a) Take advantage of friends and students
Hiring big names for collaborations is great for quick exposure, but if you’re short on cash, there are alternatives. Friends, local contacts and students are great ones for several reasons:

1) They (in most cases) know you already, so you can form a personal relationship in addition to a professional one
2) They may even be more motivated to help out (students in particular – see below)
3) They are less expensive to hire

If you have a brother who’s a marketing genius, for instance, perhaps try to get him on board to help you with marketing your project and creating your brand.

I also mentioned this in my last post, but colleges are a cesspool of many things, including budding young talent. Aspiring art students are looking for their big break in graphic design, photography or illustration — hire a student who understands your branding goals to do your artwork for you. Since they’re just starting out, they won’t be as expensive to hire as a renowned artist, and may do equally great work.

b) Embrace technology with your web presence
A couple of ideas here:

1) Email your EPK. It’s free to do with your Sonicbids account, and you can track when the recipient actually opens the EPK unlike in a normal email. This is a good way to save cash while getting that closure you need.

2) Build a cheap website. While sites like Sonicbids, MySpace, Facebook, etc. allow you to promote your band and its identity, you’ll want a home site on the internet, which helps secure that identity at an easy-to-find location (yourbandname.com, for instance). Building a website seems daunting at first, but there are tons of cheap/free services out there to help make this relatively painless, both on your brain and your wallet. I’ve personally found Wordpress, known for its blogging capabilities, to be an immensely powerful site-building tool as well, and it’s totally free to use. Check out a great example of a Wordpress-powered site for Sonicbids band Stereogrove here.

c) Be smart about promotions and touring
When The Seedy Seeds came by the Sonicbids office last week, I had a good conversation with Brian, one of the masterminds behind the band, who mentioned their small, incremental touring method, rather than going all-out on a massive national tour. This is a smart way to approach touring: there’s no sense in blowing all your cash on a great tour and then not being able to afford another one after that, losing that expanded fanbase you just got in a matter of weeks. Try a shorter approach to touring, by doing short, frequent trips to very specific targeted regions. Also take some time to study the music scenes of those regions: there’s no sense in playing metal in a city where indie rock is all the rage.

Again, there’s a ton of possibilities here, so please comment away. This is just a start.

Everyone has heard the old joke, “what do you call a drummer with no girlfriend? Homeless!” It’s funny but also, in a number of cases, true. There are numerous aspiring musicians are supported by their family, their girlfriends, their boyfriends and plenty of others when it comes to money. That is not always a bad thing. If communication is good, if expectations are clear, and the guidelines for support are set in place before a dollar changes hands, that help can be worth its weight in gold. That help can bring the artist to the next level if they are struggling. It can make things a little easier. It’s not a golden ticket, it’s not a back door from paying dues and learning invaluable lessons. It simply makes a long hard road a little easier for a few miles.

The right help

When the musician is getting help while he or she is doing all they can do help themselves, you have a good healthy situation. As the potential helper, ask if you are you giving money for something specific and something that will make a difference. Is there a budget in place? Is the musician planning for both the best and worse case scenarios? Lastly, is this going to help both in the short term and long term? If the answer is yes to all these questions, you have a good situation where helping out will actually be that: helpful.

Whether you are making a donation, a loan or an investment, the clearer you and the recipient can be, the better. Define clearly where the money (or whatever) will go and what it will do. By having an understanding among all parties as to who you are helping, why you are helping, what you want to see out of it, when you will be paid back or time frames if it is a loan and how it will benefit the artist, you magnify the benefit for everyone involved. Now, some people have very generous hearts and may genuinely feel they “don’t need to see anything out of it.” But even so, they will want to see their gift or loan actually help. They will want it to have the most positive impact it can, right? Just as the helper is being generous to the musician, it will help ten fold if the musician is held accountable, if they clearly understand there is an obligation in accepting a gift—the obligation to use it well, to deliver on the donor’s aim of making things better. When the above is not clearly stated and clearly understood by both sides, it can lead to the wrong help.

The wrong help

Everyone has heard the stories or seen the examples: The musician that is mooching off of a girlfriend, family, or others. The musician that expects everything to be taken care of for them so they can “concentrate on their art”. The artist who has absolutely no awareness how they are using and abusing those around them. You have seen the movies where the musician is laying on the couch explaining what he needs to be feeling or what has to happen as the girlfriend is paying the rent. Outside of the movies, it’s also the phone and the electric she’s paying as well, in addition to paying his tab so he can drink at the local music clubs or bars under the amazing guise of “networking”.

