Musician’s Notebook

Over the next few posts we’ll discuss how to release music via your blog, but the first step is to put in place an infrastructure that allows you to do so easily and effectively.

Throughout this series, we’ll assume you’re using WordPress, simply because nothing beats it for a good blog!

MightySeek’s PodPress is a good plugin for WordPress that will allow you to set your music releases up as podcasts in your posts. The advantages of this are:

• Easily track the number of song downloads
• Allow users to play the song from the post page
• Give the user the option to then download the song, if they like it enough

There are some who believe that giving users the option to listen from within the browser is a bad idea - it’s best to get a copy on the hard drive. But if they don’t like it, it’s going to be deleted or left around. People don’t listen to music just because they have a copy of it! So, this is faulty logic and you’re more likely to score a loyal fan if you can make the experience of listening seamless and enjoyable.

Installation is simple: upload PodPress to the WordPress plugins directory, then sign in to the administration interface of your blog and activate the plugin.

Next time, we’ll discuss some strategies for releasing music, and we’ll do it using the PodPress plugin.

The vocal folds are, of course, not located in the esophagus, so drinking water might hydrate the body, hence distributed to the various organs, but simply drinking won’t lubricate them as well. In order to lubricate the vocal folds, one needs to perform steaming.

Steaming is an easy practice to carry out. Boil a kettle of water, pour some in a bowl and, after placing a towel over your head and covering the outer edges of the bowl to prevent steam dissipation, simply breathe through the mouth for five or ten minutes.

Afterwards, restraint and discipline is required. Shut up. Seriously, for thirty minutes, don’t speak, and definitely do not whisper. You’ll also need to stay inside for that thirty minutes. If it’s cold outside, wait an hour. Breathing cold air will undo all the steaming. And, before singing, warm up properly. If you spend all that time with your face in a bowl of steaming water, you don’t want to jeopardize all the benefits!

Some people recommend adding eucalyptus oil to the bowl. I suggest that if you do this at all, you only add a drop, because the fumes of the stuff can do more harm than good. If you’ve ever had a sniff of the pure oil, you’ll know what I mean. It’s rough stuff.

There are many different ways of blogging, and each suit a particular set of endeavors, but today, we just want to know what works for musicians and bands who blog.

There are two major methods of blogging:

1. Free blog communities, such as Blogger.com and WordPress.com.
2. Self-hosted blogs, using software such as WordPress or Movable Type.

Free blogs have two major drawbacks: they’re unprofessional and they’re not very configurable. But they are free, which always a good thing for a starving artist. Self-hosted blogs are flexible and configurable, and professional, but they also require a few dollars a month. Their other drawback is that maintenance can be somewhat confusing, or even downright unthinkable for some. If you go with GoDaddy for hosting, there’s one click install available for some blog clients, including WordPress.I would recommend shelling out a few dollars, keeping a tech-savvy friend onside, and going with a self-hosted blog. Furthermore, I recommend WordPress as the best blogging software out there. It’s definitely one of the easiest to use for musicians with a bad case of techophobia!

Of course, if you don’t have the money (or the friend) on hand, you can always go with a free blog community. It’s better than nothing. Try out WordPress.com.

Once you’ve got your hosting set up and your blog software installed, you’re ready for the next steps…

Before you start your band blog, there are a few items you’ll need to prepare in advance to make sure the blog is an interesting and valuable place to go.

1. Have at least one song recorded and ready to go, even if it’s not great sound quality. This is important. People want to hear the music. If you’ve got more than one song ready, do not ever release them all at once. Put them up one at a time, and have a release schedule ready. In the meantime, promote your blog and build an audience like crazy. Then you can trickle the songs, which will keep people interested and returning.
2. Band information. You need band biographies, a bit of band history and information, and some photos ready to put up as permanent fixtures. If people can’t find out fairly easily what the band is about and something about the people who are in it, you’re doomed to hemorrhage visitors who could have been potential listeners!
3. If you’ve been reading Musician’s Notebook for long, you should know that to be successful as an independent artist (or truly successful for any good length of time, independent or not) you have to be about something and write music with purpose. Even Motley Crue had purpose. They sung about sex. So you’ll want to get some good, meaty, in-depth content up there that is strong and clear on your views (in an attractive and appealing way) so that listeners can quickly establish the ideological boundaries of your music. They’ll then either stick around with even more loyalty, or leave anyway.

