Benjamin Costantini is a conference manager at the midem music festival, an annual conference that takes place in Cannes, France where music makers, technology companies, a variety of brands and other talent come together to meet and share music and information about the industry. With many years’ experience in the Arts and technology, Benjamin got his start in music when he founded and managed the indie Spanish record label La Crème Records, a shareable CC-driven record label. He continues to manage several bands. He also founded Objectiv@rte, a company dedicated to educational research support services.

Benjamin took some time to talk to me during the festival – which I had the pleasure of attending earlier this week – about how he got involved with midem and its importance to the music industry, how artists can maximize the benefits of attending and participating in music festivals and where he sees the music world headed in the future.

Musician Coaching:

Thanks so much for taking some time to share your experience, Benjamin. How did you first get into the music business, and how did you get involved with midem?

BC:

I founded a pro-DIY record label in 2004, which happened to be identified in Spain as a grassroots movement for free culture advocacy. I’ve been managing several bands and even toured China in 2006 as a road manager. I was recruited by midem in 2011 as a conference manager.

Musician Coaching:

What is the concept behind the midem conference, and what sets it apart from other festivals and conferences throughout the world?

BC:

MIDEM is the largest global music conference and has been a must-attend event for labels, publishers, distributors and other professionals for decades. It is broadening its scope more and more to embrace the whole ecosystem of the new music business, with tech companies, start-ups and developers, brands and ad agencies, artists, managers, marketers, etc. What really sets MIDEM apart from other events is its size and how profitable it is for business, networking, learning and forecasting.

Musician Coaching:

What advice do you have for artists who wish to attend midem or industry events in general?

BC:

An artist should plan the trip well in advance to ensure a great return on investment. The best option would probably be to raise funds and perform live, get a great marketing campaign running prior to the event to raise awareness and never, never come alone. You need to know some people there to maximize connections. And if you don’t know anyone, travel with someone like your manager. Also, you need to carefully read the schedule of events, attend the conference and panels that matters to you most and jump in to connect with the speakers at the end of their talks. They love it!

Musician Coaching:

What are some of the things artists should be doing to promote themselves, get attention and build relationships before, during and after a music conference like MIDEM?

BC:

With the midem conference in particular, there is a great tool called midemconnect, an online database that enables to contact directly with other midem participants. The midem off programme is also a great opportunity to showcase your music in one of the many bars of Cannes. There are also different competitions where artists can submit their tracks for consideration such as the music pitch sessions or the midem off showcase competition, both powered by Sonicbids. And if you really want to create a buzz, bring your ukulele like Amanda Palmer did in 2011 and crash the conference!

Musician Coaching:

Are there artists or companies that you’ve noticed have been really successful at promoting themselves at the conference in past years? What would you say they did that separated them from others who did not do so well?

BC:

I wasn’t working for midem before the past couple years, but I feel that what the Pavilions do is great. Some countries are also starting to invest a lot to sponsor young talent so they can come to the festival.

Musician Coaching:

Do you have any specific guidelines for artists when approaching music industry people at conferences and festivals?

BC:

Be professional. Think of yourself as an entrepreneur first, then an artist. Don’t be ashamed to talk to people outside your network. Make sure when you get back home, you have hundreds of business cards. And schedule your time well. Set up a daily to-do list and book as many meetings as possible.

Also, remember that you no longer need to bring CDs with you. They are useless for a DIY artist at conferences. Bring your PR materials or your manager, or even your tech guy/girl. It’s worth it!

Musician Coaching:

From your vantage point, are there areas of the music business that you think are going to be more successful than others in the future? Are there any parts of the industry that really need improvement or growth?

BC:

Midem in particular is betting strongly on direct-to-fan (D2F) as a real strategy both for emerging bands and for established artists. There’s still a lot to learn, explore and invent in this field, and many labels really need to embrace this business model beyond the pure marketing dimension of D2F.

Also, you can see with SOPA for example or HADOPI in France that there is still a lot to do in the fields of copyright, rights management and the business of sharing, so that will be something to keep an eye on.

Musician Coaching:

Do you have any parting words of advice for musicians or music start-ups trying to succeed in the current industry?

BC:

If you’re a musician, you are lucky, because this is the best time ever. You will get the opportunity to record awesome tracks in professional studios and get played and reviewed by people from across the globe. Your market is the world.

If you are a music start-up, don’t pay for the rights upfront – unless your home market is Sweden.

To learn more about the work Benjamin Costantini does and check out details about the annual midem conference (and prepare for next year!), visit the official midem website. Next year’s festival is scheduled for January 26-29, 2013.

Last week, new theories surfaced about the real impetus for the Megaupload shutdown as further details about the recent arrests emerged. And two Mötley Crüe members weighed in about the oddities of the modern music business and what artists can do to succeed. Also, Grammy® winner Ne-Yo joined Motown as an A&R executive with hopes of reshaping its artist roster and making music a more unifying force.

Megaupload’s Fall May Not Have Been about Piracy

The dramatic shut-down of Megaupload and arrest of its founder Kim “Dotcom” last week may not have entirely been about piracy, according reports in a variety of publications, including TechCrunch and Time magazine. The move by the U.S. Justice Department could have been part of a plan initiated by the music industry to protect itself from the ramifications of Megaupload’s soon-to-be-released, disruptive music store and DIY artist distribution service.

Plans for the “Megabox” service were first released by TorrentFreak in December. While the service was still in beta, listed partners included 7digital, Gracenote, Rovi and Amazon. And Megaupload had launched a marketing battle against major music industry groups, including the RIAA and the MPAA, who showed Kim Dotcom in an anti-piracy film. The site had also sued Universal Music Group for blocking its YouTube campaign featuring a variety of major recording artists singing its praises.

But many sources speculate it was actually the impending launch of Megabox that added the most fuel to the fire, as Dotcom himself had described the service as a major iTunes competitor. Megabox had plans to offer free premium movies via its “Megamovie” site, which, along with its many music streaming and services to artists would have moved it from being a mere digital locker site to being a major transformative device for digital content.

Megabox had outlined a model that would allow unsigned artists and any other unattached content creators to sell their works through the site and pocket 90% of their earnings. Artists would have also had the option to completely give away songs and still be paid for them through a “Megakey” service. According to its founder, Megabox had potentially discovered way to get around the labels, RIAA and the entire music business.

