Musicians

New repositionable vinyl stickers offer bands some excellent new promotional tools.

Promoting your band with vinyl stickers is a new way to get people talking. Vinyl stickers may be custom made with your band logo or life size photos of your band in action and of the band members.

What’s this new vinyl sticker material called? FotoSticks. Repositionable and reusable vinyl stickers that won’t harm walls. You can stick them up just about anywhere and then take them down and move them somewhere else. Assuming that they get dirty, just was h them off with warm water.

You might give away free and inexpensive smaller vinyl stickers while selling life size stickers to create a promotion that funds itself.

Here are several promotional ideas:

• Give away small vinyl stickers of your band’s logo at the door

• Sell life size wall stickers of your band in action and the members along with very large stickers of your band logo.

• Locate out where agents live and plaster their neighborhood bulletin boards and store windows (with permission, of course)

• Place them in jewel cases

• Put them on fan’s cars during a gig

Here are some more detailed promo ideas…

The band Brew

Thanks to Mike Larrabee for this idea, it’s great. Do you have a Regional micro-brewery? See about getting a few cases of beer in the absence of front labels. Then create your own label and order the design as a FotoStick. You may put them on the bottles and your fans may buy a beer and get a free promotional sticker that may be re-stuck anywhere they like.

Steal This Sticker

Put your band stickers on bulletin boards, windows and anywhere else you dare. people may simply peel them off and use them again anywhere they want. They won’t harm walls or windows.

Artist Co-Promotion

Locate a good performer or two and have a monthly promotion that includes a limited run of only a specified amount of stickers featuring a certain artist. When they are gone, that is it, they are no longer available. Do this each month and you might promote collecting performer memorabilia and create some buzz.

Bar Graffiti

Put your performer stickers all over the bar or club you are playing in and let the listeners know that they may peel them off and keep them.

Photos of fans with performer Members

At each performance have one of the roadies take pictures of your fans with their favorite performer members. Collect their addresses and then send them some FotoSticks several weeks later to remind them of the night. You may be sure that they will show their friends and family. Since they are repositionable, they might put them on their notebooks or laptops to show around and then put them on their wall once they are done bragging.

Summary

Repositionable vinyl stickers are new and they get people talking. Not only are they a way to get your band image known, they establish a buzz just because they’re novel. So,do not hesitate, be the 1st band to show this new promotional tool to your fans. It is an inexpensive way to get the word out. Plus, if you sell the larger six and seven foot wall size stickers it can pay for itself and you can even profit from it in more ways than one.

FotoStick is a 5 mil vinyl material that has a sticky back that may be moved and removed in the absence of harming the surface they’re placed upon. Un prefer static cling, traditional stickers and custom magnets, FotoSticks are tough, durable and more versatile. They are prefer stickers but they may be used and re-used over and over again. They are prefer magnets except that they stick on al the majority any smooth surface. They are inexpensive and you could produce one custom sticker to one hundred thousand affordably. Stay up to date with new trends by reading the FotoStick Blog

No wonder we all seek to express ourselves in some way. To achieve success in music we need a band, as a solo career is no longer popular. And now you are amidst decisions how to choose the performer members to share you dazzling ups.

Well, there are two ways out:

1.To involve professional performers into the project and to divide obligations in advance. The only thing acquired is your own professional skills.

2.To surround yourself with deer companions and start following the path of studying altogether.

No matter which way you’ll go, just don’t haste. It can happen the guitarist will tear a strip off or the drummer will misfit a drum performance. It’s no use shouting on them. we all make mistakes every now and then.

first of all try studying few simple songs, prefer My Girl by Nirvana. But do not jump into mastering jazz or grind core, as the Suicidal Tendencies, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or the Slipknot represent.

For joint work to be fruitful enough, you should organize rehearsals into two parts, the way, one will be devoted to revising already studied tunes and the other one will be used for improvisation, which is of a excellent value, as the performer members study to predict every next step of each other. Its’ you feeling every sense of music in the result. You could feel it is aliveness by letting it through your mind. But the central thing is not to feel down in case everything is not as excellent as you have imagined. It’s much worse to loose pleasure in playing and creating music.

What concerns recommendations of experienced musicians, they are value listen to, however, keep it in mind, it’s up to you, which of them to choose to follow.

Everybody wants to know the easy, proven steps to music success. Therefore, most experts offers tips and strategies to help you reach your goals in a positive light — including me.

