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Advice for Musicians

So here we are...at the end of another year and, in this case, another decade.

This would be a great opportunity for me to do something like a "year in review."  Nothing like a good "Best of" or "Worst of" to finish out the last few days of a decade, right?

There are plenty of those stories around, so instead, I've decided to give you the best advice for music business success that I've got.

Do it now.

Sounds simple, and perhaps you're wondering, "Do what now?  I don't know what to do!!"

The answer to that question was best answered by Ray Bradbury, when he said, "Jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down."

The Best Way to Be Successful at Anything

Being successful within the music business is a lot like learning a new language... 

What's the best way to learn a foreign language?  Go to a country where they speak it all the time and you'll learn more in a month than you would in years of "school."  Total immersion is the best classroom.

Same for your music business career.  You can say you want to be a fulltime musician, but as long as you have a job or something else to keep you in your comfort zone, it's unlikely anything will change the current situation you're in to make that happen.

Are You Pavlov's Dog?

If you're working a day job, you've got a tremendous amount of inertia to overcome.  Most people have years of heavy social programming, which makes them think they "need" a dayjob.  Beyond that though, a "weekly paycheck" trains us in its own way.

We're more like animals than we think.  Do a trick, get rewarded.

Just worked 40 hours?  Here's a paycheck.  Good boy!

That's hard to walk away from!!  I get it.  But understanding this will help you do just that.

How to Change Your Music Business Career in a Single Day

In my years of working with musicians, the two biggest problems most have are:

1. Comfort
2. Treating music like a job

Total immersion solves both of these very quickly.  It immediately takes you out of your comfort zone of a regular paycheck (and what comes with it-- food, clothing, shelter, etc) and puts you in a place where you have to make things happen in order to survive.

Have a problem asking for what you're worth?  Giving away CDs?  Playing for free?  Do music fulltime, get a little hungry, and watch what happens...

Have friends who think what you're doing is a "hobby" and want to attend your shows for free?  Do music fulltime and the problem is solved.

And the list goes on and on...

So let me repeat my advice one more time...

Do it Now

Seriously, do it now.  If you really want this as much as you say you do, do it now.  Otherwise, the upcoming year end up just like this one did.

Christmas Number One 2009

Anybody from England knows what a big deal Christmas Number One is.  And Christmas Number One for 2009 is...

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE!!

Not just any Rage Against the Machine, but 1992's "Killing in the Name."

How did it happen?  Well, social media had a lot to do with it...

More info here.

Thoughts?

It Wasn't Raining When Noah Built the Ark...

Here's more advice from my new book, Never Leave Money on the Table - How to Grow Any Business and Get Really Rich with 10 Simple Marketing Strategies. This isn't a book about music, it's a book about business.  More specifically, it's a book about how you can grow your business and make more money with it.  Same business, more money.

The book focuses on 10 principles and how you can use them to get more customers, generate more money, and do more of what you love.  If you're already doing these things, this book will show you to to do them better and more efficiently.

The principle I want to focus on now is planning for success...

Ask any 9-to-5er what you should plan for when going full-time in the music business and they'll tell you, "Have a back-up plan in case you fail." True entrepreneurs, however, will warn you to plan for success. Because, surprisingly, it's success that can really kill a new business if you aren't prepared for it.

When two renegade cows took over a billboard above a busy highway outside Atlanta in 1995, no one knew the message they conveyed would be heard all around America. The three-dimensional billboard shows one black and white cow atop the back of another cow, who was painting the words, "Eat Mor Chikin®."

In his book by the same name Eat Mor Chikin, Inspire More People, Chick-fil-A® founder S. Truett Cathy explains that the company had no idea that the advertising campaign with the now-famous cows would prove to be so popular. The company had not planned a major, nationwide billboard campaign, but when Cathy saw the positive response from that first billboard, he saw the unexpected opportunity and took advantage of it—and the rest is history. For more than a decade, Chick-fil-A's renegade cows have been amusing the public and driving customers in herds to the popular fast-food restaurant.

According to Chick-fil-A, within a year, the Richards Group, the advertising agency that developed the original billboard, turned the renegade cows into an integrated advertising campaign that included point-of-purchase items in the stores and radio ads.

Since the cow campaign debuted in 1995, Chick-fil-A's business has increased five-fold from $500,000,000 in 1995 to more than $2.64 billion in 2007. Not bad work for a couple of renegade cattle and a paintbrush!