And due to Megaupload’s gigantic size, popularity and support by some potentially influential musicians, it may have been able to succeed where other services have not yet been able to legally. According to a report by Time, the rapper (and superstar Alicia Keys’ husband) Swizz Beatz was officially listed on the Megaupload website as its CEO just prior to its shutdown. While he hasn’t been implicated in the lawsuit, and experts speculate this title was just a vanity title that emerged as part of the celebrity YouTube campaign, his presence further supported the site’s reach.

Before it closed last week, Megaupload was the 13^th most visited site on the Internet and made up 4% of all global Internet traffic. It had 180 million registered users, 50 million daily visitors and was already a service many artists trusted to distribute their digital content. Megabox was set to monetize all this and pass on a majority of its earnings directly to artists. Kim Dotcom and a handful of other executives have been charged with racketeering, money laundering and multiple counts of piracy.

Vince Neil and Mick Mars:  Where is the “Weird” Music Industry Headed?

Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil and guitarist Mick Mars each discussed the current music industry climate this past week and talked about how artists can find success.

According to Neil, the music industry is vastly changed since his band first found fame in the ‘80s, and the many places artists now have to focus in order to be seen presents major challenges:  “… There are so many different outlets for music now. Thirty years ago, you had MTV; everybody watched MTV and everybody saw your video. There was one place to go; now there [are] thousands of places to go … it’s just harder to get everybody to look at you at the same time.”

He also said that there is not much that is “secret” in today’s business. Social media has given fans the opportunity to get closer to their favorite artists:  “I think with all the social media everybody pretty much knows everything. What you’re doing and where you’ve been and where you’re going.”

And Mick Mars stated that today’s bands are going to have to come up with new methods for delivering music to their fans, because the music industry is “getting weird:” “I think the future will have to see bands put together really cool packages that will be worth it for people to go see.”

Mötley Crüe begins a Las Vegas residency in February. Though Mars admitted he would rather be touring than staying put, he admitted he feels  hopeful that the residency will inspire other artists to start their own residencies and open up the industry to new ideas:  “I know it is a cool thing we are doing, and that we are probably going to make this possible for other bands to do the same thing. I don’t know if we are planning on doing more of this type of thing or not. We are going to have to check it out and see.”

Ne-Yo Named Senior VP of A&R at Motown

As recently-appointed A&R executive at Motown, 32-year old, award-winning artist Ne-Yo hopes to help the industry and music fans revert back to a united front, according to a report by Fox News. The Grammy® winner’s new title was announced by Universal Music on January 25. He has multiple hits as a solo artist and has written huge songs for Rihanna, Beyonce and others.

While Motown has its roots in black music, this type of music originated as art that could appeal to everyone and unite fans. And Ne-Yo said that he hopes to return to this idea in a music industry that he believes is becoming increasingly segregated:  “I want to get back to a place where everybody’s listening to the same thing no matter what race, color, creed you are …Now there’s music that’s specifically for black people and there’s music that’s specifically for white people, and I feel like the essence of … music is lost when you do that.”

In his new A&R role, he hopes to bring artists to the label that are deeply talented but also willing to work. He wants to focus on those who are driven to be working musicians, not just “one-hit wonders:”  “I definitely plan on making sure the people I bring to the industry are going to be an asset to the industry as opposed to a liability … It’s more than ‘She looks good in  a short skirt’ or ‘He looks good with his shirt off’ – it’s about somebody that has talent.”

Ne-Yo is set to release his fifth album in summer, 2012 and will be moving over to the Motown Records label himself from Island Def Jam, also a subsidiary of Universal Music.

Todd Tate is a consultant who manages web and social media strategy for musicians ranging from emerging artists to Grammy®-award winners.  He is also a musician himself. Todd got his start in the music playing in garage bands as a teenager and went on to study jazz composition, performance and audio production at San Jose State University. After college, he went onto open San Francisco’s Blue Room Studios, where he was an audio engineer for countless CDs, including the 1997 Grammy®-nominated jazz release by Carlos “Patato” Valdez. Todd also served as co-founder and CEO for AngryCoffee.com, a company that launched the first publicly-available web-based interface to Napster and Napster-like networks at the dawn of digital music. He is also the Community Architect for the SF MusicTech Summit, a conference that brings together visionaries in the music/technology space, along with the best and brightest developers, entrepreneurs, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce.

Todd recently talked to me about how he got involved in music and technology and shared some advice for artists who want to gain more visibility online, grow their fan bases and establish solid careers as professional musicians.

Musician Coaching:

How did you first get involved in the music industry, and what brought you to where you are today?

TT:

First and foremost, I’m a long-time musician. I started playing guitar when I was 13 in heavy metal garage bands. And I quickly realized I wanted to go to college and major in music. So, I went to San Jose State University fresh out of high school at 19-years old and majored in jazz performance. I quickly changed that concentration to jazz composition and arranging with a minor in audio production. I got the keys to the recording studio and was the studio manager for a couple years.

I worked my way through college recording heavy metal bands in the recording studio there. I was also the supervisor for the student union’s Community sound system, which was a really professional set up. I learned to work that pretty quickly and would mix bands that came through touring at San Jose State. I supervised and trained other students also. I worked with Firehose and some other really well-known acts during the ‘80s at the amphitheater there.

I actually mixed a popular funk rock band that came through the San Jose State studio called Colorwild, and they encouraged me to join their band. So, I started commuting to Santa Cruz a few times a week and rehearsing. We got really serious as we watched some of our friends get record deals. We packed up our bags and all moved to the same apartment building in San Francisco.  That band included Randy Emata – who is now a popular L.A. producer – on keyboards. We played the local club circuit around here in San Francisco.

I also started a production studio here in San Francisco that operated in the Mission District from ’94-‘97 called the Blue Room Studios, named because the recording room was blue. We did a little research as to what would be the most mellow or inspiring color to paint a studio, and it was a light baby blue. I had a lot of experience with Latin jazz in college, and a local producer really liked the Room and really liked my experience with Latin music, so he brought a lot of his business over to the Room and threw me a lot of business that couldn’t afford him at the time. I ended up working on Carlos “Patato” Valdez’s 1997 Grammy®-nominated release, which was a really big honor for me. Tito Puente ended up beating us out.

We had some other luminaries come through the Room. We did all the tracks for Train’s first record. I was the guy who attracted the band into the room and was responsible for sales, marketing and I also participated in a lot of hands-on audio engineering.

