Posts Tagged ‘Music marketing’

Cameron Mizell is a professional musician, former record company employee and runs the website Musician Wages.

Musician Coaching:

Tell me about how you came to New York and put have been able to become a full time musician.

CM:

I came to New York a little over five years ago, and right before coming here I’d been playing in Bloomington, Indiana and it was kind of a big fish/small pond situation, where’d I’d been playing a lot of gigs and was kind of one of the guys people would call if they wanted to get a gig. And I thought, “This is great, but I need to move on.” That was what prompted the decision to move to New York. My wife – then she was my fiancée – and I moved up here and had no jobs, no leads. We just decided it was time and decided to move. That – coming up here with nothing – makes it really hard to do music. So I had to find some kind of job to make ends meet, and I went through a couple sales jobs that I was terrible at, and then ended up at Verve Records as a temp and then eventually I was hired on full time.

I worked in the production department, and when the label was downsized in 2006 I was promoted by default. The downsizing made the label much smaller, so the lines between every department were blurred. I worked closely with the creative department and also learned what the marketing department did, what the sales department did, and I even learned from the label’s lawyer.

Thanks to all this, I started to get a better idea of who owns what and how deals work and what labels look for in an artist, and by doing that I figured out what an artist should look for in a label. That gave me a pretty strong background [in the music industry]. Then when I felt it was time for me to quit, I left that and started doing my own music full time.

Musician Coaching:

Was there anything that precipitated you saying, “Now is the time, and now I can go do this, even if I don’t know if I’m going to make it?” Was it something in your label gig?

CM:

Well, yeah. I had been essentially doing all the production responsibilities for Verve, but my official title was Assistant Manager. I was very busy and working long hours, and it was a very stressful job. I felt like I could probably make this much money on my own doing what I love to do. Frankly, I didn’t even really have that much time to do my own music outside of work because I was working late and thinking about it all weekend. It was too much, and I decided I had to go. They weren’t going to be able to pay me what I felt I deserved to be paid.  When it really came down to it, the money wasn’t important; I just wanted to be a musician.

Musician Coaching:

Tell me about how you found enough money to survive when you were starting out?

CM:

My main source of music income, especially when I left Verve, was selling downloads, mostly on iTunes.  I was able to create a decent amount of income by 1) having several albums available so there was more to sell and 2) I picked up some (sort of) tricks for promoting my music online. The thing that worked the best at the time was doing iMixes on iTunes. I wrote a whole article about that on Musician Wages. Essentially what you do is create mixes, or playlists, in the store. When people go to iTunes they’re usually there to buy music, so the best place to try to help people find your music is going to be in the store itself. As an independent artist you don’t get any page placement, so what you do is find similar artists and albums that are very similar to yours and make playlists of your music with those artists, so that over time people start to connect your music – like my jazz trio with John Scofield or Soulive or Medeski, Martin and Wood – similar types of music. So it helps establish these “listeners also bought” trends. Once that started to happen, I noticed more people were listening to my music through websites like LastFM, and could also see what else they were listening to.

Musician Coaching:

And it gets you more feedback for creating mixes with other artists.

CM:

Exactly. Because sometimes the music that I thought my music was similar to actually wasn’t what other people thought. Other people thought it was similar to some other artist I’d never even heard of, so it helps me discover new music and new artists I can use in playlists. So it’s a self-perpetuating thing.

Musician Coaching:

So does this method still work in iTunes 9?

CM:

iMixes were introduced in 2004 or 2005, so that’s been several years. In internet years that’s generations. I think it’s a lower priority, or the feature is further down the importance ladder at iTunes. I don’t think it’s as effective as it used to be. First, because it doesn’t get as much attention, but also because over time – and I don’t know if this is my fault or if people were bound to figure this out – people were doing this, and it was like blatant spamming, making iMixes that only use the top-selling artists, even if it had nothing to do with their music. The playlists were not really designed to be good playlists. They were just designed to put your track in front of as many people as possible. I feel like that kind of deteriorated the cleverness of this whole thing. It became really obvious when people were making iMixes to promote their music. I still make iMixes that are essentially like if I were going to make a playlist for myself or a mix CD for my car. I can turn all those things into iMixes. And they’re good mixes, because if I want to listen to it, maybe someone else will want to listen to it.

Musician Coaching:

I remember you telling me you had some success with Christmas music as well.

CM:

In 2007, when I was still working at Verve, I really became aware of how much Christmas music sells, so I started to wonder if I could turn that into a revenue stream for myself.

People just buy Christmas music. In some ways it cheapens the whole idea of a Christmas album, because it’s blatantly commercial. My wife loves Christmas music , and she was always asking me, “When are you going to make your Christmas album?” And I said, “It’s way too early in my career to make a Cameron Mizell Christmas album.” There was no way I was going to do that. But then I started noticing other independent artists having a lot of success with their own holiday albums. One night I was sitting around with a couple musician friends and we thought, “What kind of Christmas album could we make? It needs to be very, very specific – the niche, the genre. It needs to be something that’s not very common. How about bossa nova? What would a Stan Getz circa 1964 Christmas album sound like?” So we went and arranged a bunch of public domain Christmas hymns as bossa novas – Girl from Ipanema meets O Little Town of Bethlehem, that kind of thing. We recorded it all at home so there was no overhead. We put it up on iTunes and the first year it did really well. iTunes included a track in one of their iTunes Essential playlists and put the album in a feature on the jazz page. We ended up making about $2500 bucks in a month from that album. We kind of realized, “Okay, that worked, what else can we do?” The next year we made an Americana Christmas album — the same guys with a totally different sound. These are all instrumental albums, so this is great background music for the holidays.

There are studios and session bands that do this sort of thing, which you might see on an end-cap in someplace like Target, so it’s not a new idea. Our approach is just less slick, more organic.

