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Archive for the 'future of music' Category
We often write about the importance of musicians having to engage and involve casual listeners in order to build deep and lasting connections with them, and to convert them to loyal fans. These connections are what drive sales of the concert tickets, band merchandise and music artists need to pay the rent and put gas in the van.
While just getting your music discovered is no longer enough, it is extremely important that you get as many people to hear your music as possible. Obviously. The more people that hear your music, the more potential fans you have to convert into loyal fans. And while not every person who hears your music will like it (sorry), it’s a numbers game and maximizing exposure is critical in order to succeed.
Enter Jango Airplay. Jango Airplay gives you access to millions of active music fans that listen to their favorite artists on Jango.com, a vibrant social music service that lets fans create and share custom radio stations. Your music is guaranteed to play right alongside the artists that you choose in Jango’s custom radio stations, from Jay Z to Arcade Fire to Bella Fleck. Jango Airplay plays your music to their fans, who are likely to dig it. Based on what we’ve heard from many artists, this is a very cheap and effective way for you to get your music heard!
Jango is offering Evolving Music readers a special deal, where you can set up a Jango Airplay account (if you don’t already have one) and receive 100 guaranteed spins on Jango.com for FREE. Then, you can choose how much more you want to be played (packages start at as little as $10 for 250 plays) and where with basic geo-targeting. You’ll also get detailed actionable reports and data about your new fan base so that you can find out who likes you, where they live, how old they are and what other types of music they like. You got nothing to lose, so give this a try! Click here to get started.
So you are a musician. That’s awesome. But competition is stiff and you need to make a living. Aside from live performance, music, and merch sales, there are many ways to make a living by composing or providing your tracks for film and video. And fortunately, these types of opportunities for getting paid as a musician and composer for film/video have increased astronomically over the past 10 years with the rise of, you guessed it, the internet and technology.
As a working composer and sound designer, I have managed to build a viable and growing career doing what I love, which is making music and playing with sounds. I have only been able to do so by expanding my search for composition opportunities into artistic realms never before thought of as viable to composition work. All sorts of people are now making video and require music for their videos, expanding the need for original music.
The advantage of the internet and the role it plays in increasing our exposure as artists is obvious and there is no need to belabor the point. Most of us communicate daily with folks all over the world whether it be for collaboration, paying gigs, or as friends and family. However, the advent of technology and its impact on opportunities for musicians begs a bit more analysis. Not only can musicians and composers create better and faster, but because of access to affordable technology, other types of media artists can more easily make video as well. This includes photographers, photobook creators and curators, and authors, who now actively create video to promote and showcase their work. Fortunately for us musicians, these videos need sound and music, and as a result, photographers, curators, and writers are now valid artists with which to seek opportunity.
One example of a photographer and videographer creatively using original music is Genevieve Russell of Story Portrait Media. As part of her work, Russell creates videos which incorporate dialog, photography, and music for photographers to showcase their work and present themselves. One such example is the showcase video for Norah Levine found here. Clearly, photographers, who never had need for music in the past, are now viable candidates to seek out and contact for music composition gigs.
A second example of the use of original music is a fantastically fresh new media called “flipthroughs,” being created by the Indie Photobook Library, founded by photography writer and photobook curator Larissa Leclair. This flipthrough video is a superb example of a new media mash which needs music. It features the photobook “Desert Days” by photographer Matt Austin and shows a close up of a person flipping through the photos in the book with an accompanying track by the artist A(a)rdvark/Jeff Austin. The killer track adds emotion and artistry to the act of viewing a photobook, which previously would have been a silent process. Who would have thought? A photobook curator makes a video of a photobook with original music to create a cutting-edge fresh mashup of media which best of all, requires music.
Another group who is now searching for music are book authors. The concept of a “book trailer” is a new phenomenon and many authors are either creating book trailers themselves, or are hiring professionals to do so. Regardless of how it gets done, though, these book trailers need music. There are tons of articles and blogs online that give advice on how to create a book trailer and all of them mention adding music, whether original or royalty free, as part of the process. Obviously, now, authors are a target for opportunity.
You might be wondering how you would go about finding artists who actively seek music for their work? While this could be an entirely other post, it is safe to say that “traditional” methods work. Join photography and book writer forums, post on blogs related to the subject, answers questions related to the subject on yahoo answers, search for videographers who make videos for photographers and email them directly. Yes it can be boring and take time and effort, but being active in your search to find opportunities for your music bears results. This world is ripe for music, a sonic apple waiting to be plucked.
