Do you have a Gmail account? Well if not, get one now! It is free and is an essential tool for knowing what is being said about you on the Internet . Everytime someone writes something on the interweb about you it will show up in a daily summarised email or RSS feed to your Gmail. This will show you when you get an awesome review, someone talks about how much of a loser your drummer is, or puts your music up for illegal download in a blog. The uses for this feature are infinite but absolutely needed. To access this feature head go here. A great tip is if you are putting a name with one or more words to use quotations, for example the search I use on my own name is "Jesse Cannon" and "Cannon Found Soundation".
The must-read-blog, The Music Think Tank, has up some awesome Creative Commons Licenced contracts for 360 Deals. Now whether you want to go anywhere near a 360 Deal is another story. These are a great education for bands and labels alike. I suggest anyone who has any interest in understanding where the industry may go check these out immediately.
Unless you are living under a rock you may have heard Facebook is taking over! Now nearly double the size of Myspace, Facebook is still not quite as friendly to bands, but with all those people on there, it is time to get your band on there. We will help you navigate through Facebook's confusing landscape and get a great profile for your band!
The Daily Chorus, a really great source for which unsigned bands are hot and upcoming, has a great article written by John Zaremba of kick ass band Say When. As a member of a band who is on tour more then any band around he knows a thing or two about touring. Check out his very wise words and learn to not make routing mistakes when heading out on the road.
We are Twits! We Twitter! We have followers! We are following other Twits! We are a part of this totally awesome new social community and no longer have a social life! So, what else do we do? What are the tricks to promoting ourselves, managing our Tweeting time, and how do we sort through all these Tweets? Follow me!
GPS systems have become one of the most necessary pieces of gear in a touring bands arsenal. Having a good GPS system can be make a big difference in missing some shows, losing sleep, and taking a wrong turn that gets you way off track. We are going to look at some popular GPS systems and figure out which one is right for you.
Yesterday, I went and saw a great band called Darling play over at Don Hills in Lower Manhattan. They played an awesome set, and afterward I was saying hello to friends, and noticed the live show equivalent to talking while chewing a steak: the drummer didn't put together any of his drum set BEFORE he got on stage!
We all know and love Digg (in fact you should Digg this article if you like it), Thesixtyone.com has made a site that takes your music and people can Heart (aka Digg or I Like) a song if they like it, creating a virtual online chart! Right now it is littered with Stereogum and Hype Machine buzz bands, and it seems like this is the first time a site has actually done this right! If they start to make different categories for different musical interests it can really be something special on the net. The artists' music is all uploaded by the artist or record label themselves and licensed under Creative Commons. Get On It!
Legal Advice from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.
New Music Strategies, a blog of great ideas and insight into the music industry asked a great entertainment lawyers for some advice for musicians. This is some great basic knowledge that even if you have heard before, it may help to be reminded some of these fundamental ideas.
Over on Oliver Chesler's always awesome blog, Wire To The Ear, he has the scoop on a service that can be a new way to get music you are not sure will sell on to iTunes and Amazon's music stores. This is perfect for labels back catalogs as well as rarities from your own band. As amazing a services TuneCore is, the upfront fee they charge seems a little depressing when you don't know if anyone is really going to buy a song from your band that has been defunct for the last 12 years. This could be a great answer for extending the catalog of many musicians careers into the digital world. (via Wire To The Ear)
Astute Reader and Amazing Vocal Coach Marissa Dockery, wrote in with a very solid point about Vocalists using Airborne and Emergen-C. Check it out below:
Regarding sickness and fancy over the counter remedies from a vocal perspective, I tend to think that less is more. Airborne, Emergen-C, and other vitamin cocktails are huge dosages of vitamins, which often dry out the throat and mouth, adding another obstacle to preexisting congestion. Small amounts of vitamin c (maybe 250 mg) every couple of hours while keeping well hydrated with room temperature water is a better approach. I also recommend tea, Epsom salt baths, keeping the body warm, resting, and eating well, staying away from dairy and sugar. Ideally, take a few days off if you can, you will be better for it.
Photo by flickr user Ateo Fiel
Metronomes: The dreaded, soulless, torture devices inflicted upon musicians in order to make them march in line like teenagers into the cookie cutter, just like a Pink Floyd video. Well I am here to tell you if you wanna be a really tight musician, and be awesome at your instrument you are going to need to start playing to some sort of time keeper. Whether you are a Singer, Guitarist, Flutist, or Drummer, this article applies to you and your practicing habits. In this series I am going to tell you how to make playing in time fun, how to do it on the cheap, as well as why you must practice with a Time Keeper.
Jango, is a channel based online radio service that is now boasting an audience of 6 million listeners per month. It operates off a simple system where you can select a channel such as Justice, and they will play artists like Justice and other similar bands (very similar to Pandora). They are now encountering a bit of ire from some industry purists who are not happy about one of their newest monetization methods. They are now offering bands a "Pay-To-Play" method of getting their music on the site via their Airplay campaign. For the small fee of $30 you will be introduced into the site's playlist, and guaranteed 1,000 plays. The listeners is then presented with the chance to either delete the artist from regular play or promote them. If you receive 50 promotions you are graduated into regular airplay. While some find this a disgusting form of access, in a bands eyes this is a very cheap way to start marketing your music to fans who fall into your demographic. In fact we are hard pressed to find a better way to get introduced to listeners who are looking for new music by a band similar to yours. While some may find this to be payola we feel it evens the playing field and allows small artists the same chances as larger artists. Get on it!
