4 Legal Protections for Your Band and Your Music Every Group Needs

The need for legal protection is much more critical in this technological age characterized by piracy. The good thing is that the law protects you to ensure that no one uses creativity illegally. If you and your friends want to start a band, you need to know your right and place in the constitution. Here is some legal protection that you need.

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How To Find Your Music In China

There is a possibility that your distributor or label might have at sometime distributed your music in the past to China and it is now floating around somewhere out there. This search will find if your music is there, it may be just a catalogue list with no sound file or it may be that it wasn’t properly removed when you changed labels or distributors and was left with no one to claim its license. If you do find your music in the search to your surprise, then you may contact your current or previous label or distributor to claim the licence or you may inquire a distributor like Musicinfo who specializes in digital music distribution to China to help claim your music.

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Why You Need To Sit On Your Tracks Before Sending Them Out To People

Picture this: You’ve just spent some quality time finishing a new track and it’s brilliant.

You’re super pumped for other people to hear it and can’t wait to send it to people for feedback, maybe get a preview up on Soundcloud or even get it released on Spotify etc.

Stop.

Before you do anything with the track, you need to wait.

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What Are Music Magazines Doing To Stay Alive In Today's Digital Age?

As social media becomes the main place fans find out about the latest music news, what’s happening to popular and indie print music magazines? Brand recognition only goes so far, even for music industry staples like Rolling Stone Magazine and NME. 

Even for younger fans, there’s a nostalgia attached to print music publications. Anyone aware of modern music history understands the importance of journalistic interviews, especially in rock and roll. Though print magazines have long shared the stage with radio and TV, they maintained a prestigious foothold in pop culture — until digital media changed the landscape

Let’s take a closer look at how music magazines cope with changes in how people consume music-related content.

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4 Signs You're Ready For A Music Publicist

* This post was originally featured on Symphonic’s Blog by Hugh McIntyre *

Many up-and-coming musicians dream of becoming the next critical darling, of seeing their new single praised by the collective blogosphere, and of one day gracing the cover of Rolling Stone. These are all very nice dreams, but they’re tough to turn into a reality. Between writing and recording music, touring, speaking with everyone from merchandise companies to fans to booking people, and perhaps even working a job on the side the make ends meet, it can be very difficult for indie artists to also find the time to speak with dozens, if not hundreds, of music journalists.

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How To Submit To Music Blogs, Magazines And Radio And Get Heard

How To Submit To Music Blogs, Magazines and Radio and Get Heard… It’s extremely annoying and very unprofessional trying to get the attention of music blogs and radio when the artist is private messaging or has an automated message saying, ‘Yo, check out my music’. Not is it unprofessional, but it shows that you do not have the respect for others, including artists’ or place any effort into wanting to have your music really listened to as this is seen as being lazy…. ….It is obvious to every station and blog site when an artist has not really had a look at the site or station to understand or know what it’s about and what the protocol is.

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How To Release Your Own Music – Full Presentation

In January 2019 I was asked to present a talk on how to release your own music to a group of people in Riga, Latvia.

It was the first time I’d done anything live, with regard to self-releasing, but I took up the challenge and wanted to fit as much information into the talk as possible.

Turns out, I went overboard and spoke for almost TWO HOURS on the topic! I had so many stories, tips and things I wanted to discuss.

Anyway, I re-recorded the presentation here, and was more concise and a little faster. I managed to get the presentation down to a little over an hour.

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How To Get Started In Music Publishing

Have you ever heard someone say I’m signed to BMI, ASCAP or SESAC so I’m set for publishing?

Registering with a performance rights organization (aka PRO) is an important step to collecting your publishing royalties, but there are three major types of additional publishing royalties that you are probably not collecting if your only step to collecting your publishing royalties has been affiliating with a PRO.

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Contracts Studio Producers Should Be Familiar With. Part 1

Here we compile and analyse information about the type of contracts that studio producers and sound engineers are likely to require as part of their work. Our objective is to clarify when and under which circumstances sound engineers are entitled to ownership of copyright and when a one-off fee will suffice.

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The Nashville Number System: What Is It?

Guest post by Soundfly Mentor Andre Madatian. This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

If you ask almost any Broadway Street musician in downtown Nashville, they will tell you that the Nashville number system has gotten them through at least a song or two, if not an entire set, on a honky tonk stage at some point in their career. Some don’t even leave the house without their iPad filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of Nashville-style notated charts before heading to work or a weekend run of shows out of town. But there is something quite definitive and unique about the way Nashville creates their charts — almost like a universal language amongst all of the musicians in the local community.

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Essential Questions To Answer Before You Finish A Songwriting Collaboration

In a music-theatre context, there are a number of questions that must be answered before any song can be completed. Often when lyricists and composers collaborate on songs for a new show, these questions may be answered unconsciously or internally by each collaborator or not at all. If one person were writing a show all by herself, that might be just fine. But in a collaboration with one or two other artists, it’s critical that everyone on the team articulate these questions together, discuss them and come to agreement on each answer. If this is done before starting work on a given song, it can save everyone a lot of extra work, frustration and other unpleasant feelings. Take the time to be just a little bit pedantic when it comes to songs you’re co-writing for a new musical and you’ll be much happier with the results.

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How To Get Your Music On A Spotify Playlist (From A Band That Has)

How you get your music on a Spotify playlists is a hot topic. Most people expect there to be a simple, golden bullet solution. Who can I pay? Who do I email? From experience, the reality is quite different. In this article we’ll tell you the approach we took with The Daydream Club, an independent artist that has amassed over 40,000,000 Spotify plays and regularly attracts between 500,000 and 1,000,000 streams per month.

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How To Find A Music Publicist You Can Trust

You’ve decided you need a music publicist you can trust to help you promote your next album release. You’re nervous. There are stories you’ve heard from bands who hired a publicist who took their money and disappeared, or maybe the publicist stuck around but made huge promises they simply couldn’t deliver.

The result? Thousands of dollars down the drain.

I’m not telling you this to scare you, but to prepare you to hire a publicist you can trust so it doesn’t happen to you. There’s always some sort of inherent risk in hiring a music publicist, but there are also some things you can do to increase the chances of hiring the right publicist for your band’s needs — and one you ultimately trust.

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Did Led Zeppelin Steal Stairway To Heaven?

I don’t think that any respectful musician should be proud of violating the copyright of another one. With all the social networks that exist nowadays, if someone makes a plagiarism, the news will spread worldwide in a matter of minutes. It is far too embarrassing of a place to put yourself in.

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