Here at Assault HQ, we know how difficult it is to plan a weekend in Chicago. With so much good live music to choose from (and so much alcohol to drink to while you listen), who can decide? We can. Just follow this itinerary and you’re guaranteed an awesome time:

FRIDAY:

You can kick your weekend off in delightfully kooky style with Assault favorites The Maybenauts (and their chums The Demerits) when they play a place called Cigars & Stripes in Berwyn. I’ve never experienced this place firsthand, but apparently it’s an awesome bar with a tiny stage, so you’ll be real close to the action. Also, I’m guessing drinks are gonna be pretty cheap, considering the location and all -- should be a sloppy good time with a couple of awesome Chicago bands. (C&S apparently has a Smoke Shoppe which features “over 100 brands of fine cigars.” I’m guessing Mr. 51% pretty much lives here when he’s in the Berwyn area.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRXQE00VNK4

OR: If you want something a little more traditional, in a larger setting, with a more mainstream vibe, Tegan and Sara are bringing their special rock’n'roll sounds to the Aragon. Tickets for this will run ya $32.75, which I don’t consider a great value for your money. But if I had unlimited resources, I’d go just to see them tear through “Hell” alone. That shit is catchy! (The doors open at 7pm and it’s all ages.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj18OrqWA9I

SATURDAY:

On Saturday, I recommend you throw down $25 for a ticket to the late show at Schubas: superstar brothers Dan and Matt Wilson, who have a combined history that includes popular favorites like Trip Shakespeare, The Twilight Hours, and Semisonic (and yes, it’s the Semisonic you’re thinking of -- the ones responsible for one of the catchiest, most awesome songs of the 90s: “Closing Time”). This will probably be an evening of much gentle melodic delight, so pack a few funny pills and enjoy the ride. The late show starts at 1opm and, as stated, tickets are a whopping $25 -- but this is kind of a special occasion. Also: the show is 21+, so grab a babysitter for the younguns.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGytDsqkQY8

OR: Conversely, if you’re not looking for subtlety, charm, or wit, and you just want some hot rock sauce poured down your pants, Stone Temple Pilots are bringing their reunion juju to the Riv. I wanted to check these guys out on their first comeback go-round a few years ago, just to see if they’d stack up to my memories of listening to Purple when I was twelve, but didn’t make it out. I’ll probably miss this one, too (unless $58.50 [+service charges] falls into my lap and I don’t need it for anything else, which is slightly less likely than Scott Weiland staying clean for the duration of this tour), but damn if I don’t sometimes dream about pumping my first to “Vaseline” in 2010. Oh well. Tickets are seriously sixty bucks apiece, and the show starts at 7:30pm.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FDk7pGQAKo

SUNDAY:

For Sunday, Reggie’s Rock Club has a real doozy for you: Nemesis Entertainment’s Double Strength Rock Fest, which features no less than seven bands for only $9 -- that evens out to $1.28 per band (if my math can be trusted), and I think we can all agree that’s a fair going rate for the rock these days. The bands are Standby Radio, Little Boy Jr, F.H.O.D., Arrange For Use, Falling In Fate, Six Ways From Sunday, and Parkinglot Firesex. If that doesn’t sound like a spectacular Sunday evening to you, you don’t drink nearly enough Red Bull -- and you probably hide your balls in a jar for “safe keeping.” Come on, guys! (Also: ladies.) Let’s do this shit. It’s an all-ages show, it starts at 5pm, and it’s only NINE DOLLARS. That’s the cost of a movie, almost, and you’re bound to hear something you like from this ragtag crew of musical mercenaries.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk9RbLeLlmg

And that’s your weekend! (You’re welcome.)

We love Motion City Soundtrack here at Assault, and their new record My Dinosaur Life is by far the best thing we’ve heard yet in the new year. So imagine how pumped I was to see that frontman Justin Pierce did a little feature with MTV (apparently they want to get back into the music business) wherein he teaches you how to play the new MCS songs “Disappear” and “The Weakends” on guitar. This kind of stuff is always rad for people (such as myself) that are too damn stupid to figure out guitar tabs. I’m sure our own Mr. 51% will be all over these videos, and you should check ‘em out too – learning how bands actually play their songs is pretty damn cool. Obviously this isn’t Eddie Van Halen teaching you to shred the fuck out of “Eruption,” but I know it’ll take me at least two weeks to absorb the mad knowledge Mr. Pierce is kickin.’ So click this link (or the pretty picture to your right) and you’ll be transported to a dreamworld of guitar magic.

Album sales are down. Record labels are tanking – the only way they can make money these days is to sue middle-aged women whose kids illegally download a couple Britney Spears songs. More people listen to music than ever, and yet all labels can think about is how to suck  every goddamn penny out of every re-hashed and recycled sound-a-like band that they can until people are just fed up with it. We’ve come to and surpassed the corporate-arrogance tipping point long ago, and yet they keep piling up fresh insults, rubbing more salt into the wounds of the kids who fund their expense accounts.

White hot rage!

Nowadays, there are so many tools out there at your disposal as a musician that you don’t need a label, a marketing company, $20,000 to record an album, or half a million to promote it. You can rely on good old fashioned word of mouth. Except today it isn’t just word of mouth – it’s word of mouth on steroids. So why is it that bands who are still unsigned, have no shows booked, and have no major accomplishments to date are in such a hurry to place a gatekeeper between them and their fans? That’s right – I’m talking about deflecting me to a manager. I’m not trying to book you for a show, or sign you to a label. I just want to tell people that you probably haven’t reached out to before how great you are.

We’re not the oldest music site on the internet, or the most widely read. But in our few short years of existence we’ve amassed a fairly sizable following; we have a couple thousand people that visit our site on a regular basis and trust us to recommend music to them because we’re honest rock ‘n’ roll enthusiasts. So when all I want to do is tell the thousands of visitors we have per day on our website about how much I love a particular bands music, it’s not a bad idea to send a quick email saying “Thanks, here’s a .zip file with our music and a couple pictures to include in a post.” We’re not asking for anything besides what you’d gladly give a major magazine or blog, and the only difference is that we won’t embarrass you with stupid questions or try to psycho-analyze your music. And this isn’t just with unsigned  bands who should be taking every opportunity for free promotion they can get – the problem is even more intense with mainstream bands that I have adored for the last 10 years and given up gas money, food, clothing, and just about everything else I can think of just to buy their album or go to their shows. If you’re a mid-size band with loyal fans, you should either be responding to tweets directed at you, including an email address on your website, or (at the very least) making sure your record company is responding to blogs that request information (that is a separate blog post for a different day – my main man Oswald Hobbes could surely wilt your boner with horror stories about attempting to contact “punk rock” record labels to -*gasp*- promote their bands).

All I want to do is tell the small audience I have amassed in 2 years of blogging that I’ve found a cool band you’ve probably never heard of and that you probably should check out, and here’s why they are awesome. Simple.

So why on earth do you not respond to countless emails, tweets, phone calls? Not even, “Sorry, we’re not touring so we’re not doing interviews,” which I would accept as an answer. Not even “Sorry, but you’re not big enough to cover us.” The best fucking part is that sometimes bands do respond to us and they then tell us to email their manager.

I’m sorry. I told you I was going to do a 300 word write up on you on my blog, not a cover shoot for Rolling Stone followed up with an acoustic set with Hayley Williams and Travis Barker. Answer my 5 questions and take 10 minutes to email me about your upcoming shows and albums, and I will tell my small army of music fans that your show is worth attending.

The thing that pisses me off most is that there are bands that are successful, that have been around for a long time, that have never had legit mainstream success, but have always been SO close to breaking out and taking over the world. The one thing they’re inevitably missing is that final push to get them over the tipping point. The thing they’re missing is those lifelong ambassadors, the superfans who have been with them since the beginning and who are still fighting for them.

Why? Cause you shut down their fan club. You ignored their emails. You didn’t release an album or have any fan interaction for years on end, and you failed to be human.  You gave them press releases.

In “Third World” Timmy’s fantasy universe, the almost-big time bands would still interact with their fans. (Exhibit A: Hayley Williams of Paramore does this right. See also: Ted Leo, definitely among the world’s five greatest Tweeters.) If fucking Paramore has the time to interact with their fans amidst their grueling touring schedule, I’m pretty sure that four guys who just made it out of the basement last month can return an email without too much disruption. I’m not asking you to leave your girlfriend for me or invite me to your family reunion; just a quick response, some token participation to show that you take this shit seriously and that you actually want more people to hear your music.

The unsigned bands would stop fucking worrying about playing big time and answer my two or three emails and not forward me to a manager with a fucking Yahoo! email address because I mentioned the word ‘interview.’

I shit you not, this is an example of the kind of shit I have dealt with in the (recent) past:

Hey you guys are great! Heard your single somehow/someway and saw you live and thought it was even better! I’d love to do a quick write up, or maybe ask you a few questions about the band, and link to anything you’ve got in the works, and possibly put you in a larger round up of up and coming punk rock groups.
-”Third World” Timmy

The band’s response

Hey thanks for the kind words! We’re definitely excited to get something going on your site. Could you possibly contact our manager? He’s a better person to talk to about this stuff.

I’m sorry, a better person than the band themselves? What’s he going to do, exactly? Give me permission to ask you questions after I already asked you? Ask how much traffic our website gets? Find out if we’ll hand out flyers for you? I really just don’t fucking get what else he could answer for me that you can’t answer in a 10 sentence email. The manager’s response, from a Yahoo email address:

Thank you for expressing interest in our band. The reason behind you contacting me is that I handle all media including any kind of interview. The band is excited to be on your website, and feel free to contact them to further your write up of the band. If you have any questions or concerns contact me at your convenience.

Gee, thanks. As soon as you start putting more layers of abstraction between yourselves and your fans, you look stupid. (Hey, guys – Oswald here. Just wanted to point out that not only is the manager’s response superfluous and high-handed ["feel free" to talk to the band? I'm not trying to set up an interview with Fidel Castro over here], it’s also retarded. Since I don’t know what would possess an unknown band to waste money on a manager, I’ll go out on a limb and guess that it’s because you want a veneer of professionalism and class to impress people. This band obviously chose the wrong dude.)

