Learning about the music industry - week six

I had two chapters to read this week as I have the original version of the book and the new version. The main change being that in version two blogging has become a chapter in it's own right.

So news from the band before I talk about the learning from this week. We are on a sort of pre-recording holiday time at the moment with Martin in Italy, Calum just back, Ant visiting his family and me off to V Festival this weekend. Earlier in the week Ant and I spent some time working on a new song, sorting out some of the press and PR stuff that goes with releasing an album - like what should it be called, what should the artwork look like, should we have promo copies and fan copies, how can we get the best out of our very very small marketing budget. Which is why this course is so useful as I hadn't quite realised how much of a cyber impact we can have if we make the internet work for us in a meaningful way. I nearly forgot! The most exciting thing that happened this week was the release of our first sinc deal! My forgetfulness was because we did the work for this a while ago. We just weren't allowed to talk about it until the launch. The story behind the promotion is that a few weeks ago we were approached by the artist manager for focusrite (focusrite make lots of very good professional recording stuff). Anyway we were asked if we would like to feature on a promo video for a new piece of focusrite gear - the saffire pro 14 - and of course we said, yes. The whole process involved organising a date to shoot in London, choosing and re-writing one of songs to fit the time the guys at focusrite wanted the video to last, heading off to London to spend a whole day recording and filming. The result you can view here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1hh1aXifx0


The most amazing thing about it so far is that is been up 8 days, already had over 1200 hits and has also pushed people to come and find out more about us. Plus we were given some very nice gear for doing it. So thanks all round.

So to this weeks learning - connecting with fans and blogging (a sort of two for one read offer :)

It's certainly true that to be a successful artist you also have to be a successful business person. For us that’s about making sure that as we develop our music, our shows, our style and our fan base we also work on our business - managing our money properly, having goals and objectives and sticking with them until we achieve them or need to adapt them. It's also true that you have to think about your band business as much more than the music. Certainly without the music we wouldn't be a band and music is what brought us into being a band plus putting on a great show is what we want to do more than anything else. However, as a band we also know that to make living from being in a band means we have to look at all the ways in which we can support our fans to want to support us and bring new fans along too. Making an income is something we have to do from all the different things (T shirts Mugs, shows music, branding) that we can offer in a why that people can identify with, and, want to buy into again and again. So what is our identity, what are we selling to our fans - great music, honesty, high quality, having a good time, integrity are just some of the things that come into my mind to start out with. How we communicate that is where we need to do some more work. Yes we are using Twitter, facebook and Myspace and yes we have a mailing list. The trap we have fallen into though is not making our mailing list work properly as we have only ever sent messages to people when we wanted them to come to a show or buy something we have never done a proper news letter!!! Whilst we have a good idea who are fans are, their gender, how old they are and what the like I can't say that we have really thought through how make best use of that information meaningfully. So here's job number 203445 - Write a newsletter that tells people what we've being doing, shows how we are progressing, tell them what they've missed, included a fan opinion, and generally pit out a regular newsletter that brings the band to life. We know that we have an emerging following abroad and what better way to communicate with them until (and even when) we get out to them to play shows. So time to get writing it using the format - make it personal, guts, putting people into action.

And the extra blogging stuff. The new chapter on blogging certainly expands on the stuff I read earlier. I guess the main message that still hits me on the head about blogging is that if your are to be a successful blogger you have to engage with eh blogging community, It's one thing to blog it's another thing to get involved.

I can't say I’ve done much of this yet but I’m adding it to my list and as always will use my business head as well as my artistic head to get it done.

Cheers

Zak

Learning about the music industry - week five

My 'to do' list from Ariel's course is getting longer! My 'completed' list isn't quite as long. However, the good news this week is that we've had some new profile shots done, redesigned the main website (made it much simpler and more of a portal to facebook, twitter, you tube and myspace) plus have started to build relationships with other people out their in cyberspace. What still needs to get done is a review and re-jig of all the other websites that we have a page on that we have some control over to make sure that they are up-to-date, remain relevant and where possible are linked together to make managing them easier.

Anyway, news from the band before I talk about learning from week five. As I've said before we are not doing many shows at the moment as we are busy getting our acoustic album ready for recording in the last week of August. This has meant six nights of hard rehearsal, lots of heated debates, and lots of fun. Luckily we only annoyed the neighbours once! At the moment the album list of songs looks (in no particular order) like this - Boogie in Boots, She is Moscow, Wake Up, Too Many Kiss, Dry, Friends and Foes, Good Man, Final State (with a special guest singer), My Baby Did Me Wrong, Mathematics. When holidays are done we've got a week of fan testing by inviting local fans into our rehearsal space to listen to the acoustic versions of the songs before we record them so that we can be sure that our fans will love them and also be able to see how (even where we've reworked them) each song links comfortably to it's sister electric track. We want this acoustic album to be different from the electric one we plan to record in the spring yet not so different that people buying it after having seen our electric set are put off (it's a very hard balance to get right).