During that time, I continued to play in bands. And I ended up playing in a band with the guys who were working at Webmonkey at the time, which was the subsidiary of Wired magazine. Webmonkey was an internet tutorial site. So, they’d have tutorials on how to write HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. I said to my friends, “Wow! This internet thing is getting pretty big.” And a buddy of mine was working for WebMD making really good money writing code. So, they thought since I was an audio engineer and a musician, I should learn HTML and write free tutorials on how to manipulate Internet audio. So, I locked myself in my apartment for thirty days, learned HTML and wrote four tutorials, which included step-by-step instructions, plus screen shots. And the tutorials I made were “How to Make an MP3,” “How to Get Audio into a Flash Movie,” “How to Get Audio into a QuickTime movie” and demo’ed all those things. Then I also did a demo on “How to Manipulate Beatnik Internet Audio,” which was Thomas Dolby’s Web 1.0 play. It was how to sonify the Web so you could scroll over a menu bar and program it to play different scales with a variety of sounds. So, it had a better sound and audio engine than the standard MIDI stuff that first came out on the Web when it first emerged.

I showed the demos to my friend after I finished them, and he thought that the Website should be a company instead of my resume. So, AngryCoffee was born. We found an angel investor that gave us some money and an office South of Market with some desks. We had three full-time people and an extended team of 13. We started offering Web tutorial content to syndicate to e-Learning companies.

Before we knew it, it was May or June of 2000, and everything was crashing down and the whole bubble was exploding. We knew we had to do something spectacular. So, we decided to pull a publicity stunt – hack into Napster. We launched the first publicly-available, Web-based interface to Napster and called it “Percolator”, and the tagline was “Percolating Independent Artists to the Top.” It was just a simple search box on the front door of our website. I know this will sound ridiculous now, but at the time we were trying to get bands to pay us $10 to have their own page on our site. It would include a photo, two legal MP3s, a short bio and a link to their website. What we were doing was taking the Napster search returns and pointing people to our independent artists.

Musician Coaching:

That’s pretty impressive.

TT:

It really took off. We had over 80 major media mentions over three months. I was a panelist on Gavin 2000. Gavin was a radio reporting agency that no longer exists now. I was introduced to the panel by Ted Cohen as “the panel’s pirate” at the time. He had just passed up the gig for CEO of Napster and became the VP of New Media for EMI. And he said to me, “What you are doing is really cool. It would be a real bummer to see you guys go.” So, I told him we’d like to experiment with this thing. But of course, we didn’t want to get sued, and we wanted to do the right thing, because we were all musicians ourselves.

Ted set us up with some interesting meetings and experiments. We got to help promote Radiohead’s Kid A, so at one point we were streaming the entire Kid A record from our website a month before it was released. After it appeared #1 on Billboard, we took the search engine down. Time moved on, and we had some meetings with some people very interested in acquiring the company.. By the end of 2000, we received a $20 million letter of intent from an Italian publicly-traded company. They really liked the brand and the team. It all resulted in a $5 million due diligence process the following April and the result was a pretty good term sheet on moving forward. They went back to Italy and simply couldn’t secure the licensing to make the product legal. So, the acquisition didn’t go through. And shortly thereafter, the Italian stock market crashed.

But I’ve always played music and have kept my eye on technology. Over the years, any time I’ve been in a band, I’ve used technology to share my music online and have helped my friends use technology to share their music online.

Musician Coaching:

And your current gig is focused on digital marketing and consulting. And you also do work with the SF MusicTech Summit as well.

TT:

I’m the Community Architect for the SF MusicTech Summit. Since the inaugural event in 2008, I’ve helped cultivate sponsors, attendees and panelists. I’m retained a couple months before every event, and I reach out to the entire ecosystem of Web music technology, whatever that may be. I vet dozens of companies around every event and then throw them to the executive producer, and he takes it from there and arranges all the panels and closes the sponsorship deals. And then I act as a co-host the day of the event and handle special projects and some of the more popular panelists. As an example, a year ago, I spent half the day handling Ben Folds.

Musician Coaching:

So, tell me a little bit about your consulting business.

TT:

At the core, I’m a musician and a technologist. I’m a web and social media strategy consultant that specializes in production. I’m not one of those guys that just tells people what they should do. I actually build things online for the artist and then try to empower them to operate the entire system by themselves. I’ll build them a website. I usually use some integration of WordPress and will take a really nice paid-for theme and will hack it up so it becomes different from what it was originally. Then, I’ll teach the artist how to log in, blog, change things. Then I use the available social media music tools to integrate with their website and Facebook page, whether that be from RootMusic, SoundCloud, Official.fm, etc. I try to use the tools that are free, because most musicians only have so much money to deal with everything.

Musician Coaching:

And there are a million people with their hands out now.

TT:

Yeah. Lately I’ve been picking up some clients that have a bit of a budget, so I’ve been diving into Topspin a little more, which is great. I’m looking forward to working with that platform a little bit more. Another is Cash Music.

Musician Coaching:

As a guy who is the community architect for the MusicTech Summit, a guy who is a performing musician and a guy who has been Web savvy for this long and has been helping people to make sure their digital strategies are intact, can you give me a list of some of the most common things you see artists doing wrong when they come to you for help?

TT:

If you’re an artist, there’s so much noise out there and so many bands that I believe very strongly you really have to be performing live to get things rolling. You have to start with a locality. A lot of people say that the Internet has leveled out the playing field. But it’s actually made the noise level come up. So, as a band, you can’t just put up a website, give away free music and expect for it to go ballistic. It happens sometimes. But you really have to base things around at least a few short stints of shows. You need the live shows to collect email addresses and get an email list going and get Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc.

One thing I’ve been amazed by in the past is that people don’t know how affordable running Facebook ads can be, especially within just your own locality. That’s definitely one thing I would start with.

As far as concepts for bands go with an online strategy, I’ve got a short mantra or motto:  *Find*Listen*Share*Buy*Fan*Go* I describe it in a blog post I wrote for my own site last year. But for bands, I really suggest putting together a good-looking website. I personally have been encouraging websites that don’t have too much going on. If you are currently performing live and you have a video and music, having a front page that just has a couple calls to action that make users do something is great. You should have a front door with a really large, great-looking, high-resolution photo on it. And if you have a video, embed it on the front too. Then, have some sort of a free giveaway in exchange for an email address. From what I’ve seen lately, this is very successful.

And it’s great to have all these social media channels, but it’s also good for the band to operate the social media channels themselves. So, I would narrow that part down to what’s really hot today, which is Twitter and Facebook. Try to build the followers there and engage with those people every day.