Another question I’ve been asked many times when I’ve expressed interest in sponsoring young bands struggling to make a name for themselves: “So, what does this mean you want to sponsor the band? What do they have to do exactly?” My response: “We want to give them free stuff. That is all. Maybe let us snap some photos of the band while they’re on stage. That’s about it.”

98% of the bands I’ve been in contact with are awesome. This isn’t a perfect world, and not everyone knows what the rules are so, in an attempt to appear as professional as possible, they’ve made themselves look like assholes. Next time you’re trying to negotiate a record deal, or a sticky PR situation, by all means consult your manager, or your PR person. If you need a tour planned, by all means, a Tour Manager is the way to go. But for fucks sake, we’re basically music fans who spend a bit of free time writing about bands we like. (Oswald again: I think what Tim is trying to say here, through his thick red screen of rage, is this: Act like a person. It’s that simple. We are a few guys that work our asses off running a blog that aims to share the gospel of rock with people on the internet; we’re not slimy industry insiders. Before you give us the brush-off, take a look at our site. Spend a few minutes to understand what we do here, and the amount of space we give away – this is called “free promotion” – to up-and-coming bands that we find by going to shows and scouring the internet. If you honestly don’t want to be a part of it, then say that; we won’t get offended. But have the decency to check us out and then respond like normal people instead of turning us away like we’re diseased and it’s catching.)

I’ll close this out with a quick passage of what I read from Seth Godin’s interview on Derek Sivers’ blog

“Get over the idea that your success is equated with selling the right to listen, or selling control over when people listen. Relinquish the opportunity to make money by controlling who can listen and when. That’s gone. It’s over. It would be like a bakery selling the right to sniff the fresh bread or a wine maker selling the right to look at the cool label. It’s now a public good, something you see as you walk by.What you can sell, what you better be able to sell, is intimacy. It’s interactions in public. Souvenirs. Limited things of value. Experiences. Memories. People will pay for those things, IF: your art is actually great and if you make it possible for them to buy them. If it’s great, let it go. You’ll do fine. If it’s not great, figure out what great is and do that.”

Also: don’t give a middle-finger to people who are trying to help you; don’t be arrogant. You’re not Fall Out Boy yet, and with a shitty attitude, you never will be.

At Assault, we’re all about doing it yourself, and we recently got into contact with a band on Twitter called Trippy Wicked. Needless to say we liked them, and their new album and were delighted to find that they’d posted an in-depth how to on releasing an album on your own, independent of any record label. We’ve asked their permission to repost their blog as we feel it’ll probably help a few of you looking to for help on releasing and promoting your own indie record.

Topics covered include:

• Why release your own music?
• What goes into releasing an album?
• Pressing CDs
• PQ sheets and CD Masters
• Cover Songs
• Artwork
• Digital Distribution
• Spotify
• UPC/EAN/Barcode
• ISRCs
• Physical Distribution
• Release Date
• Websites and Web Presence

On 30th October 2009 we will release our debut full length album Movin On. We recorded in June this year, there’s just under a month to go before the release date and there is still a hell of a lot to do. I’m writing this still in the thick of it to get a real sense of what’s going on. So why are we releasing it ourselves and what actually goes into releasing an album?

Why release your own music?

Because you can. It’s 2009, we are living in the future, worldwide digital distribution is available for pennies, worldwide physical distribution is available at your local Post Office, you can do your own marketing, YouTube exists, MySpace/Facebook exists, Twitter exists blah blah blah and so on. The mid 80′s are thankfully nothing but a distant memory.

The possibility of releasing our own music had always been at the back of my mind and I had tested the water with a few labels to be met mostly with silence. I could have contacted a lot more labels, spent a few months hassling them for a response and then maybe getting a release early next year if we were lucky but we decided to go it alone and get it done ourselves. I probably wouldn’t rule out working with a label in the future but doing it ourselves is the best way for us right now.

What goes into releasing an album?

As much or as little as you want. There’s nothing to stop you making an album, burning the CDs, designing/printing/cutting/folding/inserting the covers and inlays yourself. I did this for our first 2 demos and selling something you made entirely from scratch like this feels damn good.

Movin On, however, is a full album and a lot of love and effort went into writing and making it so there was no question about making this a proper release. A lot goes into preparing for a proper release even for an underground band. More than you may realise. I’ve learnt a lot about barcodes, ISRCs, CD Replication/Duplication, preparing artwork for print, why pictures on screen look different when they’re printed, how to include cover songs, digital distribution, red book standard, PQ sheets etc.

Pressing CDs

I went with Testa-Rossa in the UK based on a couple of recommendations from friends and so far so good. They’ve been quick to respond to my questions and quick to email any forms I need to sign. As a general rule if you want fewer than 500 copies you’re going for duplication and anything over this you’re going for replication. Duplication involves CD-Rs and a process similar to burning your own except with much larger and faster machines. Replication involves the creation of a glass master and metal stamper to ‘press’ your CDs. There are lots of pressing plants and it’s worth checking out their websites to see what information they offer about things like artwork as the amount of details varies from place to place. There is debate in the underground DIY community on the merits of using replication of duplication but for me replication is the more professional route.

Before this gets under way though you need to approve the artwork and we had ours sent to us as PDFs. Printed proofs can be ordered at cost (both time and money) for the super careful. You also need to sign an IRP (Intellectual Property Rights) and Sound Recording Copyright form. This is basically where you state that yes this is your own music, you own the sound recording copyright/publishing rights and if not you have to specify who does.

PQ sheets and CD Masters

The format for writing CDs is Red Book. Red Book specifies various standards such as the physical parameters of the CD, max playing time, data storage, ISRCs (more on these below) etc. A PQ sheet lists all the track start and end times, ISRCs for the songs and track names. PQ sheets are used as a check-list when the glass master is created. The chances are you wont be doing this part yourself though and it will be handled by whoever created your master CD. For us, the PQ sheet was created by Testa-Rossa and I had to check the tracks times, names and ISRCs and sign it off as ok before they started pressing the CDs.

Cover Songs

We recorded a cover song and right up until the last minute we were going to include it on the album. I had sought the advice of friends that were involved with or ran record labels and the advice was, don’t worry about copyright, you’re a very small band and if the publisher picks up on it they’ll simply come and ask you for the royalties you owe them. This didn’t quite sit right with me as I knew full well we had a cover song and that really I should do something about it if we were to use it. During the process of sorting digital distribution and getting the CDs pressed I would have had to have lied several times either stating the copyright/publishing right was ours or that we had gone through the necessary steps for using someone else’s material.

The actual steps for using copyrighted material are actually relatively simple and I chose not to do them out of sheer laziness. Running a band, releasing an album and working a full time job is time consuming to say the least. The basic process is to identify who owns the publishing rights, write them a letter stating what you’re going to use and then pay them monthly royalties according to your sales. CDBaby give a really good description of this process in their artist FAQ. We may well include the cover on our next album though because it’s an awesome song that needs to get an airing at some point.

Artwork

You have to have some good artwork for your release even if it’s a digital only release and by good I mean appropriate to your sound and style. If you can’t do it yourself and you don’t know anyone that can help find someone on deviant ART or Flickr who’s work you like, contact them and see if they want to help out. The world is full of the most incredible artists and I’m sure many of these will jump at the chance to create something for your music. Our album cover was taken care of by a friend based on some rough ideas we described to him, a lot of which were taken from the experiences we had whilst recording.

I handled the rest of the CD inlay myself. Most, if not all, CD pressing plants will supply templates for you to use and insist that you do so according to their strict guidelines. Preparing artwork for print is different from preparing artwork for your computer and you need to be aware that the colours of your artwork on screen will vary when printed so make sure you print out tests as you go. Basically your screen is displaying colour by mixing red, green and blue and on paper colours are created by mixing cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black) so the two systems are interpreting the same colour information in different ways. My experience has been that the same colours appear more vibrant and full on screen than in print. You’ve also gotta know that black in print is not just black; it’s a mix of the four colours. When printing black in CYMK all four colours are laid down at about 75% and the art department of the pressing plant will tell you exactly what they require. There are a million and one descriptions of the difference between RGB and CYMK so go feed your head.
Any template you use will most likely specify a certain amount of bleed as well. This is where the artwork stretches beyond the physical edge (e.g. 3mm) of the format you’re designing for to allow for any minor inacuracies of the cutting machine. If someone else is doing your artwork make sure they are aware of this and don’t design an image that would suffer from losing a few millimetres here and there.

Digital Distribution

Setting up digital distribution was tough and stressful because deadlines were looming. I had been planning on using CDBaby for some time but changes to the company earlier this year have let down a lot of independent artists and labels in a big way. This was a major problem for me as one of the main aims was to get the album into Spotify. There are currently very few options for independent artists to do this and CDBaby has been the main contender for a while. I very nearly went with them but their tarnished reputation and bad customer service with my initial contact led me straight to RecordUnion. Immediate responses in the affirmative to the questions I had made it a no brainer. I took the risk and went with the lesser know service. So far so good.

Spotify

Dear America, I’m sorry you don’t have Spotify yet and I really hope it gets sorted soon. It absolutely rules and is big news over here in Europe. You have to use it to ‘get’ it but it’s basically an enormous library of music with a slick interface and works mind-bogglingly fast. I have a premium account so I can listen without adverts and use it on my phone. Listening to Pantera, Cowboys From Hell as I type this in case you’re wondering. Anyway at the time of writing there are 3 services you can use for digital distribution that will push your music to Spotify: CDBaby, RecordUnion and DittoMusic. After I discounted CDBaby I had a quick look at DittoMusic but the budget website and fact I had to pay before uploading any music or doing anything really put me off. I’ve just checked their website now and it’s looking a lot better so they may have upped their game recently. If Spotify is not your concern there are many other distributors to choose from. I used TuneCore for our EP Lowering the Tone and they were and still are excellent to work with. Research a few and work out which is best for you.

