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American Idolizes The Money, Not Your Music Eleetmusic's Kevin English had a chance to hear out some of the past american idol finalists at one of the panels held at the recently passed CMJ 2009. The topic, an interesting one mind you, was a look at entertainers who have been to the top of the mountain only to look down at how far they had to fall. Artists such as Kimberley Locke (remember her?) talk about their idol experiences as well as life after the season has wrapped and the cameras have powered down. The gist? Sometimes being an independent artist carries with it the invigorating feeling of carving out ones own musical destiny. At the end of the day you have a pretty good realization of who you are, who your fans are, and you can proudly boast that you aren't just a number in a label of numbers.

Malcolm Gladwell ,author of the book Outliers, is pretty adamant about his 10,000 hour rule. The rule states that in order to master any craft 10,000 + hours of practice must be accumulated. And getting in that many hours of practice can take 10 years or more. Basically, you gotta put in your work. The music promotion blog has a piece on Steve Martin that really attests to the decade journey that one must take to reach celebrity over night. By the time Steve was propelled into great public awareness he was a well oiled machine, ready to deliver the goods. Television (tell a lie to your vision, particularly shows like american idol and other media sources are very good at trivializing the years of work that some of our greatest icons put in to achieve icon status. Record Labels have even been fooled forgoing development for the young inexperienced (We've seen how well that works). Thats actually the equivalent of getting hired for an entry position and then getting promoted to CEO of the company a few weeks later, needless to say, that company's going to fail. I guess the point of this is if you want to increase your chances of success, not being signed but actually be icon status (being remembered for the many things you've done, not just the first thing), then you have to sleep in that car, perform in front of an audience of empty chairs, bounce from label to label because when god finally taps you on the shoulder and says its go time your going to outshine all of the others not even half way through their 10,000 hour mark. Put in the time and you will be rewarded.

Take Your Social Media to the Streets The web seems to be the defacto when it comes to networking with like minded individuals and initiating relationships, but social media is supposed to strengthen our offline ties not replace them. We've all been guilty of networking with management, A&Rs or other industry execs online but failing to truly merge the online networking with the offline equivalent. John Jantsch gives the run down on 5 ways to use social media activity online to make it pay offline.

How Effective is your Word of Mouth. So you have this great Album that your going to showcase tonight at your newest gig. Once the crowd heres your inspiring melodies and awesome rifts the word should spread about your magical compact disc right? Well Openforum blogger Yvonne DiVita begs to differ, she believes word-of-mouth is manufactured, not born. Here are 5 effective ways that you can manufacture your word-of-mouth through positive actions.