A blog is all about ideas, and not just musical ideas; you have to express them with words, too.

On that last point, I once heard a musician say “But I don’t have enough ideas!” in response - I told him to find a new career. A musician without enough ideas? You certainly shouldn’t be starting a blog if you fall in this category, but nor should you be playing music.

Go get all that stuff together - next time, we’ll be talking about setting up the blog.

Today, having a blog for your band has become something of a necessity. There are many reasons for this; increasing search engine visibility, providing a means of entry for potential loyal listeners, giving fans an option for consistent and reliable news delivery in a cynical age where they might not be so willing to give up an email address - the list goes on.

Not only does a blog provide so many benefits that it’d be crazy not to use one, they have matured to the point where it is expected by the audience that you run some kind of blog, even if you only use that blog for brief and basic announcements.

A blog can be incredibly simple or scarily complex; in this Musician’s Notebook series, we’ll look at how and why you need to set one up for your band, and how to make some noise and get attention.

Too many artists are playing stale music; cliched lyrics, cliched licks and riffs, and cliched outfits. Ok, so the outfits don’t make a band, but it’s a hard question some of us have to ask: does my music provide something new? Years ago, I played in a band with some friends that sounded like rip-offs from cheesy 80s hair metal, minus the hair (except one of the guitarists, who had one heck of a fluffball). Had I liked playing in the band a bit more, it would have been much harder to admit: we were playing stale, cliched crap.

It’s hard to ask, and it’s harder to answer, but it’s something you’ve got to do, and do honestly. Take a tough look at your music and if you feel compelled to defend something, then your question is answered. If it’s fresh and exciting material, there will be no doubt. You’ll know it, because you wouldn’t have heard it before.

Your first instinct will be to brush past the question with a “of course it’s not stale!” but avoiding the hard truth is the worst thing you can do. What have you got to lose if you ask? Nothing - you will gain when you start thinking about the kind of music you want to be making. And if you don’t ask? You’ll lose a lot more, such as the prospect of an audience.

So, are you providing something new? Is your music fresh, exciting, and a relief from the barrage of cloned marketing rubbish that hit the airwaves on a daily basis. Go on - ask yourself.

And without the income generated by big name acts, how will record labels support and promote lesser-known artists? “If we keep moving down this particular route, companies will only release records that are sure home runs,” says Martin Talbot, editor of industry paper Music Week. “That means either stuff by established artists or unknown artists doing cover versions. There is the danger that it will no longer be worth it for companies to invest in new, up-and-coming artists. And if record companies don’t invest in them, who will?” From this article.

This quote comes from another article on Prince’s recent marketing tactic. What’s the fallacy? It doesn’t matter whether record companies are going to support and promote lesser-known acts! Hell, it’s better for those bands if they don’t. We live in an age where artists can do it on their own, even on a shoestring budget. Nobody needs the third party taking the lion’s share of the profits.

Talbot is clinging to the old assumption that a band needs a big record deal in order to do anything worth doing.

Of course, the music industry is reacting out of fear to this great success, as per its usual patterns:

“The Artist formerly known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores,” said Paul Quirk, co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, referring to a period in the 1990s when the singer famously stopped using his name to protest a binding record deal.
From this article.

There’s a great article by Tim Manners of Fast Company on piracy and music marketing:

http://www.fastcompany.com/resources/marketing/manners/112904.html

My only gripe is that this article suggests you can’t get CD-quality or higher from the internet; that’s a load of pure bogus.

The music industry is its own worst enemy. Every time a tactic works to get more music into more hands, they kill it off. Fewer sales for them, fewer music out there, and fewer happy (paying) listeners.

In the UK, a decision has just been reached regarding the standard rate of royalties musicians receive when they sell music through an online distribution channel: 8%.