UPC/EAN/Barcode

In order to get your music into the digital stores you will need one of these and the digital distributor will be able to provide you with one. If they don’t then go somewhere else. I paid $10 for ours; cheap as chips. UPC stands for Universal Product Code, EAN stands for European Article Number and is basically a UPC with a extra digit in front (add a 0 to the front of your UPN and you have an EAN describing an America product). A barcode is a graphic representation of this that can be read by machines and uber-geeks with 20-20 vision. If you REALLY want to learn more about this have a look at the info on Wikipedia.

Once you’ve decided on your distributor, upload your music, artwork and complete any required details, buy a barcode, set your pricing plan if this is available, set a release date (generally allowing for the 6 – 8 weeks maximum time get your stuff live in the digital domain) and press the big red button. RecordUnion didn’t offer any pricing plans so everything will just be set at each digital store’s defaults. Others like CDBaby and TuneCore will allow you to choose different price bands for the digital stores that offer them.

ISRCs

International Standard Recording Code. An ISRC is a code that uniquely identifies a recorded song (or music video recording). RecordUnion provided me with ours once I’d uploaded the songs. You need to send these along with your audio master CD to the CD presser and they will encode each track with its corresponding ISRC. When you get your CD back and put it in your computer iTunes (or whatever) will look up the code and know what each track is and where it’s from.

Physical Distribution

I’m currently planning on selling the album using Big Cartel though I’m keen to see what the ReverbNation/Audiolife tools are like once they are public. I haven’t set this up yet though and the CD mailers I’m going to use literally turned up in the post today. I went for cardboard pizza box style instead of jiffy bags. Don’t just get the cheapest jiffy bag you can find because posting CDs is really not that expensive and if you take pride in your work package it so it won’t get damaged. I’ve also been contacted by a couple of online web shops that want to stock it and I’ve identified some others that I’m going to speak to. As far as I can tell the way this works is that you send them a bunch of CDs and when they sell some they let you know how many and you invoice them.

Find the online stores that stock your kind of music and make contact with them. I haven’t bothered with trying to get the CD into any independent shops yet as I’ve heard this can be time consuming and quite difficult. I’ll look into it for the next release though. I previously used PayPal buttons to sell Lowering the Tone through our website and MySpace but they were awkward to set up so I’m trying a different method this time.

Release Date

We waited until certain parts of the process were out of the way (getting the final master, artwork + CD layout complete) before deciding on a release date. There are so many factors involved and unforeseen changes to any of them can ruin a short deadline. Make sure you do set yourself a deadline though and take note of Parkinson’s Law; work will expand to fill the time given to it. If you give yourself a year it will take a year, if you give yourself four months it will take four months. Take into account that pressing CDs and pushing music to digital distributors takes time. The pressing plant we used gave a turnaround time of 10 to 15 working days. That’s up to 3 weeks and this doesn’t include approving artwork + any amendments, signing IPR forms, copyright disclaimers etc. Digital distributors will want you to upload your music up to 8 weeks in advance (the maximum I’ve seen, some are less) of your release date to allow the digital stores enough time to get your music listed. There’s no reason why you can’t have different physical and digital release dates though.

Websites and Web Presence

There’s a lot of debate and advice about what you should or shouldn’t do in terms of all the available places you can locate yourself on the internet. They all need working at and you need to understand how each one works. First up get yourself a website where you can pull all your online stuff together. I rebuilt ours over the last couple of weeks and it went live last week. If you don’t know how to build websites there are various services to do this for you. I have no experience with any so do some research but to start with there is Bandzoogle, Host Baby and I think ReverbNation offer a service in partnership with Bandzoogle. I also wanted a blog as well. I had used WordPress previously but found it to be far more complicated for what I needed and was a hassle because it’s constantly being updated. You need to install the updates yourself and it’s more than just a click of a button. I went with Blogger because I use it for my photo blog and is very simple and user friendly. If you want even more simple than this I’d suggest Tumblr.

Unfortunately I would suggest MySpace is still a must as most people expect you to have one and lots of promoters and webzines exist only on MySpace. It’s a good place for someone to have a quick listen to your music but make sure it’s not the only place. I gave up using iLike because its user interface was a pain to use and I don’t think anyone ever found us there. Twitter and Facebook are the some of the most popular at the moment and both are good when used well.

I’m using SoundCloud to host our music for streaming and when the album is released I’ll be making the whole thing available through them. They provide a very great customisable widget for you to use and their website is very slick and very user friendly. You can host your music with most of the usual suspects but for now I’m going with these guys for embedding our music on various websites.

Until recently I was using ReverbNation for our mailing list but I switched to FanBridge because I could customise the HTML of the signup form and their pricing plan is better for me. I’ve also been listing gigs and hosting music with them for a long time but I’m not sure how beneficial this is. They do provide lots of widgets for gigs, music, videos, mailing list signup and so on but they’re very heavily ReverbNation branded and not customisable enough for me to want to use them everywhere.

The one rule for ALL web presences is DO NOT SPAM. EVER. MySpace is an absolute shithole for this and if you spam me on MySpace we can never be friends, online or offline. Don’t send messages saying “I see you like so and so band so you should check us out and let us know what you think”. What I think is that you sound desperate and no I’m not interested in checking you out. The problem with spamming is that places like MySpace and Facebook make it so easy to do. Think about how many event/band/group/page invites you get that mean absolutely nothing to you and then make a conscious decision to not contribute to this.

This is pretty much where we are at with the release right now.

So what’s left?

The CDs are being pressed and the digital content is currently being pushed out to the digital retailers and streaming services all ready for 30/10/2009. T shirts are still to be designed and printed as well as stickers and badges, press packs have to be made up and I need to contact some bloggers and publications for reviews and interviews. There are also internet radio stations and podcasters to investigate (not looked at this at all yet). Gigs are being lined up for the end of this year and the beginning of 2010. Once the CDs are here I’ll be packing up a bunch ready to send out in time for release date and making up press packs for those that want a hard copy. I’m also going to look into some more web shops.

Money, time and effort are the three major factors to consider. A lot of the time you’re balancing the money you’re able to spend for services with the favours from friends you’re getting. You can’t hassle friends to hurry up if they’re doing an awesome job for you and doing it for free so you have to work to their timescales. There was a month or so when there was nothing I could do except for wait for a couple of parts to be complete and this was an odd time for me. I prefer to be getting my hands dirty rather than waiting round but I know when it’s time to step back and let the guy with the skills take over.

Everything else is just plain hard work especially if you’re gonna do most of it yourself. I’ve spent the last couple of years learning about and catching up on where the business and industry side of music has come from and where it’s going by putting in a lot of time reading various blogs and books. The last month has been the busiest this year and I’ve been working an hour at home before my day job, an hour at lunch and every spare hour I can grab in the evening and weekends.

If you need any inspiration for hard work and going DIY with any aspect of your music read Henry Rollins’ ‘Get in the Van’ Right now. You could also try reading ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’ and watching ‘DIY or Die’.

If you’re thinking about releasing your own music stop thinking and start doing because you have complete control and it’s so rewarding. Just under four months ago we drove away from Dorset knowing we had the makings of a stonker of an album in our hands. In just under four weeks we’ll be releasing it. Roll on the 30th.

Check out Trippy Wicked’s website to get some of their music and be sure to checkout their blog. They’ve got some great info on there.

So if you’re anything like me, you get you’re music from any source possible.  More often than not, this source is completely unreliable and does a number to your iTunes library.

I recently had a chance to review TuneUp, a program for your Mac or PC that automatically “cleans up” your iTunes library.  Now, like many, I feel the coolest part of my iPhone is the ability to flip through the album covers when in landscape mode.  Unfortunately, due to the lack of accurate resources (see paragraph 1), I was often searching through a stack of iTunes music notes.

Of course, if you don’t have the cover artwork, you can have iTunes search the store for the artwork, but again, this was often prevented due to incorrect song titles, album titles, or an unnecessary “The” before a bands name.  Who has time to fix that?

I thought I was doomed to forever have an iTunes catalog of unorganized, improperly titled, cover-less songs.  Until today.

TuneUp installation was a breeze.  And as “Third World” Timmy will tell you, I am the LEAST tech savvy person around.  I have trouble logging into this blog.  Anyway, the concept is easy.  Once you install TuneUp, you choose what you are trying to do: Clean Your Mislabeled Music, Find Your Missing Cover Art, Explore Your World of Music, & Never Miss Another Show.  I’ll start backwards and work my way up.

Never Miss Another Show

Based on the music in your library and the location you set, TuneUp notifies you of upcoming concerts in your area that may be of interest to you.  While I currently have the unfortunate luck of residing in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I could definitely see this as being my best friend if I were lucky enough to be back in Dallas or Chicago.

Explore Your World of Music

Based on the current song playing, TuneUp has a little pop-up window which lets you completely delve into the realm of the song/artist.  In my case, The Red Strokes by Garth Brooks was playing (don’t hate).  Within the little pop-up window attached to iTunes, I had full and instant access to Garth Brooks tagged YouTube videos, Artist Biography, Concert Notifications, Album Recommendations, Song Recommendations, Google News, Merch, Ebay, and more.  A pretty cool set of features that will definitely help me waste valuable time while at the office.

Find Your Missing Cover Art

Sounds simple enough, and it is.  TuneUp simply scans your library for missing cover art and then gives you up to 4 options to select the picture art from.  I didn’t play around with this feature too much, as I needed more help than this.

Clean Your Mislabeled Music

Here’s the good stuff.  Simply drag your library to the pop-up box attached to iTunes (says it can do them all, but that it works best when doing only up to 500 at a time, so I abided).  TuneUp then scans your songs and assigns them to 3 categories: Matches, Likely Matches, & Not Found.  Matches are said to be definite finds, Likely are said to be “pretty good results, but you might want to verify” and Not Found, well, yeah.

For this review, I decided to take my entire library and scan it.  I have 900+ songs on my work laptop, and had 16 tracks Not Found.  These tracks were either self-recorded Garage Band tracks, or live concert tracks.  None that I felt should have been “Found”.  I had several return under Matches, but a majority of them came back as Likely.  I, of course, didn’t feel like verifying any of the Likely ones, so I took all suggestions and decided to see how it faired out.

