It really comes down to a a very simple formula: The audience wants entertainment. If you deviate from this form, you get into troubles of all kinds. Below are some cardinal mistakes I’ve seen, especially here in the San Francisco Bay area scene, one of the few places where you actually still have many places where you could do live entertainment, music, DJ:ing and so on. So it’s quite doable to get gigs most of the week, just need to do some thinking.

To start with, you need to have a brand identity, be unique. Yet another generic blues band does not really cut it. You just drown in the amount of garage blues bands of all kinds that exists. Find something unique you like doing and the gigs will follow. Be generic and you are ignored.

Secondly, you have to somewhat swallow your pride and place something the audience like listening to, or dancing to. Trying to educate them about the music roots or something similar is futile — the audience is not there attending a class, they want to have fun.

Thirdly, you need to rehearse with the band or your act. Doing something ad hoc is fun at jams  but for real professional image it is hurtful to see bands that can’t stop a song properly or play each song the same way, with little finesse. Not to speak of using the same 20+ song playlist for years and years.

Fourthly, you need to be exciting on stage, if the artists, singers or musicians are on stage looking like they are bored, scared or otherwise indifferent, that then will cause the audience to take a step back. The audience wants entertainment, they are even forgiving for sudden impromptu acts as long as they experience something unique. Having a dialogue between the band/artist and the audience is what separates success from utter failure.

Fifthly, you need to have integrity and stand for things that you think are important. This means that you stick to something you think is the difference and provide entertainment. Trying to please all will just frustrate most.

Sixth, select the band so the members like playing together. Putting together a super-group of super-musicians usually lead to a short-lived band. This means less time to market as the band collapsed and it takes time to build a brand.

Seventh, as for marketing, someone has to take the role of becoming the marketing person for the artist or band. No marketing, no gigs. And it does not mean to pest friends and family to attend gigs, it means to build a real fan base. Note that live venue and bar owners are interested in headcount, not the quality of music. No headcount, no gigs. No fans, no headcount. I doubt anyone has a big enough family and friend circle to pull something like this off, or then they will suddenly lose a lot of friends due to pressure tactics.

Eight, surprise the fan base with differences in the act or playlist. Doing the same act over and over is wearing, even for the biggest fan. But provide them with surprises so they want to get to the next gig.

Ninth, make each gig special, a theme or some kind of reason why the gig really happens. A new album release, a sudden 20-song medley theme presentation or something similar. This comes back to point eight.

Tenth, make sure the old or new fans want to see you again. It means that you provide them enough rope that they want to see the event again. This is a tricky area, the things I could think of is to pre-announce some other event happening later that they really want to check out. Or never do a dull or bad gig, even one person in  the audience is an influencer, he or she could tell others to ignore the act/band or tell them to absolutely check them out later. Never stop a gig too early just because the audience is small —  that gives the impression that you don’t take your act or your fans seriously. Don’t take lots of breaks, why? The audience is there for entertainment, not to wait for you to show up again after a 20+ minute unnecessary break. Prince is not taking breaks at his 3+ hour concerts. No energy as part of this is also a problem, lethargic bands are nasty, self-destroying entities.

I could go on. But the trick, again, is that the audience wants entertainment. They want to attend a happening — live music I think is one of the rare forms of entertainment that could stand against the avalanche of cable TV, video games and movies on demand. If it’s done right.

I got a SoundCloud account some time ago, but forgot about it. Still on my eternal quest to find a way to easily distribute digital content across multiple services — this might be it as it’s easy to push to MySpace, FaceBook and other future places, even Twitter.

This is still in the testing phase, but I added the SoundCloud player on the right side of this web site.

Back to studio work!

There’s nothing wrong with that. I assume the idea is that musicians like to go out and listen to other bands playing. Well, to start with that market is super-tiny, there are not that many of us. Secondly, many are playing at other gigs at the same time so they can’t attend. Thirdly, musicians are picky so I doubt they want to go out and check yet-another blues cover band.

Same with Myspace that seems to become a market channel for band announcing events on each others’ Myspace pages.

All together, me thinks this is focusing on the wrong marketing approach. It would be far better to use other channels that could actually reach the audience that the band or artist could ignite an interest  for going to the venue. It really depends on the music style.

I give you an example. I sub:ed as a bass player for a local blues band where the band leader is a DJ at a local channel playing blues music. Actually the DJs had their own bands. The did lots of promotion using their radio station, so when the event happened it was a very nice crowd attending. Even better, they liked the music as it was targeted towards their interest.

So targeted marketing is always more productive rather than spreading thin and posting event noticed on craigslist musicans section or similar places with a hit-and-miss ratio close to 100%.

