If people can get the same product elsewhere for free with no repurcussions, what needs to be done is simple.

One: Improve the product,

Two: make it easier to find your product than the free version and

Three: remove the free equivalent.

In practical terms, that means

One: higher quality recordings, smaller file sizes, faster distribution, better convergence of media and greater creativity implementing new technology and more diverse cultural life experience.

Two: Faster, more intuitive user interfaces, websites or applications with clear design and

Three: Improve the law: A more organised approach to protecting copyright on a worldwide basis, without infringing on the differing civil liberties in the global community, implimented by targeting the uploader, not the referencer, at a local law inforcement level.

Business affairs,

Media production, videography, photography, marketing, design, legal services, media lawyer, accountant, artist manager, radio producer, tv programmer,

Summary

Part 1: What is the music support Industry

Part 2: How the music support industry has evolved

Part 3: Main Businesses in T

Part 4: How Musicians interact with the Recording industry

Part 5: How Musicians make money in the Recording Industry

Part 6: Behind the scenes: The Support Network

Record labels, Recording studios, marketing,manufacturing plants, physical sales, mechanical rights, majors verses independent record labels, DIY production, producers, session musicians, artists, A&R reps, radio pluggers, linis with live industry for promotion, touring, links with publishing for synchronisation to tv, radio, mixed media,

This video defines the recording industry as a whole, looks briefly at how the recording industry has changed over time, the main businesses that are involved with recorded music, as well as how musicians interact with the recording industry and of course the support network of professionals that keep its processes running smoothly.

Part 1: What is the Recording Industry

The music recording industry is the business of finding talented artists and good songs, putting them together in a recording and selling the result in either physical or digital form to fans. It covers all types of music that is in a permanent state – by that I mean any music that doesn’t require a human to be there creating it at the point of audience listening to it, so vinyl, CD, .mp3, youtube, but it does not include any instance online where the performance inputted at one end, is steamed, and being listened to by the audience at the other end – That then becomes the live industry and is covered by performance royalties.

Heres the defining bit, in very simple terms, a composer writes a song, they own that idea, but they loan it to a musician to record it. The musician records their version of that song, thereby creating something new themselves. Imagine Madonna using a Michael Jackson Song. The two have distinct styles, and although MJ clearly has the idea and the songwriting, when Madonna comes along and records it, she will add her own feel that will entirely change it. They both have different types of ownership of the idea: MJ’s is the publishing royalty as he is the songwriter, Madonna’s is the Mechanical Royalty, as she mechanically made a new version of his idea. The recording. This is then loaned to the record label to distribute to fans and the label takes a cut of the resulting income.

Part 2: How the Recording industry has evolved

The recording industry is the most publicly followed part of the music industry. People have come to use music industry and recording industry interchangeably  as a result but its roots lie in the late 1800s when technology allowed for sound to be stored and later reproduced. The recording industry grew very quickly to be the largest part of the music industry and has only recently, in the last 10 years, begun its fall from that power as a result of no longer being able to regulate copying of the records it gets its value from. Today the recording industry is hurrying to move its sales online to access the customers again, but is still being held back by inadequate international copyright laws that allow people to steal music without consequence. Luckily, its a large industry, it always needs musicians to help it along and is still actively looking for them.

Part 3: Main Businesses in The Recording Industry

The main company in the recording industry is the Record label. A record label employs an Artist & Repertoire Representative to go out and find what styles of music will sell well. They are then tasked with finding artists that are talented in that genre, and songs that sound great, take the two to a recording studio and let a producer put them together into a great recording ready for sale.

This is a long process and todays market sees A&R reps waiting for aritsts and genres to develop themselves based on audiences, changing from the slightly more proactive and taste-MAKING process A&R used to do, to a more financially secure RE-active selection of talent. As a result of this, the songwriters and the artists are most commonly the same individuals now, but A&R will decide which of the selection of tracks available the artist will use to become the most marketable.

An artist development manager or the manager of the record label (depending on the label’s size) will take into account the wider industry and trends, and use their expertise of having usually been in other roles around the industry to make a judgement as to how many albums, what territories – or countries around the world – to promote the record in, what the potential future earnings could be from the artist and discuss these with A&R reps who have become specialists at particular genres or markets.

