Music Venue Maintenance: 4 Areas For Owners To Focus On

A music venue needs to be maintained in order to attract your customers to the big event. There are areas that you should focus your efforts in order to make your venue more appealing. Here are some of the projects that you should tackle as the owner of the venue.

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Practical Venue: How To Run A Successful Music Hall

Running a music venue is one of the most exciting jobs that you can do. You’ll get to meet lots of musicians and take a central role in your city’s art scene. Here’s how you can succeed at managing your venue.

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7 Ways To Find A Manager

The manager is the most important person in your operation. Your manager is your teammate. Your partner. Your friend. The two of you (or six, depending on how many are in your band) are in it together. Us versus the world. The manager is the liaison between the artist and everybody else. The manager oversees everything from the recording process to the album release campaign to the tour routing, booking and performing to the social media management to the lead singer’s divorce. The manager handles the business, first and foremost. The best managers handle the business with creative finesse. To navigate the constantly evolving musical landscape, managers need truly creative minds. You don’t want a manager who is operating the same way this year as she was last year. Every day is new. Every day is different.

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Band Management: How to Make Your Artists Truly Successful

Whether it be a new artist getting prepared for a wave of gigs, or an artist who is seasoned with entertainment experience, a manager can be a useful and essential element is the prosperity of their career. A manager is the business backbone, the organizer and the planner; a band without proper management is restricted from success. This person can be an outside source or a member within the band or group who has a knowledge of business and professionalism. There are some key points to have in mind when you are seeking success for your artist.

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Music Industry Email Etiquette 101 – For/from people who give a damn.

When emailing a band’s management for the first time, you only have a few chances to get our attention. Mess that up, and your email is lost.

Below is a list of common mistakes and pet peeves from years of receiving emails, along with suggestions for ways to improve your communication to people you do not already know. Reading this will increase your chance of the support slot, or the desired response you hope for.

Remember, we are all people, trying hard to share music, just like you.

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Artist Managers Management Contracts

Music Managers & Management Contracts

THINGS TO WATCH OUT FOR

For many artists and bands the first contract that they have to face is the management contract. The manager will have a lot of responsibility and possible control so it is vital to get the right person and the right agreement.

The manager may come from various backgrounds – he’s a friend of the band, works already in the music industry, is an entrepreneur from a different industry or just has heard about the band’s potential and swoops in.

A manager should have one of the following but ideally all:

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How to Structure a Company to Succeed in the Current Music Industry

Much of the talk about the music industry in recent days focuses on future transformative changes in the way music is consumed. Will it be streaming or downloads. Will we be listening to music files from an app or from a cloud, and if so, who will own that cloud? The possibilities for content in the future are limited only by technology we create, and there will be even more changes down the road that are hard to imagine at this point in time. It is a very interesting discussion. Lost in this discussion, however, are the possible transformative changes in the companies that develop the artists that will make music in the new system, and how they can be positioned to easily change revenue models as technology changes the way content is presented.

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How to Manage an Effective Street Team In the New Digital Decade

One of my New Years resolutions was to do a bit more blogging and provide the music and marketing communities with some cool tips in navigating the web and managing your street campaigns.

I have been in the marketing field for over 10 years now and running FanManager for 6 years, so I wanted to post some of my observations and let you know what has worked and what hasn’t.

The entry below will cover everything you need to know about online street teaming in this new digital era. Although physical street teams are still important and relevant for many hard touring bands, online street teaming is becoming much more prevalent. 

HERE IS WHY…

1) Ease of Reaching Fans. It has never become so easy to reach tens of thousands of people in just a few minutes. In today’s ADD culture, people want instant bite sized bits of information. People are tuning out billboards and traditional advertising and are much more willing to listen to a recommendation of a new track, video, or concert from a friend.  This is why platforms like Twitter and Facebook are so important today.

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A Sample Music Business Plan

I just got home from a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with my mother, sister, brother, niece and nephew in Franklin Park, New Jersey. The roads were slick from an early snow shower that turned to freezing rain. As I was driving home it dawned on me that I haven’t written a blog post (on any topic) in over a month. But tonight I suddenly found the inspiration to present…

A Sample Music Business Plan for Your Band

For those of you who haven’t read my previous posts on this topic, I’ll briefly bring you up to speed. I wrote a post on Music Think Tank Open that was transferred to the main page (an honor in my book) called How to Write a Music Business Plan. It was a bit fluffy like this one might end up and one of the MTT readers called me on it. The first comment was, “Would have been stronger with a template or sample.” I got pissed off and created a template. Thanks again Justin.

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Management In The Music Industry

Peter Drucker stated, “Long-range planning is necessary precisely because we cannot forecast[1].” According to this statement, planning is essential to any enterprise so that the right decisions can be made when the environment changes. Music enterprises must be able to strategize and plan in order to create value for its customers. Strategizing and planning allows the enterprise to create its goals in its mission and vision for all levels of the hierarchy to strive for.

For example, Motown Records’ mission statement was, when it was first created, to “unite and bring people together through music[2].” A mission statement, as being part of planning, was created for Motown Records so that all artists, publishers, employees, and presidents of Motown Records would make decisions based on “uniting and bringing people together.” Knowledge of the goals and direction of the enterprise are necessary to know throughout the entire enterprise so that everyone knows what decisions are to be made and which are the right ones[3].  Motown Records brought value to its customers that shared the same ideal in music: the desire to unite people. Planning the mission and vision statement encompasses all decision-making for music enterprises. After knowing the enterprise’s plan, any employee or superior would have to ask, “Does this decision align with our core values and work towards our vision as a music enterprise?” Customers will value an enterprise that is consistent with its plan to create that value for its customers.

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The primary job of a manager is to take care of your lazy artist…

When a westerner (an American for example) walks by the office of a co-worker, and the co-worker is quietly sitting there doing nothing, the westerner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is lazy and probably slacking.  On the other side of the world, when an easterner (someone from Japan for example) walks by a co-worker, and that co-worker is doing nothing, the easterner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is most likely engaged in deep thought whilst grinding away at a solution to some problem…

I want to say two things in this post: 

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