And oh my goodness. Hair bands with screaming singers an cliche lyrics, or then artists with costumes singing poppy songs and dancing badly. No wonder the eighties is considered a bad time for music if you just focus on the American scene.

Meanwhile, in Europe we listened to Ultravox, early incarnations of U2, Simple Minds, New Order and a lot of similar bands that were pushing the boundaries concerning synthesizer use as well as still providing strong melodic lines with very interesting arrangements. And no 200bpm guitar solos, that’s for sure.

It’s kind of nice that bands like the Killers and Keane re-introduces this more interesting music style from the eighties. My background is first listening to a lot of seventies music and playing that in high school bands, but then I was mostly active in the early to late eighties and was involved in bands doing this kind of European eighties music. It was fun, very much pushing the limits and was still commercial.

It’s not good to always copy-cat past styles but this would be an exception to make the music scene interesting again — unless I start sounding like and old-timer wishing for the good times. Or, alternatively, just start another interesting music scene, that’s as valid. If nothing else, please get the synthesizers back as arrangement tools and not designed to do staccato techno lines all the time.

A lot of results come from the inside — a belief in what you do is important and could be heard. Yep. That separates any attemps from those who are just happy to have recorded an album, released it and that’s it, from those who have ideas and want to spread the musical ideas around.

It does not help that during mid-age we all get family obligations and so forth. So it’s just a matter of setting priorities during different stages in one’s life.

Imagine being this kid growing up in Northern Europe, and at the end of the sixties and early seventies there were not really much rock music in the local radio. You ended up wiring huge antennas above your room in the house to pick up faint interesting stations such as Radio Caroline in order to get your daily dose of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes, Pink Floyd and similar band acts.

Compare this with growing up today in any corner of the world, if you have Internet, you could listen to anything. It is my own opinion but this plethora of music has deflated the pure fun of being able to listen to interesting music. Compare downloading thousands of songs to an iPod versus struggling to listen to a boat that might or might not send a signal if the sea is rough, in addition to having battles of East European stations taking over the frequencies with propaganda drum rolls. Or even if the AM signal could reach quite far, sometimes the athmospheric conditions were bad so you could not pick anything up.

Anyway, that was my weekend fun, staying up until 6am or so listening to Radio Caroline and similar radio stations with an ancient tube radio.

It is even better, with Nicecast you could start any station you want and broadcast your own music, world-wide. Again, the supply is so big so it’s a matter of being picked up from the huge amount of broadcast:ed music, instead of being one of the few. Still, it’s one of my goals to set up my own Internet radio station with own music — just need to work hard in the studio this incoming holiday season. This in honor of the old pirate radio stations that broadcast:ed cool music to music-starving young people around Europe.

PS: Radio Caroline is still alive, in some form, broadcasting over Internet.

To give you some background, in the seventies/eighties and maybe even today (I left Sweden 1988) there was a big market for dance bands who played at various venues in Sweden and also on the west coast of Finland (as I belong to that ancient tribe that speaks Swedish but lives in Finland.)

Their repertoire consisted of a mixture of sappy slow songs as well as half-speed dance songs. The lyrics had to do with ‘Trust me Baby’, ‘I Love you Forever’, “Don’t Cry when I Leave You”, “Tonight I am Yours and the Night Belongs to US” and similar sugary topics with innuendos left and right.

Now, where I lived, the lower part of Western Finland where this lost tribe of Swedes live, in our young circle we just hated this whole culture. The local place for venues actually rented Finnish rock bands — at that time the Finnish rock bands were wild (few know that Hanoi Rocks was basically a Finnish band.) So we got our revenge that way. One of the first bands I played guitar was doing Cream covers and similar stuff. Dance music, yak (and of some economical reasons later I actually played bass as a sub with a local dance band further north, to pay for my expensive synthesizer equipment but that’s another story….)

As part of this ‘different’ rock culture, young people from north and other places visited our local venue. One of those visiting was my future wife — that’s again another story.

Or then something like the BBC documentary story about the story of the guitar.  YouTube is full of interesting musical tidbits, and the selection grows each day.

I would not be surprised if the average Internet user would mostly look at videos a couple of years from now, where the text pages such as blogs and similar things are a minority.  I’ve been looking at what it would take to make more video based blog entries. The biggest problem for me is that it takes editing effort. Personally I don’t like those bird-view single take videos on YouTube, you know those ones where you see a person staring at the video camera from above and talking or playing. Somehow it’s not that exciting, unless the topic is cool.

So any interesting material should be edited; and that takes time, even with iMovie (even if I prefer Final Cut myself.)

