A blessing is how country singer-songwriter Tanya Marie Harris refers to the last three years.
At the top of 2013 she began pursuing a music career. Her first single, “A Woman Scorned,” hit No. 1 on the Roots Music Report Country Chart in 2013. The track was done with producers Johnny Dwinell and Kelly Schoenfeld, of Daredevil Production, on Music Row in Nashville, Tenn.
If you don’t own a McDonald’s franchise and you work for McDonald’s, you’re an employee of the person who does own the franchise.
What are the odds of landing the gig if you show up in tattered cargo shorts, a stained Hawaiian shirt, and moldy plastic flip flops?
Photo: Chris Potter
http://bit.ly/1ryPA8o
If you don’t invest in these things your ownership of the car will be quite short, either because it was repossessed or because the engine will freeze up.
amplification if it’s electric, strings, regular maintenance on the truss rods, frets, and wood to keep it humming consistently throughout the seasons.
Can you really learn to play guitar without investing in one?
What if you put up a lemonade stand with the hope of finding someone to purchase the lemonade for you?
What would consumers and potential business associates think if they stopped by your lemonade stand only to find you had no lemonade?
What would you tell those consumers and potential business associates about your hopes and dreams of a profitable lemonade stand that would remove the sting and 1st impression that you simply don’t have any lemonade?
You can’t expect a fat retirement account when you retire unless you invest a portion of every paycheck while you’re working throughout your career.
Dave Ramsey makes the thought of investing painfully simple…if you want to grow corn you are going to HAVE TO PLANT CORN!!!
Without investing time?
Without investing money?
This is a fantasy.
In plain English YOU HAVE TO PUT IN.
It’s going to cost money to get this career of yours off the ground.
Excuses as to why you can’t or more appropriately why you won’t invest in yourself are just that; they’re excuses.
Yes, I’m sure they are valid but they are, in fact, excuses.
Excuses are reasons to forgive yourself for not doing something. They act as a pardon of sorts, making us feel ok that a certain objective wasn’t met.
Do you ever pardon yourself for not eating?
No, somehow, some way, you find a way to breathe, you find a way to eat because your life depends on it.
If your breathing or eating is curtailed for too long you will fight to make it happen.
This suggests that your life actually doesn’t depend on making music.
Doesn’t it? (Pun intended)
I’m certain there is a great deal of self-sabotage embedded in this dichotomy.
We all come by it honestly because the people that love us are fearful we’ll be broke, so they tell us to get a “backup planâ€. In order to frame and sell the backup plan scenario correctly, they need to tell us that the music business is hard.
It is.
If it was easy EVERYONE would be a rock star.
It’s hard getting up every day to go work at a job that you just don’t have any passion for.
That’ll suck your soul, man.
And all this for the sake of being responsible and falling into line with society?
All for the sake of making your parents and/or other people happy?
This is where they want you by the way. Don’t blame the messenger(s) in your life. Whether the message comes from love or from nasty, bitter, jealousy they are regurgitating what they have been taught their whole lives.
It’s what THEY believe and sometimes they really don’t like being reminded there are other more attractive avenues.
What you invest in this scenario is far more valuable than money; it’s your TIME.
Where there is a will there is a way.
In other words, you won’t be able to research all the remedies in advance of all the challenges you are going to incur with your artist career.
There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the NASA expert gives the astronauts a red cyanide pill. The NASA expert says, “We can think of 1002 reasons why you would need this, but mostly it’s for the reasons we can’t think of.â€
I think of artist careers like this.
This is the main issue I see all of you grappling with.
Let me save you the suspense, YOU WILL FALL OFF YOUR HORSE.
Everyone does, so that’s a real easy statement to make.
The more you get back up on the horse, the longer you stick around, the more contacts you make, the deeper you get into the business, the more relationships you will make, the more successful you will be.
While every detail to every artist’s recipe for success is unique, this basic formula is ubiquitous.
This will require an investment of time and money. You pay for food, you pay more for bottled tap water than you do for gasoline, so why not find a way to pay for your career?
Have you invested enough in:
Lessons?
Instruments?
Amplification?
Practice space?
A website?
Professional recordings?
Marketing?
Education for marketing, recording, and writing?
What haven’t you invested in?
Why haven’t you invested in it?
A nationwide radio promo campaign is going to cost $500,000 to purchase the opportunity to crack the top 50.
Is it because you don’t understand how to market online?
You can learn.
These days the music business is hard, don’t get me wrong. You’ll invest more than you get back initially.
There are different kinds of investments. When you invest 40 hours of your time at your day job you get a regular paycheck every week in return.
INSTANT GRATIFICATION.
When huge venture capital companies invest large sums of money into tech companies they are not expecting to get an immediate return on their investment.
I’m a smart guy but I assure you, I’m no genius.
