Lessons

Lesson Info

Next Steps: Building It Over Time

Now that said, we don't think that you should take this is a to do list effect. One of the students that we were teaching said after going through this, she raised her hand and I'm like, okay, yeah, just do we have to do all that, and I was like, well, no, no, absolutely not it's not necessary to do all of it in particular it's the type of thing where you should take this is just a set of possibilities. You should choose just one because that's I mean, look, you could only do one thing at a time choose just one the most likely one, the most the one that you think you'll get the most out of. I suggest video that's our that's, our suggestion is video, but whatever it is that you choose, push it, see if you can get some play out of it and then if you get some play out of it, back out, take the play that you got and say, hey, we just got played over here, and then you send it to an mp three blogged, which then might be more interested in it because you're not just some guy off the street t...

hat didn't have anything at all, nothing like that. So you pull this stuff together and then once you get an mp three block review use that review and then you try and get on npr because then they're going to be a lot more interested in you see how that works this is this this whole cycle feeds on itself and it's all about taking each success and then using that as a credential or objective proof that you're worth checking out and building it even larger and then once you get past some point actually you start cutting things out like we're at that point in seventeen years with their own band I worked to the point where with some things we only bring up the key points that we're trying to sell the person we're in front of and we only mentioned the things that matter but it's about building this stuff up one time well that said and based on the amount of time we have left here's some learning more items first of all in the book we have a whole how to run a college radio campaigns have to bottom five things musician needs to know gather getting played online how to make sure you don't lose the rights to your music when you posted two sites there's a lot of things that you actually need to be aware of when you're doing this kind of stuff the key one being if I were to give you one piece of advice one key piece of advice. It's read the agreement, right. Read the agreement of anywhere you send it. We have seen sites that claim perpetual writes dear music, f you uploaded, we've seen sites that say, if you uploaded tow us as soon as you do, we have right of first refusal on any other deal that you get on your own. And we have we own that part of your music, and we could we actually or some of them were a little nicer and said, well, we have an option to put an offer in first, which is the kind of thing that you sign usually when you have lawyers looking at it. Meanwhile, you're going on these web sites and up loading stuff you really want to generally stick to where the party is, because where the party is, they get too restrictive than they get a vanities that actually says no, and they intended revert these things on some of them not all of them, but you definitely need to read the agreements. And then elektronik musician magazine we have a feature article came out not too long ago. Sixteen ways to get your music to new fans. It covers everything that we talked about here, an article format, if that's the way that you prefer to read types of things like this it's also included in the course packet for those who enroll so if you just unroll right now you can actually get it and further the last thing I would mention is that the indie band survival guide we have an entire chapter called get heard which just covers the same kind of things and gets even more detail but the main thing we focused on here in this whole section was the ways that not only that you could get heard with how they make you money and how they actually promote you and how they generate sales for you so hopefully that's like a slightly different take than we have in the indie band survival guide to be clear the in advance arrival gate is about exposure this is about income so we're running low on time and so I wanted to leave plenty of time to talk about all this kind of horrific let's see do we have any questions right here in the studio? Yes, I was wondering about like a cross pollination of ideas like how you said that that song about the beer cans and uh I mean uh that I guess that I guess that that speaks for itself you know how it how it's like uh um how you how you can uh gain uh gain a sense of like uh lose my my my train of thought but I'm just a sense of like how you uh transact with ideas and and uh how do you uh how do you, uh like look for senses of, like, different different how do you look for different well ideas things different ideas like that to do with how that one that was open to different things that was an interesting when they kind of threw us right like we wrote the song based off of this card in this war game so that was kind of obvious than test that's like maybe we could talk to them about sharing this song since it's about what they created so that that's kind of one of the things that we thought of and we didn't know if it would work and we didn't know if they were care it didn't take long for such an email but simply did track him down the company down and submitted it and just say this is something maybe you want it share on your website now I don't think we even starts like hey, I think this might be cool and they came back to us and said that's cool can we post it and I'm like, oh that's right, way like this about your game gets a demo and you're like I don't know if we want to post it were like now we should do it we can get some exposure that's right? It was a demo yeah there was just a demo version yeah so and so it just it was just an opportunity now it's we're going to talk about this in marketing because there's a lot of ways you can market your music based on the idea behind the music not just the music genre and we liked them better because there's huge audiences sitting behind it you can do it and before possibly one of the things you might be thinking of at this point is well, wait a minute if I have instrumental music, how do I tight anything there's no idea as well with that if you can tie your idea