Another typical scenario: the musician that looks to use given/donated/invested money for the things that are not going to help his career. That particular artist that feels eating expensive meals out, hanging out in bars or spending money on clothes will some how fast forward their careers. These are the people that are just seeing it as spending money and not having consideration for how you are trying to help and flat out abusing that help.

Then there is that attitude of “help me now and I will bring you with me as I become a millionaire.” You take care of me now and I will take care of you later is the other one I love hearing. It is pure crap, and yet many people waste their time, their money, and their patience not-really-helping (aka “enabling”) these musicians to go on doing absolutely nothing.

Recently, I interviewed a number of women that dated musicians: successful, failed, and aspiring ones. The stories are a book in themselves. The things that were said, the promises made, and the explanations given for the lack of forward motion when they came back looking for more.

In the end, those helping lost their money, lost their relationships, lost their trust in these artists (which carries over to all artists in most cases, every drummer gets the bill for that one in the joke). And for all that loss, nothing improved for the artists. It isn’t a zero sum equation, where at least this person’s loss does some good over there. Everyone loses because of these supremely selfish individuals.

This goes for both sexes, too. Women do it too. People use people, it is an unfortunate and simple fact of life. The best thing you can do is watch for situations that are not clear—and which resist your attempts to clarify what is being asked and to what use it will be put. If it seems a little shaky, go with your gut feeling.

Conclusion

If you are going to help out, then make sure it is truly helping and not enabling. Make sure the details are there. Make sure the clarity is there. Make sure everyone understands the details. Whether it is written out or verbally discussed in depth, the answers to those HOW, WHY, WHAT and HOW questions above need to be clearly understood by everyone involved. Set goals, set time frames. Set worst case scenario plans. If you are supporting a guy while he is in the studio, make sure he is getting a job as soon as he gets out of the studio. Basic things like that.

Watch out for those that might use you, take advantage of you, and potentially end up hurting you. To the musician, remember every minute of every day that that is a human being with wants and needs of their own who is helping you, not the life support for a wallet. Show that you are worth that investment and/or worthy of their generosity.

Do not enable a musician with serious delusions of grandeur. It’s that simple: Don’t feed the energy creature. Don’t let them cost you a small fortune to further the bloating of a big ego. I am not saying don’t help or don’t be generous. DO give, DO be generous. But DO look first. Look at what you are doing, how you are doing it, and if it really will be helpful.

* ‘The End of the MP3′ Web sites that allow users to play (or stream) music files for free have been around for years, but one called Lala has been making noticeably larger waves. Lala has developed an application that will allow users to stream their entire music libraries on mobile phones (beginning first with an iPhone app). The company’s co-founder says it will replace MP3s as the preferred format for digital music. Ironically, this puts Lala into direct competition with Apple’s own iTunes music store. As Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk notes: “LaLa claims it already earns an average of $67 per user. That’s 300 percent more than what the iTunes music store brings in, according to a 2008 Forrester study. If that figure is accurate, Lala is already proving that drastically lower pricing for music could spell higher profits for the record industry and more tunes for the people at the same time.”

* Refined Music Search Search companies are listening users’ complaints that finding music online is a chore. On Wednesday, Google debuted a much-hyped new search function that allows users to play and purchase audio files directly from a search results page, thanks to partnerships with several burgeoning music services (Lala and Myspace’s iLike, to name a few). The move comes a year after Yahoo partnered with Rhapsody to create a similar playable musical search function. Still, as PC World’s Ian Paul finds, music search is far from perfect: “When I searched using song lyrics, Google often came up short…Yahoo’s search results were less robust than Google’s in my tests. I could only find music samples when I searched for artist names, not song or album titles. But if you’re looking for a simple way to sample a particular song, either service will work just fine.” The L.A. Times’ Jon Healey is similarly unimpressed with Google, and doubted the contention of some bloggers that the service would help grow legal music downloads: “It can help expose millions of people to legitimate Internet music outlets, which will help those companies compete with free (and, in many cases, unauthorized) sources of music online. Whether consumers will actually spend more on music than they’ve been doing, however, is a whole ‘nother question.” Meanwhile, Microsoft has begun its own talks with MySpace to host a comparable service.

