• The RIAA will now count 100 on-demand streaming requests as equivalent to a downloaded single for purposes of certifying Gold and Platinum records. [RIAA]
• Record stores continue to morph into passion businesses owned and operated by music business veterans and super fans like Canada’s Frankie Nielson. After decades developing acts like Paul Weller and the Comsat Angels, he explains how he came to Steveston, Canada and opened the Beatmerchant Record Store. [Richmond News]
• NARM VP Bill Wilson talks about two of the music industry’s biggest current passions: “tip jars” and cars. [The Next Web]
• At age 81, Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman has grown passionate about mobile apps. [Columbus Dispatch/NYT]

• Chancius Drzewucki deconstruct’s Alex Day’s YouTube success. [Music Think Tank]
• Tony van Veen from CD Baby and DiscMakers explores nine music promotion strategies at the New Music Seminar. [DiscMakers]
• Are we at the point where a promotion and distribution deal from a clothing store can mean more than a traditional label deal? Ghost Beach takes over American Eagle’s Times Square billboard for two weeks. [MTV]
• Nashville readers: for less than $300, you can get schooled at Belmont University’s Music Startup Academy and Entertainment & Tech Law Conference, tomorrow. [SonicScoop]
• BMG’s consolidation means focusing on building a backlist of licensable music, not on reclaiming their former record label business. [Billboard]

• He’ll still be writing the indispensable Lefsetz Letter, but Bob Lefsetz will now contribute a new column to a revamped Variety. [Hypebot]
• Meet Markus Sargeant, the talent booker who helped discover Jeff Buckley and Coldplay. [Birmingham Mail]
• Streaming service usage matches radio usage among young listeners. [Deadline]
• Old-school music manager Peter Mensch would like to spank Justin Bieber. [Inquisitr]
• First sale doctrine applies to physical books and CDs, but probably not to digital downloads. [The Guardian]

• Subscriptions from Spotify, Rdio, and other “access services” helped the music industry hold its ground in 2012, according to an RIAA report that shows “flat” revenues. [The Australian]
• Ex-Dadager Matthew Knowles has feelings on his 2011 split from Beyoncé. The Sun is there. [BET]
• Is it ever okay to steal another band’s “perfect” name if they never released albums or toured? (Hint: No.) [LA Weekly]
• Music For Good lets bands funnel half their ReverbNation revenues to charity. [Indy Week]
• USA series Psych finds success by mixing music and social media. [Variety]

• Dalton Caldwell compares being a solo professional to touring by yourself as a musician in the early 2000s. I’ve seen this connection a lot lately, that creatives who would have started bands in the 90s are launching businesses instead during this decade. Expect a full essay on this in the next few weeks. [Dalton Caldwell]
• Speaking of touring by yourself, our friend Jenn Bostic just wrapped a UK tour that included some great live sets on Terry Wogan’s BBC2 show and on local radio shows across the country. More anecdotal evidence that it’s far easier to break an act in Europe, where tastemakers love promoting new music. I’m passionate enough about this story that I will actually link to the… [Daily Mail]
• Another homecoming story, from Galway singer-songwriter Julie Hawk. She’s more nervous about playing her hometown than about the 2+ years of gigs she cranked out in London and elsewhere in the UK. [Connacht Tribune]
• Mark Doyon’s essay on connecting with your natural audience echoes the journey I describe in Grow Your Band’s Audience. [Music Think Tank]
• David Hooper challenges you to stand out from the crowd and submit a really great press kit with CD—via postal mail. [Music Marketing dot com]

Have a story you’d like to see in the Daily Report? E-mail tips [at] spinme.com.