Other types of artists/associations that now require music for projects:
- Podcasters
- Audio Book publishers
- Churches
- Poets
- YouTube videographers
About the Author
This is a guest post by Adam A. Johnson, a music composer and sound designer who owns and operates Architect of Sound, a music company that provides custom music scoring and sound design for Film/TV/New Media projects both in the U.S. and abroad with clients in Canada, Ireland, Haiti, Egypt, and Dubai. Credits include LEGO, the United Nations, Aquafina-Pepsico, the National Endowment for the Arts, US Customs, Exxon, NYC Mayor Bloomberg and more. He also owns and operates the SFXsource.com Sound Effects and Royalty Free Music Library.
Remember when the tables turned and MySpace went from being the coolest social networking site around to a shady place for scantily-clad teens in questionable photos and, well… musicians? Despite the seizure-inducing animated gifs and glittering madness that came with the pimp-your-profile craze, MySpace somehow still maintained its role as THE place for musicians. Your band maybe had its own website if, you know, it was all fancy and stuff. But your band definitely had a MySpace page!
Then Facebook came along and soothed us with its minimalist design and all its tangible real-world benefits, and rocked our collective worlds. And yet, the musician was always left to fend for him or herself.
Enter Root Music. Musicians now FINALLY have a home on Facebook. This clever little San Francisco-based startup has created a way for musicians to share their stuff right from within Facebook. The BandPage is a tab just like your photos, info, or wall tabs. While they browse your page, fans can listen to your music from the embedded SoundCloud player. Want to place a banner on your page? Easy! Just upload the picture you want to use. No need to create a custom one. Every section of the BandPage is easily editable. Just drop, drag, and customize as you wish.
What you end up with is a sexy place within your Facebook profile, which you already use and people are already looking at, to share all your stuff (info, photos, shows, twitter feed and much much more) with your fans. In the place where they are already hanging out! It’s an elegant solution to an obvious problem, and Root Music has done it with aplomb. Once you setup your Root Music Bandpage on Facebook, be sure to set it as the default landing page so that it’s the first thing fans see!
With every passing SanFran Music Tech summit, the speaker list and the sponsor list look more and more like red carpet roll calls, and the schedule includes increasingly poignant panel topics. At past conferences, despite the rampant enthusiasm of attendees, there seemed to be an overhanging tone of uncertainty about the music industry. It was as if everyone was walking around being excited about all these crazy new technologies and possibilities and yet couldn’t quite relax because nobody really knew what direction things were going in. It seems like this may be starting to shift. Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post points out that things could be worse.
As the possibilities of the future of music begin to emerge, one hot topic is the future of musical instruments. Roger Linn, Max Mathews, Ge Wang, John Chowning and Dave Wessel gave a fascinating demo of just what some of those possibilities might look like. Mashable asked what people thought about this. The comments are revealing in that they are a good example of some pretty strong sentiment on both sides of the argument (technology + instruments = good or bad?) .
TechDirt recognized one of the overarching themes of this summit to be the increasing irrelevance of the major record labels, with one clear indicator being that the room emptied out after the popular Ben Folds panel and no one really seemed to care about the next panel which was a “discussion between a guy at Warner Music Group and someone at Cisco about the “direct to fan” artist websites that Warner Music has set up using Cisco’s Eos platform.” They go on to point out one audience question during the “Music and Money” panel, which summed up the whole thing: “If the major labels are such a pain to work with, why work with them at all?”
In response to heightened consumer frustration, Live Nation‘s Noah Maffit told attendees, during the “Live and Online” panel, that Ticketmaster service fees must come down. Ticketmaster’s technology doesn’t warrant the hegemony it possesses over the ticket market, and the company — bought by LiveNation in 2009 — is on a mission to update it, according to David Downs of the East Bay Express. It’ll be interesting to see how they evolve moving forward, especially with fresh, young competition like Ticketfly at their heels.
Stephen Fortner of Keyboard Magazine summed up the summit well: “…it’s grown from a locals-only networking hang largely focused on social networks as they related to music delivery, to a fertile marketplace of ideas covering all aspects of the music business in the digital age-from instruments and production to marketing and distribution.”
Follow the real-time conversation about SF MusicTech on Collecta:
For more on the previous 5 summits:
SF MusicTech Summit 1: Rockstars, Lawyers, Nerds and Me
SF MusicTech Summit 2: Guestlist Wish, Artist Activism, and Label Survival
SF MusicTech Summit 3: Albums Die, Social Media Kicks Ass, Songs Find a Home
SF MusicTech Summit 4: Singalongs, Video Interviews, and Twitter Gossip
SF MusicTech Summit 5: Google Music, API Aficionados, and Pandorable Cars