So the learning from week five - is it really week five of this nine week course already! Oh and thanks to Carla for letting us know that Ariel and team got our pitch for them to review and will get back to us as soon as they can.

Right! This weeks reading has focused on newsletters, emails and surveys. There are a number of very useful learning things here for the band. Firstly knowing that if we as a band are going to get to the point where we are going to make a living as a band the business side of what we do has to be addressed. In some ways I think that we have begun to consider this in that as well as our music we have worked hard to present ourselves on photo's video and radio, found a distinctive name for the band and produced a very strong logo (we get people come up to the stage and take photos of the logo on the bass drum) so as well as our music we hope to bring resources in through our identity too. We are also in the process of becoming a limited company.

On the subject of email lists we only started actively collecting emails in January this year (sign up to our mailing list at info@isaacsaircraft.com and we'll send you a free track). To date we've got about 400 people on our email list, which is a pretty good start. The bit i don't think we have done very well is the newsletter bit and here i think we need to do a number of things.

Construct a proper newsletter that's not just text.
Make sure it's a story rather than just saying - buy this, come to that.
Decide on a sensible frequency and encourage people to link to other stuff too.
Say something about us as people in it.
Only have one 'ask' per newsletter.

The other area of learning is the survey bit. I've used surveys before and found them very useful though I've never used them in the context of the band, so over the next few weeks I'm going to work out what we ought to put in a survey about the band and give it a go!

Cheers

Zak x

New Music Tuesday: Black Crowes, Arcade Fire, Guster, QOTSA, Los Lobos, Buckcherry, Lady Gaga - Music - Blogcritics

New Music Tuesday: Black Crowes, Arcade Fire, Guster, QOTSA, Los Lobos, Buckcherry, Lady Gaga - Music - Blogcritics


The new Arcade Fire Album is a must buy. It's there most accomplished album yet.

Learning about the music industry - week four

This blog is a day late!! I meant to write it yesterday, however, we are the middle of a week of very intensive rehearsals prior to heading into the studio to record an acoustic album which will... be slightly different to the way in which we play our songs normally. Partly the reason for doing this is that we are still capital raising to do the full electric album and partly because we do have an alternative acoustic version of each of our current songs and people keep asking where they can buy both versions. So.. if you like the hard pop-rock version of 'Steady On' that we give away as a free download when you sign up to our mailing list i know you will also like the folk version that will be on the album. Fingers cross the plan is to have it recorded and mixed by the beginning of September, mastered by the middle, and out in October! It will also feature a team up with the lovely Christina Novella on a song we wrote four years ago called Final State.

Anyway in between, redesigning each song and getting a load of new photos done I'm still reading Ariel's book and this week its all been about web 2.0. Now to be honest I'd never really got this before i read this and in some ways this week was a bit of a eureka moment. I almost cant say exactly what I've learnt because i really think that you should GO AND READ THE BOOK yourself.

So what will the band and I be doing having read this chapter.

Well, firstly - the website www.isaacsaircraft.com comes down tonight to be replaced by a new much simpler and easy to maintain website. (learning have a presence in as many paces as you can - make them as fast and simple to maintain as you can).

Blog lots more and talk to lots of people about the blogs that they are posting.

Network with bloggers where we can.

Set up a podsafe profile (not heard of this one before).

Keep tweeting.

Start using Flicker (again) This might take a bit of time to sort.

Most of the stuff in this chapter we were already doing, however it is not just about the doing it. It's the way in which you do it - otherwise you can put an awful lot of effort into not getting very much done. Sometimes i look back what the band so done online to date and i now know we have been very guilty of that. You have to have great music, a great show and a great vibrant online presence too.

Cheers

Zak

Learning about the music industry - week three

This week it's all about maximizing your website and to be honest when i first read this i felt a little daunted. Not because what Ariel was saying didn't make sense, it was because we have so many websites that we feature on. Anyway the key thing for me was building the corporate style and feel across all of our websites and also picking out which websites to focus on first. In some ways this is something the band have been quite good at in that whichever of our sites you go on you will find our logo in either it's traditional brown or in it's current electric blue model (at Xmas we have a version of the logo with a Santa hat on it!)

So what are we doing that's right

they are pretty clear and consistent.
they load fast and have no flash stuff.
there is free stuff to have as well

What we are not doing right

Some of the sites we have need updating.
Some of the sites we don't have enough control over.
We need (once we've agreed it) to add our pitch to all of our websites alongside our logo.

And the thing (other than read the next chapter of Ariels book) that i'm going to do this week.

Take our main website down and keep it down until it gets redesigned. After all My space and facebook are much easier to manage than your own website - Honest :)

Zak

Learning about the music industry - week two

This week the band and I have been looking at Ariel’s' chapter on the perfect pitch. However... before I talk about what we've learnt and what we are doing as a result of our learning I wanted to talk about some of the other stuff we got from Ariel and how we've already began to see changes as a result of working with Ariel’s learning.

