How Singer/Songwriters Can Save $100K Right Now - Today!

$100 K. I thought that would get everyone’s attention. And it’s the first thing I say when I meet with young singer/songwriters and their parents as we start the educational process of moving up from the basic performance skills of singing their own songs and playing guitar or piano to the rarefied air of the art of entertaining. That’s what I do these days as a live music performance coach.

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The Top Five Things Every Singer/Songwriter Is Doing That Need To Be Fixed

There are at least a hundred ways for every singer/songwriter to improve his or her chances of success, but these are the five I already know that need to be addressed without even seeing your show. They are inherent the performance of virtually all aspiring (and sadly many seasoned) singer/songwriters.

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The Music Business Runs On Sushi - But Are You Doing It Right?

There are essentially three conversations going on in the music business today:

• Will streaming ever replace record sales?
• How can we get radio to make room for new artists?
• Where’s the best sushi in town?

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Why Nothing Compares To Prince

There’s always been a notion that if we could emulate the lives of those we admire, then our lives would have the same outcomes as theirs – talented, successful, rich, famous, happy, whatever. That, of course, explains all the “Seven Secrets of…..” books and the popularity of biographies as treasure maps to our desired fortunes. Although the lives of successful music artists fall into that same category and there are certainly crafts and skills to be mastered, there are two areas that cannot be duplicated, which are, unfortunately, the two most important things required for success – artistry and luck. Which is why nothing compares to Prince. His was the perfect storm of skills, artistry and luck.

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The Ten Rules Of The Road (And Of Your Life)

When asked what advice I might give to the aspiring touring artist, I consider my reply much the same as Polonius must have felt in passing on wisdom to Hamlet before the latter’s aborted trip to England with the ill-fated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Neither a borrower nor a lender be… etc.).

Here then are the ten most important things to remember as a touring musician that must be memorized in order to survive. There’s no trick to coming out healthy, wealthy and wise at the end of a tour (assuming you started the tour that way), as long as you follow these few simple tenets.

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How To Get All The Benefits From SXSW Without Actually Going

It’s almost that time again - that time of year when every band and singer worth their salt makes that annual pilgrimage to Mecca (Austin) for the week-long SXSW festival. A week of no sleep, watered-down drinks, bad food, unrewarding performances and the heartbreak of the ultimate realization that it wasn’t really worth it. Never have so many spent so much time and money for so little notoriety and reward. 

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Six Steps To Successful Songwriting: 45 Tips From 45 Famous Songwriters (And One Not So Famous)

My ongoing music blog has carried the overarching moniker of IT ALL STARTS WITH THE MUSIC for some time now. It’s a lofty notion, touched with just the right amount of vagueness to seem proverbial.

 Recently, however, I’ve had to take that notion off the shelf and boil it down to its granular form. The result? It actually all starts with the song. Music is a wonderful thing, granted, but what really brings the emotional reaction home to us all is THE SONG. Music is way too general a term and it’s incredibly subjective; but a great song is a great song. There are thousands of talented musicians and composers in Santa Monica alone making great (OK, maybe just good) music, but only a handful of great songwriters.

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101 Things To Do In 2016 To Improve Your Music Career

You could call these New Year’s Resolutions if you wanted to, but then you’d stop doing them after two weeks, along with the diet and exercise resolutions already on the list. Think that through.

Assuming that you are really intent on doing something meaningful about your music career this year, you could implement these somewhat random and relatively straightforward but not necessarily simple tasks. OR you could just keep on doing things the way you’ve been doing them. But you need to stop and ask yourself at this juncture: How’s that working out?

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Ten Music Biz Predictions, Hopes & Dreams for 2016

1 Return of Real Songs

Millennials will come out of their collective fog and realize that what passes for pop music these days – well-produced, pleasant, beat-driven, formula, lyrically repetitive, singsongy, non-melodic music – are not really songs. Real songs – narrative stories with beginnings, middles and ends (as well as the clever bridges) - will stage a comeback, and real songwriters and performers will breathe a collective sigh of relief.

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How To Be A Successful Performing Artist In The New Millennium - Part Two

Last month, in Part One, we established that the only money in the music business right now is in performing your own songs and owning your own publishing and merch. We looked at the eleven things an aspiring singer/songwriter needed to do in order to be able to take the next step into learning how to become an entertainer and communicate and connect with an audience. Part One involved a lot of hard work and long, boring hours of practice and re-writes with little to no payoff. Now it gets interesting, although there’s still plenty of hard work ahead. Part Two assumes that the artist has completed all the steps in Part One.

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How To Become A Successful Performing Artist In The New Millennium – Part One

“The great thing about rock and roll is that someone like me can be a star.” – Elton John

It shouldn’t be news to anyone in the music business today that the smart (and maybe the only) money is in live performance, merchandising (which is kind of tied into live performance) and publishing (and all of its Constitutionally-guaranteed income streams). The bottom line: If you want to make a living these days on the artist side of the music business, you need to write and publish your own songs and perform them from the stage in an entertaining manner. Here’s a step-by-step list of how you might go about doing that – starting with the live performance side. (Note: There are probably a couple hundred other ways to accomplish this – but the odds are better this way. You’ll see why.)

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A Tribute To Another Unsung Hero Of The Music Business - The Artist Bio Writer - Fact Or Fiction?

Is there no greater work of fiction in the English language than the artist bio? You know, the three-page laudatory pronouncement of some new musical genius suddenly discovered and spotlighted. Or how about the one that signals the mid-career change of musical direction? Or the end-of-career, where-have-they-been, and what-now variety?

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WHAT'S YOUR NAME AND HOW DO YOU SPELL THAT?

This year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee ended in a tie for the second year in a row. Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam both correctly spelled through the list of 11 championship words, which included such everyday terms as boquetiere (an assortment of fresh vegetables) and hippocrepiform (shaped like a horseshoe), to share in the trophy. I would suggest that there could have been an obvious tiebreaker to establish a true winner of the spelling bee – each of the finalists should have been asked to spell each other’s last name.

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A TRIBUTE TO THE ROAD MANAGER - PRAISE AND A PRAYER

When Elvis Presley’s fiancée Ginger Alden found him unconscious in the Graceland upstairs bathroom at 2:00 pm on August 16, 1977, she called to Joe Esposito, Elvis’s longtime road manager. Joe immediately ran upstairs, surveyed the situation, and went right to work. He called for an ambulance from the bathroom phone and he attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and heart massage, but to no avail. However, by the time the paramedics arrived, the bathroom and the adjacent sitting room had been cleaned up, as well as the vomit from the shag carpet in the bathroom. Anyone who has ever done the road manager gig for any length of time knows exactly what to do in these kinds of circumstances.

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