Guerrilla Internet Music Promotion

Let's face it. most bands have little budget available and marketing and promotion often come some way down the pecking order with recording and new gear being the most common first spends.

So that leaves bands trying to promote their recordings (and everything else) with almost no money. Not ideal as marketing and promotion often take the lions share of the spend with larger more established bands. The trouble is getting over the hump of "no money available".

Meanwhile bands have to make the most of their situation. In this respect the internet is a great leveler. There are a great many cheap ways to promote your music available. Most bands only employ a couple of basic ways to get their music out there. Each takes time, knowledge and patience, and in that way they are not necessarily "cheap".

The trouble is that for all the internet is a great leveler, there are so many bands fighting for attention that somehow your band needs to stand out.

There are five core parts to guerrilla (free) promotion:

• The product being promoted
• Your promotion goal
  
• Your perspective on that item, know your market!
  
• The promotion strategy
  
• The mechanics of that promotion

The product being promoted is the most obvious one of the 5 perhaps, but often bands do very little in terms of smart packaging of that item. For example the base packaging itself with little thought given to appeal. Here marketing can help... ask opinions!

Setting a promotion goal will ultimately help and is one of the most important facets of a promotion campaign. After all, how will you know a campaign is a success unless you have a goal to measure it by? A clear goal gives you something positive to aim for, and it gives you a direction.

Your perspective on the item being promoted is important too. This is really part of your promotion strategy but I thought it important enough to list on it's own. For example, a product is a product, what makes the difference is the perspective on it when it is presented. think of all those TV advertisements. Some use humor, others use sex appeal etc. they all gain an understanding of who their potential customer base is (by asking, by demographic research etc) and then construct a presentation that will appeal to that market. A common one to appeal to females when pitching household goods is showing how inadequate men are at household tasks with the female "getting one over on" the male, perhaps with a shrug or a laugh. This is because they know that it is a perspective that will appeal to housewives!

Well the same applies to music. Know your market! If you understand your potential buyers, then you can construct something that appeals to them. Not just the end product, it's how you present it!

The promotion strategy itself can encompass a diverse means in order to achieve your campaign goal. For example: You decide on a video as a promotion means, it uses your song, excerpts from your song video mixed with promotion messages of some kind. You choose a humorous perspective with a strong sexual appeal to teenage males (because your homework tells you they are your most likely buyers). You would like to promote this in a viral way. That might involve:

• A street team (virtual and / or real world)
• A few blogs you run
• Social networks
• Forums
• Mailing list
• Internet Radio
  
• Other means
  

This requires a plan, and coordination so that you can make the most of your promotion efforts. Fundamentally it involves timing!

Lastly comes the mechanics of achieving all this. This is not simply "How do I post on a forum?" or "How do I use my street team?", it is also the mechanics of coordinating your plan, of launching your product using all the means you plan to use for that specific promotion.

There are of course tools available for many aspects of realizing each step in this process. Were I to specify them all here that would be a very large post. So look out for more as I build upon this post. Meanwhile you might find an article I wrote for Songstuff a while ago a useful reference.

Make The Most of Your Music On The Web

The Craft and Business Of Songwriting

A great combination of songwriting craft tips intermingled with practical music industry lessons make this a very handy book for the songwriter's bookshelf.

Craft and Business of Songwriting 3rd Edition (Craft & Business of Songwriting)

It contains lots of examples and useful career advice drawn from successful artists in a variety of music genres, from country to hip-hop. An ideal book for beginners who want an overview of the business of being a songwriter.

Writing awesome songs is only part of the work of becoming a successful songwriter in this day and age. It is vital to understand music business concepts, and to manage your career well. This book at least gives you a fighting chance. In addition to dozens of exercises and examples, anecdotes from successful songwriters including Vince Gill, Sheryl Crow, and Paul McCartney are provided. An ideal resource for the insider secrets songwriters need to make them more competitive what is fast becoming a very crowded marketplace.

The author, John Braheny co-founded and directed the Los Angeles Screenwriters Showcase, is also a journalist, teacher, talk show host, and consultant.

Sonar X1 Producer

I've just upgraded from Sonar 8.5 to X1 and i have to say I'm pretty impressed. Some major changes in the interface with the ability to save "screen sets" of screen set ups making it much easier to move through different recording phases.

With this update they've also introduced some nice tabbing features making it far easier to navigate features and just about everything can be dragged and dropped including docking / floating components.

One of the other nice new features is a smart tool that changes functionality depending on it's context. That alone saves the hassle of regularly changing the tool you are using, allowing you to focus far more on the creative aspects of what you do and not what you are going to do it with.

One new feature that's pretty yummy is the ProChannel channel strip that's built into every channel offering quite extensive control.

It seems to be much more stable. I've tried it on Win 7 64-bit and on XP 32. I still find less issues on XP 32.

Some nice advances in the packaged plug ins too wind Dimension Pro getting some needed attention and Beatscape being a very nice addition.

That's all for nnow, more after I've explored it a bit more. So far it's a big thumbs up with some very welcome improvements.

Successful Lyric Writing by Sheila Davis

I thought I'd add some posts looking at the books in my own collection, offering my opinion on each book.

Successful Lyric Writing by Sheila Davis

This is an excellent book for those fairly new to serious lyrics writing. Covering the broad strokes of lyrics writing including theory, principles and common song forms Sheila's book provides a good foundation for those wanting to move from writing from the hip to an increased awareness of what the hell is going on when they write, why one song works better than another and so on.

As a workbook it also contains lots of examples and exercises to work through plus a useful set of definitions and explanations.

There are no rules in songwriting, guidelines yes, but songwriters frequently ignore those guidelines. Where books like this fit into the equation is in helping aspiring songwriters to understand what they trade off when making decisions about song lyrics. Making informed choices is a powerful thing.

Overall I found it an interesting book, a useful reference and definitely a handy book to have in your collection.

Scansion for lyrics writing

I'm thinking on writing an article about using scansion for lyrics writing.

It's a term many lyricists aren't familiar with, yet it can be a very useful tool if you are writing lyrics before the melody, and perhaps are unlikely to have much contact with the music writer. So it's ideally suited to the isolated lyricist.

Basically scansion helps you tidy up the meter of your lyrics so that the meter of the lyrics will be more consistent, with stressed syllables landing in the right place so that the melody works consistently through the song.

It's a tool that originated in poetry writing but when applied to lyrics it's a very useful technique in that realm too.. There's not a lot of info out there on exactly how to apply it to lyrics, so who knows... time to bite the bullet and dive in?

Studio rewiring finished!

Not the top of my list in things to do but at least it enables me to move on to finish some recordings that have been draft recordings for too long!

There's a few new pieces of gear added in, including an upgrade to Sonar X1 Producer to play with. I'm really looking forward to it.

As it stands i have 6 draft recordings to finish, including "Hit and Run", and about 10 completely new songs to begin recording. Add to that lots of lyrics to finish writing.

I do love recording a song for the first time. That transition from idea, through basic arrangement to a fully realized idea. So hopefully soon I'll have some freee tracks to share and some tasters for my upcoming album.

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