Musician Coaching:

You mentioned calls to action. A really good statistic came up not too long ago that you’re twice as likely to get a click-through to follow if you have the simple word “Follow” in front of your Twitter badge instead of just the Twitter badge itself. It’s amazing how gullible we all are as Web travelers that a simple “do this” makes us respond.

TT:

The blog post I wrote that I referred to earlier is really relevant to what we’re talking about and really valuable to bands. It’s basically “search engine optimization” and what I call “social media optimization.” There are so many free services – new or already existing Web music technology companies that are building tools for musicians. They make them free because they want to aggregate all this content. One of the best things to do is sign up for more than a few of these services – especially because they’re free, and most musicians don’t have much of a budget – and try to claim a username. That goes back to having a band name that is actually searchable.

Here’s a great example:  I’m doing some work for Gift of Gab right now, who is the non-self-titled world’s greatest freestyle rapper. He’s the rapper for Blackalicious, the classic positive hip hop group. His name is also a saying, so for search engine optimization, it’s a little difficult. If you just search “Gift of Gab” … you’ll get Wikipedia articles, the reference from literature, etc. And then when you use analytic tools to measure sentiment online about his brand, it’s quite polluted with people saying things like, “I’ve got the gift of gab, don’t you wish you had it?” on Twitter, etc.

So, continuing on this subject, I’m working with my own band that’s not performing right now and it’s called “Life Love Misery.” It’s kind of a unique keyword string for a band name. It presents its own search term challenges. Whenever I see a new service, I claim that username immediately. So, I’ve got SoundCloud.com/lifelovemisery, Facebook.com/lifelovemisery, Official.fm/lifelovemisery, etc. I’ve claimed that on every service imaginable. I’ve got another act in which I play the dobro called Sayla Dobro. So, every new startup that comes along, I claim that username. If you search for those names, I have basically flooded the Web with places to find those two acts:  Life Love Misery and Sayla Dobro.

The vanity URL is very valuable. It’s a huge bummer when I start working with the band, and either they’ve picked the band name and have already signed up for a bunch of social media sites/Web music tech tool sites, and they’ve chosen their band’s name with “music” at the end. It just doesn’t look as slick.

That’s my take on search engine optimization or social media optimization. Doing this, you can flood the first page of search returns with your brand or band name. It’s pretty rare that someone will search for your music and then go three-pages deep on Google.

Musician Coaching:

Actually, according to statistics, 90% of people never leave the top 3 of the first page.

TT:

There you go. If you look at your search returns as an artist, you really want your website to be the first return at the very top. If you find that’s not working, the thing to do is to start corralling your fans through your social media channels to your website as opposed to always saying, “Find us on Facebook” or “Find us on Twitter.” For me, my new Google+ page comes out on top, then some images come out second, then my website’s coming out as a third return. Then iTunes is coming up fourth, Facebook is coming up fifth … and I can’t seem to get rid of Myspace. It’s coming up sixth.

Then, we’ve got another service called Onesheet, which was designed and launched by the same gentleman who coded ArtistData, which is another great tool for musicians.

One last thing I’d like to say to encourage entrepreneurs and developers that want to get into this space is that there is just an incredible amount of APIs and open platforms available right now for people to get their hands dirty. There are also the Music Hack Day tours put on by the Echonest that provide great opportunities to go out and meet other like-minded developers. They go on in all the major urban areas:  San Francisco; Boston; New York; London; etc. Great tools for musicians and consumers alike are coming out of those events.

To learn more about Todd Tate and the work he does within the music space, visit his official website. Also, check out his blog entry about search engine optimization and social media optimization for musicians trying to get more visibility for their music here.  Todd is available to assist SF Bay Area high-growth digital music or media companies in a business / community development role as well as vetting web based music tech companies for forward thinking VC firms.

Take a look at the SF MusicTech Summit, held this year on Monday, February 13 and register at the following link:  http://sfmts10.eventbrite.com/. Tickets are currentley around $200, but you can get a discount by typing in the code (promotoddtate).  

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time may remember my 2010 interview with Tom Silverman that wound up being picked up by several larger periodicals.  Tom is the founder of TommyBoy records and one of the principal executives at the New Music Seminar.  He asked me to re-post one of his latest blog posts about where the music business is just over two years later.  I personally feel it’s premature to call the upward swings in some areas of the business a “resurrection” but I have enormous respect for what Tom built at TommyBoy and the work he continues to do with the New Music Seminar.  If nothing else, the statistics he presents below are very interesting.  The article below is unedited and written and compiled by Tom himself.

THE MUSIC BUSINESS RESURRECTION

Tom Silverman

As I sat and planned the program for the June 2012 New Music Seminar, it occurred to me that we are approaching the first anniversary of the music business resurrection.  After ten years of decline, the music business hit bottom in the second week of February 2010 and began to rise the week of February 14^th.  There have been many reports of the music business comeback and many have tried to figure out what was responsible for this upturn.   Some have credited Adele, others the shuttering of Limewire, still others the Walmart $5 dump bins.

Let’s look at the good news.

In 2003, there were virtually no single sales as the labels stopped manufacturing them to drive buyers to higher priced albums to get the song they wanted.  In 2004, iTunes changed all that and for the first time music lovers could buy not only the radio single, but also every track on the album separately for only 99 cents. Digital singles exploded, soon surpassing total album sales, physical and digital combined.

In 2010, digital single sales increased only 1.1% leading people to believe that tracks had peaked and might begin to decline.  2011 proved them wrong as singles grew 8.5%. Although this seems like a small number, due to the huge denominator, this represents growth of over 100 million singles in 2011.

Most of the 1.27 billion tracks that sold in 2011 were at the higher $1.29 price point showing the inelasticity of demand for digital singles even in the face of free illegal downloads and a half a year of Spotify plus Rhapsody, Mog and Rdio offering streaming competition. It is important to note that this growth did not come from current hits like Adele, Katy Perry or LMFAO but across the board especially from catalog.

More good news came from digital album sales where the growth rate increased from 13.3% in 2010 to 19.5% in 2011.

In unit sales, digital albums took the biggest jump since 2007 and the second biggest jump ever.

16.8 million more digital albums sold in 2011 than in 2010. 2011 was the first year that the increase in digital album sales exceeded the fall in CD sales. This is a significant benchmark that few seem to have noticed.

Good old CDs had quite an amazing year. In the face of the Borders chain closing and many other stores folding and CD SKUs shrinking within existing stores, we saw the smallest percentage shrinkage in CD sales since 2001.

