Lessons

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Being Heard In the Digital World

And in a radio streaming, this is a universe. This this particular one is an entire universe of places to get play. If you just goto live three, sixty five alone, you will find thousands and thousands. I think I think multiple thousands of radio stations that air streaming, including people who are running their own radio stations like these tiny ones and then on those radio stations there's radio shows inside of them that you can get played on so you could just go to this goto any one of these and just look at all the places that you can get played and get ideas, submissions, places to reach producers, everything it generates both types of royalties, and it makes it actually very easy to do research because it's usually split up by genre so you can actually find entire radio stations devoted to your very, very tiny form of adm and there's so many. I don't know what it is about medium, but it's split into so many different tiny little gradations that have these weird names it's insane ...

that you could find an entire radio station devoted to it. This is a very good option, it's definitely worth looking into the submissions air not obvious on all were able to tell you right here is places that play it, then you have to do the research and find your way to get into it, but that's, good if you ever have to do research if it's ever hard to get your music played in it, that means that the place is focused on the listener, not on the musician. Any time you see these places in the front page of their website talks about musicians and how you can get played it's not a place for listeners or hanging out there trying to make money off of you and likely they're not as good that's just our may be fine, but generally are experiences we don't waste time with him makes sense, right? They're hungry from new music survey the sights and there's some platforms that, except music for their own shared music libraries so lives three sixty five is doing it. Part of it is a revenue stream for them. I think they charge for it, but then they make it available to all kinds of radio stations. Is it worth it? I don't know that it's definitely something you can look into, I would tend to suggest and prefer trying to get played on actual stations and working directly with the station's podcasts. This is another universe of places to get hurt. It is an audio format, you can think of it as recorded radio on the internet, distinct from streaming, and that it is basically a download it's just an mp three file really kind of recorder radio, so into an mp three file. The cool thing is the technologies around podcasts allow people to subscribe to it and automatically get downloads. Now, the very cool thing about this is that the listeners to podcasts are very dedicated listeners, and they don't have to have been tuned in at the time where your song happened to have been played, they will actually keep they will listen to their podcast, and when it gets to your episode, they'll hear the episode that you're in so there's actually a lot of advantages to getting played on it usually uses non royalty generating music, generates exposure and promotes by links, but it's not a direct revenue in terms of licensing, even though they're supposed to generate performance royalties or perhaps, actually mechanical abilities. It's like it's, very it's mechanical is very debatable, and they don't tend to pay that. That said, we've actually made money out of pocket chest because high caste need music. We've done a lot of composition for it. We've done, I think at least a dozen theme songs that I can recall and we've gotten paid for doing this type of thing and the great thing about the theme songs and what you do with them is that you're mentioned because that's part of what we do if we don't charge and we say all right, we have to mention our name every episode, provide a link back to us. Well, here's the thing these podcasts stay around forever it's not like a radio show it's ephemeral it's happens that is gone, it stays out there and our name keeps getting mentioned. When we go to conventions that have a lot of podcast listeners, they go, I'll be in eternal you guys are awesome. I love your stuff because we're always being heard in that it's sort of a local radio zone, so these types of things can be very effective. That said, they're more than just music podcast, so don't make the mistake of saying, hey, I'm going to just try and get played on a podcast that has my type of music actually the talk podcaster more effective, why would that be? And it's the key thing? Well, sure, you pointed at me, so I thought I had answered no response, no it's because you stand there on this standoff is a musician when you're in a like a talk podcasts and they do, they want to break up their shows in a way where they can ok now we'll cut to a, uh some music sort of like a saturday night live kind of thing and and and then they talk about you and sometimes they interview you they call us upto interview and um that type of stuff but you do you do stand out more on talk type podcast though most musicians think ok music podcast that specializes in my genre of music so open open your mind a bit of what what's out there we've gotten played and dozens and dozens and dozens of him and we tend to get really good response out of it it tends to drive sales it tends to drive interest it tends to build new fans now podcasts have a little less mo mentum than they did when we first started to get involved with it but I still think it's a very rich medium and partly because it's so easy to dio you just mail a podcaster say hey I've got some music you might like and if they like it the players give them waves for music we talked about this earlier if you can they will try and use mp three's and then they will take a compressed into three and compress it again which doesn't come out too well sorry doesn't work music streaming services so these air things like pandora and last f m pandora is one of the better known ones right now they're very interesting