Here’s why.

The theory above does not take into account the two main criteria that promoters subconsciously take into account when booking bands; will they make me money? and should I make a personal effort to help them? (by this I really mean are they a friend, or have they been recommended by someone close, or do they just seem like really nice people).

So if I were to work on arranging gigs for a band now I would be thinking:
1. How can I offer more financial value to the promoter at gigs
2. How can I build a relationship between myself and promoters I’ve never met.

Here are ten ideas to think about.

Increasing your value to promoters

1. Make it clear that you promote your gigs on high traffic localised areas – if you’re approaching a promoter in Leeds he will like to see that you can let thousands of people in Leeds know about his venue. Let the promoter know that you run local PPC or Facebook advertising campaigns for your gigs if you do and tell them that you will manually reach out to people in the area on Twitter if that’s what you plan to do, essentially you’re cutting the venues marketing costs.

2. Be above drinking age – Okay, so it’s less easy to change this if you’re under 18 (or 21 for the US folks reading this!), but if you are over drinking age then make sure that is clear in your approach because most music venues earn the majority of their profit from selling alcohol, which means that if you can draw in an 18/21+ crowd, they will most likely earn more profit from your audience.

3. Offer Your Coolness – Another way of reducing their marketing costs is to offer a joint venture or sponsorship deal where they can ride the waves of ‘cool’ – what is cool? I don’t know, but bands are generally pretty cool and so music venues want to be associated with them, simply because cool = money. If you don’t believe me, read this.

In terms of what you can do, maybe offer to go 50:50 on a back of stage vinyl banner with both of your logos on, or get some band merchandise put together with a ’sponsored by music venue’ on. I recommend reading this interview with David Huffman on some of his live gig tactics.

4. Retain the audience – Most promoters are probably aware that it’s not just how many visitors that turn up at 8pm that matters, it’s how many that turn up at 8pm, and stay until 4am. I recently went to see a band who did this brilliantly – they performed for 45 minutes at 9pm, and played their best songs except for one (their very best song) and had the whole crowd totally buzzing, they announced they’d be back on at midnight for another 45 minute set and because people were so desperate to carry on partying to them and to hear that last song they all waited around until midnight (getting lashed in the mean time!), which is very profitable for the music venue.

5. Offer Your Connections – Do you know a really decent band who you could help the music venue book? Offer to help take the workload off of the music promoters hands by offering your valuable contacts. Note: If you don’t have those connections, why not? Start going to their gigs, networking with them on Twitter – remember what they said “you get out what you put in”. If you want to build a strong relationship with other bands, then the easiest way is to help them promote their music or to attend their gigs, it means a lot.

Building Relationships with Promoters

6. Attend Other Bands Gigs – This has to be the easiest way to get gigs, build contacts, and have a good laugh all in one. If you attend local bands gigs and chat to the band after their set then you already will have built a good connection as you went to see them! But offer to keep in touch, and ask them how they got the gig and if they could help introduce you to the decision maker. I’ll be a very shocked man the day this one fails!

7. Forget about the music promoters – Sometimes trying to build a relationship with music promoter’s directly can be difficult, building a relationship with their friends (who can recommend you to them) is sometimes a better option. It’s quite likely that pretty much any music industry contact you meet could will be friends with a music venue promoter, so try and build relationships with any record labels, managers, producers, journalists etc who you could ask for some help being introduced to promoters they know.

8. Build relationships online – now that we have social networks like Twitter their really is no excuse to not be building relationships with these music promoters online to make them aware of who you are so that when you follow up offline with a phone call or demo they will already know of you and there will be less friction (it also helps to add a talking point to your conversation – “Hey that link you tweeted last night was awesome!” rather than “Hallo, can I has a gig plz?”).

9. Make your fans book gigs for you – Be interesting, be amazing, be awesome to your fans and they will spread word of mouth about your band and will pester any music promoters they know to book you. This is an amazing way to get gigs because it’s much more believable if you’re being recommended by someone impartial rather than saying yourself “we’re awesome”.

