All this hype for no music...

Every musician has played some lousy gigs, and some more than others.  Small crowds, weak sound reinforcement, cramped space, short money, high drama, the list of the stuff that can make a gig lousy goes on and on, and is enough to keep some people from ever playing out.  Dealing with gigs that don’t cut it is as much part of the process as rehearsal, glory, and getting paid.

There are so many more bands than venues to play, and gigs are much harder to find than people to play them.   Maybe it’s because anyone can grab an instrument and book a gig.   Maybe people don’t care about integrity.  Or, as the skeptics say, maybe some people are just evolutionary dead ends.  Regardless of the circumstances of any gig, I am baffled that bands cancel gigs at the last minute without a reason involving well-being, or natural disaster.  I am talking about local gigs, which is a completely different game than being a touring musician, where routing and expenses can often cause tours to fall apart weeks before they get started.  I have compassion for the challenges of creating sustainable touring.

Imagine you’re at a venue.  People have paid a cover, bartenders are working, electricity is being guzzled almost as fast as beer.  Promoters and management are running around getting the room set for an evening of fun.  And a band calls at the last minute saying they don’t want to play, they’ve booked another gig, or they’ve changed their mind about playing.  Cue empty stage, disappointment form everyone involved, and another failed event.

This is the entertainment business.  Our job as musicians is to provide entertainment.  How upset would you be if you showed up at the movie theater and they decided at the last minute to not air the film… after you’ve bought your popcorn and soda?

While I agree that bands often get the short end of the stick, I don’t believe that justifies blowing off a commitment to provide entertainment when your job is an entertainer.  I’ve never seen a band forced to take a gig.  It seems obvious to me that if you agree to take a gig, you play it.  I’m unclear how people who don’t do that will ever draw 1,000 people per night, or perform regularly.

When a band changes their mind at the last minute and bails on an event, the impact is on the venue, the promoters, and the audiences;  in short, the entire music community in that area suffers for it.  It’s easy to say “Oh, but that’s a lousy gig, it doesn’t matter anyway,” and circumstantially that may be valid.   Any band that wants to be taken seriously might be interested in having an impeccable reputation as a professional.  I’ve seen many bands cancel at the last minute, or just not show up.

It is unprofessional to cancel a gig at the last minute.   People who get paid in the music business are called professionals.

As a semi-professional musician myself, I can understand why people are so hesitant to pay musicians for their work.  Perhaps if bands up the level of professionalism, they can command more.

Bottom Line:
If you don’t like a gig that’s presented to you, don’t take it.   Every time you leave someone scrambling to cover your mess, they remember your name.  And it’s a fact that people are ten times more likely to share a bad customer service experience than a  good one.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

? Thomas Jefferson

Syndicated from: Creative Deconstruction

It used to be the record label’s jobs to tell us who to listen to.  A&R would scour the earth looking for talent, groom them, coach them and surround them with people who could get them where they wanted to go.  If the label caught the scout’s vision they would sign the act and fund a record or two.  There was a process.  It wasn’t perfect, but a process nonetheless.  Labels stopped doing this years ago.  Maybe it was MTV that started the decline of artist and repertoire.  Labels saw the money that could be made off a pretty face and their priorities began to change.  Before you knew it Britney Spears was at the top of the charts.  Once the majors began to consolidate and were gobbled up by companies run by executives who hadn’t played a record since the Carpenters, the role of Taste-maker belonged to fewer and fewer entities who cared less and less about the art of music.

As listeners began realizing that they were being fed a diet of insubstantial junk, it was the beginning of the end for the industry.  You can blame Napster all you want, but what made Napster so appealing was that it exposed fans to music they had never had access to when the major labels were running the show.  It was like one massive, world-wide mix tape that anyone with a broadband connection could tap into.  Independent bands started to realize that people in places they had never even toured were not only listening to their music, but were sharing it with their friends.

Now new tracks are pouring onto the Internet like auto workers into a state unemployment office.  Except there’s no line, and nobody working behind the counter.  Armed with a free copy of Garageband and the vague hope that someone, somewhere might listen, scores of nameless musicians are doing their best to take advantage of the new digital frontier.  It’s largely the same situation for listeners.  A music fan who logs onto MySpace looking for fresh tracks could spend endless hours scrolling through band profiles, probably finding more misses than hits.  It might take weeks before they uncover something that really gets inside them.

The major labels dropped the ball.  The world needs taste-makers.  People want help discovering new music.  When the labels couldn’t be trusted, at least the world always had independent record stores.  The fact that music lovers were willing to weather the elitist condescension of record store employees is proof of this: people want someone to tell them what they should like!  Of course, record stores were a casualty of the digital revolution, too.  An unintended and unfortunate casualty, but I’m not sure any amount of wistful nostalgia can bring them back now (though there are many who still try – and God bless them.)

This is why services like Last.fm make such big deal about their recommendation engines.  They’ve created a system built on crowd-sourcing and meta-tags in order to fill the taste-maker void.   I have found a few artists through Last.fm that I’ve now added to my regular rotation. But crowds are stupid.  The individual members of a crowd might by intelligent and capable, but put them together – stupid.  Read Malcom Gladwell?s Blink if you don’t believe me, he?ll convince you.  75% of the songs that end up on my Last.fm station are either mediocre or downright terrible.

