By the late 1980s, MTV’s programmers weren’t content with scattershot ratings, so they experimented with original series and specialty programming blocks. Today, MTV’s harshest critics blast Jersey Shore and The Hills as having nothing to do with rock and roll, but each one of these groundbreaking series dealt with similar complaints:

#10: The State

In the early 1990s, MTV experimented mixed music videos with short comedy segments starring Ben Stiller and Alex Winter. With the premiere of The State, MTV flipped the formula to emphasize comedy, even though popular music pervaded the entire show. The NYU-based group managed to put Sid and Nancy on Pyramid, stage an Eastern Bloc variety show (that got its own spinoff), and chronicle a porcupine race.

#9: House of Style

Before fashion correspondents covered the runways on E!, MTV News spun its own style features into a newsmagazine that followed supermodels and designers around the world. Cindy Crawford hosted the original series for six years, presenting segments that analyzed how the fashion industry impacted social awareness as well as style consciousness. The series drew controversy for its examination of eating disorders in the modeling business.

#8: Total Request Live

When viewers complained that MTV had stopped playing music videos, programmers launched two series: Carson Daly’s countdown Total Request and the manic talk show MTV Live. Welding both shows together at MTV’s new Times Square studios in 1998 launched a decade of pop culture influence for TRL. The show’s popularity coincided with a boom in boy bands and teen queens, with TRL becoming world headquarters for fans of Christina, Britney, and Justin.

#7: Jackass

In 1999, struggling actor Johnny Knoxville recorded a series of bizarre stunts for a feature article in a skateboarding magazine. In the pre-YouTube era, Knoxville’s crazy videotapes circulated across the country until MTV offered the Jackass crew a permanent home—and access to professional first aid technicians. The show has spawned its own circle of celebrities, including Steve-O and Bam Margera, and a third Jackass feature film is in the works.

#6: MTV Unplugged

Originally showing up on the schedule in late 1989, MTV Unplugged offered a mellow escape into New York’s folk scene, with acoustic performances by some of the channel’s most popular stars. Paul McCartney’s release of his episode’s set as a live album turned Unplugged into an essential tour stop during the 1990s. Nirvana’s 1993 Unplugged episode became one of Kurt Cobain’s final television appearances.

#5: Remote Control

Ken Ober helmed MTV’s daily celebration of television’s loudest genre: the game show. Contestants didn’t always realize that a wrong answer could get them literally ejected from a recliner through a hole in “Kenny’s” basement wall. Players lucky enough to win the trivia competition found themselves strapped to a Craftmatic bed or to the “Wheel of Jeopardy” for the bonus round. Loony theme rounds featured up-and-coming comedians, including Denis Leary, Colin Quinn, and Adam Sandler.

#4: Liquid Television

MTV sucker-punched casual, late-night viewers by melting popular music videos into Liquid Television’s opening credits. A few seconds of “Love Shack” morphed into the first appearances of Aeon Flux, The Head, and Dog-Boy. Mike Judge not only debuted Beavis & Butthead on the series, he also screened the animated short that would evolve into Office Space.

#3: 120 Minutes

In 1986, just about the only place American audiences could catch a glimpse of R.E.M., The Smiths, or The Cure was on late Sunday night, when MTV programmed two hours of alternative music videos. By the time legendary host Dave Kendall arrived in 1989, alternative had practically taken over college radio. And with the world premiere of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 120 Minutes helped modern rock conquer mainstream audiences.

#2: The Real World

MTV’s reality shows, especially standouts like The Osbournes and Jersey Shore, owe everything to The Real World. Starting with the New York season in 1992, the series broke documentary boundaries while introducing now-common devices like “The Confessional.” Third season cast member Pedro Zamora captured America’s attention by sharing both his same-sex marriage and his struggle with AIDS.

#1: Yo! MTV Raps

In August 1988, MTV brought the culture of freestyles and mixtapes to Middle America with the premiere of Yo! MTV Raps. Hosts Fab 5 Freddy, Doctor Dré, and Ed Lover captured classic interviews and performances while chronicling the sound and the style of hip hop. The groundbreaking show even engineered its own demise: the rap music it championed became so dominant in the mainstream, there was little reason to keep it as a standalone programming block.

