February 2012
1 post
7 tags
Bands: Please don't overstress Facebook! (How to...
I guess I am something like a “heavy user” when it comes down to Facebook. Not that I post extensively myself but with over 700 “friends” and equally as many pages that I follow, I am obviously using this tool a lot and most of the times I really enjoy myself doing it.
However it is quite obvious that bands (also businesses, brands and other page-owners, but they’re...
January 2012
3 posts
4 tags
Songwriting is (still) rocket science
After the breakup of my band I took a break from playing the guitar and writing music for a couple of weeks to make sure I do not rush from one thing into another. I wanted to make sure that this is still what I wanted to do with my spare time. Fortunatelly my hunger for writing and playing music was bigger than ever before and so I happily (re-)stared working on songs.
Not being in a band...
3 tags
A few thoughts on Rick Rubin...
Slayer, Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, Adele, LL Cool J, Danzig, System Of A Down, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Mars Volta, The Gossip, Linkin Park, Rage Against The Machine, Weezer, Neil Diamond, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, Gogol Bordello, Run-D.M.C..
Nuff said.
7 tags
The time has come... Digital music downloads...
Not too long ago I blogged that digital sales make up 40% of total album sales in the US already. This figure was from 2009. A couple of days ago the results of 2011 have been published and guess what?! For the first time since the emergence of digital music, digital sales outsell the physical ones by 50,3%! Check this out:
But what do these figures mean in detail? As you can see there’s...
July 2011
8 posts
9 tags
Big news: MERCH is the new MUSIC!
Inspired by a short facebook-conversation from last night I decided to point out (again) the importance of merchandise for a band / musician and - more importantly - hand over a few hints how to increase merch sales.
No need to beat around the bush: The golden times of the music industry are over. A long and complex catenation of ignorant decisions, conservative behaviour, mental stagnation,...
5 tags
4 tags
Onesheet - Easiest online presence for bands
I just recently came across a great new tool called “Onesheet” (www.onesheet.com) which basically is nothing else but www.about.me just for bands. All relevant info at a glance in one page. Great!
Since the death of myspace, bands are having a hard time representing themselves on the internet. Facebook did not do too much to fill this gap, neither does google+. There’s no such thing as individual...
4 tags
How to boost your band-career: Split up!
Most of you will have taken notice by now that my band The Blackout Argument will split up this year. It’s a sad and unexpected thing, especially since almost everything was going very well for us at the moment. I am currently sorting out and planning the things we still want to do before we disband (which are quite a lot) and - of course - figuring out my own future as a musician.
One thing that...
“Auf fremden Arsch wird der Faule fleißig.”
– (via rev-of-ev)
3 tags
Bands on Facebook (How To)
I just recently found a quite good blog entry with loads of hints for bands how to “act” on Facebook. Most of these are not big secrets, however 90% of bands I know fail on Facebook. Read this and be enlightened: http://mashable.com/2011/07/11/bands-facebook/
3 tags
Digital Sales? Look overseas!
40% of all record sales in the USA in 2009 were digital… Another 2-4 years and we might have the same numbers at European music markets as well. Note to self: rethink distribution and marketing strategies. For more information check blog.nielsen.com
UPDATE for 2011: Here are some up-to-date figures from 2011. The trend continues.
* Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” became the...
4 tags
Fight emails! Now! →
We’re drowning in email. And the many hours we spend on it are generating ever more work for our friends and colleagues. (Here’s why) We can reverse this spiral only by mutual agreement. Hence this Charter…
August 2010
1 post
5 tags
More thoughts on the music biz... and FINAL PRAYER
This interview was conducted by Felix / Final Prayer for their band-blog in July 2010. Infact Felix and me got discussed over topics such as indepentend labels, diy-ethic and the music business in general quite often. His questions were quite challenging and very direct, which makes the interview a very good one. read for yourself…
When was the first time you heard about FP and what was...
July 2010
2 posts
4 tags
The Effect Of The Essence (Songwriter Lessons...
Most of my knowledge concerning music and its adverse reactions I gained through “self-experiments”. Writing good music has always been a mysterious thing to me, so I was eager to find out more on this topic. Here’s my upshot:
Bands have countless individual strategies when it comes down to writing songs. There’s bands that only have one songwriter who delivers complete...