Well, it’s time to shake things up and serve a new audience — which explains why this post takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the dark side: How to destroy your music career in seven easy steps …

1) Give Away Your Personal Power

The first step to destroying your music career is to realize that your destiny is in the hands of other people and circumstances beyond your control. Fully embrace the fact that you need to be in the right place at the right time to get your “lucky break” and be “discovered.”

Know that industry people and music critics must deem you worthy of success for you to have value as a musician. Also, cling to the belief that all the answers are “out there” somewhere and out of your control and you will be incredibly successful at failure.

2) Turn Marketing, Promotion and Sales Into a Huge Burden

Do you really wanna fall flat fast? Then start referring to marketing as a “necessary evil” right away. Realize that you don’t have what it takes to “sell yourself” and reach more fans. In fact, there’s probably a biological reason you hate promotion: you were born without the critical marketing gene that all those “gift of gab” people have. Therefore, you are destined to live a lifetime of hardship as you struggle with having to engage in the ugly chore of self-promotion.

3) Be Fearful of Being Perceived as a Greedy, Capitalist Pig

Paranoia will go a long way to helping you fall short of a thriving music career — especially when it comes to earning money. Just know that every one of your fans is watching you and waiting to jump ship the second they smell any scent of capitalism. Therefore, if you make any sales pitches at all, they better be so low key as to be barely perceptible.

In fact, it would be best not to even make people aware that you have things for sale. Just wait till they come to you. If they’re interested, they’ll ask. And if you want to score extra points, when they do ask, tell them you left all your CDs and T-shirts at home.

4) Use a Lack of Time, Money and Connections as Your Biggest Excuse

Here’s a surefire way to go down in flames. Have convenient scapegoats based on scarcity. Tell anyone who asks (as well as a lot of people who don’t ask or care) how lousy your career is because of all the lack in your life. Frequently use phrases such as “There aren’t enough hours in the day,” “If I had that kind of money, I’d be a rock star too,” and “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” To spice things up, every now and then throw in an angry reference to “The man.”

5) Market Yourself to the Faceless Masses Using Traditional Big Media

Why spend all that time dealing one on one with fans, when someday someone could just throw a bunch of money (you know, the funds you don’t have enough of now) into a massive marketing campaign? Realize that it takes big bucks spent on radio promotion, retail placement, billboards, and paid display ads in national magazines to succeed. This mass media mindset is your ticket to success … at hitting the fast track to failure.

Bonus tip: Never answer your email from fans, and rarely — if ever — log into your Facebook, MySpace or Twitter accounts. Better yet, don’t even start these accounts, since they are time-wasting fads.

6) Promote Yourself Sporadically and Only When It’s Urgent

If you have a mailing list (and with piss-poor email delivery and open rates these days, why bother?), be sure the fans on your list don’t hear from you very often. One of the best “road to ruin” marketing tactics is blasting your fans with urgent “come to my show” or “buy my new album now” messages when they haven’t heard from you in months. Your ultimate goal is have fans read your promotions and go, “Who is this band again?”

7) Know That Everyone Owes You Something Simply Because You Exist

I’ve saved the best way to destroy your music career for last. Simply know that everyone will care as much about you and your music as you do. Understand that complete strangers will indeed listen to every note of your 70-minute concept album and read every word of your 10-page bio. Be sure to send long, in-depth emails and leave lengthy, rambling voice mail messages for the imbeciles who don’t recognize your greatness. Also, be sure to insult anyone who doesn’t get back to you within 10 minutes.

For 99.9% of the bands out there their goal is to sign with a record label. Call it an acknowledgement of the hard work, a badge of pride for the years of sacrifice, gutting it out on the road, a platform for personal expression , delusions of money, whatever – the goal is to get signed. The truth is, getting signed is pretty damn hard on one hand and incredible easy on the other. Easy because in today’s industry there are hundreds of thousands of bush league labels and so called “label executives” looking to nickel and dime you. Assuming you have good judgment, stay away from these clowns. As for the beneficial situations, getting signed to a record label is pretty damn hard. There are layers upon layers of gatekeepers to push past in order to eventually, hopefully, sit down with the right person, the decision maker, in order to make your 10 minute pitch. If you can make it this far God bless you; but remember you need to deliver something different to standout because there are thousands of potential replacements waiting outside the door. If you can get in the door I’ll reveal the tricks to stay. Unfortunately in today’s industry, and you can argue with me until you’re blue in the face, but your actual music isn’t the dealmaker. Here are the 4 things executives will be secretly evaluating besides your music. Arm yourself with these tricks and impress the decision makers while increasing the chances you’ll get signed:

