About 20 years ago, when I used to be hired by corporate record companies, like Sony Music, Universal, Fonovisa and Wea Latina, to produce albums for their artists, I realized that their talent did not need to know much about the music business to sell their music. They were assigned a executive producer thinking about the total cost of the project, a music producer taking care of the audio part of it, an art director for the photography and images, and a marketing director taking care of radio, magazines and TV appearances. Nowadays, it is not a corporate market anymore, it is a independent artist market, and all those roles fall into the artist themselves.
Luckily, today we have so many tools in our hands that we did not have then. First, we can experiment on writing songs and hearing demos with a quality that only people with expensive studios back then were able to accomplish. Second, we have an incredible freedom to deliver the honest messages that we want to present, without the filtering of a corporate company telling us what to record, since they though it would sell more records. And third, we can use all the marketing tools in the internet: Social media, iTunes and digital music stores, Video distribution of our performances (YouTube, Vimeo, etc). Even the sales of our music is presented internationally, without much effort.
Now, what we need to focus as independent artists, is to deliver true quality in the products we create. As I said before, the quality of the song itself has to be the best (talking about melody and lyrics), then the production and the style has to be tuned to our audience, and the image of the artist (pictures, videos, reviews) has to match with the music and the message we present.
Back then when an artist was signed by a corporate label, the contract offered close to $1 per record sold, after the expenses were covered. Unfortunately, many times that not, the sales never covered the original expenses (production, manufacturing, marketing and promotional tour), so the artist ended their contract owing money to the company, instead of making money.
The independent artist now has to have smaller expectations for the sales of his or her albums, but the reality is that they can actually make more money than before. Now the artists have to invest in the production and marketing of their albums, but at the end THEY OWN IT, meaning that instead of making $1 per CD, they can make $8 to $10 after their costs. So if in the past you needed to sell 30,000 Cds to make $30,000, now you only need to sell 3,000 to get the same amount!
I think that the independent artist today is in a better position than before, and the public is exposed to a better variety of music and possibilities.
We will get into the live performances in future blogs. See you soon!
