It’s 1st quarter 2010 and it’s time to dig into the back of your filing cabinet, pull out those business and marketing plans that have been sitting there collecting dust, and start updating them so you can have a successful 2010! But wait, don’t do anything if you are going to do the same thing you did last year; take the time to write a new plan – to just throw it in the filing cabinet… and watch it get pushed further and further back each time you put something new in your filing cabinet. Don’t waste your time, effort, or intention on something this year that you are not going to follow through with…

Ahhhhh, there it is… If you write a business or marketing plan for 2010 you have to make the decision to follow through with it…. NOT write it and think you will, or know it well enough that you don’t need to place it in the top drawer of your desk for daily, weekly, or monthly reference… But really commit to following your plan down to the last detail! What good is a plan if it is not followed? How can you reach your goals set in a prepared plan if you are not using it to run your business? How can you stay on budget from week to week – month to month – if you are not following the budget you set out in the plan? You can not do any of these things including take the easy road to your planned success without referring to your music marketing or business marketing plan!

What your music marketing or business plan does for you:

1. Sets goals
If you do not know what you are aiming for how are you ever going to get to your target? Before you create your 2010 music marketing or business plan you need to sit down and determine what it is you want to accomplish this year. Be realistic, if you are new to the music industry don’t set yourself up for failure by creating goals too far advanced to where you are currently at. This is not to say you shouldn’t set high goals… just be realistic in your goals and what you have the capabilities or budget to reach.

2. Do your research
Research is key to any music marketing or business plan. You need to know what is hot right now, what the trends say will be hot in six months, and what has stopped working. The riaa is a great resource site for statistics, sales information, and last years trends. Billboard.com is another great site – it allows you to see what the majors are doing for their marketing efforts, and of course… www.IamMusicNetwork.com will keep you up-to-date on what is working in music industry!

3. Plan for your future
Once you have your goals and research completed you should have a better idea for what you will need to do to reach your goals. Now it’s time to plan for your future. What will you need over the next year? Include team members, money, resources, songs, videos, equipment, office space, studio, and anything else you can think of that will be needed to help you reach your goals.

4. Make a plan
Writing a music marketing or business plan does not have to be fancy and perfect. It all comes down to effort. The more effort you put into your plan the clearer the road map you will have to follow. Take your time, plan everything down to the last detail, and include your goals, research, and planning for the future to develop a stated plan of action to get you where you want to go. Think about today, tomorrow, next week, next month, and beyond until you reach next year. What steps will you take every moment and day of your journey? This is what planning is about. If you run into trouble or need help send me an email: jai@jaihutcherson.com. I am here and I do like to help indies reach their goals!

5. Stick with your plan
Writing a music marketing or business plan and then not following it is simply a waste of time, effort, and resources. You will find, if you take the time to write your plan, that you get excited, energized, and motivated to work harder, longer, and be more dedicated. But this newness will fade… if you don’t look at your plan often. It is so easy to get off track, side tracked, or simply forget about the plan you created all together if you don’t make your plan a part of your everyday music business life. Keep your plan in a top drawer of your desk, share your plan with your team, refer to your plan in team meetings, and by all means…. follow your plan.

6. Be prepared for the unexpected
Once your plan is written you must remember it is not written in stone. The music industry may change, your team dynamics might change, your budget may change, or you may learn something new that you didn’t know about when writing your plan. You have to constantly evaluate where your business is at, how it is doing, how much closer or further you are from reaching your goals, and if in fact your plan is working. Be prepared to update your plan as needed, but don’t make changes easily. Meaning, just because you here one thing or another may be working for someone else…. does not mean it will work for you. As you evaluate your plan and progress you will know if you are on track, do not change much of anything is what you planned is working. If you hear of new concepts take the time to research them for sure, but don’t be too ready to adopt them into your plan until you see how it will affect your entire plan…. not just how it will affect today or tomorrow! Another words…. don’t get caught up with “keeping up with the Jones.”

A music marketing or business plan is your road map to your success. It is the most valuable asset you own. Protect it, baby it, keep it in arm’s reach, and by all means follow it! If you take the time, effort, and energy to create a solid plan you will be better off this time next year!

If you need help with writing a music marketing or business plan reach out – I am here to help!!!

Peace,
Jai
“Love the MUSIC in Yourself, Not Yourself in the MUSIC!”

