Song Generation: Where Does Inspiration For New Music Come From?

New music has been a major influence on people in society basically since the beginning of time. Nothing is changing much in that sense, either. New music approaches, however, change dramatically all of the time. Sources of inspiration change on a frequent basis as well. Musical acts get ideas in all sorts of intriguing ways.

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How To Promote Your Product Or New Project On A Budget

When a product or service promises consumers greater bang for their buck, it’s a powerful motivator. Getting the highest value from spending the least amount of money is what most people want from the products they buy. It’s no different for the marketers themselves. Marketers are always looking for ways to strengthen their return on investment when it comes to promoting a new product or service. Not every business has the promotional resources of Apple or Microsoft, of course, so most businesses won’t be able to use a multimillion-dollar media blitz to advertise a new product or service.

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BRASH! Magazine Blog - Time To Get Pretty Reckless

We’ve been anxiously waiting for The Pretty Reckless EP from our Jul/Aug cover artist SoBE LASH. Now the time is here to tune into her anticipated project. This EP describes a unique style of living life, exploring, and not apologizing for it. Along with being fearless in the pursuit of adventure while accepting what the journey brings, aware that at some point it all falls down. All can relate to The Pretty Reckless EP as it is a soundtrack for giving into the free spirit side of living.

Read full article.

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Indie Artists in the New Music World

It is a new world order for musicians. There’s also a high degree of change in the world of radio. Expectations, though, shouldn’t be changing all that much due to the complexities of rising to the top in a still very difficult system.

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Has The Quality Of Music Changed?

In a digital world where we have music such as Gangnam Style and ‘Friday’ by Rebecca Black… It’s hard not to observe that the music landscape has drastically changed in the last few decades because of the internet. But, is trying to create the next ‘viral hit’ impacting on the quality of the music of today?

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We do need curators, but we don't need gatekeepers or why you should stop using Pandora

Allegedly, Pandora now controls 3.6% of radio listening. This is an impressive figure, but, to me, a disturbing one. We’ve all spent the last few years touting how the Internet has changed music distribution and flattened the playing field so that everyone has equal access to distribution. Traditional terrestrial radio, with ever-shrinking playlists that contain almost new music certainly aren’t designed to appeal to a future audience, they are designed to grasp onto a shrinking past audience.

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How a Lyric Website, a Memorable 'ah' Noise, and Drake Helped Promote Chase and Status

Okay I thought it was about time for another one of my ‘thinking like a fan’ posts! Last time I posted on Music Think Tank I analysed how a combination of boredom, time, and talking videos converted me into a fan of Jason Mraz, and today I’m going to analyse my most recent ‘becoming a fan experience’ – how I became a fan of a song using a combination of lyric websites, remixes, and ‘ah ah ah’ noise related Google searches.

Typically, most of what I hear about lyric websites (the sites that just list song lyrics) is pretty negative – they’re just dodgy sites set up to profit on advertising when people are practicing for karaoke, but I think there’s more to it. Truth is they’re well optimised for search engines and they’re often what appears in Google when I’m searching for a song by lyrics that I’ve heard for songs that I can’t remember the name of – that makes them pretty powerful music promotion resources.

Sometime in October I was driving to a house party in my friends car and he played a really cool song that I started humming to, I had no idea what it was, but I loved it and foolishly didn’t think to ask what it was (but if I did this blog post probably wouldn’t exist!).

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What would YOU do with freedom and a healthy budget to break a new artist?

Over the past several years, I’ve spent much more (non-billable) time than I should have trying to convince old-school label execs, independent artists, managers (both big and small) and others that the traditional rules don’t work any more in this new music business.  

When trying to “break” a new artist independently, spending a large amount of money on radio, downplaying internet marketing and direct-to-fan communication and spending a lot on expensive videos rather than producing less-expensive but more interesting/innovative videos (e.g., the now famous OK Go treadmill video) are usually bad moves.  Top-down marketing just doesn’t work any more, unless you’re a very young pop act signed to Disney/Hollywood.  As my marketing friend would say, it’s all about “pull” rather than “push” marketing.

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