The first requirement for being successful in anything is to define what success means to you. That is one of the biggest challenges musicians face today. There is no standard to follow. It’s not like going to college, where there is an established set of measurable parameters. You attend classes, you pass exams, you write papers, and after completing all of the requisite steps you succeed in earning your degree. That’s an ideal scenario where […]

The album is dying in front of our very eyes. In other words, what kind of screwed up world do we live in where Katy Perry’s new album “Prism” sells only 287,000 copies in its debut? One in which everybody’s interested in the single, and no one’s got time to sit and hear your hour-plus statement. This is not emotion, this is statistics. The shelf life of news is shorter than […]

Finding the right answers often comes from asking the right questions. As an artist you must always be aware of yourself and your brand as a whole. The more you know about yourself, the easier it will be to promote and build your brand and gain the exposure needed to have a successful career in music. Artists often overlook these questions and continue to shoot aimlessly in their careers, which […]

With over 7 million copies sold, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop” is one of the highest selling singles of the past few years. But WHY was the song such a huge success? And what can you learn from it if you want to score the NEXT big hit? Here are 5 key insights: 1. It’s A Single Did you know Thrift Shop was the 5th in a series of […]

You might be laboring under the misapprehension that 10 seconds isn’t enough time to accomplish anything. You’re wrong. It takes 7 seconds for the brain to form a positive or negative impression of a new acquaintance and two-tenths of a second to establish a first impression of a website. Even frisky lions can wrap up a mating session in under 6 seconds flat – pretty impressive when you consider that’s […]

One of the many challenges we songwriters face is that we’re tasked not only with creating something from nothing, but our “somethings” need to be unique – and not only compared to what others have written but also compared to what we’ve written before. This is no small feat, and the moment you think you’ve “figured it out” as a songwriter is exactly when you need to leave your creative […]

What’s that NEW sound?!  You want to stand out. Be the hottest band or artist on the industry’s lips. You have a vision for success but don’t quite know how to go about this. You need to find your ground and start from the bottom up. So the first question you need to ask yourself is: how do I find my niche? There are two options… Create your own niche market. […]

First of all, I want to congratulate you for taking a big step forward in your career as a songwriter.  If you’re considering submitting one (or several) of your songs for a music business opportunity, then you’ve gone to the next level beyond just writing songs and hoping the world will come to you.  This being the case, there are a couple of classic mistakes you should be careful to […]

Recently, the MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS drove an astonishing 18,495,883 tweets over the course of the event and at various points throughout the evening even garnered 306,100, 219,800, and 194,500 tweets per minute at different moments. Was your brand active in real-time conversations surrounding the VMA’s? Is your Twitter account often active during publicized events? This is just one way of actively placing your brand in front of relevant conversations and adding […]

Not-at-all newsflash: The music industry is a completely different animal than it once was. While it’s true that the music industry has been a perpetually evolving beast since the beginning, never before have we seen such super-sized, fundamental shifts in such a relatively small time in terms of how music is produced, shared, bought and sold, and how success is quantified and achieved. For future generations, this new way of […]