4 tags
Haptics... yeah sure.
Q: “What is it, that makes digital music inferior to physical sound carriers in your opinion?” A: “Well, you know… I’m a haptic person, I need something to hold in my hands and stuff.”
Bull-Shit! I am so intangibly sick to death of hearing the same old argument over and over again. YES the CD is an obsolete medium. And YES artworks and lyrics are an essential...
March 2010
1 post
4 tags
10 Years of Values and Vices
There’s hardly anything I’ve been doing constantly for such a long time like Let it Burn Records… 10 years is a long fucking time and sometimes it surprises me, that the label is still alive. When I started LIB in 2000 with my friend Daniel, none of us would have thought that this would go ANYWHERE.
In fact it was the release of FEAR MY THOUGHT’s debut album...
February 2010
1 post
4 tags
Hardcore Empowerment
Hardcore tends to spit out a band every once in a while that seems to be somewhat different. Some call it “hype”, some call it “a band that hardcore’s been waiting and asking for”. I won’t join this dicussion, but it was EMPOWERMENT who brought the word authenticity back to my mind. Something you cannot force, reproduce or claim without a reason. You either have...
January 2010
1 post
4 tags
iPad - Meaning and Power
Apple’s keynote is not over for 5 minutes and the WWW immediatelly starts discussing (best case) and bashing (worst case) about the new alpha dog in digital media: the iPad. I spent a couple of hours over my decision whether to write an article about the iPad or not and - most obviously - decided to do it. In case you wonder why, you might have to wait for my last paragraph.
All this buzz...
December 2009
1 post
4 tags
Let it Burn - The End Of an Era...
No worries, LET IT BURN is neither gonna stop, nor slow down. I just have the feeling that the end of the year also marks the end of the way this label used to work over the past 9 years. Let me explain…
LET IT BURN RECORDS always used to be some crazy mixture of diy and professionality. I never had the feeling that one excludes the other. We traded records with small labels from the Czech...
October 2009
1 post
4 tags
"Dear Madams & Sirs, do you want to sign my Band...
I am NOT kidding! We receive emails which sound EXACTLY like this way to often. I just don’t get it…
July 2009
3 posts
6 tags
The 10 Golden LABELPROMO NO-GOs
We receive a lot of promo packages here at Let it Burn and to be honest: most of the packages we receive already fail at the first sight. Bands listen up: Sending out a promo package to a label is just like a job application (besides the fact that you will NEVER earn any money with music hahaha!), if there’s a lack of form or any other insufficiency, YOUR BAND - WILL - FAIL! Just keep in...
4 tags
ZERO MENTALITY - For lovers and haters
As some of you might know, Let it Burn Records have signed ZERO MENTALITY. Of course this is a great thing for the
label but also to me personally this signing (in addition with the signing of BLACK FRIDAY ‘29) means a lot.
I totally love their previous albums and always admired the band’s strength to go their own way. However I must admit
that I was VERY suprised when I heard...
7 tags
So what's all this?!
It feels kinda weird that my “real life job” finally made me dive into web 2.0. I attended an internet-congress in Berlin this week, basically all about web 2.0, social communities, etc. I had to face the fact that the internet is not what is used to be a couple of years ago (not even months…), a lot of things had changed and I felt quite outdated on a lot of things. This...
June 2009
1 post
7 tags
Compact Disc - What's up next?!
THREE ANSWERS for “What’s coming up next when the CD is dead?!”
—> Short: Digital Downloads Yeah, no big news, right, so let’s get a little more into detail. Digital downloads are definitely on their way to replace the Compact Disc as main musicmedia format. But this process is rather slow (especially in Europe) which can be attributed to the fact that most...
April 2009
1 post
3 tags
Image Damage
How to reestablish an image I recently talked to a band who’s working on getting rid off an image damage they’ve been coping with since day one. I tried to focus on the band’s amenities (and there are A LOT) but whatever scenario I pictured in my head, nothing really worked out. It seems as if the underground-music scene is way more “sensitive” when it comes down to...