Breaking Up EMI

As the sale of EMI to Universal Music gets further down the line, more and more interesting details come out, many of which look to have an affect not only on Universal, but the music business in general.

First of all comes word comes that Universal may have to sell off at least Virgin Records and EMI Classics in order to appease European regulators so they will allow the purchase to stand. There are several things in play here:

1. Virgin Founder Richard Branson has indicated that he'll be amongst the bidders to buy back Virgin Records. This could be interesting in that Branson has always been on the cutting edge of technology, and what he might do with a present day record label would hopefully be good for the entire industry for the entire industry.

2. Universal's stock price is at a 9 year low. They desperately need this purchase to happen in hopes of giving the stock a boost.

Now the thing about the purchase that's interesting is that Universal assumed all regulatory risk in the purchase, so they're going to need the deal to be approved or the sale is essential worth zero to them. Also, if the regulators ask them to sell off more of EMI in order to get approval, then they'd probably have to sell at a low price to get the approval sorted ASAP, which wouldn't help their stock much, since any such sale would probably be at a lower than market price.

Then on top of that, Universal has to pay 80% of the purchase price to Citi by September, regardless of whether it's approved or not, which means that they'd pay for it, but not really own it. It would be like buying a car yet not being able to drive it.

The only thing this sale really has going for it in Universal's favor is that it increases their market share in virtually every territory, with their global share increasing to about 40%. It's higher still in some territories.

Obviously this sale isn't great for the music business as there's so much power consolidated in one company's hands. The only thing that gives some hope is what Richard Branson might bring to the business again.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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3 Common Mistakes Made By Independant Musicians

CD Baby's DIY Musician blog always has a lot of good tidbits for those still struggling in the musical trenches, which I know is most of you. You can read this entire article regarding the "3 Most Common Mistakes Made By Independant Musicians," but I'll summarize the major points made in the article about the 3 mistakes here with my spin.

1. You don't monetize your live shows. If you're just starting out, you need the stage time to get tight so this point won't matter, but if you've been playing for a while and have built at least a small fanbase, it's time take advantage. Make sure that you have something to sell, either T-shirts, hats, CDs, flash drives with your music, but make it affordable. The money is cool, but the free advertising by the fans is better.

 2. Don't focus on getting signed. First of all, why would you want to in this day and age? Second of all, even if you do, your best bet is to develop as big an audience as you can. Remember the following because it's really true: Labels don't sign you for your music, they sign you for your audience. They really don't care how good you are, but if you have a line around the block, they'll come knocking at your door and you won't need to contact them. 

3. Treat your music like a business. Why do you think they call it the "music business"? You have to have fun with your music or it's not worth doing, but you have to consider the business of what you're doing as well. There are loads of places to get advice on this, but since you're reading this, check out the archives of this blog for lots of business tips. It's also a good idea to watch this Henry Rollins video over on my Big Picture Production Blog for some inspiration.

There's my take on the DIY article, but you should check out the original post as well as it looks at the 3 points from a different angle.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

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Chili Peppers Follow The Music 3.0 Strategy

Anyone who's either read my Music 3.0 Internet Music Guidebook or has been reading my blog for a while know that I've advocated a new release schedule where there are more single releases on a timely basis instead of waiting until 10 songs are finished then releasing an album.

There are 3 reasons for using this strategy:

1. We now live in a singles world. The majority of people, especially those under 35, now consume their music a song at a time. That's how they like it, so there's no use fighting it.

2. Releasing 10 singles actually gives you 11 events to promote, not just one. You can promote each single as a separate event, then put them all together for an album release, which is the 11th. Which do you think gets the artist more exposure?

3. And maybe even more importantly, releasing just a single focuses the fan's attention on just one song at a time, instead of picking out only 1 or 2 from an album and listening to just those (which is what usually happens).

Now The Red Hot Chili Peppers are taking a page from the Music 3.0 notebook and releasing a song a month for the next 9 months beginning on August 14. This is on the back of their new album I'm With You, which has already been released.  It seems that the band recorded 50 songs for I'm With You, and didn't want to wait for the normal album cycle in order to put the songs out that were left off the record.

Each single offers a number of value-added items to each release. Each song will be released on both vinyl and digital, and each single will contain a different piece of artwork that will only be complete with the purchase of all 9 singles.

It's pretty obvious that release times between records are shortening, but The Chili Peppers move signals the new Music 3.0 release reality is finally here.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

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Louis CK And The Off-Air Radio Game

As I posted a few times before comedian Louis CK does things his own way that many consider cutting edge in terms of marketing and distribution. Recently he embarked on a tour that bypasses ticketing giant Ticketmaster and charged fans a flat rate of $45 for any ticket. Here's a great interview with him posted on AVclub where he discusses the little-known game that radio plays with touring artists in a quid pro quo for promotion.