* Audio Algorithms The creation and production of music is also undergoing a revolution. At Discovery News, Robert Lamb inspects uPlaya, a Web site launched earlier this summer that uses an algorithm to determine the “hit potential” of any audio file a user uploads. By mathematically comparing a song’s features to past hits across multiple genres, the company claims to be able to predict its viability, allowing artists to adjust their new music to appeal to the widest possible audience. As Lamb explains: “Think of the technology as the artificial intelligence counterpart of Simon Cowell, except with more stats and less sarcasm.” He also says that it has achieved an 80% success rate. Meanwhile, over at EurekAlert, Luke Barrington reports on a new project at UC San Diego that also relies on an algorithm to generate automated music playlists. Test users preferred the UC playlist to Apple’s Genius recommendation system. Barrington suggests the technology will help bring new artists to the forefront: “Genius currently ignores relatively unknown songs because it lacks adequate wisdom from iTunes customers about how these songs connect to other songs. Systems like the auto-tagging music algorithms developed at UC San Diego could be useful in filling in the ‘blind spots’ in Genius and other collaborative filtering systems that rely on the wisdom of the masses to generate playlists.” And yes, the Malcom Gladwell devotees are correct in thinking that the popular journalist caught wind of this trend years ago.

* ‘The Music Gene’ Over at the Huffington Post, self-proclaimed “provocateur” Gail Zappa offers her eccentric take on the state of the music industry and an outlandish prophecy of the future. Recalling an incident in which her husband, musician Frank Zappa, was blacklisted in San Francisco, she argues that modern music corporations have enough power to tell an artist “you’ll never work on this planet again,” and actually enforce it. She bemoans the increasing availability of recording technology and the sorry state of copyright enforcement as a result of Internet file-sharing. Finally, she predicts that “Scientists (?) [sic] will prove that there is a ‘music’ gene,” which will bring about a cure for deafness and vindicate the notion that listening to music “is exactly like sex.”

* Radio Revival? Over at the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard celebrates new figures suggesting that nearly 90 percent of people in the UK listen to radio at least once a week: “For those of us bewildered and appalled by the march of modernity – in other words, those of us over 40 – this return to bygone days is so welcome it almost induces tears. We may be being badgered to buy HDTVs, iPhones, nanowotsits and any amount of technocrap, but against all this babble we can erect a solid wall of good sense and bullshit-free information…” The only trouble is that the British station leading the charge is BBC Radio 4, which specializes in just about everything but music. However, the number of listeners for classic music station Radio 3 is also up 12.6 percent to 2.19 million listeners, suggesting that for at least a certain genre of music, radio still holds sway.

1. TweetDeck - Tweet Deck is very good at organizing your Twitter world and giving it a sense of community that most don’t get with logging onto the Twitter page. Understanding what’s going on in your Twitter world will help you start conversations and answer back at people who may be trying to talk to you. The point is to stay connected and TweetDeck helps with that.
2. Twibbon – Twibbon is like a tattoo for your twitter picture (avatar). If you belong to something, a group, a tribe, whatevs, you want to show that association. Plunk a poppy on your avatar to remember the veterans, or a NY Yankees logo to show the world that you have bad taste in sports teams. In both cases you’re spreading a message and saying something about yourself.
   BANDS DO THIS: Create a logo, join Twibbon, and get your followers to show their support by tattooing your logo on their face.
   
3. Tweet For a Track – This is pretty self explanatory. You post your music, then you tweet about it, your fans wanting the track must then tweet for that track (ah, ah, see that? Clever right?). I haven’t had a chance to use this app myself but it appears to be a pretty innovative way of sharing your music.

Wow! Wasn’t that the just the Top of the tops!? Maybe… there is a lot going on for Twitter these days… and yet with all this hubub, word is that Twitter’s growth is stalling, and its number pale in comparison to Fbook. So it still appears that you need to be active in more than one social media network to get the most out of this internet thing everyone keeps talking ’bout.

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

As a new band, the idea of booking your 1st gig might prove to be a daunting task. Still, it does not have to be. By following these simple steps, you might turn a externally overwhelming process into a productive one.

