When I first meet with artists I often ask this simple question: What did you do for your career today? Because I’m well aware that by the time they talk to me, many feel overwhelmed and have already retreated into a mindset of excuses–I only have so much time so it’s not worth it or it’s already late or I’m burnt out. But excuses don’t help you at all.

That’s not to say feeling overwhelmed is unreasonable. The music business is intimidating once you begin to look at the business aspects and everything that you need to do to become self sufficient as well as effective and productive, but there’s a little secret people don’t know: the little stuff can be just as important as the big stuff. It’s about forward motion, and forward motion can take place in the smallest snatches of free time. Whether you’re waiting for someone else to do vocals on a recording before you mix or you’re waiting on a tech guy or girl to set up your website, there’s always stuff that can be done.

A simple checklist can include:

Updating a networking site.

Adding friends to a networking site.

Researching new venues or contacting a new venue.

Researching new review sites or magazines and/or sending to them.

Researching booking agents and/or contacting them.

Researching new management companies and/or contacting them.

Researching hotels or places to stay for tours and adding them to your database.

Supernova.com is a community that grew out of the largest Battle of the Bands operator in Canada, and into the ‘web 2.0’ world by building the most active Canadian social community dedicated to music. They currently have over 21,000 independent bands and artists, and over 200,000 total community members including fans and industry.

The site’s mantra is to provide new / undiscovered musicians with the same caliber of experience as a rockstar would get.

The Battle of the Bands shows put these young acts up on big stages, provide professional sound and staffing, and DO NOT take any payment from the bands. Instead, they front all the costs and provide bands with the tickets to sell (or return, if unsold). They also coordinate industry and media attendance at the events, and have seen some really impressive acts play on our stage: Billy Talent, Sum 41, Three Days Grace and many others have played the Supernova stage.

One rule people:

The Size Of Your E-mail List = The Size Of Your Income

So, how big is yours?

Myth: I don’t have any shows to promote. Therefore, I’m not going to do a newsletter.

Reality: 50% or more of the artists that I work with don’t have any shows to promote. Zero, zilch, none…and they still want to be artists in the world getting their music out and heard and liked and listened to (why in the heck would you hire me if you did not want your music out there?).

Indie on Air! & Music in Action w/ host “Classic”

The Voice of Independent Music featuring industry professionals & great indie music.
Indie on Air! broadcasts live every Friday 12:30pm CST from Chicago via the BlogTalkRadio platform
Music in Action broadcasts live every other Wednesday 2:00pm CST from Chicago via the BlogTalkRadio platform
Both shows are available 24/7 as an archive immediately following the live broadcasts.

Q) Tell us a little bit about your Internet radio show. What inspired you to start it?

I was approached by this guy the other day. He hollered at me from across the street. It happened at night, so I couldn’t really make out his face, but I could see that he had on a backwards baseball cap, baggy jeans and a CD in his hand.

He said, “Yo man, can I talk to you real quick?…” I thought to myself, “Oh crap. Not another numbnuts trying to sell me a CD out of his car trunk.”

By the way, if you approach your customers by saying, “Yo man…” I suggest you stop it. Like, now. It’s kind of rude if you get my drift.

So anyway, this guy asked me if I wanted to buy his album. I said “No” and went home.

Cowboy Cantor is a podcast run by a Portuguese music teacher. Its the only podcast around the island of S. Miguel, in the Azores islands, Portugal. The show’s aim is to share the greatest free mp3s found on the Internet, in the artist’s own sites, their label sites, or in many other mp3 sites that offer free music. It’s all done with love and in the name of independent music.

Q) What can artists do to make money on the internet?

A) A lot of different things have been happening on the Internet with music. From stores with d.r.m. files, to free music. From the Creative Commons to pay what you want. From file sharing on chats to illegal peer to peer clients. Everyday we meet new ways of promoting music and selling it. It is fact, legal or illegal, Internet is the most effective way of getting an artist to be known. Labels and artists should keep that in mind and work with it. F.M. and A.M. radios, television, newspapers and magazines still have a word to say on this process, but Internet is vital these days for music promotion.

5 Questions: Answers from Charles McEnerney, Host + Producer for Well-Rounded Radio and Founder of Musicians for Music 2.0

Q) Tell us a little bit about your IR station. What initially inspired you to start it?

