Music Success In Nine Weeks #3

The Perfect Pitch
So here we are in Week 2 of Ariel's magical world of Cyber PR, which is all about "The Perfect Pitch". Luckily for me I actually hired a PR man last year who wrote me a couple of bios and I now freely borrow random sentences from those whenever I need to summarize myself within one sentence, however I still went through this section and filled out the three lists which consisted of:

• Artists people think I sound like.
• Artists that influenced me.
• Feelings and vibes that I want my music to convey.

After a couple of attempts at using these lists to create my "perfect pitch" I decided that the one's I'd already been using from the pre-written bios were actually better, so I just used one of those instead, it reads:

"Taking the ramshackle charm of Guided By Voices at their most melodic and adding a boyish enthusiasm that tips its hat to both Weezer and Matthew Sweet."

I said it out loud a few times, and it sounded cool and made me think "I I hadn't heard my music, I'd probably really want to based on that sentence!! I am great!! Grrrrr!!

I then promptly went round the Internet and began plastering it about, if you'd care to check out Aidy.com for example you'll see it proudly displayed on the front page, and next time I make some postcards or flyers, I'll stick it on those too.

I did attempt to test it out on the "fabulous website" 15SecondPitch.com that Ariel suggested, unfortunately after churning away for a couple of minutes it finally came back with:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired

/new/createuser.asp, line 276

I tried a couple more times and got the same thing. Annoying, but hey ho, at least I've got my little daily notebook of achievements to get me through ;-)

Music Success In Nine Weeks #2

First Things First
Well I've now gone through the entire book and I've started a few of the later tasks already as I was slightly concerned after reading the fact that potential fans could have the attention span of gnats and may not be prepared to wait for longer than 3.5 seconds for my website to load. So I did a bit of tweaking to Aidy.com. I've enabled caching, enabled gzip and I've also gone through the images on the front page and re-formatted a few of the larger ones. The only thing that's slightly bugging me now is that even though my site loads fairly quickly the Reverbnation widgets that I've got on there don't, and yet these come highly recommended by Ariel. The whole page seems to load in under 3.5 seconds but after it's loaded you can still see these widgets loading up. I've emailed Reverbnation and asked if anything can be done to speed them up a bit. Another thing I've noticed with the Fan Collector widget is that the @ comes out as a “ when viewed using Google Chrome, which seems like a major flaw in an email entry field, though it does work fine in IE.

The other main thing that got my attention upon my first read was the value placed on an email list, which I don't currently have, so I've now started one. I got the ball rolling by asking a few friends if they'd like to be the first of many to join this prestigious contact list and also asked a couple of people that randomly emailed me about my music recently, and I now have an email list in double figures! But I obviously don't want to stop there so I shall continue to ask others and I've also added the previously mentioned Fan Collector widget to my blog, MySpace and Aidy.com. Let's just hope that none of my potential new fans are using Google Chrome ;-)

Week 1 – Getting Mentally Prepared
So after kicking off my email list and streamlining the website I it was time to start going through the book from the beginning, in a more formal manner, so where better to start than Week 1! This chapter actually made me cringe slightly as it reads like a self-help book, encouraging me to write down my dreams and aspirations on paper and then decorate them with coloured crayons and hang them where I (and possibly others that might start to question my manliness) can see them. Never the less, I sat down at my dining room table with a cup of Early Grey and some art supplies and began to scribble.

I found this activity rather challenging, as I have a rough idea in my head of my ambitions and goals, the main one being to actually make enough money from music to be-able to do it full time, but to articulate these ideas into fully formed sentences on paper along with deadlines was slightly more tricky. After a couple of hours I came up with the following:

1. To be-able to quit day job and make a comfortable living from music alone.
2. Complete my Song A Week project at Aidy.com.
3. Increase traffic to Aidy.com to around 1000/day.
4. Get paid TV/Film placement.
5. Increase fan base to at least 1000 solid fans.
6. Sell enough merchandise and music to make at least £2000/month.

After creating this initial list I started going through the other suggested lists and then I decorated my ultimate list of goals as suggested by Ariel and and I hung them up in my kitchen.

On top of all of this I have also purchased myself a little notebook, as per Ariel's advice and each day I'm scribbling down 5 small successes that I've made. Yesterdays list consisted of:

1. Mailed out some CDs to a college radio station that requested them.
2. Added some more people to my mailing list.
3. Purchased and assembled a fan for my housemate who was complaining about the temperature of his room at night time.
4. Added email capturing widget to my MySpace.
5. Did weekly food shop.

Even though this activity felt like a waste of time to someone like myself, I've actually enjoyed doing it and it does leave me thinking “God I'm great! I've done loads today!” So hopefully I'll stick to it, and it'll help keep me motivated throughout the darker hours of my musical endeavours. Once I've finished this blog entry, I'll be-able to put that on todays list!! God I'm great ;-)

Music Success In Nine Weeks #1

Well along with all my other music marketing shenanigans I've decided to purchase myself a copy of 'Music Success In Nine Weeks' work my way through the book and also to take the blogging challenge whilst doing it. If you've got no idea what I'm talking about go here.

I first came across Ariel Publicity a few years ago, I can't remember how exactly, but it was probably through my usage of CDBaby and somehow I've found myself on founder Ariel Hyatt's mailing list, and I also now follow her antics on Twitter and YouTube. Though I've never paid for the service of Ariel or her company, I'm eager to try out some of the techniques in this book and blog about them to see if I can get anything out of it.

As her site suggests I'm also able to enter her contest for some free Cyber PR by blogging, which is quite cool as I would have probably blogged my experience anyway. If you're interested in my current state of affairs, at the time of writing my stats are roughly:

YouTube VLOG: 40-100 views per week
Twitter Followers: 49
Aidy.com unique hits: 1000/month
Most downloaded track: Hodge Plays Mario Kart, approx 250 downloads
Facebook Fans: 181

As a wise man once said "Let's go, let's get cracking!!"