All my knowledge with this online marketing stuff I obtained via trial and error and a bunch of education. 
I paid for both either with time, money, or time AND money.
Clearly you see an obvious trend with the revenue, but there is a trend you don’t see.
Get it?
My dream is to make a dent in the Universe creating and refining new methodologies for exposing and marketing talented artists.
I’m sharing this general financial information with you so you can see clearly that if my plan was to require “instant financial gratification†I would have failed.
By people who are close enough that it stung even when I knew the information was incorrect.
I submit to you that the only sensible business plan for instant gratification is work for someone else.
You’ll get paid every week.
If you plan on being your own boss, you will have to invest a huge amount of time, faith, grit, and some money to make it happen.
It won’t happen right away.
Thinking intelligently about how and when your investment will be realistically recouped is equally as important is the investment itself.
Who better to invest in than yourself?
Stay
In
Tune
PS: If you haven’t already downloaded my free Music Marketing On Twitter book, please enjoy it on me. Go to GiftFromJohnny.com put  in your name and tell us where to send it. It’ll teach you how to get 1,000 new targeted followers every month for just 15 minutes per day.
If you like this post, please SHARE it and/or LEAVE A COMMENT thank you!
[ois skin=”Bottom Post”]
When we were making a living at making music there wasn’t a week that went by where we weren’t playing 4-6 hours a day as a band.
It came from our regular practice schedule and then relentless touring gigs.
When I moved to Nashville after the 80’s hair band thing was abruptly ended by Nirvana’s “Nevermind†record, I recorded some solo material. I searched for musicians and paid them to get the right tracks, I wasn’t just looking to “get it done†from a project management perspective or just as damaging, an excitedly curious perspective.
I wanted it to be great!
You have to be able to acknowledge the difference between an “Aâ€, “Bâ€, and “C†song.
I paid players to cut the tracks I needed.
I shopped for players based on their talent and not  price tag.
I grew up on analog recording so when the industry switched to digital I needed to learn Pro-Tools real fast.
I used to fly Kelly out to LA to mix my projects. I paid to fly him out and I paid him the “bro-rate†on an hourly basis with the stipulation that I got to ask questions.
I got to be annoying with questions. 
He’ll tell you that too, I’m sure.
Learning this software was mission critical to my artistic soul.
My band paid money to get vocal lessons. We wanted to build a better live show and we didn’t have the tools.
It was amazing how many “perks†via favors and good energy that came to us for being a SOLID band.
People could easily tell that we were serious and we worked hard at it.
They found it “refreshingâ€.
They don’t take you seriously if you plan to do good work.
When you tell people you plan to do good work they blow it off. You sound like everyone else.
Everybody PLANS to do good work.
The people who actually execute good work instantly separate themselves from the crowd.
The only way to do good work is to be good.
These days I pay to learn as much as I can about my current gig which is marketing artists.
We are cracking the code for the New Music Business 2.0 here at Daredevil Production.
We collect little pieces of knowledge gleaned from various paid sources and assemble them to construct the vision of our future.
I feel like too many of you want people to take you seriously as an artist based on what you plan to do rather than what you have done.
That’s is probably the most rampant mental flaw that artists possess. They simply don’t believe in themselves enough so they set up a pretty wicked mental racket. 
They say to themselves that if they could just get to the right people that believed in them they would go ALL IN.
Here’s the thing, if you don’t have measurable, tangible evidence that you’re “all in†and your great when you meet “the right people†then you will get nothing from that meeting.
Zero love.
These artists know it so their energy is off. (Why give a CD with disclaimers, btw?)
The “right people†know it instantly.
The artists get jaded.
The cycle begins again.
I created a life-long mentor (who I lost to a heart attack in January of 2014) from a meeting that was set up by our (then) new booking agency. I
took him out to eat and kept driving the conversation back to him. He was fascinating and SUPER smart! A hustler! He kept telling me the truth, I knew it, and I wanted more.
People always like to talk about themselves. Sometimes it’s far more productive, far more beneficial to you to keep your mouth shut and pay attention.
In the case of this specific mentor (RIP Mark O’Toole), he was extremely humble and very matter of fact.
Some are more of the bragging type, but SO WHAT? As long as they’re talking you should be listening. Forget about how you feel about the way they serve it up and concentrate on whether you think they’re being truthful, man.
By the simple gesture of taking him to dinner and admitting I was green and needed some input from a pro like him, he liked me.
He like my hustle.
He probably liked that I kept my mouth shut.
I think he could see that I was focused on becoming a student of the game.
He remembered me.
That’s the kind of people that mentors want to help.
Mentors don’t want hangers on.
They don’t want charity cases. The whole “somebody needs to help me because I’m unable to help myself†doesn’t 
usually attract good people in the animal kingdom (of which we are a part of).
