Live Musician Central

  

Probably the single most important thing a live musician can do to successfully market themselves, their band and their music is to network with as many other musicians as they possibly can. I can tell you from experience that I’m able to keep playing gigs because of who I know and associate with in my musical realm. I’m not a big self-promoter but I have contacts and friends in the music world that are really good with promotion and finding gigs. Networking with these types of people have really helped me advance my career. By networking with other bands and musicians you can increase your chances of hooking up with them for all sorts of gigs and musical projects.

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   Playing a charity gig can be a fantastic way to do some good in your community and give you an excellent opportunity to do some band marketing. Every live musician is looking for as much exposure as possible to be able to market their band and music to as many people as they can reach. If your band gets the chance to play a charity benefit you should take a good look at the potential of reaching a large audience that you normally wouldn’t get to come to your regular shows.

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   One of the most important pieces of marketing material you will produce for your band is your demo recording. I’ve already discussed using a live recording in your marketing kit

as opposed to a studio produced recording. Today I would like to discuss your song selection that you will be including on your demo. The songs you choose for your demo can sell your band in many different ways.

   I guess it’s a no-brainer that you will want to put your best songs on the demo recording. What determines your best songs? A combination of different things. Obviously you want the songs that you actually play the best. These would be the songs that the band knows like the back of their hand. Songs that you play perfectly every time you play them. It’s very important that you give a great consistent performance of your demo songs so when you play them in another club you will sound like your demo.    Read more »

   Okay, I had a request to hear the tribute song my band “Shufflin’ Noah” recorded one night for our favorite guitar lubricant:
Big Bends Nut Sauce Tuning Lubricant

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    Why do we as musicians want to give our music away for free? The business term is Marketing. Music is what we do and our music is our offering to the world. Our music is what we hope that people will want to listen to and ultimately buy from us. Our goal is to make the most amount of money from our music. To do that, our music has to be heard by as many people as possible. Read more »

   The music industry has changed so much in the last 10 years that it’s almost mind boggling. I remember how hard my band Shufflin’ Noah worked to get our songs heard on the radio. It was such a rush to be in the car listening to our music on the local independant radio station.

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    When I finally got out of high school and first started doing club gigs a good musician friend of mine gave me a book. I read it cover to cover and it has proved to be a valuable resource even after all these years. That book is no longer in print but I want to suggest another book that just released its 3rd edition in 2007. Read more »

   I’ve had a lot of requests to hear some of my music from visitors to the site.  So until I get a nice audio player going on Live Musician Central I’m going to point you to my MySpace page. It is located at: http://www.myspace.com/mattrushtonmusic 

  I want to put in my two cents about MySpace for musicians. It’s a great free way to get your music online for people to hear. There’s a great feature in Guitar Player Magazine every month called MySpace Hordes where they review of 8 artsists that they’ve found on MySpace. It’s a great way to get some exposure for your playing and you could win some valuable prizes in the process. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re a guitar player.

   I hope you enjoy it, let me know what you think.