I Really Dont Want To Get a Regular Job

Written by Jason Isbell

Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit's eponymous album will be released on February 17, 2009 on Lightning Rod Records . Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit is Isbell's second solo release and his first release with his band The 400 Unit. Prior to his solo career Jason was a member of Drive-By Truckers from 2001 to 2007.

When giving anyone advice about the music business, or anything in general, I find it necessary to have a sense of what the person or group of people is trying to achieve. The trick to manipulating the entertainment industry is knowing your specific goals and being willing to work very hard, cut dead weight, and take some chances in order to get there.

For most musicians, at least most that I know, expectations change as time goes on. When I was thirteen, for example, I spent a great deal of my time daydreaming about fame and wealth. In my mind, I had already chosen jobs for all my friends, though there weren't that many, and I had planned out every initial conversation with all my heroes. While these dreams haven't left me altogether, my priorities now line up far more evenly with my reality. Today, my wildest dreams of rock stardom can be boiled down to this: I really don't want to get a regular fucking job. I think that's an achievable goal that, in the long run, can make me very happy, indeed.

It's clear that this isn't enough for everyone. If you want to be a star, which I don't advise, you should probably stay with a more traditional method of using the business. Audition for anything that comes your way, network until your iPhone is full of numbers and your soul is locked away in your inner monologue (the soul just gets in the way of celebrity), and listen with feverish intensity to that wisest of fanny-packed and man-sandled sage, the A&R person. Allow that person's creative input to guide your creative output, and he or she will be your guide to credibility and artistic worth, at least in the eyes of the average. If you write songs, don't scare anybody. Keep it short and don't try to impress. Dress accordingly. Find a manager that demands at least twenty percent. Anything less, and you'll find yourself up saddle creek without a paddle. You'll probably want to devote every realized thought and every waking hour to understanding and pronouncing the word 'yes'. Make it your mantra. You'll get time for yourself later, when you're loaded and can afford to hide.

This is clearly not the path for folks like us. I write songs to teach myself how to feel about something, and when I see a crowd of people in front of me, singing along to those songs, I can't help but think I'm not alone in this world. This interaction is a plant that must be grown and cultivated. Find people you trust to water it when you're away. At this point in my career, the best tip I can give anyone is this: Work with your friends. Oh, and don't have stupid, greedy, negligent friends. Seems easy enough, I guess.

Internet, internet, internet. Any discussion of the music business would not be complete without the inclusion the of the mighty mighty media, the new Goliath killer that allows all of us shoe-gazing Davids access to the most powerful slingshot in history. With a click or two, we can propel our music to all corners of the world, or receive music form the least popular new band in Belgium. Become familiar with it. Unknown bands now have the ability to spend their spare time spreading the word without anyone else's help or authorization. I could sit in front of my computer and connect with hundreds or thousands of people in a day's time. If only a small percentage of these folks ever become fans of my band, that is a big step in the right direction. MySpace, Facebook, iTunes, YouTube... It's as if these sites have been custom built for emerging bands and artists, and they're easy to use. Don't complain about their power, and don't underestimate it.

Tour, tour, tour. My final piece of advice for those interested in making a living in music is to get your ass on the road. You don't have to wait on labels or radio or anything else. The Ford Econoline van is the greatest automobile ever made. Get one, load it up, and call in every favor you can. Trust friends to tell you where to play and put in a good word with the booker. If you're any good and you work hard, you should be able to find someone to take over your booking. Once you get an agent, you can usually find a manager. Once you have an agent and a manager, you can usually find a label. Don't be afraid to fire any of these people at any time, and remember that they work for you, not the other way around. In many cases, you could do their job, but they can't do yours.

If you work very hard and still have no success, there's a chance that you might be making bad music. If that's the case, I can't help you. However, if you put all of your energy into achieving well-thought-out goals, like that of not having to work a regular job and making the best music you can make, something might accidentally catch fire and you might find yourself with a hit. Stranger things have happened. More than likely, though, you'll build a relatively small but loyal group of fans that will follow you to your grave. That can enable you to make music for a living for the rest of your life, and that's way better than being famous. I hope.

www.knowthemusicbiz.com

Web 2.0 and the Future of the Music Business

iTunes Success in 12 Steps

How Indie Artist "Making April" Systematically Went from 0 to 1,000 Sales a Week on iTunes in One Year
by Ariel Hyatt, Ariel Publicity
© 2009 All Rights Reserved

I recently was having lunch with my dear friend, music attorney extraordinaire Dan Friedman, who was in town to showcase a band he represents who he mentioned was selling 1,000 singles a week on iTunes.