to something like activity like yoga like if you have meditative music you can tie it together and suddenly you've married your music to an idea the ideas our people congregate on the internet now not location, not physical location but ideas that's the world we live in and that's where you can mark it and if you're not sure what I mean by this go on read it is weird and crazy of a world is it is I don't care how narrow your interest iss there's a subreddit of people for it all over the world that are just hanging out there talking about that one topic and they actually for the biggest topics out there, you wouldn't believe what it isthe there usually are videos hook to it music hook to it and art hooked to it if you want to see this in an art sense, you want to see the same thing happen go to deviant art dot com that's, a site that just lets people put up art on whatever topic they want. They make art about everything that you've ever heard of in the world. And so this is this is all we're talking about now you don't need to force it, you don't need to make music that's for marketing, we don't want you to change your art for your marketing well, don't do that, we're not we're not suggesting that, but we're asking you to look for opportunities to promote the music that you do have in places that it makes sense. Is that that, like kind of along the lines of what you're thinking? We have a question here from alex in the chat room, and alex is wondering about having people do remixes of your music? Is that something where you approach them to remix your songs? Did they approach you? And what kind of benefit does that have for your promotion? That's a good question we actually have had people approach is we did way don't have the type elect like adm style music, where that's part of our culture is much so we haven't. Done a lot of seeking out of that kind of thing that I'll tell you this the next music project that I dio I've got about five in mind right now, and I'm not sure which one I'm going to tackle next, but because of a funny all the time developing this course once this is over and that I've slept for about a week and a half, then maybe I'll start looking into it. I'm going toe released stems and source tracks for any music that makes sense to remix I think it's a fantastic way to actually reach any audience we brought historian before we talked about it with brad sucks who basically allowed his music to be remixed, and then he made entire albums of misery mixes and then all the re mixers had their own audiences that basically pointed all of their audiences at brad sucks when suddenly he grew what he had going on. If you want an easy way to do this and you don't mind creative commons license cc mixed her dot or ge cc mickster dot or ge is an entire site that just lets you upload music and say, hey, guys, go nuts, so to really answer that question, then directly it's like, yeah, you can do both, you can make it known that you want things to be remixed, but then you would should probably prepare your music in such a way that that could be used. And the other thing is that there are sites out there that you can upload where there's just communities of remixes. Youjust yeah, give me new stuff, and I'll turn it into something new, so I would I would do both, and then the promotional thing is he just said, is it's good? You mentioned some of the blog's like hype machine is one that I know that I've used a lot and you see those remixes, those are the ones that are kind of generating to the top of the list, and they're just remixes that people have done so that's definitely a valuable way to do it exactly hot actually presented a question in regards to video and was asking if there's a noticeable difference between self made videos and professional coop collaborative ones. And of course, there's a difference. But I think the question is there was a conversation that got spawned from it, and the question is more do you think that it's good to put it out there, even if you might not have the highest quality video but your songs good? Or do you think you should hold off with that good song until you can have a really high quality video to back it up? Yeah that's a very good question and the thing is it's like then what's the definition of video are they thinking like a music video like an mtv style music video and that's what they're thinking with the hot, you know, very high quality versus something that they could do with the phone or something and just slap it together and I movie and throw it up there because there's so many other things that you could be doing with, uh, video with your tiny music like animation there's all these genres and we'll talk about that tomorrow. Um, but the answer there is e think it it depends e I know I'll take something under that is the video matters to an extent and it depends on what you're doing you you can certainly get into the thing where you're trying to make the perfect thing and you wind up not ever making anything at all it's more important to get up on the video platform that it is for it to be perfect, but what is key? We do not do not put any music out there that doesn't have good sound quality you're trying to promote the song I don't care if the video is crappy there's something about people, you'll notice it that on youtube the sound is never jerky if it is, you know you'll think that the video is you can look at some really crappy videos, but as long as the sound is clean, you'll get across the idea. So even if you have, like, a little spinning icon there spinning logo of yours with the music, make sure that the sound originally came from away file and is mastered to the extent that you can, because then it will pop out on some nice and clean limits it and I think you'll be okay, but that's, what I tend to recommend, so you focus on the audio quality invalid. If you're thinking about that, if you can make a better video, then do it go for it, solid audio quality and your video might not be so great. Still, go ahead, go forward with it. I think so, but we'll give you a lot of ways tomorrow on different types of videos that you can make there's not just the one there's there's so many free tools out there that you can use to make all kinds of different things, but we can't cover that here. Yeah, great. Any more questions from the students here? If not, I know you mentioned earlier the music genome project