I personally love New Years Eve! Not because I can party it up into the wee hours of the night, rather because it gives me a chance at a “do-over.” Every year on New Years Eve day, before the festivities, I spend the entire day day dreaming about what I want the future to look like, pondering the past years activities, and then creating an action plan to move me away from the previous years mistakes and closer to the new years goals. This is the most exciting time for me in my business. I really dig day dreaming and thinking about the future. These day dreams become my goals for the year.

A goal is no more than a day dream if no action is taken, no plans are created, or no movement towards them is accomplished throughout the year. This was a huge realization for me many years ago. Before I came to this notion that I had to act upon my dreams to make them a reality I would always wonder from year to year why I was no closer to making my living in the music industry. You see, I was always doing the same thing I did last year, no matter the results, and somehow expecting because I had a day dream of everything being different It would be…. no matter the action I took… which in my case, again, was doing the same ol’ same ol’ and expecting different results.

So again, I ask you…. Are you going to change your mindset or continue with the same ol’ same ol’ hoping for something to miraculously to happen?

I want to challenge you this year. I want you to take a leap of faith and consider that what you are currently doing may not be all you can do for yourself and your career. I don’t care how successful you are right now, there is always more you can do. The most successful people in the world know that learning something new everyday is the only way to stay successful and that there is always something they are doing that could be done better. So, with that said, I want to challenge you to reach deeper within yourself and find that little spark of energy that will allow you to sit on New Years Eve day and ponder your past, plan your future, and take the first action step of creating a written plan of how you will move closer to your future and further from your past mistakes.

Here are some steps to get you thinking…

1. Write down all the actions you took last year towards making your living in the music industry.

2. Go through each action you took and and rate the success using the 1-10 method (1 being poor – 10 being excellent) BE HONEST!!!

3. Now again go through the list and next to each action item list why you feel it deserved the rating you gave it.

4. Put your pen down and seriously consider your actions over the past year. How can you do better?

5. Close your eyes…after reading this step… and day dream about your future. Let your mind go as far as it can towards how you want to live your live and what would make you the most happy in the music industry.

6. Start a new piece of paper and write down your day dreams.

7. Now, look at the day dreams and consider what has to happen to get you closer to them. As an example, if your day dream is to perform live in front of 50,000 people all screaming your name… what must you do to get there? First, you must learn who the concert promoters are that put together concerts large enough to attract 50,000 people. So, in this case, you would need to start networking with concert promoters. – very brief explanation, but you get the point.

8. List each day dream as a goal.

9. Under each goal write down as many action steps as you can think of to get you closer to that goal. Money, time, resources do not matter right now, you can figure out all that later. Right now you just want to create an action plan of how you can reach your goals.

10. Look at all your goals and action items and create a step-by-step plan of action to reach your goals. Once you have a plan you will be able to see what you need to do, obtain, learn, possess, etc. to reach your goals. This is valuable. Now you simply have to get your hands or mind on the needed items and act upon your plan to reach your goals!

Sounds too simple to work doesn’t it? That is because it is human nature to over complicate, over think, and over estimate everything we do in life. People, life can be easy in the music industry if you plan for it to be. This ten step plan is the fundamental basis to every successful person you have ever met or heard about in your entire life. In one way or another each successful person follows this path to their success. The difference between those that are not successful, those who are moderately successful, and those that have unbelievable success is how well they follow this ten step program and personalize it to their individual needs.

2010 can be a huge year for you in the music industry. All you have to do is plan for your success. So, again, I challenge you to reach your potential…. oh sorry, i hated hearing that in school, let’s change that…. I challenge you to reach deep inside your soul and find what it is you want to do as an individual, define your desire into words on paper (very important), create an action plan to reach that desire, and then research and learn what you need to so you can reach those desires and have a unbelievable 2010!!!

Need help setting up your music industry action plan?
Step-By-Step Action Plan to Reach Your Goals & Succeed in the MUSIC Industry

Happy New Year!
Peace,
Jai
“Love the MUSIC in Yourself, Not Yourself in the MUSIC!”

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!”

I tested this man. I asked him if I could look through his palm pilot and randomly pick some names out of the list and question him about them. He gladly agreed and quickly put me in my place. You see, he didn’t just put in a name and phone number when adding a contact. He added who they were, where he met them, what they did for a living, and what it was they were trying to accomplish when he met them. I scrolled through the list and grabbed a name every so often and began my questioning. Not only could he tell me who they were and the information contained on the palm pilot, but he could tell me the last time he talked with the person, where they are today, and if they had reached their goals or were still on the pursuit. I was amazed to say the least! We are talking about a crap load of contacts – over 5000 and growing.

