How to Promote Yourself Part 7: Amazon, Barcodes, Soundscan

AMAZON.COM/ADVANTAGE

You can sell your CD through Amazon.com through their Amazon Advantage program. You simply create and account, YOU MUST HAVE A UPC CODE ON YOUR CD AND THE CD MUST BE SHRINK WRAPPED for this, and then they will order one or two copies of your CD for their warehouse. They pay you after your CD sells.

You will want to be on Amazon.com for more reasons than just selling your CD. [See what I will write for Pandora and Live365.] The down side is they keep over half of the money, and deduct the $35 annual fee from your sales, but the up side is, you’re on Amazon.com which puts you through to all of the other websites that are “powered by Amazon.com”. PLUS you can then create your own Amazon Marketplace account and sell your CD directly through their site. But you can’t do the Marketplace thing if there is no preexisting listing, which is why you need the Amazon Advantage account first. So, Amazon Advantage means THEY fulfill the order, and keep more money. Amazon Marketplace means YOU fulfill the order and get more money.

BARCODING.COM/UPC/

If you get a UPC code number for your project, you can generate the barcode graphic on this site for free.

SOUNDSCAN.COM

If you’ve got a barcode on your CD, you should consider registering it with Soundscan.com so it can be tracked. Who knows? Your project might be a hot seller and it would be a shame if no one was counting. Just because a site like Amazon.com may report your sales to Soundscan doesn’t mean Soundscan is keeping track. If they don’t know what project belongs to that number, they’ll discard the stats. So YOU need to give them the UPC code number and the title of the project. You can either print out your registration and fax it in, or register it via email. A&R people at record labels sometimes look at the Soundscan reports, and if they see a new artist getting lots of sales, it gets their attention. You just never know.

ANOTHER THOUGHT: The previous paragraph is based on what I’d been told over the years by my friends in the music business, however recent personal experience has made me think there may be another side to this. We have a guy who wants to sign us as an artist to a pseudo record deal, basically taking our project we released in 2007 [independently] and repackaging it with a few new songs. He expressed concern over our soundscan numbers because if they were too high, the label might not perceive this project as a “clean” release. So... do what you want.

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 6: Cross Promote!

CROSS PROMOTE CROSS PROMOTE CROSS PROMOTE

Choose 2 or 3 important urls [like your home page, myspace, twitter etc.] and put them as your email signature. [I wouldn’t do more than 3 or it’s too much.] Link your MySpace account to your Facebook, iTunes, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube etc. pages. Link Facebook to MySpace and the others I mentioned. Put your other links in your video descriptions on YouTube, especially iTunes and Amazon or any other site where people can purchase your music. Tweet out various urls at different times through your twitter account. Link to all of your other profiles from your homepage. Occasionally post a short blog and/or bulletin with all of your profile urls. Make it super easy for people to find ways to buy your music, and be your fan. This is very important because it’s hard enough to build up your numbers [that the whole world can see] on each profile, but if people who like you on MySpace can then easily find you on Facebook or iLike and be your fan there too, that’s only going to help you.

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

Geek Talk: Death of a Hard Drive

Death of a Drive

Kurt here.....So today was like any other Monday morning. I came into the studio to start my day of work, looking forward to working on a new downtempo track, and turned on my drives. I have a project drive that all my recent and current projects are on, and I have a dedicated drive that houses my entire sample library. It’s somewhere around 350 gigs of sounds. Well it didn’t spin up! I checked all the cabels etc. Nothing...pure silence. So I took the drive out of the case and used a contraption made by Weibetech that allows you to power bare drives up and mount them on your desktop via USB. I thought perhaps the power supply for the hard drive case had gone bad. However, the drive still did not spin up.

So that was it, my 750 gig Seagate drive that was only a bit over a year old was officially deceased. I went to Seagate’s website to enter the serial and model number and the drive is covered under a warranty so I will get a replacement.....but.....how will I work until then? There are no places in town to go drive and pick up an internal 750 gig ATA drive.

Well here’s the really cool part. I had made a “clone” of the drive earlier this month. There is a program called Carbon Copy Cloner that creates an exact clone of the drive, as a disk image. When the disk image is double clicked, it mounts on the desktop as any physical hard drive would. The name of the disk image is the same as the drive it cloned. So...I booted up Logic not quite sure if my EXS library would be there, or if Stylus RMX and Omnisphere’s libraries would show up in the plugs. To my delight, everything is working exactly as if my real drive were still mounted.

