Archive for the 'future of music' Category

Survival Guide for Engaging Fans and Building a Career in Music [Infographic]

Careers in music are built on fans that are engaged with the music and feel connected to the artist. Fortunately there are dozens of services and tools to help artists. Yet if you’re an artist, where do you start? Do you need more than one service? If so, what’s the right combination for you? How do you make sense of it all?

With artists struggling to figure out what they need to do, we’ve developed a “Survival Guide for Engaging Fans and Building a Career in Music” to put shape around this increasingly confusing landscape. It illustrates the ‘tools-for-musicians’ ecosystem, some (but of course, not all) of the key players, their relationship to the whole, and how mobile plays into all of this.

Here’s how it works:

First, do whatever needs to be done to get discovered. This doesn’t mean getting discovered by millions of people, but rather, a core initial group of fans that you will build on.

Next, engage this core initial group of fans in an interactive and authentic way in order to convert them from casual fans into loyal fans. By doing so, fans will be much more likely to support you financially and spread the word.

Once a deep connection has been made, offer fans many ways to support you financially and make it easy for them to do so. This includes selling music and creative bundles directly from your website, offering unique merch, and giving fans the opportunity to invest in you through one of the many crowdfunding platforms out there, like PledgeMusic. Get creative and don’t assume the only way to get paid is to sell music in iTunes!

Finally, carefully analyze what has worked and what hasn’t, and adjust things accordingly. Then, repeat, repeat, repeat… and don’t forget about mobile!

MobBase & the Mozilla Marketplace…coming soon!

Mozilla is unlocking the power of the web as the world’s largest marketplace, creating an open ecosystem of developers and content owners with limitless possibilities for consumer interaction. The Mozilla Marketplace will roll out to millions of Firefox users later this year. MobBase is thrilled to be a part of it and to make it easier for artists to build mobile apps!

Get Your Music Heard With Jango Airplay

We often write about the importance of musicians having to engage and involve casual listeners in order to build deep and lasting connections with them, and to convert them to loyal fans.  These connections are what drive sales of the concert tickets, band merchandise and music artists need to pay the rent and put gas in the van.

While just getting your music discovered is no longer enough, it is extremely important that you get as many people to hear your music as possible. Obviously. The more people that hear your music, the more potential fans you have to convert into loyal fans. And while not every person who hears your music will like it (sorry), it’s a numbers game and maximizing exposure is critical in order to succeed.

Enter Jango Airplay. Jango Airplay gives you access to millions of active music fans that listen to their favorite artists on Jango.com, a vibrant social music service that lets fans create and share custom radio stations. Your music is guaranteed to play right alongside the artists that you choose in Jango’s custom radio stations, from Jay Z to Arcade Fire to Bella Fleck. Jango Airplay plays your music to their fans, who are likely to dig it. Based on what we’ve heard from many artists, this is a very cheap and effective way for you to get your music heard!

Jango is offering Evolving Music readers a special deal, where you can set up a Jango Airplay account (if you don’t already have one) and receive 100 guaranteed spins on Jango.com for FREE. Then, you can choose how much more you want to be played (packages start at as little as $10 for 250 plays) and where with basic geo-targeting. You’ll also get detailed actionable reports and data about your new fan base so that you can find out who likes you, where they live, how old they are and what other types of music they like. You got nothing to lose, so give this a try! Click here to get started.

Who Needs Music? Photographers, Curators, and Authors Do!

So you are a musician. That’s awesome. But competition is stiff and you need to make a living. Aside from live performance, music, and merch sales, there are many ways to make a living by composing or providing your tracks for film and video. And fortunately, these types of opportunities for getting paid as a musician and composer for film/video have increased astronomically over the past 10 years with the rise of, you guessed it, the internet and technology.

As a working composer and sound designer, I have managed to build a viable and growing career doing what I love, which is making music and playing with sounds. I have only been able to do so by expanding my search for composition opportunities into artistic realms never before thought of as viable to composition work. All sorts of people are now making video and require music for their videos, expanding the need for original music.

