Bob Baker » Darryl Gregory Music

Staying Informed – An artist’s duty ~ Part I

Jun 302011

I attended a talk about crowd-funding recently with a songwriter’s group. I noticed that except for the presenter and the host, I was the only one that knew what crowd-funding was. I was also the only one in the audience that raised a hand when asked if they might be using crowd-funding in the near future. I was one of the few who asked the presenter any in-depth questions about the nature of crowd-funding (I even asked some leading questions because the presenter was leaving important facts out of his presentation). What was going on here? This was a relevant and interesting topic. Why weren’t more of the attendees participating and asking questions?

As I was driving home from the event I was mulling over some of the ideas that were discussed and I kept coming back to the fact that I was really the only person in the room (besides the host and presenter) that knew about crowd-funding and that had a background of information to draw upon in order to ask pertinent questions. This bugged me. Here we have a roomful of songwriters who could benefit from the information that is being presented, yet because the topic is so far removed from their level of information and experience, they sat there with a blank stare. It’s like these people were students in a 600 level course and they needed the 101 level introduction – everyone was lost in the info-overload.

But this blog post isn’t about crowd-funding. What I realized in thinking about the issue at hand was that most artists I meet are not well informed. They may know their craft and they may know a little about their discipline’s community, but they are not well informed about what’s really going on in the world that affects their community. They are not well informed about how they, as artists, can grow beyond their little hometown and out into the larger world. If you are an artist/singer-songwriter/performer, you need to be plugged in and informed.

So what is needed to consider oneself “informed”? How much of an artists’ day is taken up with getting the news on what’s happening in the world of indie music? I say not a lot and not too much. But just like practicing, it needs to be consistent and high quality. In this part of my blog post, I’m just going to talk about the ‘what’ and not the ‘how’.

Here is how I stay informed. And please feel free to add to this in any way because no one knows it all.

The Essentials:

Books -

Internet -

I still get two print magazines in the mail: Wired and Electronic Musician, but I read them online. I think I get them in the print form so I can get them online for free or as part of the package. For the most part my info comes from the Internet and radio sources and while it looks like a lot of reading, it really isn’t. But just like practicing, being informed needs to be consistent and high quality, so choose your sources well.

Please feel free to add to this in any way because no one knows it all and the list is ever-evolving.

In Part II, I will outline how I use these sources and how easy it is to schedule it into an artist’s day and how I use these sources to keep informed.

MSi9W – Week 9.1 ~ Creating the Funnel of Love

Music Success in 9 Weeks 1 Response »

Sep 052010

I am at the point in this 9 part exercise where it truly becomes evident that I am a business. This is where I figure out how to bring in a consistent revenue stream that can support my activities as a songwriter and musician. I am creating the funnel that draws in customers and entices them to pay more and more for my products.

Everything up to now has been laying the foundation for the store that I am building. I have my basic product which are my songs and live gigs. I have interaction with my customers through my newsletter and social media. I am collecting information on my customers so that I can better serve them. And I am scheduling time to keep this cycle going so that it all grows. Watering the garden.

Now I need to lure the customer in further and get them to send me money consistently and at higher levels of pricing. the basic product is what it is, but it can be packaged in different ways so as to make it seem more valuable to the consumer. The idea behind getting fans to pay more is to think of it as a funnel where the least expensive items that would be appealing to the widest demographic is at the top. As you go deeper into the funnel to the tightest point, the products get more expensive and the number of fans who would buy at that level becomes more exclusive.

As I read through this chapter I took a look at my website to see what exists in terms of the funnel. At this time I really only have two levels. Level 1, the widest, consists of free mp3s in exchange for an email address. Level 2 is the purchase of my CDs. Very basic and very obvious. I’m sure that this is what a lot of artists have on their sites: here’s a taste for some information and then you can go buy the whole CD. See you at a show! If any other business were to operate like that they’d go out of business in a week.

I need to think outside of the basic “Buy My Music” paradigm and brainstorm other products and other ways of packaging my basic product. Here’s what I came up with:

lyrics on t-shirts
lyrics on mugs
personalized songs
Gift-a-Song: songs for your friends and family as a gift
Gift-a-Gig: concert for a friend
USB flash drive with all my music and videos
stickers with my CD cover and info
songs as themes for your business, podcast – commercial
mp3s, CDs

Here’s a possible T-Shirt idea with a song lyric:

The take-away from this chapter is that there is more to the music that I write than just the obvious application of recording it and plying it live. Bob Baker often says that we as musicians can learn an awful lot from studying how other businesses market their products. He also says you can’t really have ‘sales’ until you’ve had ‘marketing’.

The other aspect that I am going to have to convince myself of is that this is a viable way to think about my music. As I have had to do constantly over the course of these 9 weeks, I have to convince myself that I am an entrepreneur.

The next thing I need to think about is which of these packaging items I think will work and then where do they fit on the funnel. Here’s what I think it may look like (a first draft):

I did not include the prices since I’m not quite sure what those prices would be at this point, but they would be priced according to the depth of the funnel.

I found this chapter enlightening. This is the ‘think-out-of-the-box’ type of thing that really makes money for an artist and also spreads the product around. This is also something that takes time to develop and does not just happen overnight. When I look at the things I can develop, I may not have that deep of a funnel as compared to other artists. But it all starts with a taste, the ‘pink spoon’ from the ice-cream store an then that leads to an ever more evolving relationship with your fans.

MSi9W – Week 1.1

Music Success in 9 Weeks 1 Response »

Jul 062010

I thought I would do a quick post on where I am on Tuesday of the first week of this blogging challenge. So here it goes…

I must confess that I’ve started a lot of these marketing/business concepts before only to get discouraged and then allow them to drop by the wayside. I’m looking to use this challenge as a way to be held accountable by my peers and by a person who has had success with marketing (Ariel). I think that I read in a Stephen Covey book that it usually takes 3 weeks for a new habit to form (and in the process break old/nasty habits). The catch is the ability to stick to it and make the action a habit.

I’m aware of a lot of the names in the entrepreneurial self-help business: Pam Slim, Stephen Covey, John Jantsch, Ali Brown, Bob Baker. Often, awareness breeds contempt and a kind of resentment at the fact that these people are making money off of me for something that should be free. It feels like a Ponzi scheme at times: I tweet a little, grow a FaceBook page, grow a list and then I tell everybody else what to do and make money off of it. That’s the contempt and the cynicism. The reality is this: HARD WORK AND CONSISTENCY. Hard work – nothing in business is easy; Consistency – doing it again and again like practicing scales and modes and rhythms. If you happened to read Derek Sivers’s blog post last week you read that success is about doing something, failing and then getting right back up and doing it again with the knowledge you gained from getting your teeth knocked out the first time. This is where I am: I do something, get punched in the gut, but then I don’t get back up and figure out the best way to punch back. Well let’s put a change to that, eh?

So I sat down last night and read the first chapter of MSi9W. I made some notes and sketched out some short term and long term goals that I will tweak today. I dusted off my success journal which I kept for a time and then let go of and placed it by my bed and will write in it tonight.I am also going to start up my ‘Gratitude List’ which I send out to a lit of a few people who I know really care about my well-being.

I’m getting up
I’m bloody
I’m throwing a left jab, but it’s a feint ’cause here comes my right

~ Darryl