Archive for June, 2010

Knowledgeable About The Music Industry? Then Write For Us!

Saturday, June 26th, 2010
Write For Independent Music Advice

*If you’re eager to start writing for us now without reading this post, check out the Write 4 Us page of this  website.

In the few short months that we’ve been in existence, Independent Music Advice has gone from strength to strength. Knowing that we had something useful to share, we decided to set up a place where people could get together and learn the business side of the music industry. Since setting up, we’ve constantly added more features to benefit you, such as this blog you’re reading now, our free Independent Musician Success ebook, our new interactive Facebook and Twitter pages (Links can be found on the right hand side of this page), and our top quality Music Business Resources page.

Today, we’re happy to announce yet another new feature to enhance the user experience, the opportunity to write for the Independent Music Advice website! The aim of this website is to empower our readers by giving them the knowledge they need to have a financially successful music career. And while we have more then enough knowledge to share with you (Make sure you’re subscribed to our mailinglist to be informed about all the latest news, we’ve some HUGE posts coming for you in the near future, you get a free ebook when you subscribe), we realise that there are other people who also have useful information which they’d wish share.
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What Is A Sale Or Return Deal (SOR) And How To Get One

Monday, June 21st, 2010
Sale Or Return Music Deal

If you’re a new musician or haven’t yet released your first independent CD or vinyl, you may not have come across the term ‘sale or return’ (Or SOR for short). In this article we will be looking at what a sale or return deal is, an example of a sale or return deal, and how to get one.
There are two types of deals you can get when trying to get your music into record shops, a ‘money upfront’ deal, and a sale or return deal. With a money upfront deal, a record shop will buy your CDs from you and give you the money upfront. They then re-sell these CDs for an increased price, keeping all the money they make from them. As the CDs now belong to the record shop, they can sell them for any price they want or even give them away for free if they so choose. While many musicians like upfront deals as they make instant bulk sales, this type of deal is becoming more rare for independent musicians. The only way independent musicians are really seeing upfront deals is if they have a proven record of selling large amounts of CDs, or if they go through a distributor (We’ll look a bit at distributor deals in this post too).
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How To Stream, Promote And Sell Your Music On Facebook (A BandPage Guide)

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
How to get your music on Facebook with BandPage and RootMusic

This article shows you how to set up a BandPage section for your Facebook fan page, as well as how to set up a Facebook fan page if you haven’t got one already. You may want to check out an accompanying guide on How To Attract 3,000 Fans In 30 Days , a ebook written by Nick O’Neill, a man with over 71,000 Facebook fans (So he knows what he’s talking about lol). All that information is below, so please see the relevant headers if you want to skip any bits. But first, here’s a little background:

As many of you will know, MySpace has been steadily declining for some time now. While it used to be an effective tool to promote your music, these days it’s full of musicians promoting their music to each other. The irony of this is that the majority of musicians are only there to promote their music to you, and aren’t really interested in hearing what you have to offer.

So while MySpace continues to die out, where should music communities go to? Facebook has been one of the many places musicians have experimented with to building up their fan base, but it has never been a complete music solution… Until now!

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How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part 2

Friday, June 11th, 2010
How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part 2

Welcome to part two of the ‘How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide’ series. This is a three part series detailing good practices and tips on how to make a mixtape and sell it. For those that haven’t read already (Or even if you have but just want to get reacquainted with the basics), you should read:

  • How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part 1

    • before you read this. Also once you’ve finished reading this check out:

    If you’ve already read that, let’s move on. In part two we’ll be looking at how ethical it is to use other people’s beats for your mixtape, where to get backing tracks for your mixtape, and finally how to make your mixtape stand out from the crowd. So without any further ado, let’s get into it.
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    How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part 1

    Sunday, June 6th, 2010
    How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part 1

    Here at Independent Music Advice, we like to listen to what you as the reader wants. We’ve had many people arriving at our site looking for advice on making mixtapes, but not really finding what they were looking for. Having a quick google search myself, I found there are no real resources showing musicians what to think about when making mixtapes. So we decided to write one!

    Over the next three posts we will be looking at some of the most searched for mixtape questions we’ve had! If there’s anything else you want to add or ask, please do so in the comments section.
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    Why All Musicians Need To Have The Business Know How

    Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
    Why all musicians need to have the business know how on music think tank

    Independent Music Advice has today teamed up with fellow music website Music Think Tank to write a post on Why All Musicians Need To Have The Business Know How (Please check out the post and leave your views in the comments section of the site). As you may know, we here at Independent Music Advice  feel strongly that all musicians should learn the business aspect of the music industry. Having talent and waiting for a record label to come and sign you up is a dying strategy at best, and one I’d never suggest for anyone to use! Due to the changing structure of the music industry, a more pro-active approach is required to break through all the noise and make your music career a successful one. Record labels are more likely to sign someone who has already proven themselves in their chosen genre, rather then someone who has talent but hasn’t build up their fan base yet. This means you need to have a ton of fans before a record label would even consider signing you, and without the ‘music business know how’ there’s very little chance you’ll get those fans.
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