6 Steps To Building True Music Industry Connections

6 Steps To Building True Music Industry Connections

By Christiana Usenza from the Sonicbids Blog.

In any field, "who you know" often counts more than "what you know." This is especially true in the music industry – an ever-shrinking pool of people that exemplifies the proverbial "small world." Now, more than ever, it's important to not only build your list of contacts, but also make true connections with fellow folks in the biz.
A true connection vs. a contact
A contact is someone you know through someone else, or is a respected person in your field who could potentially benefit you in some way. But what really matters is how you turn that contact into a connection.
Just because you once got an email back from a publicist, or met someone at a networking event and exchanged business cards, does not mean that you've automatically made an industry connection. A connection is someone you've met in person, have known for some time, can relate to genuinely, and can trust. There's a sense of mutual interest, gain, or benefit to the relationship.
Creating connections boosts your career and opens up new opportunities. Connections can help you get more shows, build your fanbase, find the right producer for your album, find musicians with whom to collaborate, or even help you get writers to review your music.
"As with everything, it's self-serving, but it's also mutual," says Bridget Duggan, who books Johnny D's Uptown Restaurant and Music Club in Boston and is a member of Somerville, MA, band Paper Waves. "It helps out both sides to make connections, although it is not something that can be forced and does not happen overnight.”
6 Steps to Build and Maintain Industry Connections
1. Select properly
When meeting people, think about how they are relevant to what you do, and why the connection is important to you. Is there a band you admire and want to open for or tour with? Could you introduce yourself to the promoter of the venue you want to play? Treat everyone with respect, because you never know how powerful of a person you might be talking to.
2. Have intention
Don’t just hand out your business card to anyone passing by. Connections won’t take you seriously unless you have some genuine reason to reach out to them. Mention a personal interest in what they do, or have something meaningful to say.
3. Meet people in person
"When I started doing promotion...I emailed everyone I could possibly think of to introduce myself to them. It didn’t work," says Duggan. "It's more about being in the scene.... Meeting in person makes a big difference." When talking with potential connections, try to express why they inspire you, offer something back to them, and, in the appropriate situation, mention a mutual friend or a shared connection who also takes an interest in you. Establish a friendly relationship and connect with them genuinely.
4. Have something to offer
If you want to grab someone's attention, offer to add them to the guest list for an upcoming show, or co-bill with a band you want to connect with. There are so many ways to reciprocate.
5. Be mutually supportive
Support people doing their "thing," and in turn, they might support you. “Stick around after the show and introduce yourself," says Duggan. "Look people in the eye and ask them their names." Go see a band from out of town perform that pairs well with your sound, and offer them an opening slot at a well-drawing show in your area. In return, open for them where they draw a crowd. This way, you both gain exposure to new audiences. Start locally, then begin building relationships and connections regionally and nationally.
6. Use social media
Connect with people you meet in person via social media to show support for what they do – they might do the same for you. If you like something they post, comment on it or share it. In addition to privately thanking your connections when they help you out, you can also give them a public social media shout-out when appropriate.
The bottom line is that you never know who might be able to help you down the road. You might need something specific one day, and, because of your connections, you'll be able to reach out to the perfect person. If you are also recognized for what you have to offer and can help out someone else, it only boosts the relationship and connection.
Christiana Usenza is musician and dancer with a master's degree in ethnomusicology from Tufts University. She has ventured as far as Argentina, Brazil, and Ghana to study music and dance, and has an endless curiosity for music genres, styles, and scenes across the world. She teaches music, writes music, and works in the booking office at Johnny D's in Somerville, MA. She is a member of the band Paper Waves, and they are currently working on their first album.

Marketing Your Music Blog With Just 3 Tools

Marketing Your Music Blog With Just 3 Tools

Clambr's Richard Marriott got "50 Experts" to weigh in on "How to Promote Your Blog with Just 3 Tools." It's a big page that's now at 53 professional web marketers, SEOs and marketing bloggers. But I think their choices of blog marketing tools and their rationales for using them, which also reveals some of their approaches to blog marketing, offer useful insights for musicians, music businesspeople, music writers and music marketers who are creating content, building brands and spreading the word through blogging.
"50 Experts Reveal How to Promote Your Blog with Just 3 Tools" comes at a good time for me as I begin a process of getting organized for the New Year. I'm investigating new and old social media marketing tools for various projects and will be sharing what I learn here at Hypebot in 2014.
The blog marketing post covers a lot of ground but little of it is specific to music marketing. So here are some key tool groups and observations that I think are especially relevant for marketing music-related blogs with some notes about future coverage at Hypebot.
Email Marketing & Newsletters