Physical CD sales on the internet were actually up 17.7% in 2011 indicating an increasing desire for CDs at least online. With CD sales still running almost 69% of all album sales seven years into the iTunes era, it is clear that people still want physical CDs. If it were easier for record buyers to find the CDs they want in stores, there is no doubt that CD sales would be selling in far greater quantity.

More good news in the 60 year old 33 rpm vinyl LP album format where we saw a huge 37% increase in vinyl sales last year. The total sales are still under 4 million units (compared to 1.27 billion singles).

After hearing stories of the death of music acquisition from the “cloud camp,” music buying seems alive and well in all its forms.  Nielsen SoundScan counted 1.6 billion music transactions for the first time ever in 2011.

If the good news in music sales is not enough of an indication of the returning health of the music business, add to that the new revenue centers of music streaming.  In digital broadcasting where SoundExchange collects and distributes to artists and labels statutory fees, the industry has seen an enormous growth in new revenues.

In 2011, $95 million more dollars were collected by SoundExchange than in 2010 and conservative projections for 2012 show growth into the mid $400 billion mark. In 2011, SoundExchange collected almost the same amount from digital broadcasters as the traditional performing rights societies collected from all of the AM and FM radio stations for the songwriters and music publishers.

Other licensed streaming services with subscription models like Spotify, Mog, Rhapsody, Rdio and other subscription services added even more new revenue to the music business.

Although this graph tracks worldwide subscriber growth, Spotify’s U.S. launch in July shows great promise for significant new music revenues from the “access” model that appears to enhance rather than cannibalize music acquisition based on early results. This is comforting to a music industry that is always worried about a new format cannibalizing an older one.

The music business has clearly hit bottom and the resurrection is here.  After a decade of the “music web” expanding its reach, becoming easier, faster and more social, new music discovery channels are showing their impact in more music sales and more paid music access. To be fair, all the news was not positive in 2010.  The continued shrinkage of CD shelf space, the decline in mobile phone ringtone/ringback revenues and the failure of Beyond Oblivion, a promising idea tying connected devices to “feels like free” music access, were lowlights in an otherwise stellar year for the business of music.  The powerful launch of iHeartRadio, the long-awaited U.S.

launch and explosive growth of Spotify, the public offering of Pandora and their achievement of 120 million registered users, Sirius/XM reaching 21.9 million subscribers. Mog, Rhapsody, Rdio, Cricket/Muve all grew their music subscriber base, all not only driving more revenue to the business, but more engagement and discovery of music and spending especially in the over-30 demographic that had historically spends far less money on music than younger demographics.

YouTube and Vevo are beginning to generate significant revenues to the music business and also driving discovery and sales as well.  Mac Miller and Tyler the Creator were just two of the breakthrough YouTube driven hits proving YouTube’s ability to drive exposure as well as sales.

Smartphones reached 50% of all mobile phones in the U.S. and the recent CES Convention showed hundreds of new connected devices, and the rollout of connected automobiles all of which will drive more music access.

The 50’s saw the transition from 78’s to 33 rpm albums and 45 rpm singles that fueled a 30-growth period for music.  The cassette made music portable and stimulated additional growth.  The CD increased the perceived value of an album by 80% and ignited the biggest growth era in the history of the music business. A decade of adjustment is over and it is now clear that we are on the brink of the next big growth era of the music business.

On June 17-19, the New Music Seminar will explore the exciting future of the music business with the SoundExchange Digital Broadcasting Summit and the BMI Creative Conclave. The creative community and their label partners will meet the digital broadcasters, music bloggers, music technologists and all of the new music exposure and monetization players. Clear Channel CEO, Bob Pittman and Sean Parker will share their vision for the future as keynotes, as every sector of the evolving new music business convenes to discuss their perspectives for the exciting new future for the music business.

For most of us in the music business, this is probably the first time in a decade where we are feeling a new sense of optimism. Although unauthorized on-line music usage and distribution has not gone away, it is now time that the music industry begins to focus on expansion and positivity rather than fear and protectionism. Welcome to the resurrection. Have a nice day.

This past week in music, industry analysts highlighted trends that have emerged during the Digital Age as experts claimed January is the best month for artists at all levels to release an album, and a study of the Billboard chart system showed that artists who show up on these charts only spend about five years there. Also, the file-sharing giant MegaUpload was finally shut down by the U.S. Department of Justice and labeled a “mega conspiracy.”

Want to Make it Big? Release Something in January

January has long been labeled a “dead month” in the music industry. But a study of artist releases – both major label and independent – conducted by the Independent showed it could actually be the perfect time for particularly emerging or lesser-known bands to sell more albums and register on the charts. And scoring a #1 hit is a good move for any band, as it increases sales, radio airplay and can garner better spots at live music festivals.

Since 2006, January releases have catapulted quite a few independent bands and artists to #1 on the charts, including The Arctic Monkeys in 2006 (Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not) and The View in 2007 (Hats off to the Buskers). And Adele’s #1 success in January, 2008, 19 inspired her to release her album 21 in January 2011, an album which sold 200,000 copies in its first week and made her the best-selling artist of last year.

What is the advantage for artists of a January release? The biggest benefit is that sales of just 30,000 albums can earn them a #1 spot, whereas in other months, that sales figure would have to be about three-times that much.

This year, new artist Lana Del Rey is hoping to replicate Adele’s formula for success by releasing her debut album at the end of this month. However, in competition with her will be Adele herself as well as more established artists Bruno Mars and London indie band The Maccabees, all releasing their third albums the same week.

Experts say the real reason January can be such a prime month for new artists in particular to get noticed is because it is during this time of year that the media and music fans are hungriest for something new. According to John Hirst from HMV, there has typically been six weeks of silence after Christmas and “…When no one’s released a record for two months the public’s appetite is for something new. It’s easier to get media attention and positive reviews so an album can over-perform.”

How Long is the Career of a Billboard Artist?

Artists who make Billboard charts are there for only about five years on average, according to a study  spend on average only about five years  A recently-released professional study conducted by Storm Gloor, MBA at the University of Denver’s College of Arts and Media (CAM) and published in the 2011 Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association (MEIEA) Journal. And according to Gloor, more than one-third who make the charts will be “one-hit wonders.”

This study is based on analysis of Billboard charts and other pop music data and is phase one of a research project designed to figure out how artists’ popularity and the length of their careers have been impacted by the huge music industry shift brought on by the digital revolution and other major events of the past 15 years. This first part of the study analyzed over 50 years of Billboard music charts.

The official results were that artists stay on Billboard charts in some capacity from 3.95-6.16 years and that 34-percent of those whose debut albums – of any genre –hit the charts only appear there once. However, with pop artists, that figure is 50 percent.

