Is it a simple solution? No. Does it have pitfalls (mainly, are their folks out there who won’t ever buy your stuff legally)? Yes. Can it work? Yes. There have been several case studies in music (mostly the “pay what you want” model, as espoused by bands like Radiohead and concept companies like 1band1brand, in which the “what you want” part is occasionally zero but the overpayers/true fans often make up for that) and a couple in film (mostly movies obtaining small release deals from the peer to peer buzz they generated).

Now we have a solid book publishing case study in the new children’s book “Go the F*ck to Sleep“. Instead of rewriting the Fast Company article that gives more detail on the story, I’ll point you to it and let you form your own opinion.

If the creative industries who are feeling their old business models crumble under their feet are seeking a one to one replacement for the old business model, they aren’t going to find it. We are now in a fluid creative content economy based in a la carte sales and peer to peer recommendations, dependent largely on reach.

Am I encouraging people to pirate? Heck no. I’m a big believer in paying the artist who makes what I like. Am I encouraging people who have things to sell to think creatively about price structure and sales tactics and be fluid in getting the message out? I am indeed.

I’d love it if you shared your stories about pirating helping (or hurting) your content and business model in the comments. Only by examining both sides of the peer to peer coin can we develop new ways for people to support themselves with their art.

In the past, you’d have listening parties when you got new albums, or swap mix tapes. Bootleg concert tapes made endless circuits, introducing people to what your music sounded like live and how you interacted with your fans in real time. For a while there were some interesting online renditions of the mix tape, but most of these sites and services met the ax wielded by the short sighted RIAA. More recently, user driven recommendation engines like Blip.fm, Grooveshark, Pandora, Last.fm, Sound Hound and more are coming to the surface. This is all great news for the indie musician out there, but often it comes as a surprise to discover the work it takes to get music listed on or found by these sites. Sites like Blip, while fun, can be especially frustrating for users who have to slog through hundreds of covers of your song to find the original version, and Pandora often frustrates those trying to discover your tunes by directing the listener away from the very music they asked to seed a playlist with.

Musicians (and filmmakers) still flock to MySpace, and television shows such as Glee have found innovative ways to use the MySpace karaoke engine to promote their shows via transmedia and audience participation, but as the perception of MySpace declines, so does your potential fan base. I find this unfortunate – music has always been something MySpace does well, and the player on people’s profiles has always been a fun way to learn what friends were listening to – however, the perception of MySpace as uncool makes it a mixed success for artists.

YouTube and other video channels are now doing some innovative things with music, to be sure, but aren’t doing a lot (yet) to make them discoverable. Unless you take the time and initiative to set up and promote your own channel, there is no great way to sort videos by type of music on many of these video sites. Hopefully, that will change as the need becomes more apparent, especially in light of the new YouTube Vevo live concert series and partnership. The industry still targets these sites as well, though, and many music videos find themselves being taken down eventually, even if they were uploaded with the full consent and knowledge of the musician.

Sometimes it is as a shock to learn that even if you work hard to put your music in the hands of your fans, and are good at it, the “powers that be” will still try to cramp your style, even if you don’t want, need or request their “help”. Witness the case in point of the RIAA and FBI going after sharers of Radiohead’s album In Rainbows – an album the band released under a pay what you can model to fans. Peer to peer is a great way to get your music out there, especially if you know how to leverage your actual files to encourage even pirates to come back and pay, but it becomes a constant battle between fan, RIAA, label and artist, even though it can lead to great ROI. So what does a musician do to avoid all of these potential roadblocks to finding new ears?

