Musician’s Notebook

Your ability to contact your audience is paramount to your success.

Mailing lists, for instance, have been the crux of many band’s campaigns from garage band to hit-maker in the past.

When it comes to your blog, the best thing you can do is have readers subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, either in a reader or by email.

The first step, of course, is to make subscription a prominent choice. Keep an RSS button in the header. Or put a FeedBurner email subscription form in the sidebar. When you put that form in your sidebar make sure it will appear above the fold (the top part of a website that can be seen without scrolling down - anything that you can see only after scrolling is below the fold).

Getting those email addresses is simply too important to your success.

You should also refer to the ability to subscribe in your posts. Some blogs use tag lines at the end of each blog post that say “Enjoy this post? Subscribe today” or something similar - the bottom of this post even has one.

Make it prominent, make it clear and make it easy.

If you have a 5-step process before your reader can subscribe, you’ll probably lose them after the second step. Make it as simple as putting an email address into a form and confirming from the email account, or just clicking an RSS button that instantly opens your feed.

Making it easy to subscribe is perhaps the easiest yet most effective thing you can do for your blog.

Get your fans coming back for more and make subscriptions prominent.

Last time on Band Blogging: Podcast Your Tunes.

Last time on Band Blogging we spoke about keeping the conversation going on your blog; this time we’ll talk about using podcasts to promote your music.

I came up with the tuneback concept for my own band which has worked exceptionally well. The premise is that each week, we spend an hour, and an hour only, writing, recording and publishing a new song.

This has gained us many friends and listeners online, as well as secured us coverage in respectable and popular media outlets such as the Sydney Morning Herald.

Technically, this is just like a podcast. You can take the concept further and make a show of it, discussing the development process of the song and its roots in inspiration, before or after playing the song itself.

Podcast Directories

The next step, after you’ve got your regular song (or show) together is to submit it to various podcast directories for exposure, such as the iTunes podcast directory (here’s how) or PodcastAlley.

Isolating yourself from the rest of the web community is a bad idea when it comes to blogging and podcasting, so get the show in as many different directories as possible.

On that note…

Don’t Be Afraid To Network

You can find other blogging musicians whose work you enjoy and do shows together, or even start a podcast network and support and promote each other’s podcasts.

Blogging is one arena where you should adopt the viewpoint: collaboration, not competition. Blogging is truly about relationships and connections, and embracing this can only benefit everything you do online.

Simply Another Medium

There are so many ways a musician can draw attention to their music; band art, blog posts, street teams and the like are all mediums to direct someone’s attention and put it on the music itself. Podcasting is just another way of doing this - of course, like radio, the medium is more suited to the purpose simply because it’s an audio medium.

Let me know if your blogging band has started up a podcast of their own!

It’s been quite a while since we last discussed the topic of band blogging. We’ve talked about the software you should use to set up your blog and how to plan for releases of music through your blog.

We’ve also talked about emailing the people who leave comments on your blog.

This post is about a related practice, keeping comment threads active. We email those who comment on our blogs to develop loyalty and relationships, but we keep comments active for another reason:

Social proof is formed by perception.

A glaring “0 Comments” on every blog post is very bad. See, there’s something called social proof and in essence this means that, since people are generally scared of the unknown, they wait for others to get involved before taking an interest of their own.

In other words: if nobody else is commenting, people assume you suck. Then, they leave.

If you keep comments active, your social proof is proof indeed.

People start to take an interest; if others are getting so actively involved, it must be good, right? So they download your tunes, leave their own comment of gratification, and then happily hand over their email address for your mailing list.

Well, that is, if you have all the other elements of your site - such as eye tracking - in place.

Keeping the conversation going

Social proof for marketing purposes isn’t the only reason for getting involved in the comments and replying to your listeners. Developing relationships with your listeners also builds strong loyalty, especially as they begin to perceive that relationship as friendship.

This builds an extremely loyal Core Audience, which is absolutely vital to getting your music out there. Word of mouth is the most effective may of building your brand, and Core Audience is the group of people that starts that word of mouth motor.

To summarize, what you need to start doing on your band blog:

• Encourage people to comment
• Reply to comments, whether they are positive or negative
• Don’t censor, but do keep spam and abusive content in the bin - keep the environment pleasant
• Don’t dominate the comments - if you’re the only one commenting on your own posts, it actually has the opposite effect on your social proof

As always, if you have any questions or comments, I’m more than happy to read and reply to them.

