Making Money from Music: Fan Relationship

It is obvious that building a fan base is essential when making a career for yourself in the music industry. To be able to monetise this fan base you have to have a pretty established following (this doesn’t mean you need a large following!) of people who interact with you. For example, if you have a following of 10,000 on Facebook/Twitter but no one ever likes, shares or comments on anything you do then these are not fans you can monetise. If you have a following of 1000 and you get a good amount of interaction with what you are putting out there, then there is potential to gain money from these fans. So, if you want access to this revenue stream, you need to put effort into your social media pages and website so that there is content for them to interact with.

Once there is interaction then you can start introducing ways of earning money. Before you can ask fans to part with their hard earned cash you need products to sell.

 

Live Experiences

Make some noise about any and every gig you have coming up. Not only can this encourage your current fans to pay for a ticket but it can help you bring in new audience members who later could become fans and pay for more gigs and other offerings. And if it’s a free event? That’s fine. Okay, they won’t be directly providing a revenue stream for you, but it’s your chance to increase your fandom and increase your current fans’ loyalty to you.

Recordings

Get in the studio and make some music! Get physical CDs you could sell at your next gig. Distribute your music online to streaming sites and download sites. Set a release date and make a fuss over it to increase excitement over your new music.

Merch

T-shirts, key-rings, artwork, whatever you can think of. This is for artists with fans they know are willing to buy stuff, so don’t go investing in this until you know it will get sold… it’s hard enough to make money as a musician without throwing away what you earn!

Now you’ve got the basic products, you need a way of selling them. For example, asking fans to sign up to a mailing list will help you understand which fans are the most enthusiastic about what you are doing. You can then use this to alert these fans when you have a gig coming up or music and/or merch available to buy, therefore directly selling products to your most likely of customers.

You could also start a subscription fan club for your most loyal of fans. Charge a small amount for entry to the fan club and in return provide them with exclusive news from you, more direct interaction with you, tell them when you have gigs/releases coming up before anyone else. Basically like a VIP mailing list.

You can use both or either of these to talk about extra developments with the 3 basic products. For example, send over sneak peeks of merch/artwork designs. Sell VIP live experiences where they can meet you for a chat before the gig. Set competitions where the first 5 people to buy your album get a free ticket to your next gig etc.

Fan Relationships

These are all just examples. You need to be fully aware of your reach, your budget and the likelihood of fans actually paying for these things. Create campaigns specific to you and never ask too much! If you are constantly trying to sell to people, they will quickly get bored of you. Provide them with enough free content to get them interested and then ask for them to buy things every now and again.

For more ways to make money from your music check out Part 1: Intellectual Property and Part 2: Live Performance. All 3 of these ways interlock in some way or another. It’s up to you to decide what works for you.

Read Full Article Here: http://www.helpforbands.co.uk/making-money-from-music-fan-relationship/

Open G Tuning: A Brief Intro

I recently spent some time in Open G tuning, or “Low” Open G Tuning, as it’s sometimes called. I was following the lead of Don Ross in his fingerstyle guitar lessons, where he walks through the details the tuning and provides some example material.

In short, the Open G tuning alters the standard guitar tuning so that the open strings, when strummed all together, make a G major chord. Like this:

Open G Tuning

Standard -> Open G
E -> Tune down whole step to D
A -> Tune down whole step to G
D -> Keep the same at D
G -> Keep the same at G
B -> Keep the same at B
E -> Tune down whole step to D

Resources

I won’t do an exhaustive rundown of the technical details of the tuning, for that you can check out Don’s lessons.  But here are just a couple resources for those interested in trying it out:

• You can easily get the voicings for chords and scales in this tuning by using the Guitar Tuning Database website, which I’ve written about a bit here.  This site has an incredible amount of material for exploring alternate and open tunings.

• If you’re looking for tabs, you can find a list of some songs here. There were surprisingly few rock songs in Open G. Mostly classic rock era songs from Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, Doobie Brothers, etc.  Even discussion threads (like this one) at sites like UltimateGuitar.com turn up a relatively short list.

• However, Joni Mitchell charted this territory fairly well.  Of course she would, alternate tuning were her thing, right? You can get transcriptions for The Circle Game here and Both Sides Now here.  Both Sides Now seems like a particularly good song if you want to explore the tuning’s chord shapes, since it’s mostly strumming.

• Now if you’re going to play slide guitar, there’s a bit more material to work with in terms of songs, and even a starter lesson here from the Guitar World magazine website.

As far as my own personal playing, I’m still exploring Open G. There weren’t really any “a-ha” moments…yet.