Excuse me? You’re distributing material online with minimum expense, and as a retailer and distributor you’re not responsible for the marketing of the artist. But you retailers want to take 92% of the earnings just for stocking the shelves?

Musicians are the ones who spend their lives working their asses off to get the music heard in the first place, the ones who go to great effort to create a song in the first place, yet some men in suits would like the lion’s share when they’re nothing more than a conduit between artist and public.

Of course, retailers deserve some payment for their services. That’s a given. But this is nothing short than ripping artists to pieces and cheating them out of a livelihood. Online retailers are earning a passive income the same way Chinese manufacturers ship so much product; get someone else to do the work and then keep all the profits from that hard work.

I once heard a great musician say that an artist’s finest works were those that brought even the creator to tears, and that they would live on forever in the hearts of those who experienced that art.

I guess it could be argued that a musician is truly making a clear expression of his state when he finds it difficult to listen to his own work, on the assumption that the piece isn’t particularly joyful. It can’t be to hard to listen to a frolicking staccato in C major, right?

Some measure this kind of success by the response of others, and look to see if their eyes mist up, but in my experience it truly is the creator’s tears that matter. Why? Simply because it’s a lot easier to invoke such an emotional reaction in others than in oneself.

One of the first Midnight.Haulkerton tunebacks, Overclocked, was written in honor of work by Cory Doctorow, a from that time on, we’ve released all the tunebacks under Creative Commons licenses. Since we allow derivatives, we even go as far as releasing the raw tracks for some of our songs, for remixing. We’ve so far had two (one, two) remixes just from Overclocked.

Creative Commons encourages musicians to provide the materials that get listeners involved, and listeners who get involved are, as fans, much more loyal, dedicated, and committed to the band and its music than those who just whack it on in iTunes once in a while.

Technically, all you have to do is put a song up under Creative Commons (they can attempt the remix just using the MP3) to give listeners more options. Of course, it’s much more viable to remix from source tracks, but nevertheless, there’s one reason that Creative Commons is great for bands.

It’s all well and good to have dreams for the future, and every band does–every band has a certain definition of what “making it” involves. But what they don’t know is how to get there. And while there’s a lot of learning required to find out how to get there in areas as diverse as marketing and public relations to management and organizational structures, there is a tool that anyone, or any group, can apply in practice.

Set targets for the near future - as in the next few weeks or months - and then work towards them.

Too many musicians look forward to ‘making it’ but don’t even know how to measure ‘making it’ - is getting a record deal (not for me, thanks), selling a few hundred copies of the band’s demo CD over the year at gigs,  or rocking out to a sold-out stadium?

If they don’t know what their desired end result is, there’s no way they can succeed on that level, whether the band objectively achieves success or not. The musicians in a band have to have a defined method of measuring that success.

So if this is pre-requisite for big-time success, what about small-time success? Worst still is the fact the bands who have no stated targets for the long-term never have a set of immediate targets!

When Midnight.Haulkerton first released the band’s name to the public in early 2007, a year and a half after they’d started writing music and planning for the future, we stated our immediate goal: have 1,000 song downloads within 6 months. We didn’t want a lot of attention yet, before we had recorded an album and readied our campaigns in full, so this seemed like an achievable goal without a hell of a lot of promotion involved.

But yesterday, only five months later, the download counter passed the 4,000 mark from the band’s main site without any real promotion whatsoever. Some of the band’s songs are hosted elsewhere, such as on the Sydney Morning Herald’s site, among others, and the combined count is expected to be double or triple that figure.

We weren’t consciously thinking about this figure most of the time, we just let it happen; but that target was in the back of our heads, churning away, as we worked to ready our various materials and campaigns. The strategy succeeded.

There’s a common myth that, in order to be a great artist, one must go through endless amounts of suffering. My opinion on the matter is that suffering does nothing to improve your art - it just gets in the way of creating. As long as this ridiculous myth exists, there is yet another excuse for society at large (and in particular the industry) to make our lives difficult and disenfranchise us of our rights.