Musician Coaching:

So it is music with a specific purpose. This project is Christmas music made for a certain type of consumer.

CM:

Exactly. That’s what we’re trying to do. It’s gotten to a point where if we do one of these every year – as long as we can make it good, because it’s not going to sell if it’s not really good – we get paid a good chunk of change after the Christmas season. It covers part of my rent for a year.

Musician Coaching:

How did you find success being a session musician? I know you’re producing other artists, playing on other artists’ music, doing a lot of musical directing. How did you wind up going from someone who knew no one a few years ago to someone that is having that side of your career?  A label gig is not always the best place to meet touring musicians,

CM:

Well, actually it’s kind of funny. Lauren Zettler, one of the people I work with most now used to work at Universal Music Group. So, in some ways because of working that record label gig I met the person who I now work with most. So she was doing her own thing, and after I quit Verve she gave me a call and wanted me to play guitar on a couple gigs, and that sort of turned into recording a new song she’d written. We did all this at my apartment in my little make-shift studio. Things clicked and that one song ended up turning into an EP, and we started to tour. With Lauren, it was really that she needed a sideman, and it turned into becoming more of a band endeavor where we both do a lot of work. We both know a lot about the music industry, so we are able to share responsibilities. That helps. All my other connections came from school. I went to University of North Texas, which has a great jazz program, and then I transferred to Indiana University, which also has an excellent music program. I know a lot of people from both those schools that are here in New York now. Once I quit Verve I had all this free time, and I could start getting together with people and playing a lot more. Really it’s all about going out to see people at their gigs, and they come out to see you at yours. Eventually if somebody needs a guitar player, they give you a call. It’s pretty straight-forward. If you’re good and people see you enough, they start to remember you.

Musician Coaching:

Tell me about MusicianWages as a platform. Why did you build that, and does it feed into your career as a session player?

CM:

MusicianWages.com was an idea that Dave Hahn and I had going back several years before we actually started it. Dave is a great writer, and he had been blogging about his experience on a cruise ship – he had a cruise ship gig as a piano player. That blog got tons of traffic. It was the only place where people could find out any information about playing music on a cruise ship, because the agencies weren’t very forthcoming about what to expect. What kind of clothes do you pack? What’s the room going to look like? So he wrote about a lot of that. What we ended up doing was taking that cruise ship blog – Chronicles of a Cruise Ship Musician – and making it one section of MusicianWages. We figured a lot of people do the cruise ship and come off the boat and are looking for work and a scene somewhere. Dave had that experience, and then after the cruise ship he started doing tours, musical theater, and things like that. I had been doing the independent musician/freelance guitar player type of thing, and had experience organizing and leading a band and trying to do something with my original music. So we just started writing about all this. We thought, “There are very few resources out there that give you practical advice as a musician.” And frankly, we couldn’t really find anything that was very significant written by musicians. Because there are a lot of people that talk to you like, “I’m a marketing expert, and here’s how you should market your music;” but they’re not actually doing it themselves because they’re not musicians. That was the whole idea:  “It has to be based on experience and it has to be practical advice; it can’t be an advertisement for whatever you’re doing, it has to be advice for someone that wants to do what you’re doing.” We asked friends that are all professional musicians to write as well. And then we had people that aren’t necessarily working musicians but work with musicians very closely – such as yourself, or Heather at Music Careers at About.com or David Rose at KnowtheMusicBiz.com, all those types of people started to contribute. We’ve built a pretty solid amount of content on the topic. Our goal is, if you search “musician,” we want to come up on the top page in Google. We’re there yet, but that’s our goal. If you go to Musician Wages, you’ll notice one of the things we try to stress is that our site is about the musician business, not the music business.

Musician Coaching:

How is putting yourself out there in that manner and other blogs enhanced your career?  Would you recommend somebody putting their experiences out there to help their career or their business?

CM:

Yeah. It’s definitely had a positive influence on my career as a musician, because every article has a link to me, and if people want to find out more about me, they just have to click on my name and it goes to my website. It’s hard to say how many sales that results in, but I definitely get e-mail on a regular basis from people through my website that are asking me more questions, or telling me they found my music and really like it. A lot of times those people come from MusicianWages. I know for Dave, for example, he’s definitely had some positive results from writing this. Dave belongs to the Musician’s Union. He wrote an article about creating a resume for musicians, and had a picture of his resume in the article. The Union paper, which goes out to tens of thousands of union members, has his resume printed in it because they re-printed his article

Musician Coaching:

Do you have any closing advice or things you see a lot of people doing wrong that could be avoided?

CM:

The only other thing I wanted to add is that there are all these sites you could be on, and I think a lot of people find this overwhelming. I see a lot of really great musicians that don’t do anything online. I think if you don’t think about it as a bunch of separate things, but think about it as one organism that is all contributing to your internet presence and make it a habit to do a little bit here and a little bit there, it grows over time. If you Google your name – which every musician should do from time to time – you want to be the top result, and you want people to know you have music available and are playing shows. The only way to do that is to repeatedly be putting your name and your music on the internet so other people can pick it up.  If that means blogging every day or blogging once a week or just posting your favorite music on some website somewhere, all of that contributes. That’s what I’ve been doing for years, and it works really well.

Learn More Cameron Mizell and follow Cameron on Twitter

Patrick Faucher is the CEO and Co-Founder, Nimbit, Inc. by way of being a technologist and life long musician.  He is a Berklee College of Music Graduate and one of the founders of direct to fan platform called Nimbit.  He was kind enough to take some time and explain to me how Nimbit works and offer some general advice and information on how people are making a living in music using the direct to fan approach.

Musician Coaching:

Tell me a bit about your background and how Nimbit came to be.