1. Be Marketable

Immediately walk in the door and tell the executive why you’re marketable. Not your demographic, not your market appeal, and not where your music sells, but WHY you’re marketable. You need to ooze cross over appeal, cross promotions, and non-traditional retail potential. Most bands make the mistake by wasting their 10 minute pitch telling the stories behind lyrics (boring) and/or their particular market demographics who attend the shows. These are all good things to discuss, but discuss them if you get a second meeting. An executive is looking past your music in to other avenues that can make money and help push your music. Being “marketable” or better yet how to “appear marketable” is a difficult thing to do and will be covered in depth in a later post; however be fully aware this is an essential element once you’re in the door.

2. Have a Gimmick

I’m not suggesting to do something stupid like have a pacifier in your mouth for all shows, but you do need a gimmick. A gimmick doesn’t have to be something cheesy, rather something consistent, a common factor between personal style, performance, and shows. I’m not here to tell you what that gimmick is because that should be left up to the artist’s creative mind. I will tell you what a gimmick translates into in the mind of an executive: product. You got a gimmick and a marketing department will have a field day creating product to couple your music. So if you’re meeting with an executive and you’ve got a gimmick, make it immediately known and point out the potential for spill over products.

3. Have Some Business Arrogance

Be very careful in how you interpret this, as arrogance may cut your own throat. Musicians who walk in the door armed with a business plan, musicians who carry a “we don’t need the label because we have a secondary plan” attitude will hit a homerun with executives. Why? A smart businessman will be attracted to this professionalism and see you’re ready to play ball. More importantly they’ll be intrigued that you may know something they don’t. Surprised by the fact you may be able to advance your career better than they can. This works. More importantly this separates you from the thousands of bands willing to lay on their backs for the labels.

4. Remain Flexible:

Bands get discouraged and offended when someone makes suggestions to elevate their career. Rightfully so, I would get offended to if some jackass floated out advice that has no merit; but be professional and choose your battles. If you’re sitting in an office of a record executive, in reality you’re lucky to have the opportunity, so be a sponge and soak up the knowledge. Executives, in most cases, have seen it all, done it all, and analyzed ever way to increase record sales through a variety of markets and avenues. Pay attention, as you can only learn.

I’m not a TV person, so I’m a bit behind on this, but a friend of mine just turned me onto a show called “Shark Tank” (watch on Hulu) and I think it’s worth a mention here.

The show is based on a BBC/CBC series called “Dragon’s Den” and features entrepreneurs with big ideas, but not enough money to make them happen. Each episode, a group of self-made millionaires from all corners of the business world take their own money and offer some to these entrepreneurs for a piece of their businesses…assuming the idea is any good and everything is in order.

As I was watching, I noticed some similarities between the entrepreneurs on the show and upcoming musicians.

Here are some “big ideas” that you may find helpful in your music business pursuit, since overlooking these will likely kill your music career before it gets off the ground:

1. Attachment is Deadly
This is important!! It happens in business, relationships, and all aspects of life and rarely does it end up well.

The best example of this is the “Monkey Trap” used in Africa. Like the aspects of life “attachment” affects, there are several versions of this trap.

How it works…

The trap consists of a container with a hole cut into it just wide enough for a monkey to stick its empty hand into. The container is baited with something attractive to the monkey, such as a nut.

The monkey reaches for bait. The monkey can’t take its hand out of the trap as long it’s holding the nut.

The monkey could leave at any time simply by opening its hand, but it wants the bait so badly, it will literally stay at the trap and be captured (or clubbed over the head) rather than let go.

It’s easy to think, “What a stupid monkey,” but we humans do similar things all the time and “Shark Tank” is a great example of this…over and over again.

The best “music business” example I can think of is being attached to songs. They’re like babies and we don’t want to change them of give them to somebody else, even though that might mean a better life.

I know a guy who had a great song that caught the attention of an upcoming artist. He had the option of getting it cut and released or holding on it and working it as an artist himself.

He chose that latter…which turned out to be a big mistake, since the “upcoming artist” was Garth Brooks.

In all fairness, nobody knew Garth would be as big as he is, but even an “upcoming artist” cutting and releasing his song was a sure thing; his record deal was not.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose… Still holding onto an idea (or anything) too tightly will kill it. 100% of zero is zero.

2. Know Your Numbers

What would the Super Bowl be like if nobody was keeping score?

What would gambling be like if no money was involved?