I wish I could spend some time talking about their history generates both kind of pro royalties and the cool thing is, the way pandora works is it links your music with other music that sounds like your music based on our original project called the music genome project a while ago you want to research that? Check it out. I can't talk about it right now if you're interested, we have time at the end ofthe be happy to talk about it getting played on this you need to have your a bar code on your music for pandora you just got to submit using pandora dot com they're very big sticklers for this they will reject your music if any of their guidelines are violated, they will not accept it all. Sorry, it's the way they work last if any just created a new account and offload it it's much more straightforward remember I said about the preparing you see why we split it up that way and the preparing the music and then the getting the music for sale and now they're getting played is because in the preparing part we talk about why you need a bar code. This is it now later on, if you did it earlier in the process you're all set social music discovery sites, we're talking about spotify and grew shark the reason why spotify is not a streaming service again, it doesn't have a rewind button your does have a rhine button, you can hit replay so it's not it's, just a music discovery site generates both kind of royalties, and the way that you get it in is that you use digital gators like cd baby to core reverb nation. Stuff like that will get you on their music. Blog's what it isthe music review blog's that include mp three files of your music, they generate exposure and promote by links, but they don't directly pay you. Not only that, but they often give away the mp three. So you need to be sure, as you're giving this out, that you're not going to be causing problems for your music down the line, right? That said, music blog's basically mp three blog's in particular is another thing that the internet opened up. So what I mean by that is that the internet opened up the world for musicians and that it allowed you to directly sell to your fans without needing to press your music into plastic discs and then put him on trucks and put it in stores and try and get people to buy it. It made it so that you directly could just get it to your fans through maybe a middleman or two with this with radio, of course, lee, if we go backwards, tio for example, the ones who were talking about earlier live three sixty five if you've always wanted to run your own radio station and it doesn't have to be terrestrial radio, and why would it have to be trust really radio? It could be broadcasting even just set up a radio station there, you have to pay a little bit, and then you have your own radio station and that's one way you can promote your music by the way you've ever wanted to do that. Music critics also wanted to wait in the critique the music they wanted and let's face it. The music critics of twenty years ago had a much narrower set of music that they would even review. Now we have all these genres of names that you haven't even probably heard of and there's music critics that air just for that type of music. The great thing is these are the types of music listeners who want the newest music that is what they're there for and in any category and this is a marketing term in you, you'll get your you're innovators and then early adopters innovators of the ones like they're the gadget guys who buy the latest gadget all the time and then they'll buy the next newest gadget there's a type of that type of thing for music, and this is where they hang out this is where you want to reach their well worth it. Some of them will charge you to submit I would be skeptical of any place that does that because then they're aiming at you the listener are you the musician, not the listener, which is where they should be aiming if they're doing that the right way there would be happy to get new music from new musicians sometimes they do it just because it's inundating them and they want to clear it up. They're hungry for the latest music and I have to do is the easiest way to start with this check out hype machine, hide them dot com and here's another universe for you sorry, I mean there's like literally you will open it up in every genre you can imagine it's like pull all there you'll find the genre you're looking for, you'll find the listeners you'll go to each bog separately and you realize that each one is different because all that is this a portal on the listing and then from there you'll have to look at their submission guidelines again follow submission guidelines every time you see him, they when they get inundated, they always find ways to just cut people out so they don't have to deal with it you want to make it is easiest possible music archive sites are lesser known way to get your music out there their public repositories of music they don't really pay directly archived at or ge will actually allow you to just upload music so that other people can download it you may be like, well, why would I do that? Well, it is a way to generate exposure, but the more interesting of if the two archive sites is actually e tree, which we have listed here now e tree is associated with the group called bands that allowed taping. What does that mean? Well, this is that long tradition that started with bands like the grateful dead, where their fans would follow him around in record the concerts which they were ok with, they're like, sure record us and then the fans I remember when the grateful dead were around and I went to a grateful dead concert, which I'll never forget, man those things air memorable that there's these people walk around these huge set the tapes, just selling older performances. There were that into the show, the band phish does the same thing. Well, now we're in the internet age. So what does that mean? If you sign up for bands that allowed taping, you're basically telling the world, go ahead and take me, I don't care my life performances and feel free to do it e tree is the archive of life performances