"I like to try to see if something can work. It’s really satisfying to figure out, “What if we try it this way? What if we made it way more pleasurable and cheaper to come see me? Or to watch my show online? And if we do this right, how much benefit were we getting from the giant companies?” The first time I ever toured in theaters—the first time I toured, really. You do comedy clubs, it’s just working clubs, but the first time I went on a tour in theaters—they were like 500-to-700-seat theaters, my agent asked me some blanket questions, like, “Here’s what’s going to come up,” and he said, “What is your radio tolerance?” That’s what he asked me. He said, “What presence are you willing to let radio people have at your shows?” and I said, “Give me an example.” And he goes, “Well, here’s all the things they will ask for in every city: Thing one is that the radio personality gets to come onstage and introduce the show. And the second thing they’re going to want is a van outside, broadcasting from the show. Then they’re going to want a banner onstage, with the name of the radio on it. Then they’re going to want a table out in the lobby with bumper stickers.”

He just made a list of, “Here’s the things that they will want.” Another one was meet-and-greets. They get to give away tickets, and the DJ introduces you to the contest winners who won the meet-and-greets. Ten minutes with you alone in a room where you take pictures and stuff. So they said, “What of these things are you willing to do?” And I said, “Let’s say no to all of this.” [Laughs.] One hundred percent of it. As a professional courtesy, if a radio DJ wants free tickets, he can come to the show. He can’t come backstage. He certainly can’t come onstage. They may not have their logo on any of the shit on the stage, anywhere near it. I want people to come to the theater and feel like they’re just coming to see this; they’re not being promoted to. I don’t think there’s anything more obnoxious than when someone has paid to be somewhere, to be promoting to them. That they’re paying to be advertised to is really annoying to me.  

I said to him, “Let’s do none of it.” And he said, “Well, here’s the thing: If you let them do these things, then they talk about your show all the time. They talk about your show on the air, and you get more free promotion from radio stations. If they get to say, ‘I’m going to be there,’ they’ll get more into it.” And I said, “Well, first of all, I don’t want people at my shows that are there to see the DJ. I just don’t want them to come.” And I said to my agent, “Let’s find out if this is a huge mistake. Let’s find out. I’m willing to sacrifice my first theater tour and have the places empty and identify that it’s because I wouldn’t let the radio people participate. But we also might find out that it didn’t make a difference and that I never have to do it.” [Laughs.] Because you can’t roll that shit back once you’ve started. Anyway, the obvious story is that it didn’t make a fucking difference. It didn’t matter."

Of course, most artists just trying to make it would gladly do anything radio asked, but does radio really have that much influence these days? The point is, just because something has also been done a certain way, that doesn't mean that it's the right thing in our new Music 3.0 world.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Women Singers Dominate Highest Paid Under 30

Forbes has recently posted their highest paid entertainers under 30 list, and it's probably no surprise that so many women make up the list. The interesting thing is that so many of them are singers. Here's how much person on the list made in the last year.

1. Taylor Swift - $57 million. Her concerts now bring in about a million a night.

2.  Justin Bieber - $55 million. He's also a venture capitalist, with investments in Spotify, Stamped and Tinychat.

3. Rihanna - $53 million. She gets big money from endorsements and sponsorships.

4. Lady Gaga - $52 million. But down from $90 mil last year.

5. Katy Perry - $45 million. Still hot even though her film bombed.

6. Adele - $35 million. 21 is still on the charts and going strong.

7. Kristen Stewart - $34.5 million. Film stars still do make money.

8. Lil Wayne - $27 million. The bulk of his income comes from live shows, earning about $600k per.

9. Taylor Lautner - $26.5 million. Twilight was bigger than we thought.

10. Robert Pattinson - $26.5 million. Again, Twilight was far bigger than we thought.

It should be no surprise that the audience for most of those on the list was teen and pre-teenage girls. What is a surprise is how much spendable cash they have.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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Old Records Outselling New For The First Time

Here's a twist in music sales that I think everyone saw coming, but didn't want to admit could ever happen. For the first time since Nielsen Soundscan has been keeping track of sales since 1991, older catalog records are outselling current albums. A catalog album is one that was released more than 18 months ago.

Catalog sales were at 76.6 million for the first half of the year, compared to 73.9 million current albums. The top selling catalog items include Guns 'n Roses Greatest Hits, and four by Whitney Houston (no doubt boosted by her untimely death).

There seems to be a couple of reasons for the turnaround:

1) There hasn't been a blockbuster hit by a superstar act during the period (although Adele's 21 still continues to be strong seller, though it was released last year).