Gloor said the results of this study will be particularly important to aspiring artists who want to plot out real, long-lasting careers in music:  “The research is important to aspiring artists in understanding their own long-term planning in light of such realities. They need to know what they are facing as they start planning for their careers and beyond.” He also said this information could help labels, as they will be able to use it to create more effective promotional strategies for their artists going forward.

The second part of Gloor’s study will involve an examination of music business trends and how they affect the popularity of artists who make the charts. According to Gloor, his initial findings have been that artists who chart might gain national popularity faster, but will not likely stay in the spotlight for long.

MegaUpload Shut Down by Feds

One of the world’s most formidable file-sharing websites MegaUpload finally bit the dust on Thursday as it was shut down by the U.S. Department of Justice for violation of piracy and copyright laws. The feds issued an indictment declaring that MegaUpload was a “mega conspiracy” and labeled it a global criminal organization stating its members “engaged in criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale.”

The indictment also charges MegaUpload executives with earning $175 million through subscription fees and advertisements and taking $500 million in royalties from movie producers, authors, musicians and other copyright holders.

According to an article in The Washington Post, prosecutors stated that the company attempted to hide the fact that they were paying users to upload illegal movies and music and used the financial windfall this practice created for a “lavish lifestyle.” Federal agents confiscated dozens of luxury autos, including site founder Kim Schmitz’s, aka “Kim Dotcom”’s Rolls-Royce, which sported the license plate “GOD.”

Of course, MegaUpload is just one of a number of services that provide file sharing online. Sites such as Mediafire and Rapidshare and also cloud storage services like Box.net and Dropbox also offer easy ways to share content. This shutdown and the potentially impending SOPA and PIPA bills – which brought about internet-wide protests by Craigslist, Wikipedia and Google last week – has many running legitimate services concerned about their future and whether or not the government has the right, even in the absence of a passed bill, to shut sites down for hosting pirated content without allowing the companies to defend themselves in court first. As Eric Goldman, a professor of intellectual property law at Santa Clara University said, “They will wonder if they have done anything different from MegaUpload, and does that mean the Feds will come through their door?”

One detail that made MegaUpload different was that it managed to get celebrities on board to support it with its online marketing campaign featuring Kanye West, Lil’ Jon, Sean “Diddy” Combs as well as Russell Simmons and director Brett Ratner, who all professed their love for the site in a series of promotional videos.

The indictment against MegaUpload was unsealed Thursday, but was issued by a federal court in Virginia on January 5. The Justice Department released a statement with the indictment:  “This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.”

Authorities were dispatched last week to arrest three MegaUpload executives employed by its two companies Megaupload Ltd. and Vestor Ltd. in New Zealand, including the site’s founder, Schmitz. The indictment also charged the two companies with running a “racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.”

In retaliation for the shutdown on Thursday, a hacker group named “Anonymous,” linked to the Twitter accounts @YourAnonNews and @AnonOps took down the websites for the Department of Justice and Universal Music as well as for the Recording Industry of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The Justice Department also seized 18 additional domain names linked to the case.

Matt Urmy is the CEO and co-Founder – along with Jonathan Sexton – of Artist Growth, a mobile software platform that helps artists manage the many intricate pieces of their music careers. Matt got his start in the music industry as a songwriter, a touring musician and recording artist, both with his bands and solo. Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, he is also a published writer with an MFA in poetry and has recorded three albums. Artist Growth is a platform that provides amateur musicians and pros a suite of tools to track daily tasks, coordinate projects and grow their music careers strategically. Through the software, users can manage finances, gig calendars, inventory, industry contacts, social media, performing rights organizations and get mentoring resources from top experts in the music business through the company’s AGtv channels. In addition to launching Artist Growth, Matt also teaches creative writing at Nashville State Community College, is developing his first Broadway musical and is working on an album with Cowboy Jack Clement.

I recently talked to Matt about the challenges he has encountered throughout his own career as a performing musician and how the Artist Growth platform directly addresses these challenges and can help artists interested in building sustainable careers within the music industry.

Musician Coaching:

How did you find your way to the music business?

MU:

I came to the music business much like a lot of other people in it. When I was a kid, I started writing songs, and I wanted to be in a band. So, I started a band. And that turned into a high school band, then a college band. And then being out of college, I went solo and spent about a decade driving up and down the Eastern Seaboard playing gigs in bars and clubs.

Musician Coaching:

Which bands were you in?

MU:

I was in two. I was in one called Telescope and then another band called The Whiskey Scars, which was a honky-tonk country band. It was by far the most successful band I was in. I was also in that band with Jonathan, the other founder of Artist Growth. He played bass. We founded it just as a way to pay the rent. We went and convinced this club owner in Knoxville and said, “Hey, if you pay our rent every month, we’ll put a band together and play here every Thursday night.” He went for it, so we got our rent paid for a couple years. We put this country band together, and it turned out to be this wildly successful, really fun honky-tonk band. The only problem with it – as you might imagine with a name like The Whiskey Scars – was that it was not a band that was in any way sustainable. You can’t live like that for very long before things start to go very wrong for you.

After a couple years, we packed it up. Both of us had children during that time, so Jonathan and I came off the road. We took a couple years off and stayed at home with our kids, worked day jobs and at about the same time came back to touring and hooked back up. So, we came back to our touring career really engaged in trying to move forward in the business. It wasn’t just about having fun and being on tour; it was about making money and understanding marketing. It was also the first time in my life I had ever worked with promoters and publishers who were actually professionals. I started learning all these things from them about how you’re supposed to do things and what the protocols are.

It was really one awakening after another. And having moved back to Nashville, I was meeting people who were veterans in the business. And all of that awakening and learning that happened coupled with the fact that Jonathan and I were completely dissatisfied with the online software tools available to independent musicians that we sat down and decided to design one ourselves. Once we did that, initially, we got such a positive response from people in the space here in Nashville that we kept going with it. And eventually, it turned into a product we were able to raise a million dollars to develop, implement and market.

As touring artists, we decided to build something for ourselves, and then we realized we had something everyone could use. So, now we’re not touring anymore once again and are instead going to be traveling around promoting this new product we built.

Musician Coaching:

Obviously you had problems and experiences on the road that made you say, “I need to create something to fill this void.” And you built a product that solved these problems. Knowing what you know now, what would you have told yourself when you were just starting out playing music and touring that you’ve learned by building this solution?

