Tour:Smart is the brainchild of Martin Atkins. The ex- Public Image Ltd / Nine Inch Nails and Pigface drummer has applied his decades of experience and educated vision of the new music industry to a book, a DVD, and a series of crash-courses / seminars / discussions / school-events designed to aid musicians on their journey through the industry.

I don’t know how to describe the latest offering, Tour:Smart PLUS!, it is essentially a four year long educational course crammed into one 48-hour whirlwind weekend. It was intense, energising, humbling and motivating. Starting with learning from other band’s mistakes of touring, to learning to print your own merchandise, to filming and editing your own videos, and then what to do with them in the crazy online world of social media. This is as complete a course as you could find, without all the fodder of the ways the industry used to work or hiring other people who then get in your way (and cause you costly mistakes). It is the nitty-gritty of what YOU need to do to propel YOUR career forward; it is about taking responsibility, creating plans and leaping into action.

There is no magical guide to make you famous in six weeks, the music business is a long and dirty road, but with a hand from Tour Smart you will have all you need to prepare and inspire you to take this road, and start eating up the miles.

As I said, I could not even begin to regurgitate the learnings of last weekend, but here are just a few key snippets that were delivered by Martin in his own passionate way, and how they resonated with myself.

“The Music Business is Participatory…”
As a musician, you have to not only practice and record your music, but promote, network, hack, sell, distribute, tweak, market, deliver and everything else in order to create your own success. Sitting back and waiting to be ‘discovered’? (LINK) I’ll tell you now that it is not going to happen.

“Beware of Smokescreens…”
Hardware or soft synths? Cubase or Logic? MP3, CD, Vinyl or cassette tapes? Getting caught up in these arguments is a waste of time. Use what works for you, make your music, get it out there. Using your music wisely is far more important that the software involved.

“Free is the New Black…”
Giving your music away is pretty much essential. However, you shouldn’t be doing it just because other artists are, but because there is a lot to be gained. Collecting emails in return is often the simplest idea, but so much more can be created and retained, from remix competitions to treasure hunts, all in the name of promoting awareness of your music and your brand. Which leads nicely into…

“Sell the Space Around Your Music…”
If fans like your (free) music, how else would they like to relate to you and how can you monetise that? Live shows? T-shirts? DVDs? Skateboards? Coffee Cups? Music fans often want to be part of a community, and anything that they can wear as a badge to say that they are part of your support will appeal to them. Of course, the individual items or events will depend on your (sub-sub-sub-) genre of music.

“Data Driven Decisions…”
This is not about trial and error. There is something to be said for going whole-heartedly into a project, but you use the data you have to make smart decisions, and then commit yourself. Fanbase details can be collected and dissected in ever-more inventive ways, such as Google Analytics, Youtube Insights, mailing list tracking and good old at-the-venue discussing with fans.

Although just the tip of the iceberg, each of these points should give you and your career something to think about, and for further elaboration, I can’t recommend enough getting in touch with the Tour Smart Team.

Lee Jarvis.

Class photos (c) Lee Jarvis 2009.

Here is a great keynote presentation from the Leadership Music Digital Summit, where Mike Masnick of Techdirt shares the details of Trent Reznor’ and Nine Inch Nails’ recent ventures, and how he believes they are pushing the music industry forward.

“That’s great”, I hear you say, “you’re always going on about NIN, but we can’t afford to do this or have as many resources”. Well, Masnick also shares how other musicians are using similar ideas and implementing them in their own careers. It’s not about copying what Reznor thinks, he’s a pioneer and can do things on a grand scale thanks to selling million of albums, concert tickets and merchandise items. But you can learn to think outside the box; detach yourself from the idea that music is a product that you must sell via a record label. Experiment, and think about all the revenue streams, technical possibilities, and other perks and positive impacts that you can generate from your music endeavours.

It’s only 25 minutes, so grab some coffee and check it out…

(original video hosted at Vimeo)

Lee Jarvis.

NIN does it again.

Trent Reznor has a great project called NIN|JA 2009 , giving away a 6 track EP from three different bands (Nine Inch Nails, Jane’s Addiction and Street Sweeper) to help promote their extensive summer ’09 tour.

Any readers of my industry blog know that I’m not just a Nine Inch Nails fan, but a huge supporter of Reznor’s music strategies. Giving your music away in order to raise awareness and generate future revenue, in this case, ticket sales. The idea worked very well for the Ghosts I-IV album last year, where releasing the first volume for free download not only resulted in $1.6m in first week sales (of physical CDs, deluxe boxsets and digital downloads), but also helped contribute to a hugely popular 2008 tour of both South and North America.

Obviously NIN are a globally famous band, but that’s not to say that lesser-known artists can’t use the same idea to help raise awareness. Imagine how impressed any venue booker would be if you could help sell out a show. Not to mention that while you have a captive audience, a well placed and stocked merchandise table will help recoup any ‘losses’ of giving away a free download or two.

Making money because of your music instead of directly from it is a lesson that many artists can learn from.

Lee Jarvis.

