The music business has transformed right before our eyes and the internet has created a level playing field for all stakeholders and artists to skip all middle men and go directly to consumers. However this means that we now have competition like none we have seen before. The big labels still take a large percentage of the market accounting for about 80% of industry revenue but still you now have various means with which you can build a self-sustained career in music. We interviewed experts in the music field from booking agents to distribution and management for their own advice to the independent artist and these are some of the things they have to say: <blockquote>”Every artist needs a strong team around them. Just because an artist is independent, it doesn’t mean they have to do it all by themselves. Look for people who you can trust, who understand the vision, and most importantly, who can do the job! You can work with your family and friends as long as they are accountable for the responsibilities given. Having a solid team going into any situation, especially when signing with a major, is a huge leverage, because you’ve already built that safety net, that foundation for yourself.”</blockquote> —<em>Julie Rene Tran, Founder of </em><strong><em>All the Best Media</em></strong> <strong>Define your own success.</strong> A lot of independent artist fall into the wrong notion of trying to compete with all the label artist who have a lot more resources and machinery behind them. You don’t have to do this. In reality they are two separate playing fields and the most important thing you can do for yourself is to set your own success goals. Do not set the bar based on someone who is on another playing field. Just focus on what you are doing and celebrate your own achievements and scale up appropriately. <strong>Don’t rush your releases.</strong> You need to have a structured plan on how you are releasing your singles. Don’t rush into releasing it all at once with the hope that one of them will become a hit. There is so much competition online for ranking and placement and it is vital that you have a structured and detailed plan going forward. Study the internet game and see what people are doing to get higher ranking and try to see how you can model your online activity to mirror theirs in ways that suit you. <strong>Don’t rush into signing a deal.</strong> It can be very tempting to jump on any deal that is eventually placed in front of you after spending so much time, energy and resources to get to where you are. But it is vitally important that you carefully analyze every deal placed in front of you and see if it is the best thing for you in the long run. You must understand your value to be able to adequately make an informed decision. It will be in your best interest to seek advice from your lawyers, older veterans in the music business and trusted confidants.

Unless you have the machinery of the music label behind you, you must learn how to self-promote your own content and this is perhaps one of the most crucial skills to be had. As is often the case, you don’t have enough money to hire PR people to help run your media campaigns and it is entirely up to you to get the people to know your music. It can be a lot to get started but with a few steps and tips, you can start on the right foot and get good results. Identify your goals: When you aim to self-promote your own content, you must clearly identify achievable goals and try not to do everything all at once. Observe the way the bigger artist are promoted and you see that they have specific campaigns targeted at specific things. Promote one thing like a single, a show or a website. Once you are clear on what to promote, you will be better placed to set clear goals for yourself. If you want to promote your website, the goal is to get more traffic. With this in mind you can create strategies that will fit into that goal and get you results. Target the Right Audience: With your promotional aims and objectives at the back of your mind, you must figure out the best audience for your campaign. If you have something important coming up, look at the best channel to use to reach the specific audience you have in mind. Sometimes it is better to use local print publications, sometimes a mailing list will suffice. There are many channels you can exploit and whichever you choose should depend on the audience you want to reach. Identify your niche: In the world of today where there is a constant bombardment of content from every side, you need a reason to stand out in the minds of your audience. They need to identify you foe something so specific that they only want to get it from you. Try to find something that makes you stand out from the multitude of people all looking for audiences. Give your listeners and consumers a reason to want more of the same from you. Branding: Make sure you have a brand that people can easily identify you with. Design your stickers, badges, posters and flyers and include your brand name, pass them out to your favorite people and clubs and leave them on shop counters etc. let people identify you for something and know what you stand for. For a lot of people, the concept of self-promoting their own music to their fans is easy to grapple with but the idea of calling press conferences and similar evens can be terrifying. The truth is some of the people you reach out to will be accommodating and others won’t. Some people will return your calls and emails, others won’t. This is a part of the grind and hustle so you must embrace it.