To scan my roughly 900 songs and save/accept changes, it took about 20-25 minutes.  What impressed me the most was that not only did it fix song names, band names and album titles, but it also added album artwork as well as meta information.  It changed my Sugarcult songs from Rock to Punk Pop, my Rick Astley from Other to Adult Contemporary (touché).  This program is awesome.  As of yet, I haven’t found an incorrect switch.  I’m sure it’s out there and I plan to search for one, but as of now, it certainly beats me actually doing any work to fix anything.  And the best part is, all but 16 songs in my library have cover art, so I can flip through those albums to my hearts content.

This program is Flippin’ Sweet.  Pun Intended. You can pickup the yearly license for $19.95 or splurge and get the lifetime license for $29.95 over at the TuneUp website.

Disclosure: We were provided a free review copy of this software, and we do get a small affiliate percentage of every sale we make of this software–but we wouldn’t endorse it if we didn’t like it, and thoroughly test it out.

“Kings And Queens,” the first single from 30 Seconds to Mars‘ new album, This Is War, has been out for awhile. It almost made it onto our Songs We’ve Put on Repeat post, but it was just too soon. Needless to say, I am a big fan of the single, and the same could be said about the majority of the album. It’s another step in the band’s evolution from “some-actor-who’s-in-a-rock-band” with their first album, to a more polished band with their second album, and to where they stand now with their own unique sound.

Link opens in iTunes

While I may stand on an island alone in my enjoyment of the new album, that’s not to say that I still wouldn’t be slightly embarrassed if my headphones unplugged while I was jamming out to this at Assault HQ. It’s good, but maybe it’s a bit beyond me intellectually. The over-arching themes of the album seem a bit too epic. I had this same feeling on their previous release A Beautiful Lie, and always found myself reaching for something a little more heavy, (like Rise Against). That said, This Is War has an even more epic feel to it than A Beautiful Lie, but I like it nonetheless.

Samples and soundscapes appear throughout the album that sound similar to the techniques the band employed in A Beautiful Lie, and at times overpower it–in my opinion, this is where the album falters a bit. Real bands with real instruments is something I’ve always believed, and while 30 Seconds to Mars has that element, there are times when it feels overproduced. In the opening track Escape, it’s welcomed because it succeeds with a chilling chant of “This is war” at the climax, but in the two closing tracks I felt like I was either listening to a Trevor Rabin/Michael Bay soundtrack or some sort of weird 80′s high fashion techno remix.

On the other hand, Kings and Queens, Vox Populi, This Is War, and Night Of The Hunter seem to have just the right blend of rock to keep me interested. By far Kings and Queens is still my favorite track on the album, but there are at least 4-5 comparable songs here, and that’s as good a ratio as you’ll find on one disc. I even liked listening to Hurricane, featuring my arch rival and nemesis Kanye West. (Though he sounds more like the auto-tuned singing from Brokencyde than he does Kanye.)

Overall, a solid album, and it will almost certainly be on my picks of the month for December.

Track Listing

1. Escape
2. Night of the Hunter
3. Kings and Queens
4. This is War
5. 100 Suns
6. Hurricane [feat. Kanye West]
7. Closer to the Edge
8. Vox Populi
9. Search & Destroy
10. Alibi
11. Strangers in a Strange Land
12. L490

Kings and Queens video (this is badass)

Like this band? You may also like Makeshift Prodigy from Chicago

A band I’m a huge fan of from Chicago, Makeshift Prodigy, (Link opens in iTunes) has a sound similar to this new album, and I’m quite a big fan of theirs. Check them out at their Official Website.

I was lucky enough recently to partake in the Chicago Music Commission’s Social Media panel for musicians at the Cultural Center in Chicago. They just posted the MP3 for the panel which they’ve called, “Stand Out In A Digital World”. I highly recommend listening to the podcast if you’re somewhat new to marketing yourself as a musician online. There’s tons of links and resources we discuss throughout the panel, and I only say “fuck” once.

Social Media for Musicians – Musicians at Work Forum

Recorded Monday,  November 16,  2009

We discussed using Social Media to build fan relationships. Developing a strategy that helps you choose how to use the available services and networks. Getting the most for your effort in growing and maintaining your fan base. Setting expectations and converting those relationships into real-time results.

Moderator:
Jim Goodrich Chicago Music Commission

Panelists:
Jeffrey David Goldford The Everyday People
Miriam Brosseau Stereo Sinai
Alan Jay Sufrin Stereo Sinai
Matt Ryd Singer/Songwriter
Tim Toomey Assault, Inc. (Me you turds)

Links from the panel you may like:

• Reverb Nation – Better than MySpace and you get embeddable music widgets
• Tunecore – Digital Music Distribution
• CD Baby – Discover New Music
• Last.fm – Another place to get your music on, like Pandora

The one tool you need in your toolbox as a band (which basically makes you a small business owner) is to install and configure Analytics on your website. Do yourself a favor and get off of MySpace. At the very least MySpace should just be used as another avenue to reach fans, not your only or primary point of contact. For this particular tutorial, we use WordPress as our content management system of choice. I recommend WordPress to anyone who asks me simply because of how easy it is, and how easy it is to integrate Google Analytics.

If you’ve already setup Google Analytics you can skip down a ways on the page as I go into the aspects of Google that will mean the most to you. It’s a good idea to look over the initial setup to make sure you’ve done everything properly. The way I setup Google does enable tracking on a few more important items that you don’t get by just copying and pasting the code Google supplies to you.

Get WordPress or a something similar CMS

With WordPress you have two choices to setup your site:

1. Download the software and install it to your web host (Recommended)
2. Host your website remotely on yourname.wordpress.com (less freedom)

Some hosting providers like Media Temple have a one click install for WordPress. This helps things along considerably. If you can’t afford your own domain name and/or hosting. Signup for an account on WordPress.com. Your name will be YOURNAME.wordpress.com to start, but you won’t be able to have complete freedom over the look and feel of your site.

If you have no other choice, start with option 2. You can always export your data and import it to your own web hosted .com later.

Signup for a Google Analytics account using your Google account name

I’ve had a Gmail account for awhile now so all I had to do was go to Google.com/analytics and sign up for an analytics account.

Setup your profile

Setting up your profile is as simple as putting in your website address for each website you have. If you want to setup e-commerce tracking for your online store you have to enable this option later. For now, just enter in the basic information for your site.

Our site already has a profile so the additional site we just setup appears below that domain name. (assault.it.com) You’ll also notice that the status icon is a little alert. That’s because we need to actually setup the embed code on the site.

Click on the edit link on the right, and then click on the Check Status link over to the right

Now you’ll see what we need to get our hands on which is the Google Tracking code. (On the right) You can just copy and paste this into your site if you’re not using WordPress, but it’s better to integrate it with the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin so you can enable additional features not offered with just copying and pasting the code.

If you just copy/paste the code into your site you won’t get any of the additional benefits setup like goal funnels so don’t do that.

Leave this window open for now, and I’ll explain how to implement this code with the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin in the next step.

Download/Install/Activate The Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress to your blog

You’re better off using the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin for a 3 reasons:

1. The plugin will track outbound clicks to see where people are leaving your site and what links they are clicking on when they do leave your site.
2. The plugin will automatically put the proper code on all aspects of your site, and when an upgrade is available it’s as easy as clicking upgrade.
3. Your downloads will automatically be tagged as /downloads/wp-content/uploads/your-file-name.zip so you can get an idea of how many downloads you are getting.

To download the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin you can either add it through the administration interface by going into your WordPress Admin area: http://www.whateveryourdomainis.com/wp-admin and then click on the arrow next to the Plugins link and click “Add New”.

Then, do a search for “Google Analytics for WordPress” and it should be the first result. Install and move on to the next step or install it manually via the directions for installation on the plugins’ WordPress page which I have pasted below:

Input your Google tracking code

Remember the code we left open in another window from before? This is where we need that code again.  You just need the id off of your tracking code which I’ve highlighted below, not the entire copy/paste code that Google gives you.

Copy that part of the code and paste it into the configuration text box like I have below.

Set up your settings similar to how I have to ensure you’re tracking downloads as well as outbound clicks from your site.

Collect the data!

Gather several weeks worth of data before you really go in and analyze where people are coming from and what parts of your site are most popular.

What’s important?

Depending on how you are using your site there are a variety of things that could be of importance to you. (Besides just actual traffic of course)

If you’re using your website as a place where you can push your music to the fans with downloads then that’s going to be one of your most important areas to pay attention to. To view your download statistics go to the content report, and then “Top Content” section.

Then filter your content by downloads by typing “/downloads” into the text box as I have below:

Another thing to pay attention to is your  traffic sources. How are users finding you? Google searches? Reverbnation? MySpace? Twitter? Blog posts?

Want to increase/decrease the date range?

Been a few months since you installed the plugin code? How about increasing the date range from the past month to the past few months? Or past few days? Do that on the dashboard where you see the calendar:

Setup Goals (AKA Super Fucking important)

After you’ve ensured your data is being collected you’re going to want to setup goals.

Goals allow you to setup a flow on the site for how they find you up until they actually do something. (For istance,  download a file off of a specific page)

There are 3 types of goals you can setup, the most important to us being the URL destination which allows us to set a user path for a visitor coming to our site. Name the goal and select URL destination and you’ll see the rest of the Goal Details options that I have in the screen capture below:

“Goal URL” is the second have the the name of the page the user should end up on, and goal value is something to set up if you’re setting a monetary value for something like a digital download. For instance, if you have a file uploaded to your site as I have above, your goal URL would be downloads/wp-content/uploads/name-of-the-file-you-uploaded.zip

Note: You can take this link from the information in your Top Content section like I showed you how to do above.

If you want to track users from say, your homepage to your downloads page you can enter in the separate steps a user would take to get from your homepage to your actual file download.

If I had 4 pages I could enter them all in each field and name each step to determine how many users are able to make it through the entire goal funnel.