Prior to that campaign, the company hoped for success in the general sense, but no one could have foreseen the impact that one little billboard would have. So, don't just prepare for failure; prepare for success.

Numerous business books are filled with horror stories of businesses cannibalized out of business by their own success. It doesn't matter how good you are if you can't meet an increased demand for your product or service. Be ready to succeed. Plan for it and have a contingency plan.

In 1995, when teenage rebel Shawn Nelson decided to build a bigger, better beanbag, not too many folks laughed. He sold the oversized, overstuffed bean bags to family and friends until one day he got an order for 12,000 of them from a company rep who saw and liked the bags. He officially founded LoveSac® with some friends in 1998.

Their $500,000.00 order might have seemed like a windfall, but with a company of one, Shawn had to scramble to produce that first big order. He did, using all the profits to complete the huge order, but the Cinderella story had begun. In 2005 he walked away with $1 million as the winner of Richard Branson's (Virgin Atlantic® owner and billionaire) reality TV show "The Rebel Billionaire."

Then in 2006, with only $500,000.00 in estimated assets, Nelson filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. His top 30 unsecured claims totaled more than $3.2 million. That hasn't stopped him. In 2008, Nelson's unique seating became the only seating in a refurbished Texas movie theater. He hasn't let his roller coaster ride of success and failure deter him from his business.

Entrepreneurs, especially in the music business, never travel smooth, flat highways. While most businesses won't ever experience the extreme ups and downs of Shawn Nelson's LoveSac® venture, complete with winning a reality show and a million dollars, you never know what can happen. So, plan for success. Failure will take care of itself. If you focus on failing, that's where your mind will be. Refocus and plan to succeed. Big corporations do.

Car manufacturers are working on new models years before the public ever sees them. Microsoft knows what will happen this year, next year, and the next. Even as one new product is hitting the shelves, research and development has already started working on the next product and the next improvements.

For the new full-time musician just starting off, that pressure can seem immense. You haven't even gotten your first year under your belt and already you need to project the next year and the next and the next!

Relax. You don't have to do it all at once. There is a process to get to the top of the stairs. Take it one step at a time . . .

Recognize that most musicians are entrepreneurs by default. Default entrepreneurs simply have a hobby, passion or need to make more money selling something they're particularly involved in. They are sold on their product and assume others will be too. They fail to look ahead, let alone plan ahead. If this is you, be aware that there's a lot more to owning, running and succeeding in a business than just having a good product or service.

So what are your plans for the upcoming year?  Post your thoughts below...

Free Music Publicity via Google

Don't you just love it when you're watching something on the news and some idiot is behind the on-scene reporter making funny faces?  Annoying, yes, but also hilarious...at least to a guy like me.

What would happen if you did something like that, but instead of making funny faces, you held up a sign telling people to go to your website? Annoying, yes, but also good exposure for you...maybe.

But take that idea and do it dozens of times, using a service like Google Maps, which photographs, or seems to have photographed, just about every street in North America, and you've got something that goes beyond just getting your face in front of a bunch of people...you've got a story the mass media will pick up on.  And that gets your face and the name of your band in front of even more people...

That's what Saskatoon musician Nate Heagy did.

"When Google announced that Street View was coming to Saskatoon, a light bulb went on," he said. "I just thought Street View would allow anyone on any corner to be seen by any number of people anywhere."

So when he saw the fine folks from Google driving around, taking pictures, getting on a corner is exactly what he did.

But Nate is a guy who thinks big, so he didn't just stop with one corner...

Following in the footsteps of a fellow Canadian, hockey star Wayne Gretzky, who once said his success was his ability to "anticipate where the puck was going to be," Nate used the same skill on Google's car.  He figured out its pattern, drove ahead, and waited...and then he did it again...and again.

Did Nate sell any records because of this?  From what I can tell, no.  Still though, it's something he can leverage to make something like that happen. 

At the least, it's a foot in the door and a way to develop rapport when he calls a booking and asks, "Remember that guy all over the news for promoting his music via Google Maps?" 

And at worst, I think it's a great story of getting music publicity in a way that wouldn't have been possible even just a few years ago.

Tiger Woods - Part 3

So you've got a few multi-million dollar endorsement deals, you win just about every golf tournament you enter, and your wife is a bikini model from Sweden...

