Music Industry News

How to Plan a Budget for Your New Album

Source: We All Make Music
July 22, 2010

As every musician knows, recording an album costs money. Managing this money is of the utmost importance as an independent artist.

In a detailed piece on MusicianWages, Cameron Mizell discusses considerations that need to be taken and choices that must be made when creating a budget for your new album.

The piece tackles such issues as hiring professionals verses getting favors from friends, how to approach bringing in additional musicians for the recording, and what to look for in a ...

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5 Reasons Not to Sign a Record Deal

Source: HypeBot
July 22, 2010

This guest post comes from the folks at likeZEBRA, a new site offering artists a growing suite of direct to fan promotion and sales tools.

  1. Competition for Attention--Music artists are already forced to compete for the attention and interest of fans; they shouldn't have to compete for that attention within their own record label. Labels divvy up their focus between multiple signed artists.  Whereas an artist may be giving 100% to developing their music career, a ...

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Music Industry Snobbery: The Inferiority of Issues

Source: HypeBot
July 22, 2010

Bruce and I run a fairly niche publication and sometimes it's interesting to compare the conversations that we are having with that of the mainstream media.  There's a story on CNN that begs the question, “Is the death of the CD looming?“  It's not that it isn't a great, relevant question.  It's that it just isn't even headline worthy in the world of Hypebot.  Why is that?  To a degree, it's music industry snobbery.  The issues that we contend with ...

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Does the Record Industry Ignore Baby Boomers?

Source: HypeBot
July 22, 2010

More specifically, can they afford to?  On a national touring level, it's easy to see that most of the acts out there, making rounds, aren't targeted towards today's youth, as much as they are adults. While teens listen to the groups and may go, the legacy acts and their dominance has more to do with the economics of live music and the subsequent failure of the record and tour industries to produce more talent that can draw as heavy of ...

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Jazzed: DJ, promoter and music lover Matthew Feldman's next dream is a nightclub in S. Philly

Source: Michael Ricci
July 21, 2010

THE BUILDING on the corner of McKean and Colorado has stood vacant for more than 25 years--and looks it. The doors are secured by a heavy, padlocked chain. The windows are boarded shut. Even the liquor-license application notice, the one sign of progress visible from the outside, has faded from the familiar, safety-cone orange to a sickly yellow. Stepping inside, most people would see only the evidence of a quarter-century of disuse--a layer of dust on every surface, holes in ...

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Yo Canada.

Source: Brilliant Corners, a Boston Jazz Blog
July 21, 2010

I've had a lively correspondence going with one of the blog stalwarts and pillar of decency, Stanley Zappa, about Canada, his adopted home. He tells me about how their art support system works and I give him background on how it ended up the way it is. He sent me some questions from some convened panel up there and they are hilarious.1. What theory best captures the nuanced relationship between therecording, storage and transmission of improvisation?

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Consider a Promotionless to Popular Strategy First

Source: HypeBot
July 21, 2010

If there's anything that Bruce Warila is well-known for, it's smashing heads with conventional thinking and providing new insight into why artists do the things they do, and more specifically, why they shouldn't do others. In his latest contribution to Music Think Tank, Warila takes his shiny axe to the idea that artists should always be promoting themselves and argues that maybe, if the hype isn't there, artists need to put Twitter away and start practicing their music instead.  When ...

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Jambase Questionnaire: Nathan Moore

Source: JamBase
July 21, 2010

Welcome back to JamBase's baker's dozen to the bright lights of the music world. Last time we heard from Plants and Animals.

There's something beautifully broken yet unassailably indestructible about Nathan Moore. Perhaps it's because when he “lets it all hang out" you get the full boat of human emotions. Few artists of any kind live as close to the bone as Moore. One never doubts they're getting the straight dope when this singer-songwriter lays things out, which means we're ...

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