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audience members to join you on the road for a week. Invite them to the studio to mix a song. Let them sing backgrounds or do handclaps… get your audience involved… create a bond. Continued from page 42 ending the video with a nice big URL! 3 tips to create a decent quality video on the cheap for online usage. Go to the nearest college with a film department. Give your best song to every student you can find and include a card with it that says; “Needed, one brilliant film student to direct and shoot my music video. Please send resume, credits, and a short paragraph telling me why you would do a better job than everybody else.” Put THEIR egos to work for you. Take advantage of the bad economy and use unemployed people as extras—they’ll be happy to get some work. If all else fails, buy a Flip HD video camera for cheap at a pawnshop and get creative. Study up on what makes a great music video before you begin production. Don’t think that you’re such a genius that you shouldn’t take advice from seasoned pros and have a plan before you begin. What are your top 3 tips on how to use Twitter—how often and what to tweet? Know your audience and give them what they want, not what you think they want. i.e. Tell them how many takes you needed to nail the vocal on a song or other insider trivia, not where you ate lunch today. Two or three tweets a day, unless it’s a show day… then more frequently to build excitement. Ariel did a great job at the TAXI Road Rally this year of tweeting when her panel was, with some more frequent reminders about its location as it got closer. Give us 3 tips on how to get social media followers/friends to give you their contact info. Give them something they VALUE in return. Write great songs and deliver amazing performances so people will WANT to buy your music PERIOD! Make sure your potential buyers know what other people think of you. Our purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by like-minded people whose taste we respect. Find a way to deliver a unique selling proposition so buyers know what you’re offering. “Steely Dan does hip-hop”… you know what to expect and can decide if you’re interested. Do something at your gigs that nobody else does that will get people talking, e.g. randomly invite What are the top 3 things you should do in your e-mail communications to fans? Learn which fonts and font sizes work best because they are easiest to read, which colors work best, which layout works best, and create a user interface that delivers one central message and makes it easy for the reader to take the action you want them to. What are the best/most effective ways to engage with/communicate with fans in 2010? Make memorable, easy-to-digest music that people actually want to hear. Be in all the right places, maintain those locations daily, and do something

remarkable that gets people talking about you. But if you don’t have remarkable music to begin with, they won’t talk about you for long, if at ALL. Are there tricks to“getting discovered”online? If so, what are they? I don’t think they are tricks so much as a well thought out plan. The problem is that most musicians don’t research plans that have worked for others, they don’t use a plan even if they find one, and they rarely follow through past the point of initial excitement. The people who are successful DO research, DO make plans, and DO follow through on the execution. If you’ve ever wondered why some artists build a following and others don’t, there’s your answer.

http://www.reddecibelproductions.com http://www.adamwatts.com

Recording - September 2010

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