Say “Bye” To The “Buy”

We’ve all seen the ads, spam comments from random accounts, and posts that look oh so tempting to check out or even try. Increase your followers!, Gain more followers! Blah! Blah! Blah!…but of course it comes with a cost…literally. Now, we can’t discredit the supply/demand business savvy that is being used here. These fly by night business pages/companies are aware that people are now desperate to get their follower numbers up. With this in mind, they’ve set up a way to manipulate the social media numbers to create the illusion of a large following. It’s smart, in a way, because when one person sees that an artist has a large number of followers on their page, they tend to check it out to see what the hype is all about. However, at the end of the day, the numbers just don’t add up.

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Rotten Apple

As Apple kicked off it’s June 30th launch of the revamped Apple Music Service (Beats music), there were many kinks and controversies along the way. The controversy was that Apple was not planning to pay artists for the 3-month trial period of the service. Many artists spoke up against not being paid for the use of their streamed songs in the 3-month trial period. Many artists threatened Apple to pull their music from the streaming service all together. Artist and activist Taylor Swift took to Tumblr in a letter stating that she was speaking on the behalf of her fellow musicians who were hesitant to speak out against the tech giant.

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What New Artists And Managers Can Learn From The Everly Brothers

Recently a friend who has the advantage of being an astute student of the music business from the outside - the advantage being that he doesn’t have to rely on the music business to make a living – threw out the trial balloon statement that what we should be looking for is the next Everly Brothers.

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Smashing the Music Industry

Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins frontman, believes that the music business model is outdated and takes advantage of artists. Corgan said, “The music business is mostly run by feckless idiots who do not subscribe to the normal tenets of capitalism which when they do, the business tends to work out well and stars tend to rise to the top, everybody benefits, but it is still a parochial business. It is run by thiefdoms way behind the times technologically.”

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BRASH! Magazine 2016

BRASH! - A Music Marketing Blog started in 2012. This blog was designed to provide music marketing tips for Independent Artists as well as provide a platform for exposure by giving exclusive interviews and social media promotions. In 2016, BRASH! is ready to expand to the magazine scene but we need your help. In order to bring this to life we are accepting donations to design, create, and develop a Music Marketing Magazine to increase exposure and awareness for quality Indie Artists. Funds raised will be used for staff memebers (writers, graphics artists, events etc.) as well as the development for the magazine’s platform, both online and print.

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In "Raging Bull" Case US Supreme Court Opens The Door To Even Long-delayed Copyright Infringement Lawsuits

     In a copyright dispute over the movie “Raging Bull”, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the case can continue dispite the substantial passage of time. In a 6-3 decision the Court held that plaintiff Paula Petrella, daughter of the late screenwriter Frank Petrella, did not wait too long to file her lawsuit against MGM claiming an interest in the film.

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ICONventional Music Service

ICONventional aims to give rising artists a chance to be noticed while making it easier for listeners to discover new music. Our online service relies on user participation, both through submissions of great music and support for the artists.

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FeedTheArts.com and FREE TIME Funding

- FeedTheArts.com is a new website introducing a way to raise money for Artists of all kinds (musicians, actors, writers, painters, etc.) using a new trade marked platform called Time Funding.

- Time Funding is a concept using virtual currency people earn on our website to fund artists’ projects (recording, marketing help, art supplies, publishers and more).  Think crowd funding without having to donate actual money.  Fans can come to our site and play games, watch videos, clip coupons and earn virtual currency called “Helping Hands”.  They can then turn around a donate those helping hands to any Artist registered to our site.  It’s free for everyone—Artists, Fans and Service Providers.  Artists no longer have to beg for money to buy those new guitar strings or pay for head shots.  They can raise the money to reach their goal at FeedTheArts.com.

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Are you engaged?

From BRASH! - A Music Marketing Blog

Getting involved with your following

When I speak of being engaged, in a Marketing perspective it doesn’t mean to “Put a ring on it”. As we all know, you can be engaged with people by becoming involved whether its in a business aspect or a relationship.  As an artist, you should want to have engaging conversations with your fans, interested media outlets, and industry professionals.  This will help you to expand your brand and exposure in the industry.

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Bad Press...Take It of Leave It (from BRASH! - A Music Marketing Blog)

“People gonna talk about you ’til the day you die; and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.” This is one of my favorite Madea movie quotes because this is true.  Especially in the entertainment industry where artists are constantly being watched, attacked, and ridiculed for making life’s mistakes or even for things that are blown out of the water by the press. A few artists escape the daily bashing by flying under the radar and keeping a simple private life.  While others feed on the bad press to stay relevant and/or capture attention towards their latest project.  But is exposure for your music REALLY worth the negative press?

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The Science of Becoming a Rock Star

Working with both well-known and unsigned artists for over a decade, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering why some people succeed in music while others fail. And though this might sound strange, there are a few physics ideas that can help you think differently about how great music careers are made.

Rule #1: Quantum Events = Music Success

Building a music career is different than learning how to sing or play an instrument. Practice makes you slightly better with your voice or instrument every day – over years, as you put in your 10,000 hours of work, you steadily move from novice to pro (see Figure 1). To be a truly great and lasting artist, you must master your voice or instrument – a lot of this work is done alone or with bandmates. But mastering an instrument isn’t the same as building a music career, and understanding the difference will improve your chance of success.

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Is the Internet Dead or just Dead to Artists?

Is the internet dead? This has been a question I have been asking myself for a few weeks now. If it’s not dead is it just going through changes like most businesses do? I have read several articles of late that seem to think that it is dead and that the future of the internet will look much different then it does today. So what if it’s dead, how does that impact us? Do we even care?

I’m looking at the internet through the eyes of someone working in the music industry, as a recording artist, a studio owner and a music publisher. What was once the supposed gateway to music business success is closing and its closing fast. In fact it may have never really been open at all.

We have all heard the stories of how a band was found on myspace and then international fame soon followed. I once bought into this, but now I’m not so sure. How true can this be? Success in business has always been built on hard work, time, effort, energy, preparation and education. There are always the stories of overnight successes but even then all of the above things were at some point involved. No one can succeed at anything if they have never put forth any effort to succeed can they?

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Simple website builder for artists launches while declaring end of recession

Canadian startup Sayvee has just launched a simple and easy way for musicians to create a professional website without the need to be a geek. Their launch is combined with an announcement declaring the official end of the recession and a creative Facebook contest.

Not often do you find a technology company with a lot of personality. Sayvee is changing that by turning the heads of their biggest competitors with their tongue-in-cheek promo videos and their latest contest on Facebook where they declared July 1, 2010 as the official last day of the recession.

“We decided that it was time for the recession to be over,” commented Steve Devries, co-founder and photographer. “We’ve been building Sayvee for the past 2 years and figured that since people are doing things like selling stars and space on the moon that we could claim a date for the end of the recession.”

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The Perceived Value of Music

An opinion about the value of music today, and what factors are contributing as to why music is at this value. Finally, what artists and labels have to do about it.

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