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.

A Musician’s Guide to Middle Management, or Leading a Band

Performing with your own band is an exhilarating experience. But before you can have your moment on stage, you need to get a group of musicians into the same room to learn some music. And musicians have a knack at being slightly unorganized, slightly tardy, slightly hungover from last night’s gig, and numerous other habits that made it difficult for girls to introduce me to their dads in high school. Here are some strategies for running a successful band, and have a good time doing it.

The advice I offer comes from my experiences leading my own groups as well as playing in other musician’s bands. Many of the lessons I learned came from looking through the rubble of projects that just fell apart. Had a few things been handled differently, had there been a strong voice of leadership, the band could have been successful. But all too often things aren’t organized from the beginning, the inter-band relationships start to clash, and a lack of honest communication and accountability lead to the band’s demise. On the other hand, successful projects of any genre always have several things in common, and it all starts with the leadership.

What I Learned Working at Venues

When I was in college, I had several jobs. One was at a restaurant, one at the town’s best music venue, and I also gigged several nights a week. All at the same time. The experience taught me a lot about what goes through the minds of the owners, managers, and staff at different types of venues.

Know your venue.

Keep in mind that every venue views their live music differently.

Some places are straight up music venues and are looking for bands that will fill the room. That doesn’t mean they won’t support new or young acts, but those acts will get booked on slower nights and less than prime time slots. At these venues, don’t expect a built in audience. One thing I learned is that bands that played on Monday or Tuesday nights and brought in enough people that extra bartenders had to be called in, or better yet, the owner had to jump behind the bar, always got a better night for their next booking.

Cameron’s Best of 2008

The best things I discovered or started using in 2008!