Over the past few months, I’ve seen a huge surge of interest in my third book, Music Management for the Rest of Us. It could be that a bunch of folks are thinking about pursuing music industry careers, in the wake of crazy layoffs all over the United States. But it’s also likely that more independent musicians are thinking about building their success teams by training trusted friends and family members to help grow their audiences.

That’s why I’m so excited about this week’s special announcement.

Next month, I’m going to launch an eight-week “boot camp” for beginning music management professionals. I’ve been spending the last few months taking the ideas from my Music Management book and thinking about ways to develop some of the most crucial skills that someone would need to take on this important role for an artist.

Music Management Boot Camp participants will meet with me once per week, by phone, for eight weeks. During each of the first seven sessions, we’ll discuss how to develop a specific skill. I’ll even recommend some reading and assign some “homework” to drive each point home. The eighth week is about setting up an action plan to deliver meaningful results for your artist. We’ll follow up again ninety days later to check in on your progress.

If you’re self-managed, this course will help you learn how to look at your career through the eyes of a seasoned manager. And if you’re new to the business, you’ll learn how all seven of these skills trump experience and connections when it comes to getting things done for your clients. (Hint: they’re the same skills Brian Epstein used to help the Beatles — even though he was a retail manager only a few months before they met.)

There are only TWELVE seats available for this course, so I suggest you act fast. If I offer this again, it won’t be until the fall. Since I haven’t been able to open up any personal coaching appointments, this is one of the rare opportunities for us to get to work together on your music career in 2010.

Class starts on March 16, but these reservations WILL sell out sooner than that.

Visit our special Music Management Boot Camp website for all the details.

I hope we get to work together this Spring!

It seems like the music journalism community has decided that this is the week they can finally pile on Taylor Swift. In the past 36 hours, I’ve read headlines about her “career-ending” Grammy performance, bloggers and columnists have called for her to hand back the statues (not just the one that broke) or retire altogether from the music business.

Bitter, much?

Three things strike me as important about this debate:

1. It’s not like someone suddenly threw her on the stage and realized, “oh, no, she can’t sing!” Taylor’s team understands that the power of an organic live performance holds far more sway with her audience than anything inauthentic. When Lori and I watched the Grammycast, we noted that she probably should have sung an octave lower, but we gave her credit for taking a shot. Her fans “get” the courage it takes to turn Autotune off during a telecast that makes Jamie Foxx sound like a robot.

2. Grammys are awarded for production, not for live performance. It’s incredibly brave to get up and sing in front of The Industry without auto-tune, especially in an environment where “being pitchy” has become an American Idol catch phrase. It cracks me up that so many people are calling for her Grammys to be rescinded because Stevie Nicks sounded so much better than her on stage. Hell, Stevie Nicks could have made Beyonce sound bad.

3. Doesn’t it seem disingenuous that artists should penalize each other for taking risks? If Pink had fallen off that trapeze, I’m sure someone would have been talking about how her lack of acrobatic skill negates her musical talent. Lady Gaga sitting across from Elton John was a surprise, but not a huge risk: they have essentially the same career trajectory. Being accused of “not being country enough” then rolling out with a hootenanny arrangement of your biggest pop hit with one of rock’s sharpest singers — that’s a risk.

One of the central tenets of Grow Your Band’s Audience is that there’s an audience for anything. Being “good” or “bad” is just subjective. “Having fans that sustain you” vs. “not having fans” is really the differentiator in today’s market. Crafting entertainment that engages a specific audience is what will propel your career forward. Even if Taylor Swift doesn’t hold on to the overwhelming amount of popular attention she has now, the teens that have embraced her album now will be the adults that support her on tour in twenty years.

Two trends explain this. First, American pop culture has become very much about tearing down the things that you don’t personally like. It’s the “awesome/sucks” phenomenon. Second, I think there’s still a “zero sum game” fear that someone like Taylor Swift garners attention that could be lavished on someone else. Again, it doesn’t matter. If you define “success” as being able to quick your day job and play music full time, you have “made it.” At that point, playing the Grammycast is just gravy.

