From Thursday to Saturday last week I was following Andrew Dubber’s tweets from a music industry conference in Finland called Is This It?
The premise of the conference is that it’s a ‘music seminar about music‘, though there was a baffling and conspicuous absence of actual musicians speaking at it. The overall tone, it seemed – as drawn from the various tweeted quotes – was that it was a bunch of music industry people desperately trying to come up with a way to continue ‘business as usual’ – marketing strategies, ways to feed more data to collection agencies to get paid, and the usual crop of should’ve-been-left-in-the-70s ideas involving scantily clad women as a marketing draw. So far, so heinous.
What’s even sadder is that this is the still the prevailing message coming out from the large music business institutions – that the music industry is under threat from unlawful downloading, that we need to come up with stronger legal penalties for ‘piracy’, that revenue now must come from live gigs and ‘360 deals’ with single agencies handling recordings, merch and performance (not surprisingly, the Live Nation rep at the conference was quoted as saying “I’d be happier if everyone just gave away their mp3s and got people to go to live events.”) Every old school institution is selfishly fighting their own corner, and try to divert the discussion away from musicians being freed up from dependency on mediators and distributors to get our music out to the people who want to hear it.
“But where’s the money going to come from, Steve?” I hear you say.
To which my answer is that the money was only ever needed in the quantities it was spent in before because of the system, not because making and releasing music required it.
That stalwart of seditious thinking on the music industry, CBBC, has a breakdown of ‘how much it costs to have a hit single‘. Here’s their breakdown:
- Total – £113,500
For a SINGLE… how much more for an album?
That’s how much a record label, doing it old school, spends before the record is released. Ergo, YOU, the artist, are over a hundred grand in debt before you’ve even thought about selling any copies. The only bit of the CBBC Breakdown that could be yours pretty quickly is the ‘songwriter’s royalties’, which you’d split with your publisher, who most likely would be an affiliate of your record label…
However, if instead you go with a marketing strategy that costs nothing, and so start with nothing when your record comes out, you’ll be a hundred grand better off at the starting gate than a signed band.
Now, in all your fears about piracy, have you ever thought that your “losses” are going to come anywhere near £100,000? I’m guessing not (if you have thought that, you’re so deluded it’s laughable, sorry)
So what are these ‘free’ marketing ideas? Here’s a few off the top of my head:
- let people in on the process
- offer teaser material as the album comes together
- talk about what you’re doing, let anyone who’s interested find out why you make the music you do
- provide easy ways for people who like what you do to send it to their friends – weblinks, widgets, free downloads, etc. etc.
- allow the people who care about what you do to make their own promo materials – posters, ecards, website designs – encourage people to build things around what you do. Reward it by being publicly grateful.
- when the album is finished, do sliding scale sales from zero to anything. Offer packages for people who WANT to invest in what you do, open up the design process of those packages to suggestions from your audience.
- release multiple versions of the album – remaster it for laptop listening, do an acoustic version of it, put up stems for you friends and fans to remix it.
There are LOADS of things you can do that will cost you time and creative energy, but leave you at close-to-break-even when the record comes out. Yes, you’ll have to record the album yourself. You’ll have to get creative, call in favours, swap resources and learn some recording skillz pretty fast. But the alternative is not where you want to be, believe me… there are ways of getting music colleges to do the recording for you (most music recording courses are desperate for quality bands to record – do it, and in exchange get the raw files to take home and use for your album). I’ll write more about this process soon…
These are all avaiable to you NOW. These aren’t the ‘future of music’. These are the ‘present of music’. And it’s never been better for us, for musicians, and for music lovers looking for music untainted by speculative music marketing strategies based on pushing artists away from their instincts and towards the lowest common denominator guesses about ‘what’s hip’.
If you are going to press CDs, invite those who want them to pay up front – almost all of my albums I’ve released have paid for themselves before I even needed to spend anything (given that the CD pressing was invoiced for on delivery).
If you are going to spend any money on conventional marketing, keep control of it – if you run a print ad, make sure it’s in a mag that’s going to write about you anyway – without the context of an interview or at least a review, print ads are pretty much worthless. With that context, they can be a good way of letting people know that the album is out.
The web has removed the need for those expensive, wasteful intermediaries. Does this mean there’s no future for the music industry infrastructure? Of course not – most people still find music through TV and radio, and as your band grows, there’ll be bits of the process you want to bring people in to help with. Tour organisation is a massive job, and as you get to the point where its viable, getting a company that knows what they are doing to handle it for you makes perfect sense.
What’s changed is who’s in the driving seat. No longer do we need to feel grateful for the appalling terms that we got from record labels when the alternative was trying to sell badly-dubbed cassette versions of our live tapes at Camden Market.
The channels for getting your own, creatively inspired, music-that-matters out there to an interested audience willing to help by telling their friends have never been more accessible, easier to use and more exciting to get involved with. We can make the music we love – Art first – and then tell the story of that, without having someone entirely disinvested from our process and purpose telling us what we should do to have hits.
Resources: Firstly, go and dowload Andrew Dubber’s New Music Strategies e-book, and start reading his blog regularly. Secondly, go and buy Net, Blogs and Rock ‘n’ Roll by David Jennings. Read his blog too. You need to.
Comment questions – if you’re a musician, what’s your favourite tip for getting people interested in your music, and if you’re a music lover, what’s the best online strategy that a musician has ever employed to get you involved in their creative process?