by bands that allowed taping that makes sense now the way this works is e tree will only accept high quality recordings they do not accept mp three's they want flack files which are lossless compression it's worth checking this out if you play live and yet another way to get your music heard that you might not have thought of previously in fact, you could encourage this when you're actually doing your shows and say, hey, we allowed taping where associate with, you know b t a t and e tree so feel free to record the concert uploaded audio content host sites that allow the sharing of your audio content river nation bandcamp sound cause probably the most famous of this whole bit they participate in revenue sharing and generate exposure and promote violence. Of course, all of this stuff is true. The key thing being here is that if you go to the the front page of sound cloud, it actually suggests all kinds of music and it's actually a really great way to get discovered because it's caught up in this hole universe of music especially if you confront the right people and get caught up in their whole discussions. It's actually another way to promote your music and the other great thing is of course they make it very easy for you to share your music on your own web sites and other web presences that you have whatever you're trying to dio it tends to work out very well your website another key way that you could get your music heard this may sound obvious but some musicians don't put their music up on their web sites and I don't know why you should probably go backwards and use the audio content hosts and that embedded into your web site and then you'll actually be all set for this kind of thing but the great thing about it is it allows you to promote not just the music but your merchandise your gigs your licensing every other part of your music and coming actually gets tied in with this and it's also the number one place for people expect to find your music so skipping it wouldn't seem to make a whole lot of sense you'd also accept donations advertising affiliate links if you're not sure what those are we're going to cover that there's an entire section on just how to make money from those things on day what I think three third day day threat they're very they're creative ways to make income like when we start talking about advertising and donations donations yeah but affiliates affiliate links that's something uh that's a little bit unique and different that musician I don't necessarily think about and it can be lucrative so we'll talk about that but like the point here is your web site you have total control of it so um use it. And once you do oh, yeah, go ahead. A question about what? Your guys his view of selling your music directly from your website is instead of linking it to itunes, like selling it from your website. Well, we talked about this earlier and I got it. Yeah, and so the key point that we would like to make about it is if you do that, then you have to do the payment method. And if it's not a payment method that people are comfortable with their familiar with it's also a problem. If you sell it direct from your website, you're just selling a download, and actually there is some fans you don't know how to deal with just a pile of mp three files they get sent to him. Itunes handles the download for them, and that may not sound like a big deal to you as musicians you're used to dealing with audio files everywhere. But your average fan, the one that you really want to sell to the mainstream audience, doesn't so there's a lot of catches with it. And we do recommend that the primary method that you have for sale on your website is one of the main digital stores. Makes on captain right now considering that it's a perfect place you could do what you can use any of like the content host but you can also use something called limpy player, which we've used it's a flash bass player it's actually there's problems with doing flash now it is so like there's other players out there that air html five there's lots of options social media web sites where people can share links to one another it generates exposure promotes by links doesn't get you things right away, but the key thing the key thing here and we're not it's we could actually talk about this for a little bit because we're not covering social media is one of these these air about making money with music is that each of your fans, each person who listens to to your music has probably their own facebook page their own twitter, whatever it is and your average facebook person might have one to two hundred people that are actually following them. I mean, this is like word of mouth blown up right? We're talking this is something that you've probably heard before we're not saying anything new. What we are doing is telling you that if you share music through audio content sites and promote sharing because they have the share links, you can actually start this chain going from right away you can actually get things going so river nation cd baby and sound caught have the plug ins and amps but that's not the only thing that will solve this problem if you have a web site or a social media thing, you can use things like share this and share holik, which gives you that big bar of every single place where they can try and share this kind of stuff and this makes it super easy for them to do it. Now we talked about this before, where when it comes to marketing, the whole thing that you succeed at is when it make it easy for people well, having that little big bar right underneath where the music is makes it very easy for people to share it on their social media if they really like it. There's some bands that, since we're talking about social networking is where that actually have multiple members and they actually one of the tips that we've learned from george rob I think yes and his in his band is that each one of the band members have their own two hundred friends or whatever like that. But they actually coordinate with one another to share music and news so that they can exponentially eight and use the band in such a