Some of the open chords sounded nice, but the scales seemed unwieldy. I think I need to hear some compelling examples in this tuning to truly pique my interest.

And to that end, I’m interested to hear…

…Are there good songs in Open G from some of the new modern fingerstyle players like Andy McKee and Antoine Dufour?

I’m certain there are. If you know any, please drop them in the comments below.

Thanks!

The post Open G Tuning: A Brief Intro appeared first on The Guitar Journal.

Making Money from Music: Live Performance

In an age where music is basically free thanks to piracy and streaming sites, the live music industry has become a bigger and bigger revenue stream for artists. As their music sales has decreased, their income from performing live gigs has risen. Therefore, this could mean you should be striving to tap into this industry.

However, your ability to make money from this depends on where you are in your career. It is all too familiar that artists just starting out very rarely get paid for gigs, or even have to pay to play! And when you are incurring costs yourself to actually get to the gig in the first place, it can be costly to carry on gigging without any return.

 

But, the algorithm is simple. Gigs mean the potential for new fans; new fans means the potential for more audience members at future gigs; more audience members means more potential interest from venues to have you perform; and the more interest there is the bigger the pay check you could potentially receive. The reason I have used “potential” so many times is that you have to milk every opportunity you get. If you do gigs months apart then the interest will fade and you may have to start this algorithm again.

Be ballsy as well… don’t always assume that you are playing for free. Don’t be afraid to ask “how much will I get paid for the gig”. If they say nothing then ask “could I at least get paid for my expenses or get a guarantee that if you’re impressed you’ll pay me to come back”. You could even try and negotiate getting a percentage of the bar sales in the venue! At the end of the day the venue needs to make money and if they pay you and no one turns up that is bad for them. Deals like this mean they can ensure they cover their costs before paying you. At the end of the day, sell yourself!

Similar to what was talked about in the last part of this series, you can earn copyright royalties for your performances. If you are signed up to PRS and perform a song that you have written yourself, PRS will pay you money for this performance. Every live music venue has a PRS license to cover the costs of paying out these royalties, so take advantage of this. Do your research on PRS to make sure you do what you need to do to get paid and don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you’re unsure, ask the venue as they should know how it works – and as they aren’t paying you this royalty themselves they shouldn’t have a problem telling you how to get what is owed to you!

Even if the venue is paying you to perform, you can still get money from PRS on top of this!

As with most things discussed in the industry, promote, promote, promote!

If you have active social media accounts and content to show as examples of what your music is like and how you perform live, then venues will feel more comfortable putting that investment into you. If they are totally unaware of how good you are as an artist then it is a huge risk to pay you money as you may not bring people in or you may give a bad performance!

Admittedly, at the very basic grassroots level when you are just starting out, your main source of income will probably come from your intellectual property a.k.a copyright, but it is still worth looking into other revenue streams such as live performance. Check out the first blog in this series, Part 1: Intellectual Property, and look out for Part 3: Fan Relationship for info on these other streams.

The next blog will be the final one in the series and will discuss the importance of having fan relationships and, more importantly, how you can monetise this.

Read Full Article Here: http://www.helpforbands.co.uk/making-money-from-live-performance/

Making Money From Music: Intellectual Property

Every artist’s dream is to be able to quit the day job and focus on their music full time. But in order to do that, they need to make money from their music. This can seem like an impossible feat, considering the industry is crying out that the value of music is dying thanks to piracy and micro royalty payments from digital platforms.

But there are some ways to still make money from your music and every little helps. In this short series of blogs, we are aiming to cover the main ways you can make money from your music, to better strategise in your career and understand what opportunities are available to you. The first part is about intellectual property.

Understanding Intellectual Property

The main thing to understand about intellectual property (or IP) is copyright. When a song is written and/or recorded, there is automatically a copyright attached to that piece of work – you can make money from this copyright.

There are three different types of copyright within a song. The individual(s) involved in creating each of these are entitled to a share of ownership of that copyright.

• The lyrics.
• The composition (i.e the melody).
• The master recording.

To make things simple we will group the copyright for the lyrics and the copyright for the melody/instrumentation together and this is normally called the song rights or publishing rights and the copyright for the recording is called the master rights.

So how do you make money from this exactly?

If you own the song rights:

One way to earn money from your compositions can be from having your song placed in sync opportunities, such as films, television shows and advertisements. The Music Sync Tank are doing an excellent series for us, delving into what exactly sync is and how to get these kinds of deals. You can see Part 1 and Part 2 (part 3 is coming up soon).