The Marketing department in the record label will decide on the branding, the ‘image’ as well as the target demographic for customer, age-range, possible re-use, re-mix and synchronisation opportunities from the recording and they will devise a route to market: The master plan of how to promote the artist and the recording as cost-effectively as possible to the target market.

The A&R rep will chat with the artist and come up with ways in which either party is happy for the records to be used, how much money they each think it will make, how long they want to be associated with each other for what the other party can provide and once they have been verbally agree, the A&R rep will create a bullet-pointed list of those conditions, just to formalise the agreement. This is called the Heads of Agreement and once signed by both parties becomes a legally binding document. So that there is no uncertainty as to what the document means, and because the english language is open to very different interpretation, lawyers are then called in to beef out exactly what each clause and phrase means in a kind of glossary of terms known as the associated long form agreement. this is the point where the artists’ lawyer and the record label’s lawyer have a great back-and-forth trying to decide exactly what each phrase means whilst keeping their client’s best interests in mind and a good music lawyer in this respect carries enough wisdom to be able to negotiate quickly with the other party while leaving everyone feeling happy. They bill by the hour of course.

Lest we forget, contracts are only there for when it goes extremely wrong. 90% of the time you should have a healthy working relationship where everyone involved wants the best music and the best delivery to the most people – not least because it is in everyone’s interests. What this means is that labels will not act unreasonably because they are the ones who showed faith in you in the first place. Make sure you or your artist manager keep an open line of communication with your contact in the label so that everyone knows what everyone’s intentions are. You shouldn’t have to be referring to your contract all the time; if you are, consider whether your relationship with your label has the trust it needs for a healthy relaxed environment.

So

Once the contracts, terms and conditions are agreed the artist receives a bit of the money that the record label thinks they are going to earn from the final records. This money is for the artists’ living allowance and to pay for recording studio time. It is known as an advance, because it is a payment of the money the recording is going to make, but has not yet made. It is not a loan, in as much as it does not need to be paid back, but because it is a payment of the earnings coming into the record label from that artist’s record, that money actually has to come INTO the label before they will pay any more money out to the artist, so you could say it does feel like a loan.

The A&R rep will give advice, but the advance will then be used to pay for studio time and maybe to pay for a high profile producer to add their sound to your songs and playing styles. Recording studios offer skilled sound engineers, technicians and producers so that every idea can be realised in high quality and the producer will run a mixdown of the takes – jargon for adjust the volume of each instrument and singer for each song recorded – which is sent off to a mastering house, the mastering department – or today, just moved from one program on your computer to another. where the tracks for an album are ordered and prepared onto a ‘master tape’. I’ll go into more detail about this whole process and the music tech involved behind it in another video, but for brevity lets crack on towards manufacturing!

So the tracks are ordered into masters which the record label keeps hold of, and which they use in manufacturing plants to create the cds ready for retail, or more frequently now they use expensive equipment to compress these digital files so they retain their high quality sound ready for upload to online ecommerce music distributors.

From this point they will set a release date for the albums, bring in different publicists for press early release, a radio plugger to promote the tracks to the major market radio stations and depending on the market they will circulate the track around the DJing circuit so that it is hitting the market before general release.

Another way of promoting the album is through touring the artist, which is where the live industry comes into its own with its own full business structure to deliver those performances.

Part 4: How Musicians interact with the Recording industry

So as a musician, you will probably begin gigging and live performance off your own back finding venues to book you through local personal contacts and maybe generate a small run of cds ready to sell as well as merchandising items to develop the brand. If this is sustained and profitable, you will catch the attention of A&R reps who will court you, that is they will have chats with you finding out your intentions, your current budget, if any other record label have been in touch or whether you have any publishing deals or booking agents they need to take into account. If you both decide that the artist and the record label make a good match and you can each see yourselves working together then they will draw up a heads of agreement, you or your manager will sift through it and your lawyer will negotiate the fine print. You will be given some much-needed cash and will be able to go out and devote your time fully to becoming a professional musician. You will spend many hours recording away in rooms without natural light and produce something that you will be proud of. You will submit it to your record label who will then call you in to discuss touring options, photo shoots, videos for marketing and some publicity stunts – maybe an off the cuff remark about something ‘accidentally’ to get people talking as well as doing press interview rounds to make sure everyone is aware and to build your buzz for the new release. This will be finished off with heavy touring being on the road, seeing many new places and working to random hours of day and night, hopefully with a set of people you love to be with and delivering to crowds who love to see you.

