Independent Rockstar… hmmm… cool site.

Looks like I have some reading to do.

http://independentrockstar.com/

An interview with Amanda Palmer

I found a really great article of a DIY artist.  It’s a quick read and is very inspirational.  Here’s the link: http://emusician.com/interviews/profile/amanda_palmer/

I love this one quote: “For musicians, engineers, and producers alike, one piece of advice I can give is, “Don’t act like a serious professional. We all know you’re just a dude sitting behind a computer.” So the more human and conversational a tone you can take, the more people will actually trust what you say. If you have a business tone, it’s a real turn-off. What you need to do is just talk to people in real language that is truthful and understandable.”

I hope you’ll enjoy reading it too.

Free Guide – 10 Licensing Tips

Need help getting your music ready for film and TV? This free download is available at Disc Makers. Here’s the direct link: http://www.discmakers.com/request/Special_LicensingTips.asp

Five Mistakes Songwriters Make Before Demoing Their Songs (and how to avoid them) | Songwriter101 – Articles | BMI.com

Five Mistakes Songwriters Make Before Demoing Their Songs (and how to avoid them) | Songwriter101 – Articles | BMI.com.

Copyrighting your work – Do you need more than one copyright?

First here is a very basic description of copyright. Copyright law is in the constitution the same way the right to free speech is. It’s not just one of the statutes. It gives the creator of the work a monopoly for a limited amount of time to control that work and make money off it and license it for others to use.

The minute you write a song, poem, lyrics (even if it’s just on a napkin) you own the copyright on it. The law is there to help you protect your work once you’ve written it down. That’s why you do need to register your work with the US Copyright Office.

Let’s say you wrote that poem down on a napkin at a coffee house.  You walk out forgetting it on the table and some miss thang walks up and says to herself “Hey this poem would be great for my new song!” She in turn uses your poem as lyrics to her song. The song takes off and she starts banking on it. Without having that poem registered with the Copyright Office, you’re gonna have a hell of a time trying to get a piece of the action (not unless she turns out to be a nice miss thang and acknowledges you as the writer of the poem).

But now let’s say that you’re pretty smart and realizing that you forgot the napkin at the coffee shop, you write it down again and send it off to the Copyright Office as soon as you get home. Miss thang still steals the napkin and starts banking off her new song, but this time she’s messin’ with a registered piece. As soon as you notice that your poem is being used without your consent or license, then you are entitled to statutory damages.  You’ve registered your poem so now you can prove that the person using your poem is infringing on your work. There’s a statute that says that if you’ve violated copyright then you have to pay a certain amount (sometimes a big amount!). She’s gonna owe you this time.

If you have about 10 songs on your new CD, it will only cost $35 (online) or $50 (hardcopy) to send your songs to the US Copyright office and register your album or work. You can even do it online now and they’ve made it pretty user friendly and easy to do. If you get lost, you can always read the instructions. They’ve laid it all out there for ya in pretty common sense English. http://www.copyright.gov/

Now… that said, there are usually two copyrights you’ll want to do, one is for the songwriter, the other is for the recording. The one that is for the songwriter is called the Musical Composition. The Sound Recording is the final recorded product that you and your band slaved and worked and paid a lot of money for. It’s the one that’s going to get played on the radio etc.

Here’s an example… Take the song “Monkey Man” by Toots and the Maytals.  The song was originally recorded by Toots in the 60′s, but was recorded again by The Specials.  They needed to have a license from Toots to use his Musical Composition of “Monkey Man” and they also needed to send off their version to get the copyright for their Sound Recording of the song. So in this situation you do need to have two copyrights, one for the Musical Composition and the other for the Sound Recording.

If you are only a songwriter and just need the copyright for the Musical Composition you can just do that part. Again you can do it online by sending in a recording you did on your Zoom H4n Handy Recorder or you can send in the written hardcopy with the music composition and lyrics.

I hope this helps! Please leave any questions as a comment!

Your music on the radio, or rather… why it’s not

It’s no secret, the internet is changing the landscape for radio.  Radio has become very corporate and no matter where you are, you turn on that radio and you hear the same songs.  The local flavor of radio is becoming more and more bland. Why is this happening?

In 1996 there was a law passed called the Telecommunications Act.  What happened when this act passed was that there were caps lifted so that anyone could purchase as many radio stations as they wanted to across the nation.  But there was a local ownership cap lifted too, so that one owner could own up to eight radio stations in a certain market. This act created a big rush to buy up stations. So where before you would have one owner for 8 radio stations nationwide, that same owner can now have up to 1,200 stations! You might recognize Clear Channel as one of them, as they are the largest station owner in the country.

Basically, these companies that bought up all the radio stations now have control of over 60% of the revenue and about 60% of the audience.

So what comes with corporate take overs? Well, what usually comes with corporate take overs, people get fired.  They started getting rid of the local programming, program directors, and replacing them with syndicated programing and regional directors.  Instead of having a live DJ at the station, he could be voice tracking in another state and all you’re hearing is just a recording. This made it even more difficult for local musicians (as if it wasn’t difficult enough already) to get their song to a program director, let alone any airplay!

It makes the radio less about the music and more about making money.

But there is competition. Community or non-profit radio being one of the competitors, college radio as well. And of course web based stations like Last.fm (yeah that’s a link to my music on their site… ha!) and Pandora. It seems as though these guys are the new taste makers in this new radio world. They realize that not everybody is listening to the radio as much (must be the blandness) so they’ve become really smart with their web interfacing. More stations are making so many of their programs available for web-casting, promoting shows that are web-casts only, and of course (and probably the most important) supporting local musicians by giving them airplay and interviews. And because a lot of these shows are web-casted, when you hear a song that you like you can easily look and see who the artist is, and where you can buy their music… whether that be on iTunes or at your local record shop.

What you can do is stick to sending your music to people who will at least give you a quick listen, and that’s community radio, non-profit radio, college radio, as well as uploading  your music to various websites like Last.fm, Pandora, iTunes etc. One great place you can go for help with uploading your tunes to the different websites is CD Baby. If you sign up with them, they have all the scoop on how to promote your music using as many source streams as possible.

I hope this helps!!!