Another way would be to get another performing artist to record your song. Every time this new recording is performed live, played in public, broadcast on radio, used in a film, television show etc. you earn a performance royalty from these usages.

The best way to keep track of this is to be signed up to the Performing Rights Society (PRS). You register any song you have written with them and they give you and your songs unique codes. They can then track the usage of your song and pay you what you are owed. Their website tells you more about what they can do for you, but essentially if you are writing songs there is no excuse not to be signed up to them as you could be missing out on money!

If you own the master rights:

If you’ve recorded a song you can be earning money from this. Similarly to those who own the song rights, you will earn money each time the composition within your master recording is synced to visual media. Whoever wants to use the song in their production will need permission from both the owner of the song rights and the master rights so you are entitled to a fee as well for this usage. This fee depends on the negotiated contract.
You also earn a royalty from MCPS each time this master recording is reproduced on CD, download etc. This is called a mechanical royalty. This is also handles by PRS but is solely about the usage of the recording of the song, not about the lyrics and composition of the song. Basically, if you have recorded a song written by someone else, you will earn an MCPS royalty whenever the recording is played in public and the songwriter will earn a PRS royalty. You can learn more about MCPS here.

As well as this, if you distribute the recording to go into physical stores or on streaming/download sites then every time that is bought or streamed then you will get a cut of the money earned from this. You will receive the money from whoever distributes this for you e.g. our sponsors Horus Music distribute to over 800 digital stores and you can distribute with them for free and they in turn will pay you your cut. No need for you to chase up the money yourself. There are other distribution options that are available depending on what you’re looking for.

If you are a singer/songwriter or you are in a band, you have written your own songs and retained your master recording rights then you’re lucky, as you can earn money for both copyrights! If a song is played on the radio you will earn the performance royalty. If you distribute your music to stores then you will get a royalty from PRS/MCPS and also your direct payment from your distributor.

As with anything like this it is easier said than done. If you get your music out there but don’t tell anyone about it then there is less chance that it will be bought, listened to and companies won’t know about it to use it in the media. You have to make some noise about what you’re doing to reap the benefits.

Browse through our blogs for advice on how to promote yourself. Also, sign up to our newsletter to get industry contacts directly to your inbox every month from companies actively seeking artists to work with.

Next time I will discuss how you can make money from Live Performances, and in Part 3 we discuss Fan Relationships.

Read Full Article Here: http://www.helpforbands.co.uk/making-money-from-intellectual-property/

Revo Guitar Straps Review

Revo Guitar Straps is making headway.  You’ll see the guitar straps around the shoulders of folks like Zac Brown and Ziggy Marley.

Revo’s idea is simple:  comfortable wooden guitar straps, handcrafted in Costa Rica.

Wood?

Yup, wood.  They kind of remind me of those wooden beaded seat covers favored by New York cabbies. (It’s possible that I had one one of those on the bench seat of my Nissan pickup in high school).

The idea is that the wood distributes the weight more evenly, rather than concentrating pressure at the apex of your shoulder..

I recently took one a Revo Maple Bullet ($89) strap for a test drive.  How did it go?  Glad you asked.

Review

Packaging was simple.  Plastic sheath with a simple cardboard tag at the top.  Once out of the packaging, there were two steps for set up – attaching the strap tail and fitting the strap hole.

• The strap tail can be attached to the main strap at any point up the strap.  You just find a slot in the wooden pieces and weave it through.  I’m a normal size guy – I wear a Men’s Large and don’t have to duck in doorways – but I had to attach the strap tail at the largest setting.  Revo says straps are adjustable from 43″ to 55″.  I must’ve been pushing the 55″ mark.

• The strap hole for the neck of the guitar went on fine, but the strap hole for the base of the guitar was more difficult.  The strap hole was just too small for the strap peg.  I ended up taking a pocket knife, cutting the strap hole a bit, and voila! Good fit. (Note: When I contacted Revo, they actually recommended this approach.  They prefer to make the strap tight for all guitars, then users customize for their hardware.)

Once it was set up, the strap was super comfortable.  The weight distribution felt more even, and the guitar felt more secure and less “swingy”.

A note of caution:  If you leave both sides of the strap attached when you put the guitar down (if you just slide it over your head, for example), it will smack against the back of your guitar when you put it down.  Better to gently undo one of the ends and set the guitar down gently.

Bonus feature: We didn’t get to try it out, but Revo says you can get custom inlays in the strap to match your guitar.  Sounds like a good looking setup for your nice acoustic.

See More Revo Straps >>

Maple Bullett Revo Strapon Amazon ($89) >>

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