What is My Image?

To have a music career means more than just making good music. Fans want more than just songs. They want a figure that is the human representation of the songs that mean so much to them. You need to be the whole package to attract listeners, who want to undergo a genuine, authentic, and all-encompassing music experience.

An artist’s image is comprised of their public behavior, performance style, musical style, social media activity, dressing style, public statements, etc. As an entertainer, you are living under constant inspection from fans and potential fans. Thus, in the public sphere, it is important that you live under the guidelines you dictate as integral parts of your image. That’s why it’s necessary for your image to accurately represent yourself, or at least a prominent facet of yourself. To be genuine and comfortable in your artist persona, you must walk the fine line of being yourself and being a consistent and accurate representation of the music you create.

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How Most Successful Indie Music Artists I Know Make a Living

I know a lot of independent music artists – rappers, singers, people in bands, DJs. I know artists that do nothing but music for a living. I know artists with day jobs and side jobs. I know artists that make a really good living. I know artists that make a decent middle-class to lower-middle-class living. I know artists that are basically homeless. I know a lot of artists all over the spectrum.

It’s 2014. The ultimate goal of most indie artists I know isn’t necessarily a major record deal. The goal of most indie artists I know is making a decent middle-class living doing what they love – making music. If they have a day job, it’s only because they have to. This doesn’t have to be their end goal. They can still aim to be rich and famous, either independently or on a major label. But if they were independent or on an indie label and making a comfortable middle-class living they’d probably be happy, even if they’re still reaching for the stars.

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MusicThinkTank Weekly Recap: | Properly Sending Your Music to Commercial Radio Stations

• Liz Uhl | Properly Sending Your Music to Commercial Radio Stations
• Anita Ginsburg | Five of the Best Jobs You Can Get in the Music Industry With A College Degree
• Cherie Nelson| 3 Tips to Better Manage a Subscription-Based Business

3 Tips to Better Manage a Subscription-Based Business

Global sales in the music industry rose 0.3 percent from year-to-year in 2012, the first increase since 1999, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Revenues dropped 3.9 percent globally the following year due to Japan, the world's second-largest music market, experiencing a sharp 16.7 percent decline in sales that year. Steve McClure, writing for the Japan Times, said the country's failure to embrace digital music subscription services like Spotify and Rdio is the primary culprit for the steep drops in revenues.

The subscription-based business model saved the music industry from imminent demise, and has subsequently attracted the attention of startup entrepreneurs. Granted recurring revenue models for businesses are nothing new. But the consumption of goods in American households has decreased over the past 20 years, while service consumption has risen, according to data compiled by the Economist.

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Properly sending your music to commercial radio stations

The first step in getting radio play is sending your music to radio stations.

Distributing music to commercial radio stations used to involve sending CDs, printing cover letters, bubble envelopes, researching radio stations, finding the right contact information and paying shipping fees. Now over 95% of the music played on commercial radio is received digitally. 

Each radio station has a Music Director and Program Director; together they decided what songs they’ll be playing on their radio station in a weekly music meeting.

 

So how do you get your song included in these music meetings?

It’s the Music Directors job to pre-listen to the music and decide which songs they will listen to in each music meeting. The first step is sending your music to the Music Director properly.

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Five Of The Best Jobs You Can Get In The Music Industry With A College Degree

What kind of career lies ahead in your future with a degree in music? You may think there aren’t many options, but there is plenty of variety offered in this field of study. Surprisingly, there are quite a few options for those who graduate with a degree in music. Here are five career paths that will have you living your dream within the industry.

Music Arranger

A music arranger is a person whose main role is to arrange the music for a performer, group, conductor, producer or a music director. He or she makes sure that the music is arranged perfectly from the instruments and harmony, all the way down to the beat. It is important a quality arranger has a degree. There is a lot of required knowledge of instruments, music theory and reading and writing of music involved in such a career.

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MusicThinkTank Weekly Recap: | SoundOut, TuneCore Track Smarts, ReverbNation Crowd Review, AudioKite, and Music Xray Compared

• Brian Hazard | SoundOut, TuneCore Track Smarts, ReverbNation Crowd Review, AudioKite, and Music Xray Compared
• Chris Meloni | How to Get Best Quality Voice Over Recording?
• Cherie Nelson | Keep Your Life in Order While on Tour
• Jason Ventura | Spotify: Friend or Foe?

MusicThinkTank Weekly Recap: | SoundOut, TuneCore Track Smarts, ReverbNation Crowd Review, AudioKite, and Music Xray Compared

SoundOut, TuneCore Track Smarts, ReverbNation Crowd Review, AudioKite, and Music Xray Compared

This is the story of a mediocre song. An objectively mediocre song. My song. Curse you, data!

If you’re looking for unbiased feedback on your latest track, you’ve got five options. Well, five-ish.

There’s SoundOut, which I wrote about way back in 2010.

Then there’s ReverbNation Crowd Review and TuneCore Track Smarts, both of which are powered by SoundOut.

Are all three SoundOut services the same? We’ll find out.

I reviewed AudioKite earlier this year, gushingly. A new and improved version launched just this month.