PF:

I’ve been a musician my whole life, since age four. I went through high school, and out of high school got a scholarship to engineering school, which was very practical at the time. I studied computer science and electrical engineering back in the early days of the Commodore 64.

Musician Coaching:

I had a VIC-20. I was right there with you.

PF: There you go! I had a VIC-20. I loved that thing. Three years into engineering school, I took a break to go and play music, because that’s always been my passion and my love. I did that for a year and decided the last place I wanted to go was back to engineering school. So, I took some time and applied to music schools and in 1990 I ended up getting a scholarship to Berklee College of Music here in Boston. After graduation I gigged as a professional musician – various groups, from reggae, to blues, to jazz, to world music, to you-name-it. After getting married I realized how unbelievably difficult it was to make a living as an artist and support a family.  So I fell back on my technical background and started doing web programming.  At the time the web was just starting to be commercialized. I ended up working for a firm called Stumpworld Systems that created some of the very first e-commerce applications for bands including Phish, Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones.

Musician Coaching:

Hmmm.   The Rolling…?  Oh yea – those guys.  Ok.

PF:

We developed an entire suite of e-commerce and storefront tools that powered different sites. We had a bunch of clients – not just musicians. And we ended up building out this whole e-commerce platform.  That company rode the boom-bust cycle through the late 90’s into 2001. I was employee number 16 when I got hired as  head of development, and two years later we had 180 employees!  Six months after that we were closed.

Musician Coaching:

I don’t mean to laugh, but I’ve worked at and seen so many companies like that myself.

PF:

Right. You’ve seen that play. It was a great ride, and we built some great technology. When the dust settled, I got together with Matt Silbert, a Stumpworld colleague.  He said, “Hey, I want to get back to serving the musicians we worked with early on and open up a web shop.” I said, “There’s one question that drives me nuts. Why doesn’t every band get online and build a business directly with their fans? There’s no reason they can’t other than the tools are clunky, it’s hard to navigate, and there just isn’t a good platform for it.”  That was around 2002 when I started to write the business plan for Nimbit.  After that we launched the very first version of Nimbit Web Tools that let you publish and manage a website, run a mailing list, post a calendar, and update your website.

We were developing the storefront piece to go out, and I met up with Phil Antoniades who ran Artist Development Associates.  He already had a whole online CD store for artists including a fulfillment solution we needed.  We started talking, and he had a whole pile of offline services he was doing for musicians from promotion, to CD replication, to other management type services.

We merged the two companies and created an online artist development platform where artists could put themselves online, get their brand out there, engage their fans, and conduct commerce all in one spot. That was the vision for Nimbit from the get-go:  artists need a way to directly engage their fan base, sell direct to them, market to them on an on-going basis, and manage their business.   The traditional major label distribution model was rendering itself unnecessary and costly, and we saw then that the market wouldn’t sustain multiple, multi-platinum releases for much longer.

The playing field between “major label” and “indie” was leveling.  The lowered barriers to entry certainly meant that a lot more artists could get in the game, and it was a lot more distracting for Joe Fan.  But we knew the good artists could easily connect with those fans and start building a business directly with them. And we saw that as the model of the future, so that’s when we set out to build the ultimate platform for direct-to-fan marketing, sales and distribution.

Musician Coaching:

So how long has there been a Nimbit in this current incarnation? How long have you been open with this suite of tools?

PF:

Over five years.

Musician Coaching:

And how many users do you have currently?

PF:

We have over 15,000 artists on our system.

Musician Coaching:

How are you differentiating yourself from the handful of other companies – Topspin, ReverbNation? You’ve been around for a while, but I’m hearing more about you lately.

PF:

Nimbit has been built from the bottom up.  From the beginning it was designed to be a fully-integrated direct-to-fan business management platform. We didn’t start out being a widget company a hybrid portal, where it’s fan discovery plus some widgets plus some fan marketing. We didn’t start out to be a CD manufacturer or an online CD store. We didn’t start out to be just high-end merchandising or analytics. That’s part of the reason it’s taken so long for our brand to take hold:  it’s a lot easier to sell a single-point solution like a fan widget or an e-mail marketing tool than it is to sell an integrated platform. What’s been our weakness historically is now our strength. We very methodically set out to build everything from the back office, forward. Not only are artists able to publish beautiful storefronts but they’re able to capture all that fan data, analyze it, drill down, create marketing programs for that fan base and then push out those marketing programs that then drive more sales.

We were the first to actually publish a complete digital and physical integrated shopping cart. We’ve been doing this for years, where you can publish CD’s, t-shirts, mp3’s, digital albums, PDF’s – you name it. Any kind of product, digital or physical, you can actually merchandise and market through your store, and the fan doesn’t have to go three different places to get it.

We’ve remained focused on how artists conduct their business behind those storefronts. It’s things like giving them lots of different ways to set up their products, making sure everything is handled from Soundscan, to royalty tracking, to revenue splits with the other stakes holders. It’s complete transparency, so the artist sees where each sale comes from, what channel, etc.  Nimbit also gives them conduits to iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody and eMusic as well as publishing their own storefronts, because that’s part of their business as well. It’s things like giving them a central place to work with their customer list and fan list, and to see all their activity data. They can see things like total sales on a per-customer basis.

Our core philosophy from the get-go was to build our solution around the artist such that they could really conduct, build, and operate a successful business. We couldn’t do that by giving them just one part of a solution or one little widget to do e-mail. We couldn’t do that by giving them one little widget to sell an mp3. And we couldn’t do that without giving them things like warehousing and fulfillment and inventory management, which is something you won’t get with others.

Nimbit didn’t do it the easy way. And it was tough to really make the business fly, because you had to coordinate multiple moving parts.  It was very expensive to operate, and required a critical mass to sustain it.

Musician Coaching:

Do you have any success stories with somebody using your platform exclusively?

