You simply cannot sit back and wait for a record label, manager, booking agent or anything in-between to step in and “save the day” for you or your band. They simply don’t have the time to weed through the thousands of Myspace links they receive every week. You have to give them a reason to work with you by showing initiative. Record labels, managers, and booking agents can help you, but you do not have to rely on them to be successful.

I have no doubt that by using the following services (or putting your own list together) and spending/not spending money when necessary will lead to a successful career in music. The important thing to remember is that it’s up to you. Oh, and talent (however you define it) is important, too.

Manufacturing

Without a record label to handle the manufacturing of the physical version of your release (if you plan to have one), you will need to take charge of this. Prices on both CD and vinyl manufacturing has decreased in the last few years, so this isn’t quite the financial burden it once was.

CDs

Join the ranks of some pretty major (indie) record labels that have used Icon to produce their CDs (Relapse Records, Equal Vision Records, Bridge 9 Records, and more). I haven’t seen prices (or quality) this good from any other manufacturing company. You can get 1,000, retail-ready CDs for $799. That’s $.80 per CD. If you’re releasing a full-length and sell it for $10, you stand to make a $9.20 profit (before paying back the money you spent promoting the release, of course). Check out their other deals here: http://www.builtbyicon.com/deals.php

Vinyl

Having been in business since 1949, United Record Pressing knows a thing or two about vinyl. Chances are if you have a vinyl collection, you own some of URP’s work. Hey, if they’re good enough for The Beatles, I think they’re good enough for you. I have personally used URP before and can attest to their craftsmanship and professionalism.

You should, of course, know that before thinking about pressing vinyl that it is definitely more costly than pressing CDs. You should also know that vinyl sales have increased by the hundreds of percents in the last year or so. Even some Best Buys have begun adding shelf space for vinyl.

To put together a no-hassle quote, you can visit: http://www.urpressing.com/QuoteGen.php. These prices do not include printed LP jackets. I suggest pricing those out at Imprint or JakPrints.

Release Distribution

How do you plan to get your music to the masses? Are you going to allow fans to download it for free? What do you plan to do with all those physical copies you had made? Something floating around the blogosphere lately is the idea that your music is to be given away for free in order to get people to buy tickets to your shows and/or merchandise. I’m not saying this is wrong or right, but I am saying it’s something to think about.

Digital Distribution

To get your release sold on iTunes, Amazon Mp3, eMusic, Rhapsody, Napster, and more I suggest TuneCore. One-time fee of $.99 per song plus another one-time $.99 for every digital store you want the album sold on and then a yearly fee of $19.98. They keep ZERO royalties from albums/songs sold. This means if your album sells 20,000 downloads, you receive ALL the money (less the amount the stores take for selling it).

Most of the other aggregators take a percentage of your sales, but they typically offer marketing and promotional services for your release, which could be what makes it sell well in the first place. Would you rather own 100% of Friendster (no offense, Friendster) or 1% of Google?

I would definitely check out IODA and The Orchard, but they have a review process which means you can’t just sign up and be on your way. Though, if you are approved, they can help you promote and market your release more than TuneCore.

Since TuneCore has a non-exclusive agreement with it’s users, you can (and should) have another option for your fans. Creating a digital store with Bandcamp is painless, quick, and free. As of this blog post, the only money they take from users is the exact amount to cover the PayPal transaction fees they are charged as a result of you making a sale.

In addition to being able to facilitate digital sales for you, Bandcamp also provides a great way to give music away for free. Not only can you decide which songs can be downloaded for free, but you can set the quality of the download (ie. lower-quality versions are free, whereas higher-quality versions are for sale) and you can also require a user to give you their email address before downloading thus growing your mailing list.

Physical Distribution

Did you know it’s really easy and inexpensive to get Amazon to sell your CD? You don’t even have to put down any money up front. Check out this link to read about Amazon Advantage. The other great thing about selling your physical product on Amazon is that they will automatically link to the digital version of the release if it’s also on Amazon.

Managing your own merch store can be a great way to personally interact with your fans. This also makes it easy to see, with your own eyes, how your products are selling (or not selling) and make adjustments as needed.