Finally, Music Xray offers a diagnostics feature, which presents your track to 5 music professionals and 20 potential fans.

Which is right for you?

Time for a good old-fashioned market research shootout!

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Spotify: Friend or Foe?

Since the beginning of its time, Spotify has always been a controversial streaming service. Ek and his team have told the music industry that his streaming service would make up for dwindling sales and help off center the effects of piracy. The truth is, Ek’s business model and background are questionable. Ek was once the CEO of uTorrent, the company that helped support and aide pirates in their piracy quest. It seems as though Spotify is Ek’s legal way to steal and under value artists and musicians. Spotify and other streaming services have devalued music and left users at the freemium membership. I truly believe these services are trying to be the life support of the music industry. They first came in to the picture with their freemium memberships, which they told everyone including other music industry professionals that users would graduate to the premium service. When we know in their minds that they don’t give a shit if anyone steps up their membership. Their goal is to devalue music and make their services accessible from anywhere and everywhere. We are able to access WIFI just about everywhere, which has allowed Spotify to have the upper hand. If you don’t believe me, this week alone Spotify partnered with Uber. Uber users who have a Spotify account can access their Spotify playing list.

Spotify’s next step is to devalue music to the point where consumers are no longer buying music due to the over saturation of free on demand streaming. For example, iTunes had so much power and made the calls for the music industry. Now iTunes sales have dropped down 15% to 20% this year alone. Don’t get me wrong, iTunes is still a powerful outlet for music, but the only outlet left standing will be the free music streaming service, Spotify. This will leave little revenue for the artists and a lot of revenue for Spotify. Spotify kills the competition, almost the same way that Walmart has taken over one market at a time.

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How to Get Best Quality Voice Over Recording?

When creating a voice over recording the end result or the final product that we get is the voice itself and nothing else to hide flaws. At certain times, voice overs are being accompanied by the background music just as in the podcast intros as well as outros or while narrating short videos. But for the majority of the parts, a voice over recording just means the voice. As a result, in this case it could be said that the better the sound quality, the more professional and clear the end-result will be.  

There are people who are not able to afford expensive gears and instruments for the voice over recordings. So, in order to get a good quality voice over without having expensive gears and instruments, here are presented some of the important tips by voice over Dubai at Soundsnack to get the best quality voice over recording. Let us have a look over that: 

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Keep Your Life in Order While on Tour

Traveling from one city to the next like a kid on the playground monkey bars, there isn't time to get much else done but your performances when you're on tour. Since life doesn't stop back home when you're on the road, here are four helpful tools to automate your responsibilities so you can focus on the music.

Dropbox

Space is limited when you're on tour, both on the bus and in your laptop. Your recording files, performance videos and photos can take up a lot of bandwidth, which is why a cloud-based file-sharing app like Dropbox is essential. Link up to your desktop computer files at home and save your largest files to the cloud so they don't slow you down. Another advantage of Dropbox is the ease of file-sharing. You and your bandmates can share new edits, videos and anything else easily without the lag time of trying to send big files via email. You can limit access to shared folders so your producers can show you their latest mixes quickly, streamlining the feedback loop immensely for production of your next album, no matter how far you are from the studio.

Price: Free for 2GB; $9.99 per month for 1TB of storage

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MusicThinkTank Weekly Recap: Why You Should Be Using Instagram as a Musician (And All Its Dirty Secrets)

• Joe Marson | Why You Should Be Using Instagram as a Musician (And All Its Dirty Secrets)

• Cherie Nelson | 3 Predictions for the Over-Hyped Music Streaming Business

MusicThinkTank Weekly Recap: Why You Should Be Using Instagram as a Musician (And All Its Dirty Secrets)

3 Predictions for the Over-Hyped Music Streaming Business

Music streaming is beating out music downloads, and has made piracy a non-issue.

Companies are jumping on the streaming bandwagon ever since Nielsen's consumer research showed that 68 percent of U.S. consumers reported streaming music during 2013. The U.S. music industry then published its review, showing that streaming consumption grew 42 percent in the first six months of 2014, compared with digital albums sales which decreased over 10 percent year on year. With Generator Research stating that the current 767 million worldwide music subscribers (36 million paying) are set to explode to 1.7 billion (125 million paying) by 2017, there is potential for a $2.9 billion revenue increase in the music streaming business.

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Why You Should Be Using Instagram as a Musician (And All Its Dirty Secrets)

I have spent the last months learning the ins and outs of Instagram. I took a couple of lessons from a New York marketing firm, read endless blogs, and, through trial and error, found the right ingredients to grow my Instafanbase to just over 3,000 real followers. I have had a lot of new fans buying my music, coming to shows and sharing my music, and unlike Facebook, I have not had to pay a cent for it!

Getting Started—An Effective Profile

Here’s the first counterintuitive rule. Increasing your fan base via Instagram is 20% about having 20 to 30 great pictures and 80% searching hashtags. I will explain this further but for now, all I am saying is you don’t need to post photographs every day to grow your account. In fact, that won’t help new fans discover you at all. 

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