At Assault’s online clothing store, we use goals to track our user’s sticking points in our shopping cart check out process. If we find there are a lot of users abandoning their carts after they get to a specific step in the checkout process, we know there must be some sort of usability issue.

One of the coolest aspects of the goals and e-commerce tracking is that you can determine where your actual converted sales/downloads are coming from most. (Meaning the websites that send you the most downloads and money!)

Google analytics goals are critical when determining what social networks to push your music to the hardest, which blogs to keep pimping your free gear to cause their audience buys digital music, which twitter users are giving you shoutouts, etc. etc.

I say again, setting up Goals and Goal Funnels will give you visual proof of where you are having success with getting your music downloaded. I can’t stress this point enough!

If you find most of your users aren’t getting to your music downloads, then you need to give them a clearer call to action on all your pages.

If you’re users are bouncing after :20 seconds and only visiting one page, then they’re not finding what they came to your site for.

There are HUNDREDS of things you can learn from all the data Google gives you. Are your fans primarily hitting the page on the site with your pictures? Are they coming to the free download of a song you offered them that got plugged by a blog? Are they looking at your bio because you have a hot chick lead singer and they want to see if she’s single? (Assault‘s top viewed page on our store is for our zombie t-shirt. Go figure.)

Analytics is the key to your online strategy. It tells you what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong. It’ll also tell you what your fans want more of, and if you’re getting them to the right place in the fewest amount of clicks.

Want more info? Did you get stuck at a certain point? Want some one on one advice? Send me a message on Twitter or post in the comments. I reply to just about everything that comes my way.

I’ve been listening to alternative rock stations for over fifteen years now, sometimes a lot more consistently than others. If we’re being honest, I took a ten year break from radio once I started purchasing CDs, and it was only after my own car died and I had to drive my girlfriend’s (which has no CD player) that I came back to the black box.

One thing I’ve noticed is that things aren’t that different from when I was in sixth grade, smuggling my Walkman into class so I could hear a new Smashing Pumpkins song the first time it was played. The top 10 tips for you struggling bands trying to get on Q101… I mean… alt-rock radio are below:

1. Be Kurt Cobain

Unrealistic? Sure. Foolproof? Definitely! These guys play Nirvana like 97.9 plays Led Zeppelin. And it’s not just “Smells Like Teen Spirt,” either; I recently heard their acoustic cover of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World.” Not exactly a deep cut, as it appeared on the band’s “Unplugged in New York” record, but still – the only other band that consistently gets non-singles played on these stations is Pearl Jam.

2. Be an ex-member of Nirvana.

This worked wonders for Dave Grohl; Foo Fighters just released their first greatest hits compilation, although that disc is kind of unnecessary for anybody with access to their local alt-rock station.

3. Take your cues from Pearl Jam’s first two albums..

Don’t try anything new, in other words, because that’s not what radio is all about. Although that wasn’t always the case: Remember that weekend, right before PJ’s Vitalogy came out, when radio stations were giving away free copies (on vinyl, no less) and playing every single track from the record (at the band’s request)? That would never happen now. You can catch “Even Flow” or “Daughter” on an almost daily basis, but don’t expect to hear “The Fixer” or anything else from Pearl Jam’s new record. The venerable tastemakers in their ivory alt-rock towers are only interested in stuff that sounds like OLD Pearl Jam.

4. Be metal, but not TOO metal.

Programmers will allow a little metal now and again, but it’s never fun (like Motley Crue) or intense (like Slayer). It’s always mid-tempo nu-schlock with chunky riffs and a really angry white guy screaming about his indestructability. Or something. (The only real exception to this rule is Metallica; they’ve proved commercially viable enough for so long now that even easy-listening stations won’t hesitate to drop “Enter Sandman” into rotation.)

5. Hang in there!

Although rock radio shamelessly ignores new artists, if you wait around long enough, toiling in mediocrity, you might make it on to a playlist. How else to make sense of airplay for perpetual non-starters like 30 Seconds to Mars? Their music hasn’t approved in any appreciable way, yet their new single gets to rub elbows with alt-rock’s elite.

6. Get pissed.

From Rage Against the Machine to Rise Against, rich guys railing against something, anything, is big business. “Guerilla Radio,” for instance, still gets a ton of spins, usually sandwiched between ads for penis enlargement pills and strip clubs.

7. Write a self-reflexively goofy novelty song.

No joke: I was sitting in traffic the other day and I actually heard “Pepper” by The Butthole Surfers. I couldn’t even drive a car when that song was released, and it was a weak knock off of Beck’s “Loser” then, too. Don’t hold your breath waiting for any rock station to play the Surfers’ truly incendiary ’80s work.

8. Smooth out your kinks.

Punk vets AFI have become a mainstay on mainstream rock radio in the last few years, but do you think they ever got spins when they played fast-paced, horror-influenced pop punk? No. They had to start wearing make-up and imitating the fake grandeur of late period Green Day.

9. Layer some blips and bleeps in there.

The programmers at alt-rock stations hate the sounds that guitars make naturally, so get your “electronica” mojo working and try to get everything sounding like our future dystopia’s national anthem. This is called the Nine Inch Nails Effect, and it fucking works!

10. Keep it boring.

It’s difficult, I know, but you need to maintain the illusion that bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam wrote the Book Of Real Rock ‘n’ Roll. Emulate bands that were famous in the ’90s – don’t worry about what’s happening now, or what might happen in the future. Your real role model should be the band Bush – four guys that never had an original idea but capitalized on radio’s need to embrace what’s already been done. They may have been from across the pond, but that’s a real American success story.

Let’s face it, unless you have a full time person to make your MySpace totally  bitchin, it’s time to look into another platform to use as your main contact point with your fans. I understand MySpace has always been a necessary evil, but when it comes to actually getting a decent return on investment from your time spent, MySpace will never make the cut.

You cannot track where your fans are coming from

While you can boast a high pageview count, high friend count, and high play count on your songs, you’ll never really know who is doing what on your profile.

You don’t know who the talkers are

The most important part of getting good word of mouth is identifying the talkers. Who is bringing people to your shows? What regions is your music being downloaded the most from based on those “talkers”?

What blogs and twitter users have pimped your page?

Other bands are not your primary source of attendance

According to the statistics I’ve heard, there are roughly 8 million bands on MySpace, and you have 15,000 of them as friends! Unfortunately, those people are probably not buying your albums or attending your shows. While they may be good to do a show swap with, or bro down with for a tour some day–they’re not helping you pay the bills and put butts in your seats.

The 10% of users that are real people more than likely COMPLETELY ignore the “bulletins” that you can blast out to everyone. When was the last time you went to a show based on a bulletin you saw on MySpace?

Controlling your brand is impossible

You’re a band, but the day you decide you want to try to make a living off of your passion you are a brand–a product. Even if you have created a badass theme for your profile, you still can’t control the look of any of the other subsequent pages associated with MySpace. (Add me as a friend, send a message, blog etc.)

This doesn’t even consider the sheer bombardment of advertising you have on the top and bottom of your profile page. Best part is, if you figure out how to hide the advertisements, you’re in violation of MySpace’s terms of use and risk getting your profile deleted.

You can do everything MySpace  does outside of the MySpace universe

Just to prove my point, you can do everything that MySpace does for you, I’ll post a few of the other places that offer the same services. (For free of course)

Embed your music
Imeem offers the ability to upload and create a playlist that you can then embed on your site, for free. Best part is that other people can embed your songs as well. Last.fm also offers this service

Fucking blog
My number one tip to anyone who does anything these days online is to WRITE. MySpace’s blog platform sucks ass, and offers no clean way for users get your content without being at a MySpace page. WordPress is easy to find/create templates for and is a far more dynamic platform to control/track your band’s internet presence. Commenting, subscribing to your RSS feed, and integrating with newsletter platforms is almost entirely drag+drop on WordPress.

Bulletins
Twitter.

Local Concerts iPhone Application. (opens in iTunes)

Tour Dates
With Last.fm you can post your tour dates which will then show up on their website as well as on their concerts iPhone application which I never leave home without. Last.fm also integrates with Livekick which sends users notifications of when your band is playing in the users’ area.

Last.fm also recently released one of my personal favorite iPhone applications Local Concerts. (Opens iTunes) Which will send you text messages when a concert has been posted by you. You’ll never miss another show again.

Sell Music and Merchandise
Last.fm allows you to sell your music that you upload which can also be embedded–oh and you can track it too. WP-E-commerce and Storenvy are two tried and tested ways to sell your merchandise and/or music in your own customizable store.

WordPress may require a bit more of advanced skills, but Storenvy allows you to host an online store on their servers where they handle everything from site setup to checkout. I highly recommend them. (Not to mention they’re the best printers we’ve ever worked with. We should know, we still print our clothing line with them.)

Disagree with me?

Feel free to post it in the comments as well as any other resource sites I may have missed.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get to check out the New Music Seminar in Chicago, and a question was posed to the speakers, “What iPhone applications should I have?” There was a bit of confusion, and some suggestions–none of which that I felt were really helpful applications for touring bands. Links open up in iTunes.

I’ve put together a list of the 5 applications that I have used in the past that I feel would be incredibly helpful to any touring musician, without including the obvious like Google Maps, Facebook, or Myspace.

Loopt

Want your fans to see where you are without having to update via Twitter? Loopt lets your fans see where you are in the country at the time, and allows you to update your status with what you’re doing there.

Cost: Free

WordPress

Need to write a message to your blog directly from your phone and include pictures? WordPress is by far the most popular blog platform, and this application integrates seamlessly with it.

Cost: Free

iSwipe

Want to take credit cards at your merch booth? Have a Paypal account? No need for a bulky credit card terminal, iSwipe integrates directly with several popular payment gateways and is great for a band on the go. It’s easy to use and easy to setup. (We used it at all the Assault Shirts live Summer Events.)

Cost: $0.99 (UPDATED!)

Pixelpipe

Taking lots of video and photos with your phone, and need an application that integrates and uploads media to virtually every service on the net? Thought so. Pixelpipe easily integrates with just about every major service out there and is great for publishing on the go.

