Realise The Change in Marketing.
I have already written a bit about the role played by publishers in the success of indie artists in my blog “Publishing Indie Music”. Earning a living out of your art is what every artist wants but is very difficult to achieve, especially in today’s world, when the generation only wants to stream or get pirated copies. It is becoming increasingly difficult to earn a name and make ends meet through record sales. In order to sustain financially, it has become important for indie artists to find alternate means to generate revenue, rather than just making music. Publishers will acquire the rights to your song and creatively exploit it in order to make money for you and themselves.
While the means and procedures of music production may have evolved in the past half century, indie artists are still left with a need to connect with the world. In other words, we need marketing.
Most of us are willing to pay if we get results, but unfortunately, due to the growing number of indie bands and artists budding up every day, all record labels want to do is to make quick money out of them, with little or no visible benefits to the indie artists. Just as there are all kinds of budding indie artists, so are there all kinds of PR firms. Their fee ranges from $50 a week to $3000 a month. One is left wondering and confused if there is a difference in their services and quality of their work and if it would be of any benefit to hire them.
Marketing has always been a puzzle for indie artists. Regardless of all the advances in the online tools available to us, we are still advised to invest in PR. While we often consider making our lives easier and getting a PR firm to do all the marketing work for us, there are two problems here. One, we do not have enough money to hire them. Two, we do not trust them to be of any substantial benefit. So we stick to what we know: social networking and live shows.
Having seen and read about so many success stories of artists that never contacted PR firms and just became famous through social media, it makes indie artists even more suspicious about the importance of the role of marketing. It feels like whatever is good will sell, no matter what. You want to throw your music online and just see the response. This makes the life of marketing firms even more difficult. They have to prove their worth in order to get money.
It’s interesting to know here that the marketing firm’s job is not to sell good music. Their job is to just ‘sell’. How they do it is their bread and butter. For example, you take a piece of musical crap to them. They know there already exists better music and more to be released soon. Yet, they will not reject your work. They are going to put their head into finding the best way to sell your ‘crap’, without trying to decide if it will be successful or not.
Be The Change
We can transform this worldview by making new connections between advertisers and artists. I’d like to see advertisers get to connect with artists instead of labels. I’d want to pay a percentage of my earning to someone/anyone who makes an undeniable effort to ensure my work is noticed and appreciated.
This change is not too difficult to make: a lot of successful and business-minded individuals get into the business side of art. These individuals should become associated with artists and work exclusively with a band for a specific project and ensure that their work is advertised well and noticed. The band will have complete faith in these individuals because they are a part of the band during the phase of that particular association. The associated marketing person will get a cut of the earnings of the band. Sounds like a win-win for both, doesn’t it? We’re only all mentally caught in an out-dated worldview of how the relationship artists and advertisers should work.
Today an indie artist knows about recording and production, they simply require the marketing part of the business. So why doesn’t such association exist? Where are the marketing groups that work with a band for a cut of earnings, as opposed to an upright fee?
Since the production part of making music has turned out to be mostly DIY business, why aren’t there marketing individuals available to associate with a band? Never again are we printing a huge number of CDs. No more does recording an album mean spending months in the studio. The industry needs to evolve, in order to make it easier for indie artists to grow.
Encourage some new connections, and be freed of the gatekeeper worldview. Nothing is preventing you from making your music and making it accessible everywhere throughout the world.
