What would happen if you played your next show at an unusual location instead of a regular club?
If you you’re looking for gigs, instead of booking any gig at a club and trying to bring a lot of people to the club, why not choose a “weird” location and let the choice of location create word of mouth?
Do it once and people will notice. Make it a habit and people will talk about you.
Be remarkable. Stand out.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Imagine your band was a service like a restaurant. What could you do to make your service, your restaurant, your band, stand out from all the other services, be remarkale and offer your customers the experience of a lifetie?
A restaurant coud dress up their staff, teach their staff to be extremely friendly, serve food and ask the customer to pay what they think it was worth. Or imagine a phone service that doesn’t put you on hold for minutes but answers your call right away.
What could your band do to deliver a great remarkable experience to your fans?
Be different, stand out, offer something so extraordinaire it will create a buzz.
Create word of mouth.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
People really don’t need entertainment at all. What people really need is shelter, food, housing, safety and maybe love. So why do we musicians think that our fans, or anyone else for that matter, needs our music? They don’t.
But there seems to be something even more powerful than need. Want.
People don’t need a lot of things. Still, people buy tons of stuff. People buy things they want, not things they need.
Jerry Seinfeld says about himself “I have so many cars, I get stuck in my own traffic jam”. He surely doesn’t need all those cars (I think most people don’t need a car) but he wants the cars. Since he can afford them, he buys them. People buy things they want even when they can’t afford them.
People want to be entertained, they don’t need to be entertained. They want to buy music, but they surely don’t need to.
So, if you want people to buy your music, think about that they don’t need your music. You have to make them want it.
The best way to make people want our music is to play emotionally charging live shows. If we manage to charge our audiences emotionally at our show, they will experience something great, maybe they will even experience change of some kind. Once that happens they will want to experience that feeling again because that’s how our brain works. If it feels great, we want to feel it again and again. And since people can’t see our live shows every time tey want to experience that feeling again, they do what? They buy the CD on their way out.
People don’t need your music, so make them want it.
Play remarkable live shows.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
When I decided to study music at the Conservatory of Amsterdam I had just played upright bass for a little under a year. Back then it was still the Hilversum Conservatorium, which fused with the Sweelinck Conservatorium of Amsterdam in 1997. It was, and still is, considered to be the best conservatory for Jazz in Europe.
I was pretty serious about playing electric bass at the time. I played a huge amount of gigs with various bands in Germany. On the upright bass, though, I was a beginner.
So, when I made the decision to study abroad, I knew I had to prepare myself for the audition in a very efficient way or I won’t stand a chance competing with all the bassists from around the world who also auditioned for the limited number of slots to study there.
Music theory wasn’t a problem. I was confident I would not have trouble mastering their requirements. Same for ear training.
But I was nervous about the upright bass. So here’s what I did.
Mainly I focused on two aspects:
1. Improving my skills on the bass.
2. Preparing for the psychological situation of the audition.
Besides getting the requirements from the school for the auditon about 6 months before the audition, picking material to play, ask a friend to come with me to the audition and play with me there (which gave me support and did some calm to my nerves), arranging the songs for duo (guitar and bass), practicing with my friend, playing many gigs where we could perform these arrangements, taking lessons from some of the most prestigious jazz pplayers in Europe, I did this:
I went to a nearby park to do all of my bass practicing under the open sky. There was no chance I would let myself get interrupted or distracted. No phones, TV, Stereo, (social networks and the internet were still in the future). Just me, my bass and some trees for audience.
Pschologially I opted to treat the audition like a concert. My friend and I had played the arrangements on many gigs, we knew our stuff. We got to Amsterdam 3 days before the audition (didn’t play at all diring those days!) and just took in the city and it’s great artistic atmosphere.
When the day of the audition came, we went out to Hilversum, to play just another gig. With the routine and calm neres of a professional duo.
I moved to Amsterdam 6 months later, studied and lived there for 4 great years.
The essential part of it all is that I practiced without distractions. I shut out the noise completely. Plus I practiced the audition situation in my mind and with my teachers over and over again, until I had no more particle in me that was unfamiliar with the situation when it occurred.
Practice your skills and prepare yourself for the experience.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
As a musician we all have to market ourselves. I argue that everything we do is marketing. Our live shows, websites, social media activity, even the way we answer the phone, treat our fans in newsletters etc.
Most of the time we focus on how to present ourselves to just one market, while I say it is nescessary to think about marketing on several levels.
In addition to our fans we have to present ourselves to music industry professionals, clubowners, fellow musicians and bandmembers, teachers, students, school officials (if you’re in college or working at a school), journalists and other media people and all the different groups of people we encounter as musicians.
