Marketing Básico Para Músicos Independentes

Basic Merch Marketing Strategies for Indie Musicians

Music feeds the soul; merch feeds the body. How cheesy but that is very true, my friend.



You know that! If you’re a musician, you need to sell band merchandise in order to survive. And in order to sell, you have to know how to market your merch. Here are some strategies that could help your band generate more merch sales:

Make Sure Your Name is Big and Bold. To make sure your fans won’t get lost and buy from another merch table, you have to have a big signage. It is a must! You don’t want them to have a hard time finding your table.

Light up your Merch. Aside from having a huge and readable signage, your booth should have good lighting. LED lights are okay but you should also put some “sexy” lights like yellow lights or Christmas lights. Just don’t put strobe lights as it could annoy everyone.

Avoid Clutter. Clutter looks artsy- as if you really don’t care. But you (and your fans) would have a tough time if your shirts and CDs and posters are all cluttered. Not only that, you would have a hard time packing up the items if it’s time to leave. Organizing your booth so it looks clean and so it’s easy for them to look, easy for you to find things is the way to go.

Let it reflect your personality. Your products should be an extension of your personality and style. Make sure booth-hoppers would know it’s your booth and not another band’s.

Friends Should Hang Out Somewhere else. A lively group of people chatting away near your booth and talking to you non-stop will intimidate people with real interest in buying your products.

Bundle Items. Bundle your CD with your t-shirt at a cheaper price to push those frugal fans to buy your items.

Get everyone’s E-mail. Every man, woman and child who visits your booth should leave their e-mail. Of course, ask this in a friendly manner. At least if you don’t have plenty of sales, your online marketing would improve. Every e-mail counts.

Set-up an iPod Station. Fans could pay you when they download your music or you could just ask their e-mails in return. It’s not a bad option.

Set- up a Photo Booth.  If you have the extra money to set up a photo booth, go right ahead! People want souvenirs for their concert experience. Yes, there’s instagram but photos from a photo booth are ten times cooler. Of course, be ready to have your pictures taken with them.

Sell vinyl records, USB sticks and other exclusive items. Fans that will make the effort to attend your show would want something that others don’t have. They wouldn’t care so much if your items are a bit more expensive than a CD because they’ve already traveled (and spent money) just to see you anyway. Make sure you announce this to your website to convince more people to watch your gig.

Sell Hand-made Items by Band Members. If you have a painter in your band, let him paint and sell the paintings to your fans. It would also serve as a lovely decoration to your booth. Tap into each others’ skills.

Money matters. You should agree to set some money aside from every gig to put towards merchandise. Every expense and income should be accounted and uploaded for every band member to see.

Task Designation. Involve every single member of your band and give everyone a job. Someone should be in-charge of inventory, shipping items, accounting, marketing, manufacturing,

Accept Credit Cards and Debit Cards. If you have a smart phone, go to SquareUp: http://www.square.com  – this app allows you to take credit cards anywhere, and they will even provide you with a card scanner that plugs into your phone! You’ll be taking more orders this way, so don’t miss out on sales by not taking credit cards!

Let them Know you have a Table. Talk about your items and your merch table in your Facebook page, website and most of all…when you’re on the stage. So you won’t sound like you’re begging them to buy, assume that they all went to the concert to have your exclusive merch. Announce it in between songs and tell them you’ll be there on the booth after your performance.

Você Esta Fazendo Estes 9 Erros Durante Os Ensaios?

Are You Making These 9 Band Rehearsal Mistakes?

A ragtag group of musicians doesn’t just become a band because it thought it was a good idea to practice together.

A band becomes a band when they click and play together as a well-oiled machine.

For instance, I’ve played in a band with a few different line-ups.

The core group has always been the “band.” New musicians that audition don’t become a part of the band until they click with us musically. Until we can groove together and play off each other.

That doesn’t happen overnight. And sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. Sometimes you need to get rid of that one band member that doesn’t click, because it’s for the greater good of “the band.”

But the most important places you will ever have is your rehearsal space. The rehearsal space is the place where your unlikely group of musicians you found on Craigslist becomes something more than the sum of their musical parts.

But if you just screw around during rehearsals, you’re not gonna become greater than before. Cherish the time you spend with your band mates while you rehearse. Have fun, but make no mistake, there is work to be done.

If you don’t think you’re progressing as fast as you could be, maybe you’re making some of these mistakes?

1. You Have No Plan

Being business minded and obsessed with efficiency can have its advantages. Think about your rehearsals like a business meeting, except that you can wear what you want, you’ll be playing music and there’s probably empty beers cans on the floor.