• Glenn Peoples suggests that the music business can learn a lot from the way the NCAA delivers live March Madness coverage. [Billboard]
• Brian Penick and Izzi Krombholz from The Counter Rhythm Group offer suggestions for musicians who want to maximize exposure at music conferences. [WCPO]
• Allentown nightclub Crocodile Rock faces a lawsuit over unpaid BMI music licenses. [The Morning Call]
• Steven Pressfield explores how artists and entrepreneurs attempt to impose order on their days. [Steven Pressfield Online]
• Seth Godin urges us to pitch new projects where they have the best opportunities to succeed. [Seth’s Blog]

• James Altucher asks Alex Day about how his YouTube-driven album beat Justin Timberlake on the UK charts. [TechCrunch]
• New European research shows that musicians shouldn’t worry too much about music pirates. [Ars Technica]
• Red Bull launches Amplifier, an accelerator designed to promote new music startups. [MarketingWeek]
• Steve Birkett suggests ways to add more personal touches to your social media presence. [Above the Static]
• Clive Davis helps NFL players prepare for music business careers after they leave the gridiron. [Oakland Raiders]

• Nashville’s music business community is gradually giving up Music Row addresses in favor of more affordable, functional office space. [The Tennesseean]
• Booking agent Tom Windish reflects on SXSW, where a few dozen of his over 600 acts played this year. [CultureMap]
• Berklee updates their music business salary survey, finding that compensation’s still all over the map for full time professionals. [Music Business Journal]
• After ten years, nobody’s figured out how to turn a profit on streaming music. [The Verge]
• Imagination Movers allege their former management “cannabalized” sales by favoring a rival client. [Times-Picayune]

• Cathy Pellow wants to change the relationship between managers and record labels, by bringing both functions under one roof. [Alarm]
• Nashville startup Artist Growth lands venture capital funding for musician-support apps. [Wall Street Journal]
• Next Big Sound measures music’s impact on the social web. [Forbes]
• What happens to the music business after radio? [The Vermont Cynic]
• Twitter gets into the music business by purchasing a startup. [SFGate]

I have a friend who is in a contract with a manager who she doesn’t even need and she’s trying to examine her options for getting out of it. I had a look at the document, which is 1.5 pages long and it seems like something she can get out of, not only because the guy is not fulfilling his obligations but because the wording of the document seems incomplete or faulty in a certain section. I’d like to forward the document to someone who can quickly tell me whether the contract is shaky enough for her to simply toss it aside.

With the caveat that I’m not a lawyer and that your friend should definitely seek legal advice, here’s how I see it:

No contract is ever permanent. In fact, a professional music management contract will contain specific terms and conditions for who can end the contract, when, and how. The contract should also contain a “sunset clause” that stipulates exactly how much a client will have to pay a manager over a fixed period of time to compensate them for work they’ve invested.

That sunset clause protects both sides. For instance, if I shepherd your career for three years and your record pops, I’m entitled to a piece of the success if you bounce to a larger management firm that takes you to the next level. But that doesn’t mean forever, more like 18 months. And compensation steps down from the usual 10-15%, usually in increments.

If your friend signed a deal without a sunset clause, or if the phrase “in perpetuity” shows up anywhere in the deal, she may not have had the right legal guidance at the time. But, no biggie. Again, it happens all the time.

In writing, preferably with the help of an attorney, your friend can terminate the agreement with a clear explanation of how the manager failed to live up to the expectations of their arrangement. Realistically, the manager’s only recourse here is to sue for damages, for breach of contract, or for lost revenue. Most of the folks I’ve known who operate this way would much rather stay out of court, and out of the headlines.

In my books, I wrote that you’ll need a good entertainment attorney long before you’ll need even a decent manager, and this is why. Call your local chapters of the Bar Association or the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for referrals to experienced entertainment attorneys near where you live.

If your friend’s strapped for cash, you can look for a local chapter of Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. Right now, your friend needs legal counsel who can draft exactly the kind of document she needs to end this agreement and protect her future earnings.

As I wrote in Music Management for the Rest of Us, your ideal music manager should be someone you trust and respect, and someone who respects you enough to take you through a long, transparent vetting process that involves partnership with each of your attorneys.

When spinme.com launched in 1997, we thought it would grow up to be Pitchfork. It hosted “Daily Digital Opinion,” J.F. Parnell’s album review mailing list, and our original discussion forums. What a precious logo we had when we launched:

While “J.F.” got headhunted away to a series of larger media companies, I chased conversations in our forums by musicians who wanted to learn how the Internet could help them grow an audience without the help of a manager or a major label. So I jettisoned the music reviews (something every SEO manager on the planet deserves to kick me over) and refocused the site around music marketing and creative development.