Email marketing was considered a key approach with AWeber topping the tools list. That makes me want to take a second look cause AWeber seems more generally on the decline compared to MailChimp which came in a distant second to AWeber in this group. MailChimp's free tier gets multiple mentions for those on tight budgets.
I'm getting ready to reinvestiate FeedBlitz for both email and RSS management. RSS tools did not make it on the list which makes sense. RSS feeds are now a basic feature more than a core tool.
I will also be checking out self-hosted Wordpress email plugins for email marketing and newsletters though that will likely include plugins for hosted email services like MailChimp or FeedBlitz.
Social Media Networks

Twitter topped the social media network mentions with Facebook lagging behind and Google+ barely appearing. Twitter definitely makes sense, especially for content and blog marketing, given its broad reach and focus on short messages with links that can lead directly back to one's own blog.
Given that social proof is becoming a more important part of SEO, all of these networks are relevant in that realm as well, especially Google+.
We'll continue covering the big players and also following the emerging world of messaging as it grows in importance.
Social Media Management

Tools for managing one's social media presence were cited more than any particular social network, which makes a lot of sense, especially for professionals who are often managing multiple accounts.
HootSuite topped the list of social media management tools and it certainly seems to be a fave among music marketers as well. They've done a good job of keeping up with a wide range of networks as well as offering 3rd party apps with reach beyond Twitter, Facebook and Google+ into music-relevant networks like SoundCloud, YouTube and Instagram.
Buffer came in second.
I'm hoping to take a closer look at tools like HootSuite that integrate various services by either connecting with a lot of sites or by bringing all the features in-house. But, like a handful of the 50 Experts, I've focused more on doing things like tweeting by hand since I don't manage accounts for clients and am exploring low volume approaches.
Analytics

Understanding what's happening and how your actions are affecting what happens is an important part of blog marketing so it's not surprising that analytics tools made some lists. Google Analytics, which may be downplaying keywords but still offers more a rich suite of tools than a single tool, was the main one discussed.
Topsy for Twitter was mentioned in passing. Of course, many other tools such as HootSuite offer analytics related to one's social media marketing efforts.
I'm looking for other analytics tools for blogs and websites but it's hard to beat what Google offers for free. If you have any suggestions, please do share.
Link Building

Getting people to link to you is an important part of SEO as well as direct traffic. I've always taken the organic "let them link to you because you have great content" approach.
If you're interested in more overt link building as well as building relationships with other bloggers, these pros recommend such tools and networks as BuzzStream, Blog Engage and Triberr.
Miscellaneous Blog Marketing Tools

iTunes received multiple mentions by podcasters.
Wistia was singled out for self-hosted video.
Wordpress appears low on the list but both Wordpress.org (self-hosted) and related plugins get mentioned repeatedly by many of the respondents. Much of this can be attributed to the flexible nature and generally low cost of self-hosted Wordpress. It's also a reminder that blog marketing begins with a great blogging platform.
I'm slowly getting up to speed on Wordpress and will be getting more detailed in 2014.
Be sure to let us know if you're finding specific web and mobile tools of use for both blog and music marketing.
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/Facebook) is building a writing hub at Flux Research. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.



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Clyde Smith on 12/04/2013 in D.I.Y., Marketing, Music Tech, Social Media | Permalink

10 Music Production Experiments That Will Make You More Creative

10 Music Production Experiments That Will Make You More Creative
Sam Matla

Creative:
Creativity is not a talent; it’s a way of operating.
John Cleese

When you’ve been making music for several years, it’s easy to get stuck in a lull. You go through the motions, doing everything that you’ve always done the way you’ve always done it.

This is fine, but it becomes boring. You start to lose the challenging aspect of music production.

To counter this, we need to experiment. Experimentation is what breeds creativity.

In this post, I list ten experiments you can use to be more creative. They might not increase your creative ability, but they will force you to be more creative during the given moment. The key here is to break the norm.

1. Limit Yourself to 5 Instruments

One of the best ways to be creative is to impose severe limitations on ourselves. It’s natural assume that the more options we have, the more creative we’ll be, but this often leads to endless tweaking and working on the trivial instead of creating actual music.

I find that forcing myself to work with a set number of instruments is a great way to be creative. It requires different thinking; how can I beef up this sound without adding a new layer? What effects can I use to make this drum section more interesting when it’s just a kick and a hi-hat?

Limit yourself to just five instruments. Drums don’t count as one instrument, for example:

Kick
Hat
Clap
Plucked bass
Piano
Is five instruments.