A) I started Well-Rounded Radio (really a podcast, but I named it before podcasting started!) because I grew up in Queens, New York City listening to a lot of really great disc jockeys like Vin Scelsa on commercial and college radio who used to do fantastic interviews. But as the years went by and radio changed all over the country, I felt like the only place I was hearing music interviews was on NPR and some syndicated shows. And as much as I love NPR, I felt their in-depth music interviews were with people that were somewhat predictable. I like to be surprised by music and I wanted to do a series where what was coming at you would be a little more unexpected.

Branding yourself both online and offline will really set up this coming year to be a break through one for your musical career.

To do this you must start with the most fundamental aspect of you as an artist: Your Pitch!

Two things happened recently to inspire this article.

Scenario #1: I was out at the Mercury Lounge seeing music and between bands I was standing at the bar talking to some friends and someone handed me a show flyer. I was taken with him immediately, I always appreciate anyone who is self -promoting because its not easy to do and it’s especially not easy to do at a crowded bar on a Wednesday night in downtown Manhattan. So, I looked down at the flyer and my heart sank. It said the following:

I wrote a piece a while back about 4 emerging trends in the music industry that will affect every music artist from here on out. In this piece, I want to focus instead on some more general trends in the way we do business and interact in society today that will affect every music artist enormously. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing Christian Rock or hip hop or whatever. Everybody will be equally affected.

Massive paradigm shifts like the one we’re going through right now unleash tremendous disruptive forces. Industries fall on them. But new industries also rise on them. What we’re seeing now with the thickening web of cyberconnectivity is a tremendous paradigm shift every bit as important as that ushered in by the printing press or the Industrial Revolution. It’s here to stay.

At one point, artists really needed to rely on getting a recording contract or having a top management firm such as Violator Management to work their contacts and make a deal happen for the artist. This is a first hand account of how to build your own career in order to get a deal offered to you similar to Drake’s $2.5 Million deal from Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Records.

If you do NOT have a home studio to produce and at least reference tracks, I would start by doing this first. This will stop you from being at the mercy of any producers when you want to jump in a studio because you are creative. Creativity can hit at any moment to an artist. To be dependent upon a producer to get into their studio will hinder you and stop the creativity because you can’t just jump in and create music at will.

Everyone is tired of that same old phrase “you only get one chance to make a first impression”. It is repeated ad nauseum from business schools to beauty pageants and everywhere in between. As much as I would rather say to throw away the stuffy old phrases, parables and sayings, this is one that seems to grow more and more true every day. Especially in the music industry.

Of course it is important to make that strong initial impression, that is first and foremost. Second, having all the music, assisting materials, image, business elements and the presentation of these pieces in place is paramount and required. Third is knowing how to individually and specifically present to the person, company, or agency, and doing it the right way.

This last paragraph represents the gold standard that has been a requirement of the industry for years. The musicians that move forward are those that have all the elements in place. If they don’t, they might want to hold up on their forward motion and get those elements in order.

So why is it more important now?

In a recent interview with The Guardian, major label lovechild Beyoncé Knowles expressed an interest in taking a different direction on her next album by “going indie,” despite the fact that – let’s face it – Beyoncé wouldn’t know what it’s like to be a struggling independent artist if she won an Oscar for playing the role in a hit movie. Which she didn’t. In Dreamgirls, she still played the star, and Jennifer Hudson played the underdog.

Of course, Beyoncé wasn’t suggesting the possibility of actually becoming an indie artist, she was just talking about working with indie artists like Of Montreal, who she heard about from her sister Solange, you know, the Knowles sister with the ‘underground sound.’

However, despite the brutal abuse inflicted on the word ‘indie’ by the very suggestion that Beyoncé could somehow “do” it, there is a slowly snowballing trend amongst major label artists to reject the bright lights and big payoffs in favor of producing their own music.

Music marketing is by and large difficult for most artists, that is something we need to realise. Marketing yourself, being confident to allow people to listen to your tracks and most importantly, handling criticism takes a bit of time to get used to. In the majority of cases though, marketing plans do fail. you may have a great sounding track, but if it is not marketed properly then it will just be white noise.

However all is not lost.

The main reasons why music marketing fails is that 1) there is always some money involved, and 2) we market our music.

They all sound a bit strange I know, but my plan is for you to get over these hurdles and to get your music out there without any hassle. I will take each of the above points in turn, but remember they are interlinked: