The future for musicians looks like more than just great recordings and live shows. The opportunities that the internet provides modern artists is available to everyone, and thus its potential is diluted. One powerful tool in creating buzz around your project or career is to get noticed. And one way to get noticed is to generate interest in who you are, and what you’re saying. in other words, creating and maintaining a conversation with your audience.

Pop culture can overwhelm us with the personal lives of famous people, and annoy us to no end with the antics of celebrities. Billboard has an excellent article on the effect of this kind of marketing on the careers of the ultra-famous. Keeping themselves in the public eye is a critical element to the careers of these top tier entertainers. Even bad press is good press for them.

For the independent artist, this same technique can yield different results. We can expand our scope and reach by generating attention for who we are, and what we have to say. Marketing a personality is nothing new. Here’s an article from Time Magazine in 1978, looking at the same methods and issues we are discussing today.

Once you have fulfilled your artistic vision, and you’re putting yourself out there, the make-or-break factor in success becomes notoriety. While having ten thousand friends on Myspace seems like a powerful promotional tool, does it really measure anything other than the number of people that landed on your page and clicked add me?

One of the most effective tools for creating a buzz for yourself, your project, and what you’re up to is blogging, and blogging often. If you are anything like me, you spend at least some of your week surfing the internet and consuming content. You have sites that you visit regularly. Consider that what keeps you coming back to a site is the steady stream of new and interesting content. Content that speaks to you.

A healthy career is grown through a fanbase. Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Prince, and Madonna are able to free themselves from major labels and even give away their music because their fans are loyal, and people are tuning in.

While it may seem like the forward momentum is slow, steady and regular content on your project webpage, blog, or social networking page is critical to bring people back. And the more time people spend on your sites, the more interested they will be in supporting your cause.

I am guilty of not providing a steady stream of information on my blogs at times, and it impacts my return traffic, and the hype around my own projects and Polyvibe. I am preparing to condense this blog with my personal blog, providing the same great content with half the work. Like Uncle Scrooge says, work smarter, not harder.

For any artist who is committed to bringing viability to their career, having a powerful voice, and keeping the conversation going are critical elements to success.

I invite you to comment on this post with your opinions. If the waters ripple, we’ll talk more about creating a cult of personality, the results people are seeing from this kind of grassroots marketing, and methodology that can be implemented to increase your results.

Our ears bring us some of the greatest pleasure. Life is a song that plays all the time: running water, the hum of an air conditioner or computer, traffic, the soft breaths of our loved ones while they sleep.

And music touches, moves, and inspires people. It defines cultural movements, joyous occasions, painful break ups – music evokes powerful memories and responses in us. A song can forever bring us back to specific moments in our lives, to sights and smells of times that have passed us by. Music transcends time, and walks with us through our lives.

We live in an era where the palette of music we can paint onto the canvasses of our lives is a rich spectrum. Any sound we are looking for can be found and heard. The experience of listening has no price, and the soundtracks of our lives are personal. We listen to music with a focus and generosity we give few other things, for music only lives in the moment.

Music has no past, and no future. It exists only now, in the same moment our lives are occurring. It moves with us through life, and as we breathe in and out, music pulses and lives in the same moments we do.

We can break down music to an academic concept or a product, and we can break down the people who listen to it as statistical information. In the end, we listen to music because it moves us. It touches our hearts. It adds a richness to our life experiences, and expands the intensity of our lives. We are not numbers on a sheet, and we are not sales figures. We are human beings, and the music we listen to is one of our most intimate and personal experiences. Even in a crowded room or concert, it speaks to us directly.

Music is a conversation. Spoken by one human being, and heard by another. The listener gets to say how the music moves them. And while we tend to describe it in terms of good or bad, ultimately only the listener can say if a piece of music moves them, and what the experience of it is. As long as it evokes a powerful response, any piece of music has fulfilled its intention. It is when the listener reacts with apathy that a piece has not touched them.

Sometimes I forget why I make music. I get caught up in trends and analysis and perspectives that I lose sight of why I got into this game in the first place. I lose sight of the fact that music has the power to inspire people, and that it is a force that shapes our lives. Music is a shared experience, and once it leaves the studio, it’s a gift to the world, something that no longer belongs to the artist.

This is what called me into making music in the first place, and to support other artists in sharing theirs with the world. When we are dust, our music lives on. Many artists left this world long ago, and their music continues to impact the lives of people today. There are albums that are 40 years old that are discovered by every new generation, and continue to impact people’s lives with the same power they did they day they were released.

I don’t make music for glory, or money, or fame. I don’t seek to release music for recognition, power, or credibility. I want every musician to know that their art has indelibly touched someone’s soul, and to give listeners opportunities to find the song that will forever bring them back to those magical moments of their lives.

We have all been touched by music. I invite you to reply to this post, and share why you listen to music, and the ways that it touches your life.

CD sales are dropping, set to be a small fraction of overall sales – and sooner, rather than later. A recent survey of high school students showed that there is a downward trend in music downloading in that age group. This is the next generation of music buyers. Perhaps their actions are pointing to something.

The Freakonomics blog posted an editorial recently with analysis of the record industry by five people who ought to know. Koleman Strumpf, an economics professor at the University of Kansas, had this to say:

“If file sharing hurts record sales, then albums that are more heavily downloaded should experience lower sales than comparable albums that are less downloaded. But, after controlling for the role of popularity, we found that downloads had little effect on album sales.” He wrote a whole paper on the subject, if you want to find out more.

