The 3 Main Lessons for new artists from the New Music Seminar L.A.

There were a few overarching themes at the New Music Seminar this week in Los Angeles:

1) You need help to "Do It Yourself"

After a decade or more of promises about how the internet would un-tether musicians and unlock immediate access to fans the reality has set in: It's just not that easy.

Reality has set in: It's just not that easy.

To help artists with the constant grind of social netowrking and fan out reach several companies have stepped in to assist. There are great digital tools available for indie artists through folks like Earnityourself.com, Reverb Nation, Hello Music and more (including Aderra.)

2)The Music Business is still in transition.
Some things have become apparent, The CD is a dead format. Yes there are still millions of shiny discs selling each year but the total has plummeted. While it is easy to blame peer to peer sharing there is clearly a larger trend. What's next? The current consensus seems to be that we are headed for a splintered multi-niche market. In the short term this is certain, whether there is a new paradigm of mass market success is yet to be seen.

3) The most important thing a new music act can do: MAKE GREAT MUSIC.
Don't get distracted by tweeting or updating your Facebook status. Work hard to write great songs and put on great shows. If the music is great, the rest is simple.
Dan from Killola has a more detailed take on the New Music Seminar HERE.

Post Script - A HUGE thank you to Tom Silverman and Dave Lory for giving us open access to everything and every one at NMS. From Panel recordings, to photo opportunities and private interviews it was a great day. The USB recordings will be available online shortly.

The 3 Main Lessons for new artists from the New Music Seminar L.A.

10,000 Reasons you are not a successful music act.

I wrote earlier about Tom Silverman's assessment that artists who sell less than 10,000 copies of an album are some how unsuccessful. After an interview at musiciancoaching.com was posted this week there has been a lot of grumbling about a) whether the seemingly arbitrary number of "10,000 albums" was anything less than well, arbitrary and b) are the number he quotes accurate?


Steve Lawson makes a few key points about this:

It’s ... based on ‘Soundscan’ statistics.

I hadn't considered that when originally reading Silverman's comments. His numbers may be accurate regarding sales tracked by Soundscan but

by their very nature, Independent artists operate outside of the Soundscan retail sales ecology.

At Aderra we often work with artists and labels that bundle a studio album on a MicroSd card or flash drive along with a live show we have recorded. While the studio album sales are always carefully tracked and reported to Nielsen the live tracks are not recognized by Soundscan at all. In 2008 our clients moved about 100,000 flash drives. Assuming there were 20 live tracks on each one

that is 2,000,000 digital track sales that were never once even whispered to the folks at Soundscan.

(This is a gross estimation, I'd have to go back and do an actual count but my math should be fairly close...)

So after I had this brilliant epiphany I came across Jeff Price from Tunecore's post in response to the musiciancoaching.com post. While he sounds a bit hurt by all of this he takes my little realization and blows it up to over 42,000,000 tracks sold by Tunecore artists, especially noting some such as MGMT, Drake and Soulja Boy who broke the 100,000 track mark before going on to success as signed label artists. (Disclosure, I have used Tunecore to distribute tracks for Eggfoot Records). (That is the first time I have worked a shoutout to Eggfoot Records into this blog so far. 2010 is our 20th Anniversary as an independent label.)

In the end Lawson makes probably the most important point in all of this debate:

10,000 listeners is a much more creatively inspiring target than 10,000 sales.

As I mentioned in this post, having fans discover a new artist is far more important than ensuring a per track sale.

I am sure that this will be discussed in great depth next week at the New Music Seminar in Los Angeles.

10,000 Reasons you are not a successful music act.