Cost: Free

Tweetie 2

If you’re in a band, then you better be on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter, you better have Tweetie. It’s the best application out there for interacting with your Twitter followers, and it’s affordable too!

Cost: $2.99

Know of any applications I missed? Post them in the comments. Like lists like these? Follow me on Twitter here. I’m always posting helpful tips and links.

It’s not too often I get an email from Twitter telling me I have a new person with a high follower count following me. When they do, I tend to look into what they’re all about on their profile.

9/10 times it’s someone who follows twice as many people as they have following them. 10/10 times said person is a “social media power user”.

I’ve been experimenting for months with Twitter. As a proof of concept, I setup my personal account as my “garbage” account where I follow everyone who follows me back. Lo and behold, I  amassed 2,700 followers of which I follow 2,685 back. I don’t read the news feed, I don’t respond to messages, I don’t care about anything that any one of my fellow “Twitter power users” have to say.

After three months with my two twitter accounts I have discovered two major points which I think will help shut everyone up who brags about their twitter follower count.

• If you can’t mobilize your followers for feedback, links, retweets, or an opinion: they’re worthless.
• Twitter is a vehicle for word of mouth, but offline word of mouth is always better than online word of mouth.

Stop worrying so much about how many, and think more in terms of quality. My meager 700 followers on the Assault Official Twitter account give me better feedback and more interaction than my 3,000 followers on my garbage account. Twitter “friends” or “fans” are way more valuable than a mass of zombie followers.

Have a different opinion? Leave it in the comments.

If you’re struggling to crack 100 fans or even 1,000 on your Facebook or fan page, or Twitter account, or RSS subscribers, then you’ll be glad to know that sometimes 1,000 TRUE Fans is all it takes to make it. I’d like to ask what all of Assault‘s RSS subscribers and newsletter subscribers are up to then because Mr. 51% and I should be rich!

A memorable quote from the same 1,000 TRUE Fans article:

I’ve been scouring the literature for any references to the True Fan number. Suck.com co-founder Carl Steadman had theory about microcelebrities. By his count, a microcelebrity was someone famous to 1,500 people. So those fifteen hundred would rave about you. As quoted by Danny O’Brien, “One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That’s enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year.”

The article touches upon something I discuss with freelance clients and friends trying to monetize their startup businesses is the success of the micro payments, or “micro-patronage” business model where the payment is small enough where it’s as if it’s a stick of Wrigley’s gum at the super market, and more of an impulse buy than a thought-through purchase.

Another business model that’s briefly discussed is another one now popularized by the somewhat mainstream company Topspin. Unlike the limited choice of chunky spaghetti vs. the non-chunky spaghetti sauce, it’s well known that having 40 different options of sauce is way better than just having two styles is better for the average consumer–hence the, “endless options of chunky spaghetti” method where you offer endless choices of a product all the way up to getting a guest mention in the liner notes of a song or a guest appearance on the next album.

One other inspiring tidbit:

In 2004 author Lawrence Watt-Evans used this model to publish his newest novel. He asked his True Fans to collectively pay $100 per month. When he got $100 he posted the next chapter of the novel. The entire book was published online for his True Fans, and then later in paper for all his fans. He is now writing a second novel this way. He gets by on an estimated 200 True Fans because he also publishes in the traditional manner — with advances from a publisher supported by thousands of Lesser Fans.  Other authors who use fans to directly support their work are Diane Duane, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, and Don Sakers. Game designer Greg Stolze employed a similar True Fan model to launch two pre-financed games. Fifty of his True Fans contributed seed money for his development costs.

Read the rest of the 1,000 True Fans article here.

Tour:Smart and Break the Band by Martin Atkins, a must read for bands about to go on the road

I’ve never been in a band, and I’ve never been a producer or groupie, and I’ve never had what it takes to make it in a band. (Albeit my expert level singing and drumming skills on Rock Band) Lucky for those of you looking to embark on your first tour, there is an incredibly detailed guide on how to do it the right way. The book is called, Tour:Smart and Break the Band. The book was written by Chicago’s own Martin Atkins, and it outlines how to plan, manage and execute a successful tour on any level.

If you haven’t heard of Martin, you’ve surely heard of the bands he has played in including PiL, The Killing Joke, Ministry, and even Nine Inch Nails.

Without going to much into the details of the book,  (It’s nearly 600 pages!) let’s just say that the book covers every single aspect of touring, all the way down to groupies, alcohol, drugs, screen printing, and using spreadsheets! I was recently lucky enough to ask Martin a few questions about the biz, and his book via email.

Tim: I read a quote from you where you mentioned that education was the new thing that drives the creative fire in your mind — something along those lines. Can you tell me a little bit about your school and yourself? What made you decide to start it?

Martin Atkins: Well, I started playing drums when I was nine, started drinking Newcastle Brown Ale and backing strippers at 11 or 12! I joined PiL [Public Image Ltd.] in 1979, performed on the seminal Metal Box album and the next four or so with them over the next 5 years. Then Killing Joke, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Pigface, and Damage Manual. I started the label Invisible Records 20 years ago, built a recording studio, produced a bunch of stuff from Gravity Kills to Skinny Puppy; then, started teaching, went to China, made a documentary, and realized that the book they were using at Columbia for the Business of Touring class was written in 1962! So, I wrote Tour:Smart, then started to revamp a bunch of the courses there. Applied Marketing was a ton of work, but I’m really pleased with the results. I’m working on Band:Smart, the sequel to Tour:Smart, and another 16 days in China amongst many, many other things — and I have four young boys!

I decided to start the school because I saw a need for real world stuff in the classroom. I pitched the people at Columbia several times on allowing me to just bring all of my businesses up there: Label, book publishing, studio, music publishing, film production and all of that — but they didn’t seem to think it was a good idea. So, like I usually do, I just did it! Education — or, more correctly, the relationship and the conundrum of trying to show people an unexpected spark — really gets me going. I’ve loved teaching since the moment I started and I love trying to make my lectures entertaining — otherwise what’s the point?

The possibilities within this are huge and I find myself very excited to see what the future holds.

Tim: Your book is one of the most comprehensive guides I’ve ever read — of any kind. If you could write a second book, what would it be about? Post economic meltdown/apocalyptic zombie outbreak touring for dummies?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzNjmIWbns4

MA: Well thanks! I have nearly finished Band:Smart and, along the way, I’ve put 12,000 words down for the Killing Joke book and I’m working on the PiL one, and a new cool marketing book, too. I do need to get on the Zombie bandwagon, though!

Tim: What are a few of the indicators that it’s time to go on a band’s first nationwide tour? Should they be making money already locally? Should they have a good seed of money saved up?

MA: I think bands should let this stuff evolve organically. Get out to the next set of cities 20, 40 miles out — where fans might travel to see the larger shows; see the five-pointed star inward facing crush strategy! Keep heading out of town in a flower petal pattern. I like to say, “Returning home just in time to fall asleep at their day job!”…but seriously, that’s how hard you need to push it.

Don’t give up your day job until you are on the point of getting fired. And yes, a band should be able to go from a show with 10 people to 40 to 100 to 200 — something like that. If you can’t do that in amongst your local markets, then what makes you think you can do it 400 miles from home where you don’t know anyone? Can’t score any deals or free beer or a bunch of free copies because your mate works at Kinkos, ditto Starbucks etc., etc.

Tim: One of the most profound parts of the book Tour:Smart to me was the fact that running a tour was just like running any small business. The one item that stuck out to me was the use of spreadsheets! How important is it to be organized and keep track of your finances and information when running a tour or a small business?

MA: Well, it’s important — and it definitely fits into that category of not magic, but attention to this stuff enables more crazy magic to happen. For instance, when you start to track random crazy stuff, you learn — let’s say in the case of the sizes of the shirts you have sold. Maybe when you look at the information after 30 shows, you realize that the only size of shirts you sell are L and XL. So, you can stop making the dozen or so small and mediums that you have been wasting money on. Small stuff like that really start to add up.

Same thing with the guest list: Put it on a spreadsheet and take a printer out on the road with you. You can alphabetize and pump up the size of the font at the last minute to make sure — or try to — that there isn’t a problem. Easy shit to avoid, costly and time consuming to try and repair.

Tim: What advice would you give to a band that has a member that is “holding the band back”?

MA: Fire their ass immediately, or give me their phone number now and I’ll do it for you. There is so much working against you that if you know something isn’t right, you have to take care of it — because, rest assured, there are 10 other things fucking up your chances that you don’t know about.

Tim: If there was one gig that a band must take and one that they should avoid at all costs what would they be?

The venue that is too large: Don’t persuade yourself that you are big enough to fill it — you aren’t!

And the show for no money on a rainy Tuesday night at the last-minute because another band needs the help — and to borrow half of your equipment, and as many members of your audience as they can — and can you help with their van? And can they sleep at your house? But there’s no money and you have to play at 6:30 and don’t get a sound check — and you could pack that place on your own. If someone blesses you with the opportunity to do them a really big favor — then do it! This is a small world and what goes around, comes around — for sure.

Tim: What are your top three must do’s for a band trying to get exposure? Having an electronic press kit? Playing as many shows as possible? Having a quality EP? Merchandise?

MA: Err, you got it. And remember that free is the new black — give stuff away, treat your fans like they were your best friends — they are!

Tim: You had a great entry in Tour:Smart about getting sponsorships. Do you have any advice for companies trying to get their clothing to musicians they align their brand with? Is it a sound investment for smaller companies?

You have to be careful, but — as I say to bands — free is the new black. I have a bunch of ideas for you, but if you target national acts halfway through their tour and show up with some free — and clean! — shirts, then you will be heroes and the band and crew will wear your stuff for the next week!

Affliction put special, nice pillowcases on all of the pillows in Austin for South by Southwest. That was cool, and probably cost a bit, but there are ways to accomplish stuff like that without breaking the bank.

