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?

I really should not be supporting stereotypes regarding drummers, or making jokes about them. One of my best friends is a drummer and I’ll probably receive a clobbering for that. That’s partly why it was hard to resist.

But on to the news:

Gibson is bringing out a robotic guitar.

And while it will not fight in the war between guitarists and drummers, it will tune your guitar.

As in, for you. Automatically.

All you have to do is flick a switch that tells the guitar which tuning to use, and it’ll do it all on its own.

Don’t throw your guitar in the bin or pawn shop just yet; there will be a limited release before the public release next year. In the meantime, there’s a nice picture for you to look at.

My father has been using the same tuner for the last twenty five years or something crazy like that. Maybe he was holding out for this thing.

Gibson have been making great guitars for many decades, including the Les Paul which is played by many well-respected and talented guitarists, such as Slash from Guns N’ Roses and Greg Cameron from Midnight.Haulkerton (jeezuz, that was a shameless plug).

What does the Gibson Robotic Guitar mean for musicians?

It means that you won’t instantly the flick the “Amateur” switch on in your audience’s mind when you tune your guitar as your tongue fumbles around a long, boring introduction to the next song. Just friggin’ play already!

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

Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music has some updates on Native Instruments and MOTU compatibility with Leopard. He points out that it’s the first OS X upgrade without real benefits to musicians. It seems to be causing more problems with audio software compatibility than previous releases. As I posted yesterday, Logic Pro won’t open if you’ve got Melodyne ReWire enabled. Native Instruments “kind of” works, but not at all if you need to use the installers, and MOTU is still testing their stuff.

Er… wrong Leopard…

I’ve gone whole hog and upgraded both my Macs to Leopard. Aside from Logic failing to run while the Melodyne ReWire files were still lying around, it’s gone smoothly on my music-making machine. My iBook, on the other hand, has had to suffer a bit more with quite a few repeat visits to the install disc. Mind you, one of these times was thanks to my own stupidity in trying to get a Tiger-tested version of XAMPP to run on Leopard.

How long before it’s safe to upgrade? That really depends on the third-party companies, as Apple’s done their bit to get audio software up to grade. If you can’t live without MOTU, Native Instruments, or Melodyne integration with Logic, then you might want to hold off for one-to-two months.

Melodyne have not published any news regarding Leopard compatibility on their website, but MOTU and NI are both posting ongoing updates on their websites as they get these issues sorted.

Has anything in your audio rig broken after an upgrade to Leopard? Have you noticed anything working after a clean install that didn’t work after a standard upgrade install? Let us know in the comments - and if you have any fixes for the problems, please do share!

Almost two days after installing Leopard, I’ve finally decided to stop fiddling and get back to work recording a tuneback. But much to my surprise, when trying to open Logic Pro 8, the program spends a few minutes trying to load before crashing and closing. A look at the error report reveals something to do with a file controlling Melodyne’s ReWire options.

Logic Pro will not work under Leopard if Melodyne’s ReWire files are installed.

In order to get Logic working again, navigate to the following directory:

/Library/Application Support/Propellerhead Software/ReWire

Once in the ReWire app support folder, you’ll see a bunch of files (the number of these will vary depending on how many ReWire apps you use). Two of these will be Melodyne files; simply trash them and empty the bin. For one of those files, you will be asked for the admin password on your computer. Don’t be alarmed by this - if you want to get back into Logic, you’ll need to trash both files.

Once the trash is emptied, try starting Logic again. It’ll most likely check all your Audio Units, and then you’re up and away again.

I’m not sure if this will be a problem with Logic Express or earlier versions of Logic Pro. The problem does lie with Melodyne, not ReWire or Logic, and hopefully we’ll see an update from Celemony soon so that we can continue using Melodyne with ReWire (I dread using it stand-alone!).

This issue with Logic also brings up the issue of Apple’s release tactics regarding Leopard. Despite the fact that a retail version of Leopard leaked online a few days before its release, Apple decided that developers would get their hands on the final copy of Leopard at the same time as the public. Developers had access to betas, but smart developers will only begin altering popular applications on the final release, because anything can change. If Apple had been more sensible about releasing Leopard to developers in advance, would we have this problem?