Why cheat?

Tons of reasons...the main one being that you're not happy with what you've got.

Why?

Happiness is an inside thing.  If you're not happy on the inside, it doesn't matter what you have on the outside.  The problem is that most of us don't know this until we actually get what we think will make us happy.

There is somebody reading this now, maybe you, who is actually going to get what he's striving for when it comes to music business success.  When you actually go for it with a plan in place, it happens...a lot.

But what happens when you get it?

Then you've got to start looking at the other things in your life, which you've neglected, because you were so focused on getting a record deal, selling albums, packing shows, or whatever else.  And when this happens, you may just be thrown off...big time.

Can't tell you how many people "successful" musicians and songwriters I've met who are completely miserable on the inside.  These folks are like the walking dead, just going through the motions of life and not enjoying any of it.

These folks love to chase whatever the next thing is... And when they get there, it's more of the same.  The grass is never greener.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way.  If you have a clean vision for what "success" is and why you're really doing the things you're doing, you'll be fine.  In my opinion, it helps to have a reason that is bigger than you are.

Charity is one of these things, which is why you see so many celebrities getting involved with things like social and humanitarian issues.  It's why Derek Sivers gave CD Baby to charity.

I'm not saying you have to donate money to charity or even volunteer your time; I'm saying you'll benefit by having a "purpose" to what you're doing and you may find something involving charity helpful.

So what's your purpose for doing what you do?  Post it below...

Tiger Woods - Part 2

Yesterday, I talked about leveraging current events with something outrageous to get publicity. Here is an example...

Something like this could get a lot of attention for your band... Is it the kind of attention you want? Maybe. Just pointing out that it could get you a lot of attention.

Opportunities like this are happening daily...

Tiger Woods - Part 1

To update those who have been under a rock... Tiger Woods has been cheating on his wife.

So what, right? This is a music marketing blog.

And that's why we're going to talk about marketing...specifically the marketing of dating site AshleyMadison.com.

Watch this...

You see, Ashley Madison is a site which caters who married people who want to have an affair.  And since Tiger has been cheating on his wife, he's the perfect guy to be its spokesperson.

That's why Ashley Madison has offered Tiger $5,000,000 to do the job.

Brilliant!

No way in hell is Tiger Woods going to do this job for $5,000,000.  For one, that's not that much money to him.  Plus, he'd likely lose much larger endorsements due to "ethics" clauses, which all endorsements carry these days to allow companies to get out of big payouts when situations just like this one happen.

The people at Ashley Madison know this, so they issue a press release making the offer and kick back, watching all the free publicity they're getting.

This isn't anything new and it happens all the time.  In 1984, Gillette reportedly offered Billy Gibbons and and Dusty Hill of ZZ Top $1,000,000 each to shave their beards for a television commercial.  Larry Flynt does similar offers for celebrities to appear nude in his magazine.

The point isn't to get the endorsement, the commercial, or the pictorial; the point is to get people talking...and that's exactly what it does.

Have you ever done something outrageous to get media attention?  Post it below...

"My Bio Teacher is a Druggie"

Eric Hutchinson is giving his fans a holiday treat by writing four songs based on emails they send in about their lives.

The first song he wrote and posted was based on a story from a fan named Kristina who thought her biology teacher was a little weird. Hutchinson titled it, "My Bio Teacher is a Druggie." The next fan-inspired song will be posted Monday on EricHutchinson.com.

Eric is a cool guy.  I did an interview with him earlier this year about how he got a record deal, lost it, and got another record deal...with the same label!

Christmas Music (and How to Cash In)

Seems that the Christmas season is getting longer and longer each year...  It used to be that retailers waiting under after Thanksgiving to start playing holiday music.  These days, it can start within a few days of Halloween.

Coming out with a holiday album is a great way to cash in on the frenzy.  And not only that, these albums are "evergreen" and can be released year after year.

Everybody is doing this, with good reason.  Holiday albums make money.  A couple of weeks ago, I talked to Rob Halford of Judas Priest about his new holiday record.  If he can sell a holiday record, which is far from traditional, you can.

I'll have that interview up here soon.  Until then, check out what Geoff Smith is doing with the Impressions...

More info on Geoff Smith is here.

Purchase I'm Coming Home for Christmas from Amazon.