I know there is more good music out there – but where is it?  We need people and services to step up and tell us where to find the good stuff so that we don?t have to waste so much time on the filler.  Technology can help but real people need to be involved, too.  Pandora has a good start, using over 50 actual humans to analyze a host of criteria when making recommendations.  Mufin is brand new, and looks like it may be the most comprehensive recommendation engine to date.  But even these options don’t feel human, so they don’t carry much weight.  People don’t want recommendation engines, they want to hear someone they trust raving about an artist they love.  Maybe it will be bloggers, maybe indie labels will step up to the plate, or maybe someone will create an engine that really does the trick.  Either way, in our post record industry world, the sooner the new taste-makers emerge the sooner the real talent will have a chance to rise more quickly to the top. That’s good for everybody- except maybe the filler.

There are only 12 notes in Western Music. This video shows how many pop hits can come out of just one Four Chord Progression. Apparently, quite a few. This video was created by the Axis of Awesome, and they’re worth checking out. You can support them (and get some cool swag) here.

T Racks 3 Screenshot

One of the most important, yet often overlooked, elements of a professional recording is mastering. Mastering isn’t a part of mixing, it is the final stage before audio is duplicated, where the fidelity (punch, clarity and volume) are added to the track. Mastering is one of the separators between demo and pro recordings, and high quality mastering can literally separate a hit from just another song. IK Multimedia’s latest installment of the T-Racks Mastering Suite takes the art of digital mastering to a whole new level, bringing advanced signal processing and fidelity to the masses.. With T-Racks 3, anyone can get music mastered at the level of a professional mastering lab.

I’ve been a T-Racks user for years, and I recently had the opportunity to work with the new T-Racks 3 software. I thought T-Racks 3 was going to be a rehashed version of software I loved. I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. The interactivity, new plug ins, and sound quality blew my mind. I expected to see a familiar piece of software, with 4 signal processors popping up on the screen. When I opened the program and saw the 12 configurable slots for the signal chain, my first thought was “is this for real?” This didn’t even look like the program I have used for years. Once I started testing the program out on a final mix, I found it to be easy and fun to use. Within two hours I had three distinct masters to choose from, and each of them sounded sonically equal to almost any major label release I have heard.

T-Racks 3 is available for both Mac and Windows, and the plug ins can be loaded into almost any audio program as well as used as standalone software. The program is beautiful and the plug ins look real (and gorgeous). All the modules can be turned on and off individually (allowing you to actually hear the difference each plug-in makes to your master), and the 12 slots are configurable in a variety of ways. There is even a bypass button that lets you compare your original (plug in free) mix with the mastered version.

As if all that isn’t enough, the five new processors (available in the Deluxe version) are recreations of some of the most powerful and well-known studio equipment in history, including limiters, compressors, and equalizers. T-Racks brings the quality, equipment, and results of some of the finest mastering studios on the planet into your home studio, and the program clocks in at under $400. If you want your tracks to sound professionally mastered, and have the highest professional fidelity, then T-Racks 3 may be the best choice for your home studio.

Top 10 Indie Music Marketing Tools

5. GYDGET - Everybody’s got widgets, but these guys get it right by enabling you to grab your info, music, and video and spread it across the net. Free.

6. REVERBNATION – Communicate with fans, build a street team, get widgets and Facebook apps, sell stuff. Tools do do it all and most of them free.

7. TUNECORE - Affordable flat rate digital distribution to all the major download sites worldwide with no strings attached.

8. TUBEMOGUL – You made a great video for a $23.57 budget. Now what do you do with it? Simultaneously upload to 18 sites including all the biggies then track performance. Basic service is free. (Bonus: A list of viral video sites.)

9. ARTISTDATA – Update tour dates on your website, MySace, Pure Volume, Last.fm, Jambase, Pollstar, Sonicbids and more all at once plus submit tour dates to local media.

10. MOZES, BAND TXT ALERTS (tie) You could use Twitter to communicate with fans, but not everyone wants an account. Every cell can accept text messages. Mozes is free (carrier rates apply) and robust, but pays for itself with ads that could upset some. Band TXT Alerts costs a little, but takes a way the ads.

bluhammock’s Jaylaan Shares “What Is Working?”

In conjunction with US. independent music trade group A2IM (American Association Of Independent Music), we’re asking indie professionals: In this fractured media landscape, what is working? What outlets and tools are helping your artists build an audience?

In this third installment Jaylaan Ahmad-Llewellyn, the founder of indie label bluhammock music (KaiserCartel, Cary Brothers, Swati, Val Emmich and more) responds:

“I think that this is an interesting question because it begs the question of what do you consider ‘working.’ There is building an audience that buys music, an audience that attends shows, and simply building awareness that you even exist as an artist…

click here to read more…

IndieBandSurvivalGuide.com is an open community created by indie musicians. It’s the place to share all the practical information, tools, and resources that’s available to indie musicians with one another. Think of this site as your band’s back office – a place to plan, share knowledge, network, and otherwise help you promote your music, get heard, and ultimately, win fans.

Check out The Future of Music Coalition. Their site contains many articles, videos, and resources for the modern indepedent musician, covering touring, marketing, digital sales, and other aspects of life in the post-industry world.

Here’s part of their manifesto:

The History of the Music Industry vs The Future of Music

June 1, 2000

The history of the American Music Industry is a disheartening one, which largely details the exploitation of artists and musicians by opportunists and those without the musicians’ best interests at heart.

For too long musicians have had too little voice in the manufacture, distribution and promotion of their music on a national and international level and too little means to extract fair support and compensation for their work.

Manufacturing and distribution monopolies concentrate the power of over 90% of music sold into the hands of five labels. With huge media mergers continuing to consolidate the decisions of what to play and promote, it becomes more and more difficult for artists to gain exposure through the few remaining coveted radio spots.

Historically, musicians have had one of two unattractive choices:

1. Align themselves with major label exploiters and agree to unfair compensation in the hopes of one day reaching a national audience; or
2. Resign themselves to working with indies and a life in the shadows.

read more at their site.