See what I did just there?

Greg Sandoval at CNET News has an interesting article, When rockers cut ties from labels, up that talks about Trent Reznor’s recent decisions regarding the music industry and his place in it.

From the article:

Attention to detail is of vital importance to musicians forging careers independently and online. The messages customers receive when purchases are confirmed really are important details to consider.

Why? In this case, because that confirmation message can really make a difference in the loyalty of a fan and the longevity of that fan’s loyalty depending on how well the message is written. What does it do to create a sense of connection with the customer? We all know that fewer repeat customers bring in more profits than twice the amount of one-time customers.

It’s important for musicians to pay attention to each and every detail when working on their promotional materials and mechanisms. Even more important than the content of a purchase confirmation message are the details of the band’s mailing list, as mailing lists provide the band with a tool more indispensable than any other tool (except maybe a shiny new Mac Pro with Logic Pro installed): freely given permission to make contact with an interested, targeted audience any time they want.

This kind of power shouldn’t be abused, of course, and abusing it means that the mailing list will dwindle.

What kind of details are we talking about? Positioning of the subscription form on the website (one of the keys is prominence, but eye tracking should be taken into account), the process that one goes through to subscribe (double opt-in is good and gives subscribers confidence in you), the aesthetics of the process, again, the confirmation email, and the ease with which someone can unsubscribe (believe it or not, this is very important, especially if you ever want to get them back again).

From album inserts to posters to websites to blog posts to conversations, the details are so important to ensuring your long term success.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: trentreznor, mailing list, online purchases, musician’s marketing

Or does your band have any promotional items at all?

Artists need to ask themselves the questions:

As far as the public is concerned, who am I as an artist? What do I want people to think of me as and perceive me as?

And then…

Do my marketing materials really reflect this perception? Will they form it, or create an opposing perception?

These important questions are what my good friend and colleague NDK Creative Artist’s latest article over at the Free Articulator discusses.

“Marketing is first and foremost a Perception-thing; it’s about image in the PR sense,” he opens with. He then follows with a crash course on how to use promotional items to form a certain perception. It’s a good article, and an important one, to all artists worldwide.

You can read this piece after you click here.

What does promotional items mean when it comes to a band?

Remember that no matter who you have designing promotional items for your band, you’ll need the copyrights to those items when they’re done. Of course, you’ll need to negotiate some terms and conditions; they’ll want attribution and perhaps a payment of royalties from the sales of merchandise and other material that their work is sold on. You’ll want the copyrights in their entirety, as well as the master files (Photoshop PSD files for instance) so the work can be adapted for a variety of uses.

Forget this last step, and watch the wolves tear you apart as soon as you start seeing success.

Tags: marketing, musician’s marketing, promotion, promotional items, band marketing, copyright, intellectual property

Nancy Prager, a copyright lawyer and writer whose articles I am a frequent reader of, has had some great commentary on the Radiohead “controversy” in the past couple of weeks (as well as the emerging “controversy” regarding Reznor and Saul Williams).

Prager’s conclusion on the whole thing:

“While In Rainbows may be a musical work for the ages, it wouldbe inappropriate to use Radiohead as the poster child of bands pursuingalternative paths if its journey leads them back to the major labels.”

I believe her to be correct. Free music downloads are a friggin’ great way for musicians to start building an audience. I’ve done it myself for most of this year. By the time I’d published the third tuneback, I was building buzz and had a few major publications, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, interviewing me and even releasing my songs on their site.

That’s not bad growth for three hours work (the tuneback concept imposes a rule of one hour spent writing and recording a song).

But building a career? You can’t do that by releasing free music forever, and in an age where - as Nancy says - some don’t even want to pay $1 to obtain the album and go over to the file sharing sites, you might want to wait until the ass-end of your career before you start giving fans entire albums for free.

Radiohead can afford to do this. They are sitting on more money than George W. Bush is sitting on stupidity. But if you are reading that, chances are you’re not sitting on that much cash. If you are, my email address can be found in the right sidebar (I have a bad case of starving artist syndrome). If you don’t charge for independently released albums you won’t be able to make any income from your songs. On the other hand, the tuneback is a minimal time and effort investment for building audience. There’s a balance when it comes to freebies.

