One of the big difficulties with building a music career is learning the difference between marketing to acquaintances and marketing to perfect strangers. Many musicians perform a great number of live shows in their respective hometowns and manage to get a good crowd of friends and acquaintances out to an event, but simultaneously see little […]

As I’ve used it before, the phenomenon of monetization of word of mouth refers to the practice whereby Facebook and other social media downgrade artistic media posts, forcing the artist to pay for advertisement in order get exposure for their work. The name “monetization of word of mouth” refers to the fact that Facebook literally […]

The featured image to this post is actually a screenshot from the application to SXSW. I may write a bit about the pathways to SXSW another time, it’s a bit of a shit show. But for the time being I wanted to put the questions out there as a focal point for thinking about performing. […]

There’s this phenomenon where people who hear their voice on the answering machine for the first time react with violent disgust. Or when you see your face in a picture where it’s been horizontally reversed from how you would ordinarily see it in the mirror. These are just two examples of a more general phenomenon […]

I’ve been hearing complaints from bands over the last year that the quality of press coverage has been just plain awful. Not that blogs are giving harsher or more negative reviews of their music – but that the coverage is oftentimes riddled with spelling errors, or simply repeats information contained in the artist’s press materials. […]

So you are nearing a fully mixed and mastered EP or LP and want to work out the release. What does a typical timeline for release look like? Many musicians rush the process without proper planning and ultimately it results in a release that gets no exposure. To properly work a roll out of a […]

When listeners and reviewers take in a new piece of music, there are a variety of unconscious standards relating to the general sound and production that inform their opinions of the music within the first few seconds of listening. I’ll refer to these standards as “commercial standards”. If you put music out for commercial consumption […]

Even in the indie music and folk music industries, it is still very common for people to do their recording work in a studio, oftentimes with producers and additional musicians. The costs of doing so can be very prohibitive, though some recording studios are certainly more budget friendly than others. Recording at home, however, can […]

I released a single last year, which is something I don’t usually do. I had a leftover song about holiday melancholy that I had sitting around and decided to officially release it. It bumped up my Spotify hits for about a month (the month leading up to Christmas) and as it turns out, it was […]