It attracts predators that smell the blood from an easy kill so if that’s you STOP IT. I promise you will just continue to attract predators.
This is why so many of you that operate from a certain “victim†or “pity†approach keep getting screwed.
If it makes you feel better the story doesn’t change for the artists who punch through into any kind of market awareness and brand name. The more they avoid the nuts and bolts of their own business, the more they get screwed.
If you don’t learn what to look for (how to inspect and what to expect) you will get screwed when you start making money.
Balance between project management (get the goods to market) and artistic excellence is key as well.
You hear me harp about how marketing will make or break any project.
Well we have all seen good marketing break projects that are artistically lame and unimaginative.
We have never seen zero, lame, or unimaginative marketing break an amazing artistic project; it kills it.
Either way you’re going to need marketing and team building skills.
Practice makes perfect.
Just like your music.
You used to suck at that too.
So if you want to move these little products you create and make a living, you will first need to learn how to get better.
How to get better at making them.
How to get better at marketing them.
Stay
In
Tune
If you like this post, please SHARE it and/or LEAVE A COMMENT thank you!
[ois skin=”Bottom Post”]
I really want to share something with y’all. It may sound a bit self-serving but I’m thinking of you (as always) so read through to the end…you’ll get it. Here’s the deal, I’m super excited today. Kelly Schoenfeld and I were chosen to develop an artist who has really got the gift. This artist’s vocal tone is rich and the control she has over her instrument is astounding. She sounds vintage, like REALLY vintage.
She sounds like a cross between (and this is going to sound weird but it is accurate) a 25 year old Patsy Cline and Dwight Yoakam.
I feel they recognized we were willing to find a formula to feature her 
old-fashioned vocal tone with a modern musical landscape. Also we had the added benefit of a solid marketing plan to begin building a demand for the record now to create sales whenever it’s finished.
We wanted to accent her strengths and build something current around where she lives artistically which once again is a vintage sound.
This got me thinking about all of you.
Kelly and I are fearless when it comes to developing artists that are unique (thus the name Daredevil Production) because we are confident that we know how to find an audience that is willing to and wanting to listen to their art the way they want to do it.
That’s a big bonus in the new music industry y’all should be exploiting regularly. You can target your audience through social media. You can create demand. It will be foreign at first but it’s doable and people make money at it every day.
We understand that we can artistically guide this artist to a place where she can make a living her way. If there is enough momentum to really blow her up then radio will change for her instead of her changing for radio.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em that’s the way Florida Georgia Line did it. There’s your proof it can be done.
Here we have a very cool situation that shouldn’t really be that unique but sadly, it is. The circumstances are that we have an artist with extreme talent, who we believe has an insatiable work ethic, is completely open to “playing in the sandbox†with us artistically, and willing to embrace new marketing strategies as well.
The Sky’s the limit.
Are you thinking like this?
Want some more proof?
All this happened with a record that received ZERO support from country radio where all her previous releases were 
promoted.
Think about that for a second.
1 word: Â GUTS.
In many past articles I have written about how it is much easier for the artists to make a living these days in the music business. This is true if you’re willing to operate with a completely open mind free of your ego, daydream scripts, and nostalgia.
Are you truly making something great or do you have to give a disclaimer before someone listens to your music?
Are you serious about cracking the code to creating and deepening relationships online with your fans?
That takes real work.
The only thing standing in your way is you.
Stay tuned about this 11 year old artist, you will be hearing from her soon.
Oh, and stay in tune.
If you like this post, please SHARE it and/or LEAVE A COMMENT thank you!
[ois skin=”Bottom Post”]
Dreams often take a long time to realize. They exist, of course, long before the point of realization but get buried deep within our minds or hearts. Tucked safely away for later, those dreams are sometimes revisited with more experienced eyes or with fuller hearts and brought back into the realm of possibility.
That feeling hit Tanya Marie Harris like a brick a couple of years ago.
We recently had an opportunity to pitch an indie artist on Daredevil Production’s online marketing expertise. This artist (who shall remain nameless) has generated some serious momentum and attention from a key song placement in an Oscar winning movie. This momentum has garnered them over 30,000 downloads of the placed song; not bad.
Check this out, their social media company has taken this momentum and worked it into just
W…T…F
Here’s the snafu. Indie bands like this are quality artists because they are very smart. When you have an indie act that is this intelligent, they are smart enough to know what they don’t know, like social media, accounting, booking, legal matters, etc., and they surround themselves with a team of professionals who are hopefully experts in their respective fields. Of course, the artists build a relationship with these professionals and they (have to) choose to trust their professional opinions; after all these purported experts are part of their team.
This tactic makes absolute sense as long as the professionals are doing their job. I understand how social media is somewhat of a mystery to many people, but many artists are not “inspecting what they expect” with regards to their social media team members.
If the job description is to expand your Twitter influence then you should see measurable daily gains.