After about 9 months this process will thin out and you will enter into conversations with the record label about them taking up your next option period (simply put, the next funding for an album, recording an album and touring it) and whether it is profitable for them or if you have out-grown them and need a bigger budget and label. lather, rinse, repeat!

Part 5: How Musicians make money in the Recording Industry

For this process you will receive a mechanical royalty from the sale of your record. This is the recognition that you have part-created it, and although this royalty is not as substantial as the publishing royalty received for owning the song that made it all happen, it can provide a good alternative income. Of course, today you are likely to own both the publishing royalty and the mechanical royalty, so its all good!

Don’t forget this hasn’t covered the publishing industry, live industry, music industry history, as well as support services to the industry or many pioneers in the music industry, as well as different job roles available, or step by step guides to becoming a musician in todays industry, all of which are covered in more detail on my website theosmithmusic.com

I hope you found this useful so you can crack on and don’t forget to let your musician friends know about it!

Record labels, Recording studios, marketing,manufacturing plants, physical sales, mechanical rights, majors verses independent record labels, DIY production, producers, session musicians, artists, A&R reps, radio pluggers, linis with live industry for promotion, touring, links with publishing for synchronisation to tv, radio, mixed media,

Part 1: What is the Publishing Industry

Part 2: How the Publishing industry has evolved

Part 3: Main Businesses in The Publishing Industry

Part 4: How Musicians interact with the Publishing industry

The a&r team come up with the way in which the composer will let their work be used by the publishing company. This is initially recorded in an agreement called the basic terms of agreement. This will be accompanied by a sort of glossary that explained exactly what each of the words in the agreement means, which is a guide to the terms.

Part 5: How Musicians make money in the Publishing Industry

Part 6: Behind the scenes: The Support Network

 
I hope you found this useful so you can crack on and don’t forget to let people you think will benefit know about it!

Publishing houses, copyright, royalties, intellectual property, international property rights,  self publishing, registering tracks, royalty collection services, atonal and international territories, heads of agreement.

This video is about the live music industry, what that term covers, where it came from, what types of business it involves, how musicians interact with the live industry, how musicians make money from the live industry and the support networks that keep it running.

Part 1: What is the Live Industry

The live industry is the process by which musicians are employed by venues to perform instantly to audiences in order to generate money through ticket sales, merchandising or value-added process such as advertising, endorsing or promoting.
If musicians perform songs for a gathering of people in exchange for money or value, and the performance is happening at the same time the audience is receiving it, then its part of the live music industry.

Part 2: How the Live industry has evolved

Music is a hotly debated subject of human evolutonary history. It has been recognised as starting by early humans mimicking the sounds around them in various activities including courtship, hunting activity, or even territorialism, all suggesting an emotion-stimulating communication method. It is well beyond this video to try and find out when the expression of emotion or ability to evoke certain emotion in others changed to an exchange of value and the origins of economic transfer of this type over humans’ 200,000 year lives, so I’ll just say that venues have not always been soley for music performance, and even today we see football stadiums being converted for the largest musical performances.

The live industry in the context of the booming 1950s industry was a promotional effort by the recording industry to sell more albums -  artists would tour worldwide so that they would become more well known and in turn boost sales of their records. Lots of money was thrown at these tours and artists enjoyed lavish experiences. This has changed through the noughties (from 2000 onwards) so that productions became more profitable and self-sustainable as recorded music is no longer providing the income to justify the investment on live performances, they have restructured and now run (mostly) more efficiently.

The industry today is dominated by few, very large companies and can involve many hundreds of staff at any one event. The industry side is predominantly covered by the events management discipline, but with some support industries such as royalties collection and lawyers for customs waivers for example.

