Is It Legal for Your Business to Play Music Over Its Sound System?

Music can help clients relax in a waiting room, make employees more productive and overall improve the workplace experience. However, in trying to provide your business with the right type of music, you may be running afoul of the law. Business owners must get permission of copyright owners (aka recording artists) when playing music in the office, reports BMI.

What’s Legal, What’s Not

To understand the legal line between listening to music at work and breaking the law, you need to understand what constitutes a public performance. Any time a large group that is not a family or acquaintances listens to music, it constitutes a public performance. If you’re listening to a CD in your office or a shared cubicle with headphones on, it is not a public performance. If you get your cubicle mate to listen to a new favorite song, it is not a public performance. If you are playing that same track for the whole office, it is a public performance.

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Thinking About Starting a Business in the Music Industry? - 15 Essential Tips to Help You Succeed

Do you find yourself banking your best ideas? Dreaming of calling the shots? Then it’s probably inevitable, you were meant to be an entrepreneur. So what’s stopping you? Well, the list is long: fears, concerns, questions, doubts… there is tons of BS that could get in your way. Not to mention, you’ve chosen the music industry. And it’s probably the most waffling of them all! Here’s some tips for overcoming the obstacles and preparing for the best thing you might ever do in your lifetime.  

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Music Insurance: Is It Worth It?

Musical equipment theft is actually something that is extremely common. Unfortunately, it’s something that many musicians encounter and even some of the musical greats have found that their equipment or instruments have gone missing.

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ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS BE THE BEST IN THE WORLD

I want to begin this week’s topic by explaining how I come up with it. Earlier this week I was working on optimizing our blog with Google. It turns out that getting your blog to show up in search results is not an easy task, but over time it gets easier if the content is good and people talk about it. While doing research on search engine optimization, I started to think about being in that number 1 spot on Google and what that must mean for those businesses, sites, and organizations that have that spot at the top of the page. I had to know how certain sites get it so I looked into it.

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Top 9 Tax Tips for Musicians

I know that tax season is a few months away still, but there’s still no excuse that you shouldn’t be keeping track of your finances all year round. I’m going to go over a few things that will help not only make tax time easier, they’ll save your band money while you’re on the road or buying things related to the band.

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The 7 Big Mistakes That Indie Musicians Make In Music Business - Mistake #1

The music business is a tough industry to succeed in. It is a prestige industry and having a position in the music business is highly sought after and positions in all aspects of the music business are few and far between. As an indie musician it is useful to understand what mistakes to avoid. So here are the 7 big mistakes that indie musicians make in music business according to Positively Music.

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Why Don't They See It?

I think we are all tired of hearing about how the music industry is a terrible business.

I get several email newsletters every day chronicling the steady, downward spiral of the major labels. These emails also report about infringers, pirates and the fact that you need more zeros than most simple calculators can handle to find your percentage royalty share from the much loved and hyped Spotify. Doesn’t anyone in the music business talk to people who have been through gut-wrenching changes before in related (or perhaps not related) businesses?

So what are the problems? Buying and consumption patterns of the customers have changed, the labels have lost control of pricing, and barriers to entry across the spectrum have evaporated (to name a few). When I see these problems which seem completely insurmountable, I think of two companies who have lived through this firestorm, and as of today, are thriving, globally dominant operations. The first is IBM and the second is Getty Images.

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How NOT to Social Network

Myspace, as a medium for social networking, is useless. The signal to noise ratio has plummeted so low that there is essentially no point in trying to reach fans through MySpace. It’s all comment spam, automatic “friending” programs, and bots. Most myspace comment boards look like this:

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