We all know it’s important to backup, and in my case, having a dedicated sample drive cloned as it’s own disk image saved my butt. So I would encourage anyone who HASN’T cloned your sample library, or other important data, to go download Carbon Copy Cloner. Did I mention it’s shareware?!! That’s right, they encourage donations, but you can use it for free! I also use a program called Super Duper for an automatic nightly scheduled backup of my project drive, which is backed up to it’s own disk image. Then of course TimeMachine backs up my Mac Pro's internal hard drive all the time, so between those three, I’m covered. Are you?

How to Promote Yourself Part 5: Blogs & One Sheets

DON’T FORGET TO BRUSH... I MEAN BLOG.

It seems that keeping an interesting and regular blog is now a requirement for anyone who’s trying to build a fanbase. Fans now expect to be able to stay posted on events, and even comment back, and yes, even get a response from the artist at times. You’ve got to win people over with your story, your personality, your life. If you’re in the studio, document that process, and even post in the studio video. If you’re doing studio work, tell about your latest session, giving interesting little anecdotes. Or even just give a great cookie recipe or tips on where to get a free meal on your birthday. Anything that might be interesting. Put this on your to do list. Just keep in mind that it’s open to the public, so don’t start slamming people openly unless you want to potentially burn that bridge.

Also several sites allow you to bring your blog in from other sites via RSS feeds. So if you post a blog on MySpace, you can bring it into your iLike, Facebook, Reverb Nation, and Last.fm profiles among others. Once you get that set up, it’s nice to not have to post it in multiple places, it just shows up each time you post it to MySpace. If this seems to labor intensive, at least consider “micro-blogging” which I’ll write about more under the Twitter section.


ONE SHEET

This is not one sheet. It’s A one sheet. A one sheet is something you’ll need if you want to pitch your CD to any retail store. I learned about this just by reading articles online. It basically includes the following information: a photo of your CD, the title, the track list, the playing time, a paragraph or two about your project, airplay or performances in the area that might drive people to buy it, press quotes, UPC code, wholesale price, suggested retail price. When you approach a store’s buyer about carrying your CD, if you don’t know what a one sheet is, you’ll look like you don’t know what you’re doing. If you’ve got a decent one sheet, they will want it to help make their decision. ADD THESE PEOPLE TO YOUR DATABASE.

CDs are quickly becoming more scarce in the retail market, and it was predicted that last Christmas would be the last Christmas that CDs are sold. These are interesting times of change to be sure. It seems, though, that there are still boutiques that are image oriented that carry music if it fits their image. We got our CDs into a very upscale men’s clothing store in Belgium simply because the owner contacted us on MySpace just to say he liked our tracks. I noticed he had a posh clothing store and responded by asking if he’d like to carry our CD. He decided to order 10 copies and see how they moved. It’s the only title they carry. You just never know!

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 4: Domains and Business trappings

DOMAIN NAME & DEDICATED EMAIL ADDRESS

With all of the other options now available, having your own website is becoming less and less necessary. However, if you have not already done so, I would highly recommend reserving your domain name. The cheapest place I’ve found to do this is GoDaddy.com where you can reserve a .com for about $9 a year. Then you can forward that domain name to any site you want, so you could forward yourname.com to your MySpace profile if that’s all you’ve got. Also, get an email address that is whatever@yourname.com, that will be much better when you send a business email than some gmail account. That also gives another subtle indication that you’re here to stay. I believe there are some mail services [like aol?] that offer to give you whatever you want as the last half of your email address if it’s available.

But if you do want to go ahead and set up your own website, then you should also be able to use your domain name as the back half of your email address. YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY DO THIS. Imagine someone at a record label gets a package from someone. They’ve got a home printed CD label, a letter on plain white paper, and the person’s email address is “luv2sing87@gmail.com”, and it all came in a plain white envelope. That says amateur. Then contrast that to a professionally duplicated CD mailed with a professionally printed address label, a letter on matching letterhead, and the contact email is something@yourname.com. That will be taken much more seriously. That says you’re taking this seriously.

If you’ve looked into getting yourname.com and it’s not available, it’s quite common to have yournamemusic.com or yournamerocks.com. Or some other variation that still shows you’ve got it going on. I’d go for .com over .net. If and when you do set up your own website, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to order your CD, and make the link to purchase very clear on every single page. Get an account with paypal.com and go to the “merchant tools” section. In there you can generate a “buy now” button with all of the parameters you set for people to buy your CD and pay through paypal. Then once you do make a sale, be sure to ship it in a timely manner, and be sure to thank them for their purchase. ADD THESE PEOPLE TO YOUR DATABASE.