1. Be prolific – put your music out there in as many places as you can
2. Link back – use your web site as your hub and make sure every blurb, bio, description, tag and more links back to it and references it in searchable text as well
3. Don’t assume – third party sites rarely have your best interests at heart. They are there for their own ends. Make sure your files and content are hosted on your own web site and fully backed up if you share it elsewhere as well. This will save you endless grief if your data on third party sites gets lost, deleted, censored or otherwise removed or damaged.
4. Be DRM free – encourage sharing, but remember to link back.
5. Have multiple pay points – give fans as many places and as many ways to buy your music and merchandise as you can sustain. Make it easy.
6. Share buttons – make sure all of your blog posts, song uploads and more have easy to find buttons for immediate liking and sharing.
7. Use free tools – those third party web sites may not have your interests at heart, but they do give you great tools to get your music heard. Incorporate these widgets, like buttons and tools to help you reach more people.
8. Paper trail – don’t assume everyone is online 24/7. The concert poster, flyer, and weekly event column are not dead. Make sure you list your web site links and social links somewhere on each piece of print media you generate.
9. Engage – if you can sustain actual engagement online with your fans, that will amplify all of your other efforts to their fullest, even if you can only sustain your real engagement on a limited number of platforms due to time constraints.
10. ROI – ROI is money, folks. If your social strategy isn’t getting you butts in seats at shows, downloads, CD sales, and merch sales – you need to re-evaluate the sites you’ve picked for engagement and more. Remember you are one of thousands of voices online – your ROI tells you if you are doing a good enough job being heard.

You’ve found your instruments, new or second hand or maybe borrowed from a willing friend, and bandmates. You may or may not have found your gear – that can get pretty expensive. You’ve found a relative or friend with a willingness to lend you a basement or garage to practice. You’re probably still trying to figure out a name. Now you need to find a way to be heard.

Granted, no amount of presence, branding and marketing will help you be heard if you suck at music or if you need more practice, but if you are actually semi-good and don’t sound like a group of tone deaf monkeys, knowing some basics can help.

What’s this “flexible branding stuff you are always talking about for music?

You’re young or just started out if you are reading this, most likely. This is probably your first band. Heck, you are probably still arguing over the name! On the one hand, you need to be “branded” (e.g. recognizable to the public) to find gigs. On the other hand, your band name will probably change at least twice in your first year of doing this.

Handle that by setting up personal pages for each of the band members, and brand yourselves individually. Make the frontman the touch point on these sites until you have a name (carefully – this will entail making some of your profiles more public which comes with risk). Then, once the band name is set (eventually) make a page on social sites for the band as well and unlink your personal accounts, redirecting folks there. This will allow you to book gigs even while you are finding your footing.

It may help to make sure each personal page has the band logo and description and the (ever changing) name on them, to let people know they have found the right place to contact you for gigs, or just to tell you how awesome you are!

Sites to help with branding: MySpace, Facebook, iMeem, ReverbNation, OurStage, NuBuMu, SeeJoeRock, YouTube

What happens if one of my bandmates leaves?

This happens, too, in young bands. In this case, if putting a notice on your local community board at school or local cafes and such doesn’t work to find your replacement drummer, try another social site. Both MySpace and Facebook offer marketplace listings for just such and occasion that work like an online classified ad. Don’t overlook Craigslist either – it’s a great place to find bandmates. Again, proceed with caution – not everyone online is full of butterflies, rainbows and good intentions.

We got really good and someone wants to pay us!

Congratulations! You are on your way! Getting paid is a sure sign that you don’t sound like a bunch of tone deaf monkeys (or if you do and are in a death metal band, that you are really awesome at sounding like a bunch of tone deaf monkeys). Getting paid opens up a whole other can of worms. In the beginning go with cash and divvy it up fairly. Keep records – you may need to pay taxes even on cash payments. If you’ve outgrown cash you can grow into a bank account, and attach it to a PayPal account – this will make it easier for folks to pay you online.

Other uses for PayPal and online payments include people buying your merchandise (you will have T-Shirts once you have a band name, I’m sure), any demo CDs or downloadable music you may have, and tickets to shows. If everyone in the band has a PayPal, it’s a fairly simple prospect to divvy up the money regularly.

Wait, merchandise!? I didn’t even think of that. We can’t afford to print shirts!

