Are you planning ahead? If not, you need to be. Here’s why…

Plan Your Release Dates Carefully

Whether you are in January or in April, make sure that your record label continues to grow!

Here in the UK, if the university market is your target audience, then you need to organise your releases according to their schedule. Most students are studying for around 8 months in a year (as the rest of the time they are partying ! You will need to plan your releases to fit those time lines.

You need to know your target markets timetable to effectively schedule your releases. This will enable you to release in a timely manner while staying flexible to adjust schedules when needed. So, be in-tuned to the patterns and behaviours of your audience.

The best way to make sure that you can get your record label going and keeping it up to date is by planning ahead. In business, this is known as forecasting. You will want to project what you want to achieve with the next month, 3 months, 6 months and year. By doing this, you will know exactly where you stand with other label competition and with your labels finances.

While you are forecasting what you want to do, make sure that you include new projects to develop, old projects to maintain and developments that you want to arise with the business as a whole. These three areas will bring you in more prosperity and opportunity.

Stay tuned! We will be bringing you more tips on how to set up your record label to thrive!

If you somehow found this page by either shear determination or by magic and you want to get more of these types of useful tips on how to get your new record label off the ground correctly, click here to find  more juicy record label business building information.

How have you found your schedule? Is it difficult to plan out? Leave your questions or comments below

I made a 5:24 minute video below (scroll down to the bottom to view), that answers a question I got from Louis. He asks ” where do I take it next (the recorded music) so it can go to the next level..”

What I think he means is that when you’re starting out and you have just finished and polished up your new music, what do you do next?

Well the video below explains what you should do next.

Basically, you need to get your music to a tastemaker so that you can get some feedback and input on what you have produced.

What is a tastemaker? A tastemaker could be one of many influential music industry types. From a well respected A and R, to a DJ.

In this case, I’ll refer to the radio/club DJ as being the person who to target. Why? Because this is the method I used when I was starting out and I have used this approach on may occasions.

DJ’s have their ear to the streets and could let you know if your music is a “hit”, “miss” or a “grower”. They could get to test your music and see what the response is like first hand via radio airplay (if they can choose what gets played) and in the clubs.

I have to apologize if your genre of music doesn’t fit this method. In that case you will want to find someone that has similar influence in your genre.

I found an interesting article in the New York Times and it confirms what I have been saying for the past few years. As the music industry (or should I say entertainment industry) has changed or is still changing, file sharing, social media and the like has blown the doors right open for independent artitst, labels and bands to take creative control and power to live out their dreams, while not being reliant on the majors.

The opportunities are endless in these times, you just have to be creative and think out of the box and come up with new concepts for marketing and connecting to potential fans.

The internet has made it a level playing field with all the different social media networking sites, which could enable someone in their bedroom reach out and connect with thousands of people throughout the world with websites like Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, etc.

If you haven’t seen my previous post about the new music business model, you should. It will get your creative juices flowing.

A proposition got put to me the other day to start a new record label. And even though I haven’t said yes or no yet, my thoughts are that if I do, It will have to be a “internet record label”. Why? Because cost to do marketing can be kept lower than it was in the past and the potential reach is global and not just local.

Yep, I know labels and artists have been doing this for a while now, but with some creative thinking on how to rise above the noise of what everyone else and their dog is doing, I feel that with the right artist I could have a pretty good crack at it.

Tempting as it is, at the moment I have a lot on my plate, so I’ll get back to that!

Anyway, back to the article I read in the NYT. What it says to me is that artists are thinking that getting signed is not all they should aim for (unless you create a huge buzz around yourself before hand, selling your goods while opening and touring on the back of well established artists like what happened to Drake from Young Money), but that their are other ways to get funding to do things independently.

That’s another reason I wrote about and showed you a tool that will help you build a mailing list.

If you create “that” buzz around you, build up and communicate with your fan base on a regular bases, stack the odds in your favor ’till you have the choice of getting signed or getting sponsorship or even going it alone.

Rest assured, whatever choices you make, the future looks bright for indies.

Please leave your comments below to let me know your thoughts on this.

I was checking out David Hoppers blog Music Marketing [dot] com, and I came across his latest blog post.

The thing that intrigued me especially about this particular post, is because what you are about to watch below in the video is something I have been talking about from some time now to a few private students and some music associates.

I have a saying and that is “give your music away and sell your fans your t-shirt”.

Now, don’t take those words literally, but the concepts behind that thought is what is, I feel, the new business model.

Watch the video taken from a keynote presentation at the Music Digital Summit ’09, presented by Mike Masnick, of Techdirt.com

Let me know your thoughts. Post them below….