Everyone I know has a newfound respect for P!nk. Apparently, she’s been doing the wire act from last night’s Grammy Awards as an encore in her live set for some time now. That it was the standout moment in the telecast says a lot about what the music business has to do to attract and retain fans.

It’s not just about having a great song or a great look. It’s about transporting your audience to another place. In our hyper-connected society, what are you doing to get your audience away from Twitter, away from Facebook, and away from their friends long enough to actually pay attention to what you’re doing? So many bands I’ve seen in the last few years still struggle and strain to be heard over the din of a bar crowd that’s more interested in their own conversations than to hear the music they apparently paid to see.

That ties back to the undercurrent of chatter going on in many of the Academy’s chapters. I’m a member of the Philadelphia Chapter, and outside of New York and Los Angeles, the chapters work very hard to build community, launch careers, and advocate for arts education. Those are the reasons I remain a long term supporter (and member) of the Recording Academy. But casual observers often see the Academy linked directly to the efforts of the RIAA to cripple file sharing.

In so many ways, that’s sad, because the members of the Academy are personally interested in so much more. Many of us recognize that you’ve got to create content worth paying for and experiences worth paying for to justify an audience’s patronage. The vast majority of artists have already embraced the idea that collecting cash for album tracks is just the tiniest fraction of your potential revenue stream. A BitTorrent of Pink’s performance is nothing like seeing her live, and that’s the kind of focus artists require to make money in this environment.

That’s a shame, because Portnow has done so much to refocus the Academy around education and outreach. It’s sad when he uses the stage as a soapbox for the industry’s anti-piracy campaign. In the middle of a recession, here’s a guy, standing in front of an arena full of folks who can afford tuxedos and Cristal, complaining that the people in the room aren’t getting paid enough. Great way to build rapport.

Still, Portnow’s always going to be lightyears ahead of his predecessor, Michael Greene. The membership practically ran him out of town on a rail when we discovered that only about 10% of MusiCares donations were actually going to help sick artists. (Portnow has largely fixed this, though the outlay on MusiCares events would still make some of my friends in the non-profit community weep.) And that’s not even scratching the surface of Greene’s alleged ethics violations, accusations of sexual harassment, and my personal beef that he pretty much got the Grammys kicked out of New York permanently.

Overall, I’m happy about what Portnow’s done, and I was really impressed with last night’s telecast. It’s the first Grammy show in years that was technically tight and consistently engaging. If you’re still upset about who actually won the awards, then you can blame me and the other 10,000 voting members who are admittedly a little behind the curve when it comes to defining “what’s good.” Portnow’s LA crew did a great job rolling out the equivalent of Oscar “screeners” so voters could actually listen to all of the nominated tracks and albums this year.

Some of my highlight moments from last night:

• Had you told me in 1994 that we would be buying tickets for a Green Day Broadway musical in 2010, I would have advised you to step away from the bong. Yet, here we are.
• Cheers to Hillary Scott for a quick recovery after getting trapped by a scrim during Lady Antebellum’s performance.
• I grew concerned that facemasked will.i.am was going to go all supervillain and use Beyonce’s riot patrol to take the Staples Center hostage.
• I’m pretty sure most CBS affiliates went to bars-and-tone the moment Eminem got on the stage. How much longer before creative and financial pressures force the telecast onto cable, like the Miss America Pageant and Monday Night Football?

This London Times profile of singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson deserves a little more than just a slot on this week’s “interesting links” list. A few slices of Michaelson’s life indicate the direction that savvy working musicians will need to take in order to make real money over the next decade.

The piece lingers on the fact that Michaelson developed her initial audience without the support of a major label. By focusing on filling gigs instead of worrying about airplay and shelf placement, she was able to develop an audience that sustained her early work.

Connecting with musical supervisors led to the next breakthrough: placement in commercials, films, and television shows. Until a few years ago, this kind of song placement was usually an afterthought for most artists and labels. Today, it can be the foundation for a career. Michaelson shrugs off accusations of selling out:

I have my morals; I’ve turned down a lot of money for commercials for things I don’t want to be associated with. So I’m not like, ‘Everybody, take my songs, give me your money.’ But if it’s for some sweater commercial, or in the background of a romantic scene in a TV show, who the f*** cares? Get over it.

