© Bertold Werkmann | Dreamstime.com

This is a list in the making.  It started with 5 Music Industry Leaders (You Should Follow) followed by 9 Music Industry Leaders (You Should Follow).  Thanks to your comments, we’re now up to 14!

Follow Tim Westergren
Founder of Pandora
Almost a decade ago, Tim Westergren and his colleagues launched one of the most disruptive online music projects the music industry had ever had to cope with. A revolution in both technology and user experience, Pandora become the leading online music streaming service and recommendation engine for music lovers around the globe. With that, Pandora was also at the forefront of royalty disputes with major content owners.

Follow Daniel Ek
Co-Founder and CEO of Spotify
Daniel Ek is a serial entrepreneur. A child technology marvel, he started his first company at the age of 14 and has since created, led and sold several companies at the cutting edge of new media and tech. His most recent project, Spotify, a legal streaming music service, has taken the world by storm.

Follow Martin Atkins
Speaker and Author of Tour:Smart
Martin Atkins, a veteran ‘progressive’ drummer, has recorded and toured with Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Killing Joke, PigFace, and Public Image Ltd., among other post-punk/industrial acts. He has emerged from his highly-charged Rock ‘n’ Roll lifestyle to guide the next generation of artists through educational programs, speaking engagements, and how-to literature on the subject of independent artist promotion and touring.

Follow Bruce Houghton
Founder and Editor of Hypebot
Hypebot is the most respected music industry blog. Read religiously by music business professionals, independent artists and music enthusiasts, no other blog provides such coverage, information and analysis on music business trends. Bruce Houghton is a regular speaker and moderator at prominent music conferences.

Follow Paul Resnikoff
Founder and Publisher of Digital Music News
Digital Music News is a leading news and information resource for the music industry. Paul Resnikoff has become well known for his executive writing style and “Resnikoff’s Parting Shot”, a colorful commentary on current events.

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Category: Social Networking | 4 Comments »

Tags: music industry leaders, twitter

Everyone seems to have a music blog these days. Nearly every time I log onto Twitter I find headlines from blogs that I didn’t know existed the day before. It can be exhausting to keep up with! Nevertheless, as music blogs gain popularity they are also becoming a key taste-making voice within the industry and among listeners.

Music blogs are becoming such a prominent source of online promotion that many artists are eating up any information they can find that might help them get their own name in a headline. Many helpful articles have been posted recently that offer all sorts of tips and advice. Some deal more with protocol – don’t spam, don’t beg, do your homework, etc. Others deal with tactics, such as including an mp3 or two for the blogger to offer as free downloads for their readers. All good advice. However, I noticed recently that there was one very important tool being neglected in the majority of these articles – relationships.

I recently posted an article on Creative Deconstruction that dealt with this idea of relationships. I’m not going to rehash that post here, but the primary point that I want to get across is that if artists want bloggers to pay attention to them, they have to take the time to build a rapport. Building relationships and making connections are the most effective ways to rise above the din – online or off.

The Power of Networking

Networking is an important skill to master regardless of your industry. Even in white collar corporate world the most successful salesmen are the ones who know how to talk about more than just their product.

Musicians are not exempt from this. In fact, I would argue that the opposite is true. Artists need to develop the ability to make connections on two different fronts – fans and media. Most of the focus has been on the artist-fan relationship, but unless your band can afford a professional PR campaign it is going to be up to you to get your name out there in the media.

Thankfully, social media has made this much more attainable. Just about anybody can be found these days through social networking, including (or perhaps especially) bloggers. Twitter is particularly useful in this regard, because there are no barriers between users. Anyone can follow anyone. I’ve seen countless relationships – even partnerships – form over time on Twitter. It is simply too useful to be ignored.

DIY public relations through social networking is an effective, free tool that is available to every artist. Take advantage of it. PR people can be very helpful in getting a promotion off the ground. But at the end of the day PR people can’t build relationships for you. Most bloggers won’t even open a press release if they don’t know the person who sent it. Relationship is what sets one particular communication apart from the rest.

So the next time you consider sending a mass-mailed press release, or tweeting “Check out my new EP!” into the ether, remember that your words will have much more impact if the connection you have with your recipients goes beyond impersonal self-promotion.

