by J Bluevibe on September 10, 2008
NZ musician magazine have just announced that the NZ Album Chart is set to include sales of Albums at gigs.
"RIANZ have announced that to reflect buying pattern changes in the declining retail market, sales of music albums at artists’ gigs will from now on count towards the Official NZ Album Chart. Previously only traditional retail sales counted toward the chart, with online sales added about two years ago.
The new changes open up the chart rules around who is eligible to file sales returns, bringing artists themselves into the equation. Venue sales returns will have to be signed by the artist, the venue and the record company, with the sales figures counted as being made on the day of the gig and eligible for that week’s chart. Strict rules will govern how the returns from gigs are managed and CEO Campbell Smith says RIANZ have the power of audit over every return with some pretty severe penalties for falsifying sales information."
This could have a number of implications for those artists who actually care about getting in to the NZ charts as at present it only takes approx 20 album sales to get in to the top 100 Album chart! [click to continue...]
by J Bluevibe on August 19, 2008
Music industry seminar:
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This week I’m starting a series of podcasts recorded at a recent seminar I presented in conjunction with The Depot Artspace and The Creative Peoples Center. The seminar took place last month and focused on the subject of promotions for independent musicians. I decided to break the rather large topic of promotions up in to 3 specific areas; tour promotion; album promotion and digital promotion.
This first podcast features Rebecca Caughey covering the topic of tour promotion and marketing. Rebecca is the Managing Director of Funktion Music Media . She currently manages Shapeshifter and Ladi6 and is a tour publicist for artists such as Bic Runga and Brooke Fraser . [click to continue...]
by J Bluevibe on August 1, 2008
It’s a pleasure to finally let you all know that the EP is now back from mastering (thanks to theproof.co.nz) and ready to be let loose on the big wide world. I’ve discussed a few options for the promotion of the EP in previous posts and wanted to ask a few questions to get some feedback on my ideas.
The first thing I’m working on is a prize promotion to accompany the EP consisting of a Vestax Handytrax turntable; Presonus Inspire 1394 sound card and some vinyl and sample CD’s. I’ve got the gear sorted through a deal with local distributors but what I’m trying to figure out is how should I actually “give them away?” [click to continue...]
by J Bluevibe on June 21, 2008
Finding your fans is something that we all should be doing on a regular basis and one of the simplest ways is through the many social music sites. So here’s a quick outline of my plan for building up my network of fans before I release the EP. This only focuses on the social music sites that I’m currently involved with and doesn’t cover all the aspects of my digital strategy which will also include posting on forums, commenting on blogs etc. If you have any other suggestions for building up my music networks then let me know by adding a comment, any help is always appreciated and I’ll be posting about my experiences with these different strategies as we go along. [click to continue...]
by J Bluevibe on May 25, 2008
As part of NZ music month voeveo.com ran a competition to win a $15k promotional package on their website. All you had to do was upload some content to sell on their site and you went in the draw. The good news is (as you probably got from the headline) that I won one of the 5 promotional packages which includes a featured artist page, promotion on the homepage and a google adwords campaign to drive traffic to my page on the voeveo.com website.
Voeveo.com sells content for your mobile phone including audio, video, games and images. I uploaded 4 ring tones to the site which only took me about 20mins to register, complete my profile, and upload and categories the 4 ring tones. You can head over to the Bluevibe studio page on the voeveo website to check out the ring tones. Whats even better is that if you register as a buyer on the site you get $9 prepay on your account which you could use to buy all 4 of the Bluevibe studio ring tones, nice.
Mike from voeveo.com got in touch to let me know I had won the package and has also agreed to hold off on the promotion until the release of the new EP which is now finished and will be out in July. It’ll be great to have the EP available through voeveo.com for all you mobile music consumers and everybody else will be able to grab it through an online music store near you! I’ll keep you informed of the release details in a few weeks time once we’ve got our plan together. This will be the first official Bluevibe studio EP so we’re still working on the best options for the release. I’ll be doing a few posts on independent distribution and promotion over the next few weeks and welcome any thoughts you might have on getting the EP out to the masses.
by J Bluevibe on May 5, 2008
Dave Hooper from MusicMarketing.com is setting up a new section of his excellent blog and is giving away free advice to musicians who subscribe to his mailing list. Not only is this a great opportunity for bands it’s also an excellent way for Dave to generate content and get more subscriptions.
Dave will be talking one on one with the “winners”of this offer and sharing his advice with his readers. This looks like a great idea and I’m really looking forward to reading the results, I’ll be subscribing to see if I can get some advice on the release of the new Bluevibe studio EP which is actually one step away from being finished, finally!
It will also be interesting to see who actually gets the free advice? It would be great to see bands from all over the globe, from different genres with different demographics of fans. Will selling an album to punks in the UK be different than selling a dub album to New Zealand fans?
If you write your own blog this type of direct connection with your audience could be a great way to give something back to your readers, create some content and expand your email list all at the same time. As a blogger asking questions of your readers should be something you actively do and I think Dave is taking this to the next level by offering this kind of interaction.
