Trent Reznor wrote a great post on the Nine Inch Nails forum about what he would do to “make it” as a new artist in the music business as it is today. Here’s a taste:
The point is this: music is free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact — it sucks as the musician but that’s the way it is (for now). So… have the public get what they want from you instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process…
The music business isn’t based on exchanging recorded music for money. It’s based on relationships. Today it’s easier than ever for artists and fans to connect directly.
Product or service?
Perhaps the key here is not to think about the music as a product — a piece of plastic that is sold in stores or at your shows. Your music is your calling card. Your performance as a musician is a service to the audience (whether seated in a theatre or dancing in a club or listening at home) and word of mouth is your best form of promotion. This is the way musicians became popular before the advent of recordings. And with the Internet having made its way into almost every household in the modern world, that word of mouth can spread far and wide very quickly.
Become familiar
Tweeting, blogging and Facebooking are the new version of postering. Do you spend time and money postering the hip neighbourhoods in your city thinking it will actually get people go out to your show? That’s not how it works unless you’re AC/DC or Miley Cyrus. What postering does for indie artists is get their name out on the street — if you have a enough posters out there, and if you play shows often enough, people will start to recognize your name, then they see your name in the local paper, they search for you online, find your website, listen to (and hopefully download) your music, sign up for your mailing list and then come out to your show.
Being active on as many social networking sites as possible can have the same effect. Make sure you (or your band) have accounts on as many social networking sites as you can think of. There are the obvious places like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, but also be aware of the multitude of other social networks such as Virb, Flickr, Tumblr, Last.fm, Blip.fm and many, many more.
Now that you’ve got all of your social networking accounts, use them! Tweet regularly, especially if you’re on tour or in the studio. There are lots of things to share with followers. Set up a page and a group on Facebook and suggest all your friends become fans. Post videos on YouTube — think about Jeremy Fisher’s Cigarette video with over 2.2 million views in the past 2 years or Dave Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars with over 2 million views in less than one week! Not every video goes viral, but if you’ve got something that people can connect with, you’re on your way to developing a name for yourself online.
Social networking goes one step further than postering: it puts your potential fan in contact with you. It gives you the opportunity to engage with fans and build your fan-base on a personal level.
Become familiar, build your relationships, and you can turn your online followers into fans who will come out to your next show.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Saw Trent’s post via your Twitter feed and I’ve been looking at it every few hours since (thanks eh.) There’s a post of my own that I’ve been meaning to write for the past two weeks but the basic bit is that from the consumer’s perspective, I think music isn’t a product or service but rather a piece of the social infrastructure. Now if I could just figure out what that means from the artists’ perspective (specifically with regards to getting paid,) maybe I’ll get that thing written.
I think I understand the concept of music being a piece of social infrastructure, but I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Get writing!