10. Send personalised emails – most people check emails, and a higher proportion reply compared to that of print demos. They also take less time and cost less to send than print demos making them preferable in almost every way. Although this is a kind of hit and miss approach, I have built some pretty good contacts in the past just by dropping them a short email to learn more about what they do (key point: don’t contact them blatantly promoting yourself). If you want to download a list of all UK music venues with their email addresses then you can grab one here for £8.99.

Image Credits: daviddmuir, elenahneshcuetphotography, frf_mkeron.

What is Ping?
Ping is Apple’s new music social network being described around the blogosphere as “Twitter meets Facebook for music” in the sense that Ping allows you to follow and accept friends to see their listening habits or let them see yours (similar to Facebook), alternatively you can set it to allow anyone to view your updates in a news feeds similar to Twitter.

There has also been speculation that Ping is likely to be the death of Myspace – highly unlikely in my opinion. I don’t think Myspace serves the purpose of a share-centered social network, that’s not why bands are using it. Most bands I know or work with use Myspace because of the fact it’s a generally accepted alternative to sending out demos and it’s a recognised and trusted place for fans to listen to your music, in my opinion the only direct competitor that Myspace have on those grounds at the moment is Soundcloud, and perhaps Youtube.

What’s the benefit for bands?
I personally don’t think Ping will replace Myspace unless it begins to create a better profile functionality than Myspace, but I do think that it will eventually become a decent marketing tool for bands and musicians simply because it’s hosted right on the gates of the magical land of the iTunes store – and if your fans are hanging out near those gates then I’m pretty certain that sales in the iTunes store will increase quite dramatically because fans will be able to purchase music with much less hassle, making it a more desirable place for musicians to send their fans.

What else?
iTunes 10 (the latest version of iTunes) has announced an added location function built in – alerting you when artists you are downloading or listening to are performing in your local area, I would be incredibly surprised if Ping didn’t jump onto the geo location networking bandwagon by incorporating this function into Ping or Ping Smartphone Apps somehow, but is it really necessary? Does it REALLY help bands?

What do you think?

Image Credit: Stuckincustoms

Image Credits: Firewall, Dossy, Sedagenvakna, Togawanderings, Jorbasa, Guccibeear2005, Fozzeee, Kelsey Frost, Neillshenton, StephenBurch, 1502808@N03, Vlashton, Dippy_Duck, Urbanshoregirl, 34128229@N06, Mediawench, Kendiala, Ryanmortimer

So I recently finished reading Tim Ferris’ awesome bestselling book ‘The Four Hour Work Week‘ and I now feel obliged to share this with you all – as not only has it been incredibly inspiring for me, I think that the lessons to be learnt in this book are highly valuable to musicians.

My Summary of The Four Hour Work Week

1. Have a Low Information Diet- Tim argues that we are all taking in far too much information than we need to be – the news we watch, magazines we read, and many of the people we speak to will never benefit us in life and so it is just wasting our time. He applies an 80:20 rule where 20% of the information we take is useful, where as 80% is not, the key is to identify that 80% and remove it completely.

This is as applicable to musicians as anyone, but I think noticing the 20% of valuable information is certainly the key here – instead of looking at fancy new gear, checking out music videos, and browsing Facebook, invest your time learning and actioning the things that will help you to succeed as a musician.

2. Outsource Your Work – In reality, we as musicians spend so much time doing things that we don’t need to be doing. I know I have spent days in the past putting together spreadsheets of music industry contacts, sending demos, and designing artwork when I could have just paid someone else to do it at a cost that is less than what the final product (or my time) was worth. A good example would be the list of UK music venues on our music resources page – if you tried to manually collect the location and contact details for all of the music venues n the UK it would take forever, whereas you can download them here for £8.99!

The point is that you only have so many hours in a day, and there are only so many tasks that you NEED to do, many of the task you do do someone else could be doing for you, so free up your time by outsourcing them and only doing what you need to do.

I would recommend websites like Fiverr for outsourcing small tasks like artwork generation, video editing, data mining, amongst other things. For outsourcing web projects I recommend oDesk, and for large scale data mining I recommend Mechanical Turk (although it is only available in the US).

