Hi I’m Matt, me and my team do fully comprehensive online marketing and branding campaigns for musicians, entertainers and small business. Packages start at $600.
Email me, Matt: kurbpromo@gmail.com
Well I haven’t done an update on the music marketing management blog for quite some time so what better to get warmed up for a bit of a marketing streak toward christmas then an update with whats going on with me?
You don’t think I’d seriously stop marketing music do you?
Well, maybe a bit, but never completely. The music industry is going through a hard time and that means it’s absolutely full with desperate people, which makes it a hard climate to do business in.
Musicians are always broke, they’re like zombies who walk around the earth with no money expecting to feed. They can’t feed, there’s nothing to eat, the sharks are jumping out of the pool.
A great cleansing begins of those who are probably not in it for real, and those who run ou of motivation wasting all their money and effort.
Meanwhile, I’m having limited success getting into the bigger game, where the decent money is. It’s totally understandable that broke musicians want to hang onto their money, but I cant do much for you for $500, I’m just being honest because I think I’m going to have to continue to be extremely cunning in not only my marketing initiatives but my business dealings.
What I mean by that is that if there’s nothing I can do with $500 I may aswell not do it, because you’re going to be disappointed and I’m going to be disappointed because you’re disappointed.
I can’t tell you $500 will make a difference, because it won’t.
So I’ll just say what I say in pretty much every blog I write here: Look at me. Probably take me another 5 years to make my first million but I’m okay with that.
Are you okay with the road that lies ahead for you as a musician? I’ve already been in it for 5 years, so if you’re just starting out are you good with the concept that you’re on a long journey and you’ll only get to where you want to go if you pace yourself for the end goal?
Personally, I need to be working with artists who have already begun to become astute in their business dealings because I really can’t be bothered with artists who aren’t realistic about the challenge that’s facing them.
What are you? Are you a career artist or a music tourist, does this look like school of rock? Rock star camp? That’s what I feel like sometimes. Do you want to give me $500 to feel like there’s a bit of something going on on the internet for a few months or do you actually want to build on your long term trajectory to becoming an artist as a career?
If you don’t have a website and some kind of strategy to go out there and online there, and hit your fans and take those suckers down in the corner pocket, tagged and bagged, well what are you gonna do?
Hope they feel sorry for you?
So $500 later, and things start to move, and you still cant pay the bills, what do you do then? Half the guys who have given me money had no idea!
When there’s 100 people waiting to hear what you have to say for yourself, when you’re using that as a stepping stone, how are you going to run that, how’s that going to go? Have you thought about that, or did you just skip forward from when you’re getting started to when it’s all coming together after you quit your day job?
Did you just leave out a few years of planning there? Y’know the years where you tirelessly blog, and write, and video and record knowing this will be a huge vault of recurring income once you’ve put the work in and reached critical mass, even if it takes 10 years.
Look, I only got half an idea myself that’s why I’m trying to go there. This ship is sinking and I don’t know about you but I can see the shore and I’m swimming for it.
If you don’t know what your swimming for, I’d keep your $500 on hand for when you’re chilling at the bottom of the ocean with the titanic that was the traditional late 20th century music industry.
I’ll find some artists who have already got the fan interaction thing down, all they then need is my business nous - look, I’m no good when artists give me $500 and expect me to put the whole puzzle together with only half the pieces.
I want to be working with people who have got traction with an audience so I can go to work leveraging propositions to extract profit from the value they receive - that is the nitty gritty I want to get down to.
So maybe a little bit in the wilderness right now, to be honest I don’t really want to work with any bands that can’t either give me at least $100 p/weekor make a commitment for at least 6 months because it’s just going to fall short, and no one wants that.
But I’m definitely still insisting that the chances of some corny product or instruction manual saving you is ridiculous. There’s no magic product or technique - like a spambot on myspace 4 years ago - that can help you if it’s just some one size fits all product.
Thats why I wont do a dumb information product. Real success is built on real risks, real ideas, real concepts, not some has been gurus cast offs, because you’ll still be doing all the work, and still failing wjere you’ve always failed in your promotion.
But I think that’s enough on my jaded perspective of our career paths in the music industry and how I’m sick of broke musicians, who are interested in a little dream, not in backing themselves long term in business.
This is me! People are always emailing me, they want what I can offer and I’ll be doing lots of marketng over the holidays as my other enterprises quieten down, but my suspicions are that my ideas are solid it’s just time to throw some weight behind them. A little more than $500.
I’m still certain that in the next year or two you’re going to have some new breed break outs showing how it’s done and yet most musicians will remain clueless. I’ll continue to progress, bumbling and stumbling along, I just hope you dont get left behind, hawking your CD on myspace to an absent audience that doesn’t know or care what you’re doing.
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