It’s been fifteen years since I first signed on to spinme.com. Having spent most of the summer cleaning up the database and getting the site ready for its next fifteen years, seven ideas struck me:

1. A band’s half-life remains about seven years.

David Hooper and I have probably spent days talking about how bands, like most relationships, evolve through seven-year cycles. The most obvious: April 8, 1962 until January 30, 1969. That’s the almost seven year period from the day the Beatles got signed by Parlophone Records until the day of their last public concert, on the roof of the Apple Records offices in London. By most accounts, those were probably seven of the most influential and productive years in the recorded history of music.

Yet, there’s another seven year period to which we don’t often pay attention. Back up to August 1956, the month that John Lennon formed The Quarry Men. It took seven years for John to meet Paul and for all the other pieces of the puzzle to fall into place. The most extraordinary thing about The Beatles isn’t what they did between 1962 and 1969. It’s that they came together and struggled through their artist development from 1956 to 1962, then still chose to take that second spin on the merry-go-round.

You have seven years before you get bored, your bandmates get bored, you run out of money, or your spouses kill you. And if you can make it to the end of your seven-year cycle with enough strength to do it all again, you have a shot. This site’s been around long enough for me to start getting messages from folks about to enter their third cycles as working musicians. They’ll be the first to tell you that they’re not rich and that this life isn’t easy. But they wouldn’t consider doing anything else.

2. Most musicians still hope someone’s going to make them a star.

Way more musicians end up on this website when looking for information about songwriting contest and record company scams—after they’ve already sent away their money. It’s our human nature to believe in fairy godparents. It’s easier to let someone tell you that it only costs $10,000 to get a record deal and guaranteed radio airtime than to hear the real feedback from critics with the power to push you toward making better music.

It’s cheaper than ever to buy airtime, to buy attention, and to buy audiences. When Grow Your Band’s Audience first hit shelves, some critics blasted me for suggesting an “inauthentic” tactic to pay talent buyers for risky gigs. What was controversial ten years ago has pretty much become standard operating procedure at the very best (read: remaining) rock clubs in the United States.

3. Few musicians admit they needed (or got) help to succeed.

Nobody likes hearing a musical origin story that says: “we got lots of hands-on help from smart people like Bob Baker and Tom Jackson so we could hone our skills into something you’d love.” We still like to think our pop stars emerged fully-formed and perfect from day one.

Even the popularity of shows like American Idol and Nashville Star hasn’t made a dent in our collective need for musical mythology. Nobody wants to hear how Lady Gaga spent years honing her craft and studying Andy Warhol’s playbook. Like that of the Beatles, her prologue matters little to her audience. You won’t see the years of work that lead to “overnight success.” Don’t let that fool you into thinking your own success will happen without spilling plenty of tears and blood.

4. Your song still sounds great on the radio.

There’s nothing like hearing your song squished down into a singularity over a heavily compressed FM radio signal, backed up by a DJ you don’t know who’s getting paid to say nice things about you. It’s such an alluring experience, it still drives many artists to spend lots of their own money on promotional campaigns that won’t ever help them convert radio listeners into paying ticket-holders. Only a handful of disc jockeys in the United States still have the power to do this, and most of them work at SiriusXM. The most successful artists I know have held out, allowing those tastemakers to find them instead of the other way around.

5. Audiences matter, platforms don’t.

Lest I sound like an old coot, I can tell you that I’ve lived through so many “industry-killer” technologies and platforms, they’ve all blended together into a single blob:

• Private bulletin boards on CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL
• MP3.com
• MySpace
• Facebook
• ReverbNation

Guess what? When I write this website’s 21st birthday post, we’ll have probably seen another dozen “essential” web platforms come and go. What remains the same is the need for artists to develop direct relationships with audiences willing to support them by showing up. Making a living making music means getting your fans off their comfortable seats and out into the world where they can interact with you, and with each other. Don’t believe anybody who tells you it can’t be done, especially as new scenes and subcultures emerge every year.