I also saw that MTV finally released their archive of videos online, at MTVMusic.  That’s a good idea, even if 99$% of rock videos are cliches. I noticed that after about one year taping the early day MTV satellite channel material, first it was fun but you started to see the same patterns after a couple of months. There are exceptions such as anything done by Peter Gabriel or Beck, but otherwise releasing all the music videos might be fun first, but boring watching after a while. Well, there’s always hope that there’s a next generation music video artists that will think outside the box. It is needed.

So, video rules, that’s for sure.

UltraSleep Sample Download audio file (Ultrasleep_Sample.mp3)

In addition I used Logic’s Space Designer with an aux bus where I routed the drums, the electrical piano and the guitar (not the bass) to make it sound like a live recording.

I don’t know if this will be a permanent fixture of my compositions, but it was fun just trying to do an improvisational session; first drums, then electric piano, then bass and the guitar part at the end. All done with single-takes, this is a live recording, after all!

If nothing else it will end up on my internet radio playlist, stay tuned when that’s around.

PS: This also shows that I have an overdose of Zappa in my mind just now.

I have a somewhat complicated history with this record. Long time ago, In Finland, I actually ordered the LP to a local record store. When it showed up I didn’t have any money so I could not pick it up. Sometimes I wonder if I have had the money, might have inspired me to get a Mini Moog or something similar and focus more on keyboard playing than guitar playing in my teens….

So I had to atone for my sins and now when I could afford any record I will finally get it into my collection.

There’s another secret reason behind getting it. If I ever end up again on a jam playing keyboards, instead of playing along with yet another typical organ or electronic piano solo, I will try to find a mini-moog like patch on the keyboard and go for it. That might be different from the myriads of keyboard solos at most jams around here… So I need inspiration. And a gentle touch on the pitch wheel, too!

As for the long tail. I really wanted to get the digital version, from iTunes or Amazon MP3. However, it is not available there. This is yet again a good example where I don’t think the long tail really works all the time. There are all kinds of reasons albums don’t show up on iTunes/Amazon MP3/eMusic and so forth. Sometimes there are all kinds of legal issues with the master tapes. Sometimes the record company who has the master tape is no longer around; it might even be that the original masters have disappeared, or are gathering dust in some unknown location. Maybe even the original tapes have just become so bad you can’t do much about it.

So it’s a big problem, the sooner a lot of older material is digitized and saved for the future generations, the better. But it all depends on the artists, the labels, those who control the content and so forth. So the idea of the long tail for consumers is a good one, but just hard to implement in real life.

There are now plenty of somewhat similar sites where producers could upload their music and those interested could license: Musync,Gratis Music library… I think I joined some of those long time ago, but what usually happens is that one needs to constantly upload material. What happens in my case is that I run time concerning administrative work; or frankly speaking I rather spend time in the studio than working on such admin work.

There’s of course the school of thought that you get a little bit revenue here, a little bit here, and it all ads up. Then again, if you just get $20 or less for each site, there’s a limit where this is not really worth doing.

I think personally the best way to get revenue from licensing, as well as keep one’s integrity concerning the music style, is to create connections to film makers, TV producers and so on. Maybe joining Taxi is a half-step as you get your feet through the right doors — provided your music is good, or course.

There’s always the issue of integrity. A lot of these music libraries have the side-effect of directing the efforts to certain kinds of music, to the point where it’s bland and follows everyone else doing something like ‘marketing techno music’, blazing guitar rock tracks or something similar that is not really new and interesting. I think that’s the biggest danger if someone wants to license music and sells their soul. If that happens, think why the Devo guys are so successful when they produce music for films and advertisement…

For example, the current surge of huge festivals with many artists playing during weekends. It’s all about the costs associated with dragging huge sets around the country. It’s cheaper to fly in the artists and place a big PA system to be used by everyone — at the same time charge extra for all the artists performing. To some degree this is good, the fans have a chance to see many bands and take part of a ‘happening.’ However, the main reason for all this are the huge costs today concerning transportation and other administrative overhead.

Ever wondered if your band or artist never shows up in your town, let’s say somewhere in Alaska? Or why the various band shows are aligned around the country? It’s all based on costs and estimated audience attendance, to maximize the profits. There are usually a lot of concerts here in USA in mid-west as it does not take long to drive between the venues, same on the east coast. While the distances in the west are longer so the costs go up and one needs to do a careful spreadsheet analysis to figure out the venue dates and places.

I personally think that the main reason the so called Super-DJs appeared on the venue circuit has to do with maximizing profits, both for the club owners, agents as well as the DJs. It’s not so expensive to send a DJ, nowadays with just a laptop and backup hard disk, to any place in the world, they do their 4+ hour job, their name as a headline guarantees that people show up and everyone is happy. There’s seldom any huge costs associated with the show as these events do not need pyrotechnical work, lights and so on, just electricity into the DJ booth.

