Shaun Letang – Page 3 – Independent Music Advice

Rap And Hip Hop Beat Making Theory

This is a guest post by Marcel van Ling from Hot Beat Store, and a follow up to our beginners guide on how to product music. This lesson is more advanced. You can write for this site too.
Rap, Hip Hop and R&B beats are important for recording artists, and not hard to find on the internet. If you do a Google search for ‘hip hop beats’ for example, you’ll get hundreds of websites offering them for your use.

Beats, or instrumentals as they’re also known, are musical arrangements without the vocals. Because of their popularity, there are a lot of producers making rap beats. This however doesn’t mean there’s no space for you in the music production market. As you can imagine, the quality of these instrumentals vary very much. Some are at a very high quality, while others are extremely poor.

IMA Music Business Re-Opening, Win Your Own Music Website Worth Over £500, And New Posts Every Day

by Shaun Letang

Hey guys! I’ve a few very important announcements to make today, so please make sure you read to the end of this post.

First of all, I want to announce that the IMA Music Business Academy has officially re-opened as of today! For those that don’t know, the Academy is an online music business course that has helped well over 100 independent musicians, managers and industry figures progress their music career through better music business knowledge.

The course has been shut for a while while we’ve focused on existing members and improving it based on their feedback, but we’ve now re-opened it to a new set of members.

How to Market Your Band With Little Or No Budget

by Shaun Letang

How to promote your music with little or no budget

Hi guys, I’ve got something very special for you today! This is a fantastic guest post by Christine Infanger, one of the most helpful and knowledgeable members in our members only forums. She has left more then a golden nugget or two for forum members, so I had to approach her for some information she could share here for free. If you read and enjoy this article (Which you should), please follow her on Twitter as well as sharing this article on your favourite sites (Facebook, Twitter etc). Ok, so without wasting any more time, here’s Christine:

In an era where social media is a finger-click away and virtually everyone has a smart phone of one kind or another, it’s hard to make your band stand out in a sea of artists fighting for a chance to be heard.

A few years ago I was offered the opportunity to head up the marketing and promotion for an agency based in New York City. They needed a competent go-getter (me) to handle not only the Chicago market, but the Midwestern United States as a whole. Additionally, I was in charge of establishing and maintaining Street Teams for a number of the artists on their roster – both well known and unknown – for the entire US.

This was a prospect which had me giddy with anticipation until the catch came: I was to do all of this with virtually no budget (Read: Money).

Here are a few things I learned. Hopefully, enumerating on my experiences will prove helpful for a few.

The Musicians Union – Support And Advice For Artists

by Shaun Letang

This is a guest post by Sam Chapman. If you have useful advice and want to share it in front of thousands of independent musicians, click here.

If you are a musician trying to making a living in the competitive music industry, you may have come across the Musicians Union (MU). The Musicians’ Union is an organisation that protects the interests of musicians in the UK, providing legal advice, education and training, insurance, and much more. Even if you aren’t from the UK however, you may still want to read this article. It can give you an idea of the type of services that are out there for musicians, and allow you to know what to look for in your own country.

So, what are the benefits of joining such a union? Well, this is exactly what we look at below. I hope this article will give you a better idea of what help you can get as an independent musician, and show you that professional help isn’t as unobtainable as you may have first thought.

A Preparation Guide For Your First Live Performance

by Shaun Letang

This is a guest post from Andy Chubb. If you are an experienced musician / business person with a working knowledge of the music industry (And something useful to share), please consider contributing to this site.
Playing your first gig can be a very nerve racking experience. Whether it’s in front of a few friends or in front of a room full or strangers, it’s not easy to escape those first gig nerves. They can have you feeling terrible right until the ‘dreaded’ experience is over, at which point you’ll realise the actual performance wasn’t that bad. But the nerves leading up to it? Well, that part isn’t quite so fun.

A lot of the time, nerves come due to a lack of organisation and not knowing what to expect. While you can’t fully know what to expect on your first gig, being prepared can go a long way in helping ease those nerves.

I thought it might be a good idea to write down a few hints and tips for those who are going to play their first gig. As a reasonably experienced musician myself, I would like to pass on some advice that will hopefully help others out. If you find these tips useful, please share them on your favourite social networking sites, or leave a comment below.

Why You Should Never Give Out Your Music For Free

by Shaun Letang

You should not give your music out for free

Giving out you music for free is a waste of time.

Yes I know, this goes against everything you’ve been taught so far. We all know how hard it is to sell your music to new fans, so the obvious step seems to be giving out loads of freebies until people are ready to buy your music right? Ummm, wrong!

The thing is, giving your music out for free can actually be doing more harm then good. By doing this, musicians are reinforcing the view that music should be free for listeners. In actual fact, musicians have as much right to make money by benefiting other people’s lives as anyone else does. Would someone makes board games just to give them out for free? Would a cleaner clean a hotel if they weren’t getting paid? Would a bus driver allow free passengers just because they enjoy driving? No, no, and NO!

8 Reasons Email Marketing Will Boost Your Music Career

by Shaun Letang

Welcome to email marketing for musicians. Building a mailing list is one of the most important things you can do to boost your music career. By getting people on your mailing list, you can quickly and easily communicate with your fans, and keep them informed about your going ons. Fans are what push you forward in terms of how well known you are and how much money your music career brings in. Because of this, communicating with them as effectively as possible should be a top priority of yours.

In this article we look at the importance of collecting email addresses for your mailing list, and how you can use this process to benefit your music career. We also point you to a good guide at the end, which instructs you on how to set up a mailing list, and how to make sure your list is profitable.

So what are the benefits on setting up a music mailing list? Read on to find out.

How To Sell Music Online – The Ultimate Guide

by Shaun Letang

If you’ve ever wanted to know how to sell music online, you’re in the right place! Today we’ll be looking at how to take your digital songs, and put them up for sale in multiple places. Once your songs are up, everything runs on autopilot. There’s no need to stand by and manually send every song that’s bought from you, the systems we will show you handle everything on your behalf.

There are two main places you should be selling your music online: On your own website, and on other established digital download shops such as iTunes and Amazon MP3. Today we’ll be looking both at how to sell your music on iTunes (And other popular MP3 stores), and how to sell digital downloads on your own website. First however, let’s have a look at why you may want to sell your music online.

No Longer Available.