Category: Social Networking | 1 Comment »

Tags: music PR, promoting music online, Social Networking

© Bertold Werkmann | Dreamstime.com

This is a list in the making.  It started with 5 Music Industry Leaders (You Should Follow).  Feel free to add to it in the comments field below the post.

Follow Trent Reznor
Nine Inch Nails
In May 2008, Nine Inch Nails released the The Slip as a free digital download accompanied by a note from Trent Reznor, “This one’s on me”, as a courtesy to NIN’s loyal following.  The album was downloaded over a million times before the end of May 2008.  Many of the music industry’s most disruptive paradigms, including the “Free” and “Direct-To-Fan” concepts, can be traced back to Trent Reznor’s independent marketing activities.

Follow Don Passman
Author and Entertainment Lawyer
One of America’s top entertainment attorneys, Don Passman is the author of the non-fiction bestseller “All You Need to Know About the Music Business”, which has sold more than 300,000 hardcover copies in print.

Follow Mike King
Author and Associate Director of Marketing at Berkleemusic.com
Mike King is an Associate Director of Marketing at Berkleemusic.com, the online extension of Berklee College of Music.  Prior to Berklee, Mike was the marketing/product manager at Rykodisc, where he oversaw all marketing efforts for label artists, including Mickey Hart, Jeb Loy Nichols, Morphine, Jess Klein, Voices On The Verge, Bill Hicks, The Slip, Pork Tornado (Phish), Kelly Joe Phelps, and Frank Zappa’s estate.

Follow Lou Plaia
Co-Founder of ReverbNation
ReverbNation, the online indie music giant, provides a suite of online marketing tools to its community of more than 500,000 artists, managers, promoters and venue owners.

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Category: Social Networking | 6 Comments »

Tags: influential Twitter accounts, music industry leaders, music industry Twitter

Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Sean Holland, Director of Artist & Label Relations at  Jango Airplay.  If you haven’t heard of Jango Airplay, it’s a great tool for emerging artists to get discovered by millions of online radio listeners.  Continue reading the interview below to learn more about Jango Airplay …

How did Jango Airplay get started?

Jango started in 2007 as online radio, very similar to Pandora. In early 2009 we launched Jango ‘Airplay’, our promotional platform for emerging artists to get guaranteed airplay right alongside all the big name artists to our 7 million monthly listeners. There was a big gap in the market for emerging artists to get a real voice in online radio. We have the listeners coming to hear everyone from Jay Z to Bob Dylan, Arctic Monkeys to Willie Nelson and figured it would be great for artists and listeners alike to get these new bands some exposure.

Do artists that sign up to Jango get to decide who they want to be played next to?

Absolutely. In your artist dashboard you can pick up to 30 ‘Similars’ which are the artists you want to be played alongside. You can change these anytime you like as well for more targeting. We also deliver to each artist a report, the ‘Fan Overlap,’ that gives them a list of the artists most liked by their new fans on Jango. This can really help in re-targeting.

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Category: Marketing, Music 2.0, Social Networking, Technology | 1 Comment »

Tags: getting your music discovered, Jango, online radio, promoting music

It’s no secret that MySpace has been losing to Facebook for a while.  Regardless, the one thing the social network has going for it is its Music division.  When searching for an artist on Google, for example, you’re most likely going to click on their MySpace Music page before you go to their Facebook Fan Page.  This is why MySpace recently revamped its Music section and added  a music video hub and an artist dashboard that provides analytics and even tracks iTunes sales.

According to a post on Digidpendent:

Launched in beta, the MySpace Artist Dashboard is a free and offers a peak at  detailed analytics of an artist’s content within both MySpace and iLike. Functionality includes:

• Unlimited access to charts, graphs, and snapshots of MySpace Music data
• Data includes fan geography, song plays, profile views, friend count, and profile visitors
• Trending data available for 7 day and 30 day glances
• iLike integration into MySpace Artist Dashboard provides top-level data from iLike’s partner networks
• Artist Dashboard is available in 17 languages in over 20 territories

If you’ve been checking your analytics on MySpace, I would love to hear what you think about it  in the comments below and whether or not you find it useful.