Part 3: Main Businesses in The Live Industry

The business behind the live industry is fairly straight forward. An audience pays for the privilege to see musicians perform live music. Booking agents collect large amounts of musicians together to offer to promoters who match up the artists and the venues – in much the same way A&R reps do for the recording industry – and venues host the musicians and audience so that they make a profit from ticket sales and any beverages or merchandise.

In order to organise this on a larger scale musicians may attend many venues consecutively into what is known as a tour – a collection of gigs in different venues to the maximum amount of audience members. The artists may put on a more elaborate show, including the need for costumes and stage props which need to be set up and packed down for each gig. This brings along a set of staff like drivers to move the equipment from venue to venue, roadies who move equipment into and out of venues, riggers who set up the equipment on the stage, instrument techs who are experts in particular instruments so that they are set up and ready to play for the performing musicians, stage hands who are in charge of equipment being in place at the right time on stage, sound engineers, lighting engineers, special effects engineers, who look after the technical delivery and sound reinforcement of each show and extra (normally) locally contracted security staff. This has not included the support staff like dancers, choreographers, make-up artists, and for some younger stars, teachers!

These have to be managed and organised by an expert called a tour manager who is the direct liason with their employer, normally the record label, and their client, the musician.  The Tour Manager is also responsible for the finances and regulating the budget given to them by the record label – although on larger tours they will delegate this to an accounting assistant to keep track of the finances.  On larger productions the on-stage staff have to be managed by a stage manager and a logistics manager will maintain all the staff involved with setup, transport and packdown.

The tour manager and the record label will be in contact with various different promoters who have their own geographical ‘patch’ of expertise for attracting audiences to certain genres of music – some tours can end with a different promoter on a different pay rate for every venue of a 50+ venue  tour!

Part 4: How Musicians interact with the live industry

A musician’s experience of the live music industry is usually fairly hectic. On small gigs they will be in charge of the booking, promoting and performing themselves leaving not much time for marketing, ticketing, promotion, and then delivery of a good event! Larger events involve a long lead-up time of intense preparation – don’t forget live events have changed from being solely promotional exercises for new albums from record labels to having to be profitable themselves, and many have investors to answer to meaning they must present a working business model for the tour before the full funding is released for them.

By the time musicians arrive at venues where all the equipment is set up, the staff are in place and the final preparations (and resolutions of some random unpredicted event that ALWAYS happens just before the gig) the extent of the planning that took place can be missed. Of course the sign of a good tour manager is one who is always calm and in control, as they are a project manager for a high-value project sometimes on display to hundreds of thousands of people with a reputation to uphold for many different stakeholders, the musicians, the record label, the entertainment company backing them, the logistics supplier, sometimes even the country they have arrived from. This explains why tour managers can sometimes be a little short with musicians. As long as you bear in mind the amount of leg work they have to do behind the scenes, all should be magical.

Before you get a gig you will either know venues directly, be with a booking agent who recommends you for gigs or a record label or publishing house that puts up the money for you to tour. You will bring on at least one promoter to organise the contracts between artist and venue and a publicist to tell the world about what you are up to. These will be organised by your business manager if you are lucky enough to have on. The agreement you make with the venue on what date, what songs, what conditions,all in a checklist form known as a rider. So for example, to ensure a DJ gets 2 Technics 1210s and a Pioneer club mixer, they will submit a technical rider with their performance contract. If they aren’t there, the contract is null and void and the artist doesn’t play. The contract will include an artist rider, or a list of items the artist requires from the venue as a condition of the performance. These have ended up being pretty stupid requests in the past, the most famous being from Van Halen’s request that a bowl of M&Ms was in their dressing room at every venue, which David Lee Roth later stated was just a test to see how well the venue read the contract; apparently just before this became their policy one of the stage hands for the band had nearly been killed by dangerous working conditions at one venue. As long as the request is legal, nothing is too obscure or too ridiculous.

The pre-promotion of the event may involve going to each area where you will be performing to do local radio interviews and press interviews so that you prepare the audience to buy your tickets, as well as setting up local competitions or even battle of the bands to focus and engage your target audience. A battle of the bands is a good way of hijacking the fans of a good local band so that you may impact on a specific scene in one particular area, other promotional methods include more online competitions, voting and commenting polls for customisation of touring so that fans can speak directly with artists.