Tim: With Assault, we measure down to the penny sometimes with what we spend our money on. We try to do everything that we possibly can ourselves — see photography, web design, shirt design, accounting, SEO + online marketing, blogging, etc. etc. If there is an expense that’s worth paying for for bands playing relatively often on the local scene, what would it be?

MA: OK, in certain circumstances a buy on to a larger show can be a great idea — it can also be the worst waste of money. But, once again, if a band keeps good records of their sales and attendance — not how many people you wish were at the show, but the real numbers — then you can extrapolate and make decisions based on better facts rather than no facts.

I don’t mean this to sound like a plug for me — because I’m silly busy anyway — but a few bands have brought me in for a few hours or a day to really analyze what they are doing and consult to them on what they are doing right and wrong. Sometimes they are surprised when I call them out on some rock star bullshit or studio elitism stuff, or just their fears. I get to reinforce the good ideas, accelerate them, pour gasoline on them — and put ice down the pants of the insane, distracting shit that many bands surround themselves with, immerse themselves in. And, compared to losing everything — your love of music, your credit rating, your friends, your van and your partner — I’m cheap as fuck!

Tim: If there was one or two careers that would really help you supplement a career in music — as most parents would want for their aspiring musicians — what would it be? I wrote a post on this a while back and someone suggested “car mechanic” — I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t thought of that.

MA: Yeah, mechanic is great. Studio person, logistics, web, PR, screen printing — anything — welding, culinary, all of that stuff comes in handy. Xbox modding, hair cutting, tattoo — it’s all great shit and the more skills, the more chances you have of tapping into a new audience and involving them in your music.

Tim: Of all the touring you’ve done, which tour was the most fun and why?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTs5SoOteQQ

MA: Well, it seem like it’s the ones from way back. PiL across the USA in 1981 when we did American Bandstand — they still play it in Europe! I was very young and drunk, and speeding through most of it. I had no clue how much it all cost — none of us did really — but, 30 years later, it seems like it was fun.

Parts of Ministry was fun. Lots of Killing Joke. From a drumming point of view, I was at the height of my game — I did Pigface, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Killing Joke and Murder, Inc. all in a mad two-year period. I was drumming all the time.

Pigface was just fantastic in the breadth of the onstage experience: Sitars, cello, harp, belly dancers — Danny Carey from Tool!

I liked touring Europe with Killing Joke — Madrid, Barcelona — oh yeah! — and Japan and Australia.

I guess, every minute of it was terrific! Why, well, someone else — mostly — paid for it. And I’ve forgotten all of the horrible mind-numbing horror!

Tim: What’s the weirdest thing that ever happened to you while you were on tour?

MA: A guy came onstage with a shopping cart all hooked up with pickups and all this mad stuff. We [Pigface] were all really excited. It sounded like a shopping cart! I nearly pissed my pants onstage.

Tim: Of all the skills you mention in Tour:Smart — screen printing, learning HTML, accounting etc. — which proves to be the most valuable in putting together a tour for your band?

MA: You need every single one of them. You can split them up between the band members — that’s a great idea — but you need them all, and more!

Tour:Smart by Martin Atkins, a must read for bands about to go on the road

I HIGHLY recommend Martin’s Book, Tour:Smart: And Break the Band, to anyone who’s in a band. The book includes insight from other musicians, tour managers, producers, sound technicians, booking agents, and just about anyone and everyone involved with the music industry. The book also features guest chapters from Henry Rollins, and Chris Connelly.

I’d also check out the Tour:Smart Plus weekend events going on in October. (Check out the first Tour:Smart Plus Weekend wrap up here.) Martin’s school is called Revolution Number Three which you can check out at their Official Website.

If you’d like to keep up with Martin, or talk to him via the internetzzzz you can @reply him on twitter via @marteeeen. Ask him what he thinks about girlfriends, bacon salt, music, word of mouth marketing, and just about anything else!

One major skill that I’m relieved to have learned while in college is how to take good quality pictures. One of our ideas with Assault was to get pictures of our shirts on rock bands rather than on stock mock ups like every other apparel company. We felt it was the one thing to set us aside in a small way from everyone else that would also be a great way to network with bands that we were fans of.

Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that live concert photography is probably one of the hardest forms of photography. You can’t depend on your camera’s automatic mode if you want your photos to look professionally done. You can’t use a point and shoot camera. After a few practice shows though, and with plenty of practice and tips from our friends, we were finally able to nail down our process which we’re going to share with everyone, cause we’re awesome.

Lookout! Giants at the Metro Chicago

Account for lighting & other variables

If you’ve been to Assault’s Online Store you know that we try to get photos of people wearing our clothing during rock shows where there are any number of variables that you can’t account for. Such as:

• The crowd
• The amount of lights
• The layout of the venue
• The variation in color and intensity of the lights

To help you get started doing your own photography under these conditions I’ve prepared a few tips and techniques that will help take your photos from sorority party-girl self shots to Rolling Stone worthy concert photography. (Maybe not THAT good, but close)

As always, we’ll try to accomplish quality results as cheaply as possible.

Equipment: Digital SLR Camera

Your little party camera, aka the point and shoot, isn’t going to cut it. I’m sure it’s got plenty o’ megapixels, but the most important thing is that you get a large image sensor to capture more color information. I started off with a Nikon D70 DSLR that I bought off my friend Dennis Burnett for $300 bucks. It’s older than my little sister’s point and shoot, but the photos still look ten times better.

If you shop around I’m sure you can find a decent used SLR. Try Craigslist, or Ebay. (Does anyone use Ebay anymore besides Nigerian scammers?)

Not only is the camera body important, but it’s important to have a decent lens on your camera. I stuck with the zoom lens that came with my camera to start, but eventually purchased a Nikon 50mm prime lens to help in the low lighting situations.

Equipment: External Flash

A Hero Named Hope live show at the Metro Chicago

The quickest way to make your photos look like an amateur Kenny Powers photo shoot is to only use the built in flash. Buy a decent external flash. You’ll be able to shoot from further away. You can also get a better amount of light around your subject. Along with a softer light, you’ll also be able to adjust the intensity of the light so your shots aren’t washed out and overexposed.

I bought the Quantaray QDC 900WA for my Nikon D70 for $99 bucks. It looks like you can buy the same one online for the same price. Google it.

External flashes can also have a diffusion cover of some sort put on them to reduce over exposure and ensure that your subjects are softly lit.

Chris Huebner from the band, From the Broken

Camera Setup

Put your camera in manual mode. When I first started I asked my friend Dane Sponberg for some settings to start out at. Here’s what he had to say:

Try using these camera settings as a starting point:

• 800 ISO
• F4 or 4.5
• 1/30th of a second shutter speed
• Flash set to +1

If the stage lights aren’t coming through, either bump your ISO up and turn your flash down, or leave the shutter open longer, like 1/10th of a second. Just watch that, cause the longer the shutter is open, the blurrier it will get.

A few additional pointers, tips and tricks

A few of my personal additional settings/tips that you may also benefit you are to:

• Shoot in uncompressed raw mode
• Try not to overexpose, digital imagery picks up more color information in the blacks which is more easily fixed in post than an overexposed shot
• Bring an extra CF or SD card
• Charge your damn camera. I can’t count how many times I’ve been burned on this
• Use Lithium batteries in your flash so it charges up faster
• If your camera is older like mine, clean off the contacts with rubbing alcohol to ensure the external flash will work
• Shoot LOTS of images. Many will not turn out.

Some final thoughts

If you’d like to see how most of my early photo sets turned out you can look at our Flickr Photo feed. The most important thing to do when getting the shots in the show is to make sure you are shooting in NEF Raw mode so you can edit the files later in Photoshop.

The more color information you have the easier it is to make your photos look even better in post. My next tutorial will cover how to edit the photos and color correct them to make them look even better.

I got an email this week from Shy asking for a tutorial on how we apply our t-shirt designs onto photo real mock ups. I must say as much as I’d like to act like we could do photo shoots every day with pretty girls like the people do over at Design By Humans, we can’t. So I enlist my resourceful mockup PSDs from Emptees, and Photoshop layer modes and by the time I’m done I’ve got something worthy of the Assault Shirts homepage.

There are already plenty of people who have built ready made templates to place shirts on and to adjust colors so I’m not going to go into detail on that process. Instead, I’m going to refer you to the post I did last week about a few quick tips, as well as point you to the Emptees resources page where I got my templates from:

• Tips for prepping t-shirt designs for print
• Emptees Resources & Downloads

I chose to use this prepared blank shirt photoshop mockup by Falseone.org and if you chose the same one I did, your design should look something like this when you are done:

For demonstration’s sake, I’ll be using the most recent design we released, SS Amnesia, because it fits very well on many different colors.

Is your design flattened and not on a transparent background? See Below:

You have several choices if your design is on a flat background:

1. Trace your design in Illustrator:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0yNFH99cWg

2. Use the magic eraser tool and delete your background (This will look like shit)

3. USE LAYER MODES

Depending on the color of design you can easily set the design layer’s mode to either “Screen“, or “Multiply” and it will delete the background (or blend it) so that you see the design placed nicely on the shirt mockup.

This will take some experimentation. Generally, if you have a darker background on your design you want to use “Screen” as your layer mode. Think of it like a screen door in a way. All the black and darker tones becomes see through. If you have dark colors in your design that now look brighter or darker, you may want to use Image>adjustment>levels (or cntrl+L) to adjust your colors to get them as close as you can to your actual design.

If you have a lighter background on your design set your layer mode to either “Multiply” or possibly “Darken”. @angbowen from Fuel Your Creativity has a great article explaining the various layer modes and how they work. I highly recommend reading her article, Photoshop Blend Modes Explained. It will help clear up any confusion about what each layer blend mode does.

Is your design is on a transparent background. Read below:

If you’ve prepped your design with a vector fill layer as your background layer, you should easily be able to hide that layer, and copy the other merged layers by hitting cntrl+shift+c or by flattening your image and hitting cntrl+c.

Change over to the blank mockup t-shirt file, and hit cntrl+v or paste your design on top of it. Scale it down as you see fit and place it on the design. If you had a transparent background on your design you should be good to go for the most part. The only other step is to change the color of the t-shirt to the actual color you want it.