6. The smartest musicians I know maintain multiple bands (or brands).

When I started brainstorming the Zone Booking Strategy I outline in More Gigs Now, I wanted to find ways for musicians to spend far less money on hotels and gas without burning out their core audiences. Watching folks like Rhett Miller and Joe Pernice over the years, I’ve also gained an appreciation for artists who can maintain multiple creative identities. On a practical level, multiple personas let you develop overlapping audiences that don’t always compete with each other. While Lori and I sit in the center of the Rhett Miller/Old 97′s Venn diagram, audiences at those gigs are remarkably different. Bands only last for seven years because our tastes and our skills evolve. Side projects and a strong solo presence, when handled the right way, can keep bands from their usual violent breakups.

7. The experience matters as much as the song.

When I toured behind Grow Your Band’s Audience, I often showed a photo of the bathroom at CBGB’s and claimed that audiences don’t tolerate things that are nasty for very long. That’s why CBGB’s became so well known for breaking new acts. You had to be that good to get people to forgive the building’s inherent biohazards.

Every audience member experiences your music in a slightly different way, and it’s their experience they remember. That’s why television shows like Grey’s Anatomy and True Blood have impacted record sales: tying your song to a compelling experience can do so much more than weeks of repeated radio spins.

Richard Shindell’s song, “The Ballad of Mary Magdalen,” stays in rotation at my house because of what Lori and I experienced during a Cry Cry Cry show at the Keswick Theatre over ten years ago. We still remember sitting in Lori’s car, parked on a residential side street in Glenside, talking about what we had just seen on stage. Relatively people know the song or its writer, but nobody who was at the show that night will forget it.

Not the actual gig, but as close as YouTube will provide:

It’s time for spinme.com’s third ride on the merry-go-round.

If spinme.com were a band, it’d be time for its third lineup change or its second reunion tour. You’ve probably noticed that I spent the summer tidying up and highlighting some of the most crucial information on the site. (Had I instead focused on the most popular, you’d be seeing a lot more about American Idol and Rebecca Black.)

You’ll see new essays here focused on growing your audience, booking more gigs, and managing your music career. I’ll also answer (polite) questions from the mailbag. Occasionally, I’ll dive into popular culture for models of success (and failure) that you can use. Thanks for fifteen great years. Here’s to the next seven.

* The opportunity costs of recording are still too high. Even though it’s cheap and easy to lay down tracks, the focus and attention you need to produce something memorable takes lots of energy. If you’re going to get that focused for even a single day, why not lay down as many tracks as you can? They won’t all be perfect, but even a 3-song EP could get you three times as much revenue for the same day in the studio.
* The EP remains the minimum threshold for bargaining with taken buyers. Even though many fans still settle for buying one or two tracks online from a band they love, talent buyers want to hear how you might stretch a set together.
* A series of EPs builds a foundation for your branding and your merchandise strategy. A physical EP works more as a souvenir of a great show than as a recording. Craft an artifact with great packaging, and you’re building a mythology based on quality. String a few together in a short amount of time, and new fans will think you’re extremely accomplished.
* EPs are very spreadable. Lori has a habit of buying 5-6 EPs when we see a band age likes, show she can mail them out to her friends. For the same price as a major label album in a chain store, you can sell a bundle of EPs. It’s like getting paid to let your fans promote you.

As always, it’s important to balance frugality with craftmanship when planning your release. I never advise bands to go into debt when producing records, and I’m a fan of small runs (collectors’ editions!). Think about your release strategy as a 9-18 month timeline, so you always have something new to talk up, plus stuff you’re working on.

Does this all mean I think you shouldn’t work on an album. No. If that’s where your passion lies, and you have the songwriting and production chops to pull it off, go for it. Just remember that audiences’ biggest criticism of musicians over the past two decades has been the lack of depth on most albums. If you’re not ready to compete with the Arcade Fire, don’t sweat it. Remember that the Beatles were pretty much singles-oriented for the first 2/3 of their career, and they turned out okay.

Photo by Thomas Hawk, under Creative Commons License.

It dawns on me that the music business went through this trend a few decades early. Our leaderboards? Billboard, R&R, SoundScan…

Except now, thanks to digital distribution and market fragmentation, our scoreboards look a lot more like the back pages of the Wall Street Journal than the leaderboards at the Masters. Digital charts change daily, so does it mean the same to be “#1″ now as it did then? Plenty of strong companies have stock prices that will never land them a feature on CNBC, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to close.