Keep score! If you don’t know how much your albums, live shows, and other expenses are costing your, or how much they’re making you, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Without metrics, you could be losing a fortune and not even know it…or making a fortune and not know you need to do more of that to make even more money.

This works on many different levels… A club owner isn’t going to book you without knowing how many people you’re going to bring. A bank isn’t going to loan you money with your publishing catalog as collateral without knowing its value.

Keep track of your numbers. Know where you’re making money and where you’re losing it. Do more of what makes you money and less (or none) of what doesn’t.

3. Prove the Concept

Think you’ve got a great album? Think your band has what it takes to go national?

Numbers (see above) don’t lie and “measurement eliminates argument.” Prove your stuff is good by showing it on a small scale.

Why small?

For the sake of argument, let’s say you only have $1000 to spend. It’s much more effective for you to spend it all in once place, hitting the same people again and again, than spread it out over several places.

Think of it in terms of “flyers.” If you’ve only got 1000 flyers to hand out, you’ll make a much bigger impact on the guy who sees 10 of them than the guy who only sees one. One flyer, unfortunately for you, isn’t enough to do anything. Put some muscle behind it by focusing your marketing efforts on one area and hitting it hard.

Keep this in mind… If you can do it in one place, you can do it several places.

Humans like to think that we’re all different, but the reality is that we’ve got a lot more in common than not. If 1000 people make a certain decision, such as buying your music, it’s likely that 5000 people will make that same decision, if you do the same thing 5x bigger. Because of this, it’s easy to get a feel for how your music, your marketing, or anything else will do on a massive scale by testing it on a smaller one.

So go “small” to prove what you’ve got works. The people you’re wanting to get the attention of will get this since nobody in business is going to spend a ton of cash “testing” something on a national audience. They know a better option is to have less risk by working with a smaller audience, so they’ll understand.

4. Having Options Means More Money

In business, having more demand than supply is synonymous with getting the most money for what you’ve got. When there is only once product (you) and more than one person interested in buying it, the price always goes up.

Do what you can to get more than one person/company interested in what you’re doing and you’ll get a better deal. In the music business, this is knowing as a “bidding war.”

How do you make a bidding war happen? Prove the concept and know your numbers.

5. Play Big

The difference between the average musician and the ones who make a ton of cash is how they play the game. Successful musicians go balls out and take chances. They don’t wait to be discovered, they make discovery happen.

If you watch one of these shows, you’ll also see the investment made is based on the person behind the idea, not the idea itself. The difference between a “good idea” and a successful business is the person (or people) behind it.

Most musicians are like hitch hikers. They go to the highway with some idea of where they should be going, but not really, they just know where they are right now isn’t working for them. So they wait around for somebody and do things according on somebody else’s schedule and plan.

Successful musicians take risks and control their own situations. They’re the ones driving the car. It it crashes, they take responsibility, but the car goes exactly where they want, not just in the general direction. And like driving a car, they’re constantly evaluating where they are and recalibrating, based on where they want to go.

Ask yourself this question:

Are you just trying to get a little father away from where you are now or are you going somewhere specific?

6. Bet Everything

You don’t get big results by having a “Plan B.” Having something to fall back on gives you an excuse not to work as hard.

If you’re really certain of your music business success, why have a backup plan?

Uncertainty is what causes failure. Is this you? If so, all is not lost… The solution is to work so that you make your success inevitable.

What are the things you have to have in place to make your music business goals happen?

7. Get Realistic

If you’re not honest with yourself and able to get a realistic opinion of where you are now, you’ll never be able to improve.

As I mentioned earlier, “Measurement eliminates argument.”

Where do you start? If I were talking about weight loss, it would be for you to get on a scale.

What is the “scale” for the music business? Number of gigs you’re playing? Amount of people on your mailing list? Number of albums sold? Probably all of the above…and then some.

If you really want to do this, you need to know this information and work to improve it.

The harsh reality…

If you don’t have numbers, aren’t really committed to this, or have no idea if your “big idea” works, give up the thought of ever really doing this on a big level. There are too many people who have these things in order and that is who investors, labels, publishing companies, and fans always go with.

Why settle for anything less? It’s doubtful you do coming at it as a music fan.

Regardless of the economy, the state of the record business, or anything else, there is ALWAYS room for great artists and people will ALWAYS pay for it.

People want art. More importantly, they want a break from their day-to-day lives and they’re looking for somebody to provide it. This can be you, but you’ve got to do the work to make it happen.