My jaw almost hit the table. 1,000 singles a week on iTunes?

Who is this band? And how are they doing this? And he coughed up the answer (and luckily for me their phone number).

A few days later, I cold called Greg from "Making April", who it turns out are an emo/piano rock band (kind of like Ben Folds Five), and we spent an hour and a half on the phone. Greg generously spilled the beans as to how Making April got to where they are today: selling 1,000 CD singles a week on iTunes and signed to a record deal.

How They Did It…

Greg explained that they decided to make a full time business out of their band. Everyday at 9 AM, three of the four members met in what they called "The War Room," which was a room reserved in one of their homes. They took it seriously, just like a job, and every day they would set simple goals.

“In the beginning we really did not know what we were doing,” Greg recalls. “The daily goal was to make the maximum amount of friends on MySpace, which is 400 a day. Between three of us, that was 133 each.” Here’s how it went from there.

Step 1: Find sound alikes – famous bands similar to you. - They started by looking at similar bands in their genre that had large friends lists at MySpace. Dashboard Confessional, for example. They would go and they would ping each and every friend in Dashboard Confessional's friends list…

Step 2: Ping each person. And then they would go to the comments and post:

"Hey if you like Dashboard Confessional, you're probably going to like Making April. Would you please come check us out and leave a comment?" Then, people would check them out and leave comments.

Step 3: Get personal. The band would then personally respond and personally thank everyone that left a comment. And they always signed their name using a sig file, which included their IM address.

Step 4: Instant Messenger bonanza. Then they would get their new fans’ information through Instant Messenger, and they would sit all day long on Instant Messenger chatting back and forth with their new friends, and according to Greg it was crazy. They actually couldn't turn on their IM because the minute they would open it up, they’d get thousands of people trying to ping them. So they had to post their status as “Away” on their IM because their buddy list was insane.

TIP! Give your music away. The whole time, they were giving away their music for free to build their audience.

Step 5: Run contests. After several months making thousands of personal contacts, a new marketing idea struck them: Making April decided to create a contest to run for their fans. They asked fans to add them to their “Top 8” friends. This success of the contest manifested in the band getting even more MySpace traction.

Each of the 20 people in the contest got points for convincing others to add their video and/or song. According to Greg it got completely out of control.

After this successful contest, a company called Brickfish took notice and offered to help them launch a second contest. Entrants had to design a T-shirt, and in return the band would write a song for the winner.

So, out of a well planned T-shirt contest they got an additional 100,000 hits to their page in two weeks, and the winner got a shirt, a personal call from the band, and an original song written about them. “It was unbelievable.”

Step 6: Engage your audience consistently. Another of their strategies was to send out a bulletin every single day. Not a hypey bulletin pushing themselves, but a simple one that would engage their fans by asking a question like, “Should we get chunky peanut butter or smooth”

They felt that there was no reason to blog because they weren't really on the road, and they didn’t have a lot of news to report, so they just kept asking questions on their bulletins, day in and day out. And they had a call to action: They would ask everyone on the bulletins to comment back on their pages. They would get hundreds of responses from people, which then would add a track play and a front page hit to their MySpace page. Just due to the question, they would get 500 messages instantly, and 600+ comments a day.

Step 7: MTV action. After their wildly successful Brickfish contest, they got a song placed on MTV’s “Laguna Beach.” They don't really know how they ended up on that show – they think a fan probably e-mailed the track to MTV – but the episode aired three times, and all of a sudden they noticed people started to buy the download.

Step 8: Get ready to charge for tracks (after a solid fan base is built). It was only after all of this traction and attention that Making April started pushing their iTunes page. This was after a full year of solid online promotions. They took the free MP3s off of their MySpace page and they started seeing their sales pick up.

Step 9: Repeat and repeat and repeat… and repeat. They put a big wall-mounted dry erase board on the wall of the war room, and every day they each had a goal to make 150 friends and comment back personally.

Step 10: Measure your goals and write them down. Then they laid out a weekly plan to hit their goals and numbers at iTunes, which were 200 plays and 400 friends a day. They also went after the friends of another a band called Secondhand Serenade (who blew up after becoming the number one unsigned artist at MySpace).

Step 11: Be masterful at one thing. I asked Greg if they did blogging, podcasting, Twitter, or other social networking sites, and to my surprise, he said “no.” They did this all on MySpace alone. The goal for MySpace was to consistently add 200 friend requests and 400 plays to the traffic they were already generating.

