A lot of people are striving for the dream to get out of the day job and move full time into a career in making music.  I’ve sure you’ve heard stories of people using wild and crazy marketing ideas to get attention, big name bands breaking away from major labels and weekend warriors leaving the desk job behind to become full time musicians.

So how do you do it, with your band, with your strengths? Well there is no single answer, every artist is going to need their own unique approach and it’s up to them to find what that is. Obviously having great music is first and foremost, but you also need to get people to listen. One trick is using the skills you develop in your day to day jobs to your advantage, and design your marketing campaign around those strengths.  Things like getting the grammar nut in the band working on copy and the really friendly one working the email list after the show is obvious. However thinking outside the box is the best way to survive in a music business whose box is constantly changing.  One thing to think about is combining skills sets of the different members of your musical team to create something greater than the separate items. For example if you’re a web designer and your guitar player works in sales. You can design a functional and effective way of selling music online more so then most. If you have a carpenter, an electrician, and an artist, you can design your own lighting system, and a killer, totally unique light show. (more…)

In case you haven’t noticed, we have been launching a ton of new tools and features lately:  Ratings and Reviews, Pick-O-Meter, our It Works section, and (just last week!) a revamped “my submissions” section. We launched these tools with your feedback, so now the questions are: How can you use them? What’s the best way to use them?  They are still relatively new so every single use for them has yet to be discovered, but here is what I found seems to work best.

When starting a submission to one of our listings on Sonicbids, first find something that fits your genre and relative location (if your looking for live/location based stuff).  For this I would use the good ole “advanced search” tool which you can use to filter out all the stuff that doesn’t apply to you.

(more…)

How to upload audio to your EPK

When dropping your files to MP3s, use a decent bitrate. Going under 112 kbps will start to bring in a wavy sound to the songs, because of the severe compression of the audio file size. We find that 5 MB is usually more than enough for an average song that’s less than 5 minutes in length. If your song is closer to 3 minutes, try re-ripping the track at a lower bitrate (preferably 128 kbps) to keep the file size down. (more…)