Musicians, please, don’t do anything to reinforce this idea among non-musicians (or other musos, for that matter). It’s only going to add to the momentum that gets you screwed over in the end. And to all others who would believe and propagate this idea, even with good intentions, I ask you personally to stop and think about what you’re doing: are you contributing to a belief that makes life harder for others? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding yes.

I have experienced intense hardship in many parts of my life - more than is called for by the number of years I’ve been alive. But it hasn’t helped my art; it has come at those times when things were shaping up well and slowed them down. When those periods pass, my songwriting is still the same as it was.

We don’t need pain to get better. We just need dedication to our art, an open mind that embraces great ideas, and the old mantra that has something to do with practice.

I was falling into a bit of a songwriting rut from a compositional point of view over the last two weeks and tried all my usual tricks to free myself from it. But this time, it wasn’t that there was no melodies building up inside; I had been so caught up in the structured process of songwriting and working to expand the band’s repertoire and improve on the existing material, that I’d forgotten the creatively liberating power of unstructured jamming.

Then the other night, at a friend’s house with a bunch of musicians in the living room, the curse broke. Why? Simply put: a few beers and six hours of jamming for fun, for no reason and with no goals in mind, with a few like-minded musicians and a bunch of acoustic instruments.

Better still, none of these musicians were members of my band. My band is made of fantastic musicians, but working incessantly with the same people - no matter how skilled - can turn off some creative lights

After six hours, I felt free again, and the musical ideas have been pouring out just as fast the lyrical ones.

An important public relations and marketing tactic for bands to understand is the ‘trickle’. Too many bands get some artwork or a web layout and as soon as they’ve got it plaster it on the web without any kind of plan. Others gather up all their materials and wait until they have everything in place, and then press ‘go’.

Of the two strategies, the latter is the better, but there is another way that will improve the marketable value of the band without costing anything extra.

Trickling marketing materials from a solid foundation

The first band doesn’t have a solid foundation from which to release new teasers, songs or artwork, and the second band puts together their solid base and then releases everything else at the same time. The key is putting a good website in place and then working with the art, teasers, songs and other promotional material to pace it and draw it out so that each element can be better appreciated over time, and not missed in one big bang. This draws people in and grabs new potential listeners.

How do I do it?

Take an inventory of everything you’ve got and everything you’re developing. Strip out all the elements that aren’t necessary at the start, but leave yourself with a solid base of good material.

From there, you’ll need to make a plan as to how you’ll release the other material. At what time would grab the most impact, relative to other parts of your campaign? In which way? Do we quietly put it on the website, or is it a great song that we can release with press releases, a gig, and a whole new section for the website? The plan is crucial.

The third step: execute the plan. For some reason, this step is the most often missed!

As readers will know, my band Midnight.Haulkerton does a weekly Tuneback, a song that is written, recorded and published online all in one hour or less. Since most songs go through the same process over days, weeks or even months (and in a few cases, years, like one of our songs Pages which was written years ago and continues to evolve) to achieve refined quality, the quality of the Tuneback process can really vary.

Compare Creative Commons for the Common Man and Reality. Sometimes it works, and other times it doesn’t work out so well. Creative Commons for the Common Man was something that we felt had the basics of any good and polished song, while Reality came from not having a whole lot of inspiration or motivation during the specific time and day of week when we do this.

It’s interesting to note that while I’m a proponent of uncompromising quality in works of art and entertainment, I still strongly advocate the Tuneback and what it can do for both the band and listeners. For the band, it’s a skill strengthening exercise, and for the listeners, there’s new material, week after week. But why publish substandard material if one advocates what any artist should, that character of uncompromising quality?

We know, and our listeners know, that a Tuneback isn’t a polished, commercial product; it’s the rough and raw output of our creative energy. It’s like a sketch compared to a painting; they don’t compare at all–but one can still find beauty in a sketch.

In fact, one can sometimes find more beauty in a sketch, than in a painting. While refining and polishing a song is usually a good thing, it can also take away the edge of the song, that rawness that excites and ignites listeners.

