Music Discussion | Independent Music Advice

Archive for the ‘Music Discussion’ Category

What It Really Takes To Succeed In The Music Business

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

This article aims to inform musicians how to succeed in the music business. A lot of bad and outdated advice is shared on the web, much of which leads to musicians wasting valuable time and effort. Many people have fallen into the trap of following bad advice, only to reflect a number of months down the line and realise their music career hasn’t progressed very much at all. Due of this, it’s become a widely accepted theory that you can’t make money from your music. This however couldn’t be further from the truth, as we hope to show you today.

Today we aim to debunk this myth, and show you what is really needed to get where you want in the music industry. If you aren’t willing to adjust your thinking and invest both time and money in your independent music career, I suggest you stop reading now. If you’re ready to turn your music into a business however, read on, and make sure you don’t miss a single word.
(more…)

Posted in Independent Music, Music Discussion, Music Help, Music Strategy | No Comments »

Top Music Advice Blogs

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

Today I thought I’d do something a little different. A lot of the guides we’ve written here over the last few months have turned out to be full resources allowing you to progress in certain areas of the music industry. What’s more, all of these guides have been free. While we aim to continue helping anyone doing independent music, we do realise there are other people out there that also help up and coming musicians. Some of these people have covered subjects we haven’t yet covered in full, so it’s definitely worth reading a few different sites to get as much advice as possible.

In order to offer you a fuller resource and help you further your music career, today we’ve listed four different music websites that we feel will help grow you as an all round musician / business person. If you know of any other good music advice websites, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.
(more…)

Tags: music advice, music blogs
Posted in Independent Music, Music Discussion | No Comments »

How To Get Your First Profitable Mailing List Up And Running

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Mailing lists (Aka newsletters) are one of the most under used tools by independent musicians. Using email marketing software such as Aweber, you can build up a means to effectively build relationships with your fans and market to them when appropriate. Though they’re one of the most powerful ways to making money and keep in contact with fans, very few independent musicians use them and are therefore losing out on a lot of money. Major labels have been using newsletter and mailing lists for years to effectively communicate with fans and make sales, but no one’s really told the ‘little guy’ why ‘the money’s in the list’. In this article we’ll be looking at what mailing lists are, why they’re so effective at keeping you connected with fans and making you money, the different types of email marketing services there are (And which is best for you), and finally how to build your own money making list.
(more…)

Tags: Email Marketing, How To, Mailing List
Posted in Music Discussion | 4 Comments »

Dealing With Gig Nerves And Performance Nerves, The Ultimate Guide

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

Public speaking is seen to be a fate worse then death for some. The process of standing in front of a room full of people delivering a speech can make even the most bubbly person shake from head to toe. If you want to take your music career to the next level however, most likely you will have to speak in public at some point. And not only will you have to speak, but you’ll also have to perform your music and get on an elevated stage so everyone can see you CLEARLY. Sound fun? Well actually, it can be once you get used to it! Some people truly believe performing live to fans and connecting with them in person is one of the best parts of being a musician. If you’re one of the people who suffer from pre gig nerves or performance nerves however, we’ve created a guide to minimizing pre-performance nerves, and getting you comfortable with performing shows once and for all…
(more…)

Tags: Gigs, Nerves, Ultimate Guides
Posted in Gigs, Music Discussion | 6 Comments »

The Best Ways To Promote Your Music On A Budget

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

Today we thought we’d look at some of the best methods of promotion available on a budget. We know many independent musicians don’t have a huge budget, so any type of promotion would ideally need to be cheap or free. They’d also need to be easy to implement and easily integrated with other types of promotion. With that in mind, we’ve come up with some of the best ways to promote your music on a budget. But the best part? All of these types of promotion have been proven to work!

While the following list has many useful ideas, you don’t have to use all of them when it comes to your promotional campaign. You may instead want to focus your efforts on doing a few of them well if you have a limited amount of time or resources. So read on and see what types of promotion are best for you…
(more…)

Tags: Music On A Budget, Music Promotion
Posted in Music Discussion | 2 Comments »

Can You Make A Full Time Living As An Independent Musician?

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Like many musicians, I’m sure at some point you’ve dreamed about making it big. To have unlimited adoring fans, enough money to live the life you’ve always wanted, and to carry on doing what you enjoy; making the music you love! This is a natural dream for all starting out musicians, though it’s not always as easy as that…

In all honesty, only a very small percentage of people make a worthwhile wage from their music. The majority of musicians unfortunately don’t break even, spending money pressing up CDs that don’t end up selling. I’m not saying that their CDs aren’t worth buying (Although some of them probably aren’t), a lot of people just don’t know what to do once they have their music on the shelves. Humans aren’t naturally sales people after all…
(more…)

Tags: Achieving Success
Posted in Music Discussion | 1 Comment »

How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part 3

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Welcome to the third and final part of the ‘How To Make A Mixtape’ series. This series was started because we kept receiving mixtape related questions, from how to make a mixtape, to more complex and specific ones on pricing and releaseing your mixtape. After replying to a few of those questions individually, we decided to create a series of posts where people could get all the answers they need instantly. These posts becase the “How To Make A Mixtape” series, one of which you’re reading now. So far in this series we’ve answered beginner questions like “What is a mixtape”, to more popular questions such as “Can you use other people’s beats on your mixtape” and “How do you make your mixtape stand out from the crowd”. In this final part, we’ll be look at some questions you’ll need to ask yourself when pricing your mixtape, releasing your mixtape, and promoting your mixtape.

While there’s some very useful information in this topic, our previous topics on the subject of how to make a mixtape provide info on the earlier steps on making the ultimate mixtape. So if you haven’t already done so, you may want to check our previous “how to make a mixtape” posts before reading this one:

Other How To Make A Mixtape Parts

If you’ve already read those How To Make A Mixtape guides, we can move forward…
(more…)

Tags: How To, how to make a mixtape, Mixtapes, Music Distribution, Music Promotion, Selling Your Music
Posted in how to make a mixtape, Music Discussion | 7 Comments »

Knowledgeable About The Music Industry? Then Write For Us!

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

*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.
(more…)

Tags: Partner IMA
Posted in Music Discussion | No Comments »

What Is A Sale Or Return Deal (SOR) And How To Get One

Monday, June 21st, 2010

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).
(more…)

Tags: Music Distribution, Sale Or Return, SOR
Posted in Music Discussion | No Comments »