3. Improve Your Productivity – It’s a common misconception that if you work more then you get more results. Tim urges that we focus on effectiveness over efficiency, why sit at a desk for 5 hours getting gigs when you could get more gigs in less time by being more productive.

The trick to becoming more productive is to limit distractions, increase motivation and work in short bursts. I recommend writing on a post it note every time you go to work on your music what it is you plan to do – maybe it’s ‘contact 20 music promoters, film a video interview and get some new artwork made’, then reduce every potential distraction you can, remind yourself why you’re doing it (I find having a collage of pictures of things you want to achieve by your computer helps) and finally give yourself a short amount of time to do it – you’re more likely to get all of the above done in 2 hours, than say 6 because you will force yourself to be productive.

4. Create a Passive Income – Tim states in his book that you need the freedom and independence of an information business to be truly free and able to enjoy the four hour work week lifestlye. This is totally possible for musicians – create a product range that you can sell online and leave breadcrumbs in the form of videos, articles, and die hard fans driving people to your products so that even if you do take a two week vacation to the Bahamas, you’ll still wake up in your hammock every morning with a nice little wake up message from Paypal!

Tim Ferriss has trouble defining what he does for a living. Depending on when you ask this controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer: ‘I race motorcycles in Europe’, ‘I ski in the Andes’, ‘I scuba dive in Panama’, ‘I dance tango in Buenos Aires’. He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the ‘New Rich’, a fast-growing subculture that has abandoned the ‘deferred-life plan’ and instead mastered the new currencies – time and mobility – to create a new way of living. Why wait a lifetime for your retirement when you can enjoy luxury now?

I hope this has been as useful to you as it has been to me. Feel free to drop me any questions in the comments below.

Marcus

Image Credit: Practicalowl

Here is Classical Interiors UK Ltd.

..and here is what they are now to be known as – The Overtones.

Conrad Withey, President of Warner Music Entertainment, said

“The Overtones are the find of the year. I’ve described the boys as the Take That of Doo-Wop, which sets a pretty high bar but they are up to it both in terms of talent and looks. With the current vogue for 50s and 60s music and all things vintage this is perfect timing for the album and the start of their recording career.”

What’s probably more impressive and inspiration is how these guys managed to get signed – rather than the typical method that the majority of musicians take to getting signed to a record label (bombarding A&R scouts with demos), these guys let the A&R come to them, totally by chance.

How they got signed
A talent scout from the record company that propelled many of music’s most popular artists to superstardom overheard the decorating team singing during a tea break whilst working off Oxford Street in London’s West End. Impressed by the performance they were invited to try out in front of executives from the label and were rewarded with a deal.

What the band had to say about the deal
Lead singer Timmy is still getting to terms with it all; “We have gone from our painting rags to musical riches. One minute we are trying to make ends meet wallpapering, the next we are signing a record deal with Warners – it’s a dream come true.”

Darren Everest, the falsetto vocalist of the group added: “We only started the painting and decorating as a way to make a bit of cash and have a chance to rehearse at the same time. We never dreamed that would be the way we would get spotted by a label.”

What to Learn From The Overtones Fortune

Although this story does seem like a one in a million dream come true type of opportunity, the key point here is that these guys were clearly so motivated and passionate about their music that they opened up the opportunity to be found and not just found, but attract record label A&R scouts attention when they’re off guard and not already being bombarded with demos.

Get creative, get inspired, and go out and do what these guys did – hunt your dream down!

Warner Bros Records recently published a statistic that indicates that the most popular section on their artist websites is the photo section – suggesting that this is what fans want to see the most when they visit an artists official website.

This to me suggests that while in the offline world your music and ‘brand’ (in the form of gigs, mp3s etc.) are clearly what needs to be prioritised and presented to fans in order to retain them, but perhaps with online photos are actually quite a vital and intelligent method of retaining fans and encouraging them to keep coming back to your website for more.