To some of you, this may seem ludicrous and even impossible to do. That just means you need to try it more than anyone. If you’re struggling to make your 5-track song interesting, consider using:

Send tracks
Reverbs and delays
Distortion
Heavy and complex automation
Preset morphing through automation (one sound to another, a la Deadmau5)
Complex composition to compensate for the lack of instrumentation
2. Compose With Sine Waves

There’s nothing better than the sweet, sweet sound of a sine wave. Except for everything.

Composing with sine waves is far from enjoyable, but it forces you to think outside the square. You have to pay close attention to octaves, and where certain musical ideas should be placed on the piano roll. How low should your bassline be? How high on the register should your melody be?

The great thing about composing with sine waves is that it makes your mixing process a lot easier. Everything is already in its rightful place, so that when you replace the sine wave with the right sound, you know how to EQ it to fit with the rest of the tracks.

Another benefit to this experiment is that it forces you to disregard sound design, at least at the start. You’re focusing purely on composition.

3. Structure Your Track First

There’s something I like to call the Arrangement Workflow which means arranging before anything else.

Many people don’t understand this when I first tell them about it. How can you arrange something that isn’t there? Shouldn’t you come up with ideas first?

It’s simple. You build your structure with blank clips first:

Create 3-5 “placeholder” tracks (e.g., Drums, Bass, Chords, Melody)
Create blank MIDI clips for each (different colors)
Arrange blank MIDI clips in phrases to sketch out a basic structure
The best thing about this experiment is that it requires you to think of the project as a whole, right from the start. Often we get so stuck into our 8-bar loop, or whatever, that we forget we’re making a full song.

4. Use Sounds You Hate

It’s easy to trawl through sample packs and find sounds that fit perfectly with the rest of your tracks, and you should do that when making music. We want to use quality material.

For being creative, though, there’s nothing like a challenge. Why not use a sound you hate? It could be a preset, a drum sample, even a vocal phrase. Find it, cringe for a moment, and then figure out how to make it work with the rest of your track.

I don’t recommend doing this with every single project. Treat it as an experiment, as practice, to strengthen your problem solving muscle.

5. Produce a Track in 60 Minutes

One of the main reasons producers don’t finish tracks is because they never set a deadline. There’s no real pressure for them to finish the track. They may think they need to finish it, they may want to finish it. But at the back of their mind, they know that if they don’t finish it, life goes on as normal.

Thus, whenever they reach a challenging moment in the music creation process, they give up and move on to a new project.

Giving yourself a set time to make something forces you to act rather than think. When you have 60 minutes to make a song, in the case of this experiment, you don’t have time to muck around. You don’t have time to think about whether you should use a different pluck or not, you just fix it later on.

6. Use Presets, or Don’t

If you’re a preset user, then experiment without them. Design your own sounds.

If you’re not a preset user, then experiment with them. Don’t design your own sounds.

7. Automate 5 Parameters on Every Track

Of all the ten experiments listed, this one is the most fun yet frustrating.

The idea is to add at least five lanes of automation to every track. So, your kick drum needs to have five lanes of automation, and they need to be doing something. You could automate a high-pass and low-pass filter, the decay of the sample, some distortion, and reverb. Or you could automate delay, a glitch plugin, an EQ, and the two filters.

It sounds easier than it is. When you get to the crash cymbal that hits every 32 bars in your song, things get a little more tricky. How on earth do you add five lanes of automation to a crash cymbal?

That’s up to you to work out.

8. Work at a Different Tempo

Whether you’re a 138 trance purist or a progressive house producer who never leaves the safe confines of 128BPM, consider making a track at a different tempo.

You can still make trance at 110BPM, just like you can make progressive house at 132BPM. Switching up the tempo often sparks different ideas and sounds, and it’s also enjoyable.

9. Create a Song With One Sample Pack

If you’re anything like me you’ll have an endless number of sample packs that contain only a few samples you always use.

Why not try making a song from one sample pack? Doing so will not only cause your song to sound more cohesive, but it will lower the amount of choices you have to make when picking samples.

With this experiment, the smaller the sample pack, the better. Avoid using construction kits and pre-made basslines and melodic loops. Stick to one-shots and FX.

10. Merge Two or More Genres Together

I left this one till last as it’s the most difficult.

Merging genres together is a great way to be creative. If you’re a house producer, why not incorporate a dirty DnB reese bass? If you make trance, why not season your track with a few dubstep wobbles and screeches?

Over to You

There you have it. Ten experiments that will force you to think creatively.

Have you got any experiments of your own that you’d add to this list? If so, what are they?

If you haven’t got any of your own experiments, which of the above ten are you going to do first?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam Matla
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I run EDMProd and produce trance and progressive music. Drop me a line on Twitter and connect with me on Google+
Tags: creativity, workflow