The “magic” that record companies in practice do is marketing and distributing your music with the help of their vast marketing and distribution networks. Getting your potential fans to listen to your music is a really big dilemma for many unsigned and independent musicians, but thanks to the Internet there are some really useful music marketing, distribution and licensing services that can help you with this big task.

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A lot of artists use only a couple of social networking websites to promote their music on, and they usually choose the ones with most users such as MySpace and Facebook. This kind of strategy can be very effective if you are targeting the whole world. However, by adjusting your online music promotion approach regionally you can reach much more potential fans than with MySpace and Facebook alone.

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You might have already heard about the Luxembourg based online music store Prefueled and its “entertainment hubs”, which were introduced this year’s February at the MIDEM trade fair in Cannes. The company offers an online social network, online music store, entertainment hubs and they also support unsigned artists. I’ve been following Prefueled’s development with an interest for a while now and I was pleasantly surprised when I had the chance to experiment with their entertainment hub, or Fuel Tank as they call it, in Sweden.

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I have tried to encourage artists to use recorded music rather as a promotional tool than a revenue source. However, it can be a very expensive promotion tool since recording time in a professional studio is expensive. Although modern home recording equipment is affordable and provides good audio quality, you still have to know quite a lot about audio recording, mixing and mastering in order to get good results. If you want to stay unsigned and also get financial support to cover your album’s production costs, try appealing to fans.

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In the aftermath of Radiohead’s In Rainbows album first week downloads one very interesting phenomenon was noticed – even though the album was free to download through inrainbows.com, around 240,000 people downloaded it through BitTorrent trackers on the day it was released. This implies that it doesn’t matter anymore if the music is free or not – the new generation of music consumers are grown into free online content sharing culture and will continue to use the same content sharing networks that they have gotten accustomed to. Major record companies have failed to take advantage of this phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean that independent artists couldn’t take advantage of it.

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I really like how things are turning out now in the music industry. Radiohead has released downloadable version of their newest album In Rainbows without a record label and fans can choose how much they to pay for it, and yes you can even get it for free if you choose so. Inspired by Radiohead’s success many other major level artists such as Jamiroquai, Oasis, Nine Inch Nails and Madonna are now planning to do a similar move and release their next albums direct-to-consumer without record labels’ assistance. I just love to see artists taking care of their own business and that is also the main mission of Not Evil Music – to help all artists to become more independent when it comes down to the business side of music.

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Using social video websites is a great way to promote your music and uploading music videos to YouTube has become somewhat a standard procedure among indie artists and mainstream artists alike. Some of the video sharing websites also offer an affiliate program for video publishers, which means that you can get a percentage of ad revenues or get paid by the number of video views. I haven’t seen so many indie artists trying to leverage this kind of revenue model yet, so why not give it a try?

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A while back I wrote an article “Will music be like water?“, where I analyzed music futurist Gerd Leonhard’s thoughts and visions about the future of music. That was somewhat an eye-opening experience and I truly recommend checking out his blog and his YouTube video channel, if you are at all interested in the future of music industry. However, there were so many unanswered questions that I decided it was time to talk with Gerd himself. I discussed with him on the phone and I tried my best to find out how the music industry will change and how indie artists can best take advantage of that.

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Rehearsing is essential for every musician and it is something that bands and artists should do at least on a weekly basis, if not on a daily basis. Although the main purpose of rehearsing is improving musical skills, you can take rehearsals to another level by recording them on video. This is a good way to see how you look from the viewer’s perspective and also to keep your fan base more active.

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Gerd Leonhard, co-author of The Future of Music book, has been talking a lot about how music will someday be like water, and that the day might be closer than we realize. Basically this means that music consumers will have access to large catalogs of songs with a single periodical fee, just like we pay for accessing tap water in our households. Now, in practice Leonhard is talking about music subscription services, which are already happening on a large scale with Napster and Rhapsody leading the way. However, music subscription services haven’t caught the interest of music consumers as well as expected. iTunes is still the the market leader. According to Leonhard technology is still restricting larger scale adoption of music subscription services, but eventually pay-per-song revenue model will be replaced.

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