Category: Social Networking, Technology | 2 Comments »

Tags: artist dashboard, MySpace analytics, myspace music

© Bertold Werkmann | Dreamstime.com

This is a list in the making.  Feel free to add to it in the comments field below the post.

Follow Terry McBride
CEO and Co-Founder of Nettwerk Music Group
Terry McBride is a two-time recipient of the Pollstar Industry Award for Personal Manager of the Year for his work with Sarah McLachlan (1997) and Avril Lavigne/Coldplay (2002), and recipient of the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at the 2003 Juno Awards, recognizing an outstanding individual who has contributed to the growth and advancement of the Canadian music industry.

Follow Derek Sivers
Founder and former President of CD Baby
Winner of the 2003 World Technology Award, Derek Sivers founded CD Baby “by accident” in 1998 and turned it into the largest seller of independent music on the web, which he sold a decade later to Disc Makers.

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Category: Social Networking | 11 Comments »

Tags: cd baby, Dave Kusek, Derek Sivers, future of music, Gerd Leonhard, Ian Rogers, Mediacode, Music Industry, Nettwerk, Terry McBride, Topspin Media

By now you’ve either been criticized or have yet to be—it’s a fact of life and there is no escaping it, unfortunately.  But criticism, no matter how harsh, doesn’t mean you should throw your towel in and just give up.  What matters more is that you continue to establish strong relationships with your fan base because they are the ones that will carry you on regardless of how much or how little criticism you are met with. Keep in mind, however, that critics will often say things for a reason, so rather than internalize what they write or say, take a moment to reflect on it because it might just be constructive.  Heck, for all you know, what they say just might boost your career.

CLICK HERE to read “Take It With a Grain of Salt—Dealing With the Critics” by Loren Weisman at the Music Think Tank.

Category: Music, Music 2.0, Social Networking | No Comments »

Tags: creating music, Indie Music, music critics, unsigned bands

The Flaming Lips perform at SXSW

Music began as a performance art. If you wanted someone to hear your music you had to stand in front of them and play it. At the advent of sound recording the primary way the world enjoyed music began transitioning from the concert hall to the living room. Music became more and more accessible until it ended up in our cars, iPods and phones.

Thanks to digital distribution music can be distributed, downloaded, copied and shared for essentially nothing. Listeners now have all the music of the world at their fingertips – but as a result the value of recorded music has plummeted.

It’s poetic really that the same path that initially shifted the music industry’s focus away from live performance has now led it to a place where performance is one of the only platforms left.

If you want to succeed as a musician in 2009 – and likely for many years to come – you need to begin treating live performance as the backbone of your career.

This represents a dramatic paradigm shift for many artists. For decades it’s been all about the album, the album, the album. Bands went on tour to support the sale of their newest release. It’s time to flip that around and begin releasing music to promote your next tour. The reasons for this go beyond the fact that shows still make money and record sales generally don’t.

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Category: Music, Social Networking | 2 Comments »

Tags: gigging, live performance, strategy, touring

After completing their contract with Sony and J Records, Pearl Jam has joined the growing list of empowered unsigned artists just looking to bypass their labels and go directly to their fans. Like their predecessors, it has come down to the ability to control their future, increase their profits and open up a wide variety of inventive bundling options for it’s September 20th release. By using their name, having great songs and hiring the same business professionals that have been working with them in the past they have completely cut out lengthy contracts and undoubtedly will have the same level of results. Why are more and more artists doing this? Major labels have lost their way. Before the Internet boom, when an artist got signed that meant that the label would pour EVERYTHING they had into you. I can’t blame labels at all for being reluctant in this declining music industry; however, it’s the lack of ideas and unwillingness to jump all the way in that is killing them.

There’s one valuable point that has been forgotten: people still LOVE music.

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Category: Business, Direct to Fan, Music, Social Networking, Technology | No Comments »

Tags: major labels, Pearl Jam, unsigned artists

Yes, there is such a thing as useless social networking. It’s when you accumulate thousands upon thousands of “friends” or “followers” who could really care less about what you have to say or offer. Quality, not quantity, folks … even in social networking. Seth Godin says it the best in the following video and I think it applies to everyone, even musicians:

Category: Social Networking | 3 Comments »

Tags: online marketing for musicians, Seth Godin, Social Networking