MU:

The first thing I would’ve told myself is, “You need something that you can use to keep track of everything that’s easy to use and understandable.” That was my #1 problem. And each of the things I needed to keep track of was small, but they all added up to something big. For example, I needed to retain a list of every show I performed somewhere and have that accessible. And then, I needed to find a way to retain email addresses I collected at clubs. I also needed to have a way to put together a collection of every set list that I played at every club. They were all written down on pieces of paper, and I would lose them. Sometimes I would carry them around in my guitar case for a while and reuse them. But eventually, they’d get lost or I would spill a glass of wine on them. I would also lose receipts. I didn’t keep track of them, even though I had a glove box full of them. I also needed a list of how many records and how many t-shirts I sold at each show.

There was a lot of basic data keeping. And I didn’t have an understanding in my early 20s of how to use Microsoft Excel, FileMaker Pro or any of these file-keeping systems. They were tools that for me were really cumbersome and a pain in the ass to use. So, my solution was just not to keep track of anything. And it was so easy for me to justify it by saying, “That’s not what I do anyway. I’m just supposed to be an artist.” If I could talk to myself at 20 again and Artist Growth existed, I would say, “Yeah, you are an artist. And what you need is a tool that allows you to keep track of stuff and remain an artist and not have to learn how to use really fancy accounting software or a really fancy contact management system. You need a simple tool that’s easy to use and allows you to keep track of everything.”

What ends up happening is that after a certain amount of time, you do end up in a meeting with somebody who starts asking you questions:  “How many records did you sell last quarter? How many did you sell in the last two years? How much merchandise are you moving? How big is your mailing list?”

Musician Coaching:

How do you think things would’ve gone differently if you had these tools? Would The Whiskey Scars have gone somewhere else if you had access to that data?

MU:

I think we would’ve had the option to go somewhere different. There are always so many components that factor into whether or not a band is going to take the leap from being a concept that’s getting its feet wet on stage and in the studio to an actual act that’s invested in and becomes a business. That could be a lack of data or a lack of understanding, so you never get the meeting or the chance to meet with people who can take your career to the next level. But it could also be that your lifestyle isn’t sustainable or that you hate your drummer and it’s doomed from the beginning, or that you have a child.

It’s hard to say if The Whiskey Scars or any of my other bands, or even I as a solo artist in my mid 20s had been able to have access to Artist Growth, that I would’ve been the next John Prine. And of course, ultimately, you have to have the quality art to back it up.

Musician Coaching:

I find it interesting, because you guys are collecting data I never even thought of. How would somebody use every set list they ever had?

MU:

What there is now is live performance royalty registration, which is a real revenue stream for somebody just starting out. You can get $200 or $500 every quarter in the mail from your performing rights organization (PRO) for performing. But you have to submit those set lists. And you have to submit those set lists with venue data. Artist Growth has over 30,000 venues in the system already. So, there’s the venue data. Now you just need a set list and a way to submit it. And that’s what we built.

We’ve tried to take all the ways there exist to have a revenue stream and have created a data tracking and data entry system that will be really easy for people to use. And we want it to actually turn into money for people or to help them leverage a meeting or get to the next meeting with people. Of course, the art has to be there.

It all goes back to the art. All the producers and managers we talk to say over and over again, “It’s all about the song.” And it is all about the song, the record and the art. If that’s there, the data just reinforces that. You can have all the data in the world. But if the music is terrible and makes people want to turn their radio off, and you can’t sing, then the data doesn’t matter. But if you really have something, and you really believe in what you do and are on a journey to discover your voice and get better, and if the feedback you’re getting is positive and it’s something you love to do and that you are passionate about, Artist Growth’s tools can help you. Artist Growth helps that kind of person start to put together the information that’s necessary to jump from the concept band or the concept artist who might have an independent record and has played locally, to somebody who is actually able to make music their career and have a team of people that are going to support that career. All that data matters now, because the landscape has changed.

Musician Coaching:

You pretty much had me at “$200-$500 per quarter.” That’s pretty impressive. Explain to me how that works.

MU:

Live performance royalties are relatively new. But PROs collect these blanket licenses. They call it “licensing a venue.” They go out to all these venues – restaurants, bars, theaters, any establishment that plays music. They say, “You’re a business and you’re playing music in here, and entertaining your customers and guests is part of what brings in music and helps you make money. We represent the artists that make the music that helps you get business into your establishment. And since you’re using their art, which we represent, you need to pay us a fee to be able to do that.” So, the PROs collect all that money and distribute it out to the artists they represent.

BMI, for example, has over 400,000 artists that are affiliated with them. They collect money for all these licenses all year long from venues, big and small – restaurants, diners, coffee shops, as well as theaters, stadiums, etc. And now, with live performance royalties, what an artist that is affiliated with BMI does is send them the set lists they played at the venues that pay the licensing fees to BMI every year.

Musician Coaching:

And you guys have taken this to the point where all an artist’s songs are registered with Artist Growth, and that process is fairly automated?

MU:

Yes. What you do with Artist Growth is upload your catalog. You put your registered work catalog into Artist Growth, and from that, you’re able to create set lists from the songs. You just drag and drop, make a set list and the system automatically connects it to a date, a gig and a venue. And we have the venue data built into our system. So at the end of the night when the show’s done and you’re doing your close out, you just hit “submit.” It’s kind of like sending an email. But we take all that information and you can send it off to your PRO. Once you register your set lists this way, every quarter, you get paid by the PRO for these performances. Part of the money the venue has paid the PRO is to cover the cost of the performance you did the night you performed there, so you’re entitled to some of that money. They send you a check in the mail. It’s not a ton of money. But a couple hundred bucks here and there really matters when you’re at the beginning of your career and trying to make it.

Part of the spirit behind the platform is also helping artists understand the business they’re in. That’s why we have AGtv and a mentoring portal. We have experts that the general public has never had access to before providing information on a wide variety of subjects, including legal issues, contract negotiation, songwriting, production, engineering, etc. Artists can go to these people whose expertise has previously been under lock and key within the business for decades and watch videos with information on their phones or tablets from some of the best minds in the business. These industry people talk to them about how to position themselves and get ready to really go for it. They tell musicians how to sidestep landmines, make a call to a radio station that doesn’t know who they are – and to navigate a lot of other challenges like that. This information really matters to artists in the beginning, because they don’t know the protocol. So, we provide career management and career mentoring.

Musician Coaching:

I’m not even sure I would know how to call a radio station cold other than winging it, so that’s promising information.