PF:

Absolutely. We see it every day.  We have hundreds and hundreds of people really making a living.  We have a children’s artist that makes well over six figures per year,  using Nimbit to run  sales, marketing and distribution.

Another perfect example is an artist named Ellis Paul who’s been a long-time indie staple in the folk and Americana space. He started out with a label and now uses us exclusively. In this past year he raised nearly $100,000 using our platform, directly with his fans to fund his new album.

Musician Coaching:

You have a fundraising aspect as well?

PF:

Yes, it’s actually as simple as creating any other product offer on our system. Ellis set up a bunch of really cool donation bundles, ranging from $50 up to $5,000 and $10,000. People could support him at these different levels, and he did this all through his website, mailing list and at his store. He got a $10,000 offer within half an hour of putting out his first e-mail. He sent this patron down to Nashville where she could sit in for the recording of some of the songs, and she actually played on some of the songs. She said that in retrospect that was the best $10,000 she ever spent. He calls it fan-raising instead of fundraising.

He used that money to produce probably his best album ever to date. And now those same fans that have supported him on the album, he’s activating them and sending concentric rings around them to go out and create buzz about the new album, which he is releasing without a label. But he is already on track to sell more than he’s ever sold in the past. In fact, we have some artists that have, since coming with us after being on a label, sold more and made more money doing it this way than all of their previous releases combined. That’s not an unusual story for us.

Musician Coaching:

How are you integrating with the people on the big social networks?

PF:

Today fans live online; and they live on MySpace and Facebook.  We announced a new product which is called MyStore for Facebook.  MyStore enables artists to sell individual songs, entire albums, physical CD’s or anything from a Facebook fan page.

The fan doesn’t have to leave Facebook which has a twofold advantage:  1) that’s where the fans want to stay because they’re talking to their friends; 2) because it’s being done there and through Nimbit, so the artist gets a bigger piece of the pie.  Because the artists know who bought what, they can say, “Hey, looks like many of our fans enjoy the up-tempo songs. We can send out a note saying, ‘We’ve got this new album featuring these up-tempo songs. And if you want to feature this song on your personal page, you can do that.’”

Essentially there is this whole generation of people – millions who are on Facebook – that live online. The key is that successful artists have been able to find fans where they are. In the past, if somebody played a stadium, the artist didn’t know who was there. The ticket company might know, but the artist didn’t know. We create ways to do that. I think what is especially exciting about the Ellis Paul example is that he raised $100,000 from 300 people. They are essentially his patrons. He compares it to when Mozart went to Emperor Josef.  Mozart had one sole patron. So now you can have individual fans who are producers and patrons, and they can be vocal about what they want. This creates a great dialogue. Mass music used to be, somebody had a song and pushes it down someone’s throat and the label makes all the money. In this case, the artist selling music themselves, the fans communicating directly with the artist,  it’s a more healthy and fulfilling relationship.

Musician Coaching:

I always compare it to Twelfth Night, because you have the character the fool who would show up for the various different people of royalty and dance and play fiddle for a coin or his supper what have you. It’s become a lot more feudal in that regard.

PF:

That’s a very good point. It has become a lot more feudal, and if you look at the economic model, it mirrors that in a way. It’s coming down into smaller enterprises and more dispersed across these fragmented, niched marketplaces. But you have this very big difference in that you’ve got a communication medium that can cover the entire globe in an instant. It’s not localized from a physical standpoint anymore. So you can have direct patronage across the globe that’s very dispersed, but it follows that similar economic model of the old patronage model.

Musician Coaching:

What about things you’ve seen completely backfire and don’t work or words of caution?

PF:

You have to have both right and left brain. You need somebody who can be a great musician and a great business person. Some musicians might fail as business people because they either don’t have those skills or don’t hire people to do it. You can be the best musician, with the greatest skills and tunes out there, but it’s the power behind the throne. As an artist, you owe it to yourself to understand and be directly involved with the business aspects of your career and understand that you are a business, and you are the CEO of your business.  You have to understand what’s going on and surround yourself with smart people. I often point to the fact that back before Madonna was a big star, she was very driven and understood the business of music. When Ray Charles was emerging as a star, he successfully negotiated to retain the rights to masters; he was the first artist ever to do that because he understood the business landscape around him.

I often hear artists say, “You know what? I just want to make the music and get a label to take care of the rest.” And I tell them, “That’s a recipe for disaster. Not that that couldn’t work out, but your approach is a recipe for disaster. You will quickly get taken advantage of and spit out and not end up where you want to be.”

There’s an interesting story that is indicative of how mindsets are changing in terms of how artists define success. For the past three or four years I have given a lecture at Berklee College of Music.  It’s generally a talk about distribution and marketing and different concepts for getting your music out to market.  I ask at every workshop I do, “How many of you want to go make a living in music after you leave Berklee?” All of them raise their hands. “How many of you see working with a label or getting a label deal as critical to doing that and making a living?”

Four years ago every person in the class raised hands. Two years ago, only half the students raised their hands. This year, I went and gave a similar workshop and asked the same question about a month and a half ago, and exactly zero people raised their hand.

None of them saw a major label as a critical component for success. I thought that was fascinating.

Jill Sobule

For those that don’t know Jill Sobule is a gifted singer-songwriter who is probably best known for her 1995 Singles “I kissed a girl” and “Supermodel”.  Jill has released seven albums full length albums and several EPs and has released records on MCA, Atlantic, Beyond and Artemis records.  Jill’s most recent album was a self release that was funded entirely by her fans.  I met Jill when working at Atlantic and she remains the kind and gracious person I remember from almost fifteen years ago.  She was kind enough to give me some of her time by phone before the Thanksgiving Holiday.

Musician Coaching:

I know a lot of people know your name, but even though we worked together, I don’t know the earlier parts of your story or about what you initially did to build a following and first get picked up at MCA.

JS:

In those days, before there was social networking, how did you get followings? I suppose, I played shows a lot; and I remember I had a bit of a following in Denver, and then I moved to New York, and then I met someone who was a publisher out of Nashville, and he saw me at my last show in Denver before I moved to New York. He was interested in non-country acts, and he put me up at the Nashville Extravaganza. It was like the South by Southwest of Nashville. The A&R people from New York and the west coast came to Nashville, and they saw me and signed me. At first they thought it was very cool that I was this pop act from Nashville, so I let them think I was from Nashville for a while. That was the days of getting discovered. That’s how I got on MCA, though a little bit before that I was in New York. Remember those pre-YouTube Days? What you did was you played and played out. I think maybe people are coming back to this too, I hope.

Musician Coaching:

You did the MCA thing for a while and had some decent success with “I Kissed a Girl” and with “Super Model” during the Atlantic years. Tell me about life after major labels.

JS:

After the album that had “I Kissed a Girl,” I did another one – “Happy Town” – and it was always my reaction to do something different and weird. I don’t think the label knew what to do with me after “I Kissed a Girl,” because, was I a novelty act? What was I? There was nothing else like “I Kissed a Girl.” It was one of those songs that was added last minute as a goofball song. I didn’t know that would be a single. It was kind of my curse and my blessing. I think when the second record happened, they still didn’t know what to do, and I was dropped. Then I was on a record label called Beyond Records, and that was another one of those where it went belly up. Then I joined Artemis with Danny Goldberg for the album after that.

Musician Coaching:

I had no idea you were with so many labels subsequently.

JS:

Oh yeah. And then Danny Goldberg signed me and then went to Air America afterwards, and he was my guy. So nothing really happened after that. And then they went under. My last two before this one were on indie labels that went under. It’s not very good luck, I must say.

Musician Coaching:

I wish that were an exceptional story, but it does seem to be the rule rather than the exception now.

JS:

I don’t feel special. The only thing I would like is to have all those records back. That’s my only disappointment – my only one that carries on now. There are a few of them I’d like to have back. I’d bootleg them now anyway.

Musician Coaching:

After Artemis, what happened then?

JS:

After Artemis, I thought, “Enough,” for a while, and I was just playing around and gather songs, creating songs. I had a three-year gig doing music for a show for Nickelodeon called “Unfabulous.” It was the first and last time I’ve ever had a job. I scored the show for three years. It was a live action with Emma Roberts, and it was really fun. I learned so much. I remember when I was trying to get the gig – it was a friend who was creating it, and I think she knew I was lying – and I said, “Oh yes, I’ve done this before,” even though I’d never showed her my resume that had nothing on it. And it was one of those things where I said, “Okay, here’s the first show, and I have 50 cues I have to make. What do I do?” At first you’re bullshitting, and then you realize, “No, I’m doing it!” It was really kind of great. I did that, and it takes up a whole lot of time. Since I’m not savvy at the computers and my Pro Tools, I had another friend – one in New York and one in L.A. – work with me on it, because I was always between the two towns. Then, I thought, “I’ve got this collection of songs.” Throughout this all, my following was growing, even before there was Facebook. I had newsgroups, and I was really, really good at communicating with fans. I had a really good relationship.

About six months before I did this jillsnextrecord.com, I said, “Hey, what would you guys think? There’s no point in going to another label. What’s the point, and why would they have me?” I said, “Would you guys contribute to my next record?” And it was overwhelmingly great response. In the meantime, I kept playing a lot. I played in New York a lot. And I do this thing called “The Jill and Julia Show.” I do this thing with Julia Sweeney from Saturday Night Live, and we’re still doing it. She tells a story and I sing. In the meantime, I’ve been completely active and actually touring a lot. In a way, it’s like Old Time and New Time. On one hand, you build a fan base online and on the other hand, you work Old Time and hit the road. I actually came up with an idea – jillsnextrecord.com – where fans, at first just my fans on my newsletter would help me make a record. And I didn’t want them to just give me money, so I developed different levels of contribution in return for different gifts and services. For $25, you get the first CD before it’s released. I didn’t know how I was going to release it, but … everything from free concert tickets, to “I’m going to put you in the thank you’s,” to “In my last song I’m going to mention your name,” to house concerts, to weapons-grade plutonium. The weapons-grade plutonium was a total joke; for $10,000, a person could sing on my record. Someone actually did it. It was so much fun, and the great thing and scary thing about it was, I thought, “This could’ve just been my mother and a few fans.”

Musician Coaching:

Were you hopeful this would really get funded? That’s such a leap of faith in so many ways.

JS:

I tried to figure out how much it would cost to record the record, and I tried to figure out, “What do labels do?” I figured out how much it would cost to market it, hire a publicist, tour. I put together some arbitrary number that seemed like even for a label that would be an indie would be a budget. And if I would’ve gotten $10,000 that would’ve been fine, I would’ve done that too. I ended up in less than two months getting that, and I had to stop it, because people kept putting more in.

Musician Coaching:

Wow. It’s just so flattering.

JS:

I know, it’s crazy. And a lot of that was just presales too.

Musician Coaching:

You’re an artist that’s been around the block – on the majors and the indies, doing it yourself. What did you do to put out this record? My understanding is it’s done pretty well.

JS:

Well, I don’t know how well it’s done. I don’t know who buys records. I sell a lot of them online and at the shows. What I did was I had a manager at the time when I first did it, who I knew was so wrong. He was a nice guy, but he was so wrong. I remember he came to the studio when I recorded it, and we were finally at the end. He said, “This is great. I can’t wait to have a CD. Burn me a CD so we can start shopping this.” And I said, “No! People would kill me.” So I found someone that felt the same way I did, even though I don’t think even he knew how much work and what a pain in the ass it was. I just hired someone for distribution and a publicist. There were a few items where I probably wasted money; like people working with “new media.” “We’re going to help with your brand.” What is that?

Musician Coaching:

It can be very vague unless you get someone to detail a plan for you.

JS:

Exactly. I think I had some losers. That’s what I did. It seems like the last thing I had were some stores, and you can get it – like Barnes and Noble. Who knows if the next time it will ever be hard copies. I think the only reason to have hard copies is that it shows; people can have a souvenir.

Musician Coaching:

How have you found the touring changing in the last few years? Have you found the kind of access fans have and the reach you have with fans has changed that for you?

JS:

Well, I’m not at the level where my tickets are really expensive, and because of the economy they can’t come to my shows.

Musician Coaching:

I guess I mean reaching out before you get to a region.

JS:

Oh yeah, well, that’s fantastic. Today on my Facebook, I say, “Going to Denver. Who wants my extra drink tickets? Who wants a backstage pass?” I’m still at a level where it can be pretty personal. And maybe someday it will grow so fast, but right now it’s at a place that suits me. There are certain artists that want to have a wall between them and their audience. But I like feeling like I’m just in someone’s living room.

Musician Coaching:

That’s really nice.

JS:

It takes up a lot of time though. I spent a lot of time on the internet. I went over my 5,000 friend limit on Facebook.

Musician Coaching:

I know, I got an e-mail about that. I was mortally offended. (joking)

JS:

I know, I feel so bad. What can I do? I wish I could just have one. It’s a pain in the ass, because I have my Twitter, my Facebook, my Facebook musician page and my Website. I haven’t looked at Myspace in ages.

Musician Coaching:

There are just too many places to be present online now.

JS:

That’s the hard thing. I’m constantly learning right now. I feel like after I get back from tour, it’s back to the chalk board. I have to figure out what my next adventure will be and how to do it.

Musician Coaching:

Are you going to be doing another record?

JS: I have this idea that in the meantime I’m going to do a bunch of little EP’s and put them on my web page – songs that are special event songs, like a Valentine’s song. I’m thinking about the most depressing Valentine’s song, or just really sad songs. I’m going to have themes for my EP’s.

Musician Coaching:

Do you have any advice – things that have been really effective for you in terms of online activity and maybe any words of caution for artists?

JS: I have a couple things. The pluses and minuses – like you said – if people want to be my friends on Facebook, for example I spent a lot of time emailing them back, trying to be as personal as I can, saying, “Hey, join my musician page, because this is over the friend limit.” But it takes up a lot of time. I feel like with each one, whether it’s true or not, you’re building up a new fan. And that’s really good because they’re the Man now instead of the label, but it takes up a lot of time when you could be writing songs. On one hand, I really missed having a label doing all this stuff for me. I haven’t written a song in a long time, and I’m ready. I would say – I won’t completely bash the label thing. First of all, it gave me money to record a record that never sold anything and I’ll never recoup, but I didn’t owe anything. With this record, there were extra expenses. I didn’t know it was going to cost this. There are wonderful things and downsides to it too.

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Check out more about Jill Sobule

I get roughly 4-5 show invites per day.  Come see my band play, come see me spin- stick around for our friend’s band.  It’s funny too because realistically I don’t actively socialize with a large group of people, nor do I go out as regularly as I did as a younger man so if I’m getting 4-5 invites per day I can only imagine what it is like for people who are a much better target as a potential audience member.

I must admit I delete a fair amount of FaceBook event invites and E-vites and emails after only skimming them.  It is very rare that I get an email that stands out- I’m over-saturated as I’m sure most people are in this day and age.

I recently got an email that was forwarded to me by a friend of mine and had I not had any plans to be elsewhere that evening I would have showed up and that is very rare for me especially when the event is featuring an artist or DJ I am not familiar with…

He wrote:

Friends etc.,

An untimely grease fire at the workplace has left me temporarily unemployed. You can imagine all the snivelling phone calls I’ve been making to everyone I know who might have the power to get me any kind of paying Disc Jockey gig. One such call has resulted in my return, tomorrow (Friday) evening, to the venue where the string of disappointments that is my New York City DJ “career” was launched, way back in the roaring nineties.

Come by after work, if any of you still have a job. I will be there playing rock & roll records, if I can figure out how to undo whatever the DJ from the night before did to all the plugs in order to hook up his or her computer software. Alcoholic beverages will be served, gently separating you from your money. As a bonus, the anthropologically inclined among you will get a rare opportunity to make field observations of our modern craven capitalist society at its absolute worst: Ludlow Street on a Friday night, 2009.

Come support me as I make every effort to befuddle the kids who will be running the world when we are old and helpless!

Motor City Bar, 127 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, Friday December 4th from 7 to 11 PM…

The gravy on top of the sundae: When I am done, Messrs Larry and Suke of Born Loose/Candysnatchers take over on the turntables. It could end up being the most Three Stooges-esque DJ changeover in history.

Thank You,

Matt

Call me crazy – I figured that the event would be a good time because I got the sense that the author who I have never met (save to ask his permission to re-post his invite) would be having a good time. I am not suggesting anyone copy the style of this letter but rather be made aware that personality can still get through to people even in an email. I was also inspired by the fact that sometimes reality is the best pitch there is…
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More soon,

R

I thought it would be interesting to highlight the accomplishments of some of the folks who are out there hustling.  As you all know there are so many musicians out there.  How does one distinguish oneself from the masses of aspiring artists out there especially without having a great deal of disposable income?  Below are three examples from regular (albeit talented) musicians I think are doing things a bit differently and I believe it will pay off.

1) Victor Rice.

