Click here to download sample pages of this 174 page book.The Songwriter's Toolkit: From Pen to Push Play
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Click on the book to purchase now. Pre-sell purchases include a free download card of the new EP by Aaron Blanton (a Grammy nominated and multi Dove Award winning artist.) Aaron Blanton has sold over 1 million CDs. You'll get a free ringtone and at least six brand new songs recorded in L.A. and Orange County. The download card will ship at the time the book ships. This is a limited time offer!
I find myself having the same conversation over and over. Friends in and out of the music business are all asking the same questions. When it comes to the enormous glut of music, with all its variations and mutations and genres, how does any one artist rise through the noise? The field is vastly overcrowded and shows no signs that a slowdown of new music proliferation is imminent. A statistic I cited in my last article of 98,000 new albums in 2009 is a stunning and nearly unimaginable quantity, even in a land that loves music such as the U.S. Who are all those artists? How do you find the one album or single that you might love to hear but are unaware of, hidden among the masses? It is the proverbial conundrum of the “needle in a haystack.” It’s in there somewhere, but how will you ever get your hands on it? Fans can’t enjoy music they don’t know about.
There are at least two remedies for the “lost” music dilemma. One is more obvious and clearly understood to nearly everyone as “marketing.” Marketing a song, album or band is one way to expose a great piece of music or an artist to those who are eager to learn about something fresh. Marketing includes all of the concepts we have explored in previous articles such as, building fan bases, touring and advertising, social media and much more. Some of this can be done with little or no cost; and some at the price of a Ferrari. Publicists and marketing teams are expensive but do bring a level of ROI (return on investment), in most cases. Their job is to take an unknown, little known, or forgotten product or person and raise the profile enough to produce consumers. Through a series of ad campaigns that might include TV, radio, print media, internet and many other exposures, they work (for a limited time based on budget) on reaching a specified market with a specific message. The clever strategies they employ are probably the reason you are reading this on whatever brand of devise you purchased. The work of marketers and publicists has a nearly unscalable influence on what we actually think or want to buy. This can be done to some degree, by any DIY-er who has the will and stamina to commit to the goal at hand. It is tough but can be done.
The second remedy for locating “lost” music is much less manageable. It isn’t about ads or hits on an internet site. It has to do with what I will call “filters” and is completely outside of one person’s shear brute will power to succeed. “Filters” is the old method of culling bad music. It separated the wheat from the chaff and helped the most durable music get to the top of the heap. When you heard a hit on the radio, it was there because it had met with certain scrutiny of record execs who cleared the production for that song. It meant that an artist, producer, A&R guy, a team of songwriters, radio promoters, session players and several others had had a hand in making it a hit. They were responsible for giving that record the green light to get where it was. They were the filters who held back the music that was of lesser quality (based on their set of criteria) and allowed only the music they believed in to go forward. This was further supported by radio, record stores, and jukebox vendors. With all these entities focusing on “the single”, consumers ran by the millions to buy the hit record they had been dancing to and hearing on their car radios.
Now we see few if any filters to help us locate and fall in love with “the single.” We are left to our own devices in trying to uncover the great music of our time. The idea of DIY was that anyone and everyone who had some talent could make a record and so we all did. At last we had slipped the surly bonds of the “corporate system” that had held us all at bay. Little did we know that our newfound freedom to be creative would also produce the lowest record sales in the history of commercial recordings. But where a vacuum exists, something always rushes in to fill it. So what will our new filtering system be? Only time will tell.
©2010 WalkWayGroup
Click here to download sample pages of this 174 page book.The Songwriter's Toolkit: From Pen to Push Play
Click on the book to purchase now. Pre-sell purchases include a free download card of the new EP by Aaron Blanton (a Grammy nominated and multi Dove Award winning artist.) Aaron Blanton has sold over 1 million CDs. You'll get a free ringtone and at least six brand new songs recorded in L.A. and Orange County. The download card will ship at the time the book ships. This is a limited time offer!
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