If the job description is to expand Facebook likes then you should see measurable daily gains.
If the job description is to monetize the social media you should see money rolling in every day/week/month.
You have to remember that “Social Media”, “Social Marketing/Content Marketing”, and “Monetization” of the social media assets are 3 completely separate processes that are easily confused.
Artists, I implore you to ensure that whoever you are paying your hard-earned money too is taking care of business and earning their paycheck. I have had meetings now with several indie artists, even a few multi-platinum artists who used to have big record deals, and their trusted advisors on social media are completely inept. The artists understandably aren’t aware of all the details regarding social media and therefore remain unaware of any methods to measure the effectiveness of these companies and rely too heavily on the opinion of their chosen experts to determine if they are doing a good job.
This is akin to leaving the fox in charge of the chickens and then accepting the fox’s professional opinion on exactly how many chickens are left in the coop.
If you don’t stick your head inside the coop, you will never really know what the hell is going on.
Btw, in every one of these meetings the social media contact person for the company the artist was using was present or on the call. ALL of them condescendingly responded to our strategies with,
“Oh yeah, we are familiar with email lists.â€
“We are familiar with squeeze pagesâ€
“We are familiar with all these technologiesâ€
…as if to dismiss our silly age old ideas. You know what?? I am familiar with open heart surgery but I won’t be performing any operations today because I DON’T KNOW HOW TO FREAKING DO IT AND THE LIVES OF THE PATIENTS ARE DEPENDING ON THE EXPERIENCE OF THE DOCTOR!
The process of targeting, finding, contacting, engaging, and maintaining a core audience online is comprised of very common technologies mixed with, a consistent work ethic, and very common sense…which is not so common.
In an effort to ensure this isn’t happening or won’t happen to you, I have attached a report we regularly present to artists so they can more effectively measure the performance of their social media company against some successes we have had with our clientele (if we have real conversations on the phone with their social media experts online, it ends in confrontational disaster). Think of it as a sort of social media report card. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
I hope this helps you.
Gents, you asked me a question during our conference call that I felt was better answered with visuals rather than just words. The proof is always in the pudding. You asked regarding your current social media strategy, “What will you do differently than what we are doing right now?”
Here is a good look at what we are doing DIFFERENTLY than what your social media company is currently doing with you.
We will actively expand your social media accounts. Take a look at daily/weekly numbers that Daredevil Production gets on Twitter.
Take a look at another Twitter account we are working for a Facebook magazine called Real Country Music Fans. Again notice the daily/weekly gains in followers and unsolicited fans.
These are the kind of monthly gains you SHOULD be experiencing. With both Twitter accounts you can see that we average a solid 1500 to 1800 new followers per month with 12 to 14 per day being unsolicited followers.
Take a look at the Facebook LIKES for Real Country Music Fans. I should point out that this is our magazine and we haven’t even been pushing it or trying to expand it, yet you can see through clever activity we experience regular gains on LIKES.
�
This particular case study was with an artist named Collin Raye. Check out the results from a Facebook contest we put together. With this contest we were able to create much needed activity on the artist’s Facebook account. We generated over 70,000 comments in just 40 minutes.
NOTE: there are over 100,000 comments because people kept playing well after we ended the contest.
Additionally, this contest created 5,000 new Facebook LIKES for Collin.
The image above shows that we added 1,268 emails in 13 days.
Of course, getting the emails through consistent online and live show disciplines is one thing. Turning those social media follows and LIKES into email addresses, and the email addresses into revenue is something else completely.
Take a look at this 4-day sale we did for Collin Raye. Note the different product columns and the fact that most of sales happened during the sale days which are highlighted.
NOTE: these numbers reflect the sales that came from the web store we set up for the artist. There was an additional $1,750 of revenue generated from Tunecore as well.
Red arrows below show there are 5 pages of receipts. 172 receipts to be exact
Here is a look at what one of the receipts look like. I show you this to support the data shown in the excel spreadsheet.
Hopefully this will demonstrate exactly what we are doing differently. In my humble opinion, after all the attention you have received from “Insert Oscar Winning Movie Here”, your social media numbers should be much higher. They’re abysmal at less than 1,000 Twitter followers, less than 3,900 Facebook Likes, and no email addresses to speak of.
Again, the technology is nothing new. In fact, the solutions you are looking for to grow your business are about 10% common technology and 90% language and experience. Compare these numbers here to your current numbers and I think you will find the differences compelling. My father always taught me “The numbers don’t lie because the numbers can’t talk.”
If you like this post, please SHARE it and/or LEAVE A COMMENT thank you!
[ois skin=”Bottom Post”]
Tanya Marie Harris is a Country music singer/ songwriter who was born and raised in London, Ontario.
Tanya’s first single, “A Woman Scorned†was released to iTunes on May 31, 2013.