I still believe we should incessantly seek uncompromising quality, but we also need to recognize artistic beauty in its various forms, and appreciate that different musical formats deliver different purposes and expectations. A song from an album or a single faces the public expectation of polish and a certain healthy dose of commercialization; the Tuneback, on the other hand, demands the opposite, an unrefined snapshot of an idea.

A guitar-playing friend of mine is dabbling in the art of on-the-cheap home recording and asked me a question about getting a decent signal. He was going through his computer’s built in line-in and could only get a very small signal that sounded quiet and weak, and if he tried to fix this he got a clipped and distorted signal.

I’m not a recording expert, but I do know it’s important to get the signal right! It’s possible to go directly with the line-in through your computer (my friend didn’t know that input volumes could be adjusted in Windows XP’s software volume controls just like output volumes), but I recommend to anyone who is even half-serious about home recording to at least get a cheap pre-amp. Better yet, get a Behringer Eurorack–you can get them with two phantom-powered microphone/analogue inputs and built-in pre-amps for about AU$100, so it would be well below the $100 mark in America.

From there, all you have to do is turn up the volume, make sure it’s loud enough, and bring it down (or up) enough until the red “Peak” LED stops blinking when you play. Check that you’re getting a similar signal in your computer’s digital audio workstation–loud enough, but the signal metre isn’t hitting red. You’ll have a clear signal with no clipping.

For XP users with no pre-amp or mixer, skip to measuring volume directly in the DAW. For Mac OS X users you don’t even need to check the DAW meter. The input volume settings provide a good signal gauge.

Of course, nothing beats a decent digital input with a built-in pre-amp to get great sound quality, if you have the extra money!

The Free Articulator, a resource for Creative Artists of all kinds, including writers, musicians, songwriters and painters, has launched after years of time and effort leading up to this day.

If you’re serious about developing a career as a musician, I suggest you head on over and get a subscription today. You won’t find information for artists like the stuff on the Free Articulator anywhere else.

Except maybe here ;)

So head on over and subscribe today.

Midnight.Haulkerton, the band which I happen to be lead singer and songwriter for, launched its official online community, Haulkerton.com today.

This is the first time we’ve done this, and while our blog has done quite well, we have no way of knowing whether or not this does well for bands. Musician’s Notebook readers will be the first to know how it fares.

Members automatically get a free blog, photo album and access to the forums, so head on over and take a look.

And of course, check back here to see how well it goes, and how you can do this for your own band.

The world’s biggest record label, Universal Music Group, has officially stated that it has no intentions of renewing its deal with Apple to sell songs through iTunes. This could be a pressure tactic, perhaps trying to get Steve Jobs to give in to one of their numerous demands, but Apple has rarely given in to such things in the past.

On the other hand, if Apple doesn’t make some sort of deal to keep them on board, this could be the end of the iTunes Store. After all, it is the largest record label and despite the fact that their artists usually suck (think such talents as Eminem and 50 Cent), this will practically empty the iTunes Store.

The implication for independent bands? iTunes is a great way to sell your music without giving away rights to a publisher - but if nobody’s going to iTunes, nobody’s buying music there either. Granted, there are alternatives, but nothing that has the reach, influence and public trust that iTunes does.

Unlike the mobsters in my previous post, independent record stores provide a great outlet for promoting and selling your music to a larger crowd. Better still, the small independents won’t try pressure tactics on you in an attempt to nullify your copyrights and monopolize your sales.

1. Selling your records

Most independent record stores are more than willing to take a few of your CDs of your hands and pay you a percentage of the sales they make. This is the easiest way to get hard copies of your tracks sold outside of your own gigs–getting your albums into record chains is another story, and nearly impossible for local bands.

2. Cross-promotions

Many independent record stores are as hungry for promotion as your band is, so you might be able to strike up a deal with the owner by asking for a few gift vouchers in exchange for free promotion at gigs. If you followed the first step, you’ve got your albums in the place and can offer a few dollars off the CD’s sale (that comes out of your cut, of course) with each gift voucher. You get a few more fans (the guys at the store) and they get a few more customers.