In other words, file sharing is not the source of the drop in album sales. A powerful insight like this is the last word on file sharing for me (although not for the RIAA).

Audioholics.com posted a great editorial on whether CDs are approaching the event horizon of obsolescence. They include a buffet of statistics showing that while physical sales are slumping, digital sales are growing with velocity.

As the digital music market overtakes physical sales, CDs will become less available (relegated to major chain stores like Wal-Mart). We can see this shift with the demise of? Tower Records. When people can get all the music they want without going to overpriced record stores, they will. This trend has yet to infect mom and pop record stores, like Orlando’s own Park Avenue CDs, and since most of these stores are seen as boutiques rather than purveyors of the lastest industry tripe, most of them will likely survive (don’t forget that most small record shops deal with smaller and indie labels, and used CDs and vinyl).

People are still buying tons of music, and if digital music sales are any indication, music will continue to be a commodity. Although most commentary is still focused on what major labels can do to revive sales, the real issue is becoming what can artists do to empower themselves in this new realm.

People are exposed to a larger variety of sounds than ever before. Demand for music has skyrocketed, while profits are shrinking. The idea that music has lost much of its monetary value in the current market is a two fold effect: the novelty of file sharing and mega hard drives, and the price difference between a digital single or download and a CD.

We live in an era of convenience, and audiences consistently choose the format which is most user friendly (think audio tapes in the 80′s). The shift toward digital libraries has been predicted for years, and even with DRM, digital is already the industry standard. I’m still surprised that such a well-known and predicted phenomenon can cause such panic among executives. It’s almost as if upper management in the record industry has been ignoring the experts.

The quality of the music is a major factor in sales when people have access to massive catalogs, too. Hip Hop is a great example of this trend. Collapsing under the weight of violence and misogyny, some hip hop artist still enjoy huge mainstream and underground success. And the cause of this slump seems to be the choices made my industry executives over the last ten years.

The reality is this: The fate of major record labels has nothing to do with whether or not musicians will be able to create fulfilling careers, absolutely nothing. With unlimited access, people aren’t compelled to buy any album unless they absolutely want it.

And in case you wanted to know the secret to success in the music business in any climate:
Make Great Music!

Our friends at The Seminal caught our attention with their take on the RIAA “victory”.? I put the word in quotes because the nature of a victory is that it advances your cause in some way.

I invite you to check this astute commentary. Here’s my favorite part:

“That’s right, the artists who slave for years to make records, pour out their souls into their CDs, and enrich our lives in a myriad of ways don’t actually get any of the money recovered through these ridiculous lawsuits. Not one red cent.”

The commentary on this case is already so powerful, there;s little left to add.

Over the next few weeks, we will begin to look at other ways artists and musicians can generate revenue besides signing their futures over to transnational behemoths, and the future of record labels.

“Linkie Winkie is a bit of a social experiment and we want to see what happens. We’re not going to tell you much about it, except that its a very altruistic little site and loves to be talked about.

So if you can work out what it does, and get your timing right, then Linkie Winkie might help you out for a while.”

From what we can tell, by giving a shout out to Linkie Winkie, they will in turn to give you a shout out. How it does this, is still a mystery, but one blog discusses the effect of Linkie Winkie, while the other provides a bit on who is behind the experiment.

I’ll provide an update here if anything comes of this, but participating in a social experiment of the web 2.0 variety just seemed like a fun think to do on a Friday evening.

• “These days, most DJs can be contacted by e-mail. I’ve occasionally received e-mails from bands offering their music. I always listen to stuff that people send directly to me, and I’ve definitely ended up playing some of it.”
• “Simply calling up and asking DJs to play the CD will work pretty good, if you can put in the hours necessary to call lots of stations.”
• “A station member sorts the stuff into genres, and it’s put into a new music section. DJs look through the new music selection and play whatever strikes them as cool.” (Lesson: Make sure your style of music is crystal clear to whomever opens your package.)
• “Putting a big sticker on the front cover that says “SOUNDS LIKE:” helps. Compare yourself to heavily played college radio music.”
• “List the tracks you think are the best and describe them in basic terms (poppy folk, folky slowcore, whatever).”
• “Don’t use the words ‘lush’ or ‘soundscape’ anywhere on your promo material.”
• “(Point out) your best track. No music director has the time to skip through six tracks — they’re probably doing it between classes, or while they’re eating lunch.”

Read the whole thing at the Ask MetaFilter discussion raging right now.

originally published on dr.xnlb.com

While it will probably never supplant UPC entirely (or even at all), due to it’s ubiquitous nature, and entire industries and retail outlets already employing Barcode scanners for inventory and checkout procedures, ThingLink is a great idea, and a free alternative to the UPC system. The service will appeal more to artists and artisans that are making limited run items and still want a way for people to find out more about them later.

As an experiment, I’ve registered Polyvibe Records’ first two releases with the site (which seems to be a bit buggy at the moment):

• Future Funk Collective – Future Funk Collective
• ? Thing:105ENN
• A_Scissors – Flux Decapitator
• ? Thing:742GEM

While the actual releases won’t be labeled with their ThingLinks, future releases might. We’ll still have to register UPCs, as they are required by our distributors, and I don’t expect them to adopt the ThingLink system anytime soon. But there might be some value in registering each release with both Systems. However, if you don’t put a UPC symbol on your stuff, due to cost or other reasons, ThingLink is definitely the way to go.

Spotted on Boing Boing