way to share and like and all that kind of stuff to get the message out or their song out or what have you it's, just something to think about. If you're in a band that have, you know, you have many members, you could be coordinating yourselves in a very strategic way question and regards to tweeting, and he asked what your thoughts are on pay with a tweet kind of situation where people give away their demos by giving them a tweet. Well, I love that kind of stuff. Personally, I think those are great. And yes, I mean, the whole anything you can do to encourage people to share, especially because as musicians, if you're prolific, especially it's, very easy for you to give music toe to do things. We I was just thinking of another thought for musicians at if they have a show, they could possibly create a trend if they got everyone at their concert to tweet at the same time. Oh, yeah, friend. That's like a crazy idea. Good one. You know, bringing there's a program that actually come about for you. There's actually ties into question that hannah had regarding what would being a part of the bands that allow taping? How would that affect your digital sales? Can that affect in a positive way? Or will people just try to get the free version? Actually that's a very good question, although it depends on your fan base right either the type that's happy with the live version that they have and they don't ever want the recorded one its offense and and it really depends on the type of fans you have certainly it's something that is not an automatic oh yeah, I'm going to go on dancing a lot of taping and click yes on that little box it's not necessarily for everybody that's for sure it's a good question you have to evaluate it I tend to think that it does it I tend to think that the more stuff you have, the more people will interact and participate with you and they'll start to get more into your world, which is what we've discovered you know another where nineteen albums and we did the song of the day thing it just got people more and more in our universe even though even whatever we gave away just pull people in yeah, thanks, yeah question okay, so social news and entertainment sites these air online communities that share stuff anybody you stumble upon? Yeah, incredible of you and I don't know about online but it's actually a place where people discover plate web sites to check out now stumble upon when we did song of the day it got picked up, we actually didn't know about it at the time and we were watching our web statistics were like what's the stumble upon that, sending us like ten thousand people, it was literally sending us that many people and it's the site where just people click on a category and say, send me to a site that's all it is so you get caught up in it, you can submit your own stuff to it, and then if people like it there's like the thumbs up in the thumbs down, it will make it more and more likely they'll be picked up. Metta filter if it's another site if you haven't checked about it, it's just a place where people share cool things to check out reddit is another universe yeah, so it's getting some people nodding so I can tell your editor from time to time I spend a lot more time, I should already it's it's something like six percent of internet traffic is going to that thing, so we're talking about and there's six percent of like the billions of people that are on this thing, so we're talking about an enormous amounts of people there are read it some bread, it's about each genre of music where people just talk about it and then there's radio reddit, which started up which was a way for people to share music with other reddit er's that they enjoy and the thing about it is they're not particularly read it is a very cynical place where they don't really want to see you promoting your stuff but if you can get somebody to share your stuff on your behalf or I guess you can act like you're not yourself and send it just don't be obvious you can actually start to reach quite a few people and again every genres out there read it in particular is a good place also to promote things by topic so if you actually happen to have a song about something that's interesting like if read it had been around when we did the chief s album we would have gone to the board game site hey this band made an entire album about she's asking you know it's been a really good place to promote it that's is there so many people that are on it and the way that it's mechanism works which I'm not going to get into it so compelling that it actually draws people in state they stand that world digg is a site that does some similar stuff to read it it has a little less poll than it used to because just the way that the world's worked but all these things generate exposure they don't directly make you money now the key thing here is it's not about thinking about music sites it's about thinking about sites where people share what they like jonathan colton, who we mentioned earlier did very well by getting a lot of shares of a site called slash dot, which is surely your technical person you've probably heard of it and probably have hung around on a site called slashdot that particular thing there's so many people on that site that they have something called the slashdot effect when they share link on that site it sometimes takes sites down that's how many people are on it? So he was shared on that and he got so many people interested in his music it grows fan base very quickly and that's by narrowing into his prick particular group if that makes sense and I think the point here is like, you know, a lot of times musicians think of radio right and it's like we're so far from radio now and audiences are hanging out in so many different places that but they basically can get you an audience like radio used to and that's a good example like jonathan, did you get a lot of fans through slashdot, which we'll see you guys were like, what would slash that? So I started that organ in case you're interested and a lot of those sites and directly to play it might send it to your website, which is where you can