As the Grammy's were getting going last night, you may have tuned into 60 Minutes a few minutes before showtime. If so, you were treated to
a comically badly done cliche-ridden story on a band that is on top of the
world right now. However, towards the end of the show there was a tour of the bands
recording studio. In this piece there was some invaluable advice for bands big
and small. Whether you find their music to be melancholy snooze rock or worship
their every move, they show how a band on top of their own game is doing it by obiding by a few key policies. After the jump we will watch the videos and discuss the importance of what was said.
Twitter! TWITTER! Tweeting! SRSLY! WTF?!?!? Yes, even your Dad is doing this right now. Old curmudgeons like John McCain are even doing this. Now everyone is telling you that you/your band has to join Twitter (does this mean you become a Twit???) or else you will never succeed and fail at all your hopes and dreams and end up a loser like, ughhhh, JOHN MCCAIN! Seriously though, I still hate Twitter and have committed the next few hours of my life to why we need to be on Twitter and how to get there. Let's do this together!
As we all know your health is one of the biggest factors in how good many singers will be able to perform. Many musicians are big fans of a product by the name of Airborne, to boost their immune system. However they aren't aware of some small facts that can really help your health and save you some hard earned cash. 
As we told you before beloved Williamsburg venue Soundfix has succumb to neighborly pressure about the noise the venue brings to the neighborhood. It turns out they may still be able to have the ocassional instore/show. Amazing neighborhood blog/guide FREEwilliamsburg has the scoop.
One of the last ways a band/musician can still make money in this business is by getting licensed for commercial use. It is one of the many things bands always ask me how to do and no one seems to know. In stepsPump Audio! A website that cuts out any middle man and mystery and will get your music to people looking to license your music and make you money! Let us know your experiences using these guys or any other similar service in the comments!
Do you spend countless hours having to update all of your social networking sites? A new site called Ping.FM will give you back hours of your life! With just one message sent from a variety of mediums (Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Email and many more!) to their service, they will post it to a variety of social networks for you. With one message you can update your Blog, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and 30 more social networks! This can give you back tons of hours to do the things you really want to be doing with your life!
As a Record Producer, everyday of my life I watch guitarists put on a new pair of strings. You would be shocked how many guitarists do not string their guitars properly. Now you may be thinking "I'm no n00b at this, I know what I am doing". Despite all of your confidence, I have seen very seasoned players miss tiny little nuances that miss the mark. You may also be thinking that your guitar plays just fine. By stringing a guitar correctly, it will not only play better, but it will break less strings and also stay in tune FAR BETTER. Even if you have watched some of the popular YouTube videos, we have some essential info for you about what they miss. Click the jump for a quick tutorial.
While they are still technically a "cover band", we now have entered the rubicon of bands using iPhone's as a main instrument in a band. Here we have The Mentalists covering MGMT's "Kids"
. I think in future listening I may be prone to Soulwax's remix of the song. The band uses Ocarina, Retro Synth, miniSynth and DigiDrummer Lite to obtain their sound, however untill the drummer gets a little more tight they may want to consider programming the drums into iDrum. Jump for the video.
About three years ago I read a book called Freakonomics
, a paradigm-shifting expose, by Steven Levett and Steven Dubner.
I was particularly interested in their theory about how abortion lowers the
crime rate, after it ignited a huge controversy in the political world. He also
shows how many drug dealers make no real money, and the reasons real estate
agents never have you in their best interests. After reading it, I found the
real benefit of the book was to see the world in a new way.
We all know that YouTube is the new TV, and its no secret that an awesome video can get your band tons of easy promotion. With shrinking budgets and a more even playing field in the music business today it becomes harder and harder to get noticed. That said, if you have a little creativity you could make an awesome video to get your band noticed in one or two short days just using a little effort. With the advent of cheap editing software and digital video recorders, the playing field is even if you are creative enough. Below we will go over some examples. All of these videos are going to fall into two qualifications and can be done fast and on the cheap:
I have sad news: the hundreds of dollars you spent on Friendbots, all the time you have spent adding cute girls to your profile, all the hours you spent making friends instead of writing better songs, it most likely isn't going to help. Once upon a time, A&R did look to see how many friends you had and you may have even fooled one into being interested in you, but for a long time now, everyone is on to this trick. We all know these aren't your real fans! Everyone knows what it looks like on a myspace page when you have rabid fans, as opposed to a bunch of people who have never heard your band. You think people are listening to you when you add them? The amount of time it takes to get 10 people in your bands demographic to listen to your band can be had much easier by going out into the outside world, playing shows, going to shows, talking to people about your band, or figuring out what the next effective marketing technique for your band may be. You are going to have to figure out something else since this one is dead.
Photo by flickr user marceatsworld
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