Creating a Budget for Your New Album

Creating a budget for a new album means figuring out not only how much money you’ll need, but also how much time it will take from your first rehearsal to release day. After releasing a number of my own albums and answering questions from many of my friends doing the same, I’ve been caught off guard enough times to know where the hidden expenses are, how to save money, and where my money is best spent.

Naturally, the DIY environment is changing increasingly fast as technology makes much of this easier than ever before. But just because it’s possible to record an album on Monday and have it available on iTunes on Tuesday doesn’t mean it’s the best thing for your music. Taking some time to establish your goals and determine what you can realistically afford will help you create the best album possible.

Allison Weiss on Building an Internet Presence

Allison Weiss is one of the hardest working singer/songwriters I know. We met through Lauren Zettler, who I play with regularly, and I’ve been able to watch Allison do her thing online and in person, from the audience and behind the scenes. I can honestly say that what you see is what you get with Allison. It’s her ability to be herself online has attracted a massive but well targeted internet following across several social networking platforms which she weaves together using tools freely available to anybody. In other words, she uses no tricks and doesn’t have a team of web gurus hiding behind a curtain. She really does it all herself.

I asked Allison if she’d share her secrets with us, and as I suspected, there are no secrets! She is just a creative and savvy musician that is willing to try out new technology to stay ahead of the curve (something I believe is a key to a successful DIY music career). But don’t take my word for it, read Allison’s responses and see for yourself. There’s a lot to learn for any independent musician trying to get their music in front of the right people.

Booking Your First Tour

Getting your band off the ground is full of “chicken or the egg?” situations. One of the things I commonly hear bands say that if they just had a booking agent, they could really get things moving. But booking agents only want to work with bands that already have things moving.

Just because you have to book your own shows doesn’t mean you can’t go on tour. Even if you don’t have much experience booking gigs, a little organization, creativity, persistance and flexibility will make booking your first tour is a simple enough task. After you get the first tour under your belt, going on the road in the future will not be as daunting.

Create Invoices, Get Paid

As a freelance musician, or freelance anything, making sure you get paid for your services can be a tedious task. Individuals or small contractors might be overwhelmed or not very organized and you’ll have to follow up to make sure the check gets in the mail. Large companies tend to have a lot of red tape, and your invoice has several departments to pass through before a check is processed. To speed up your payment, look like a true professional, and make your own book keeping more organized, you should get in the habit of creating detailed invoices for every job performed.

Getting the Most from Tags & Descriptions

It’s a well established fact that seach engine optimization, or SEO, is an important tool for building an online presence and attracting more traffic to your website. To learn more about SEO, see Dave Hahn’s Search Engine Optimization for Musicians. As he mentions, musicians needn’t be overly concerned with SEO on their own website if it’s for mostly promotional and informational purposes. This is very true, and the last thing a working musician needs is one more distraction from their instrument. However, the concepts are important to understand as you expand your internet presence because better optimization helps more people find your music. In this article, we’ll apply these concepts outside the musician’s website and into other online communities.

Most social networks have their own internal search functions or methods of organizing user profiles. Twitter is an excellent example of a site whose search engine helps not only connects people with common interests, but also allows virtual chat rooms to be created on the fly if every user tweets a common word (usually preceded by a # symbol). YouTube relies heavily on searches to help visitors dig through all the content, so precise, well thought out titles, descriptions and tags on your videos increase the chances of the right people discovering your videos. Both sites are destinations with built in communities, the perfect places for musicians to build awareness.

What I Learned at My Record Label Job

At 16 years old, I got my first job at a video rental store. Since then, I’ve worked at a mall, been a waiter, caterer, bartender, bar back, bouncer, sofa bed salesman, and office supply salesman. I also got my first paying gig as a jazz guitarist at 16, playing at a cafe in the middle of the mall. I think that gig paid $22.50 (the band leader took a 10% finders fee and split the rest four ways). That was the beginning of my double life–the kid that worked hard to make a paycheck and the kid that really just wanted to make music. For the most part, the first kid kept the other one kind of quiet because music is a hobby, not a job, right?

My attitude changed when I quit the office supply business and decided to find some mindless temp work to pay the bills while I tried to get things rolling with my music. I was completely honest with the interviewer at the temp agency:

“I’m a musician, and I just want a job where I can punch out at 5, forget about everything I did that day, and go focus on my music.”

He asked me what I played, what I listened to, all the typical music related questions. Then he said he might have just the position for me–Verve Records needed a long term temp to do some data entry. Perfect. Sign me up!

A Musician’s Guide to Creating an Online Presence

For the independent, D.I.Y. musician, establishing a balance between online and offline efforts is becoming increasingly difficult. It seems that every new social networking site that pops up is one more task to add to your overflowing list of things to do. With each website you’re trying to fill the shoes of musician, marketer, sales person and booking agent if not more. It’s a full time job in and of itself–simply too much for musicians who also hold down some sort of job outside of music to help support themselves. How is one supposed to keep up?

This article is not about how to keep up, rather it’s about how to ignore the noise. To be blunt, there are people out there trying to make money from you. This is a classic case of products and services that we didn’t know we needed until they existed. In most cases, we don’t need them. If they’re not trying to sell you something, they’re just trying to get your attention or your internet traffic. I’m not blaming these people; they only exist because independent musicians make a good market. We have only ourselves to blame for all these distractions.

It is entirely possible to ignore most of what’s happening online and still have a large internet presence. The beauty of the internet is that your presence can exist without sitting in front of a computer. Here’s what I suggest.

The Self-Released Album Reference Guide for Musicians

Releasing your own album can be overwhelming. In fact, just writing about how to release an album is pretty overwhelming.

To date, I’ve written a fair amount about how I make a living as a freelance musician based on my own experience. But there’s much more information freely available by a wide variety of experienced writers and musicians, many who have taught me a thing or two about the music business. The problem with all this information is that it just becomes too much, and trying to take it all in eats up the time and energy you should be spending working on music.

This article is a reference guide–a virtual table of contents to 20 articles useful information about what it takes to release an album yourself and market it on an independent musician’s budget.

The Self-Released Album 101: The Basics

In what seems like a past life, the only way to release an album was through a record label. The label had the money to pay for your recording, the ability to distribute it around the world, and the marketing resources to make sure people knew your album was hitting the stores. Today, any resourceful individual with a little bit of money and a lot of creativity can make an album commercially available to the same number of people as the major label.

Ready to release your own album but not sure where to start? In this article you’ll learn where you can sell your album online, what distribution means, how digital music distribution works, and some bare essentials necessary to start selling your music.

Home Recording for Indie Musicians with Indie Budgets

The cost of creating a home recording studio has dropped significantly in the last 10 years. Coupled with the low cost and ease of distribution via the internet, the amount of self-released music by independent musician has increased dramatically. You needn’t look any further than a company like CD Baby, one of the leaders in distribution for independent artists to realize that, while the major label and traditional brick-and-mortar retail sectors of the industry are suffering, companies are growing on the backs of independent musicians.

This is both good and bad. On one hand, more interesting and niche-oriented music is being released. Music that makes up a tiny part of the market, simply because it has a very specific and rather small audience, can still be created and widely distributed. On the other hand, there is a lot more low quality and, let’s face it, bad music flooding the market.

If you’ve been hesitant about recording at home, the information here will hopefully encourage you to give it a try.