Never fear, the online world is here to help with this, too. Remember that PayPal account we just talked about? You can use it to take payments from sites like CafePress and Zazzle. The sole purpose of CafePress and Zazzle is to give you a simple, easy, affordable way to make and sell stuff. They use a print on demand method of distribution, which means you don’t have to order hundreds of shirts and pay up front – you design them, you upload designs, you set a price, you link folks to the product on your social sites or web page, and CafePress and the like handle the orders, the delivery of the stuff and the paying of you.

This all seems like a lot to handle. Does it take time?

Yes, it does. The more serious you are about your band and your music the more time you should spend interacting with fans and fellow musicians on your online presences. If it’s just a hobby you hope to make some money at you can dial it down a notch and focus on other things. The nice thing about being in a band is that you can divide the work load among you so it doesn’t take too much time from homework, dating, jobs and other things in real life. Even so, all total you should spend about an hour a day on this part of things – the marketing part – in addition to the practice part and the gig playing part if you want to make this a permanent part of your music life.

Is there more to learn?

Absolutely, but this beginners guide should get even the youngest musician started down the right path. We can talk strategy down the road in installment two of this.

What about printed materials?

As my friend Nate from Big Duck Management will assure you, the days of the poster and postcard and sticker are far from dead. They are just a part of the whole now, though. Even things like photos and videos are easiest to have fans upload online to your social sites first. Then save the best to add to your media kit you’ll be building as you go.

This post was inspired by this question on Twitter today:

The artist can help us be the engine of their discovery by allowing sharing, and better, by proactively ensuring their content is out there to share. I would have never discovered some of my favorite album purchases without a friend sharing a link to a song with a “you must listen to this” note attached, and I am not alone in this. After all, those who find music online are several times more likely to make a purchase.

How can an artist help their music get found? Uploading songs to sites like Blip.FM is a great start, but just slapping a song on Blip or a video on YouTube is only the beginning. Artists need to proactively tag and title their work, from the ID3 tags to the file name, to make them more discoverable. If your ID3 tagging isn’t up to par, what I find when I search for your music to share are a bunch of crappy covers on YouTube or hundreds of junk links to poor quality fan recordings of your music. That’s not what you want for your music brand!

If you are really good, you will learn to embed purchase links into your YouTube videos on your official channels. After all, 91% of those who proactively look for something on YouTube make a purchase related to their search. If you are full of awesome, you’ll learn to be shameless about putting purchase info into your songs themselves. Some musicians use analytics in their file links to track listeners and reach out to them. Some simply end the official song file with a voice over saying to find them on their website, spelling the URL. As a listener, that is fine with me – it gives me a way to find you and pay you for your art. Musicians who have sharable links on their sites increase sales dramatically as well.

If you are a musician or label, what creative ways are you encouraging sharing and turning it into a purchase?

First of all, this isn’t an automated business we’re in. It is true that some clients and their products or goals can lend themselves to some automation (see ReverbNation for musicians, or IndieGoGo for film, for examples). The reality comes into play that even those clients will eventually have to get their hands dirty and get involved with the people who are interested in their social efforts. If you are automated then you aren’t listening, you’re missing opportunities, and you aren’t growing like you could be.

Second, if you are a consultant and you don’t value your product (which is often your self) or your knowledge enough to charge for it, why are you in business? If you aren’t comfortable charging a price and sticking to it, perhaps in the back of your mind you think what you offer has no value, and if you think that – so will your potential clients. Figure out what you know and what it is worth, and charge accordingly. Perhaps this post from Christopher Penn will help you get some pricing perspective.

Finally, as I mentioned yesterday, you can’t go social and introduce all of the shiny new toys and tools and strategies that compliment your business without making sure your business can support the interaction. That where the business development, web site and other aspects of what I offer come in – it goes way beyond social. You will need to make at least a few organizational changes to accommodate customer interest, because you can’t force the customer to interact in only one way any more. You may be there for sales or news updates only, but your customer may throw you a customer service curve ball – you need to be ready. Your web site and other media (print, TV, etc) presences need to be ready to be social too.

