Amazon.com Widgets Musicbizformation, a Division of Musformation | Daily Musician's News, Tips, Gear, Business & Gossip
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Randy Nichols is the manager of great bands like Underoath, The Starting Line, Hit the Lights and Fake Problems. Ultimate Ears and AbsolutePunk have both done great interviews with him where he drops some great knowledge on the roles of a manager in music today. One of the best quotes I have read in a long time is below:

"Ultimately anything that a record label or any other partner isn't doing becomes the managers responsibility."

The Misconceptions Of Artist Revenue

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gucci-mane-ice-cream-tattoo.jpgAlternative Press has up an eye opening article on the real deal with band's finances from the bands themselves. While the story misses the point that many of these bands got in bad financial situations by not paying attention to their business moves, it is still worth noting that the rockstar life is not all filled with bling and gold. Check it here.


We all know that trading tracks for email addresses is one of the best ways to build a lasting fanbase. Brian Hazard has penned a phenomenal article for The Music Think Tank on this subject and has outlined some of the many ways you can promote your music on the web, by employing this trade.

Do You Need A Manager?

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Using the hypothesis that for starving bands a Facebook share can be the equivilent to a $1.29 download for KJaty Perry, Disrupt.FM will enable your fans to download your song for the price of a Facebook update. This cool and easy to use service seems like another great way to spread the worst about your music.

Google Voice To Now Allow Number Porting

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In exciting news you will soon be able to use your old number on Google Voice. Lifehacker has the full deal and why you should be excited by this.

Bloggers Vs. A&R

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An Inforgraphic On How Kickstarter Works

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This great infographic is a great way to get your head around the amazing Kickstarter service. It is brought to you by the great people at Zippycart who you should surely check out.

Crowdbands is a new startup that allows bands to have fans involved with making decisions for their musical endeavors. Fans can sign up for Crowdbands and start to become involved in the decisionmaking processes of bands that are signed up with the site. To get involved, check them out here. 

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Outside of the obvious - your music is no good, labels reject musicians for a variety of legitimate reasons.  Regardless if you're anti label or not, sometimes it's best to understand why exactly you got the snub.  Here are the top 5...........

Tight Mix Blog has the low down on a cool service called Dropico that organizes your photos across various social networks. Get hip to it and let it help you save time syncing photos.
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Impulse is a Facebook music page and storefront that will allow you to easily sell your music on Facebook. Obviously this is a big deal since we know every one of your potential fans is wasting every moment of their life away on Facebook, looking for something to do. So why not enable your fans to purchase your music there?

Soundcloud Now With Podcast Abilities

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Souncdcloud has made the exciting announcement that they will be enabling podcast technology through their service. This is great news for all of you who look to regularly update your fans with new music. Check out their blog here and find out how to get involved in the beta process.


While making some of the best electronic music around today, Flying Lotus is also innovating some technology that rewards true fans for buying his records. You can now get alternate versions of song off his latest record by scanning the album cover of his latest record to prove you bought it. While this won't stop piracy from running wild it does offer an interesting new dynamic to purchasing music. Check it here
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Both Fanbridge and TopSpin are upping their mailing list skills. Fanbridge has a blog up about using their geotargeting feature which can greatly improve show turnouts and do specific marketing for releases. Whereas TopSpin has many new way to group fans and even superfans in their system so you can target your mailings to fans buying habits.
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The Music Think Tank has up a great article on the importance of having your lyrics on lyric database sites. The chances for people to discover your music by searching for lyrics can be vast and many once you receive significant exposure. Be sure to check out an interesting article and story.

How WordPress Themes Work

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Seeing as most smart bands use WordPress for their website, this web graphic from the fine folks at Yoast is a great educational look at how WordPress Themes work and can help you understand how to tweak your own. Good stuff.
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It did it again, for another year in a row vinyl sales have grown while album sales decline! Rolling Stone posted this article that documents this trend and it shows another reason you should make sure that vinyl is a part of your release strategy. Looking at the artists who did well in vinyl sales it also shows vinyl sales are not limited to one genre and that no matter who you are you can make this format work for your release strategy.
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One of the coolest things to happen to DIY bands recently is the partnering of Bandcamp and Songkick to bring concert listings to Bandcamp's album pages. If for some reason your show listings are not automatically being added to your Bandcamp page Songkick has posted an explanation of how to manually add them.
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As we said earlier this week, the call can come kind of quick. All of a sudden your group is starting to play larger venues and they want a stage plot so that things run smooth. When it comes to input lists venues and soundguys like to see you have it in a standard format. In the above picture you can double click and download one I recently had to make for one of MusforMGMT's groups. Adapt it to personal preferences and you should be good to go.
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It is no secret that online radio is one of the best ways to promote your music. With services like Pandora, Last.FM, Jango, Blip.FM and other services not only can you get your music before the ears of listeners who like the type of music you make, but you can also get paid for your plays as you begin to dominate the online radio airwaves.






It all comes down to this. As you come down to entering the studio and then recording your songs you are now tasked with one of the most difficult balancing acts ever known to man (ok... well maybe to musicians). We have written countless articles on how to avoid many of the pitfalls many musicians fall into when they go to capture their material. Read on and make something great for us all to hear.









With everyday, as the gatekeepers die and the major labels lose power it becomes more and more about just having a great song. This being the case you better start brushing up on your skills! We have assembled a lot of advice and tools for you to use to write better songs on the other side of this link.






When trying to break your music out of your circle of friends and out to the whole world, you are inevitably going to have to take on the hat of doing some publicity for your own music. As you begin to take on this large task there is numerous bits of advice that you may have overlooked on how to do this effectively. We have assembled numerous articles on how to take over the world of music and get it out there.






Now that you actually have songs recorded you need to get them out to the world to be heard. With every day that passes more and more amazing tools become available for artists to do this without the help of a label. We keep an up to date guide of everything you could ever want to know about what you should do in order to make the right choice on how to get your music out to the world.






Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr, YouTube all become more and more important everyday (well maybe not Myspace, but contrary to much chatter it is still important to know the most up to date ways to make Myspace feed your other pages). We keep musicians up to date with the most current ways to use all of these social networks to promote your music. If you are not reading our guides to social networks you are missing out on the crucial knowledge of how to promote your music with the most up to date techniques.






What separates the winners and losers is how well you handle playing live and then getting your show on the road. Playing live and touring may seem easy but there are countless pitfalls that one can encounted over time. We show you all the new tricks of the trade as well as wise advice that has been passed down over the years.






Managing a group of people and keeping everyone on the same page and motivated is one of the biggest make or break factors of any sucessful group. There are many emerging tools that can make this easier and we sort through them, all the while dispensing valuable advice on how to deal with your members with minimal chaos.






Getting covered by blogs is fast becoming one of the things that everyone wants to figure out. Sadly, there is not a lot of information out there on how to do just this. We have quite a few articles with the techniques we use to get the bands we work with on to some of the top blogs out there.