The scary part is that Radiohead and Saul Williams are setting a dangerous precedent. Pubs already pay insulting rates to bands because they know they can get a cover band in for free. The problem of piracy has begun to plague album sales in the same way. This can only make it worse.

Or maybe, NDK was right when he proposed that Radiohead were really asking their fans: given the opportunity to steal from us, will you?

Tags: radiohead, in rainbows, saul williams, trent reznor, free music

Led Zeppelin will offer downloads of their music from all major online music retailers as of November, around the same time as their reunion gig in London.
Led Zeppelin is one of the last rock giants to allow their downloads to be acquired digitally, one of the last hold-outs across the world. When the last hold-outs cave in, it becomes clear that “Digital Downloads” are not just a passing fad for the music industry, but the new hegemony - something we at Musician’s Notebook already knew.

While Led Zeppelin doesn’t need to worry about forging an audience and a career, digital downloads are a vital part of the modern band’s effective marketing campaign, among other things (such as band blogging). It’s advice that may run contrary to the music industry’s own beliefs, but we all know that they’re not very good for you anyway.

We’ve come along way from the controversy around Metallica’s anti-Napster stance all those years ago. Personally, I don’t understand the controversy: Metallica has legal rights and the legal right to enforce those legal rights. They are legally, morally and ethically justified in demanding that fans don’t rip them off. At the same time, offering downloads of songs, whether it is free or for fee, is the distribution medium of right now and there’s no going back. If you have a problem with your songs being sold at iTunes, please leave through the third door from back - yes, the one that is marked “Career Incinerator”.

Led Zeppelin is also selling ring tones and full songs for mobile phones with Verizon Wireless, so you might say they’ve also sold their soul to the devil.

After my last post on using your own ringtone as a cheap and effective audience building device, Jeff, a Musician’s Notebook reader, left a comment about MyxerTones. The dilemma he mentioned was the difficulty that many people face with getting the ringtone from the computer and onto the phone. I use an O2 XDA which allows me to transfer an MP3 over pretty easily, and hadn’t thought of the potential difficulty for owners of numerous handsets.

MyxerTones looks like a great solution - you select the sound file from your computer, and it’ll send it straight to your phone. Difficulty erased!

It’s pretty common for someone to ask you where you got your ring tone after it rings; who sung it? Where did you buy it? People ask these things every day. Are you missing an opportunity to promote your music by using another artist’s ring tone?

You can reach the masses through blogs, but loyal audiences are developed one by one. Next time someone asks where you got your ring tone, take the opportunity to create a fan.

Unsigned Bands Promotion is great resource by Marc Gunn for independent musicians and bands who are slogging it out to promote and market themselves on a tight budget. The site is full of great tips to pull you out of a promo rut - here’s just a few:

• Boost traffic to your band website
• Building a mailing list with minimal expenditure
• This may be the most important characteristic of your band’s behavior if you’re to develop an audience!

Check out Unsigned Bands Promotion today and thank Marc for his contribution!

Since we started looking at our bands as businesses back in one of the first Musician’s Notebook posts, we have to remember that every business has a public relations department. This means some part of your paradigm for building and promoting your band has to come from a point of view that puts the emphasis on relationships.

Many musicians and bands see the media as an indefeasible enemy to attack and hound. But the smart ones see it is an ally; the media might not know about you yet, but this perspective will help you. In public relations speak, the media is another public. No longer is it just your audience you need to manage relations with, but the media just the same - or more importantly. Never forget your audience, but leveraging well-developed media relationships will take you far.

The other common perspective is perhaps more dangerous, as it leaves no room for a challenge; the concept of the media being an impersonal entity. The fact is, the media is comprised of human beings, people like you and me, people with tastes, interests, strengths and weaknesses. You are not out to build relationships with robots. You’re out to build them with people, and every part of your approach needs to bear this in mind.

You can change your perspective, or, on the other hand, you can keep seeing the media as an impersonal entity or an indefeasible enemy, and you’ll never get anywhere with them.