sell your music or it might send it to another place which has the bilek next to it this is why I think these things are better and we like these things better than radio his radio doesn't have that by late next to it it's just not there and of course things like suzanne when she mentioned earlier and we talked about how to get onto examine the second session from today all the way back there was many hours ago and if you can get into that kind of thing and get into the world you can actually pull things together and make it work and then on music websites now this is the type of thing which has any website that has an audience whatsoever. We talked a little bit about this earlier as well and the thing is they can be huge. We talked about this story earlier we can repeat it briefly for the ones who just might have turned in now where we shared a song called where all these beer cans here last night on a website that was for a board game company and you might think well that's no big deal that the truth is they have huge s e o tonnes of customers and we got tens of thousands of place and it was a twenty thousand place before we even blinked and we were on the first page results from google for beer hits and this was our song I mean so is sending tons of people are away and the thing I like about this kind of stuff on the thing that we always dio when we take advantage of these things is that there's no huge submission stack that they're going through so they choose yours to appear in it and the fact that we had music in a place where there wasn't usually music meant that we stood out even more and the fact that they had a huge audience to reach was the real bonus and we're gonna talk about this with marketing because that's actually a big part of marketing nowadays we had a question come in actually earlier today but it's about this exactly I'm sure in the reverse are there any negatives to going to non music sites in terms of do you back yourself into a corner creatively? It was alexa list rowe had asked it this morning and she was worried about getting into the wrong beach, so to speak certainly if you get tagged for a certain knit nish it's can cause you some problems depending on what the net, what it is, but most of the time it helps you and here's why I say that I think about facebook and how it started out it didn't try and connect everybody it didn't say here we're for everybody does anybody remember where they started college what's that wasn't it wasn't in his harvard, harvard and harvard only yeah for for them to share with harvard now they could have said, well, wait, you're tying yourself down to not just college educated people but just harvard who else is going to do this? And then they built it, they built in audience, he they built their own platform, they built this following and then they grew it from there. So really a better way to think about this is can I use the audience? Is that I can reach that are within my reach build it to the point where I'm actually creating something and then grow it. I think the only way that it can really hurt you is if you get tagged and like, we'll hear the person that does x kind of music and you don't do anything else it's, you know, you could end up with something from a marketing standpoint, we have to rebrand yourself a little bit, but I actually tend to not think it's a huge problem unless you're getting into something that other people it's like, oh, you're this type of thing and it's something that most other people don't want to have anything to do with I could see it might have some trouble just starting out that wouldn't be an issue, but it's, when you get a bit bigger and you have a bigger fan base, then you might want to worry about that more that's probably a good way to put it jonathan colton is a good example of that he started out more in the geek niche himself and then he grew really big in that niche and he was making, like, half a million dollars a year on just that niche which is not a small niche, by the way. I mean, you might think it's small, very big and then he his next album he just brought his marketing more broad, like start to get promoted all over the place. Yeah, good question. Yes, you want talk about this it's video? Sure. So with video sites that host video content youtube video daily motion generates exposure and violence, participate in revenue sharing and generates sink licensing revenue potentially for all of it now you tube is now the number one search engine for music it's the top one that's the first place people go when they want to look for music, so you really need to be in there it's very important if you use you too, but you also need to use something called content I d so that actually even if you don't use you to, you still should use content I d to make advertising revenue now you guys are taking notes, so I'm going to tell you we have an entire session on just how to monetize youtube because there are so many ways to do it. Constant ideas near the top of the list. So join us tomorrow we're gonna have an entire class on this. Now, the key thing with this is that one key thought these slides are almost in reverse order in terms of importance. I did it. We did it the other way. We talked about this because basically, people expect radio to be the best way to get played. If you were to choose just one place to put your music, we recommend video, and the reason is and video you can monetize it. Number one number two it's got sharing built into it. Number three, it actually had it's the one thing out of every type of media that goes viral, whereas every other type of media does not seem to go viral. And it also is the one that's people are most inclined to use in terms of music. It's the number one search engine so you could build an entire music business off of youtube alone and that's why we're going to cover it that way when it comes up and that's why we consider it to be so incredibly important, so we're going to cover this tomorrow, we do have a question, but maybe we hold off till tomorrow on this one, yeah. But we could throw it out now. This was kind of