So maybe nothing like a business meeting, but it still needs to be efficient. Have a plan of action when you go to practice. This is the underlying mistake that most of the following 6 mistakes will build upon. Without a plan, it’s easy to get wrapped up in stories, not working on challenging song sections or even trying to write new ones.

If you have an hour to practice, schedule 5 minutes for chit-chat, 5 minutes for warmup(just play an easy song you all know to get in the groove.) and then devote the rest to actually rehearsing to get better.

Make a plan of what you’re gonna work on before you waste all that time telling stories about last week’s awesome drinking session/concert.

2. You Don’t Want to Do the Work

Work. It’s a word that has a nasty ring to it.

But just because it’s work can’t mean it’s not fun. It’s very liberating to overcome the challenge of a hard song part, nailing that solo or finding that perfect vocal harmony.

Think of it like work, just way cooler and more artistic. That’s what your job is when you’re in your rehearsal space.

3. You Play the Same Songs Over and Over Again

Sure, it’s good to play your set-list over and over to make it as smooth as possible. However, if your setlist sounds as smooth as possible then it’s pointless to keep rehearsing something that doesn’t need work.

Instead, focus on your underdeveloped songs, your song ideas and melodies that you’ve toyed with at home. It’s much more productive to work on a short idea for 30 minutes and end up with a template for a new song than to play the same 6 songs over again.

You won’t end up with anything new, and you’ll have wasted an entire rehearsal because you’re not challenging yourself.

4. You Don’t Challenge Each Other

This is in a similar vein to #3. It’s OK to be honest with each other about your parts. If your guitar part doesn’t really work for you, then say it. Being in a band is (usually) a collaborative effort.

Unless there’s one head songwriter that also writes all the parts then you should communicate what works and what doesn’t. It’s challenging to try to come up with new parts, and it’s annoying if you’ve worked for long on a part that nobody likes. But if taking some more time to work on an even better part contributes to the greater good of the song, then that’s something you should be willing to do.

The opposite is also true. Sometimes musicians think their part is no good because it’s too simple or they don’t like it for some reason. If it sounds perfect to the rest of the band then it’s their job to encourage the musician to keep doing what he’s doing.

Sometimes simple is best for the song.

5. You Don’t Focus On the Problem Parts

When the bridge of your ballad is the only part of the song that needs work, don’t play the song over and over. That’s simply inefficient.

Focus only on the part of the song that needs work. Otherwise you’ll waste a lot of time going through the motions of what you already know instead of focusing on the actual problem.

It’s like a chef who doesn’t know how to make gravy makes the whole roast turkey again because he keeps screwing up the gravy. It’s simply not productive.

Play that part over and over again until you nail. Then play it a few more times to make it groove. Then you can play the song from start to end.

6. You Don’t Record Your Practices

One of the best things for my band practices wasn’t a new instrument or an effects pedal. It wasthis little portable recorder. By recording all our practices, my band and I were ready to gig within a month of ever starting to play together.

We just recorded all of our practices, I sent the recordings to all of the band members when I got home and we all listened and did our homework before next practice. Everyone could work on their own mistakes on their own time so that when it came time to practice we could work on making the songs groove.

Nobody was struggling with their parts and we could focus on playing like a whole.

Absolutely the best band investment I’ve made.

7. You Don’t Do Your Homework

Of course, recording the whole session is pointless if you’re not going to do anything with it.

It’s supposed to help you with your parts that you can do on your own time. It’s a great way to write solos or practice your backing vocals or harmonies.

But all that stuff is pointless if you don’t do anything outside of practice. And let me tell you, it’s annoying for everyone else if you’re the only one screwing up the songs for next week’s gig.

8. You Don’t Plan for the Next Practice

Just like you need a plan for each practice, planning in advance for the next can be very productive.

Problems are more fresh in your mind so if you jot them down before you leave it can jog your memory the next time you come in. You might forget about fresh song ideas that you just came up with so by planning ahead for next week’s practice is important to keep a good workflow going.

9. You Don’t Love Your Music!

This isn’t really a part of the mistakes per say, but if you don’t love the music you’re making you’re wasting your time.

Sometimes you love the music but the band members are in the way. If the drummer isn’t doing it for you and they are your songs, then find another drummer.

It might sound harsh but would you rather have an awkward conversation and an awesome group of musicians or would you rather dread going to practice each week just to put up with bad drumming and uninspiring music?

I don’t know about you but the former sound an awful lot better.

Conclusion

Some of these tips might be relevant to you, some might not work for your particular situation, but I really hope you gained something from reading this article.

If you’ve recorded your music in your rehearsal space and want to take it to the next level, check out Crowd Audio’s mixing services today. Have your music mixed by dozens of engineers and pay for only the mix you like the most.

