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You hear about your friends, family and friends-of-friends enlisting in the military everyday, you see the recruiting commercials and can even witness them on CNN in the background from time to time, but one opportunity that is never widely publicized is the military path for the working musician. the savvymusician.com solid rundown on the opportunities available to the working musician such as premier bands and regional bands complete with the pros and cons of undertaking such opportunities. "This is a good four year job for just about anyone. It can be a GREAT 20+ year job for many" Michael Mench - Commander of the US Air Force Band of Flight

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.

Mastering proffesional Adrian Carr of ACMastering recently posted a good article explaining mastering in fairly simple terms for those who are still convinced that "mixing and mastering" is one word. One thing that really helped me to understand mastering back when it was a big question-mark to me, was the differences in the files types each technique used. When mastering a song your are working off of the final exported two-track (that Wav or Aiff file all your hard work went into), whil with mixing you are working with each individual track that you laid individually during your recording, at this point your song is probably still sitting on some virtual sequencer like cubase, garage band or protools. I dunno, it helped me understand it a little more.

1. The best approach is slow and cautious. Right now, we are in the jungle. In the jungle, you don't rush blindly ahead. You dip a toe in the sand, and see if you sink. We have no hope of predicting which of these services might catch on. We need to move slowly, with very short-term agreements and see what works and what fails. And we need to be sure not to undermine our other business partners while we do that. Which leads to… 2. We should support our allies and punish our enemies. Rob McDaniels for InGrooves estimates that it takes 150-200 streams of one song to equal the royalty income on a single download. Right now, our industry still relies on the sale of physical product (believe it or not, it's still the primary source of revenue) and on digital downloads. Perhaps streaming is the future. Perhaps not. But we would be very unwise to cut ridiculously low-cost rates to a business model that obviously threatens both physical retailers and iTunes. Let's take care of the people paying our bills. At the same time, we should continue to press ahead with legal efforts against things like Pirate Bay- efforts that are finally starting to show some results. 3. We need to recognize that "bundling" and ad-revenue sharing is a marriage, and it works both ways. If we bundle the cost of music access into the cost of a mobile phone or the sale of a computer, we're now not only in the music business, we're in the electronics business. Any economic factors that hurt the sales of phones and computers will now hurt us as well. 4. Most of all, we need transparency in the negotiations and setting of rates, so that everyone in the music community understands what they're being paid and how it's being calculated.

Learn from the best music video directors and interact with musicians who need and appreciate your talent as much as you need and appreciate theirs. Share your work with the fans and let them help you to become the next big music video director working with some of the biggest names in the music business.

A4A is the only site you will ever need for the promotion of artists and their work, whether you're an indie musician or the next Stanley Kubric. We help you to build a fan base that is both loyal and passionate about your work and then the promotion is a matter of sharing your video with your built-in fan base who will in turn share it with their social networks.

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.

The Nydailynews says that radio is not supposed to be here right now. First, the TV was supposed to kill the radio by changing it from an audio to a visual medium, that didn't work so much. Then MTV was supposed to be the radio killer back promoting a product that sucked the magic out of songs by pre-empting the listener's imagination - again the radio withstood the test of time. To be fair MTVs claim was that television and radio could work together, promoting and enhancing the other and thats exactly what happened. iPods, and social media are the disruptive technologies now but something tells me many other mediums will kick the bucket before our good ol friend the radio lays its head to rest.

Public Servants Arlene Goldbard raises some compelling ideas about how artists can help the economic recovery. Arlene, a writer and a social activist suggests that in order to help spark the recovery of the economy we have to recovery culturally, and who better to help us do that than the most creative ones in our society, the artists. She reasons that government initiates that put artists and musicians gifts at the service of schools, communities, hospitals and prisons are a good investment that worked in the 1950's to spurn recovery. Follow the link to check out the video, and if these are ideas that you support then there is a petition to support Art & The Public Purpose: A New Framework in the comments.

Tired of creating songs that sound too much alike? Add a partner to the group. The ideas that a partner can bring to the table and they way that they work through and create songs can bring you all of the orginal flava that your new music has been craving.

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.

Tick Tock, The Copyright Act of 1976 is About to Expire. It's always entertaining to me to watch the money traps that the labels set for artists, back before information was freely available, EXPLODE! Welp, that's exactly what's about to go down. The Copyright Act states that an artist or author who sold a copyright before 1978 can take it back 56 years later and If it was sold during or after 1978 they can take it back 35 years later. Assuming a correct and prompt filing of paper work, the record labels could lose sound recording copyrights they bought in 1978 starting in 2013. How does this affect you? If the labels don't wanna lose the contents of their entire library you can make a for sure bet that the new copyright law will be negotiated in your favor. Higher royalties anyone?

Would you mind your child being taught by a computer music teacher? I was taught to type by a computer mavis beacon...could work.

Do you practice perfectly? If not you might need a little push in the right direction. The howtopractice blog advises you not to open your music and bash your way through it but instead break your practice up into many tiny tasks that you can aim to improve -only then will you see rapid results. The best part of this post is the colorful circle of "perfect practice" that holds your hand through the 5 steps of mastering your pieces. Save the chart to your computer or hand draw it in your practice notebook if you have to. Once you have begun practicing with this colorful piece of wisdom don't be shy to scribble the answers to each of the 5 questions out. Seeing is believing, plus writing it down always seems to work for me. Toodles.

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 gut may be a ways from the ears but sometimes it's crucial for you to bend of and take a listen. Powderfinger Promotions President David Avery had to take a listen to his in his decision to start working with Jams Bands such as String Cheese Incident in an era when Jam Bands just weren't fashionable.

Fixing the date for the RED-WHITE Theme for blogger

Potential Artist Revenue Streams David Sherbow music business visionary has a good outline of ALL POTENTIAL ARTIST REVENUE STREAMS. The list covers publishing, digital sales, merchandise, live performances, sponsorships, endorsements, fan clubs, and the list goes on. It'd be great if this list could actually link to articles that explain how to work the revenue of each stream. Hopefully we'll see this in Potential Rev Streams list 2.0.

Radio tagging is supposed to be Radio's next big thing. The only problem is that currently, most consumers aren't widely tagging and downloading songs. I don't even think most consumers are aware that radio has enabled this feature. Most people are too busy surfing the stations trying to find a song that they haven't heard a begillion times. Radio seems to be naive of this fact, and have been moving full steam ahead with their song-tagging project. It works by using HD Radio and the Radio Broadcast Data System signals to tag songs with identifier metadata, called a Unique File Identifier (UFID) code. iPods or Mp3 players docked to the specially equipped radio can store the song metadata and indicate tagged songs available to download from the iTunes or Microsoft library, once the player is synched with a PC.

Imagine international corporations new noise-canceling headphones that are priced to provide max functionality without breaking the bank. The tech behind the product category basically works on the premise of minimizing the amount of ambient environmental noise that intrudes on a headphone user's listening experience. If your looking for a cost efficient pair of noise canceling head phones these might be a solution worth checking out.