BUSINESS CARDS

If you don’t already have business cards, you should get some immediately. This too makes you seem more established, and it’s great to just pull one out quickly if you meet someone, and have them take it with them. It’s best to get a cellphone number and keep it forever. Put a cell phone number, email address, and website where they can hear your tracks on it. Don’t put your land line or street address unless you’re in a location you’ll be staying for a very long time. And don’t change your cell phone number if you can help it. There’ve been several times I’ve needed to track a singer down ASAP for a session the next morning, and the phone number I have for them is no longer current. I end up calling someone else because I need to get it booked.


LETTERHEAD

In this age of digital communication, you won’t be sending out snail mail all of the time. But when you do, putting your correspondence on your own letterhead makes you seem much more established and professional. Sending your press kit out with your logo on the address label, your letterhead, and your CD will give a much better impression than plain white printer paper and a plain white envelope.

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 3: Database & Logo

DATABASE [It’s all about who you know.]

One of my weakest areas is taking the time to really organize my contacts. Relationships and contacts are vital. Absolutely vital. As you get more of them, you need to keep track of who falls into which category, and when you’ve communicated and what was said. Take the time to enter people’s info into your database, and come up with casual and friendly reasons to get in touch so that you stay on their radar. If you are not on people’s radar, you might as well be invisible. Walk the careful line of staying in touch without being annoying. DO NOT ONLY EMAIL PEOPLE WITH THE ‘Hey got any work for me?’ MESSAGE! That is not only annoying, but makes you look needy and desperate. Perhaps when you have something cool you’re working on, just send out a little email blast letting people know that you were honored to be a part of such and such, and they can check out the project at whatever website. And then, of course you can include all of your contact info in each email, or even attach your vCard, or whatever your address book program calls it. Reaching out like this is totally acceptable, and anyone in the business understands that you’ve GOT to promote yourself.


LOGO

You’ve probably not considered having your own logo, but the reality is that you are in BUSINESS, and businesses have logos. Having a well designed logo that fits your sound and personality can go a long long way. It can tie all of the elements together in how you present yourself. To have a great logo on your website, myspace page, CD, business card, letterhead, etc. makes you seem much more established and professional. Logos are tricky though, so be prepared to spend a long time developing what you want, and don’t settle for the “name swoosh”. [your name with something similar to the Nike swoosh] We spent about 5 months, going through 3 graphic designers and about $5,000 when all was said and done. But for that $5K, we got a professionally designed logo, business cards, address labels, and letterhead. YOU DO NOT NEED TO SPEND THAT MUCH. Give yourself time, but keep this on your to do list. It makes a DIFFERENCE!


[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 2: Photos

PHOTOS
Make sure you’re thinking big picture [meaning of your entire
musical presence... not a really large photo...] when you get artists
photos taken. [And for the love, please do not stand by a tree trunk
and smile at the camera.] You need to make sure everything about the
entire package all fits into whatever image you’re going for. It’s
good to ask yourself the question: who is my demographic? [Demographic
is a fancy word for the group of people who like a certain thing.] Are
you appealing to the Clay Aiken, Celine Dion crowd? Or the Snoop Dogg
crowd? Make sure you LOOK and DRESS like you SOUND. Then make sure
your pictures have that vibe. Don’t dress like a hard core punk rocker
if you’re singing adult contemporary love ballads. Your CD is a
product, a commodity, which needs to be marketed. And if you’re not
well defined and streamlined in your identity as an artist, you will
have a hard time finding an audience to which you will stick. And you
want to be very sticky! [And heck, if you’ve got money to hire
professional hair, makeup, wardrobe, art direction, etc. go for it.]

ABOUT RELEASING A RECORD

I’m going to leave the following paragraph, but even one year has made enough difference to change the situation in the industry. See below this paragraph for my updated thoughts.

[WHAT I SAID IN 2008: If it’s looking like your full record might take a few years to complete, [which is entirely possible because life happens] you might want to consider getting the first 5 or 6 songs mixed and mastered, and then print up 100 copies of a “partial release”. This will allow you to at least start getting it out there and get some momentum on it. We did this with our first 6 songs, and shipped the prerelease out to record labels and some radio stations that played our genre of music. [Good thing we did, since we had no idea it would still be TWO YEARS before we’d be finished.] From that we got 10 song licenses for various compilations, we got one song on the Banana Republic playlist, we got airplay on a nationally syndicated radio show, and we made some extremely valuable contacts which later paid off with CD orders when we had our full release finished. I am SO GLAD we did this!!! It’s the best decision we made. It might also give you just a little bit of satisfaction so that you’ll take your time and do the whole record right and not rush just to get it finished. Another option would be to call it an EP. But later after you’ve recorded more, put it ALL together because you can sell a full length CD for more.]

