Browsing all posts in July, 2009.
How to Raise Money as a Musician
So, you have a big project coming up. You’re recording an album. That means your burning cds, printing album covers, touring, feeding yourself during this whole process, and keeping up with strings and equipment purchases. How do you do it? What happens when you are so tapped out that you can’t dig any deeper into [...]
SoundCloud File Sharing
I am part of a music duo and we have recently been recording an album. The engineer for the album asked us to begin sharing our work in progress files through a website called SoundCloud. SoundCloud basically acts as an FTP upload area to quickly share your music files with others. Many musicians are using [...]
Where are the Downloading Thiefs?
Illegal downloads of music are down. 42% of 14-18 year olds downloaded music illegally in 2007. By January of this year, that number was down to 26%. Now the RIAA & the record labels would like to think they scared people into not downloading by suing their pants off. Problem is, that didn’t really have [...]
Social Media & Creativity
Does this new emphasis on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace take away from the creative process? Is it possible that the artist begins to spend too much time updating Facebook instead of writing new songs? Yeah, the major artists have teams completing the social networking, but sometimes that becomes obvious. If a corporate intern is doing [...]
Apple Income: 8 Billion & Counting
Kudos to Apple and its iTunes store that just hit 8 billion song downloads. That’s 8 billion in 6 years. They are now averaging more than 2 billion song sales per year. Apple takes roughly 30% of each song sale. That’s $2.4 billion in sales. Not bad when the rest of the record industry is [...]
Mega Man & Music
Capcom just released Mega Man II for the iPhone. This popular Nintendo game from the 90′s can now be played in its original format on the iPhone. The phone’s screen actually mimics a Nintendo controller and a mini screen shows up in the center. This is brilliant. Capcom offers one level of the game for [...]
BCBG | Maxrave and New Music Discovery
What do you do when you aren’t selling your product in traditional outlets? You look for new outlets. And that is exactly what is happening with some new bands and the Maxrave retail outlet. Maxrave is a subsidiary of BCBG Max Azria that caters to women aged 16-24. Maxrave has over 280 stores in the [...]
Digital Music Percentages
A disconnect exists between the % of digital music consumed and the % of Record Label sales derived from those digital sales. EMI’s CEO, Elio Leoni-Sceti, recently stated that “seventy percent of music consumption is digital and yet only about twenty percent of music company revenues are derived from digital.” It is likely that 80% [...]
Apple’s App Store
Over 1.5 billion applications (apps) have now been downloaded for the Apple iPhone & iTouch. All that in about a year. And it was just about a month ago when that number was 1 billion apps. The rapid sales of the new 3GS phone have played a large part in this amazing increase. Over 40 [...]
The Do It Yourself Artist – Part II
For the Do It Yourself artist, what is one of the most important determinations of their success? Well, like all entrepreneurial endeavors, success largely depends on keeping expenses low. Very low. As in, each band member lives very frugally. And herein lies the trouble. The superstar artist of the past lived extravagantly off money from [...]
