How to Make a Living as a Full-Time Indie Musician cont.

Carrying on from my last post, I found this great post on the Ariel Publicity blog where successful indie artist John Taglieri’s philosophy on being an indie musician was summarised.

Read more about ‘How to Make a Living as a Full-Time Indie Musician’ at Ariel Publicity (The Original Cyber PR Blog).

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How to Make a Living as a Full-Time Indie Musician

I’ve been listening a lot recently to this audio download titled “How to Make a Living as a Full-Time Indie Musician”.

Music marketing author Bob Baker interviewed indie successful artist John Taglieri and picked his brains on how John took control of his indie music career, what steps he took and how he has been able to give up the day job to focus on music full-time.

There are were many similarities discussed which parallel building a good business, things like

Determining your vision as an artist
Setting regular goals to achieve
Figuring out what success means to you
Working on the baby steps every day to push you forward

They discuss the pro’s and con’s of the indie music path versus the major music path. John describes a major label record deal as a bad car loan and he explains why.

They discuss plenty more insightful topics including using Myspace, publicity and building a fan base.

You can learn more about it on Bob Baker’s website.

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Have You Sorted Out Your Band Press Kit?

A really valuable tip I picked from the music marketing workshop I attended the other week was the need to have a press kit available 24/7.

You should have both an online and offline version available for press, promoters, booking agents, etc.

The press kit would include things like:

Band bio
Press photos
Music samples
EPK or video bio

By having both an online and offline version, if you don’t happen to have any physical press kits on hand for whatever reason to give to someone, you can direct them to your website where they can get all the necessary information they require.

Your website is available 24/7 so put it to work!

Keep your bio concise
Also try and keep all your information current and concise, a bio that’s 10 pages won’t get read. Trim the fluff and just present the most compelling facts you can.

Image thumbnails
When you upload hi-res press pictures, make sure you create thumbnail images for people to preview.

EPK (Electronic Press Kit)
It’s worth the little effort needed to create a 2 or 3 minute video where you can present what the band is all about.

Anything that can help make life easier for the person seeking information on you is a plus and a video can present a bit of personality that won’t come across on a written bio.

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Do You Have A Music Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a systematic process which people go through in order for you to establish who is seriously into what you or your band does.

The marketing funnel looks like this:
Suspect -> Prospect -> Customer -> Life Long Customer

The Suspect (Unknown interest)
With a marketing funnel, everyone is a suspect until they raise their hand and express an interest in what you do. You can’t be sure who is interested in what your band does until they give you a sign they are interested.

You can’t convince someone to like your music if they don’t, you just want to sort through and find the people who are interested.

The Prospect (Known interest)
As soon as someone indicates they are interested in what you do, they move on and become a prospect. This can be indicated by someone joining your mailing list or becoming friends on Myspace for example.

They have now qualified themselves as someone you should establish more contact with. The point now is to see if they are interested enough to move on and buy your music to become a fan or customer.

The Customer (Fan)
These are the guys and girls who have proven they like you enough to spend money on you. Treat them well and look after them as these are the people who most likely to spend more money with your band buying more music, merchandise, tickets to shows, etc.

The Life Long Customer (Raving fan)
These are the hardcore fans who will back you no matter what. They eat, live, breathe and believe in what you do to the very ends of the earth.

These are the people who are keen to help spread the message about your band, join your street team and want to help promote you. They will support and buy almost anything you do.

Why is a marketing funnel important?
It gives you a way for figuring out who is at what stage and how that can benefit you as an artist. As people move through the different stages, the numbers become less and less but their value to you becomes more and more.

A hundred raving fans will benefit you in so many more ways than a thousand interested prospects. What you need to do is nurture your relationships with people and figure out who is who.

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How To Post Video To Multiple Video Sites

It can be real time consuming uploading a video to multiple sites usually.

TubeMogul takes the hassle out of it where you upload a video once and then they distribute it to multiple sites for you!

You need to sign up for an account with TubeMogul and then each other video site service you wish to use ie. Youtube, Google video, Yahoo video, Metacafe, etc.

After that, you provide Tubemogul with your login and passwords for the video sites you have accounts with and they upload it to them for you.

They even provide statistics on your video views so you know where and how often your videos are getting viewed.

Handy service huh?

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Youtube Tips For Musicians

Since Youtube is the third most visited site in the world according to Alexa, it makes sense that you get a presence for your band on there asap!

Aside from music videos, you can use Youtube for video messages to your fans, posting live performance clips, showcasing any news articles or interviews you may do or have, basically anything that you can communicate with video.

People like to view the personalities of the people behind the band these days so show them!

What camera should you use?
The cheapest and easiest option would be to use the video option on a standard digital camera. Download your video off your camera through USB and then upload to Youtube and viola, you’re done.

If you feel the need, you can always upgrade to a camcorder later which is certainly handy if you wish to film live performances.

What about editing software?
If you need to edit your video, I’d recommend using Windows Movie Maker or Apple iMovie. They’re free and more than capable of performing the basic editing required, you can even add titles and captions to your videos.

Add your url to all videos
Yes you can place your url in the video description box but it doesn’t quite grab the attention of the viewer as when its watermarked and displayed the whole time throughout the video.

It will help drive interested people back to your website which you should then encourage to sign up to your mailing list so you can stay in touch!

Using Youtube annotations
If you’re too lazy to learn how to use editing software for adding text and titles, Youtube has a feature called annotations where you can overlay text onto your Youtube videos! Handy for adding your band url and extra comments that you wish to convey.

How to make a dirt cheap music video
Find some cool video footage of something and add your song as the ’soundtrack’ to that footage, skateboarding, surfing, motor racing, whatever!

People searching for videos on surfing, for example, will find your video, if they like the song they’ll see your url and visit your site. Add them to your mailing list, show them what a great band you are and encourage them to buy your music!

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Band Promotion Tip – Always Build Up A Mailing List

The first and most important suggestion I can give to help you promote your band online is to collect names and email addresses of anyone remotely interested in your band, both from online and off line sources.

I’m not talking about collecting random email addresses either and spamming them!

Build up your mailing list
What you want to do is collect people who willingly wish to hear from you by way of them signing up or opting into your mailing list or band newsletter.

You can then stay in touch and communicate with them, letting them know what you’re up to and continuously promote your music to them.

If they don’t dig what you do, they can easily unsubscribe which is a good thing as you only want interested people on your mailing list.

Why build a list?
Simply because unless they are extremely motivated, they could see you live for the first time or bump into something online, think it was kind of cool but then completely forget about you.

Without a mailing list, you have no way of communicating directly to the very people that are interested in you.

Mailing List Software
PHPList is great, open source, newsletter software and best of all, it’s FREE.
Aweber is a powerful autoresponder service that works on a monthly subscription.

With PHPList, you install it on your web server and send out messages whenever you like.

Aweber differs in that you can write a predetermined sequence of messages which will begin to be sent out when someone signs into your mailing list. This is really handy if you wish each new mailing list member to receive messages that perhaps explain more about your band, your history, anything really.

Both allow you to send personalised messages so instead of them saying just ‘Hey’ or ‘Hey everyone’, you can say ‘Hey John’.

It makes it seem like you’ve personally sent your message to him which is much nicer than just broadcasting a group email.

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