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 […]

Should musicians play a Sofar event? The answer is that they should, if it is rational from an opportunity cost standpoint. For most musicians the answer to that question is probably yes, independent of whatever investment monies Sofar happens to secure. [Note: Investment is neither revenue nor profit]. If your average Sofar musician were to […]

Album Of the Year has a page that they publish every year as a part of their review analytics. AOTY specializes in tabulating numbers for records that have been reviewed by a limited set of outlets, much like Metacritic, except they appear not to use a special weighting rubric to adjust the ratings of various […]

There’s an ongoing push in some music circles to declare that the album is either dead or irrelevant, given the preference in consumers to absorb music by individual tracks versus by albums.  The argument, at least as its been trotted out lately, has been something to the effect of, “well, if the consumer absorbs music […]

The method for doing business as an independent musician has been shifting quite a bit over the past few years.  I’ve been trying very hard to diagnose the problem, and how to figure out a solution for it, but it’s a very complicated issue.  I think I’ve figured out one of the sources of problems, […]

A number of years ago, a fellow songwriter friend of mine who I deeply respect told me that one of my songs was bad. Actually, he was more specific than that, he said the lyrics felt forced and that I was trying too hard with the lyrics. He was very nice about it, and in […]

You may know of the northeast megalopolis as the socio-geographical designation of over 50 million inhabitants on the eastern seaboard, which includes the cities of (at least) Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C. I’ve always been fascinated with the possibility of setting up a more formalized musician pipeline between the cities – […]

Let me start out by stating an obvious truth. You do not need a publicist or publicity or marketing in order to be a legitimate musician or artist. There are plenty of musicians that pay for publicity that the world would be better with them not doing so. There are also plenty of musicians whose […]

A common complaint from musicians in the modern era is that people asking for music services too often seek to pay musicians in exposure in lieu of actual money. Musicians usually react to such offers by pointing out that exposures aren’t a form of literal currency, and so, for instance, exposure can’t be used to […]