Each of these groups are different markets, people we would like to reach. Or, even better, people we’d like to tell our story to and whom we’d like to believe and spread that story.
So, firtsly we will have to find the story. Our story. How that works is another article alltogether. (Story here means: What experience do you want people to have when they encounter you? More than your words, people will remember the feeling they got when they met you, saw your show, talked to you on the phone. Make that feeling a remarkable one and they will come back for more. The experience they have when they hear your story IS the story!)
The million dollar question is, how do we tell that story to the many diverse markets we move in as musicians? Because, while it is essential that the story is consistant and authentic, the story has to be framed differently according to the different markets. Each market has a different worldview and the story has to framed to fit that worldview. I’m not saying that we have to tell people what they want to hear, but in order for them to understand what we’re talking about, we have to fit our story into a form they can grasp and understand.
Label owners talk, think, move and even dress differently than clubowners, musicians or people working in TV. Each of them even have their own lingo. In order for them to understand and believe your story you have to tell it in their individual language or they won’t be able to hear you. It’s not that they don’t want to listen to you (as many musicians think). It’s your responsibility to make it possible for them to hear and understand what you’re saying.
So, the question for us all to answer is:
In other words: Get into the heads of the various markets, learn to see the world from their standpoint. Then, and only then, learn to tell them your story in their words.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Many musicians suffer from stage fright. It’s common and it’s not dangerously affecting their performance. Exept that it is, because once you walk out on stage, into the recording studio or the audition room it’s a whole different ballgame than it was when you were at home or in your practice room.
While knowing your stuff helps, it’s not enough to deliver a top notch remarkable performance, recording session or audition. (Same if you have to give a speech or if you present your music to label executives, bookers and managers by the way.)
I’d argue that 99% of all musicians focus on the material they have to perform and don’t spend any time and thought at all on the aspect of the performance itself. Exept, of course, that they grow extremely nervous the closer they get to the gig. Auditions are the number one self esteem killer, followed by recording sessions followed by live performances. I’ve seen people throw up before auditions, shiver uncontrollably during recording sessions and literally pee their pants before important gigs.
The reason for this in all the cases I’ve seen was one and the same. Musicians didn’t prepare themselves for the performance. They focused entirely on the material they have to perform and spent no time practicing the situation of the performance.
At live gigs, about 75-80% of the audience’s perception of the concert is visual. Even auditions the visual appearance of the performer plus their non verbal communication is more important than one would imagine. In recording sessions, of course, the material matters most, because it is repeatable instantly and one can hear all the little details of the performance. But even in the studio you get a better chance on performing at your best if you rehears the situation beforehand.
I’d say that for any performance situation you have to prepare both your musical skills plus your performance skills.
This means practicing things like entering/exiting the stage (esp. for auditions), what happens between songs, how do I address the audience verbally, visually and non verbally, how do I communicate with my audience from the stage, how do I move, where on stage do I deliver which song, and much more…
The key is, though, you really have to rehearse these things like you rehearse your music.
If you have an audition, ask your partner/friends/family/peers to function as the jury and play through the scenario with them. For recording sessions, set up a little imaginary music studio and rehearse the situation. For live gigs, set up the rehearsal space like a stage and practice the show (in addition to the songs) with the band.
Video Tape Yourself
The focus here has to be on the things you do when you don’t nescessarily play. The things that happen in between. What will it be like to enter a room with a jury sitting there observing every move you make? What’s it like to have a producer, engineer and some other hang arounds in a recording studio watching you as you prepare for the recording and set up your gear? What is it like when you play a show for a live audience?
Video tape your behaviour in performance situations as often as possible. Analyse the videos and try to top your best performances.
It’s not only about the music. Any live performance is to a huge part about the presentation of the performance. Video will show you the real you. Something you can work with and improve.
Practice that and watch stage fright crawl up in a corner and vanish. Start delivering remarkable performances (the world wants you to!) and win that audition.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Someone tells me they want to start a label. First thing I ask is “why?”
They want to challenge the satus quo and offer different and better services to bands than the usual label. Ok, good.
While the ideas they put forth, though, are excellent, the way they want to do things internally are not different from any other organisation. They are looking to organize themselves the same way labels have done it for years. Ways that we now know don’t work out anymore.
The reason for this is, they want to engage in partnerships with other music industry professionals and they are afraid these people won’t be interested in any new methods of doing business.
Well, my only respons there is: If you really want to make changes you need to both find the right people who embrace those changes, and pick fights with those who don’t.
Compromising your ideas out of fear of not fitting in will kill your ideas alltogether.
No matter if you want to start a label, band, create a show, write a song etc. Have an opinion and speak up.
Pick a fight.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }