So, another year comes to an end – and, for us, the first year of our blog and our efforts to spread a little of our hard earned wisdom and expertise in the music business.
We feel that we started well when we launched in March but tailed off in the last four months -but we do have the excuse that we’re still managing 5 songwriters and producers (all of whom have had a very successful 2009) and we also launched an entirely new business that we have mentioned here before – manufacturing and selling the best football gift ever – that’s ‘soccer’ for our US readers.
So, time became very short and this site and the musician’s educational and training business that we are working to build have ended up taking a back seat. To be fair, we didn’t realise quite how successful the football toy would quickly become and how much of the time of all of us in the office would end up being consumed by entirely new jobs in which we had no prior experience – manufacturing in China, warehousing and logistics, customer service and more.
Strangely, the experience, whilst time consuming, has taught us some new skills that we will be using in the music business – particularly the direct marketing and internet marketing stuff. Its also become a ‘hit’ by virtue of both being really good (if we say so ourselves) but also because we applied some of our Web 2.0 marketing ideas to the launch of the product – although not as many as we should have and not as many as we are always exhorting you to do!
So, before I finish with the excuses, here’s another one. The No.1 Fan business is still going to take up a great deal of our time in 2010 – there’s this little thing called the World Cup coming up and the demand for an England version of our toy is immense. So, our best laid plans for ”Make It In Music’ could still go awry, but we hope that we have thought this through sufficiently to be able to cope with all three roles that we now have to fill.
BTW, the reason why we ended up with another business to run that has nothing to do with the music business is a long story for another day, but it’s indicative of how you need to overcome the problem of too little time when you’re working a day job and trying to make it as an artist as well. We looked at that a little bit in this post about needing to make your music career a full-time job. We know how it feels!
As for how we came to be making a singing, dancing football toy – we’ll tell you another day!
So, we’ve spent a good part of December looking at this site and thinking through our plans for what we want to achieve for us and for you.
We were already doing this, but then I read Ariel Hyatt’s post about setting goals and thought that it merited me putting our plan and goals on the site.
So, without going into tedious detail, we’re planning to:
a) overhaul the site and give it a refresh in the design department. Expect that to be in place sometime in February; and
b) post valuable actionable information to help you further your music career a minimum of once a week. We’d love this to be three times a week but the schedule will be entirely down to other demands on our time; and
c) introduce video training wherever possible both on the site and in our products; and
d) build out the content of the site to include the best musician’s resources on the web, both written and filmed by us, but also outward links to third parties whose content we admire and respect – you’ll know who a lot of those we like already are; and
e) we’re going to be applying everything that we teach to two of our own clients in their embracing of direct-to-fan techniques for their albums due in 2010 (and we’ll keep you up to date with our own experiences of what’s working and what’s not); and
f) launch a whole range of in depth training products that will distill our experience and expertise into step-by-step training that you can follow to tackle specific parts of the process of furthering your music career. A key prodcuct available from this site will be groundbreaking training designed to take you from ‘know-nothing’ dreamer with no material (and possibly not a lot of talent), to ‘know-it-all’ self-promoting artist with commercially viable and critically acclaimed material, bound either for direct-to-fan success or the sometimes still pursued record deal.
That’s a big undertaking but we have the plans to make it a reality. Amanda is a long way into her eBook on how best to use Facebook to promote your music – which will be an essential tool for all. (We still think a MySpace profile is a necessity – Amanda talked about why MySpace is still relevant in this post back in March, but although users depart daily, ‘the industry’ still likes to go and check out that profile for every new band).
I’m writing our Twitter methods down, and am doing the same for YouTube, and we plan to do another piece of training that ties all four sites together and deals with the other web presences you need to have and how best to use them to promote your music.
However, we have felt for sometime that our expertise is about more than handing out training on how to promote your music in the Web 2.0 world – our training is and will be class-leading on those topics, but our knowledge goes far wider and deeper. There are people who espouse that online promotion of your music is the be all and end all of how to make it in music today. And some of their training is fantastic. But they are missing a lot of very important things out that our years of frontline success in the music business makes us uniquely placed to divulge.
After all, we spend a lot of time telling you that you and your material need to be great before you spend ages promoting it – no-one wants to listen to music that isn’t good enough, no matter how much you try and stuff it down their throats.
So, we’re going to be looking at that aspect of your career development as much as possible and our cornerstone product will be training that teaches you everything you need to know to succeed as an artist. Whether you do or not will be down to how much effort you put in and how much of our training you take on board. I’m not saying that you’ll be able to make it if you haven’t got enough talent – but if you haven’t, we’ll tell you how to make the most of what talent you do have and how to find those with talent to spare to help you (and them) on their way to the top.
I’m really excited about 2010 and what we can achieve for this site, the business that I want to build and, ultimately and more importantly, for your career and life as a successful artist in the music business.
What we both need is the much-touted fireworks. No better time to plan for your own than when watching the last ones of the year set off at whatever celebration you’re at today. Just remember that when the clock strikes 12, there’s another year of challenges and goals ahead.
So, Happy New Year and let’s work together to make 2010 the year that you achieve everything you always wanted to in music.