I want to briefly talk about Twitter. One of the things Ariel suggests about Twitter is that as a tool for engaging people with the band a lot of artists go about using it in the wrong way and only post stuff occasionally which usually consists of - buy our record or come to this show tonight.

If you are going to get the most out of Twitter you have to remember that it's primary function is to work as a short burst social networking tool and if you want to connect to people you have to be willing to share more. Whilst we'd done this a little bit before reading Ariel’s stuff, I can't say we'd done it with any real plan. This week we've tried tweeting every day little snippets about what we've been up to that generally still have a band theme but tend to be more engaging that we would have otherwise tweeted, and.. We’ve begun to get feedback from people who are following us that we don't know - which to us is great progress. For example, we played a gig at our local pub on Saturday just for fun. The stage was in the pub garden, which meant that there was a small tree right in front of the stage (almost on the stage). During the gig a friend took a photo of me singing behind this tree and just after the gig I tweeted the picture with a quote 'ever played a gig with a tree on stage' and I got a response - a real connection with a fan that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise got :)

Any way onto to today’s learning. This week we've been looking at creating the perfect pitch. Now I have to say that as I write this is still work in progress and I’ll be taking Ariel up on her offer to review some of our ideas later in the week. What I wanted to say at this time is where we think we are at with creating a perfect pitch. IN other words how would you sell the band in one line?

For us the idea initially of comparing ourselves to other band was at first a little uncomfortable. Although if I’m honest lots of other people have already done that. Describing us as.

Comfortably familiar, yet uniquely different.
A great rock - pop band without a bass player (yes we don't use a bass player, it's not a crime!)
Keane with Balls.
Coldplay experimenting with HI-NRG in the Beatles potting shed
Piano led pop rock from these tipped chaps.
Deliriously draped in angst.


Certainly we are happy with all these pitches that others have already made about us and to deny that we are inspire and influenced by other bands would be ridiculous. Also it's very true that people need a hook to categorise you in their CD collection so comparison are very important. Just as an aside we often get people say you must get a bass player until we get them to listen with their eyes shut and they then say that you would think we had one and we then explain that the Doors didn’t; have a bass player and it didn't do them any harm!

Any way the pitch. It seems to us the pitch needs to sharply sum up the band but it also needs to link the band to other bands and enable people to feel they can understand the band very quickly. The pitch has to describe then band and make people want to find our more about the band at the same time. The pitch should be honest and true and slightly tempting. Hence - I’m going to be sending Ariel’s some ideas for review this week and reading chapter three at the same time.

Cheers


Zak

Learning about the music industry - week one

Having bought a copy of 'Music Success in Nine Weeks' on Friday the weather here in the UK this weekend gave me an excellent opportunity to sit down in between rehearsals and start reading Ariel's book.

As with most books I read that aren't fiction the first thing I had to do was to take a look through the whole book and get a clear handle on what the whole course was about before sitting down and carefully reading and actioning the first chapter on goal setting.

This first chapter was actually very comforting. As a band we have always been very comfortable with goal setting - our manager has a written strategic plan for the band that we regularly review - can’t say that we have always met the goals we have set ourselves but sometimes the working towards a goal and then finding it's either not the right goal, or we've set the goal too high or not clearly enough is just as important as reaching the goals.

Goals have to be specific and measurable and they also have to be flexible - if not you run the risk of missing out on great opportunities because you are too focused on your band goals rather than the opportunity that's put in front of you.

Goals also have to be broken down into smaller goals as well. A goal that says 'get a record deal' is never going to get you any where unless you work out what the goals are that you need to achieve in order to 'get that deal' ,and, what the possibilities are for a 'record deal' that isn't about someone coming along and handing you a load of cash to make a record. What we learnt very early on is that no one gets a 'deal' with out a great story and a strong track record to start off with so we broke our goal towards 'getting a deal' down into manageable steps and stayed flexible as well.

These are the goals we set over two years (and achieved) to date around getting a record deal.

Practice songs and rehearse shows.
Record and self-release some stuff and get used to working in a recording studio.
Find a producer who loves our music and spend some time learning how to record with them.
Record some stuff and look for a little label that can distribute our music and help us to learn about the record and distribution side.
Release a single with a little label and learn about PR and Marketing in the UK.
Work with other producers to see how they operate. Learn, learn, and learn about recording.
Record and release a second single and learn about PR and marketing in other countries.
Try out some more producers and learn about working with producer managers.
Set goals for recording and marketing our first two albums.

Which is where we are up to now. Along the way we've remained adaptable flexible and open minded, knowing that it isn't just having great music that makes a band, its great showmanship, great people to work with, great PR and strong never give up work very hard business like attitude to everything we do.

My learning from Chapter One is that we need to keep working hard, keep setting realistic and measurable goals and.... remain Utterey flexible and focus.

Also, remember we may be artists, but we work in an industry and thus we need to work very hard to make sure our fans get to hear us and support us to keep on making great music for them to enjoy.

Time to start reading the next chapter and putting it into action.

Zak