Taxi Rejection #3

Here we go again, obviously not third time lucky ;-) Got some actual textual information this time though, making this rejection more useful that the previous two.

Submitted Songs

Christian Kelly

Amsterdam

Listing

CONTEMPORARY COUNTRY SONGS for a Male Artist a la BLAKE SHELTON are wanted by the Dir. of A&R at a Major Nashville Label. Great, conversational lyrics are a must. Familiar Country themes are welcome but must be told in a new and fresh, contemporary way. Uptempos are preferred but they are open to hearing mids and ballads, if they are amazing. Vocal and instrumental demo presentation must be top-notch! Please submit one to three songs online or per CD, include lyrics. All submissions will be screened and critiqued by TAXI and must be received no later than Tuesday, May 18, 2010. TAXI #S100518CO

Feedback

Taxi.com Rejection #2

Well here we are once again, with my second lot of feedback from Taxi.com for a couple of songs I recently submitted. As before I've posted the feedback and the songs themselves. The listing wanted songs about smiling, so I hastily knocked one up after seeing the ultra specific description and I also stuck in an old song of mine entitled Polly, which was a bit of a long shot but it's fairly poppy and makes a brief reference to smiles in the third verse with the lyric "look for your smile".

Submitted Songs

Polly

Smile

Listing

CONTEMPORARY SINGER-SONGWRITER-type SONGS about "SMILE/SMILING" needed by a successful Music Publisher based in L.A. who's gotten tons of great Film/TV placements for many TAXI members. Open to all tempos. Male or Female vocals are okay. No instrumentals please! Universal lyrics are necessary. Vocal and instrumental presentations must be top-notch! Recordings need to be Broadcast Quality (great home recordings should be fine). They offer a non-exclusive, 50/50 split deal - you keep your original copyrights. Please submit one to three songs online or per CD, include lyrics. All submissions will be screened on a YES/NO BASIS - NO CRITIQUES FROM TAXI - and must be received no later than Friday, May 21, 2010. TAXI #Y100521SS

Feedback

CD Baby

Apologies if this entry seems a slightly biased but I love CDBaby and I’ve used them since around 2003 when I released my first album, I’d actually had plans to release it via MP3.com which used to be an awesome site back in the day but unfortunately they got bought out and things changed so I had to find an alternative. After hunting around I came across CDBaby and a lot of people seemed to have a lot of positive things to say about them, so I decided to try it out.

The concept was fairly simple, I paid a one of set-up fee which I think was around $30 and I mailed them 10 CDs. They then set the product up on their site everytime someone purchased my album they’d take a small percentage and then deposit the rest into my PayPal account. Then when the CDs all sold, I just mailed them some more, simple!! So all I’ve had to do is put a link on my site to CDBaby, where people can purchase my music.

The site itself was setup by a guy called Derek Sivers, whom I actually met once at an informal CDBaby meet up in London last year. He was a professional musician and in the late 90s he wanted to create a way of selling his own CDs online and the whole thing grew from that.

As time’s gone on they’ve added other features and built up a number of partnerships with various digital download and streaming companies like Napster and iTunes, this additional distribution hasn’t cost me anything extra and unlike other companies like TuneCore it doesn’t expire, it just seems to sit there forever or until I want to delete it. It’s easy to set up too, you just log into your account, click on your album and select any digital distribution service you want you’re album to be available on and CDBaby do the rest. Once again they just take a small amount from each sale. They also now offer a digital distribution only service, so you don’t even have to have a physical CD, and they recently branched into singles too, which they’ll set-up for the low cost of $9.

I’m still using CDBaby today, and I still think they’re the best distribution company out there for an indie artist, although recently I’ve also started using BigCartel.com as I’m selling some slightly unusual items that CDBaby don’t cater for such as a limited edition single on 3.5” floppy, which I did for fun and as a cheeky marketing ploy!

Oh and I’d strongly recommend subscribing to the CDBaby DIY Musician’s Podcast, it’s a great resource if you’re looking for new ways to try and promote your music yourself.

www.CDBaby.com

Taxi.com Rejection #1

Okay, I'm gonna document my Taxi.com experiences via this blog, just as a useful guide to anyone else that might be thinking of using their services, I'm going to try and remain un-biased and actually link to the songs that I've submitted so you can make your own mind up about the feedback I receive from my submissions to them.

Since joining Taxi I've gone through all their listings, submitted a few songs that I thought were relevant and every couple of weeks I've gone through the new listings and done the same thing. I've just now had my first response, and it was a negative one, I submitted 3 songs for the following advert:

"ELECTRONICA SONGS - with vocals - of the 1990s - in the wide range of The Prodigy, Chemical Bros., Moby, etc., needed by a Music Publisher who has signed and placed tons of TAXI songs in various Film/TV projects. Original songs only that have a 1990s style and feel of the artists referenced are what's needed. Universal lyrics that can fit a number of film and TV scenes are what is being looked for here. Excellent vocal and instrumental performances are a must. Please submit one to three songs online or per CD, include lyrics. All submissions will be screened on a YES/NO BASIS - NO CRITIQUES FROM TAXI - and must be received no later than Monday, May 17 2010. TAXI #Y100517EL"

These were the songs:
Normal
Something You Forgot
Quiet Dreaming





They were all rejected on the basis of "Recording", I haven't had anymore feedback than that, as your feedback from Taxi just seems to be a form with some check boxes, which looks like this:



So, I went on the Taxi forum to get some more info and received some really good advice from other Taxi users and some suggestions on improving the recordings. I'll follow this advice and in the meantime, I'm gonna keep plugging away!