From a marketing stance, building up such a huge buzz by locking everything down so tightly can be effective. But the same buzz can be achieved by deliberately leaking a product in a strategic way. Many bands have done this over the years to build up anticipation for second, third, fourth (and so on) albums. If a huge marketing buzz can be built without sacrificing third-party application compatibility, why not do it that way?

I’ll also be looking at how MainStage operates under Leopard soon.

The last time Apple released a music product was the jam pack released concurrently with iLife 08. Recently the company released Logic Studio 8, the latest update to their pro musician’s package, and within it, a new product called MainStage. MainStage allows musicians to take their Logic effects and MIDI queues to the stage. All the programming you do at home when recording a track in Logic can be duplicated any time live, and the gap between studio and live versions are bridged that much more.

The product features a 3D interface designed for the stage, so the information that you need at a glance is the most prominent. It works with MIDI keyboards, drum pads, control surfaces, and pedal boards - anything that has a MIDI output or USB port, really. The program offers the most powerful feature in conjunction with the keyboard using a feature Apple has called “keyboard racks” - layer up studio instruments and effects and then split them to various sections of the keyboard.

You can throw out your guitar effects pedal; gone are the days of various stomp boxes lined up in meticulously wired set-ups. That is, if the quality of the effects in this program is as good as Apple claims. Presumably, the software can switch the guitar rig depending on which part of the song you’re up to.

I haven’t had the chance to play with this yet but I’m very intrigued and excited about this package. If you’ve had the chance to play with it, tell us how it is in the comments. You can find out more, or purchase Logic Studio 8, here.

DevDad.com is the blog of stay-at-home dad Mike from Tampa Bay, Florida. He’s a 21 year old father, and I can sure sympathize with him for working out of home with a (wonderful) distraction running around. It’s interesting for me, personally, to read his blog and see how he handles business and family simultaneously. It’s a great blog, especially if you’re a parent of any kind. My son was conceived near the end of high school, and since most people tend to be in their thirties before having kids in this era, I feel more of a bond with what’s written on his blog than I might if he were 31.

Mike is running a competition, the Stay At Home Dad iMac Give-Away, for readers of his blog. The iMac is a fantastic home studio machine (for those who can’t afford something like a Mac Pro) - sure as hell beats the Mac Mini I have to forge my demos on - and I figured that readers would appreciate the heads up on this competition. If you can win this one, you’ll be churning out great new songs and tunebacks like a dog on heat. Go and check the Stay At Home Dad iMac Give-Away, and even if you don’t enter, subscribe - it’s a fun read.

This competition is sponsored by SitterCity, a leading American babysitting agency (it even does petsitting!), and while I’m out here in Australia and would more babysitting for Axl, I know Mike would not be partnering with them unless they were the best in their field. Thanks for the opportunity, SitterCity.

What are you still doing here? Go enter!

Apple quietly slipped out the latest jam pack after the latest version of Garageband was released a few days back. This jam pack focuses on the human voice, providing soloists, choral ensembles, and even human percussion (beat-boxing and the like).

Jam Pack: Voices gives you over 1,500 Apple Loops featuring professional soloists and choirs in multiple genres and styles. It also provides more than 20 software instruments, including voices, choral ensembles, and amazing drum kits built on the human voice and body. From the Apple website

I suspect that what makes this jam pack useful are the choral ensembles that allow garage-bound artists to fill out their songs with rich vocal backings. I don’t think anyone expects to use a jam pack to replace the role of lead vocalist, though!

The Jam Pack: Voices retails for US$99 from the Apple store.

Apple has just released iLife 08, which features an updated Garageband. I’ve yet to play with it, but when I do, I’ll let you know what it’s like (I prefer Logic at home).

The main new feature that caught my eye was the Magic Garageband feature (pictured above), that allows you to assemble a backing band and play the instrument of your choice over the top. This seems to be a good thing for musicians needing to practice more regularly, especially in the area of improvisation.

The downside seems to be a lack of customization. From the videos I have seen, there’s no way to change the melodies or chords played by the backing band, and no way to override the genre settings which define a limited number of instruments for your use. Having not used it, I can only speculate, but this seems to be the case. And if it is true, the usefulness of this feature will be quite restricted.

More news coming when I can get my hands on a copy of iLife 08.

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.

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.