Making sure that the members of the band are all on the same page is an essential 1st step in the booking process. Agree on a number of gigs per month that anybody at all will play. Put together a set of your best tunes and make a demo. Your demo ought to not include full-length tunes ; a few short snippets of your strongest material will showcase your band’s strengths and will sell your band to potential Venues with little or no resolution. With your demo, include a photo of the band, a short statement about the music or type of that the band plays, and your contact information, including the band’s web site. Decide what Venues you’re interested in playing and how much you’ll charge them for playing, if anything. Getting these details out of the way early will produce wonderful communication among the band members, thus avoiding misunderstandings in the future.

Next, do your research. Scope out the Local scene; find out who your competition is, which performers performance where, what Clubs cater to your specific sound, and who your target listeners is. Talk to seasoned Local acts; a number of times times, your fellow musicians will be your perfect sources of information. Getting to know your competition, your listeners and your Local scene will prove to be an indispensable tool when you are selling yourself to venue owners and booking agents. furthermore, be open to anything. Limiting yourself to clubs and bars will hinder your chances of booking your band. Find out about open-mic nights in your area, offer to open for other performers for free and find out about Local fairs and festivals where your band might get some exposure.

When you’re out and about checking out potential Clubs, ask for the names of the people responsible for booking artists at that location. Get their contact information and keep track. Use all of your contacts and, when calling them, be brief and to the point. Ask them If they have time to talk, and if not, when it would be a good time to contact them. Ask for permission before submitting your demo. Be persistent, but not pushy, and realize that it will take some time to get that job. Once you do get the gig, be sure to discuss payment, if any, as well as what you’ll need to bring as opposed to what the Club will provide. Be professional and be honest.

With determination, a little know-how, and some clever self-promotion, you could land that first show and be on your way to success in no time.

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.

The first thing that you need to do is to scout out at least one good venue. What you want to look for are venues that are:

a) inexpensive
b) fun
c) willing to give you the freedom to set up your own shows

The other important factor is bringing in other bands to play with you. You’ll know you’re on the right track when you start putting together shows that you’re genuinely excited about. If you’re excited about the shows you put together then that excitement will translate to your fans. When you consistently put together fun and exciting shows you’ll see the beginnings of a new scene. Other bands will want to be a part of it and you won’t have to beg people to come to your shows. You’ll just need to tell them when they are.

When you put on shows with bands who know each other and who have fun together then people will actually stay for more than one band! They’ll leave happy without having spent too much and the bands can actually make some money too. It’s a win, win for everyone if you do it right.

If you’ve got total freedom over the shows you put on then you can do some things that are outside the box. You can have a comedian or a magician open for you. Be creative. I saw a band once who had made a big wheel that they would spin that would prompt them to do all kinds of entertaining stunts in between songs depending on where the wheel landed. It’s your show. Have fun with it!

Before I moved to Los Angeles I played in a band in Rhode Island where there wasn’t any kind of established scene. There were a couple of no-name venues where we regularly played. One was at a restaurant/bar at the beach and another was a tiny bar in the suburbs. Neither one had bands playing there until we proposed the idea. We brought in bands that we wanted to play with and we played what we wanted to play.

Both of these places that we played at gave us 100% of the door and 100% of merch. One of them even gave us the door plus $100 and free drinks! The bar was a tiny unknown hole in the wall, yet we made more money per show there than when I played in a band that sold out the Viper Room. Those shows were some of the best times of my life. We weren’t trying to reach for something beyond us, we were just putting on the shows we wanted to play and that we thought would be the most fun for everyone. We booked the bands we liked to watch and that we liked to hang out with, so naturally our fans would enjoy the show as well. People would come back to see us again and they would bring more friends and tell more people, to the point that many of them would be turned away at the door.

The idea is to bring people together in a way that’s a win win for everyone. If everybody wins then everybody will want to be a part of your shows in the future. If you want to create a scene, forget about the big expensive venues that don’t care about you, book 6 unrelated bands a night, don’t pay you and that your fans can only afford to go to on special occasions. Instead, find a fun place that’s receptive to the idea of letting you come in and put on your own inexpensive shows. It’s an opportunity for everyone – the venue owner wants more customers, you’ve got fans and you know other bands who have fans (you just need a willing venue), and the fans have a few hours and a reasonable amount of money to spend, and they want good entertainment.

Bring it all together and you’re the hero. So don’t be one of the countless complainers. Be a doer. Amazing things can happen when you’ve got the vision to bring people together.

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.