This was the first MET summit, organised by Chicago Booth GSB Students and held at the Harper Center, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who considered it a great success. The summit focused on Media, Entertainment and Technology (there’s the ‘M’, ‘E’ and ‘T’ for those of you paying attention), and featured some well chosen panelists and keynote speakers from a variety of backgrounds. I chose to follow the Social Entertainment and Music panels and will touch on them here as I feel they all shared good advice that you can apply to promotion of your music career / artist management / online marketing / record labels and much more. (note: Part 2 next week will go into the keynote speeches)

Session 1 – Social Entertainment
Cliff Warner, Principal/CEO, Thinkwell Design & Production; Matt Freeman, CEO, Betawave Corporation; Anisha Ahluwalia, Associate Director, Denuo; David Goldberg, CEO, Youbet.com

The panel spoke well about various types of customer engagement in the digital world, touching on the gap between huge scale tools such as Yahoo adverts which can reach millions of consumers but may only return impression figures, and the kind of niche tools that really help you to understand your customers needs when you connect with them in a relaxed state of mind and retain their attention; finding the right combination for your business / career holds the best possibility of engagement and ultimately, success.

With less disposable income and more choice than ever before it is harder to keep customers interest and retain return visits, and any business having strong offline comparables will have to offer something more compelling online. This may be as simple as ‘being able to shop at home in your underwear’, it may mean creating more interesting additional features to support custom, displaying reams of data that could not be processed or viewed physically, or offering real-time updates allowing instant changes to orders / decisions. Nike plus did this well and brought the physical act of running to an online state by offering a community to share advice and support.

We also heard about brands that needed to actually discover what their brands mean before launching into social media, and perhaps when it is unsuitable or just plain weird they are better off partnering other companies or launching a community based on a related but diverted niche of the brand. The panel finished up by suggesting where they see social entertainment moving in the future, and the points raised are something that I agree strongly with and will feature in future blogs, namely ‘mobility’, ‘filtering’ and ‘authenticity’. Customer will want access and entertainment on the go, and products such as the iPhone allow new ways to engage them all the time. They will also want and need ‘filters’, meaning that with more and more content being created and shared online, recommendation and guidance will bring quality to the end user and create a strong appeal. Lastly, authenticity is something that people crave, and with people becoming numb to faceless internet spamming, that means that genuine conversations, a strong offline connection and authentic actions / reactions create trust and loyalty to your brand (company / artist).

Session 2 – Music
Beverly Jackson, Sr. Marketing Manager, The Recording Academy; Jonas Tempel, CEO/Co-founder, Beatport.com; Peter Strand, Founding Partner, The Law Offices of Peter Strand; Brenden Mulligan, President & Director of Business Development, ArtistData

Well, obviously here is my forte, and the very well chosen panelists meant that i could have happily listened to a two hour speech by each of them, but I feel we covered a fair bit of ground in the session. Upon entering the room, there were already postcards advertising the Grammys (3 weeks late?!) and Recording Academy artists on all the seats… hmmm. Speaking of the Grammys, quote of the day goes to Jonas Tempel, who said after seeing the Jonas Brothers and Stevie Wonder performance, “I’m not sure if I was confused or offended”. Jonas and the panel also offered a wealth of knowledge regarding the music industry, mentioning that publishing rights are one revenue stream that should be protected, although I was a bit concerned at how this evolved into ‘illegal downloading is wrong’ and ‘they will get you if you do so’ style comments (maybe because of the watchful eye of the RA representative?). 10 years after the Napster hooplah started I thought there would be less of that.

We did move on, and somewhere that the panelists saw potential growth is in the live music sector. Concert tickets may be high, but people are obviously willing to pay that and even more on ebay and the like, so the demand for shows and discovery of music doesn’t seem to have slowed at all. Best Buy is apparently making shelf space in their stores for low-end musical instruments, obviously as a demand reflex rather than a good-will incentive to encourage young music types.

A variety of music players / widgets / promotion sites were brought up, all available to aid artists’ careers, and the panel agreed that independent artists are in a strong position in this shift in the industry, and also the new interesting ways of artist promotion such as the Prince CD giveaway with the Mail on Sunday in England, himself being a music visionary and now a savvy industry marketer and businessman. I would have loved someone to emphasise that the giveaway almost certainly helped Prince sell out 15 of 21 shows at London’s O2 Arena within the first hour of tickets becoming available.

Something I consider very important and is quite a hot topic recently is the Creative Commons Licensing. I wanted to ask the panel their thoughts, especially as to if this relates to the remix competitions that Beatport offers and to what the Recording Academy thought of the huge popularity and financial success of Nine Inch Nails’ operation with this licensing, but unfortunately we had run out of time.

I thought the discussions such a success and inspiration that I will endeavour to contact the recent panelists and other music industry professionals and report back with some interviews / quotes in the near future.

For more info on each of the panelists and keynote speakers, as well as general MET summit details is at www.metsummit.com, and I strongly suggest that you keep an eye out for next year’s event; if it is carried out as passionately and as smoothly as this year’s then I see it being a great opportunity for young entrepreneurs to enhance their knowledge and a key event to forge interesting relationships with intelligent forward-thinking media companies in 2010.

Lee Jarvis.