But for me, personally, I wish I could tell you how many copies of this track, that single, these EPs or those albums I’ve bought over the years. Because I’ve loved them.

And so it goes on today. In my ‘music’ life I hear work from artists that makes me want more of their work to the point where I’ve bought *hundreds* of albums in the last 18 months – tracks which came to me FOC got me so hooked I put hand in pocket and bought the musicware.

And now I’m working with two bands who are a cut above the ‘good, unsigned’ work that one normally hears; giving them my time, accessing my contacts for them, advising them on strategy and a roadmap to achieve their goals.

Because they shared.

The appetite for good quality independently produced music is enormous, we have over 100,000 subscribers to our weekly audio. That figure didn’t build up by accident.

And Charlie’s point about lacking audio? How difficult is it to record one track?

I’m still looking for ideas to make money with music, since last year been focusing more on making it a second business. The decision tree on this is pretty simple: “Yeah, man, sounds like a really cool gig, love to do it—how much this [benefit] gonna pay?” It seems no pay, always a [benefit.] When is the band going to have a benefit?

Promote? I have no time left anymore, much less practice. Very fortunate to have a day job that supports my family (especially with health insurance) but need to be doing side jobs and music would be a first choice. This year, reinstated working as a house painter to pick up a few bucks, I had “retired” from the building trades some 20 years ago as the day job.

sort of rambling on now.

I play out about once a week in a bar for tourists as a sideman in a blues/rock trio doing mostly covers. We don’t have any merchandise, no recordings, nothing to offer the customers who seem to really like our renditions.

I should be practising, bye for now
Charlie

That’s not the case for a some other kinds of artist, and certainly not the case if you play the kind of music that only really thrives in a ‘listening’ space, or if your personal circumstances don’t work with that (like you’ve got kids, or a disability, or a day job that prevents you from traveling to that degree)…

So yes, gig everywhere – I did it for a long time, playing at every available opportunity, from open mics to the Royal Albert Hall. It did me a whole power of good, but it just doesn’t work logistically for me any more.

So I use internet exposure and conversations to drive interest and excitement in house concerts, which I then book in mini-tours a few times a year, allowing me to pool the expenses, maximise the buzz, and which will still be viable when we’ve got a baby in tow The gigs become financially viable in and of themselves, the scheduling leaves way more flexibility for teaching/lecturing/consulting as we travel, we get more time to hang with the people who host the gigs (win!), and the digital footprint of every show is so disproportionately huge to the number of people there, it’s insane.

There’s no one way to make this ‘work’ – there isn’t even one way of measure what ‘working’ means. For the most part, promotion is a both/and proposition rather than either/or

So I fully believe in playing everywhere. It gets up out in front of people, you learn more about playing, and it gives you more opportunity to sell CDs/merch, etc.

yup, that makes lots of sense too – there are definitely different levels of interaction, and ways of measuring the value in that. Time can be targeted in different places depending on the actual interaction generated there…

Again, as I just said to Suzanne, this isn’t the ‘go out and ‘connect’ with loads of people end of numbers, it’s the ‘being available to be listened to when the discovery process leads someone to your part of whatever online platform they spend their time on. Whether that’s a friend referral, being in someone else’s myspace top friends, last.fm ‘similar artist’ radio playlists, iLike suggestions, twitter recommendations…

The admonishment here is to see making your music available to be listened to as a top priority. The degree to which you go actively looking for an audience is a different question…

But I do love Youtube Insight – fascinating stuff!

My point is more about ‘allowing’ people to hear you, more than it is about chasing numbers – I’m certainly not advocating seeing myspace friend numbers as a metric of success (as you may have read, I deleted 8000 myspace friends late last year)

But to hide your music in the hope that people will find you more mysterious or alluring and buy your CDs just to see what you’re like is – in my experience as an artist,fan and observer of both elsewhere – a non-starter. When those lovely people who come and see you live want to tell their friends about what they’ve just seen, having your music available for streaming means you’re more likely to get a load of people listening to you in the time before you play a show in that town again…

For most artists, whether or not your audience spends money on you is still a secondary question to having one – clearly, spamming social networks with ‘hey, check me out’ messages isn’t going to help, but making sure that people who want to listen to you can find your music, find out more about you, connect with you, and buy whatever it is that you do have for sale makes lots of sense.

In other words, the one with lots of online fans isn’t making any money, while the one who focuses on real sales is doing well.

Online exposure isn’t the same as profitability. MySpace has shown that to be the case. You can become famous online and still have a situation where no one wants to buy your music or come to your shows.

It’s important to understand that online fans don’t have to put in nearly as much effort as those who come to shows and buy CDs. So you can’t assume they will become paying customers until they actually become paying customers.

Before throwing the kitchen sink at the social networks you suggest (as I firmly agree they should), i think folks should consider how they might be able to track and use this interaction data to further grow their audience and to simplify the process over time.

Trendrr pro and bandmetrics offer an as yet untested approach to this, while YouTube (insight) and reverbnation already offer analytics tools.

This leads to the question of how best to use the data – and that will vary from artist to artist