The really cool thing, he wanted to teach me why he did it. He told me the how, where, or that anything else in the process didn’t matter as long as I understood why and that I would figure out the rest along the way from my foundation of WHY….

“Everyone you meet – everyone, everywhere, in any setting or place, in any profession or trade, or from any background has something to offer you – IF you are willing to listen, learn, and give what you have to offer, even if it’s just your ear at the time, respect of listening, and getting to know them better – AND you must be willing to commit your time to finding what you can help them achieve.”

This is a strong statement. It changed everything for me. I know, I know, it sound simple…DUH. But really, it’s not. It is the basis of music marketing and the foundation of how to network with others to reach our goals. I have handed my phone to people to many times to remember to have them add their information in my contact list so we could “re-connect” later. LOL, I assure you these are the 2 or 3 contacts out of 10 that I have no idea who they are, why they are in my phone, or how they even got there in the first place.

Networking in the music industry is the most important part of your business. It is what you will rely on most often to get what you need, find resources, advance your career, and above all – get what you need to advance to the next level. Too many people, myself included until I met this man, do not put enough value on relationships today. The internet is doing to networking what TV and video games did to us as kids. I can remember before cable TV came to my neighborhood all the kids would would meet out by the telephone pole and decide if we were going to go to the creek, play hide-n-seek, or work on our tree house down in the woods. But as soon as cable TV came, BAM! Fewer and fewer kids came around to play together. Then when Atari introduced the 2600… that sealed the deal. Only those of us whos parents wouldn’t spring for the game console ever met at that pole again.

The internet today, it’s is the same thing all over again. No one takes the time to learn who the other is, where they are coming from, what they are trying to achieve, or what their plan is to reach their goals. Sure, you might “add a friend” – and I bet you are proud of your 42,000 friends. But really, how long has it been since you met them out at the telephone pole? Don’t get me wrong, the internet is a huge advantage for networking. But like the TV and video games of my youth, there are many bells and whistles that pull people away from actually interacting with one another for promises of MORE FUN! The worst thing, even when we are offline and meet people we have learned to exchange information – i.e. email addresses with promises of getting to know one another better online and exchanging information there… where se can add it to our contact database. How ofen have you done this? How often did you connect with that person after that brief meeting?

I learned a lot from this man. He became my mentor. Here is what I learned… and once I understood the why, as he promised, the rest was easy!

Meeting one person at a gathering, on the street, on the internet, or anywhere…. and actually getting to know that person – taking the time to exchange information, ideas, goals, etc. is worth more than meeting 100 people and not knowing anything about any of them. He taught me to slow down, take the time to build a relationship with each person I met in life, and record the details. He said I needed to stop my wrong thinking of the more people I meet the better and change it to the more relationships I build the better. Then he gave me the key… I had to actually help that person, in anyway I could, achieve their goals before worrying about my own. In this exchange, every time, the other person would in some way help me when I needed it. Strong!!!

What does all this mean? It means slow down. Talk. Exchange ideas. And most important, when you add someone to your contacts list make sure you actually know them and can call them a contact. Then, and only then, can you truly reach for your phone and call anyone on your list and get what youneed when you need it. It’s called networking. In today’s very fast paced world we all too often forget that networking is about helping one another, not simply exchanging phone numbers. It’s about building strong relationships with everyone you know and committing to really being a friend, not just a name on a list. Most importantly, it means stop worrying about how many people you meet and start concentrating on how well you get know who you meet.

Networking is the backbone of the music industry! Build your list of contacts into friends, find ways to help those friends, and your reward will be a network of roads to your own success.

Peace,
Jai
“Love the MUSIC in Yourself, Not Yourself in the MUSIC!”

Phone: 972-510-5244
Email: jai@jaihutcherson.com
Website: www.JaiHutcherson.com

Welcome to the indie music marketing blog that will help you generate buzz, increase awareness, and drive fans to buy your CDs and merchandise. This is your real deal, no BS, resource for building effective music marketing campaigns around tested music industry marketing and promotional strategies that have been proven to work.

I encourage you to comment, ask questions, and expect that I will reply to every person who posts. This is an interactive blog that allows you to ask the questions that will answer your music marketing concerns. No question is a dumb question, no idea is stupid, and you can be assured I will do my best to help anyone who wants to learn more about how to get their music in the hands of more fans.

I want this blog to be your go-to resource – the one place you can count on for real world help on solving your music marketing issues!

Peace,
Jai
“Love the MUSIC in Yourself, Not Yourself in the MUSIC!”