The solid fan base and the revenue from those song placements allows Michaelson to be more adventurous in her writing and recording today. Read the full article to learn how all the pieces of her strategy came together.

Natalie Gelman’s recapping some of her favorite Seth Godin books on her blog, and relating what she’s learned to her experience as a New York City street musician.

One of the most important things Godin said in the book for me was: “You have to believe your own story.” If you aren’t sure that you’re the best emo-folker or the best renaissance troubadour from far, far away how are you going to keep striving to be that and gain your fans trust and love.

I wrote about developing a vision of your perfect audience and your perfect gig in Grow Your Band’s Audience. Natalie takes those ideas even further in her description of how she landed some great showcase gigs by clearly defining her image, her sound, and what she represents to her audience.

Go read her post!

Hello Mr.Taylor,

I hope everything is going well with you.

I found your website on google and I’m looking for someone to help me with some music management advice. Could you?

I’ve been in NYC for almost 3 years, and I’m from Brazil. I graduated in Psychology in Rio de Janeiro, but I worked as a music therapist and music production for 4 years. Since I came to NYC, I’m searching some courses and universities in music management, but I can find one. Maybe you can help me.

Thanks for your time!

I’m looking to hearing from you.

L.B.

L,

While I’m not convinced that a specific music management college degree is the very best option for everyone, one of the best programs in the country is actually an online learning experience offered by BerkleeMusic. They’ve got access to the very best instructors, and you can’t go wrong by plugging yourself into Berklee’s alumni network. You can access classes from anywhere in the world, whether you’re in NYC or visiting your friends back in Brazil. Make sure you sign up for Bob Baker’s marketing course.

[Question for the mailbag? E-mail Joe.]

Heather Nolte remarks that Twitter’s latest usage numbers show a decline in active users, from 23 million down to 20 million. Whether the novelty has worn off for some passive users of the service or whether the entire social media trend has hit a plateau remains to be seen.

Still, as I wrote about yesterday, too many artists rely far too heavily on social media as the foundation of their music business growth strategy. Keep an eye on the next big wave of technology users: kids. Find a child in your family between the ages of 11-15. Chances are, they’re not on Twitter, and they don’t have any desire to be. They’ve already created their own social network, using text messages or e-mail. Are you getting yourself ready to promote your music in a market where a growing number of potential audience members don’t leave a search trail?

Artists tend to live on the bleeding edge of technology and innovation, since that’s part and parcel of the job. Audiences, however, tend to lag. Building an audience development strategy that doesn’t rely solely on social media is critical to your success as an independent musician.

Yes, I’m still working on the draft of “Grow Your Band’s Audience,” version 4.0. (Side note: if you buy the PDF version now, you will get a free upgrade to 4.0 when it launches.) One of the things I find funny about the process is that folks have asked me for years why I didn’t update the book sooner to include lots of tips about social media.

I covered that ground somewhat in “More Gigs Now.” And I hear echoes of what I wrote five years ago in Zach Pentel’s dismissive comments about MySpace Music in this Mashable writeup of music business social media tools:

“Since MySpace Music has failed to show much staying power…”

A few years ago, bands were turning their entire web presence over to MySpace. Today, we spend a lot of time talking about Facebook. And there’s already an undercurrent about Twitter.

Yes, these are all useful tools, but they aren’t the best tools at actually getting folks out to shows and opening their wallets to support your music. As I wrote in MGN, talent buyers get really suspicious when you have a lot of social media friends, yet you have little to no track record of getting thirty or more audience members out to a live gig.

Social media friendships tend to stay in the social media space. While mobile devices have helped spur meetups and tweetups, we may never be able to rely solely on social media to get fans to gigs. It’s easy to turn down a gig invitation via tweet. It’s much harder when you have cultivated real relationships and express how you are relying on your audience to help you get to the next level by getting out to a show.

Pentel covers five online resources, which are all really cool. Of the five, one stands out as a proven way to build real support for your music career: FanBridge. It’s great to hear that they’re “in the black,” since they provide really strong contact management tools for musicians at a fraction of the cost of enterprise service. Plus, they’re really nice people who can help you with support and ideas.

