Audimated Blog » Music Business

Oprah Presents “Master Class” With Jay-Z

audimated — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:44:26 +0000

As part of the launch of Oprah’s new network, Jay-Z stars in the first episode of “Master Class” – an OWN original TV series about stars and their rise to the top including lessons they learned which may be able to motivate others on their journey to prominence.
Click “more” for episodes 2,3, and 4

How Your Fans Help Sell Your Music

audimated — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 23:06:51 +0000

Take a look at those closest to you and your music. I am not talking about your biggest fan on the internet or the twitter profile that retweets your posts. I am talking about the people who you have a real relationship with who also care about and support your music. If you had a show in your basement, who would come? Who are your biggest supporters? If you have a new song, who do you show it to before you upload the song to the Internet? The answer to all of these questions is likely your inner circle of friends and family. If you are in school, these are your classmates. If you also work a 9-5 then these are your coworkers. If you are a more advanced full time musician these people are likely already on your “street team.”

These groups are keys to your success and are likely already supporting and spreading your music. For the part time musician, this first circle of “contacts” is your first set of “satisfied customers.” Your music provided a service to this group and now this group is out there in the community as walking talking testimonials to the quality service your “music business” provided them. These testimonials and communications about your music are the roots and foundation in which you organically grow your fan base. Without a set of initial fans championing your cause and validating the quality of your music, you are left to “spam” potential fans or pay advertisers to deliver your message to relevant listeners.

What motivates your friends and family to become your first set of die hard, stick with you to the end fans? What turns them from passive listeners into the marketers and sales force for your music? Motivations can differ from person to person, but it is likely a combination of several factors which include: your consistent push of quality music, the desire to see/help you succeed, the desire to be part of something bigger than themselves and the value of being “the first to know” of a new music out of their friends.

What did you do to motivate these people or deserve their support? Basically nothing beyond what you are currently doing now: making great music. Your family, friends and fans (in that order) will care about and support your music as long as you keep consistently providing them with great new content. Stay focused on top notch excellent music content and your fans will inherently want to help spread the word.

What does this mean as an independent artist? Consider each new listener as a potential new customer to “satisfy” with your music. If you do your part as a “music business” (notice you are not a marketing business) and provide they will invariably do theirs as your marketers. In order to help your fans help you market your music we have outlined a few broad steps:

1. Focus on recording good songs with high production values
2. Get these songs online so that it can easily be shared
3. Get fans involved with your music and caring about your success
4. Reward them for being a fan

If you would like to learn more about how Audimated can help you turn your fans into your sales force watch this:

If you have a story you would like to see us cover please contact Jared@audimated.com.

Moby And The Music Business

audimated — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:34:18 +0000

Here, Moby shares his perspective of the music business.

Benjamin Zander On Classical Music

audimated — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:51:44 +0000

Benjamin Zander loves his classical music, check out this video that explores all new possibilities and new experiences within this genre.

Blink 182′s Tom DeLonge At Guitar Center, Music Business 2.0

audimated — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:00:17 +0000

Here’s a video of Blink 182′s Tom DeLonge speaking about the music business. He talks about how the music business has changed and where the music industry is headed.

Integrated Music Marketing Campaign

audimated — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:40:43 +0000

Mike King speaks on the various ways marketing your music online.

How To Survive As A Producer With Martin Atkins

audimated — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:44 +0000

Martin Atkins, formerly of legendary bands Ministry, Pigface and PIL, talks about how to survive in the producer’s seat.

Jim Jones “Music Business 101″ Classes Part I-IV

audimated — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:28:38 +0000

Jim Jones has been conducting music business classes at a Brooklyn High School.
Here’s Part I-IV of the FUSE filmed series.

Why It is Important that We All Pay for Music

Deborah — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:49:23 +0000

All the litigation around intellectual property rights as they apply to music on the Internet is important to track. But, more important than any threat of legal action against illegal downloaders or CD distributors is the fact that music is created by musicians, artists who are trying to make a living just like you and me. Paying for music produced by others should not be motivated by fear but by a sense of fair play. Just like any other profession or service rendered, a musician is providing you, the listener, with a product that you use and enjoy.

Plato said, “Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” Think about the important role that music plays in your life. Think about the many positive benefits you get from listening to and creating music for yourself and others.