The advantage of the internet and the role it plays in increasing our exposure as artists is obvious and there is no need to belabor the point. Most of us communicate daily with folks all over the world whether it be for collaboration, paying gigs, or as friends and family. However, the advent of technology and its impact on opportunities for musicians begs a bit more analysis. Not only can musicians and composers create better and faster, but because of access to affordable technology, other types of media artists can more easily make video as well. This includes photographers, photobook creators and curators, and authors, who now actively create video to promote and showcase their work. Fortunately for us musicians, these videos need sound and music, and as a result, photographers, curators, and writers are now valid artists with which to seek opportunity.

One example of a photographer and videographer creatively using original music is Genevieve Russell of Story Portrait Media. As part of her work, Russell creates videos which incorporate dialog, photography, and music for photographers to showcase their work and present themselves. One such example is the showcase video for Norah Levine found here. Clearly, photographers, who never had need for music in the past, are now viable candidates to seek out and contact for music composition gigs.

A second example of the use of original music is a fantastically fresh new media called “flipthroughs,” being created by the Indie Photobook Library, founded by photography writer and photobook curator Larissa Leclair. This flipthrough video is a superb example of a new media mash which needs music. It features the photobook “Desert Days” by photographer Matt Austin and shows a close up of a person flipping through the photos in the book with an accompanying track by the artist A(a)rdvark/Jeff Austin. The killer track adds emotion and artistry to the act of viewing a photobook, which previously would have been a silent process. Who would have thought? A photobook curator makes a video of a photobook with original music to create a cutting-edge fresh mashup of media which best of all, requires music.

Another group who is now searching for music are book authors. The concept of a “book trailer” is a new phenomenon and many authors are either creating book trailers themselves, or are hiring professionals to do so. Regardless of how it gets done, though, these book trailers need music. There are tons of articles and blogs online that give advice on how to create a book trailer and all of them mention adding music, whether original or royalty free, as part of the process. Obviously, now, authors are a target for opportunity.

You might be wondering how you would go about finding artists who actively seek music for their work? While this could be an entirely other post, it is safe to say that “traditional” methods work. Join photography and book writer forums, post on blogs related to the subject, answers questions related to the subject on yahoo answers, search for videographers who make videos for photographers and email them directly. Yes it can be boring and take time and effort, but being active in your search to find opportunities for your music bears results. This world is ripe for music, a sonic apple waiting to be plucked.

Other types of artists/associations that now require music for projects:

  1. Podcasters
  2. Audio Book publishers
  3. Churches
  4. Poets
  5. YouTube videographers

About the Author
This is a guest post by Adam A. Johnson, a music composer and sound designer who owns and operates Architect of Sound, a music company that provides custom music scoring and sound design for Film/TV/New Media projects both in the U.S. and abroad with clients in Canada, Ireland, Haiti, Egypt, and Dubai. Credits include LEGO, the United Nations, Aquafina-Pepsico, the National Endowment for the Arts, US Customs, Exxon, NYC Mayor Bloomberg and more. He also owns and operates the SFXsource.com Sound Effects and Royalty Free Music Library.

Root Music: BandPages on Facebook

Remember when the tables turned and MySpace went from being the coolest social networking site around to a shady place for scantily-clad teens in questionable photos and, well… musicians? Despite the seizure-inducing animated gifs and glittering madness that came with the pimp-your-profile craze, MySpace somehow still maintained its role as THE place for musicians. Your band maybe had its own website if, you know, it was all fancy and stuff. But your band definitely had a MySpace page!

Then Facebook came along and soothed us with its minimalist design and all its tangible real-world benefits, and rocked our collective worlds. And yet, the musician was always left to fend for him or herself.

Enter Root Music. Musicians now FINALLY have a home on Facebook. This clever little San Francisco-based startup has created a way for musicians to share their stuff right from within Facebook. The BandPage is a tab just like your photos, info, or wall tabs. While they browse your page, fans can listen to your music from the embedded SoundCloud player. Want to place a banner on your page? Easy! Just upload the picture you want to use. No need to create a custom one. Every section of the BandPage is easily editable. Just drop, drag, and customize as you wish.

What you end up with is a sexy place within your Facebook profile, which you already use and people are already looking at, to share all your stuff (info, photos, shows, twitter feed and much much more) with your fans. In the place where they are already hanging out! It’s an elegant solution to an obvious problem, and Root Music has done it with aplomb. Once you setup your Root Music Bandpage on Facebook, be sure to set it as the default landing page so that it’s the first thing fans see!