Meus Efeitos Sonoros Para Game No Celular (IOS) Video

My Sound Design For Mobile Game IOS

Hi to all! Well, I did this sound design a couple weeks ago for a costumer. 

All sounds are original and were recorded and produced at Power Field Studio 

Watch the video below.

Este Tutorial Disseca Os Sintetizadores Na Música de Stranger Things’

This music tutorial dissects Stranger Things’ synth-heavy score

Fall TV is kicking into high gear soon enough, but until then Stranger Things is more than happy to continue dominating TV headlines (sorry The Get Down). And in the latest bit of Stranger Things-related ephemera: Justin Delay of the music website Reverb breaks down exactly how the show’s synth-heavy soundtrack came to be. Composed by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of the band Survive, the Stranger Things score references everything from John Carpenter films to Tangerine Dream. And Delay explores all those references—and how to replicate them—in nitty-gritty detail in Reverb’s new video. 

Although the 15-minute video is aimed at musicians, anyone can enjoy hearing the Stranger Things score come to life with the help of Delay’s impressive synthesizer collection. For more on the topic, check out Sean O’Neal’s explorationof the score’s musical context. Or just buy the show’s soundtrack, which is currently available digitally and will be released as a CD on September 16.

E-Mail Marketing Para Músicos! Guia!

A Simple Email Marketing Guide for Musicians

Email is dead. Just like rock is dead right?

Wrong.

Email is the #1 way you can reach your fans as a musician. Even if you have a kick-ass website, a behind the scenes Youtube page and a hyperactive Twitter account, your fans probably won’t check those every day.

But do you know what they actually check every single day?

Their emails.

That’s why email isn’t dead. It’s as relevant as ever for telling your fans about new tour dates, videos, songs and anything you think your fans would like.

Sure, it might be old fashioned. But it’s the same type of old-fashioned as classic rock is. Teenagers still listen to Zeppelin, just like you should still reach your fans using email.

How to Set Up an Email Account

You’ll need a 3rd party service like Mailchimp or Aweber. You don’t want to email from your personal account because mass emailing through Gmail simply doesn’t work for a lot of technical and logical reasons that we don’t need to get into here.

Aweber has a really great guide on email marketing for musicians, but their service costs so just go grab the free guide and then sign up for Mailchimp.

Mailchimp is free for the first 2,0000 subscribers so you’ll have plenty of time before you need to shell out some money for maintaining your list of fans. By then, 2,000 subscribers should be able to net you some extra cash via album sales, merchandise or from just coming to your show.

There are other services, but none as easy and fun to use as Mailchimp. I personally use Aweber because of a lot of statistical tools and nerdy stuff like that but you don’t need all that crap for talking to your fans.

How to Get Fans to Sign Up

Even a well known band can get frustrated with a lack of signups. It’s not really about the quality of your music, it’s about the noticeability of your signup box.

We’ve been over the importance of calls to action in recent posts, but I’ll explain it a little more.

If you’re going to focus on email signups, your website has to reflect that. Don’t put your signup box somewhere on the bottom or buried in a bunch of other stuff.

Put it right there in front of your fans’ eyes. Put it above the fold, which means on the part of the website that’s visible immediately before you have to scroll down. It should definitely blend into the design, but it still needs to grab the visitor’s attention.

Focus On Email Addresses

You can design your signup boxes so that your fans need to put in their name and location along with their email. This is great if you want to know more details about them and where they live. It’s always good to know where most of your fans are located since you can structure your tour dates around those locations.

However, the more fields a person has to fill out on a signup boxes, the less likely they are to sign up. So if you’re going for volume I would recommend using just the “email” field. That way you get more people signed up on your list, and if they want to start a dialog with you they will inevitably respond to your emails and start a conversation.

It might look less personal upfront, but it’s better in the long run.

Give a Gift

A popular way of getting people to sign up to email lists has been to offer a free eBook or report on a topic that the reader is interested in.

Marketing blogs give special reports on marketing advice. Photography blogs give photography tips etc.

Your band is definitely different than these blog sites but you can still give your fans an incentive to sign up.

• Free Single - You can give away a free unreleased single that they can’t get anywhere else.
• Free Video - You can give them access to a music video or a live performance.
• Free EP - If you aren’t too worried about selling your music you can give away some of your music. An EP might be a great choice because you’ll give your fans a taste of the EP, giving yourself an opportunity to sell them your album later down the line.

Those are just some examples. You could even give them access to your “private EPK” for signing up that has a little bit of everything: music, videos, bios and pictures.

