OK….

I know most of you are on the grind this morning… obviously I am too, it’s why I am on my blog and not with my DAD yet. STOP what you are doing, go see your DAD, call your DAD, or send a note of thanks! For those out their that have lost their DAD… be there for your MOM. For those DADs out there…. let your kids have your time all day…

Music Marketing Duties will still be here tomorrow!

Peace,
Jai

Hey Folks,

Been out doing a bit of my own social networking just listening to some music and trying to meet some new people and ran across this really groovy band…Route.44  http://www.myspace.com/route44 Be sure to check them out and let em know you heard about em though I am Music Network! It’s not your norm and that is what makes em sooo cool!

Peace,
Jai

Hey Folks!

Man, I love this time of year. My family celebrates Christmas and my wife goes all out decorating the house, baking cookies, and spending all my money to try and single handedly save the economy as she hits all the shops and malls for presents. I am amazed every year how much she gets done and how well she sticks to her plans no matter how crazy things get…..

Of course that makes me think about “follow through.” I have gone, one time only, with my wife to the malls and shops to “be in the spirit” and help her pick out a few gifts for family and friends and I can tell you that if she did not have “follow through” and stick to her plan we would have never made it out of the mall alive! Me being like a kid in a candy store…. ok, we were in the candy store…. I wanted to go here and there as I saw shiny cool toys and gadgets that I wanted for myself, but my wife kept pointing to the clock, her list, and then telling me “we don’t have time for you to just stroll through the mall window shopping… we have to get in, get out, and stick to the plan!” “But, but, right now I’m here and everything is out and I have been thinking about looking at this stuff for a while now, this is a good time to just quickly look…” I said. “No, we have to keep with the plan or I will not get done what I need to do today to finish everything before Christmas!” she said.

Let me tell you this. When my wife says “NO!” It wakes me up. Usually she is the sweet, quiet type that just kinda goes along with the flow of life at her own pace. Actually, usually she is late to everything because she just moves to her own clock and really enjoys being chill. So, when she puts her foot down and says “NO” I have to wake up and listen….

What does this have to do with music marketing and awareness campaigns? A lot! You see, my wife gets all the shopping done, all the cooking completed, gifts wrapped, house decorated, and everything else that demands her time every year at Christmas because she has developed a plan and then sticks to that plan to a “T.” That one time of going to the mall with her showed me just how much she does stick to that plan and why….. My “five minutes here and there” just to check out a new toy or shinny object added up to making her more than two and a half hours off schedule. And trust me, once she is on a mission – the last thing you want to do is be the one to get her off schedule – she made me work with her the rest of the day to get back on schedule and by doing so I saw exactly what my “five minutes” really did for her day and plan!

Your music marketing activities, especially online awareness campaign work, require strict detail to a schedule. Getting off schedule even a day can throw the entire campaign out of wack until you get back on schedule. This is because each step you take is built upon the previous steps and you can not move forward until you complete each step of the plan. If you do not follow through, down to the minute, of what you are supposed to do you will start to hurt your over all online awareness campaign.

While you are online it is hard not to just take five minutes to look at this or that – you know the shinny things that grab our attention – and those five minutes add up quickly. While you are doing searched on your favorite search engine for radio stations or online magazines, a headline about your favorite commercial rtist might grab your attention, or when you visit a radio station site a picture might grab your attention and make you want to click on the picture to see or learn more…. This takes you off task and off schedule fast. It might not seem like much, but add this up over a three or four hour period of doing research and you have now only spent about half the time you dedicated to research actually researching music industry resources.

Staying focused and following through with your plan while surfing the net is hard work – maybe harder than anything else while marketing your music. You have email, forum announcements, new blog posting announcements, instant message pop ups, etc. that all are competing with your time and energy while doing your work. You have to learn the art of tuning distractions out, turning off announcements, and paying attention only to the task at hand. Your music marketing efforts have got to be the only thing that has your complete and total attention the entire time you are acting upon it. Not just for the time drain, but also for your focus, your commitment, and your follow through.

Constant research, sifting through websites for needed information, and going through lists of radio stations or press outlets to find the ones that are still in business is tedious. I have found that the only way I can do it over and over, day after day, is to set goals. I set a goal of 20 – 25 radio stations a day, 3 – 5 music magazines a day, and 3 – 5 event promoters a day. By doing this I have a goal to keep in mind which forces me to stick to the plan of the day. I then know I do not have time to get distracted by those “new and shinny” things that pop up looking to steal my time and effort.

Here are some tips for making the best of your time online while working your awareness campaign:

• 1. Shut down email programs for the entire time you are working. – Check your email before you start and then after you finish, but not during.
• 2. Turn off your instant message software while working.
• 3. Create goals for each day of work and do not allow yourself to stray away from that goal until you reach it.
• 4. As you find “shinny” things that grab your attention make a note so you can go back to them once you complete your online awareness activities.
• 5. Do not visit your social networking sites or favorite user forums while working.
• 6. Do not allow yourself to read the news, current events, or anything not directly related to your research while on industry websites – Keep note of sites that offer these things and do allocate time for this at a later date/time. It is iportant to stay on top of industry news, but not while working on awareness.
• 7. Turn off your phone while working.
• 8.  Close your office door or let anyone else around you know that you are working and need total focus so no interruptions.
• 9. Once you begin your online awareness activities limit your breaks to only one an hour and make that one break quick so you stay focused and on point.

