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Taking Marketing Cues from Alphex Twin Richard James AKA Alphex Twin is a british electronic musician described by the guardian newspaper as "the most inventive and influential figure in contemporary electronic music. Known for his outlandish marketing efforts it appears that Alphex Twin is at it again. His latest release goes the length of embedding his "demonic" face directly into the audio of track #2 (often referred to as "Equation"). It works by analyzing the audio with a spectrograph (note to self: keep a spectrograph conveniently stacked by my CD collection) which then decodes the audi and plots it in a frequency/time format. Pretty cool. If your looking to do any wacky marketing for your next release then you just might have stumbled across the holy grail.

The secret to creating a good marketing video is to throw a lot of stuff out there to find something that sticks. Regular output hones your craft, and being bold and specific helps.

Songwriters looking to get paid: Market research and Song Pitching go along way.

If the name Ian Rogers doesn't ring a bell it will soon. Ina Rogers is the CEO of Topsin media, a music client that analysis how your brand is doing online. The data that his company collects suggests that the campaigns that take the shape of a snowball have a much better chance of showing a return on investment. Which as someone cadidly pointed out in the comments is the traditional definition of artist development. Ians 3 points that success seeking musicians should follow are 1. Goal: Have more fans tomorrow that you had yesterday 2. Grow fan connections as well as dollars. Everyday should mean more email addresses, twitter followers, Facebook fans, and MySpace friends and of course dollars. 3. Action: Do something small weekly, something big monthly

Start a relationship with your fans.

Applying the Record Label Model to the Indie Artist You may already be familiar with the online world of myspace music and facebook pages, and the offiline world of shows and radio play, but as George Howard puts it "Err too far online, you fail. Too far offline, you fail". In order to be successful today you need to achieve the perfect balance between online and offline marketing. Eleetmusic's Kevin English outlines how to use the four R's (Radio, Road, Reviews and Retail) of the "Not so new record label model" to capture the audience statistically proven to be more receptive to trying to new things. College students.

Street Music How indie are you? Thats a good question to ask, because i believe that there are certain level of indie. I actually really enjoy the street performer, simply because sometimes walking down hollywood blvd. needs a soundtrack. What about the street merchant? At the same time you do have those artists that feel that they can sell you or even worse trick you into buying their product with a few nifty words, i think we're all in agreement on this, but there's nothing that inspires me to reach into my pocket and slip a few dollars like hearing them working for it. When trying to market your music on the street words just don't cut it.

Musicscout.com could help your band get discovered. Music scout is an App that has just been released for the android and iPhone market that enables music enthusiasts to express their thoughts and sentiments about the band they're currently watching. Now all you gotta do is convince all of your fans to download the App and give you great rating everywhere you go.

the machinery of culture is constantly changing and i hate to say it but that means as a creator of music you gotta be constantly changing too. To help soften the blow of the many more cultural changes down the road, then surrounding yourself with a real social network of musicians and partners that may be able to understand certain shifts more easily than yourself could be a good step in battling your future market woes.

A new study has found that the the fall of an item's popularity mirrors its rise to popularity, so items that become popular faster also die out faster. Kyle Bylin, Accosciate Editor for hypebot.com has taken that study one step further by relating the new find to the marketing strategy of record labels. It could be said that the Record Labels are killing itself to live, what a weird paradox.

Capture the crowd while they're in the moment. Mike Doughty the "creative force" behind Soul Coughing (signed to warner bros in the 90's) had some surprise marketing tactics for his music during his live shows that w

Tackle the online market place Tunecore Cd Baby

Loiterers Should Be Arrested. The CMJ Music Marathon ended last week but the lessons learned have just begun. Kevin English, blogger at eleetmusic.com took some time to talk about the lessons that he took away with him from the many panelists. His conclusion; there is no concrete answer to surviving in todays music industry. Old school pundits stressed the importance of networking and buzz generation by any means possible while New Media progressives represented new media applications, widgets and digital services that promised to strengthen direct to fan relationships. It wasn't until the Sudanese rapper Emmanual Jai took to the stage that he realized industry survival was about constantly adapting, bending the industry to specifically cater to your needs. Figure out what your number one need is right now as an indie artist and exploit that need. Kevin's short but enlightening read this morning brings me to the idea of a (wait for it, wait for it) digital manager. Not loading up all of your tracks on myspace, but actually hiring a manager to surf the web all day and submit your music to opportunities world wide. Has anyone tried something like this yet? let me know how it works, and what you have been doing to try to adapt.

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.

A strong news hook is essential for getting media exposure

Here's a couple of resources that i've gathered on who to get shows booked for you or your band.

Theres been a lot of talk about how to survive the music industry, what social networks you should be on and online distributors you should be with but the simple truth is that the music you create is much more important than your current method of distribution. So i challenge you for 2010 to step your game up partner with that one drummer and create amazing music, be relentless and most importantly get out of the house and book some shows. Paying or non-paying, it doesn't matter if your the right person for this, the money will come.

I've talked about using iTunes Imixes to help increase exposure to your music, but thats not the end all. Eleetmusic has a couple more ways in which you can subtly get users to recognize your music as talent rather than spam.

If you were a little shy of completing your goals for 2009 then maybe refining your focus should be the mission for 2010. Multitasking is known to be good for doing many things at once, but generally sub-par results are achieved. Pick one thing that you want to improve this year, break it down into manageable chunks and find out how a narrowed focus can put you way ahead of your fellow multitaskers.

pt 2.