THIS IS WHAT I SAY IN 2009: In this age of digital music, it seems that the option of releasing a “single” or “EP” is so easy, it only makes sense to do so. If you only have a budget to get one song recorded and mixed by professionals, then go ahead and get a good looking graphic put together and digitally release that one song as a single. If you do it on CD Baby you only need to pay the one time $35 registration fee, and you can leave it out there forever without ever having to pay again. Then you’ll show up on iTunes and Amazon digital etc. Then after you get a few more songs recorded put them together with your previous single that you released, and put it out there as an EP. Then, after you record a few more songs [3 to 5], put those few songs out as another separate EP. Digital only. Then you can record a couple of more songs, and put it ALL together as a full length CD. Be sure, though, that you do have something previously unreleased on your new CD. One benefit of this is that when someone looks you up online, they see that you’ve released 4 different projects, which looks better than just one full length CD [even though it’s not really]. So it gives the perception that you’ve got more going on. One caution, be sure if you put it all together on one project, that the music production is cohesive, so they actually sound like they all belong on the same record. If your sound has changed over time, then keep the ones you like, and put them out on a new project, leaving the others off.

Don’t think that you don’t need any physical CDs for a digital only release. You will need promotional copies, so spend your money and make sure they look very good. That way when you mail your CD to sites like Pandora.com, it will be taken more seriously.

No one else cares about your music or your career as much as you do. Don’t wait for someone else to come along and do things for you that you think you’re not good at. Just work at getting better and do them for yourself.

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 1: Your CD

Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. So here is part one...


YOUR OWN CD


Clearly your songs need to be very strong and your music must
sound great. If you can afford to hire a professional producer, you
should definitely do so. Trying to make a record without a producer is
like trying to shoot a movie without a director. You might end up with
a finished product, but having that objective person looking at the big
picture and bringing it all together is extremely valuable. You want
your songs to sound cohesive so they all belong together on the same
record. You also want a producer who will make sure that YOUR VOCAL
sounds fantastic. Don’t settle for someone who gives you hot guitar
tracks and then just leaves you on your own in front of the mic when it
comes time to cut the vocal.



When it comes to music production, there are three factors: FAST.
CHEAP. GOOD. You can only have two of those, but you can’t have all
three.


If you’re not sure about a producer, just offer to hire them for
one song to start with and see if you like working with them. You want
a person that you feel comfortable with who will bring out your best in
the studio. Depending on the genre of music, you could easily spend at
least a couple thousand dollars per song, but that should include
paying the musicians, and you should strive to have full ownership of
the masters. If a producer gives you a lower rate up front in exchange
for partial ownership of the master, that’s also another option. The
scenario of a producer “developing an artist” and not charging them for
their services is what many people often expect, but producers need to
pay the bills too. Plus if you’re on their no-money work roster, you’re
going to come last, after their money work. You could find yourself
still waiting for them to finish your project two years after you
started. And it may not always be easy to find a producer who believes
in you enough to work with you for free. So if you want to get
something done in a timely manner, just pay them for their services,
and walk away owning what you did.


Having a GREAT MIX and MASTERING are of utmost importance. A
crappy mix is a huge indicator of amateur work. Your songs must compete
sonically with what the major labels are releasing. You cannot forego
mastering.

ARTWORK


When you meet a person for the first time, what do you notice
more, what their face looks like, or how their voice sounds? When you
are putting together your CD packaging, do not underestimate the vital
importance of having a GREAT CD COVER. Good artwork is essential. Spend
some time in the record stores looking at the CD covers of other
musicians in your genre, and get some really good references for
whomever is designing your cover for you. Something like this, though
always subjective, is AS important as having good production and
mastering on your tracks.


If you’ve done any cover tunes on your CD, you will need to pay
out the mechanical licenses before you can get your CDs duplicated.
Hopefully, all of these royalties are processed through the Harry Fox
Agency, and if you’re getting less than 2,500 CDs printed, you can pay
online at songfile.com. Otherwise, you’ll need to find out from the
song’s publisher who processes their mechanicals. Please learn from my
mistake and get several hundred ‘FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY’ copies
printed up if you have several cover tunes on your CD. We didn’t do
that, we got 2,000 CDs pressed with really nice expensive digipak
packaging, had to pay mechanicals on all of them, [which really adds up
for 8 covers per CD], and then ended up giving away 600 of those CDs.
Soooo... we paid hundreds of dollars in mechanicals that we will never
get back. We should have gotten 500 CDs in a cardboard sleeve printed
for promos. Live and learn.


STAY TUNED FOR MORE UNSOLICITED ADVICE...