Victor Rice was the bass player for the Scofflaws and the NYC Ska Jazz Ensemble.  I was fortunate enough to study bass with victor many years ago.  Victor moved to Brazil several years ago and he has since honed his producing and mixing skills in the last few years.  I don’t know this because I have seen Victor or kept up with him (I’ve been a lousy friend) but he has been doing some video of him doing live Dub Mixes under the name Strikkly Vikkly.  In the digital age people take the skill involved in making and mixing records for granted.  I say if you’ve got the skill – show people…  Is Victor good at mixing?  See for yourself:

2) This is a ShakeDown

I saw this band at the Dewey Beach Music festival and they were quite good live.  What made a lasting impression on me though was when I came across the video below and heard how it was made.  I caught up with Brandon, the lead singer of the Cleveland based group and he explained to me that the band actually borrowed 21 MacBooks and used the program photobooth (pre-installed mac software) and captured five or six takes of the band performing their song “Circles”.  The video was shot in their rehearsal space and the editing was done by someone at their label (an independent called Reversed Image Unlimited.  Total cost to the band – 0$.  Check it out:

3) Good Night, States

Pittsburgh, PA based Good Night, States emailed me kind of out of the blue.  I try to listen to everything people send me and usually that means 1-2 songs.  An hour after having their music playing in the background I realized that I was really enjoying what I was hearing which sadly rarely happens these days.  I had the pleasure of seeing them live at CMJ and really enjoyed the show as well.  I have yet to see this device live in action but apparently the band developed and Iphone application that allows fans to plug in their Iphone to the sound system and play along with the band live.  Pretty trippy.

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More posts coming soon. Thanks as always for reading.

-R-

Dane Venable is the head of marketing for Atlantic records.  In addition to overseeing several product managers Dane still handles his own roster of acts that he does marketing for personally including James Blunt, Death Cab for Cutie, Jason Mraz, Rob Thomas and Matchbox 20 and a new artist named Robert Francis. I worked with Dane when I was at Elektra and he was kind enough to give me his time and insight on what music marketing looks like today.

Musician Coaching:

Tell me in your words what you see marketing a band at that job entailing for you. Marketing is a broad term, so how do you see your job or your role in marketing a band?  What does that look like for you?

DV:

Providing a consistent direction for the artist with the ultimate ability of cutting through the clutter.

Musician Coaching:

Let’s talk about the clutter.  When you’re first sizing up a project obviously there’s going to be a lot of creativity involved, but is there a strategy to make a band stand out among all the thousands and thousands of bands out there?  Have most of the bands that come to you already identified a niche to market to, or is that something that you try to identify/try to connect them to?

DV:

It always differs with the artist.  Some artists come in with a very strong vision of who they are, where they want to go, because some bands have already been out there building touring bases.  And by that I don’t mean, “Oh yeah, we played the past six months once every two weeks in Pittsburgh.”  The Zac Brown band is a perfect example.  He’s been out there ten years throughout the Southeast building a club base.

Musician Coaching:

So funny, yet another time I thought that was an overnight success that turned out to be years and years of hard work

DV:

He’s been doing 150 shows a year for ten years; that guy knows exactly who he is, he knows exactly where he wants his career to go.  Sometimes you get a group that is just out of art school and has been practicing in basements and just kind of putting together their music.  They may have general ideas, but they need it fully fleshed out, and that’s where we try to help them, because the days are long gone of trying to hang an image on an artist and then make it work.  Even though a lot changes year to year with the amount of clutter and noise that’s out there, one thing that’s gotten even stronger is a band’s sense of credibility and what that means in the world.

I think the smell test with audiences is stronger than ever.  If you take a look at some of the most trafficked and active websites, they are websites that really do have artist involvement if not complete artist control.  Kids go to those sites and know that it is the artist’s voice.  It’s not somebody in management, it’s not some uber fan that’s just putting stuff up.  That credibility I think really matters for a lot of bands.  Look, if you’re an artist that writes big pop smashes or big hip hop smashes and you want to go directly to radio, that’s one route you can take it certainly; that’s always been there.  But a lot of the bands we deal with are not looking to go directly there, not that they don’t believe in their songs in the same way, but they want to build their audience, they want to have a sense of discovery before they get to just be known for a song.  And so in that way, credibility really matters, the way you approach things matter.

And by the way, when I say credibility, it matters on the other side too.  I just got done having this conversation the other day.  We want artists to be active with their fans.  It’s crucial today. However, it has to be sincere and feel natural.  To have an artist on Twitter where it’s not a natural fit and they’re doing it because they think they need to is a horrible idea because it’s not going to come across as sincere or compelling.  What we try to do is say, “Let’s choose a medium you are comfortable with.”  With some artists it’s writing words, with some artists it’s using video cameras, with other artists they love Twitter, it’s made for them – little short blasts of stream of consciousness.  But what we try to encourage is just interaction with the fans in some way that feels completely natural and we completely respect and work with artists that also want to keep some sense of mystery.  Maybe there’s an artist that doesn’t feel natural talking about what they’re doing every minute of the day.

Musician Coaching:

How do you compensate for someone who isn’t communicating in these ways because clearly when that is working for somebody it’s a very powerful tool.

DV:

Twitter works amazing for Jazon Mraz.  He’s got 350,000 followers but that doesn’t mean Twitter is going to work for a different artist.  Why would it?  It’s hard to look at a Chad Kroeger Nickelback song and say that doesn’t work, because they are all big hits.  But you wouldn’t say, so why wouldn’t my artist just follow that formula?

Musician Coaching:

Well of course, but what are things you do when a band wants to retain its anonymity in some kind of way?  How do you end up compensating most often?  Do you just look for other ways of connecting through different mediums?