BigCartel provides a very easy way to set up your own, fully-branded online store. You name the prices, the shipping costs, and handle the fulfillment. You also keep the profits. BigCartel doesn’t take any percentage of your sales, but they do charge monthly fees for certain account levels.

Things to consider when thinking about running your own store: Do you want to run a shipping and receiving warehouse from your bedroom? Do you want to deal with angry customers? (You won’t have any of those, right? They are your fans after-all!) Do you know someone responsible and trustworthy to take over while you’re on the road?

If you’d rather not mess with running your own store, you can always use the services of a professional fulfillment company. Some popular, musician-specific fulfillment companies are as follows: Merch Lackey, MerchNow, Factory Merch, Buyswag, Band Wear. Just search Google for more options.

Publishing and Licensing

As defined in Wikipedia, “Performance rights organizations (PROs) provide intermediary functions, particularly royalty collection, between copyright holders and parties who wish to use copyrighted works publicly such as shopping and dining venues.”

Basically, if someone wants to use one of your songs for any commercial purpose, these companies make sure you get paid. They can/will only do this if you’re a member of their organization, though. You must also own the rights to your material. Watch out for this if you ever do sign with a manager or record label. Sometimes they will want to own the publishing rights to your music, which is something you should avoid if possible. Note: This probably isn’t possible when dealing with major record labels. They will more than likely own everything…for a very long time. But hey, that $100,000 advance they gave you (that you have to “pay back”) is great, isn’t it?

The big three PROs in the United States include: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC. Do some research into each company and see which one is best for you (if this is even something you want to take part in).

Analytics

Imagine knowing where your biggest concentration of fans live. You’d know exactly where to tour and why. You can also use this information to target cities that you believe should be more interested in you. There is no better service to find out this information than BandMetrics.

On top of their location based stats, they also give you an overall view of how your band is doing on the internet as a whole. It’s some of the most valuable information you could ever get your hands on.

Management

You should already be amassing a collection of names and contact information for people that you’ve met. Any of these people could help your band at some point whether it’s the dude you met at the airport in Cleveland or the girl whose brother’s friends with the roommate of the drum tech for the Arctic Monkeys. Get their information, log it, and, most importantly, keep in touch. Oh yeah, and also get some business cards printed up. You should always be prepared to give your information to a potential contact.

Even if you’re not keeping track of your accounting for tax purposes, it’s commonsense to track expenses such as gasoline, merch/release sales, publishing royalties, van rentals, etc. Know where your money is going and learn how to keep more of it.

This being the Bandize blog, I won’t go into all the details of how Bandize can help keep you organized, but I do obviously believe these are all things you should be staying on top of with or without it.

Building your career up to the point where a manager is necessary is a very big step for a band and can take time. Getting a manager to notice your band can work very much the same as getting a record label to notice it. Usually, if they want to work with you, they’ll find you because of all the hard work you’ve done on your own. Show them why they should invest their precious time in your band. Also, if you already have cold, hard statistics courtesy of all the information you’ve tracked since forming your band, you can use that as leverage for a more lucrative deal that sways in your favor.

Promotion

It’s hard to get people interested in what you’re doing unless they’ve heard of you. “Without promotion something terrible happens… Nothing!” – P.T. Barnum

Work It At Home

Don’t wait around. If there’s a band playing in your hometown whose fans could be your fans, go to their show. Talk to people, get a buzz going locally. Get some DropCards made and pass them out to people at the show. Have some flyers professionally printed that list out multiple upcoming shows that your band is playing. People have to work, go to school, and do things other than follow your band around (yet), so give them options!

Digital Promotion

There are almost too many ways to promote yourself online. Myspace has turned into one big bands promoting to other bands mish-mash of boringness. It’s still necessary to at least have a Myspace, but focus on building your own site and making it your central hub.

Don’t be afraid to embrace technology, but also don’t flood your fans with every new service that comes out. Stay organized and make sure you can keep up with everything. The key is to engage your fans, not just give them a bunch of random tools to contact you with and then not return the favor because you simply can’t check the band’s Twitter, fan voicemail, Myspace, Facebook, etc. Clutter can be a killer.

There are services out there that can create some real interaction between fan and band. One of these services is called BrightKite. Think of it as Twitter on steroids. Not only can you post updates to your profile just like on Twitter, but you can easily “check-in”, which lets your fans know exactly where you are when you post it.