Step 12: A record deal. Because of all of their solid dedicated focus, Universal Republic Records took notice and offered them a deal. The moral of the story and the end result of all this work: Making April got a deal.

Was this process easy? No. It took solid dedication, trial and error, and a hell of a lot of time invested, but Making April managed to be one of the top selling bands at iTunes in 2007 and they beat a vast majority of artists signed to major labels.

I think this is a phenomenal and an inspirational story and one that teaches us lots of lessons. From my experience, musicians tend to give up too easily and lose focus, and then become defeated and give up. Making April proves that with a plan and some dedication, you can get very far with the tools available to anyone who wants to give it a go.

Check them out here: www.myspace.com/makingapril

Examining Where the Industry Went Wrong

43 Places to Promote Your Music - January 2009

This month's newsletter features the listings that were submitted to me this past month. The contacts listed are sorted into FIVE sections.

1. Publications that will REVIEW your music
2. Radio Stations/Shows that will PLAY your songs
3. Labels, Vendors and Promotional Services that will help you to SELL your CD
4. Sites where you can UPLOAD your band's MP3s or videos
5. A wide range of Helpful Resources for recording artists

http://www.bigmeteor.com/newsletter/jan2009.shtml

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17,000 Illegal Downloads Don't Equal 17,000 Lost Sales

If a song has been downloaded from a torrent site 17,000 times, it doesn't necessarily equal 17,000 lost sales, according to US District Judge James P. Jones. The judge recently ruled against using this kind of reasoning in determining restitution in a criminal copyright case, though it doesn't necessarily affect civil cases against downloaders.

Record companies cannot collect restitution for every time a song has been illegally downloaded, a US District judge has decided. Judge James P. Jones gave his opinion on United States of America v. Dove, a criminal copyright case, ruling that each illegal download does not necessarily equate to a lost sale, and that the companies affected by P2P piracy cannot make their restitution claims based on this assumption.

Daniel Dove was originally found guilty of criminal copyright infringement for running a torrent group called "Elite Torrents" between 2004 and 2005. The jury in the case had found Dove guilty of reproduction and distribution of copyrighted works, as well as conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. At the time, Judge Jones sentenced Dove to 18 months in prison for each count, plus a special assessment of $200 and a $20,000 fine ($10,000 per count).

However, the RIAA and Lionsgate Entertainment had both submitted requests for restitution—they had argued that each individual copy of content downloaded through Elite Torrents was the equivalent of a lost sale. For example, the RIAA said that 183 albums were transferred through Dove's server 17,281 times, then multiplied that by the wholesale price of a digital album in 2005 ($7.22) to conclude that its member companies were owed almost $124,769 in restitution, or $47,000 if Dove agreed to be part of an RIAA "public service announcement" about piracy. Similarly, Lionsgate said that it owned copyrights to 28 of the 700 or so movies that Dove served up—Lionsgate argued that Dove caused the movie industry to lose some $22 million, and since Lionsgate owned copyrights to about 4 percent of the available movies, it was owed $880,000.

Jones wrote in his opinion that equating each download with a lost sale is a faulty assumption. "Those who download movies and music for free would not necessarily purchase those movies and music at the full purchase price," Jones wrote. "[A]lthough it is true that someone who copies a digital version of a sound recording has little incentive to purchase the recording through legitimate means, it does not necessarily follow that the downloader would have made a legitimate purchase if the recording had not been available for free."

It's important to note that this decision does not directly affect the thousands of civil cases that the RIAA has launched against accused copyright violators. Dove was convicted as a criminal copyright offender where restitution is a consideration, while the RIAA's civil suits can ask for monetary damages determined on an entirely different scale. For example, Jammie Thomas was found liable for $222,000 in damages in 2007 after "making available" only 24 songs (that verdict has since been overturned, however, as the "making available" theory has been riddled with holes via different rulings). "The factors that go into the calculation of restitution are different than the ones that go into the calculation of statutory damages in civil cases," the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann pointed out to Wired.

Still, the Dove ruling is reassuring in that it emphasizes once again the concept that a sheer number of downloads doesn't necessarily equal monetary losses. This is the same assertion made by software groups about piracy, such as the Business Software Alliance (BSA), and it keeps getting shot down.

FL Studio - Music Theory - Beats, Bars and Tempo

Henry Rollins on File Sharing

http://www.djmixhosting.com/user_uploads/504prob83c/1-02firstonthelist.mp3

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