Now, onto the musicians’ experience on the day:

You will turn up for the gig through a private entrance away from the public, be warmly received into a comfortable dressing room to prepare and warm up, supplied with the items you requested on your performance rider then when the time is right you will be called by the stage manager to the green room, a room off to one side of the main stage in which you do your final preparations and warm up. The stage manager will tell you your set length or the amount of time you have to perform songs before its time to come off, and you perform! Your artist manager will make a note of which songs you performed to submit to your publishing company so you can get some performance royalties and on longer tours after the performance you will meet competition winners, sign merchandise and do a quick press interview for a couple of local news publications, organised by your publicist.

Part 5: How Musicians make money in the Live Industry

Musicians make money from a combination of taking some of the ticket sales, refreshment sales, merchandise sales, performance royalties and can also make money from recording the gig to sell a ‘live performance’ album and receive mechanical royalties. You can do this by making sure every one of your songs is registered with your country’s royalty collection society as your work, then, once you’ve played a gig, make a note of the date, the songs performed, who they are by and get the venue manager to sign that it is correct. This can then be submitted to your royalty collection society to boost your performance royalty payments, which is an easy way to get another income stream! The fastest way for smaller artists to generate extra money is in merchandising, and that will prosper from successful branding and great design for your fans.

This video has not explained the history of the music industry, the recording industry or the publishing industry as well as support services to the industry or many pioneers in the music industry, as well as different job roles available, or step by step guides to becoming a musician in todays industry, all of which are covered in more detail on my website theosmithmusic.com
I hope you found this useful so you can crack on and don’t forget to let people you think will benefit know about it!

Part 1: The Live Music Industry

So, firstly, the Live Music industry has always existed so long as there have been gatherings of people to watch musicians perform in exchange for money or value. Being a musician and delivering music to listeners, for hundreds of years have been one and the same.

Part 2: The Music Publishing Industry

But, since the 1600s when Gutenburg (gootenberg) invented the basic printing press for use by the Church, liturgical chant has been reproduced in paper form. But it was only in the 1800’s that the industrial revolution paved the way for a more structured delivery of music to a wider audience.

It was at this time that the publishing industries – Book making, news reporting, print media – were developing economies of scale enabling them to deliver products to a much wider audience, and the production of print music (or sheet music) was no exception.

With venues of the time, including stately homes, theatres and concert halls demanding the latest compositions to give to their in-house orchestras for their audience to enjoy, Classical music, from Baroque to the late 1800s romantic, took the lead with the delivery of sheet music; mainly because there was money behind this style which was enjoyed by aristocracy, leaving folk music trailing behind and being delivered more by word-of-mouth. Religious music had always propagated through Monks and Priests educated enough to transcribe their music and hymns, but this was not a commercial industry as developed in the industrial revolution.

When many different orchestras were able to play the compositions of few composers as a result of sheet music distributed to them, the music publishing industry was created.By the late 1800s, composers could write works that would be sold on paper to hundreds of localised orchestras and the printing industry was thriving.

Part 3: The Recorded Music Industry

In 1857 Leon Scott made his first audio analysis tool that could record on a piece of paper the audio input it received. This lead to Thomas Edison, in 1877 to go one step further; a machine called a phonograph that could both record and play back audio instantly using a thin metal cylinder.

Through the 1880s to 1900s a format war was had involving cylinders of tin, wax, celluloid, and disks of 4 inches, 5inches, 7 ½ inches 10inches and by 1903 the 12 inch record, made from shellac, a resin from the female lac bug of India. By this stage the 78 revolutions per minute shellac disks were able to take around 4 ½ minutes of music recorded through ribbon microphones.

The ability to record a particular band performing a particular composition using the sheet music for it, created the recorded music industry.

This recorded music industry put much more focus on the musicians themselves, and away from the composers. The process by which musicians were being recorded became more sophisticated, until Les Paul, in 1948, recorded the first sound-on-sound overdubbed, or multi-track recording, with a  track called ‘Lover (When You’re Near Me)’. This example showed that recordings no longer needed to be taken live (where all musicians were in the same room playing together) and this opened up further opportunities in artistic license through records including Paul’s tape delay, phaser and delay effects.