To do this double click on the Gradient Map Layer which will bring up the gradient editor.

Double click on the red colored tab to the right which will bring up your color picker window.

What I do next is head over to the American Apparel Colors resource and grab all the CMYK values for the shirt color I want. The highlighted field in the screen shot above is where you enter the first value, the second value goes in the next field, and so on and so fourth. Here’s the color picker window with the proper CMYK values for the American Apparel red color:

The red code listed on the American Apparel page is 0,100,80,2. See where I entered them above? Nice work.

You can use any color you’d like for the gradient map color, but you probably want to stick to the exact color your shirt supplier gives you. Just sayin’

Feel free to scale/distort the shirt if you feel it needs to be warped a little to fit into the shirt, but I generally leave it as is. Here’s what the design should look like:

Click to see a larger version of this image to see the detail

Need more help still?

Post in the comments, and I’ll gladly answer any questions you have on using free mock ups or getting realistic t-shirt templates. GoMediaZine has also covered this in great detail and even sells templates. I wish I had an entire design team like they do, but unfortunately it’s just me, and Mr. 51% so you’ll have to take what you get!

Unlike a good portion of the design related blogs on the internet, we at AssaultBLOG try to write as much of our own content as we can rather than just link to other peoples’ hard work. It’s also been awhile since we’ve written an extensive tutorial so I’ve decided to make our own list of best posts from Assault that you may have missed if you just recently started subscribing to our RSS feed.

5 Tips to make your unsigned band stand out from the rest

List of tips to spend your hard earned day job money to make your band stand out from the rest.

HTML emails – A quick rules and primer tutorial

Thinking of writing an html newsletter? Consider these few things first.

When Every Sale Counts

When you launch your first online store, it takes forever to get sales. This article will give you a few insights as to how you can get those first few sales even when your traffic is relatively low.

SEO Tips and strategies the high priced consultants aren’t telling you

Don’t feel like paying $2,000 for an SEO audit of your site? Read this list of tips and it will greatly help you fare better in the SEO world. This is my most comprehensive and one of my best SEO articles to date.

How to float to the top of Google search pages

Interested in what gets you in the top ten search results for Google searches? I list out my secrets for free! (This list is a great list especially if you have no money to spend like I don’t.)

E-Commerce tips explained with some interesting human behavior psychology

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?  I came across this outline from a book by Dan Ariely called, “Predictably Irrational” that had some incredibly insightful information about people and why we at times seem to act completely irrational. It covers giving away  things for free, putting high price points on products to create demand, and even the benefit of arousal!

How to reset your Myspace page using CSS

A brief tutorial with working code to make your Myspace look a bit more respectable. If you don’t want to read the whole post, you can just copy/paste/edit the source code that is supplied.

Tips & tools to improve your conceptual web design

A list of tools that will help bring your web designs one step closer to print designs including non-standard web fonts, custom line breaks, and transparency across all browsers.

Assault Photoshop Brush Set 1

The first set of brushes released from some of our t-shirt designs that were never used.

5 tips & resources to help get your t-shirt company off the ground

During my time at the university of hard knocks in the t-shirt business I learned a few things that I share here with anyone else who may be starting a t-shirt company so they don’t have to go through the same growing pains that I did.

How to create your own Photoshop Brushes

A step by step tutorial outlining how to create your own Photoshop brushes so you don’t have to spend hours scouring the net for the perfect brush.

How to use Photoshop Brush Dynamics

Part two of my brush tutorials where I show you how to use brush dynamics to get some cooler effects with your brushes that you’ve created in the Photoshop brush tutorial.

How to make those trendy lasers and light bursts in Photoshop

I’ve seen tons of ads with cool looking light bursts and light rays, and decided to write a step by step tutorial on how it was done. Originally, I believe I saw them in wired from designer, Tom Muller, so I even got in touch with him and interviewed him to find out more about his design process.

Alternative ways to find design inspiraiton

My personal best ways to find design inspiration when watching tv or going to the park just doesn’t cut it.

Turn a WordPress blog into your own personal FFFFound

A wordpress theme tutorial with included plugins that will allow you to make your own FFFFound blog like I have done on VNovember.com.

Like what you see here?

I write one quality post like this at least every week, and time permitting I make additional posts about the music industry, apparel industry, and design. Subscribe to the RSS feed, it’s worth every penny.

Convincing Mom and Dad to let you go move to LA to be a professional musician probably won’t fly with most parents, but believe it or not it is possible to learn another skill to help you get a step closer towards your ultimate career goals; albeit a step from a different direction. You may even find another skill you enjoy along the way.

While my parents would have supported me had I told them I wanted to be a professional musician and not go to college, they surely wouldn’t be paying my rent while I play open mic nights at the Double Door inbetween shifts at my $7.15 an hour barista job.

Here’s five careers you may enjoy just as much as music that can also help you achieve your ultimate goal of being a professional musician.

5. Writer

This may be the most obvious item on this list because obviously, good song writing elicits better music–but hey you could always just have Diane Warren write your music like Aerosmith did.

4. Teacher

While there may not be a possibility to network directly in your industry like some of the other jobs on this list, as a teacher you get weekends and summers to go play shows and go on tour. It seems to have worked for Art Garfunkel, Gene Simmons, and Sting.

3. Social Media Specialist

No, I don’t mean a twitter PR zombie that you find producing assloads of worthless shit that no one cares about–that’s not a Social Media Specialist. I’m talking about a specialist who not only has a good network of friends and knows how to launch an event, but can also write press releases and get your announcements syndicated through Google news and in all the local publications in the area.

Now that everyone’s on the Twitter bandwagon, you can find literally hundreds of other musicians, and music journalists that are within reach of 140 character message or less.

2. Sound Designer

Maybe a no brainer, but a talented sound designer can not only help get your music recorded in a high quality manner, but they can also be a good resource for networking with other bands and people in the industry. Chances are good if they have the proper access, you can save yourself a few thousand dollars experimenting with studio equipment, or renting studio time to lay down your fat beats.

Trent Reznor started out working as a janitor and assistant sound engineer in his earlier career and he recorded demos during unused studio time leading to him getting signed to his first record deal. Not too bad for a college dropout. His most recent endeavor with Janes Addiction just launched this past week: Nin|ja2009 and has CD quality audio available for free!

1. Web Designer/Developer

While you may disagree with a good portion of my list, I’m almost positive this is one of the jobs you can agree with. With music going digital and major record labels pouring all of their dollars into lawyers pockets instead of towards making quality music, now is an even better time to become your own producer and distributor of content and music.

If you have the tools to build your own site, and design your own graphics, you’ve saved yourself a ton of time and money trying to find someone else to help you with the details. Any decent web developer/designer can make a custom Myspace page, create your own merch store at a place like Big Cartel, implement a blog into your site, and get your music online and distributed to the masses. More importantly, a resourceful designer/developer can also build an entire unified online presence for your band that extends to the print world as well if need be.

Honorable mentions: Morning Radio Jockey, Copyright Lawyer, Graphic Designer, actor, (It’s doing wonders for Joaquin!)

Have another job I missed? Share it in the comments!

In the past few weeks I’ve taken over responsibility of our Twitter account from Craig with the goal of networking with as many people as possible in our industry whether it’s bands, t-shirt bloggers, designers, and web celebrities. Thankfully there are quite a few lists of designers, and t-shirt bloggers who are on twitter and there are even great utilities like Mr Tweet that help you find friends to follow in your industry. The one list I have yet to see (and maybe it’s cause I just didn’t look hard enough.) Is a list of bands that actively participate in Twitter. This is my attempt to list all the ones I have found so far:

The Glitch Mob
16Volt
CombiChrist
Words Now Heard – Also known as Chris from Merchspin
Bella Morte
Henry Rollins
Genitorturers
Dizmas
Sean from Harvey Danger
Atomic Love Bombs
Seven Day Sonnet
Bloc Party
Jimmy Eat World
Colin of The Decemberists
Jeff Finley
John Roderick
Band of Horses
Brian Eno
Andrew Bird
Bjork
Bonde Do Role
The Cardinals
Questo of the Roots
Kristin Hersh
Shaquille O’Neal – That guy from Shazaam, the genie.
Coldplay
Common
Rivers Cuomo
Dananananaykroyd
Duke Special
Snoop Dogg
Funeral For A Friend
Josh Haden
Hadouken
Calvin Harris
Imogen Heap
Tay Zonday
Hot Hot Heat
Dave Matthews
Muse
Oasis
Amanda Palmer (The Dresden Dolls)
Pearl Jam
Jack Penate
Peter, Bjorn and John
The Raconteurs
My Brightest Diamond
Q-tip
Jay Reatard
Trent Reznor
Soulwax
Britney Spears
Regina Spektor
Guy Sebastiam
Sonic Youth
The Streets
Willie Nelson
The Subways
The Teenagers
Ani Difranco
Tokyo Police Club
Timbaland
Jason from Mates Of State
Roger McGuinn / Lead singer of The Byrds
Tom Waits
Lil Wayne
Weezer
Patrick Wilson
The Wombats
We Are The Physics
Broken Records
Nick Cave
Roots Manuva
Kanye West
Boom Bip
Robert Smith (The Cure)
AC/DC
Erykah Badu
Lily Allen
Port O’Brien
Ghostface Killah
Gnarls Barkley
Bondo do Role
Chris T-T
MC Hammer
Ocean Reid
Jonathan Coulton
D.A. of Chester French
Manchester Orchestra
Cathi Bruns
Razorlight
Air Traffic
Beastie Boys
Mos Def
Sean Lennon
Sigur Ros
Panic at the Disco
Interpol
Death Cab For Cutie
Anberlin
Bad Religion
Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear
Dave Allen of Gang Of Four
Ben Kweller
John Vanderslice
Ingrid Michaelson
Wendy and Lisa
Yoko Ono
John Tesh
Soulja Boy
The Cab

Thanks to these guys for helping with the list:

• Musicians you should follow on twitter, and some you shouldn’t
• Gen from Genitorturers