Advise from Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails

If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed / established:
* Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish? If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake) - your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from major labels. Good luck with that one.
If you're forging your own path, read on.
* Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.
To clarify:
Parter with a TopSpin or similar or build your own website, but what you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters... whatever.
Don't have a TopSpin as a partner? Use Amazon for your transactions and fulfillment. [www.amazon.com]
Use TuneCore to get your music everywhere. [www.tunecore.com]
Have a realistic idea of what you can expect to make from these and budget your recording appropriately.
The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So... have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process (plus build your database).
The Beastie Boys' site offers everything you could possibly want in the formats you would want it in - available right from them, right now. The prices they are charging are more than you should be charging - they are established and you are not. Think this through.
The database you are amassing should not be abused, but used to inform people that are interested in what you do when you have something going on - like a few shows, or a tour, or a new record, or a webcast, etc.
Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace - it's dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don't autoplay). Constantly update your site with content - pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any - Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.
If you don't know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don't get it - find someone who does to do this for you. If you are waiting around for the phone to ring or that A & R guy to show up at your gig - good luck, you're going to be waiting a while.
Hope this helps, and I'll scour responses for intelligent comments I can respond to.
TR

via forum.nin.com

This post by Trent was viral a year ago and I just want to share this again since it really rings true to today's times whether in the music business or in your own career.

The general message is clear: the world is changing and we should adapt. There is no point in staying put because the wave is coming (or has already come) and you have to ride the wave.

Starting out on a new role? 'Make your bones' first.

Every time you take on a new role, building credibility is incredibly important. I don’t think you do it by being smarter than everybody else or knowing more necessarily than everybody else. I think you do it by rolling up your sleeves, by showing commitment, by proving that you’re willing to learn, by asking for help.
All those things earn you credibility, especially if the people who work for you feel like you’re not going to sit back and take credit for what they do, and if they get a sense that you’re going to support them, help them grow.

via nytimes.com

Pardon the Godfather terminology, I could not help it. But the movie does have a lot of leadership lessons in it.

Anyway, I'd just like to share this bit of wisdom by Dawn Lepore, CEO of drugstore.com. You may think that in order to succeed while being the new guy, you need to impress the old-timers with your brainpower and outsmart everyone. Think again. That is almost always a sure way to alienate yourself from your organization.

If you are still new, start out clean, slow but sure. Get a good mentor or coach who can show you around and help you learn the trade. Be the good guy who asks a lot of questions like a child does and always, always be a team player.

The 'deadly' social media debacle

A NYT article talks about how social media, Facebook in particular, can go about dealing with the inevitable - the death of its members. It turns out, they've already figured out a way:

“The way to make this work in cases where machines can’t make decisions is to tap into the members,” he said, pointing to Facebook’s buttons that allow users to flag material they find inappropriate. “One way to automate the ‘Is he dead’ problem is to have a place where people can report it.”

That’s just what Facebook does. To memorialize a profile, a family member or friend must fill out a form on the site and provide proof of the death, like a link to an obituary or news article, which a staff member at Facebook will then review.

via nytimes.com

OMG. I cannot begin to think the many ways this can turn ugly. In fact, reading through the article, there was already one high-profile instance this has happened.

A friend of Simon Thulbourn, a software engineer living in Germany, found an obituary that mentioned someone with a similar name and submitted it to Facebook last October as evidence that Mr. Thulbourn was dead. He was soon locked out of his own page.

“When I first ‘died,’ I went looking around Facebook’s help pages, but alas, they don’t seem to have a ‘I’m not really dead, could I have my account back please?’ section, so I opted for filling in every form on their Web site,” Mr. Thulbourn said by e-mail.

When that didn’t work, Mr. Thulbourn created a Web page and posted about it on Twitter until news of the mix-up began to spread on technology blogs and the company took notice. He received an apology from Facebook and got his account back.

While it sucks to be dead, it is definitely 'suckier' to be presumed dead when you still have some breaths in your lungs.

How do you keep a LeBron from jumping ship?

If you are managing a team, a company, an organization and asking that question, you are missing the point. We have been living the free agent lifestyle for about a decade now where people come and then go to the nearest greener pasture. Gone are the days where employees will stick it out with their organization for 25 years. Deal with it.

Of course, making sure that your team is paid well, equipped with the right tools and knowledge to do their tasks and given some flexibility to do the things they love to do - while these things make people stay, we already know that and I'm not going to talk about those. What we need to do is to accept the fact that people jump ships at a faster rate now. At this day and age, everyone agrees that it is safer to be on the move or at least ready to move.

The real question that managers or leaders of teams should be asking is, "How do I make sure my ship will not hit an iceberg if the captain decides to abandon the crew?" Here are a few practical recommendations:

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. We all know this yet we always succumb to developing that lone potential and making him into a superstar. Some leaders have their own reasons for doing so, consciously or otherwise: "I see myself in him," "There's just not a lot of good ones out there." Yada, yada. Look, you are taking a risk, and not a good one at that, if you are behaving like this. Develop a succession plan where you have a number of back up people who can perform critical functions and keep things going if your main men are not there, temporarily or permanently. Like basketball, a team is no good if it does not have a strong bench.
Keep your doors open for new people. Everyday. Even though your headcount is already filled, make sure you are always on the lookout for fresh talent and that you always have resumes "in the pipeline." You never know when someone is just going to pack up and go to timbuktu. Also, meeting new people everyday gives a strong message to your employee-base: Work your ass off, and more. Otherwise, you'll find your desk with a new guy sitting behind it.
Don't make/keep discussions about attrition a taboo. The problem sometimes is that people don't talk about it to the right people and because of that they don't get too see all the perspectives when deciding to pack up and leave. In most companies that I know of, employees don't talk about their intentions of leaving not until the last minute. Keep your communication lines open to your team members so they they can openly talk to you when they are thinking about leaving. That way, you are given the opportunity to give your thoughts and, if it's the sensical choice, save them from abandoning ship. When they do talk to you about it, be sincere when having that discussion. Help him make the right decision even if the decision eventually would be for him to leave.

Old-timers are not going to like this statement - Attrition is OK. Really, it is. Just as long as you can manage it. And by manage, you are making sure that the attrition does not put a hole in your staffing for too long, it does not open the flood gates of more attrition and you are using this opportunity to introduce new and thicker blood in your talent pool.

rakstarppip.com

Blag!

Advise from Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails

Starting out on a new role? 'Make your bones' first.

The 'deadly' social media debacle

How do you keep a LeBron from jumping ship?