Now think about the struggling musician trying to get his or her sound out there. Often working for “free” for the elusive goal of “getting exposure,” the musician needs all the income he or she can get from the sale of music that has taken hours to create, record and produce.

As a musician, you need to get up to speed about copyright law – try and protect yourself as much as possible. But, don’t be naïve, either, and think that copyright laws are necessarily clear and “theft proof.” Read Brad Templeton’s 10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained, for example, so that you have a basic understanding about what is, and isn’t, permitted in creating music and how to protect your work.

And, for musicians who want more, you can get a more detailed overview of actual federal copyright statutes by visiting the law collection at Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute. This overview is from Cornell University’s more comprehensive collection of 17 U.S.C. Sections 101 – 810 (U.S. Copyright Act).

In the meantime, all of you music lovers need to do the right thing. Pay for the music you want to listen to. Paying ten bucks for an album you will listen to for a thousand hours is a pretty good deal.

Deborah@Audimated.com

Audimated.com: Cutting Through the Noise Online

Deborah — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:18:26 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I think we all find the sheer volume of information – and music – available on the Internet mind boggling. Some of it is good, but unfortunately the majority of it is bad. This is a catch 22 for up and coming artists. On one hand you have they playing field leveled so that you can compete online against the major label acts (with millions being spent on marketing), but on the other hand you now have millions of other artists (just like you) all struggling to reach a limited number of fans online. Because of these pressures, a good online strategy is now a requirement for any musician who hopes to make a career out of their craft.

A favorite book of mine that helps sort out what is happening to those of us on “information overload” in the Internet Age is Steve Johnson’s book, Interface Culture. The author writes about the role of social networking media in the dissemination of knowledge both pre and post Google. I recommend this read to anyone looking to learn more about how people use and share information online.

Currently there are over thirteen million active artist accounts on MySpace (US only) and in 2009 $3.4 billion dollars (that is a ton of money!) were spent on independent music in the United States alone. The numbers do not take into account the underground or unregistered transactions that occur in the music industry nor the countless other artists around the world who are not on MySpace. In addition, as the price of home recording equipment continues to decline, the number of people creating and marketing music will continue to increase. This creates an ever-expanding supply of new artists, each of which will need increasingly more marketing to be heard.

As a result of these market pressures, independent artists are now spending more time on social networks, email accounts and giving their songs away for free than they are creating their music. On the other side, the music consumer is facing thousands of websites and millions of songs to choose from and is spending their time browsing more text, email and free streams with no way of filtering out the content they are interested in. These fans want a personal connection with the artist, but are instead subject to banner ads, pop ups and viruses associated with the consumption of music. Both the independent artist and fans are wasting their time, energy and money on everything but the music. This is becoming an increasingly large problem…

There are thousands of social networks and platforms online, but how do you choose the right one? Should you go with a larger more broad network like Facebook, Myspace or Twitter? Or should you use a more niche focused network like bandcamp? Should you join all of these networks? How much time should be spent on each and what is the focus? The answers to these questions can quickly spiral out of control and in the end you will probably be left with more questions then you started with.

One solution is Audimated.com (which we endorse) which was built specifically to solve this problem. How does Audimated solve this? In its simplest form Audimated musicians only have to join one network (Audimated.com) and let their fans (who are on multiple networks) spread the message on their behalf. In this way, the artists can stay focused on their music (thats the goal right?) and let the fans be the sales force online.

Why is this approach unique?

Together Audimated and independent artists like you, can solve this problem by revolutionizing the independent music industry with a new model for compensating artists and distributing music. Both artists and fans are rewarded for creating and sharing the music respectively. Here is a little bit more on how it works.

This model should prove as an music overload “filter.” Music recommendations come from the fans, and not from the artists “blasting” would be fans asking for a listen. Good music will eventually “float to the top” of the Audimated charts and browse features and be passed along by interested fans (this is also how the ebay and amazon models roughly work) . Because fans on Audimated are actually there for the music (as opposed to the random old man or robot profile on myspace), you know that your music is being heard and spread by people who are actually interested in the music.

Check it out. As a musician and a fan, I think we need all the help we can get finding good music and getting the word out there.

Deborah@Audimated.com