Here’s a tip for you: with band blogging, more than many other forms of blogging, it’s important to build a sense of loyalty and relationship with your readers. In the early days, you’ll want to email new commenters and maybe have a round of friendly email conversation. Developing this personal relationship means you retain their friendship for the long term, translating into ‘band brand loyalty’.

Music, like all art, is a form of communication, and thus, especially in the early phases of the blog, it is important to reinforce the fact you have important things to communicate paramusically, through communication with commenters and readers, and through writing about those opinions on the blog.

Even once you’re pretty well established, make sure you send out an email once in a while. It helps!

In the last post on Band Blogging on the PodPress plugin, we were setting up an infrastructure so we could go on to discussing strategies for releasing music online, through the blog.

There are three factors to consider in releasing music:

1. Timing
2. Audience
3. Situation

Timing

If you have ten songs you want to release on your blog, don’t do it all at once, and not on the first day you launch the blog, either. Again, strategy is required! Consider these things. I stress this because most musicians are all about throwing stuff out there without a plan or a care to thought, and then wonder why nobody’s listening.

Only ever release one song at a time is a golden rule in this situation. This is not like releasing an album to retailers. This is using an asset to build a loyal audience. So if you have a finished recording and three demos, release the finished recording, and if that particular song builds a following of its own, you can leak a demo every few months to keep the enthusiasm going. Same goes for remixes and varying versions of the same song.

If you set a schedule of release that listeners expect you to keep, stick with it. I promise my listeners a tuneback a week. When unforeseen circumstances get in the way of this, my listener count suffers a bit of a drop.

Audience

Unfortunately, not everyone remembers to come back and check the site all the time. Make sure you collect email addresses from anyone you come into contact with, and offer a mailing list subscription service on the blog. The most important thing you can have is a mailing list. Also, let interested parties know. One of my early tunebacks was inspired by Cory Doctorow’s work. I let him know as a gesture of goodwill, and he linked back. Got some good traffic from that experience, and some stuck around to listen.

Situation

Using the first two factors will give you a pretty good release strategy. However, there’s the more variable ’situational’ factor that comes into it. You need to consider what else in the environment may influence your releases. Midnight.Haulkerton is going to be releasing an official website soon, and we’re holding back blog-wise and in terms of tunebacks while we prepare for that. At one time, I had severe family problems. They weren’t the usual kind; in fact, they were problems that meant I had more time on my hands than I wanted. But that meant I couldn’t create tunebacks and hence had nothing to release.

Other situations may warrant a quicker pace of release, particularly when you have two songs ready around the same theme and the first catches some public interest. This was the case with Overclocked and World Ending.

The main lesson is this: don’t treat releases flippantly. You need to have a plan and live by it. Throw all your songs out there at the same time and you’re throwing a whole bunch of assets to the wind.

The 2007 Digital Media Survey, carried out by Entertainment Media Research, indicates that social networking sites have democratized the way many people listen to music. This is great news for independent artists. Why? Because if people are choosing their music via social networking - by nature a social process - then big corporations are not picking and choosing the music people can or cannot listen to.

Undoubtedly, the likes of MySpace, which is owned by Murdoch and friends, rigs the system to promote the musicians and labels they have commercial relationships with - but it’s still an improvement for independent artists, going from no exposure on big media platforms (that is what MySpace has become, after all) to some exposure.

The internet as a whole has really opened the world up for artists, and social networking is just one part of that. There are plenty of ways to get exposure online that don’t even involve MySpace and other corporate properties, but it can still help. Every listener counts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

In part one of Establishing Your Band, we discussed the themes and concepts in your music and the impact you want that music to have on the world. The second part of this series will look at these aspects of the planning process a little more clearly. If you don’t have these things cemented in mind before you get started then all your efforts will be in vain.

Turn on the radio and listen to the songs. 9/10 of them are about nothing. They have no substance. The reason these artists receive constant radio airplay and TV appearances and seem to be so popular comes down to the marketing dollars that large companies pour into them. They’re marketing vehicles in themselves. Since they lack the substance and personality that a truly popular, lasting artist has, they fade away once media consumers have seen their face once to often.

What is required to not only gain true loyalty and popularity but last for a long period of time in the music business is substance and personality. The band, its members and its music should each possess these qualities. The type of substance and personality can be as varied as the stars, but they have to be there.