DV: Well, that kind of depends.  I like to think in a lot of ways artists whether as diverse as Bjork, Sigur Ros, Tool, even Radiohead, all like to keep their anonymity in some way, shape or form.  But all of them have some creative ways of connecting to their fans.  With Bjork, it’s usually in art.  She does five or six videos per project, or every design she puts out is something that really speaks to who she is as an artist.  With Trent Reznor it’s really about just his timing and the inventive way he connects with his fans.

Musician Coaching:

You were talking earlier about bands that were fresh out of art school vs. those that had built a following over ten years.  Have you noticed over the last several years that it’s become more one than the other or is the split pretty much the same?  The stuff that’s getting signed and winding up on your plate, is that stuff that tends to be more established or less established, or is it the same old 50/50?

DV: Really I wish I could say it’s changed appreciably, but really I think it ultimately comes down to someone’s belief in a song or in a group of songs.  As much as in the marketing template or the “Marketing 101” book, I would love to have bands who have had experience touring or have been out there for a while building a fan base or through one or 2 indie releases – that’s the dream come true – so you don’t have to completely start from scratch.  But a lot of times an A&R person just hears the song, hears a demo, sees a show and that overtakes everything. It overtakes every other factor.  And that happens time and time again, and that’s not a bad thing, because if our company got to a place where we said, “OK, we’re doing 360’s, therefore touring is a huge factor for us so we only want bands that have begun to build a touring base,” that’s kind of dangerous because then it probably means the nature of the songs or the nature of the music is down in the mix, even just a little bit. The music and the song always have to be first.

Musician Coaching:

It’s good to hear you say that, because it can appear sometimes on the outside like it’s something different.  Let’s talk about if you’re starting out with somebody brand new.  What are some of the low- or no-cost marketing techniques that you consider a must for every band that wants to get noticed?

DV: Building and maintaining your own Web site. And trying to actually market yourselves and build it to a point where, when anyone goes on it, whether it’s somebody from a label, an attorney, another musician, it actually feels like it’s active.  It actually feels like you’ve done some work and you’re not just sitting in your bedroom creating these great demos but you don’t have really any motivation to take your music outside your own bedroom.

Musician Coaching:

Along those lines, do you guys spend a lot of time on SEO or is that just not really in the per view for what you guys do?

DV:

We have someone over at Warner Music Group who actually specializes in Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and online advertising.  He can flip your head back and forth with the amount of research he’s done on it and how you can target advertising to a project.  Almost all of our online advertising now is done this way.  We rarely just do banners for static placement at this site or that site.  The advances in technology and actually trying to be able to reach exactly where you want to reach are like a dream come true.

Musician Coaching:

How are those keywords then determined?  It must be kind of hard when you have a middle of the road rock band.  Do you keyword tag other bands?

DV: It depends.  I’ll give you an example.  We have Death Cab for Cutie in the “Twilight:  New Moon film.”  There’s a person upstairs that comes up with 50-100 word associations that we register and when those hit, “Boom.”  You have to just envision yourself and what you do and how you search Google. If you put it in your mindset, it’s not that hard.  It’s not like a science.  How is anyone going to search:  “Death Cab Twilight;” “Death Cab New Moon”?  Whatever.  There are a thousand different ways.  Are you going to get them all?  No.  But the odds of actually reaching your target as opposed to just reaching all these eyeballs that have zero interest in what you do are light years ahead. It’s completely changed.  Print ads are rare, few and far between with the exception of Alternative Press.

Musician Coaching:

Are most of your marketing efforts on or offline at this point?

DV: It depends what you mean, but they all have to start online.  Online is where everything starts, it is Ground Zero.  Atlantic was the first major label to garner over 50% of our annual revenue from digital sources.  That’s a huge accomplishment.  If you think that the physical market still takes up 75% of people’s purchases, and 50% of our revenue in the last year came from digital sources – meaning ring tones and digital sales – it’s a really big accomplishment.  What that says is that everything we do has to start with some digital structure.  That’s where everyone is.  That’s where everyone’s living and breathing. So that takes up a lot of our time, especially for developing artists.  Certainly then you go to traditional methods depending on your timing.  If it’s an established artist, you go a lot quicker.  And by traditional I mean, you go to radio and traditional press and there’s touring and tour marketing and hand-to-hand combat out there.

Musician Coaching:

Speaking of traditional, there really aren’t many record stores anymore…  Has anything really replaced a band playing in local record stores before a tour date?  Where are you guys going when you have a band on the road?

DV: Web chat is the new in-store.  You get to see your artists, you get to see them talk, and if we’re doing it right there’s a pre-order or an order right there, and somebody orders their music.  Secondly, though if you’re still talking about things that are done more traditionally is that any developing artist that we have, they are out there at the merch booths immediately after their shows signing, meeting, kissing babies, taking e-mail addresses.

Musician Coaching:

Tell me more about Web chat.  Do you guys have your own proprietary software for that or are you using something?

DV: There are various methods we can use.  One of the ones we’re doing right now on a consistent basis is this guy Jason Castro, and he was in the fourth season of American Idol – he’s the guy with the dreads – and we’re making a debut album with him right now. His first single just came out.  Because of his notoriety that stayed around his fan base is exceedingly strong and has remained so.  Throughout the process of this album we have bi-weekly Web chats with him.  It’s almost like “Date Night.”  He goes on camera for an hour and answers live-time questions from his fans.  It works, it keeps people connected and it keeps people coming back.  The last chat we had we were shut out of three rooms.  Three rooms were completely full and we don’t know how many people were waiting.  Each one of our rooms would hold a maximum of 1,000 people.  I have no idea how many people were trying to get on there, but 3,000 were there.

Musician Coaching:

Anything else you can think of as advice for things that make your job easier when somebody shows up at your door?

DV: An artist that actually wants to work and realizes that they are part of their career.

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Please check out the new artist that Dane is working with Robert Francis.