A lot of artist grow up with a fairy tale notion of the music business. You tend to think it’s all about playing shows and being the next big thing on everyone’s radar and eventually getting a pass into the inner circle of stardom and fame. A lot of young artist spend their late teens and early twenties playing in tiny shows in near empty rooms. Most of them upload their music onto the music platform sound cloud with the hopes of being discovered. Most artist have not really thought about how they can exploit the world of streaming as their major source of revenue until their circumstances changes. You see today even the biggest acts making a lot of money from streaming alone and Indy artists should be able to take a share of this cake. At some point Spotify paid very little for every stream and so many artist are too engaged in various other activities to even properly look at the metrics on streaming. To the surprise of many, months after uploading their content, they begin to see some royalties trickling in. this adds up to a substantial sum if your music played well on the platform. Streaming should be one of the largest streams of income for a lot of Indy artists if they learn to exploit it properly. Services such as Spotify are not the enemy, they are the allies you should work closely with. Understandably enough, artist should be paid a lot more for their craft, but you need to play the numbers game and work with what you get and hope that your fan base continues to build up. If you got a penny for every stream and you run into a couple hundred thousand streams that really adds up into something. Don’t get it wrong though. Spotify won’t help you build your career and it is not their job to do so. All they’d o is provide you with a platform where you can be discovered by potential fans and producers. It is your responsibility and that of your team to build your own career and try to convert all the listeners on the platform into your own loyal fans. Behind every success story is countless of hours of dedication and hard work consistently towards one goal, and that is to be heard and appreciated. There are no guarantees in this business and you must understand that it is mostly up to you to push your content forward. The new model that the music industry is forming into is one that has a place for everyone and although it might be more difficult than it used to be to stand out, you still have a chance.

This is an excellent time for artist that want to go it alone and position themselves to achieve greatness in the music industry. But as an independent artist you must be able to stand out from the crowd. How can you achieve this? Highlighted below are some tips you can implement to be a successful independent artist. <strong>1. Connect with your fans</strong> Building a nice relationship with the people who love your music is a great way to achieve more success as an independent artist. You have to continually engage your fan base and connect with them on all platforms where they flock. This engagement will be online and offline if you want to be consistent in their minds. One of the ways to connect offline is playing at live events at various venues and locations. When you ace the live shows, you will be winning over the hearts of new fans and also keep the old ones on your coolade. Ensure you make a long lasting good impression in the minds of your audiences when performing live. You should also engage your fans online by posting interesting posts regularly on all your social media pages such as Instagram, Facebook and twitter. This is where you can interact with your fans from all over the world and continue to build your fan base. If anybody says something nice about you, be sure to acknowledge and thank them. <strong>2. Stick to what you are good at</strong> Quickly identify your strong points and play to these strengths. You don’t have to go the same route as every artist out there. While some people will sing a good song and drop it on Ditto Music to make sales, you can easily go a different route if you know you are stronger in other areas. Stage presence might be your strong suit and you can perform at a local venue or event. You can get regular gigs to put your music out there in front of new people every week and earn some cash at the same time. If you are good at making videos and editing visuals you can start making music videos and posting online. Anyone of them can go viral and boost your music career to the next level. <strong>3. Don’t wait all your life for a record deal</strong> Music deals do not come knocking at your door and no one is going to do the ground work for you. Do not assume that any big label knows your name and will come to you with a deal. Don’t assume they have all the answers to the music business either. We have seen artist sign up with big labels and end up not releasing any music. These labels can drop you as quickly as they sign you. Also no big label will even consider you if you don’t already have a track record of success no matter how little so focus on getting your own game up and letting the people know you. Things will eventually fall in place. There are so many tips to be followed asides from the ones mentioned here. But the summary of it all is to work hard, stay focused and stay current with the times. You can’t go wrong with this mindset.

