the same thing as piracy? Not really, but some might argue it’s worse. In this case, ‘some’ refers to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and their producer Nigel Goodrich. If this immediately reminds of the Metallica (et al) vs. Napster showdown from a decade ago, you shall be easily forgiven, but there is big ideological difference. Metallica were upsets about making fewer millions of dollars which proved to be a pretty fatal turn-off to the general public, trumped only by the salary cap (AKA, ‘millionaires vs. billionaires’) showdown that take place every few years in each major sport.

Yorke and Goodrich are complaining about money, but not their own. The Black Keys already voiced that particular gripe with Spotify, though they did so with a bit more humility than the one-time kings of popular metal. Yorke and Goodrich are not complaining about piracy on the part of fans, but on the part of the Spotify itself. They have removed their music from the service in protest on behalf of struggling bands (such as yours), claiming the reimbursements are grossly insufficient. This is of course objectively true and for the sake of discussion, I’ll hold the cynicism and assume their concern is sincere. The fact that they gave away an album for free does make them pretty credible on this issue. 

But others might (and do) argue that their idealism is a bit out of touch with the average band's concerns. Streaming services provide a platform like no other in the industry today, for bands to gain exposure. It used to be that bands fought to get on the radio with a shred of concern for whatever royalties they may or may not have been entitled to. But the radio doesn’t really exist in that way anymore. Now it’s generally just a platform for mainstream bands to stack on top of their already substantial collection of platforms. If you think about streaming sites as the radio stations of the 21^st century, the appeal becomes obvious. If a band demands money from people who haven’t heard them yet, they are installing a shark-filled moat at the very entrance to the path that would lead them to people BEGGING to give them money. On the other side of this, one could see how Yorke and Goodrich aren’t necessarily condemning the service itself, but simply pushing for fairer compensation. It’s a pretty interesting thing to think about. But since this is an advice blog, I’ll close by taking the liberty of saying, “Yes”, you should put your music on Spotify. To read more, click the link below:   

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How To Market Yourself When You’re In ‘Dire Straits’ (But Not The Band)

One of the oldest clichés of the business world is the phrase ‘It takes money to make money’. Some might say that it’s a cliché because it’s true, which is within itself a cliché, but let’s not get into that…The point is that while this may often be true, it doesn’t take as much money as you might think to see a return on your investment. From cheap merch ideas to virtually free advertising opportunities, just because you’re broke doesn’t mean that your dreams are. So maybe you instead of drinking before your next show or picking up that ukulele for your solo album, save a few bucks for some frugal but effective marketing. Here are five ways to grow your brand that will cost you less than fifty dollars:

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