On a shoestring project part 30

  There is so much talk about the state of music business on the net at the moment; it's even making the news. Being a musician it is important to keep up with the new trends, and follow where the business is going. I heard during the week an interesting point about the internet's role in music business in the future. It was compared to Radio. I can some how see the point here. I found my self listening songs posted on Facebook by journalist who is Running a Jukebox show on Facebook. And I've seen lots of other people do this as well. You are doing your work, and on the back you play tunes posted by other people. It is an interesting concept. I also read a statistic that most people prefer to see a video while listening to a song. I suppose it is a natural progression in the times we live in. Everything is Sensory overload. We want our movies, sports and even games in 3D. It's all about stimulating as many of our scenes as possible. Of course I sometimes miss the more simpler times, when I first got my hands on the Guns n' Roses Appetite for destruction LP, and the artwork on the cover and the actual music was enough to take young boys attention for hours and hours. But at the same time, all the new technology has its advantages. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know about the video we made for our band jpkallio.com few weeks back. I will use this as an example here for a second. After the actual recording of the song, we decided to make a video for it. It was Tomeks, the bass player’s brain child. He went out on the streets of Dublin to do some filming first. Then we hung up few white sheets in the wall of our rehearsal room, set up few lights and filmed all of us playing the song. If you would put this in to time frame, we probably spent about 8hours altogether on the filming. Then Tomek spent fare bit more time editing the video. The result was really stylish black and white music video. In its first week we got over 700 views! And this already in my mind is phenomenal. For an unknown band to be able to reach to that many people in one week would have been unheard of 20 years ago. But this can be all very “virtual” and bit hard to grasp. But when bit over week later we played our first concert and I knew for fact that at least 30 people in the audience had heard the song already before we ever played it live, that’s when the power of this new music business format did hit home. So we will be embracing all the tools of this new music business available to us and I would encourage all other bands to do so as well.
  But lets not forget probably the oldest promotion you can do, playing live. How many times have you heard band talking about “making it”? Still today in many musicians minds this involves getting signed to a record label, getting a manager, a booking agent and what ever else. First of all, no record company would have interest in your band unless you have a substantial mailing list; second, if your only goal in music is to get signed to a record company I would encourage you to do some serious reading about the state of the music business! Record companies will only sign you if they know you will sell records, meaning you have existing fans who will buy records, not meaning they put the magical wheels of music business in motion and you will be on fast track to stardom. So I ask you: If you have enough fans/ followers/ people subscribed to your mailing list for a record company to want to sign you, would you not be better producing the record on your own and keeping 100% of the profit, rather than 40% down to anything as ridiculous as 1% of the profit? But one way or another, it comes down to one thing, getting people to sign up to your mailing list/ Facebook page. And still today by far the best thing for this I have found is playing live shows.
  We have implemented an action plan, well... more like a guide line. Every one knows that new bands WILL NOT get paid for gigs. Yeah being a musician is a skill that we worked hard for and it should be appreciated, but before you get ahead of your self, you need to be able to provide value. By this I mean: You need to be able to bring people to your concerts, fill venues night after night! Before you can do this, you do not have value in the eyes of the booking agents, venue promoters, and bar owners. Yeah your music need to be good, but not for the promoter to like it, but for the possible fans to fall in love with it. I mean do you honestly think that the head of Aiken promotions (One of Irelands biggest booking agencies) really is a big Justin Bieber fan? I don't think so! But he knows Justin will fill the O2. So to start of our plan is 100 concerts. First one is done, so 99 to go. The idea here is for the first 100 concerts to just concentrate on:

1. Playing in front of as many people as possible
2. Clock in the hours of playing live as a band
3. Get people to sign up for mailing list and all the social media sites
4. Build a name for the band
5. Have lots of fun :-)

 During these first 100 concerts we are not trying to make money. In fact, as long as we won’t be loosing too much money, we'll be just happy to play. So any venues who would like to get on that 100 list, just let us know ;-)
But is not just a small gimmick, it is something I would recommend for any starting band.

  So the number two in the 100 concert plan will take place in the Captain Americas on Grafton Street on Thursday the 31st of March 10pm. If you were at the last show, you know it is going to be a rocker of a night again :-)
  Oh yeah, and one more thing. As Twitter had its fifth birthday, it would be only fair to share our twitter here.
http://twitter.com/jpkalliomusic