(Disclosure: I have used FanBridge on and off over the years for side projects, and have occasionally posted an affiliate link. For the purposes of this piece, links will send you straight to their homepage.)

Spend some time each month exploring new social media tools, but don’t get lulled into a false sense that there’s a magic online bullet that will fill the seats at your next club gig. Instead, use those tools to build relationships: find house concert and booking opportunities through Twitter and Facebook, instead of just trying to race the rest of the bands in your scene to the largest buddy list.

It wasn’t that long ago that we tried to measure bands’ success by the number of AOL Instant Messenger buddies they collected.

“The way this place is working, the landlord business may be more profitable than the bar.”

That’s the critical quote from an accountant interviewed for a CNN profile on a relatively new bar in Detroit, P.J.’s Lager House.

Owner P.J. Ryder opened up the place two years ago after running a record store for fifteen years, then working in the real estate field. He told CNN that he knew a music-oriented club would be a tough way to make a living, and the numbers he shares shed some light on why the talent bookers you’re talking to really want to know whether you can deliver a big crowd:

• The bar’s monthly lease is $3,000. In most cities, that number is dramatically higher.
• P.J. spends $7,000 per month on alcohol. Factor in the beer specials, like $1 PBR tallboys, and you can start to see why he needs big crowds to build profit at the bar.
• $26,370 has to come through the bar to keep the place open, because P.J. uses the cash flow from live acts to pay musicians, techs, and bouncers. He usually charges a $5.00 cover and pays bands $4.50, which is surprisingly generous. Most clubs I have worked with lean closer to 50/50.
• On nights when P.J. doesn’t charge a cover, bands get 25% of the bar sales. That might actually be a bigger win for most acts, even though it strains the club’s profit margin.

When you’re trying to book clubs, are you really thinking about how you can partner with your talent buyer? Remember that few clubs have “foot traffic” or built-in audiences anymore. Even the team of business students that wrote P.J.’s business plan assumed that bands would bring lots of audience members to the club.

If a talent buyer takes too many risks that don’t pan out, the club shuts down.

Yes, I have heard plenty of stories of club owners that love to gouge bands or deflate door numbers. But I know of way more club owners who are really in it because they love the lifestyle and they want to have fun. Help those club owners make money by delivering a solid audience to your gigs, and you’ll develop partnerships that will sustain your music career for years.

Some things show up in four year cycles, like the Winter Olympics, leap years, and complaints about Talent2K.

In the past few weeks, I’ve found myself again facing a stack of mail asking whether Talent2K is “legit,” whether they’re “reformed,” or whether they can deliver on the promise of a record deal.

Contributors to spinme.com have been writing about Talent2K since the very first iteration of this site, over a decade ago. Back in 2003, John Foxworthy wrote a guest editorial summarizing the findings of his investigation into the company. We followed up with some more details in a 2004 post, and our comments and bulletin boards have perennially surged with new readers looking for information about this A&R outfit.

Here’s how it works:

• Bands “sign” with Talent2K, an independent A&R company, who guarantees the offer of a record deal within a fixed period of time. During that time, T2K representatives “shop” a band’s demo to major labels. The contract promises a full refund if T2K fails to procure an offer.
• Usually days before the refund clause kicks in, T2K brings back an offer from one of a collection of affiliated labels. The deals we have heard about all require acts to front some of their own money for production or distribution expenses. These upfront costs often amount to thousands of dollars.
• Bands who turn down the deal end up losing the fee they paid Talent2K. After all, the contract only said they’d get you an “offer,” not an actual deal. And the contract didn’t stipulate which label you’d be hearing from. (They didn’t promise that you’d get signed to Warner or Sony, after all.)
• Bands actually forging ahead with the record deal often report back to us that they hit unsurmountable obstacles in the recording or production process. Bands have to pay their own expenses to travel to Los Angeles to record in an expensive studio–all stipulated by the record deal, and all requiring upfront expenses.
• The handful of recording artists that have made it to the point of completing an album under these deals now have to market and sell their CDs without help from the label, unless they’re willing to pay for an approved publicist. In some cases, I have heard of bands actually failing to receive the product they ordered. (As if nobody actually expected them to get that far.)

