On a shoestring project part 32

This week I'll do this other way around. First of all, jpkallio.com will be taking part in the King kong club in the Village on Wexford street on Monday the 11th of April. To get an idea what’s going on, on the night, this is in the words of the organizers:

"Dublin's Biggest and best, Live Musical Gameshow!
The one band that gets the most claps at the end of the night goes on to the next level for the big prizes. Judged By our Fabulous Replica of The Empire State Building.... CLAP O METRE!
Prizes include festival slots at Vantatastival, KnockanStockan, Life Festival, N.P.L.D festival, Temple House Festival, Support The Hot Sprockets at there album Launch.
It is free entrance and free for bands to enter...
Beer 3 and 4 euro..
Each band is also video recorded and put onto our YouTube space; (check it out when you get the chance, to get a feel of the night...)
Each band is interviewed and recorded live for our Radio Show on RTE 2 XM."

So we need all you in there to support us :-)

Also big thank you to every one who came in last Thursday to Captain Americas - It was a great night :-) And we have some photos and Video up here again. I also started to document our 100 concert challenge on its own page. I am sure it will be almost impossible to get video and photos from all of the 100 concerts, but we will do our best :-)

That’s the updates for this week, and now to the meat and veg. As you know I have been talking a bit about the band promotion. I actually think radio is going through changes as much as the most of the music business. I personally was never a big fan of radio. I was always very picky about my music, and mainstream radio very rarely had any music that would get me exited. But I do understand the importance of it and lots of my friends regularly listen to radio (Tomek is a fan of Radio nova here in Dublin). To get to any radios play list is very tough for independent artists. And you can feel like throwing money down the drain by sending CDs to radio station and not even knowing if any one opens the envelope... And here is few points I would like to make. If you record, produce reliance and promote your own CD, then you basically are an independent record label. And small labels relay need to keep their spending to minimum. So I would not just send CD to a random Radio stations, let alone 100 of them. If you want to go after some radio play, research the radio shows that might play your music. Make sure your music would suit their play list, again no Reggae to Death metal stations, and vice verse. Then it is time to make contact. Drop an Email, polite one; no one likes a smart ass, or a big ego. I have dealt with lot of people in radio over the years and my personal experience is this: Most people in radio are music fans, they might not like your music, but some one will. And yeah, in big commercial station money talks, record companies and radio stations have relationship and for a reason. Radio makes its money from advertising, and they only can sell add slots if they have the listeners. And it is no brainer to figure out that what's on top of the charts got there for a reason, because people bought the tracks. So yeah, as annoying as it might seem, it all comes down to business. But I do believe that small indie or internet radio station that actually likes your music is worth a lot more, than your track played once in any of the main stations. So dig deep, look for specialised radio shows that suits your music.

The next thing to look at is all the different types of internet radio. They can go from online pod cast to sites like last.fm. I would recommend checking out Jango, It is a payed service but you get some free plays when you first join. Also there are lots of companies offering to distribute your music to stations for a fee. To me this comes down to control. If the company offer a “world wide” service, how do you really know what got played? I have opted for a service, that I will test drive for the next 3 months. Of course I am hoping to get radio play for us, but also to review the service. So as you know, there are lots of companies looking for your hard earned money, so let’s see if we can make sense of them as well. I'll let you know all the details of this service and how it works in the following weeks.

I have mentioned in the past about the importance of an email list. On our last concert we had a simple A4 signup form, and this proved to be very successful. Try it out :-)

And one more thing. After the success of our first video, we would like to make a new one. We are bit short on ideas at the moment, so we would like to hear from you what you think it should be like. Here is the song , so get scripting, or just even small ideas, we'd love to hear them all:-)

Everybody dies by jpkallio.com

Talk to you more next week.
J.P.