There has been a lot of transformation in the music business and the advancements in technology have opened up a lot of spaces for inspiring and upcoming artist to make their mark in the game. We have seen so many overnight success stories of people who have had their videos go viral or their music embraced worldwide. Granted there has been a lot of work behind the scenes before these artists get to enjoy this seemingly overnight success but the thing is none of this would have been possible without the internet that connects us all. It is important to note however that for every success story there are thousands of failures mainly due to competition and lack of skill, talent and drive on the part of the failed musicians. The good news is that you can be different and if you follow some guidelines and stick to them, you can be on your way to achieving success in the music business. One of the mistakes that people make today is spending all their time, energy and resources trying to get the attention of the music labels who they think have the codes to their future success. But this is backwards. You need to gain the recognition of the people first and see where it leads you. <strong>Things have changed</strong> In the days of old, the only way you could make any money from music was to sign to a major label. And there was a huge barrier and obstacle for independent artists to make any real money. Today that barrier has been taken off completely and there are so any unsigned and independent artists who are making a good living from music, getting radio play and making the charts and even getting the top awards. In this new model, the record labels do not hold all the answers anymore and they will even gravitate more towards an artist who has successfully built a brand for himself online and offline rather than bet on an unknown even talented artist. <strong>You need a plan</strong> When you are starting out and independent, you most likely will not understand all the rules of the business and you can easily fall into a trap. This is especially so when you try to copy the different methodologies you see successful artists already employing. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily apply to you. We have seen artist spend all their money on PR agents and radio promoters without even laying all the ground necessary for any success. Things like having a website and a social media following need to be in place so people can easily access you should they be interested in you. It is painful to see artist waste the little money they have on moves like this without getting any meaningful results. PR agents and radio promoters are definitely vital but it is all about timing. There will come a time when you have to pay them to work for you but not at the beginning stages where you don’t have enough in place to take you to that level.

One of the tedious aspects of being an Indy artist is the seeming absence of a clear path to achieving anything. But this is wrong because not only does a clear path exists, but just looking for a map looks like betraying the notion of integrity on the artist side. You can work in law or finance and everywhere else that has a clear hierarchy in place. But as a musician you also want this sort of structure and hierarchy. There have been a lot of great explanations of the modern model of the music business and how it applies to Indy artists but there is little information on what to do exactly, how to do it and when to do it. A lot of the Indy artists out there are motivated and highly driven to the painstaking work but they don’t know what there are supposed to be doing. There is no singular path to the show business but why should every artist have to reinvent the wheel to get anything done? When you speak to the industry experts, you quickly learn that are certain steps you must take and you must take them in a particular sequence in order to maximize your opportunity to make any money and any imprint on the music world. These steps are built for today’s dynamic world of continually shifting trends and expectations. How well you are seem to be going forward in the music business today is mostly centered on a perceived momentum. Anything you achieve today is an indicator of what you can do tomorrow but the headache remains how do you get started when you have no current achievements to your name. It’s a catch 22. Earned press is an area where you have the highest chance of achieving any momentum and creating your own narrative to stand out from the crowd. Music PR is typically overly expensive and very selective. You don’t want to go this route if you haven’t hit it to a certain extent. The great news here is that the world of music yesterday has transformed into a new digital age where there are no gatekeepers of content and you have equal opportunity of putting your music out there for the public to listen to. Thousands of Indy artist have gone this route and this transfers the onus to you the artist to get your own success. Once you have press, it is now time to target an audience. Exploit all of the available platforms to hook your listeners unto your content and get them excited about your stuff. Continue to build your audience base and find different means of leveraging them as means to your financial success. The buzz around you will land you projects, deals, features and collaborations. When you are on the upward momentum, a lot of things start to change and you suddenly start to get more access. You get more bookings, more gigs and more exposure. This all accumulates into a giant of stream of income sourced from various other smaller streams.

The advancements in technology have been a great help for entrepreneurs across all industries and the music business has also felt the disruptive impact immensely. The old model of the music business was that an artists would have to find a means to land a record deal before he can gain any access to the market. But today with the advent of digital technology, a lot of business savvy musical talents all around the globe are making it happen on their own. Paul Pacifico, CEO of the Association of Independent Music (AIM), says: “Artists today are pretty much by definition music entrepreneurs and owner-operated companies, building their businesses and their brands. For them, technology has been the principle driver, reducing the barriers to entry in terms of lower costs and the democratization of industry supply chain resources, such as production equipment and support services.” The thing a lot of musical entrepreneurs currently lack is mainly funding and the under capitalization of music businesses is very obvious now at all levels but that will soon be a thing of the past. “The reality for any startup, in any sector, is working smart, boxing clever, and making best use of available resources,” says Pacifico. “What’s encouraging is that in Europe we are seeing the green shoots of an independent capital market in the music industry, with strong interest from one or two of the larger European investment funds whose expertise is in IP investment. They haven’t historically done music, but want to start that conversation of ‘what if?’” Until such time when music entrepreneurs are moving clever and getting reasonable results and outputs, KOLARS is a band based in California made up of husband and wife Rob Kolar who is the writer, singer and producer. Music is transcending into a myriad of genres.