Asking people to sign up is a tricky thing because many people are overrun with emails from a hundred different websites. But if you offer them something in return, they’re more likely to sign up.

The Importance of Autoresponders

Autoresponders are the emails that you can set up to go out automatically. These are golden in the marketing world, but you can also use them to your advantage while not pissing off your audience.

Use autoresponders to tell your story. If you have a funny story from the studio or a cool way you wrote your hit single then write it down and put it in an email.

Say you set your funny studio story to go out after 3 days and then your songwriting story goes out 3 days after that. Then everyone on your email list gets the same experience, whether they signed up today or two weeks from now. They still get to hear both of those stories because they get the same emails through your autoresponder.

How to Use Broadcasts

Broadcasts are the opposite of autoresponders. They’re emails that you send out manually on a specific day and they go out to everyone who is on the list at that time.

Look at them as being more time sensitive, as opposed to the evergreen content of your autoresponder emails.

Use the for:

• New tour dates
• New shows in town
• New members of the band
• New album being recorded or coming out.

Basically, broadcasts are news about your band. Whenever you have something to say about stuff that’s happening right now and won’t be happening at all times, that’s when you use broadcasts.

How Often Should You Email?

If you set up your autoresponders so that they go out every now and then, your fans will remember you.

Couple that with the occasional broadcasts when you have some extra news and you’ll start developing a following of fans that like your stories and listen to your music.

A monthly broadcast of everything that’s gone on in the last month is also a good idea if you don’t have a ton of great stories to put in your autoresponder series.

What Else?

Well there are a ton of resources out there about email marketing that you can check out.

• Music Industry How To has a good beginner’s guide about email marketing for musicians.
• Know The MusicBiz has 10 email marketing tips for musicians.
• The DIY Musician from CD Baby has a good email marketing guide for musicians as well.

Make no mistake, email marketing is one of the more powerful promotional tools you can have as a musician.

Don’t hesitate to use it. It might just explode your fanbase.

In conclusion, I’ll leave you with the #1 email tip you should follow when emailing your fans:

Quest love É a Novíssima Arma Da PANDORA Contra Apple E Spotify

Quest love is Pandora’s newest weapon against Apple and Spotify

As Pandora gears up to challenge Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal, the internet radio pioneer is going to need all the star power it can get.  With artist relationships, exclusive releases, and music curation becoming competitive weapons in the streaming music war,  Pandora doesn't have much choice. 

It's a good thing Questlove stopped by. The Roots drummer, NYU professor, and tireless party DJ just partnered with Pandora as its first artist ambassador and will soon host a radio show called "Questlove Supreme." 

Whether or not it was obvious when Pandora made a string of expansion-minded acquisitions last year, this type of partnership has become crucial as Apple Music's star-studded executive team has tapped into its extensive industry network (and Apple's cash reserves) to bring on household names from Drake and Elton John, even aiming squarely for Pandora's legacy territory with the launch of its Beats 1 radio station. For its part, Spotify recently hired Troy Carter to head up its artist relations efforts. 

This is a natural move for Pandora, which has been sharpening its focus on artists for some time, aided in no small part by cofounder (and one-time  touring musician) Tim Westergren. The partnership is also well timed: Pandora plans to launch a new Spotify-style, on-demand streaming service before the end of the year. 

CD's Continuam Dominando No Japão, Embora o Streaming Continua Murmurar

Compact Discs Still Dominate in Japan, Though Streaming Continues to Bubble Up

The Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) has released its half-year figures for 2016, and the results are predictable.

Digital revenues -- including streaming, album and track sales, music video and mobile ringtone sales -- totaled $255 million in the first half of the year. In the previous six-month period (the combined third and fourth quarters of 2015) the digital industry had a value of $236.7 million.

Japan has long adored the compact disc -- including 3" and 5" singles, rarely seen stateside -- a predilection partly sustained by the country's strong preference for local repertoire and love of limited, collectible releases. However, the writing is on the wall regarding streaming's ascendence, and Japan will be no exception, though it clearly continues to be an uphill climb for this "new" digital industry.

Indeed: $991 million was spent on CDs so far this year -- the highest-selling format in the country. Just $7.1 million was spent on vinyl. In total, the physical market -- including audio and video sales -- so far this year is said to have generated $1.9 billion in revenue. 

Line Music, a subsidiary of South Korean web giant Naver, was technically the first "full-feature" streaming service in the country. Sony previously had operated its expensive -- $14.50 per month -- Music Unlimited service. Music Unlimited was shut down earlier this year, replaced by the Spotify-powered PlayStation Music in early 2015, which is not available in Japan. Apple Music launched in the country later that year, and Spotify is expected a full rollout relatively soon.