Navigate your way through the hell that is the Music Business.
The music industry is a cold, dark place where you will be put in a cage match with competition from all over the world in a battle to the death. The bad news is, many of your more established rivals have a big advantage over you from the start. This is a tale for those of you aspiring to go pro. Working with our small label, Addictive Vibe Records, which started out on iDJ a couple of years ago as a friendly place for talented emerging artists to get their start, I've been kind of tossed into the madhouse that is promoting and selling music for the last year or so. Mr. Michael Bordash, of iDJ, often criticizes the state of the music industry and, while its oftentimes hard to accept - as a daydreaming producer trying to make a name for yourself - his criticisms are strikingly accurate. The sales model in place barely works for big labels, so you can hardly expect it to work for you. Let's take a step back to when we just launched Addictive Vibe records with four or five iDJ members on board. The goal was to create a small, official label which would then be shopped around to distributors [whom without you are not able to sell on any big online or brick and mortar music shops.] Once the label got accepted by Symphonic Distribution, we were ecstatic, feeling like we finally had broken through into the big music business. The label was now distributed on giant retailers like iTunes, Beatport and Amazon, among many others. So, we must be doing pretty well. Right? Not quite. Once your label is picked up by a distributor, you must fulfill the distributor's sales quota + the independent sales quota for each retailer as well. For the purpose of this article, I will focus specifically on Beatport, as it seems to be the holy grail for most emerging producers. At first, the quota for Beatport was $200 worth of sales per quarter. While seemingly reasonable, this was still a pretty scary number for a few completely fresh, and unknown, artists. So, the next step here is promotion. Not being an established label, with virtually no promotional budget, we - the artists - were promoting our music in our spare time in pretty much every way imaginable, short of spending money on advertising. We were posting on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and practically any and every place imaginable. Creating promo remixes to generate attention, networking with industry professionals and posting videos on YouTube is all part of the equation. With most of us having full-time jobs or being full-time students, or both, this all had to be done in our spare time, often taking away from personal life and cutting into the time actually needed to make music. As our label slowly grew, we handpicked artists which we felt would represent us well and be active in the promotional aspect. It is fair to say that not everyone is able to promote around the clock, and no one is ever expected to do so. Though, I would say that - for a label our size - our promotional effort was substantial. As a result of our promotion the sales we generated weren't substantial enough for us to clear the quota on Beatport in the first, second or third quarter. We were on "probation" the entire time, while we were working hard to get our name out there, in any way possible. The sales quota increases and rolls over each time you miss it, making it exponentially harder to catch up. Once we had several releases out on Beatport, the pirates kicked in. Practically every single release we sent out to our distributor was pirated within a week of it's commercial release in the online shops. The amount of effort pirates put into "sharing" music is astounding, because it literally spreads all over torrents like a wildfire. Whether you agree or disagree that music piracy is a good or bad thing, it is obviously a constant presence in the business, and a small label really has no way to prevent it from happening. Suffice it to say, this certainly didn't help our sales any. Of course, one can turn around and say…