I know most artists by general practice (or coincidence) have photographers taking pictures of them at most gigs, but for those who aren’t taking advantage of this – I recommend doing so, and making it a habit of uploading them regularly not only to your main website, but also to photo sharing websites such as Flickr to try and capture the attention of the millions searching for photos – perhaps they will see your photo and go on to listen to your music..

What makes a good band photo?

Of course, don’t upload every single photo – I know live photographers have a fantastic habit of photographing zoomed in pictures of cables going into your FX pedals and non-sensical blurs of the stage lighting with prolonged exposure – these aren’t really what the fans want.

When it comes to live shots, fans want human photos showing the band in a moment that they could have experienced, it’s kind of like a teaser shot. The more interesting the photo is and the more it can portray any emotional extreme, be it energetic, lonely, passionate, humorous, sad, happy, in love, the better. However, if you have ‘gear shots’ of your guitars, pedal settings, drum set-ups then by all means upload these, as they’ll no doubt cater to the group of your fans who are musicians themselves.

Promotional photos
For me, a good promotional (or promo) band photo is one that makes me think: ‘WTF’, ‘She’s hot’, ‘that must have been an odd photography set’, or ‘why didn’t i think of doing that’. Why? Because they’re all emotions triggered within me that will make me remember the photograph and want to share it with my friends.

Well, I think she’s pretty good looking

Image Credit: danielavladimirova, Ama_lia

Beats by Dre is the latest venture by Dr Dre, who has opened his line of high spec headphones to be endorsed by some of the most aspirational and idolised artists out there including Lady Gaga, and Diddy in the hope that fans will want to buy a pair to draw that connection between fan and artist a little bit closer, of course at a premium price.

In fact, even Hollywood is endorsing Dre’s products with some less than subtle product placement – Okay it’s expected tol see car manufactures, Oakleys, premium vodkas and what not in the movies, but the other night I was watching The Book of Eli and I noticed that main man Denzel Washington (Eli) was wearing Dr Dre headphones! Even stranger when you consider that the film is set in the future after an apocalypse!

However, lets get to the important stuff. In January 2010 Dr Dre had sold over 1,000,000 pairs at about £100 a pop, and his reported sales for the fourth quarter of 2009 were recorded at $50,000,000.

I’m not sure about you, but those figures seem pretty damn impressive when you consider that the venture is still very new and is backed off of a brand built through performing gigs and producing sick hip hop beats.

Beats by Dre Headphones
Here are some of the available pairs of Beats by Dre headphones that you can buy.

Could this be the start of a DIY musician revolution?
I personally think it’s great to see artists realising that the value in using music to build a brand that can indirectly be used to sell premium products is far more valuable than trying to sell music directly as a product. Obviously artists have been endorsing products since the early days, but to actually be backing a product like this makes me wonder whether non-established artists will soon learn to work on their brand rather than simply trying to promote their music in a direct sense.

Image Credit: Sirclamalot

But Why is This Important to Warner Bros?
I ask the question because while I know that understanding website visitor behaviour and profiling is important from a conversion optimisation and usability perspective, I don’t see how it would benefit Warner Bros Records productively in that sense – and besides, why couldn’t they have just made deal with the countless variety of available legal video script software, and web analytics packages if they were collecting data to improve the user experience of their website?

There are suggestions that the type of illegal flash cookies that Warner Bros were using allow the creator (Warner Bros) to access the data created by the visitor (which includes demographic information as far as sexual preference) – creating a database of this information would allow Warner Bros to then sell on the visitor data to other companies at a profit. Maybe they misunderstood the phrase ’sex sells’

Here’s my opinion
Whilst I hate the idea of my personal data being sold for profit, I can’t help but think that this crime that Warner Bros are committing is very miniscule in the grand scheme of things. After all, what about all of the issues regarding privacy with Facebook and Foursquare? I’m sure companies like Facebook and Google are doing far worse things to profit on my personal details, I guess the difference is that Warner Bros Records don’t make their visitors agree to a 30-page long privacy agreement, whereas Facebook and Google do.

What do you think about Warner Bros Records being sued for spying on their visitors?

