Growing Changes in Indie Music.
We are all here to make a career in the music industry and earn our living from music. However, growing competition in the indie music industry has made it difficult for indie artists and bands to earn an easy living.
As I have written in my blog How to Become a Better Indie Artist, getting a publisher for your work helps indie artists and indie bands. Producers charge exorbitantly, true, get them still. They will make sure you are connected to someone who knows more than you about making records. It is always good to know the experts. You get to learn by absorbing all the knowledge and become better at art. While publishers are very helpful in getting your work noticed, technically what they do is buy the rights of your music to sell it in the market and make money for both you and themselves. Today, market is full of pirated CDs and it is a task to sell original work to increase your sale and revenue. Thus, survival is becoming increasingly difficult for indie artists and indie bands, especially if they want to depend only on income from sale of their music. In this situation, they opt for another source of income to earn a living.
Marketing is very important for the success of your music and indie artists are still struggling to cope up with that and find easier ways to connect with the world, despite the fact that production procedures have improved a lot in the past 50 years. Indie artists are mostly willing to pay for marketing and advertising if they are assured that this will give a boost to their sales. However, the fact cannot be denied that it is difficult for new artists to think about hiring managers and publishers, so mostly, the only plausible option left for them is to get online and work the DIY way in the initial few years. Therefore, I say, and those of you who have read my blog Raising money for Your Indie Music, will know, how important it is to create music that is marketable to the general public, because if you don’t have something that interests the listeners on a basic level, it doesn’t matter how good your development process goes. Not everything that appeals to an artist appeals to general public. So learn, and make sure you have something really amazing and original.
From my interviews and experience, I have learnt that record labels care more about making money for themselves. While it is easy for a successful artist to let this happen without concern, because they already have huge profits coming in, it does not give much benefit to indie bands and artists even after having paid for their services; simply because the inflow of money is not enough to enable them to give a cut off to others.
Because artists are generally not business minded people, they have a lot of problems in deciding which company to approach to get the best combination of benefits and results. Just like there are artists of different genres, there are also firms of different kinds. Their charges start from $50 a week and go up to, or more than $750 a week. There are also various tools available on the internet which help indie bands to reach their target customers, yet an artist is required to keep a budget aside for PR. While these tools are readily available, it is important to have your own website. If you have no idea about creating and maintaining a website, there are companies like Hyper Effects that can help you connect with your target audience efficiently. Hyper Effects is one stop for your website, marketing and cyber development requirements. It helps you to create a website to display your talent or sell your indie music or indie art. Their websites are easy to navigate.
While there is not much we can do to change the situation for indie artists and indie bands in present time, it would be good to consciously plan a change in trends of the industry with indie artists going to advertisers instead of contacting labels. We can try to find advertisers and rely on them to get customers for us. No revolution in history has been easy and this is not going to be easy either.
Please leave your comments. They are my inspiration.
