The start of a new decade is a good time to start setting a concrete plan for yourself as a musician.  I think a lot of people have a general idea that they want to be “successful” as a musician, but from there things get a little bit hazy.  For many musicians, the plan oftentimes […]

Consequence of Sound has a useful Album Release calendar that they put together, which gives people a heads up as to what releases are coming up and when.  Their release calendar can be found HERE.  If you’re a music journalist, it’s useful, because it allows you to plan ahead in terms of knowing what releases […]

I was talking with a friend about songwriting credits the other day, probably an outgrowth of the Lizzo trademark controversy, and have been thinking about the term “singer-songwriter” – a phrase that I use for myself, and one which many people in the Big City Folk community use for themselves as well.  It’s funny because […]

In the last Localist article (link), I suggested asking friends how it was that they got into listening to a new artist. As a result of this, a few Big City Folk musicians went out and asked their friends how they found out about new music. I provide a broad general ranking based on an […]

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. […]