Is Talent2K a “scam” or a “ripoff?”

That depends on your definition. Legally, they provide the service that they offer. They shop records and they find record deals. But are they really doing anything you couldn’t do on your own, for far less money?

Their website no longer lists the “record deal” offer they’ve made in the past, so I have no idea if they still actually put that out there, or what they charge. Let’s look at what’s listed under their “limited offer” promotional package, for $995:

• 40 submissions to forty record labels
• 40 submissions to forty of the top management firms
• create a biography and press kit
• create a website for your project

Here’s what it really takes to accomplish the same net result:

• Order 80 nice Kraft folders from Staples, outer envelopes, eighty glossy headshots and eighty one-page fact sheets at Kinkos ($160)
• 100 CD’s in slimline cases from DiscMakers ($164)
• Convince a Facebook friend to write/design your one-sheet and CD sleeve (at least lunch at Taco Bell, no more than dinner at Morton’s.)
• Stamps ($173)
• Design and host a professional website. (Bandzoogle’s service does a great job for $15/month.)

Instead of spending $995 on your label outreach, you can do it yourself for a few hours of sweat equity and $512, and you will get EXACTLY the same result: no nibbles from any legitimate label that wants to offer you a deal.

That’s because NO A&R person is looking in their slush pile for acts anymore. They’re talking to club owners about who’s packing small venues. They’re watching chatter on bulletin boards and asking MP3 bloggers what they should be hearing. They’re looking at iTunes charts for bands with sales figures from out of nowhere. They’re looking for an audience that’s already been built.

They are NOT looking for acts in any pile of mail delivered by the United States Postal Service.

The website promised we’d be stars!

But, wait! Talent2K’s web site says that they have received millions of hits in the past year, and that they are one of the biggest music related websites on the net.

I call shenanigans.

spinme.com is definitely NOT one of the biggest music related websites on the net. Yet, even in a year where I have been wrapped up in book projects and posting only sporadic updates, we get many more unique visitors, according to respected third-party tracking service compete.com:

Not a fair comparison? At least they beat me during the month I screwed up the DNS records and knocked the site offline for, like, a week. But let’s stack both our sites up against a real tastemaker, like the folks at Pitchfork:

Won’t it cost less if seasoned professionals do all the work?

In 2003, it still cost thousands of dollars to record and master an album. Today, you can do it for far less, especially if you connect with fellow artists through communities like Just Plain Folks.

If you hand over thousands of dollars to anyone claiming even the most spurious connections to established artists in the hope that you will become an overnight sensation, you are simply telling the universe that you don’t like having money.

There is no company on earth that can take your band and a two thousand dollar investment and make you a star. Period.

Only you have the power to do that, and you don’t need to charge yourself that much.

If you feel really compelled to spend $512 on your career this month, I have compiled a shopping list:

• Get the Musicians Publicity Bootcamp collection that Bob and Ariel made, for $245.
• Buy Jay Frank’s awesome new book about how to write songs that radio programmers and A&R folks will love, for $25
• Hire Madalyn Sklar to conduct an interview of your band, which also includes a post on her blog (also read by more people than T2K), for $50.
• Get five independent, unbiased reviews of your press kit and demo from experienced journalists from ReviewYou for $150.
• And, of course, buy all four of my books for $67. (Why should my friends get all the love?)

Buying all this stuff won’t get you a record deal, either, but it will make a heck of an impact on growing an audience that can actually help you make your money back.

It’s hard to read the tea leaves on this one, since this company has survived and evolved through things far worse than this:

CEO Greg Scholl is leaving the company, which is also laying off one-fifth of its team. News reports and press releases indicate that this is simply a “cost-cutting” move. As The Orchard moved into digital distribution and away from the brick-and-mortar fulfillment business, it became more dependent on automated systems instead of physical inventory.

You don’t need quite as many people to manage a database as you do a warehouse.

Derek Sivers posted a little experiment.

In it, a band that was selling its CD for $15 at gigs asked the audience to come see them at the merch table. “Pay what you want,” they said, “and if you can’t pay anything, we’ll send you home with a CD for free.” That way, they reasoned, everyone would go home with a memento that they could share with other potential audience members.

The band’s revenues shot from $300 per gig to $1,200 by changing from a sales pitch to a deeper emotional connection.

What interests me is not just the strategy, but the comments that folks posted on Derek’s site. It didn’t take long before band started piling on:

“I can’t afford to give CDs away for free.”

“My band buys discs from our label for $6. This won’t work.”

“I only play to 100 people, tops.”

So many people read Derek’s post and jumped to conclusions, believing that:

• Nobody would actually buy their CDs.
• This strategy required them to give the bulk of their CDs away for free.
• Too few people come to gigs for this strategy to work.
• We don’t want fans who can’t afford to pay.

Derek wasn’t encouraging anyone to actively give away anything–the experiment is about challenging yourself to make an emotional connection with an audience that leads to real interaction and a chance to grow your audience.

Instead, we see a lot of folks who refuse to even try something new or to measure their results in a scientific way. Success in this business requires a willingness to try controlled experiments and to see what actually delivers results. If you stick to the same old strategies, you’ll never grow beyond the handful of folks at your gigs right now.

If you don’t see yourself as worthy of an audience, your audience will reflect your opinion. If you don’t think your CD is worth paying for, neither will your audience. And if you see yourself “capping out” at a few dozen fans, expect to see half that number at your gigs. This goes beyond attracting an audience. It speaks to building a magnetic presence that causes your audience to want to experience you: on record, online, and live on stage.

Yes, you will occasionally stumble and make some mistakes. Some of those mistakes will cost you time and/or money. And if you really measure the results of each move you make, you’ll eventually hit on the formula that works for you.

Otherwise, you’ll run out of steam, anyway.

Lots of friends and colleagues from abroad have hyped up Spotify to me, and I don’t doubt that it’s an awesome service. As we hear more about Spotify, especially involving mobile apps and in-car services, I fear we might be getting ahead of ourselves. Specifically, I worry that users’ fervor for the system overlooks the core reason why similar concepts have failed in the U.S.: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The law was written during a time before iPod, in an era where it still seemed plausible that record companies could wield enough power to prevent users from finding content on demand without owning it first.

WFUV has a great, concise summary of the hoops broadcasters and webcasters must put themselves through in order to comply with the law:

• No on-demand content.
• Bizarre restrictions on the number of songs you can play from a given artist or album within any rolling three hour window.
• No published playlists of your shows if they’re archived, since users could conceivably find a song they want to hear within the archive of your show.
• Podcasts of music shows? Oh, hell no.

And this has nothing to do with royalties, either. It has to do with how the DMCA interprets copyright and ownership in the work. To get around it, you need to get a signed release from every known and prospective owner of the copyright in a recording. Usually, that’s the record label. But, with convoluted contacts from the past decade, it doesn’t surprise me to see managers, artists, songwriters, compilation producers, recording engineers, and other lienholders in the mix.

For a service like Spotify to work in the United States, they’ve got to get all of those parties to sign off on exemptions and exceptions to DMCA. Otherwise, you’ve got another version of Pandora. (And, while Pandora’s cool, nearly every limitation of the service can be traced directly to DMCA.)

I’m sick of articles that contain the phrase, “during these tough times.” (Sick of writing them. Sick of reading them.)

Many of my contacts in the booking business have freaked out about receipts this year. When jobs are on the line and gas prices rise above $2 per gallons, live entertainment is one of the first things that gets slashed from the budget. If you’ve been sweating it out this summer, watching venues fold up as fast as your fans’ wallets, think about how you can stand in service to your audience.

Can you host your own concert at a park or a community center? How about a private house concert for a handful of your most consistent supporters?

Remember to avoid “free” concerts — your core audience won’t value them as much as they will if you promote the gig as a “recession-buster” or an “entertainment stimulus package.”

Here’s where you enjoy the biggest opportunity right now… If your perfect audience member doesn’t want to spend $50 to see their favorite area act, can you redirect them to see YOU play live for $10? They’ll get a great live experience that they’ll value even more — because you turned it into a transcendent experience for them. And then, when times get good again, they’ll still be on board to support you through your own bigger gigs.