Let me end this with a positive and interesting prediction. As the transport and other costs have become astronomical, there’s a market for local bands and artists. The audience wants something to relate to. At the same time it’s not so expensive to hire as a headliner local musicians and artists, as all that is needed is a short trip to the venue. Many bars nowadays also have decent PA systems so there’s no need to include such costs into the performance.

Anyway, for this to happen, the artists of course have to be good, so you can’t avoid the hard work of good songs, personality, connection with the fans and so forth. However, I actually thinks this will be now easier than during the last ten years where local talent had to compete with mid-range performers. One might even say that the middle-income bands are indeed squeezed in today’s market…

Anyway, one reason behind this post is to teach someone to look at the music world as an economist — a lot of unexplained scenarios will be revealed.

Let’s say you are a bar band that plays four times a month, four people, and here in USA a typical payment from such gigs is between 300 and 400 dollars. So let’s say you get $100 each, or $400 a month, or roughly $4800 or let’s say $4000 a year in case you can’t get that many gigs. If you are really busy, it’s twice or $8000. Now, to be fair you need to register this as income or INS will get back to you later with a huge fee, so let’s say you pay 30% as tax from the $4000, or $2800 a year. Now, as you see, it’s hard to live with this income unless you don’t pay for rent, no health insurance and so on. If you have a family, it’s close to impossible to live with such sums. And I didn’t even take ino account expenses such as gear, gas/transportation and so on.

Let’s say you play in a band that could get gigs six times a month with venues where they ask $15 as entrance fee and could get let’s say 400 fans to show up. As a band this is already a nice situation, to have a public of 400 +/- 100 to show up each time. The venue generates $6000 for each event plus possible money from selling alcohol, but let’s say that they offset this with the costs of the place, hiring bartenders et rest. Of the  $6000, it might be that all kind of forces such as promoters et rest take $1000, still $5000 to split between each member. To exclude any other costs in a four-person band, let’s just assume that each one gets $1000 for the two-hour job. Not bad.

Now if you play 72 times a year, quite a lot, it is $72000 minus taxes, or $50000. One could live with that, as long as someone is frugal and don’t expect to drive the latest car or live in a big house. Still, it’s hard to justify costs as a family bread bringer with this income, doable, but tough.

If you get to the next bracket, play venues with +1000 people, more expensive tickets, it will get to a decent level, but few could reach to this place. I somethings think that reading Rolling Stones is the phone catalogue of such acts.

The thing that helps a lot in USA and Europe is that due to the geographic spread it is easy to create events across all weekends all-year-round, provided you have a very good agent, and of course if you are good to start with.

Now, looking at the recording business, let’s say you have a single that sells 4000 copies on iTunes/Emusic et rest, and this is a lot. Depending on your deal with the label you get everything from 25% of the profit up to close to %100 (you own the label.). So it’s everything between $1k and close to $4k. Not bad, but few could sell this amount of tracks, it depends on your background, catalogue, marketing and so forth. There’s definitely not that much money in selling records today.

You could get some licensing fees from licensed music, films et rest, or BMI/ASCAP licensing fees, again those are not that much unless you belong to the top-1000 artists such as Prince/Elton John/Beatles et rest.

What I’m trying to state is that someone could have an exclusive revenue stream from music, but it is a rare exception rather than the norm. In other words, if you are young and an aspiring musician, please do so but also put in place an alternate career wherefrom you could get revenue. If nothing else, you could purchase a nice guitar every second year or so.

His views about what is important when producing, what will happen next and so forth are worthwhile to check out. For example, he said that if the original material is mediocre, it takes a lot of effort to product this to something decent.

The important skill to develop and find in a fragmented future market is the taste. All music has an audience, if it’s done well, you could get it sold, even if there’s less of a market compared with the golden days of music when the jobs paid really well. But then you could be involved with music you really want to do. There’s always an audience for any kind of music, as long as you really are involved in the style — it has to be something you really like working with.

The one big sales pitch behind this studio is that they have a house band that plays for tracks. I think this will become a good sales pitch for studios and producers. In today’s world anyone could configure a very good studio in the bedroom using semi-pro equipment and computers.

However, the sound will just sound the same concerning productions, micro-edits with loops and so forth. If you multiply this a thousand times or more you start to see the problem with the produced sound — it takes a lot of effort to sound unique and have a specific sound for productions. Same with creativity, one person could only get to a certain point concerning creative ideas with music.

Compare this with a studio setup where you have a pool of musicians that know each other inside out. Based on sessions you could configure this group and put together new tracks. I think this sounds very much like the old Motown system of sessions. Still, I think this is a good way to define a separate sound from anyone else out there, in this age of swing percent values and auto-alignment of pitch and midi quantizations…