If you’re going to start keeping score, try using some of the metrics that will really determine whether you get to keep making music for a living:

* Number of fans on your mailing list
* Number of tickets sold to your next gig
* Number of gigs on your upcoming calendar

And, unlike games where you’re competing against someone else, all you have to do to succeed is to keep beating your own high score.

Photo by Flickr user joyosity, under Creative Commons License

The other day, a colleague asked if I’d ever consider getting back into the label business. Remove the fact that I’m busy with about eight other projects, and I still struggled to come up with a clear way to express the kind of value I could add if I launched an indie label in 2012.

However, after rolling the idea around overnight, I settled on a few reasons why a tightly-run, artist-focused music label could still succeed in the 2010s. After all, I’d never counsel an artist to sell their master recordings (still a standard industry practice), which was the reason why we dismantled Handwritten. (At the time, securing those copyrights was the only way to keep a small label viable. We didn’t have the heart to go through with the deals on the table.)

1. Relieve artists of “promotion and distribution” duties. It doesn’t sound like much work to manage a CD Baby account, but all the fringe “stuff” involved in actually selling albums and MP3s can eat away at an artist’s creativity. A successful indie label handles all the e-commerce and wholesale fulfillment issues on an artist’s behalf, in a way that amplifies fan service.

2. Cultivate in-house production and session talent. Hearing John Oates talk about all the cross-pollination of Philly artists making cameos on each others’ records in the 60s and 70s reminded me that a handful of great labels still do this really well. Signing to an indie label today should feel like gaining admission to a society of peers, ready to help each other succeed. (See: Mumford & Sons.)

3. Curate a stream of “modal” releases. Saddle Creek probably does this better than any label right now, just as 4AD and Mammoth did in the 80s and 90s. A curator-driven label can create a meta-fanbase that carries support across multiple acts. Atlantic had this mojo in the 50s and 60s. Wouldn’t it be exciting if they found a way to get it back?

So if I actually lost my mind and launched a record label in the near future, I’d make sure it hit all three of those points. What else do you think would define the successful labels o tomorrow? Tell me in the comments.

Photo by Steve Hardy, under Creative Commons License.

In front of an audience of industry veterans and aspiring students from Temple’s communications program, Oates revealed some candid details about his perspective on the past, present, and future of the music business. Five moments stand out:

1. The album’s dying. Oates acknowledged that audiences no longer invest the time it takes to absorb a whole album, admitting that splitting up the album into two sides during the LP era made it easier for listeners to digest a string of connected songs. Even though that sounds discouraging artistically, the shift frees up musicians to focus on pouring their energy into recording powerful singles instead of weak and watered-down albums. A single bad track can lead to poor reviews and lackluster sales, while a string of “hot” EPs can build real audience support over time, Oates said.

2. Embrace support wherever you find it. Oates recalled how early support for Hall & Oates singles from R&B radio in Ohio spread across the nation, enabling them to become what he called “the first modern R&B crossover act.” A traditional music marketing campaign probably wouldn’t have targeted specialty radio this way, but this grassroots support gave them the foundation to keep making records.

3. Don’t spend too much money making a record. Oates joked that the entire budget for his album was under $30,000, and that half of that was spent on hotel rooms in Nashville. While Oates remarked that he’s in the desirable position of having the means to self-fund the recording, he reminded the audience that working out songs and arrangements in pre-production can save a significant amount of money compared to projects that “evolve” in the studio.

4. Mastery of your craft makes recording so much easier. On Mississippi Mile, Oates hired a producer to enforce a “Dogme 95″ recording style. (It’s not unlike what we used to do at World Cafe in the 90′s.) The rules: lay down the entire album in under a week, with no more than two takes on any track. Recruiting experienced engineers and musicians may have cost more “per hour,” but enabled the team to wrap up recording in less than a week.

5. Never surrender your master recordings. Oates warned emerging musicians in the audience to refrain from signing record deals that include copyright assignments. Although he intended to sell his new album “out of his trunk,” a chance meeting with an executive from Warner Nashville opened up a conversation about a new model for record labels. Taking “P&D” to a new level, Oates’ arrangement with Warner focuses the label’s efforts around promotion and distribution. The label fronts the cost of promoting the new album through its in-house team, but Oates retains ownership of his masters. When tracks start selling on Tuesday, both sides win.