What this all means for the customer is an adjustment in thinking about how they do business and what kind of benefits this will have for you and your customer. Interestingly, this post is about only a fraction of what I offer. The social media and business development is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all of the cool things I get to do with clients, it just seems to be where a handful of folks get mentally stuck. What this means for the consultant is that you need to offer something you value, or no one else will value it either and you’ll be on this treadmill of rejection and price cutting until you throw in the towel or price yourself out of business – self doubt isn’t sustainable.

What’s the difference? You hear everything. Everything around you, every conversation, every bit of white noise – it all goes into your ears unfiltered. Half of the things you hear you don’t even notice unless they disappear, such as a sudden blanket of silence being the first thing you notice about a daytime power outage as all appliances and machines stop in unison. To listen, really listen, takes talent. It takes the ability to filter out all of the white noise around you and hone in on what’s important. It takes an ability to retain and filter information, to generate an appropriate response.

The best business people are great listeners. I was talking to a relatively new business person the other day, giving advice and assistance, and I realized what an exercise in futility it was becoming, as I’d had this same conversation with this person every month for the last several. That was a red flag to me that the person should not be their own boss – an inability to listen, absorb and apply information; but it also meant I hadn’t been using my full listening potential in that ongoing conversation either – I’d allowed the hum of a busy schedule to tune out the finer points of global listening, and had missed the cues that would have kept me from wasting more time repeating valuable advice no one was absorbing.

Global listening is a concept that takes listening beyond the ear. Once you master the art of active listening in conversations, being able to put it in practice by absorbing all of the information available to us, filtering it according to your active listening and apply it to your business and relationships, your business will soar (and so will you). Don’t get me wrong – active listening is hard, and global listening is even harder. I know few people who have truly “mastered” either, but there are many who do it well, practice daily and constantly strive to be better.

In the online world where these adaptive media tools are changing and expanding by the minute, and where boundaries are nonexistent, you listen or hear as well. This becomes part of the global listening technique, being able to filter your information fire hose in such a way that it enhances your off line listening. Everyone talks about engagement techniques, and “joining the conversation”, but that is only scratching the surface – the way you listen is, in the end, much more important for your success. Your competitors and clients and colleagues are out there giving away encyclopedias full of information, needs, and more. Be the one who listens.

Treat every day like a symphony, and take time to listen to every part.

Myself (Leslie Poston) of Magnitude Media (formerly Uptown Uncorked), and co-author of “Twitter for Dummies“, @leslie

Ariel Hyatt, Ariel Publicity, “Music Success In Nine Weeks“, @cyberpr

Dick Huey, Toolshed Inc, @dhuman

Tavit (David) Geudelekian, Primary Wave Music Publishing, @tavit

Lou Plaia, Reverb Nation, @reverbnation

I have a few clients who make a living creating sonic brands for commercials, products, moments in movies, events, and more. It fascinates me how music and sound affects us as humans. I mentioned the term sonic branding online the other day, and it sparked a very intriguing discussion about how sound affects the brain. Music has long been known to have ties to memory, emotion, and behavior. Is it any surprise that marketers and others have tapped into that over the years?

Where did the term sonic branding come from? I’m not sure – that’s just what I’ve always called it. It seems to make the most sense. That’s what it is, after all – auditory branding of a moment in time. If you follow Ze Frank‘s premise that branding is the emotional aftertaste left after a shared experience, which I do, this isn’t a great leap of logic.

From Ze Frank’s web series, The Show, August 29, 2006:

If the concept of sound interacting with the brain and all of the possibilities that entails is new to you, you may enjoy some of these books on the topic (disclosure, I use Amazon’s affiliate links to help feed my enormous book addiction):

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination

The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit

There are many more books on the topic, but those will give you a good start. If I missed your favorite, add it in the comments below!

As a consultant, I love seeing the innovative ways the people behind the music we love are using microsharing platforms. It inspires me to see the ongoing and building connections with fans, the innovations in distribution, the advances in sales, the making of successful gigs and forging of collaborations.

These platforms have another effect also: they make music human again, bringing it out from behind a faceless corporate label or radio station. What should musicians be doing on these platforms to get their music heard and do an end run around the status quo?