Hopefully this will get you thinking and you can create a space and frame of mind to keep on point, stay focused, and follow through while acting upon your online awareness campaign! If you have some more ideas that may help other readers please leave a comment or two and I will post for everyone to see and appreciate! As always… keep busy, work smart not hard, and remember – the more effective effort you put into your music marketing efforts the more you get out of them…. Knowledge is power and the more you have the further you will go!

To jump start your music marketing efforts check out The Ultimate Online Awareness Campaign eBook available now!!!

Have a very merry Christmas and happy holidays!!!
Peace,
Jai
“Love the MUSIC in Yourself, Not Yourself in the MUSIC!”

I have been doing a lot of market research over the past few months preparing for my next book and have found some pretty interesting misconceptions about who indie artists and groups feel their number one competitor might be. I have talked with very successful indies as well as “start up” indies and can 100% tell you the biggest difference is how the successful artists or groups view their competition.

My research has shown that more than 75% of independent artists, musicians, and groups feel that other local artists and groups are their #1 competitors for these top five reasons given:

• There are only so many clubs or venues hiring live music for pay…
• There are only so many, genre specific, fans in the area that will actually buy music…
• The local, genre specific, radio station only plays so many songs from local artists…
• The local entertainment magazine only reserves so much space for local artist coverage…
• The local CD Retails only has so much self space reserved for local artist’s music…

Here is the problem with this reasoning….

All these answers are all based on local market acceptance and appeal. You have to ask yourself if you are trying to be a “local hero” or are you trying to gain national or international recognition? If you are only looking to gain local recognition than all these are very valid questions and should be at the forefront of your mind. You should find a way to make sure you are on top of all other artists in the local scene and insure you are getting all the attention. However, if you are like most artists or groups I talk to, you want to gain national attention that leads to international success in the music industry. Thinking local and competing local will not get you there. It won’t even get you 1% closer to your goals. In fact, it will drain your time, money, and energy resources to the point that you don’t have anything left to devote to national exposure.

Don’t get me wrong. I feel that a local following is imperative to gaining momentum needed to achieve national success. But getting your CD in local retailers, getting a spin from time to time on local radio, or concentrating all your efforts into selling your CD to every single potential fan in your local market is not good business. Think of it this way; if you have national exposure, are getting national magazines to review your cd, gaining national spins on radio, and creating a fan base from several outside markets, don’t you think your local market will see that press as well? They will, they do, and it makes them realize that you are not “just another local market artist or group!”

Marketing music works a bit of the opposite as you might think. You can get all the local press and coverage you would ever want, but you still have to put in the exact, if not more, effort to create the national exposure you desire from that local press. On the other hand, if you put your efforts into national press and acceptance, your local market will pick up the story and run it locally because it has the “local musician makes good” angle. Now think about this; how much easier would it be to get booked in your local venue if you have national press coverage or radio spins? Much, much, easier I assure you! And what about self space in retail? It will be a lot easier to walk into your mom and pop CD outlet and get your CD on the “top” placement if you can show them spins, reviews, or stories from national outlets.

Your competition is national artists, not local artists. Local artists should work together to help raise awareness to the market. The more national positive stories, reviews, spins, and buzz your market can establish the better. Why? Because it will make national press, radio, and professionals start to look at your local market to find out why so many artists and groups are getting the coverage. This is the basics of how markets like Atlanta, Indianapolis, Nashville, Houston, and others have grown their markets into power houses in their genre. They learned, quickly, that if they do not consider one another as competition, and actually help one another piggyback on any coverage they may get as individuals, that the local market would be able to get additional national coverage resulting in more direct coverage of their own efforts as individuals within the local market.

I will leave you will one more thing to consider; If you put your efforts into markets outside your local area and only get four or five new fans in each market you put effort into, how fast and large do you think you can grow your fan base? The second biggest mistake I found while researching my new book was that artists and groups that are new to music marketing strategies feel that gaining only a hand full of new fans in a market equals failure. This is absolutely wrong. There are hundreds of markets in the US alone. If you were to gain only five new fans in each market, and to make it easy lets say there are 300 markets available (realize a city is a market so this is a low, low figure), you would gain 1500 new fans. Now, if you are truly marketing your music and takin gthe steps to increase awareness of your project you could show those 1500 fans how to get their friends into your music as well. To make it easy, let’s say each of your 1500 fans have only two friends, 1500 x 3 (your established fans plus their two friends) = 4500 fans. Now, do it again, each of the new 3000 fans brought by your established fans brings in 2 friends = 6000 new fans. You are already up to 10,500 new fans. I think you get the point. A small handful of new fans in a new market, if marketed to and worked correctly, does not equal only a handful of new fans!

Keep an eye out for my new book; “Low or No Budget Music Marketing Strategies” It will be available online at www.IamMusicNetwork.com and on amazon.com. And, to keep with the title of the book, I will offer the book for $9.99 digital download or $14.99 paperback version. It should be ready in the next week or two!

Until next time…
Peace,
Jai
“Love the MUSIC in Yourself, Not Yourself in the MUSIC!”