The Guitar Player's Resource
A few words of friendly advice to all the music artists out there on the Internet looking for that magic bullet or that piece of information that will rocket their career forward.
While the Internet is a great place to research the media, find places to promote or continuing relationships with your fans, it is also a vast pool of misinformation provided by people who don't know what they are talking about. I say that because most of them have never done what they are offering advice about.
You have everyone from record producers and engineers to guys who own websites, people who work on street teams to school teachers who have never had a job in the industry to artists who have never sold a thousand CDs even in their hometown, all trying to tell you how to promote yourself and your music or how the music industry will be gone in the next year.
My email box is filled every day with messages from independent artists asking about various misinformation they have read or tried and didn't work. My one piece of advice for you is very simple, consider the source of the information. A guy who sells CDs online is not a good source of how to promote and market yourself and your music especially when his business model is to wait for you to send him your fans to buy your CD! If he is not promoting artists himself, the advice is not worth listening to. Now, if he told you where his customers were coming from and how the other artists got them to order their CDs, then that would be something to listen to.
The same holds true for the advice we have all heard of just put your music on every site you can find and people will find you and it will sell thousands of downloads or CDs. Good luck. You will find out with a little digging that the artists who are successful online are actually promoting themselves all the time and directing people to those sites!
The simple fact is that most people who put out ideas on the Internet have never done what they are suggesting or with any success. The artists who constantly promote themselves and develop relationships with their fans, the media and industry people become successful. Those that look for a magic bullet that doesn't require them to do any of the hard work don't.
You can find advice and strategies that actually work and that you can personalize to you at www.TSAMusic.com.
A side note: When I started in this industry 26 years ago, there were only four major labels. I don't think the record companies will go out of business. New ones will just take their place like they always have, selling what was considered radical formats of music at the time (8 track, records, cassettes, CDs). A great question to ask someone is, "What is the music industry definition of a major label?"
Author Tim Sweeney is head of Tim Sweeney & Associates, who are entering their 18th year of being, "the only true artist development company in the world."
Tim is one of the music industry's most sought after experts and consultants, and has written several influential books including "Tim Sweeney's Guide To Releasing Independent Records".