Substance: clearly discernible intellect and responsibility in stances taken on various issues in songs, copy, media relations, and all related band content.

Personality: likeable qualities found in the band’s branding and its members through the use of either manufactured characters* or member’s natural personalities.

* Some may take exception to the concept of manufacturing a character. This is about keeping a private life as well as a public life. It might not seem necessary before you have hordes of fans in the street, but if you don’t start from the beginning with privacy in mind you’ll never get it.

These two factors will be strongly influenced and even decided by the values you adopt as a band. Are you going to be wild or mellow? That may depend on your stances on say, the Iraq war or global warming, if you’re a ‘situational political’ artist. Or maybe your stances on the state of the world and society if you just want to write meaningful songs without tacking any stereotypical roles onto the band.

Whack out the pen and paper (or word processor) and make a qualitative list of what you (and your band) stand for. What are the loves and hates of your band? What values? When you have a good, substantial list of values, you’ve got a start.

If you want your band to last the distance, decide your values now and stick to them in songs of great substance.

music, bans, songwriting, marketing, market research, personality

The Establishing Your Band Series
Part One: What Direction Are You Going In?
Part Two: What’s This Band About?
Part Three: What You Need in Band Members
Part Four: Governing Models
Part Five: The Band Agreement
Part Six: Building Repertoire
Part Seven: Recruiting New Members
Part Eight: Learning & Arranging Repertoire

Subscribe to the Musician’s Notebook RSS feed to receive the next installment of Establishing Your Band.

Establishing your band is one of the first important things you have to do on the road to getting your music exposed and heard, so it only makes sense to cover the topic with a series of articles that’ll guide you through doing this right. It’s a topic that most musicians just don’t get, as correct practices in this field draw on knowledge from areas as varied as marketing, public relations, and management.

So you’ve made the decision: you’re starting a band. But what’s the first step? I’m almost sure that you were going to say ‘find a few other musicians to rock out with’ but you’d be wrong. That’s not first, and it’s not second either. The first thing you have to do is determine what direction you want your band to go in.

1. What are your goals in terms of audience? Are you interested in the club circuit or the stadiums?
2. What kind of musicians do you want to play with?
3. What kind of people do you want to play with? You might know how many guitarists you want, but unless you have an idea of the personalities and level of commitment and honesty you’re after, the only thing you’ll have to guage new members by is their technique. It’s recipe for getting burned.
4. What kind of boundaries will you put in place with the other musicians? If you’re aiming for some level of success rather than just having fun, you’ll need a Band Agreement, written and prepared before you recruit the first member.
5. What themes and concepts will run through your music? This is incredibly important. Don’t skip this question. You need to know whether you’re going to write forgettable love songs or tackle real and meaningful issues.
6. How long do you want this band to last for? Don’t just say “forever”—determine how many albums you expect to release if you’re successful, how many years before you want to try something new. “Forever” can be a good answer, but it shouldn’t be your first inclination—you’ve got to think it through.
7. What genres and styles of music do you wish to play?
8. Will you write the songs and hold the intellectual property while the band plays around your vision, or will it be a cooperative effort between members?
9. Ultimately, what do you want to achieve with your music? How do you want to affect the world?

These questions are absolutely essential in laying the groundwork for your band. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you’re on a one-way trip to failure, unless you get lucky and make a massive fluke along the way. Here’s why:

Most people see the music industry as hard to get into because it’s hit-and-miss. The fact: a band is a business, and if you run it properly with a good sense and knowledge of business, it can succeed just as any other endeavor.

Bands may appear anarchistic and cool, but if you don’t treat it like a business, you won’t get anywhere. If you treat it like one, and know what you’re doing, the possibilities go as far as you’re willing to work for them. Determine the direction of your band, plan for your success and know what your purpose is—these are steps that all businesses take before doing anything else. The information you gain from this process are important to keeping you focused on your goals, and the starting point for all the market research you’ll need along the way.

music, bands, starting a band, songwriting, marketing, management, planning, research

The Establishing Your Band Series
Part One: What Direction Are You Going In?
Part Two: What’s This Band About?
Part Three: What You Need in Band Members
Part Four: Governing Models
Part Five: The Band Agreement
Part Six: Building Repertoire
Part Seven: Recruiting New Members
Part Eight: Learning & Arranging Repertoire

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