MU:

Yes. And it’s not just information we put in there. You watch the channel and get one of the top radio promoters in the country telling you how to do it and how to follow up and when. And then the system will send you reminders saying, “Don’t forget to call that radio station back today,” so you don’t have to remember to do it yourself.

Musician Coaching:

And people can check all this out on the Artist Growth website?

MU:

Yes. You can sign up for everything right there. And once you have your account, you go to the Apple App store or the Android Market – depending on which mobile device you have – download the apps, and you’re off to the races.

Musician Coaching:

I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus, but there are a ton of artist services companies. The problem I think that’s most unanswered that you solve is the one attached to live performance royalty registration. Are there any other problems out there that your application solves that aren’t solved by the other sites out there – Nimbit, ReverbNation, etc.?

MU:

I think the main differentiator between our platform and those platforms is that those platforms mostly help with the distribution of content and the marketing and promotion of that content. I’ve personally used ReverbNation, and then I moved onto Nimbit. I’ve gone through several of these companies for my own personal career. And all reporting metrics that were available to me were based around the response to my marketing efforts. So, I had metrics for my email campaigns, metrics for my social media, metrics for the sales of the content that they digitally distributed for me. From a business and even a marketing standpoint, all this information was relevant. But what they didn’t have is a really integrated, streamlined system that allowed me to track my own personal data from my career on the road and details like royalties, licensing deals that I would do with a TV show, etc. They also didn’t offer me access to expertise that taught me how to get those opportunities, or once I had that opportunity, expertise that showed me how to leverage it into actual income. These services were just there to help me let people know I had a record or that I was going to go on tour and track the responses I got back.

And the information these other services provide is valuable and important. That’s why we don’t have digital distribution as part of Artist Growth or direct-to-fan marketing or widgets to put on your website. We don’t have website templates or an email client like ReverbNation has, because there’s already so much of it out there. What artists really need is to learn how to participate in the business side for their own career and then actually interact with the industry. They don’t need just another way to reach out to the fans. It’s very important to interact with fans, but artists also need to understand how to have a career in music and how to get in touch with people that can help them take that career to another level.

Musician Coaching:

I think that’s solid advice whether you’re using Artist Growth or not. Obviously you’ve provided a solution to help carry all this advice out – keep tabs on things, make sure everything is orderly, be aware of your time expenditures and where your money is coming from, etc.

MU:

Yeah. And there are a lot of people out there that don’t even know what a performing rights organization is. I talked to some friends of mine back in Knoxville that were asking about Artist Growth, and I was talking about live performance royalty registration, and I was rattling off PROs like BMI, etc. They didn’t even know what those were. And they didn’t know it was free for them to go affiliate with them or that all they had to do was pay a $25 registration fee and they could start getting checks. That blew their minds. It’s easy for me to know about it because I grew up in Nashville, which is a Mecca for the music business. But when you’re living in a suburb of Decatur, Georgia, or out there in some of those places on the West Coast you don’t necessarily know what an organization like BMI can do for you.

And that’s part of what we really wanted to do with the Artist Growth tools. We wanted people to really understand what all the opportunities are, even when you’re at the level where you’re technically an unknown artist. There are still opportunities for you to grow a business, way beyond just Facebook and YouTube. Quantifying where your career is at is so important. It’s important to artists, but it’s also important to record companies, publishers and managers. If you have the right information, they don’t have to guess what 10,000 YouTube views means in terms of a revenue stream. They can look at your revenue stream for the past six months or two years and say, “Look at this growth. I can take this to another level.”

It’s about hard data. And that’s where we’re headed in the entertainment industry. The Internet and technology has taken us to a world and a paradigm where data are so readily available that there’s no reason to not include them in the process.

Musician Coaching:

And how does it work for you guys on a business level? How do you make money as a business, and how much do you charge artists?

MU:

This was the biggest challenge for us when we were designing the platform, because for me, it was very important that this platform could scale. I wanted it go be valuable to a 12-year old sitting on his bed after doing homework with an iPad and his first acoustic guitar and trying to learn what it means to write a song. But I also wanted it to be valuable and useful for someone planning a large enterprise tour with multiple people on a team, multiple road teams out there working simultaneously. How do you build a software platform that scales all the way across the industry like that?
That’s how it got broken down into mentoring and management. A 12-year old doesn’t have much need for a financial and inventory and accounting management system, but he does have a need for mentoring and AGtv. What we’ve done is designed the system so that as your career grows, you can access bigger parts of the system. You can download the app from the Apple App Store for free. If you have an account with Artist Growth, you can just watch AGtv and just get the mentoring. And those channels can be 99 cents per month or $1.99 per month to subscribe to the library, where you can go in and access al the content.

If you want to buy into the whole system and subscribe to the entire thing and have the accounting, gig management and the smart scheduling management that has all the push-note integration, the search database, the AGtv, the quick sale and all that, it’s $4.99 per month flat for everyone. We wanted to keep it really cheap.

The way it scales from there is, depending on how big your team is, you can add other members to the account. You can do it in two ways. You can add members who are “read only” and don’t have access to all the financial and inventory data and contract details but can get set lists, schedules, tasks and to-do lists assigned to them and can report back with project details. Those accounts are 99 cents per member. Then, you can have an admin account added on. The way it works is that anyone else inside the system that has their own $4.99 account can be invited to be an admin of another account. So, if I was a manager and had ten bands, I would buy myself an account and all of them an account, then make myself an admin of all ten of them. Then I can manage all ten of them from a single place on my dashboard on my mobile device or computer. And then those bands can have those individual smaller members. You scale it out as much as you need. A whole management company could admin 600 artists from one account if they wanted to.

But if you’re a small band just starting out, you can pay $4.99 per month and have all members use the same login info to get in and out, as long as everyone is cool with everyone seeing all the information. Then as the business grows, and you’re hiring other people but don’t want them to have their finger in all your data, you can start adding on team members that have different permissions.

We didn’t want people spending money on features they didn’t need. So, if you don’t need accounting and inventory, you can just watch AGtv. As soon as you’re selling records and playing shows, get the $4.99 per month service and start giving people access so you can be a team. Then if you get signed to a management deal, add on an admin and let them have access. If you have to add on a road crew, you can add on some read-only members and distribute tasks for them.

Again,  use it to help you manage only where you are, then as you grow, the account can grow. The hope is that it’s cheap enough that anybody can use it.

For more information about Matt Urmy and his new platform for artists, visit the Artist Growth website. You can also follow the company on Twitter and Facebook.