The ways in which you can harness the power of this kind of instant communication should have your head spinning. If you’re playing in Austin, TX and you arrived to town early, go grab some lunch somewhere and check-in at the restaurant with a message that says, “First 5 people to come see us at Maria’s Taco Xpress get into the show for free tonight!”

In Closing…

There is no real mystery to becoming a successful musician. It simply takes hard work. Taking on all of these responsibilities can seem daunting, but today, more than ever before, having a DIY attitude can take you further than you’ve ever dreamed possible.

Now, go make some music.

On-demand manufacturing services such as CafePress and SpreadShirt are becoming very popular with bands. While I think there are some benefits in using such a service, I also find it quite distressing.

When a fan purchases something with your band’s logo on it, they’re putting their hard-earned money into your pocket. Doesn’t it say something about the item they’re buying if you as a band also spent your hard-earned money getting it made?

There has been a lot of talk on tribes within the music community as well as achieving those 1,000 fans. Would you want to serve those loyal 1,000 fans just some slop you’re not willing to invest any money into yourself?

If you’re not sure that a particular shirt design is going to sell very well, putting it on a site such as Spreadshirt to test the waters isn’t a bad idea, but the great thing about having to spend money up-front on having shirts printed is that it (usually) inspires more research and planning in what you want to get made. Also, you know your fans well enough to at least have an idea of what they will respond positively to and subsequently buy.

Something to also consider is the amount of money you could actually make through an on-demand store VS. having your merchandise professionally printed in advance.

Spreadshirt’s standard price is $17.40 for an American Apparel t-shirt with something printed on it. This means that you will be charging your customers/fans AT LEAST that much, and more if you want to profit. So, to be fair, let’s say you up the price to $20.00 a shirt so that you can make a sweet $2.60 per shirt that you sell. You tell all your fans via Myspace, PureVolume, and Twitter about your new “Official Merch Store” and they go buy some of your merchandise. If you sell 50 shirts, you’ve just made $130.00. That’s not bad, but it could have been better.

Now, let’s see how this looks if you were to have ordered your own shirts through a screen-printer. We will use JakPrints to get our example figures, but let it be known that there are thousands of other printers (even some in your neighborhood) that could print shirts for you as well.

Let’s say you decide to order 100 black American Apparel shirts through JakPrints with a 2-color print. The shirts are going to run you $6.25 each plus a $30 one-time fee for the 2-colors for a grand total of $655.00. Because we’ve added the set-up fees into our total pricing, we can now divide the grand total ($655.00) by the 100 shirts we’re having made, which tells us that each shirt we print costs us $6.55. Now, let’s look at the profit differences between selling 50 on-demand shirts and selling 50 of the shirts we had printed through JakPrints.

If we also decide to sell the Jakprints shirts for $20.00 per shirt, that’s a profit margin of $13.45! So, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, you stand to make a lot more money on these custom-made shirts than through your Spreadshirt store. Let’s run the numbers just for fun: $20.00 per shirt multiplied by 50 equals $1000.00, which, after taking out the cost of each shirt ($6.55), leaves you with a profit of $672.50. Incase you got a little lost along the way, this means you have already made back the money you invested in having the shirts printed and then taken in an additional $672.50 profit!

On the flipside of this, I personally own a shirt printed by SpreadShirt and it looks good as far as on-demand merchandise goes. Can I still tell that it’s not really a screenprint? Of course. I also understand that not every band has the luxury of having a few hundred dollars to get some shirts printed, but hopefully the comparison chart above shows just how beneficial saving up for the right shirt can work out better in the end. After all, sometimes you have to spend money to make money.

Something else to consider is that you can’t take Spreadshirt shirts on the road unless you front the $17.40 per shirt to get some printed.

Make your fans feel special and encourage them to attend your shows. If you create a tour t-shirt that says “Joe’s Band Winter 2009 Tour” and only produce a limited amount, your fans will be feel special. They have something that’s only attainable by attending your show. In this age of digital 24/7 availability, having something tangible that only a select group of people have is a great feeling!

The overall point here is that before you just create a shop on one of these on-demand sites, really think about your customers/fans. They deserve the absolute best, but so do you, so really crunch the numbers and see which option makes the most sense.