Record labels, who brought together the composers from the publishing industry and the musicians from the live industry and created a vinyl for the recording industry, would employ people to find the upcoming talent: to put the right musican with the right song in the right studio with the right producer or sound engineer and to release the record at the right time. These people became known as Artist & Repertoire Representatives (or A&R reps). Who went on to pick and choose the successful artists we see today.

Part 4: The Music Industry forming, 1960

The second world war had vastly improved communication technology and shown many people that the world was smaller than they thought, with the first suggestion of a global community. Improvements from morse code where a sound synthesiser was needed to produce the tone were adapted by musicians to create the first polyphonic synthesisers attached to a keyboard to create surreal and out of this world sounds on the multi-track recordings while Les Paul, already credited with inventing multi-track recording, had been frustrated with the lack of sound coming from his guitar while playing live, invented the single-coil solid body guitar, the first commercial electric guitar.

All of these industry advancements fell into place through the 1960s when Elvis Presley, his UK counterpart Cliff Richard and then The Beatles all capitalised on them. Elvis was the epitome of musician-focused international audience delivered through record sales and promoted through live performance. Cliff Richard developed a similar trait in the UK market and The Beatles brought together their own songwriting, with their performances, massive international record sales and expansive promotional live performance touring. The Beatles marked the first mega-band to write and perform their own songs, showing it was a viable business model:

Having caught the attention of some wealthy people who noticed the record sale levels, the recording industry began to receive much larger investments, enabling elaborate stage shows for promotion, manufacture of large volumes of records that were distributed worldwide and lucrative recording contracts with talented artists.

Merchandising prospered through live events as an alternative income stream and for many years this continued as a successful strategy. More artists, more labels, better deals, better distribution.

Part 5: Technological Improvements

Various new recorded music formats were introduced; compact tape cassettes in the mid 1970s, a transitional medium from vinyl long-playing (LP) records through to compact disks in the 1990s and while this was happening, the technological industries were advancing digital microcomputers enabling personal computers to become widely available to the public.

A new concept known as the internet, designed as a Cold-War failsafe for national government communication became publicly available in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the WorldWideWeb web browser. Commercial use was not allowed until 1995 when Amazon and eBay were established. As the internet had been restricted commercially for 5 years, many had discovered the internet’s potential as an information and file sharing network and public perception began to accept a shift to digital storage of information not just on local area networks seen through 1980’s corporations but on a personal level.

This marked the removal of geographical restriction on distribution of recorded music: you did not need to go to your local store to collect your favourite record any more but online stores were simply inadequate – having been restricted 5 years.

John Fanning, Shaun Fanning and Sean Parker released Napster in 1999. It focused on organising all the music (mainly in .mp3 format) into one portal where the public could search for the track they wanted and list the tracks they had. This is the point at which intellectual property ownership became the most valuable asset of the recorded music industry and where the lines between publishing and recording industries were further blurred as there was no longer a tangible product to distinguish the two.

Now there was an unregulated collection of recorded music which rendered the sales of physical recordings useless for those that just wanted the recording and not a physical product they could keep.

‘Why should I pay for an overpriced album where most of the money does not go to the artist when I can just go online, type its track name in and get it for free?’ Was the mindset.

Part 6: The reformation of the music industry

In 2001 CD album sales peaked in line with the .com bubble bursting they have not stopped declining. The recorded music industry has been in panic, trying to hold onto the pre-internet strategy of album sales through their controlled stock.

The internet does not have the intellectual property right laws – in particular international legislation – for them to be able to control the market any more. This has lead to attempts by recording companies to improve intellectual property laws through case law precedents by taking individuals to court in high profile cases.

This had a knock-on effect on the publishing industry who provided the songs to a now ever-decreasing value market, and to the live industry, who no longer received such lavish budgets for touring due to a lack of return on investment.

Part 7: The Future

These industries are sorting themselves out. The musc industry as a whole is the largest it has ever been. It is just changing its route to market and income streams.

Before the money was in recorded music sales which propped up live performance and publishing.