Image Credit: Gageskidmore

So with all the hype around the iPad dying down I thought I would do a bit of a round up on some of the coolest apps built for musicians, most creative uses of the iPad by musicians and talk about some of the future plans for the iPad that might benefit musicians.

The Seven Coolest Ways Musicians Can Use the iPad

1. Mixing songs on the iPad using it as a Midi Controller
There are several apps available, such as MidiPad that allow you to use your iPad as a midi controller – to take control of the faders in your favourite sequencer and mix different channels in real team using the on-screen faders, buttons and knobs. Considering most midi controllers start at not far off the price of an iPad, this is a really useful function for recording musicians.

2. Dj’ing on the iPad
There are a variety of apps available for the Apple iPad that allow you to mix music and use it for djing. I have not yet heard of any major DJ’s performing a set directly from and iPad but i’m sure it has or will happen. Mixr is probably the most used app for dj’ing on the iPad – the interface simply gives you two virtual dj decks on screen and a crossfader in between that you can use to fade between the two tracks.

3. Displaying Sheet Music on the iPad Whilst you Perform
There is an iPad application called AirTurn which seems to have caught the eye of a lot of performers. The app uses a bluetooth device to automatically detect where on a piece of sheet music you are and it turns the pages for you automatically!

4. Scoring Music on the iPad
Yep! Not only can you get apps to turn the pages of your sheet music but you can write your compositions too! The leading application for this function seems to be forScore (see video below), but it appears to have all the same funky features that the leading software packages we’re all used to have.

5. Writing Songs on the iPad
There is talk of Propellerhead launching a Reason Rebirth app for musicians to use to produce and mix there tracks on the iPad – it wouldn’t surprise me if other music production software companies such as Cubase, and Logic followed suit.

6. Downloading and Learning Guitar Tabs
One of my favourite applications I’ve seen for the iPad is the TabToolkit for iPad, which allows you to search for guitar tabs, download them, and even play them back (okay, with shitty midi preset sounds – but it’s better than nothing!). Also, because the playback is using midi you can pause channels, alter the speed of the track and much more, making it easier than ever to mute the drummer

7. Playing with Synths on the iPad
There seems to be endless amounts of synthesizer apps on the iPad including an Electribe and a Moog!
I guess these would be really cool just for jamming out melodies but they’re pretty fun to just play around on

Know any other cool ways musicians are using iPads? Feel free to share your stories and add to the list!

Photo Credit: Scolirk

You’re now in charge
Unlike five years ago when the influential A&R executives or radio music directors in your niche only had to turn their phone off and not check their post to get away from being bombarded by demos, you are now the one in charge because these potential contacts are so addicted to using social networks and scouring the web that you can make it physically impossible for them to not know your name.

So how does it all happen? Here are my three favourite ways to get a potential contacts attention using social platforms:

Using Twitter
On Twitter there is no friction with talking to strangers so you’re totally in control of what goes on – hey I even tweeted the Dalai Lama this week saying “hey dude hows it hanging?” The point is that if you want to build a relationship with Mr. A&R from Sony Records you just need to retweet them, reply to what they’re saying, and get there attention through the mentions function.

Using a Blog
The great thing about the online world is everyone is so vain – you can bet that anyone no matter how influential they may seem will be searching for their own name / bands name / companies name, in search engines because they want to know what people are saying about them. Some guys even managed to get a job at Google by getting some webpages ranking on Google for the CEO of Google’s name.

So if you’re a musician running a blog, then remember you can name drop key bands, individuals, or companies in your blog posts. Providing your blog post appears in search results for their name then you can use that tactic as an ice breaker.

Using Facebook
You could use a Facebook fanpage to capture the attention of people you want to build relationships with, but in order to do so you would need to personally add the contact on Facebook to do that (which a lot of people don’t like – Facebook is too personal for you to add people at random).

But you can certainly use the facebook advertising platform to laser target these people and zap them into contacts. See my blog post on Facebook advertising for an in-depth explanation on how to do this.

Do you know any other interesting methods that you use to build contacts using social media platforms? Share your tips in the comment section below.

Webwizzard