2) Record labels and retailers have dropped the prices on catalog items to $4.99 to $7.99. Compared with a current CD price of $13 to $18 and a digital album from $7.99 to $10.99, catalog items are a bargain.

3) The buyers of albums are predominantly older and purchase more albums, especially catalog items.

All this signals an uptick in business for brick and mortar retailers, which is good for the industry. Let's see if this trend continues until the end of the year.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

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8 Tips On Formatting Your Sponsorship Proposal

Simon Tam, the owner of Last Stop Booking and author of How To Get Sponsorships and Endorsements recently posted some tips on how to get sponsorships on Music Think Tank. Below you'll find his 8 tips on how to format your proposal.

1. Cover: Make it distinctive. You might consider adding something like “2012 Sponsorship Proposal Prepared Especially For [the company]” with their logo on it. Give them plenty of opportunities to visualize working with you.

2. The Call Out (optional): The second page can be for a large dramatic image/photo or some of the major “bragging rights” stats. Artists can typically use this page as the “one sheet” – a one page descriptor of who you are, major stats or accomplishments, or press excerpts/testimonials from other sponsors.

3. The Partnership: This is where you want to focus on the main benefits for working with your organization. What are the main ways you and the sponsor are a good fit?

4. The Fact Sheet: The nitty-gritty details of your event, tour, or organization that they are sponsoring. Cover all of the major who/what/when/where/why questions, such as as “What is the event?,” “Where does the event take place?,” “Who is involved?,” “Why should I be sponsoring this event,” etc.

5. Key Marketing Information: This is where your research into your industry pays off. You’ll want to talk about your niche market, the demographics of your audience (and who you are targeting), how you will be messaging your brand/event along with their company, and talk about successes with past sponsorship campaigns.

6. Co-Branded Marketing Opportunities: You’ll want to send 3-6 custom, creative pitches to the company that allows for them to visualize working with you. This should play directly off of your niche market/their target audience. The more custom the idea, the higher the asking price that you can fetch. It also helps you stand out from other sponsorship opportunities that only offer logo placement. Marketing folks love creative ways to showcase their brand, especially to an interested audience who they might never be able to reach in any other way. If there is also a “viral” component to one of the ideas, that’s even better.

7. The Benefit List: List all of the benefits that the company gets from sponsoring you. Put your emphasis on the more custom, creative options and less on the generic commodities that typical sponsorship packages offer (such as logo placement). This is your formal offer so make it as clear as possible on what they can be expecting in return from their sponsorship dollars or in-kind gifts. If you’ll accept a payment schedule, include that as well.

8. The Sponsorship Agreement: The sponsorship agreement should be easy to complete and return. Details such as a self-addressed and stamped envelope are good. Add an extra bit of professionalism by having this portion printed on NCR (carbonless copy) paper where they can tear off a copy for themselves and send one to you. You can also do things such as adding a QR code or link to a digital version of the agreement.


Read Simon's entire article at Music Think Tank.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

iTunes Gets Swindled

We all think of Apple as this monolithic company with high and enclosed electronic walls, far too smart for anyone to scam. Usually that's true, but every once in a while it happens, most recently with the UK iTunes store.

According a story in the The Telegraph, DJ Denver White, an unknown part-time rapper, was sudden selling on the level of a superstar like Madonna, yet without any buzz or visibility. While it's possible for someone to get a street buzz that quickly cascades into major sales, anything resembling that was nowhere to be found, which prompted an investigation.

It turned out to be a very sophisticated scam where gang members with at least 24 laptops along with thousands of stolen credit cards, purchased the music of DJ Denver from both iTunes and Amazon for six months in early 2009, which accrued royalties of nearly $1 million.

What's worse, Denver's songs were uploaded through digital aggregators Tunecore, CD Baby and SongCast, who were unknowingly caught in the operation as well.

The gang members installed a program on the computers called "Hide My IP" which was intended to disguise their location. They then used the stolen credit cards to purchase the music, which then generated a royalty for DJ Denver, which the group then divided.

The fraud was detected when someone at iTunes noticed that a part-time DJ with no marketing or record label affiliation was selling enough to be featured on the high volume sales chart. After some forensic investigation, the police were able to track them through email and Paypal accounts, since the "Hide My IP" software couldn't hide their identity as much as the crooks had hoped.

At that point iTunes stopped paying royalties, so someone named Daniel Thompson began to call Tunecore demanding payment of the outstanding royalties. Tunecore was already in touch with police, so they told Thompson they could only pay that large amount in person for tax reasons, and offered to send him a free airline ticket to come to New York to pick up the royalty check. After Thomspon sent them his address in order to have the tickets sent to his home, the police swooped in. In total, 11 gang members were charged in the crime.