One to One Sharing: Hand pick fans to send free songs, offer an opt in DM link to a free song each month for your fans and followers, talk to your fans one on one and get to know them – if you are in their city, meet up with them before or after your show. All of these things foster the one to one fan/creative relationship as well as sales.

One to Many Sharing: Use your social platforms and website to give people ways to discover your music. Use all of them! Sure, Twitter is fun, but if you integrate Blip, iMeem (now MySpace Music), and more, you’ll get more bang for your buck with the cross linking and user driven sharing systems they all have. Toss in more obscure things like Twitter lists and you have even more ways to share your sound with the world.

Collaboration: Social media provides an unprecedented arena for collaboration between artists and fans. Take advantage of the mashup culture, and use the ability to reach people you wouldn’t normally be able to reach to create new projects and expand your reach and audience, as well as to make more varied and interesting music.

Booking Gigs: The access that social media platforms give musicians to venues and enthusiastic fans can go a long way toward eliminating the middle man in booking gigs. One of my favorite uses of this is a musician who has been using his social network to book intimate house gigs all over the country, exposing fans to his music in a much more personal way. Another favorite example is the musician using Ustream with other social platforms to generate interest in upcoming gigs locally. Then you have people like Sooz in Boston using her love of music and social media to drive awareness to local bands through an annual event she’s making (Soozapaolooza).

Distribution: The music industry may be crying foul at the way things are changing, but that isn’t going to stop the deluge of fans clamoring to get their music delivered to them in new and unusual ways that free them from the vice-like grip of pale Clear Channel pop and label generated. Musicians on top of the trend with social media platforms for delivery will find themselves ahead of the game. Innovation is the key to success now.

Live Shows: Fans are clamoring for live shows. We already discussed the innovation of having fans host live in home shows via leverage of social media platforms, and of fans hosting live events to showcase their favorite artists. Collaboration with your fans using social media can increase attendance at live shows already on your schedule and help you schedule and broadcast live shows in new and innovative ways on and offline.

These thoughts are just grazing the tip of the iceberg of potential. I’ll be talking in Cannes France at MIDEM about more ways to leverage specific platforms for musicians this month – if you are there, come have a listen!

For me, the musical trailer that leads to a new band, musician, or song is often a shared file sent to me by a friend or client musician. Random nuggets of discovery that lead to musical happiness, vetted by people I trust. For a growing number of people, musical trailers come from sites like Grooveshark, Pandora, Blip.fm, iLike, Last.fm, iMeem (now Myspace music), LaLa, Musicovery, FlyFi and others. Lately, by hooking sites like LaLa and Blip.fm to Twitter accounts, Twitter has become my main source of music discovery.

Hooking whatever account the music lover or band uses for music sharing, even multiple sites, to Twitter creates one stream for music discovery for people in your network. It gives you a way to create a musical trailer stream distributed to multiple fans, that they can then pack and take with them via RSS feed or other services, and that they can share with their networks via lists, hashtags or regular tweets.

If you also hook your discovery and sharing services to other social networks like Facebook and MySpace profiles, you reach an entire extra layer of people. Facebook makes this a bit harder lately. They’ve decided, for example, to ditch the iLike stream (which is unfortunate, it was one of my favorite Facebook apps). But people are finding ways around site restrictions to share the music they love with each other.

Think how you as a musician can up the ante by not only sharing your music and your favorite music to listen to by others using streaming services, but by purposely creating an old school music sampler to act as a coherent musical trailer for your upcoming album. Then release the sample into the wild for free download and make it easy to share. One of my favorite things I see happening on Twitter, specifically, are bands that will randomly send me a link to a free song set (usually two or three songs) via Direct Message a few months before the album comes out – I love that! It’s like unwrapping a present in my DM box.

I’m continually watching for new ways to discover new music to buy, and so many others do the same. Make it easy for us to hear you by changing how you think about your music and the music of others. Emulate the movies a bit, and tease us with trailers – get us excited for your next release. What ways are you using to get fans excited for your new music?