a. Being a pandora listener, I am a little bit curious to learn more about it, okay, minutes, if you don't mind no, I'm happy to talk about it, so the music genome project started out with basically a bunch of musicologists who were trying to categorize music in terms of more than just the ways that it normally is categorized in our way that a computer system can actually put these things together. So it's about temple it's about instrumentation, it's about mood it's about a whole bunch of different things I can't remember how many different categories there were it's been a long time since I read it it's um like sixteen different categories of classifications, so when pandora brings a new song into it catalog, they analyze it for all these different things and they create these values for it. And so the way it creates its stream is that the ones that have those similarities get played next to each other and that's how it works last if m also groups things together and it does it in an entirely different way, what it does is they have that scrabbling platform that they have, and so they can find out what people listen to and based on what people listen to, it finds out for a meet song what other songs they listen to so it doesn't even go it doesn't even care about what's actually in the music it just knows people that like this like this now we interviewed the last fm guys and one of the things that I'll always remember based on the interview is is he said I don't care how obscure you think your music taste are I don't care how wildly different like all the things in your collection are there's somebody else that has similar tastes than you and I'll tell you one other thing beyond this something that that other person is listening tio that isn't something you've heard before is probably something that you would like and want to check out and I've seen it happen I actually go on last step families like who and I have this crazy eclectic collection like most musicians do I mean, I have all this industrial music from the eighties and nineties because I listened to a lot of that back then then I've got jazz and I've got some classical music and then I've got much alternative stuff and then a bunch of these really obscure artists that I think nobody's heard of and then sure enough there's like other people that have similar things and other things that they've liked are really good and so both of those platforms are actually really good places to get your music exposed because as soon as they start to making those connections that people that like x will like this your music can come up and that's a good reason to use it and there was one more question that now randy asked in the beginning just curious if you guys track that about how people how do you discover music yes I'm just wondering you know was in another radio in there there was a lot of radio and there you have it I have him right here I mean we got brandon said itunes radio itis review aside though. Okay? That's interesting. Yeah. Nicole spencer said hi pam dot com spotify and blip fm okay, well apple it is in the way we talk about that book yeah and hannah said noise trade is great and I look for artist recommendations on itunes is the people who bought this album were also also clever the amazon and the eighteen style like their connection and that's what we're talking about there's so many ways new uh there was a ton of youtube lots of excitement about all the youtube channels alex best and nerve us azua said youtube there was lots of youtube response yeah, yeah yeah number one music's way did have another question from a guest um in the chat room who had asked about creating what you thought about creating a podcast that's more like a documentary of playing your music. Oh sure and maybe other people's music also absolutely we get some of the multiple stories about that that's a very good one uh you want to talk about sure it's the baron's yeah so on that topic and not just about the the documentary style, which is perfectly good. We did that a couple times just for fun on a couple of things, especially when it came to the song the day project. We released a couple things about how we put it together and what we did. A lot of people were interested. How were we achieved it? But one of my favorite stories about that is above noggin bards who do celtic music. And they created in the earliest days of podcasting, the first celtic music podcast. And they did it in order just to highlight their own work makes sense. I mean it's a whole another style. They actually also had web pages up with words to their music. We've actually run into it when we were making her album when we did know and then we ended up interviewing those skies and talking to so they released it. It was just for their own music and next thing they knew they had one of the top celtic music podcasts on the internet, which is fantastic, you know, that's great, they had that. And the interesting thing is than other celtic artist start to submit music to them and so they first said, well, wait a minute I'm doing this so that we were doing it so that we can promote our music but then there's other artists but you know what? We'll include it they started to include other artist in it little by little they grew became the top celtic music podcast and the top music podcast was titled the broad italian bards celtic music pop kissed it had their name on it so every other band celtic band in the world was promoting them because every time they play them they talk to their fans and so then they fed the whole thing together and they were a fascinating we'll be talking about them later because they've got a couple of their stories that are really good we'll talk about like with digging they did some really clever things and but but leaving that aside it was a fantastic way for them to reach new our audiences we believe also and having multiple projects that cross promote each other and doing different things hitting things from different angles the ones that we've seen that air making their living off the music and most successful generally I'll have different things that cross from almost all of them george rob the bards and uh well john everybody everybody raise every single one of them did this and you know it tends to it shouldn't be surprising these air creative people so they're always they're not going to be stuck just doing one thing