Home Recording & Social Media Tips for Musicians
Author Tony
This is my blog portion of the free beta Community, Indietrak, that will when launched combine home music recording and Internet social media marketing tips and a networking community of musicians helping musicians.
At the Community tab above you can create a profile page, make friends, chat, get involved in discussion forums, and you will soon be able to upload your music, videos & photos, have your own blog, create groups, post events and classifieds, network with other musicians, and much more.
Feel free to add comments or questions to any posts that interest you. If you’d like to be a guest columnist to share your knowledge or experiences, let me know at the Contact page (mouseover the About tab).
How Many Here Want to Get a Record Deal or to “Get Signed”?
Author Tony
My question to you is, “Why on earth would you want that?”
As someone who spent decades in the old and dying music business, I can attest to the soul-destroying horrors that most artists experience there. Only a tiny percentage of those signed actually make any money and they subsidize the thousands who only end up owing the record company money and selling their souls in the process.
If the record company spends a couple of million dollars recording and promoting you and you only get paid a few percent of record sales royalties, how many records do you think you have to sell before you see a dime? With less and less people buying CDs these days, it’s a lot! And when was the last time you saw a record store?
But the worst thing as far as I am concerned is that so often corporate committees who only care about money decide what you should record, who you should work with, how you should look etc. In other words, you’re forced to violate your integrity as an artist daily. No fun!
How is the music business dying? Well record industry veterans are getting laid off left and right and CD sales continue to drop. And most music industry people are at a loss when it comes to knowing how to use the Internet to properly promote a band.
A friend of mine had 5 number one records in England and made a total of $5,000. When he left his label and promoted his album on the Internet he sold 4,000 copies (which would have made him zero if he’d sold that few with a record label), but he pocketed $60,000 from those 4,000 sales by being his own label.
The Top 4 Mistakes Most Musicians Make Online
Author Tony
1) MAILING LIST MISUSE
Sending emails to their mailing list only or mainly when they want to sell something or get people to a gig or other event.
Here's the bottom line on this - and I can't stress this enough - your email list is your most valuable asset. It's long been observed that the size of your mailing list and the number of mailings to it majorly determines your income.
What too many don't know is that in the current marketplace the nurturing of the list is now the key factor that realizes that income. And that doing 1) above badly misuses and dramatically weakens the potential value of that list.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Social Media | 
Tags: keyword+research, secrets, SEO, social+media+musicians, Twitter | 
20 Comments »
9 Ways to Check the SEO Strength of Your Competition
Author Tony
In the last article I showed you how to do keyword research and how to find how many sites are competing with you for those keywords. This article will cover ways to check the SEO strength of your competition.
What this means is that for any particular keyword, the top 10 sites in the search engine result pages will have varying degrees of competitive strength and very often by analyzing them against the SEO parameters that I will cover, you can get a good idea of whether you could take their place in the top 10 or not.
It is always smart to have enough data to wisely pick your battles. That way you can avoid wasting a huge amount of time fighting the wrong ones (as many do) and trying to compete for keywords that simply have no chance of getting you traffic.
So, what are the main competitive strength factors and how can you find out which ones a competing site is strong or weak in?
Read the rest of this entry »Keyword Research For Free?
Author Tony
In the last article I explained why finding your correct keywords was so important to your success when using the Internet for promotion.
If you've ever looked into getting some SEO done you may have been startled by how much it can cost.
But what if you could do a lot of it yourself for free? Well, you actually can.
In this article I'm going to show you how to do keyword research yourself using a very useful free tool that you can use online.
Read the rest of this entry »Why is Search Engine Optimization so important?
Author Tony
Many people don't realize this but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the key thing that underpins all successful Internet Marketing campaigns. In fact, one of the biggest factors that determine whether you succeed or fail with an online marketing campaign is the keywords you target (see my "The 2 Biggest SEO Mistakes that Musicians Make" blog article for information on how this often gets messed up).
Why is this? Well, the basis of any Internet Marketing campaign is to get more traffic to your web site so that you can then build your emailing list, which is itself a major key to converting your fanbase to happily buying customers of your music and merchandise, and having the correct keywords can give you a very major advantage in this.
Many people don't realize that keywords should be used not only at your web site but in your blog posts, your on-line articles, videos, links from other sites and yes, even your tweets and Facebook posts, as well as anywhere you appear on-line.
On top of that, many musicians make the mistake of building their web site first and then end up having to rebuild it after they've done their keyword research because they didn't realize how important the content layout and keyword placement is.
Read the rest of this entry »The 2 Biggest SEO Mistakes that Musicians Make
Author Tony
- Image by Coneee via Flickr
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves discovering the key search terms (keywords) that people actually enter into search engines when looking for your kind of music. Many musicians figure out likely keywords but then completely miss the vital step of analyzing those keywords in terms of the competition.
Comping, Schmomping, I Don’t Need No Stinking Comping!
Author Tony
There are many ways to record vocals but there are two major ways, each of which have their proponents.
1) is to record the vocal track(s) and then go back and have the snger punch in to try and fix any areas where the pitch or the feeling or the timing is off.
2) called comping, is to have the singer record half a dozen takes, one after the other, and then listen to each track and choose the great sections from each track and combine them into the final composited master vocal track.
There are pluses and minuses to both approaches:
With 1) it can be hard on the singer because he/she has to have more attention on getting it perfect plus when punching in it’s sometimes hard to get a good continuity of feeling.
With 2) there’s more work involved with comping, especially for the producer and engineer but usually a more relaxed (in a good way) vocal with more continuity of feeling.
I personally often like the comping approach but different producers, singers and engineers have varying views on this. What about you – which do you prefer?
Posted in Recording | Tags: comping, engineer, home+recording, music+recording, producer, singer, vocalist | 3 Comments »
Mastering Tips – What is Mastering and Why Should I Care?
Author Tony
Mastering is the combined science and art of taking a finished mix and tweaking it in ways that can range from adding a professional polish to really taking the mix to a whole new level. Sometimes the before and afters can be quite dramatic and what you thought sounded great before can tend to now seem somewhat flat and lifeless.
As Paul White from Sound on Sound magazine put it, "What many people don't realize is just how great a difference is made to commercial records at the mastering stage. Prior to mastering, you might be surprised at just how ordinary some mixes sound. "
The main mastering tools are compression, EQ and limiting and because of this there is something that you need to be very aware of when mastering and that is that these tools will raise the overall apparent volume of the mix and this alone can make the mix suddenly "sound better". It is important to be able to switch effects in and out in such a way that you don't get fooled by this artificial improvement caused just by raising the volume.
Read the rest of this entry »Posted in Recording | Tags: Audio, Compressor, EQ, equalizer, Exciter, mastering, Mastering+Tips, Mixing, music+recording, record+production, Sound | 4 Comments »
Free Virtual Drum Kit!
Author Tony
Virtual Drums is a free Virtual Drum Kit that you can download and play with your mouse either by itself or while listening to music. You can even do drum fills and rolls by using both mouse buttons. It’s fun 
While you’re here, click the Community tab at the top of the page and get a sneak peek at the free beta community of musicians helping musicians where you can now create a profile page, make friends, upload your music, videos & photos, have your own blog, create groups, chat, create and be involved in discussion forums, post events and classifieds, network with other musicians, and much more!
You can download Virtual Drums PC version here and the Mac version here. Enjoy your new kit!
Live Social Media Counter
Author Tony
This is an interesting constantly-updating tool showing what’s going on in social media in real time:
