When I started at Berklee, I got a job in the jazz department at Tower Records. This was before iPods, before MySpace, and at a time when people were still asking what we had on cassette. The jazz department was up on the third floor, and nobody wandered in there unintentionally. As such, it was somewhat remote, and it gave the employee ample time to discover great music. As a new Berklee kid, I...
There should never be free music.
Anytime you give a track away, people should be buying it -- and the currency of choice is an email address. Second to that, let them pay with a tweet, by becoming a Facebook fan, or creating a post about your music. Any of those currencies may actually be more valuable than the 99 cents they may (or may not!) want to spend.
Online Promotion 101
I spent a good portion of last week delivering guest lectures to the “Creative Promotion in New Media” classes at Berklee. For the class, I offered up some slides which helped explain both what marketing is about along with a few examples of sites that were good, bad, or at least illustrative of the necessary understandings. Ultimately it came down to 5 major considerations. Here they...
The Master of Duh
Yesterday, I was invited to attend an extra-special songwriting clinic at Berklee. The guest-lecturer was an alum named John Mayer. Maybe you’ve heard of him? We were classmates together for one very brief class, in one very very brief semester, and at the time he wasn’t all that impressive. Apparently his spark was ignited in his second (and final) semester on campus. In any event...