related were talking to before with licensing and covers, but video gesture wants to know what permissions are needed if you just want to do a music video of a cover song, but you won't be doing any physical sales. Wow, we don't. We should probably talk about this now because it's not something. So this is this is another copyright question do you want to? Well, what was it is doing a cover song? Yeah, what permissions are needed if you just want to do a music video of a cover song, but you're not physically selling it, you're not recording and putting it on an album just making a video of somebody else's song no, your own cover song I guess you're performing someone else's song so you would have to handle all the cover stuff that we talked about previously, so if you're going to do a cover song uh and then, um need to sink license for the cover, right? Yeah, technically, you need a sink license to actually be able to, then thinkyou're the song tio video. Now, look, this gets into a really gray area. This is where law and technology meet and bump heads. The law is very, very, very slow to a death, and technology is just a one hundred miles an hour are one hundred kilometers now if you're outside of the u s but the fact is like this is where content idea actually comes in on then we'll talk about this but like it's it's a way for copyright owners to actually help well to youtube creating technology to help copyright owners to actually keep control over their copyrighted works and that's why that is a very important thing it could be used for you tow actually so you khun we can monetize it as musicians but it's also where this actually comes in so it's it's google youtube's way of trying tio get out ahead of this gray area um and to empower copyright owners to actually like that I could do the take down the dreaded takedown of your video that you just put up our they can actually get that actually get the advertising revenue off of it and keep it up because it's like oh this is fantastic is generating some revenue for for us we'll talk about that tomorrow but yeah this is this is what copyright is such a uh rabbit hole to start talking about all this kind of stuff you really could do a three day session I'm copyright but it's a good question absolutely good question sync royalties seek licensing was always something that was very difficult to do in the past because it was lawyer to lawyer with things like youtube then they had more easy ways to monetize it than they did before it actually and it meant that they were able to say share revenue share advertising revenue in a way that usually in the transaction you would have to figure out how much it could be worth and how much you would make on it later and all this kind of stuff that said and tell me if I'm wrong in this jason that if somebody said ok you're going to do a cover song there's no way to make them do it and they could just say no sorry take let's take this down right for that let's you know let's say this person decides to make a cover song and put it up on youtube so they do their own sink yeah could the copyright owner of the cover the composition owner say take this down and you could do all that work and they could just say take it down sorry I mean that was basically the question that we just had so but you know what I mean? It's just a key point here is that there's no way to make them do the advertising revenue they can just take it out take it down which is what I was saying they could take it down they could do that I think they leave it up and they don't care this is the type of things that we'll talk about this in the chat room just said we think that you should do a three day session just on copyright true that would be him but a walking around and I was sitting there going you're head to heads will explode yeah, and we want to focus on making money they decide to it all but like, you know, if you just get the basics down, these are the kind of the things that can really get out there and do and you will make money on this stuff it's a drug it's a drier topic although it's driving everybody is interested in and in the end the thing about it is people violated all the time and it doesn't like nobody even does anything about it because it's impossible to track like exactly what's going on. So it's like all these big thing and everyone wants these hardened festivals and they don't exist that's like my favorite one is is everybody's favorite thing fair use it's very use its fair use they want to say, well, what's very uses it just a certain amount of time. Or is it the fact that you know it's educational and what people don't know is that fair uses in a right it's just a affirmative defense, which means that they can sue you about it, but then you have to affirm the defense and then you're defending yourself in court which is no fun and it's this big mass and we think do you see what I mean? We see how dry it is so dry I mean it's like you anyway I waken talk about in little snippets as it relates to the incumbent you know, like jason said this stuff is stuff that can bring money these air we've we've talked about a whole lot of places where you're actually already where you're just putting in your tax idea and they're going to start sending you checks and how to do it and it even though we've been through hours and hours and hours of material there's a lot of huge chunks of it where if you get organized guys you can do most of it in a weekend you're going to be going site after site after site making hopefully a little spreadsheet tracking everywhere you set your music and all these places where you signed up but then once you do it the more you get out there, the more it actually improves the value of what you you're doing that's what these sixteen categories are you know that's and it just is a reminder that's what this one thought thing is it's reverse order I do recommend thinking of it the other way where the most important thing is video and the least important is commercial radio but it's up to you. You need to do what you need to. But we needed to cover everything for completeness sake.