So let that be a lesson. Don't even think about screwing Apple.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Chuck D's 5 Tips For Music Industry Survival

Chuck D has been one of the most influential rappers ever, acting as a spokesperson for the state of the urban black man through his powerful lyrics in Public Enemy. In a series of tweets, Chuck lays out his tips for music industry survival. These apply to everyone trying to make it in the business.

Rule #1: Don't let other people's money distort your goals. Their shit has nothing to do with you. Be thankful and work with what you got. 

Rule #2: Don't spend more than you make.What you don't know you'll have to partner up or pay for. What you save is what you make. 

Rule #3: Celebrity and artists are two different things. You can be a celeb, but that's like winning the lottery. Make yourself valuable to something. 

Rule #4: It's easy to make recordings now but learn how to perform your art very well. So well that when people see you they undeniably have no words. 

Rule #5: Always top yourself. Put the AWE in audience. If the crowd feels they can do better than you, why would they take the time and money to be bothered?

Sadly, Public Enemy seems to have fallen out of fashion these days, as boasting about how great you are seems to top social commentary. Still, Chuck's words about the music business are wise and worth taking heed.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

New Keyword Research Tools

Since every artist is an online marketer at heart these days, there's a great awareness in the importance of keywords when it comes to websites, videos and social media. The better your keywords, the more likely people will find you. That's why doing research before settling on a set of keywords is your primary weapon when outlining your online strategy.

While most people usually use Google's Keyword Tool (here are some tips), here are 3 additional tools that you can try. Best of all, they're all either totally or partly free.

KeywordEye.co.uk
While KeywordEye comes from a UK developer and as a result uses British defaults, it doesn't take much to make it more US oriented. In fact, it can give you keywords for several countries and languages if that's needed.

One of the coolest things is that it offers a cloud visualization of the most used keywords (see the graphic on the left). Keep in mind that the free version limits you to 100 keyword searches, which is normally plenty for most music campaigns.

Keyword Spy
Keyword Spy approaches keyword search a little differently than most, allowing you to search a domain for keywords. That means you can look at a competitor's site to easily determine what they're using. There's an "Ads" page that shows you some information about the adverts used on a site, and a "Top List" page provides a list of the most successful keywords.

SEMRush
This tool is really a paid tool that has a useful free option that has the unique ability to provide a metric for the number of Google results. This shows you how big the field or the competition is, as well as a useful section on related keywords.

If you're really serious about keywords and don't mind spending some money, paid services like SpyFu, Wordtracker, Adgooroo, Complete.com, and KeywordDiscovery are all viable options as well.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Music Sales For 2012 Not Pretty

Soundscan released its mid-year music sales report on Wednesday and for the most part, the state of the industry is not pretty.

Album sales are down 3% from last year, but that's not the worry. The biggest seller is still Adele's 21, an album released at the beginning of last year. New albums from superstars like Justin Bieber, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Nicki Minaj have yet to make much of a sales dent.

150 million albums have been sold so far this year, behind last years 155 million. Adele's 21 has sold 3.69 million this year and more than 9.4 million in the US since it was released in January of 2011. What's a bit depressing is that 21 is the only album that's cracked the million barrier this year. Lionel Ritchie's Tuskegee is close with 912,000, and the latest boy band sensation One Direction and their Up All Night comes in third at 899,000.

But only 11 albums have gone past 500,000 this year so far, despite all the superstar releases. This is also down from last year when 16 went gold by this time.

Singles are a bright spot, however, as they're up over last year by 6%. The top selling track is Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know," with over 5.5 million downloads since the first of the year. fun.'s "We Are Young" is the runner up with 5.09 million sold, with Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" (which is selling for a quarter on Amazon MP3) coming in third with 4 million downloads.

Even those numbers are down a bit though. In 2012, 47 songs have sold at least a million, while in 2011, 52 songs had reached that point by this time of the year.

Is streaming starting to take it's toll?

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Facebook Loses Active Users

It's been evident that the number of unique visitors on Facebook was leveling off in recent months, but now comes evidence of a significant decline. Via an article on Hypebot, the site analyst company ComScore has determined that the number of unique visitors to Facebook have declined by 4.8% in the last six months!

This is pretty substantial in that Facebook was counting on its subscribers to rise a bit in the US rather than dropping, in order to support its recent IPO and subsequent investors. It's true that its more likely that the company will gain users in other parts of the world (in Asia in particular) as the US market seems somewhat saturated, but a decline of almost 5% is really unexpected.

So what's the reason for the decline? Are the users tiring of the Facebook experience? Do they hate the redesign (especially Timeline)? Are they using another social network instead? Are they still using the network but not loggin in? What do you think?

For the record, Facebook claimed that it has over 900 million "active" users in their last quarterly report. It'll be interesting to see what the next quarter report looks like.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.