The Three-And-A-Half-Minute Song

Caught in a daze, I found myself staring at my computer screen at a large list of music titles from my “Indie Chillout” Spotify playlist when I had a keen observation. Song number one, length = 3:21, song two, length = 3:25, song three, length = 3:43, so on and so forth. A similarity among all the track titles, a majority of them ranging roughly from approximately 3 minutes and 15 seconds to 4 minutes and an average song length of all 100 tracks of 3 minutes and 50 seconds (a minimum length of 2:24 and a maximum length of 6:10). It isn’t just happenstance that this is around the average song length time for almost all major genres of music. In fact, there are several reasons why most songs fall within this time range as explained below.

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Got Gear Or Skills? Here Are 8 Other Ways To Make Money With Them [Infographic]

If you haven’t made it big with your music yet but you’ve picked up some gear and some skills why not put them to other uses? Using the resources you already have you could create an additional income stream. Sure, it will take a bit of extra work but it can also help you make connections in the industry.

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Why Your Home Recording Sucks (And How to Fix It)

Recording at home is a viable option for musicians now. Whether you just want to throw together a quick demo or you want to record a whole album from your garage, you can get a relatively affordable setup and set up something resembling a makeshift studio at home. Just because you are a musician or singer doesn’t mean that you are an audio engineer, and there are many reasons your recording probably sucks.

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Why You Don’t Need A Record Label To Be Successful

We live in a time where musicians have everything they need to be successful all in fingers reach, yet many artists still don’t understand exactly why artists are steering away from labels more and more. With these few topics, artists are able to understand why you don’t need a record label to be successful in today’s music industry.

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New Infographic “The Sound Of Music” Looks At Famous Songs In An Unusual Way

One of the UK’s leading acoustic foam manufacturers has created a new infographic called “The Sound of Music” which reveals 20 fascinating anecdotes about the accidental and unusual sounds captured in the studio and found on some of the world’s most iconic songs.

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5 Great, Affordable Home Recording Studios In Nashville

Planning on recording in Nashville but put off by the high cost of studio time?  Don’t overlook the area’s numerous home studios.  Here are five where you can get great results without busting your budget.

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4 Tips For Songwriters Seeking Artists To Record Their Songs

This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

The goal of many a songwriter is to find artists to sing our material. And there are few things more thrilling than when you hear your music come to life. The first time you get to hear an artist’s take on a song you spent hours on, all alone in your writing room, is truly magical. The feeling exists somewhere in between hearing a very personal cover, and the ephemeral act of co-writing or collaborating with someone.

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Tips For Selecting An Audio Interface For Your Home Studio

Ever wonder what the difference between a decent home set up and a great one is? Often the devil is in the details, and facny insturments and mics wont matter if they get all mushed before they get tracked.

The folks at Rivington Music decided to help answer the question of how to select the right interface. Selecting a good interface has to be one of the most important steps to capturing high quality audio. This audio interface is basically the sound card and this piece of hardware handles converting your audio from digital data into an analog signal, also known as digital-to-analog converter.

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BEWARE: Recent Decision In CBS Lawsuit Over Pre-1972 Sound Recording Could Wreak Havoc In The Copyright World

The recording artist and songwriter communities should take note of a recent decision in ABS Entertainment, Inc. v. CBS Corporation, et al., a case concerning pre-1972 copyrights - and raise an outcry! The Judge in this case held that remastered versions of old songs are entitled to a new copyright and owners of the originals are not allowed to stop the public performance of them.

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9 Things You Can't Ignore If You Want To Record A High-Quality Demo

This article originally appeared on the Sonicbids blog. 

A demo is the musical equivalent of the sketch a painter makes before he or she lays paint to canvas. It’s meant to be fast, lightweight, and easy to pull off – a way to quickly and cheaply capture your sound and represent as well as you can to your fans, labels, distributors, or basically anyone you hope to take you seriously as a band or musician.

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7 Things You Need To Build A Portable Studio

A Musician that’s always in transit but needs to express himself will need some sort way to record or edit his music. In today’s day and age we have all of these Apps for our tablets and smartphones which are very handy. But sometimes we really need a computer based portable solution to a real studio setup.

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How To Be A Successful Performing Artist In The New Millennium - Part Two

Last month, in Part One, we established that the only money in the music business right now is in performing your own songs and owning your own publishing and merch. We looked at the eleven things an aspiring singer/songwriter needed to do in order to be able to take the next step into learning how to become an entertainer and communicate and connect with an audience. Part One involved a lot of hard work and long, boring hours of practice and re-writes with little to no payoff. Now it gets interesting, although there’s still plenty of hard work ahead. Part Two assumes that the artist has completed all the steps in Part One.

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5 Solid Ways To Check If Your Music Really Is Good Enough To Release

Music appreciation is subjective. We all know this, and it’s one of the reasons why you can spend endless nights debating with your friends over whether the latest Flying Lotus release is really better than his production work with Thundercat or whether there is artistic merit in the Cloud Rap niche and how it might do better to integrate some of the sounds of drum & bass.

It’s rare to find someone who likes *exactly* the same kind of music as you, especially once you start delving a little deeper than “yeah, I guess I like to listen to all sorts of stuff”.

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What Goes Where? Setting Up A Recording Studio

Your first attempt at recording a song or even just vocals at home will likely include the built in microphone and soundcard of your computer or even a webcam.  It’s a confusing task to even understand what all pieces of studio gear are required, let alone how they must be connected to operate properly.  Newcomers become intimidated almost immediately, but think of these factoids…

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