Currently, the money is still in recorded music sales, but it is declining rapidly, and future-conscious industry professionals are seeing a need to move to live performance and publishing/synchronisation and endorsements taking the lead with recorded music sales yet to reach their market equilibrium – but which is lower than it currently is. It is reasonable to see recorded music sales transferring online, but the eCommerce is not matured enough yet to provide a viable easy-to-use store. iTunes by Apple is leading the way for online media eCommerce and that market equilibrium for recorded music sales will be proportional to the technology improvements for years to come.

Review

In summary there are 3 main parts to the music industry: Live, Publishing and Recorded. They have changed dramatically over their 150 year life and most of that change has happened in the last 15 years.

This chat hasn’t covered convergence of media, support services to the industry or many pioneers in the music industry, as well as different job roles available, or step by step guides to becoming a musician in todays industry, all of which are covered in more detail on my website theosmithmusic.com

I hope you found this useful so you can crack on and don’t forget to let people you think will benefit know about it!

It will take time and effort to develop a brand, but it is worth it in the long run, as it makes it easier for your audience to relate to you, while you become more memorable.

So how do you make sure that your fans are experiencing the best you that you can offer? There are a number of quick checks you can do, along with some longer-term projects, which when chipped away at, slowly come together and quietly end up as product you:

Summary:

• Find out what you represent
• Find out where you fit into the music industry
• Find out every point of contact with your fans
• Put what you represent about where you fit in the music industry as one message through every point of contact.

1. Who are you?
Sit down and have a think about what you deliver. What does it mean to be you and what about life do you associate with. Find your individualism in the things that have influenced you throughout your life. Don’t try so hard to be completely original. You aren’t. No one is. Instead, life influences you therefore nothing you do is truely ‘original’ but if you cast your life experiences net wide, you can become more creative by bringing them together in a way no one else ever has.

2. Where do you live?
No, I’m not talking about your geographical location, what I mean is how do you appeal to other people, what do they associate with and what types of people do you associate best with? This will be the hardest question to answer early on because you won’t have established your core identity and you won’t have data to work with about your audience, their spending habits or their preferences. But try to find your community; easiest through finding your genre, some of the current blogs, news, magazines, venues or promoters relating to your genre – this is where you will be best received, so its worth getting to know it quickly and see what other similar-sounding artists have done and why.

3. Where do you meet?
List every point of contact you have with the outside world. Now ask if they all match your identity and if they represent your community? Would one set of people who know you through one area describe you in a completely different way to another set from a different place? Aim to bring all of these expectations into line with a unified message to all – the better you communicate your values and intentions, the easier it is for promoters, A&R, and other industry professionals to see where you can get into the market, making it more likely you will land a job!

4. Polish the delivery
By now you know what you stand for, you know who needs to hear your message, you know where they come across it and so its time to make the impressions!

your colour scheme triggers a subtle and subliminal mood reaction in viewers and different colours bring different reactions:

• Black = Authority & Power
• White = Innocent & Pure
• Blue = Calm & Cold
• Red = Stimulant
• Yellow = Distinctive & Irritating
• Green = Relaxing
• Brown = Genuine & Sad
• Purple = Royalty & WealthYour prose tone needs to match – don’t put one message out very conversationally and another corporate message!

Next gig, be there, gonna be wicked!

verses

We would like to extend to you a polite invitation of attendance at our annual variety performance

(don’t confuse your audience!)

The way you deal with absolutely every single person will affect your brand. With branding there is no down-time – but this shouldn’t be a problem if you have found who you represent properly, it is just a level of responsibility to deliver it as you begin to represent something greater than yourself when you develop fans, industry contacts, and people like your team or entourage who rely on you.

Your logo is a key part of identifying you quickly for fans, but it is not branding on its own. True visual design branding means you can cover up the logo and artist name and still know exactly who they are – think apple products, and the typography-obsessed late Steve Jobs. Spend the time to find a graphic designer to develop you logo – make sure you are truely proud of it. The test is that you are willing to show it to the head of universal music and confident they would be impressed with your individuality then you are there as long as you are also proud of it!

Your lyrical content, your biographies, you album intentions and your press interviews or public relations all contribute to your branding and to have it clearly established who you are and what you represent will mean that you are much more confident in what you do.