On a shoestring project part 31

Share

I've had a good look around in the past six months of the music scene in Dublin. I looked in to venues and promoters who put up shows for independent and up and coming bands, I looked in to local bands, what they do, how they promote them selves, where they play, how often they play... And I have found out few things that might need attention, and I will try to do my best to help this situation.
  First of all, we all know there are few cool venues around the town, where you can get a gig with an indie band. But I would like to see a list of venues and band nights online where any band could go and try their luck. But of course this is not as simple as just set it up and every one is happy. First of all, if I would post every venues promoters contact details, I think they would be ready to lynch me after a month of mail boxes full of not so great music... Second thing is that this list should be informative as well, there is no point trying to push your reggae band in to a heavy metal club. And if you just want a venue list, that’s what the Hot Press yearbook, is for. So what I will try to do is going to take me a long time and probably lots of help from musicians and music fans. As you know jpkallio.com started a 100 concert challenge, where to build up following, mailing list and social network lists. With in this challenge we will perform in quite few venues. So as we go along, I started a page on the blog where I will post the venues we played, and with the venue promoters permission I will share their contact information and some details of the venue and what kind of music they are looking for. I will work out the details of this page in the next few weeks, but the start up is already up. One-way or another it will be a free list, but again I do worry that the list will be abused by musicians who just waist promoters time... So be nice people:-) I also want to get a bit of a conversation going, where other bands and artists can share their experience of the venues and submit other venues. So first of all, let me know what you think of this idea, and also if you have any venue suggestions for the list you can send them to jpkallio@hotmail.com, or the comment section on the Indie Venue List page, that way they are there for every one to see.
  Second, I was very surprised how few up and coming bands have website! For the love of all good in the world, this is not that hard to do! There are loads of services on the net where you can get a template for a website, and I would be very surprised if you did not know any one in your friends who knows a bit of HTML. I started from the bottom... I think it was an Web design for Dummies, or something like that, about 12 years ago. But being a musician, I know it is sometimes hard to manage your time, and it feels like another over whelming task. I would like to make a web design guide for musicians, but to me right now that just seems more than I can take on. But maybe in the near future. Do you think this would be useful? And would you use it? For now, try it your self, there are endless amount resources online. If this fails, try to find some one who is willing to do it for you just for fun. Remember, it does not need to be the best website in the world. I believe that just an ok website is still million times better than no website. If you can't find any one, then try contacting some colleges and see if they can put you in contact with some students who might want to do this just to build their portfolio. The next step up from here would be getting a professional to do this, but be careful with your hard earned cash, shop around wisely. If all else fails, contact me. I am a musician, not a web designer, but I have done quite few sites so far and for a small fee I can get your website up and running.
On top of the website you need to have presence on as may social media sites and music sites as possible. I talked about compiling a list on them way back in one of the earlier blogs. But for now on our websites link list there is a links to our social media sites. Not all, but the ones that seem to be working for us. So just click on the link and sign up your own band up, and when you do, make us your friends :-) I will be tweaking this list almost weekly so keep an eye on www.jpkallio.com/links.html
  And hey, don't forget about our next concert! 31st of March in the Captain Americas on Grafton Street. The show starts at 10 with a support band and we'll be on right after them. This will be number two in our 100 concert challenge. I will leave you this week with a new video from our first concert :-) This is a song called “News” Back for more next week.

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

On a shoestring project part 29

  St Patrick's day is here once again and I have full busy week with Sliotar. But me, Sebastian and Tomek are still buzzing after last weeks concert. First of all Thank you to every one who came in, it was a great success, and we could not have asked for a better concert. The Pint truly is a nice venue. The Stage is just perfect size with the room, and the sound system is great, especially for loud rock bands like us:-) The whole night was filled with great music. The night was kicked of by Evil Veto, whose Rock metal set the mood for the night. Next was our turn.

It can be a nerve recking thing, months of practice compressed in to a twenty minute set. And you get only one chance at it. You know the songs inside out, but still it comes down to something more than that. For us, the moment took over, we threw our bodies and minds in to the music and it payed off:-) In Tomeks own words “After 6 years of 'silence'I feel like I'm really coming back “.

We played five song intense set that got the whole rooms attention. We got off stage drowned in sweat, full of adrenalin and hungry for more! So now the plans for the next concert are in full swing. Our set was followed by the 24 Broken Amps, another rocker. It was their first concert in 6 months, but tight as you could ever wish for.The Echoes were more of a pop rock band and they brought in their own fans. Time is a thief from Cork finished the night with a stormer of a set. Good night was had by all:-). This really is a nice concert. And I can recommend for any band looking to showcase some songs to get in contact with Billy at liveandunsigneddublin@gmail.com. Also check out their Myspace at www.myspace.com/liveandunsigneddublin
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot;-) We have some video from the night!



  Now to the promotion. When you do play a concert, the point of it is to expand your fan base and get your bands name out there, right? I know some of you just want to play music, but if you want it to go somewhere, you need to look at the bigger picture. And before the concert I had an idea. It is good to have flyers with your bands website and other social media links. But flyer do get lost really easy. So we made stickers (100% recycled material) with our bands name on them:-) And we stuck them on all of our friends clothes, so when they go home, they still have the sticker with your web address with them:-) Also other people came to ask for them.
  I'd like to share with you another link. If you are in to promoting your band, you should look up Bob Baker, check out his website at: http://Bob-Baker.com and http://TheBuzzFactor.com
This man really is on top of his game when it comes to the marketing in todays music business. This might just be one of the better links I will share with you, go check it out.
  And also bit of self promotion;-) I know i mentioned our website on almost every blog, so this time its our Facebook page. Go and like our page at http://www.facebook.com/jpkalliomusic
Have a great Paddy's week and I'll be back for more next week:-)