If you would like to use my music in a non commercial film like the one on the left by Sean Horne, "Light Orchestra, the Vancouver sky during 2010 Olympics Games," please contact me. I'll post all the best ones here and on my You Tube channel.
"MRDC came together a couple years after I had split with my then writing partner. I had been writing and recording music for visual media. My friends suggested I put out an album online and see what happens. I never intended to take the songs live. I had recorded all the tracks on my own. There was no band. So I conceived that I would be a solo Artist / Producer in this strange eclectic electronic landscape I had created, put the songs online and see if there was an audience. After all, at this time Moby was not touring, and neither had Enigma.Was the internet going to allow all the artists out there like me to post our songs, yes, be discovered, yes, earn a living, maybe. This blog is my journey thus far on what worked, what I’ve tried, and what I’m doing now living in maybeville."
I’ve been trying a few different things over the last year, 10 months since the release of Infomusication. I started a Twitter account for MRDC, a Facebook page and make an effort every few days to interact with them. One of the tools I find very helpful is Ping.fm This allows you to post to your micro blogs all at once in the same place. So if you’ve updated your blog, or have an event or anything you want to blast out this is the place to do it and save yourself some time. Ping will connect you to a large handful of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Ning, hi5, Friendfeed and any custom URL’s you put in your list. What I am getting at is this is one thing you should do not the only. I make every effort to respond to posts on my Facebook page return emails and DM’s from Twitter. You need to keep in contact with the people that are interacting with you. Its just good manners. What I’ve found out in my experiment is that people stumble on you. They may not be actively searching for “Trip Hop” or Electronica” music, your band name bla, bla, bla. I have Ping.fm connected to my site, Twitter and a few others. When I update this blog I use Ping.fm to let these sites know. This links my site to all these blogs and back again. This helps the web surfer find their way here from Google and others. Writing this blog adds more relevance and keywords that may be used in a search. Connecting it to all the places Ping put’s it increases my chance of finding a new listener for my music. These things along side some other good ideas I have picked up like don’t just post “listen to our new song”, “buy my new track on iTunes” every day, it just pisses people off. I think you need to post events like when your album is available online once. If a potential new fan is reading your Facebook page they will eventually read this entry. But if they are reading through all your posts and every second topic is go to my iTunes page it gets old real fast. I think these pages should have some insider info on them. Make them personal like when you went to your local music shop to pick up a new axe, take some pictures, “this is my new Les Paul and I can’t put it down”. Just an idea but now you’ve added Les Paul as a keyword in your blog. It’s possible someone doing a search for Les Paul will find you. My point is hopefully you wouldn’t go to a party and just talk about yourself all night long. Successful social media strategies should be “social”.
So you’re past the writing stage, you have an album of songs together, now you have the task of getting an audience. Funny thing is renting a hall to perform your songs live and renting a web server to post your songs on your new website are kinda the same thing, well sorta here’s my comparison / analysis. You rent the hall, all the gear, you’ve rehearsed, you’re ready for opening night, but wait you forgot to put up posters, some people passing by saw you loading your gear into the hall and asked hey wazzup? They might show up, maybe they’ll bring their friends unless there is a more popular band down the street yeah maybe. But wait you have a web site and all your songs are on it, damn no one checks that out either. Just like the kids that saw you from the street you have all your meta tags in place and Google has indexed you so maybe just maybe you’ll be found. Keep dreaming, unless you do something to get the word out nothing happens. At least if you can fill the hall, 100 people will hear your set and maybe grab a CD on the way out. Waiting for Google to send you that many could take a month and there is a good chance they will leave your site in the first 10 seconds if you have not grabbed them with a great design, story and a reason to read and listen. Something happened a few years ago to form the way humans feel about downloading music online. Still there are some that prefer to help artists out and pay something for the files, at least they know what they are getting and it’s a clean file. But for the most part from my experience its hard to even get people to take a free mixtape or even visit an artists site. I don’t know why, but the majority need to know you’re the next big thing before they will even click through, have a recommendation from a peer, another artist or hear you on the radio. My point is everyone believes the internet is the golden goose, “as soon as we are online those millions of Internet surfers are going to download our tunes.” Yes the vehicle is in place the problem is connection. I have used countless music sites to try and connect because I can’t play live in every country that has Internet service, (aside from not being able to afford to produce a live show here in Vancouver). You’d think you would be able to introduce yourself to potential fans but its not that easy online. I have yet to meet an SEO expert that can give me the magic key word combo to drive millions of web surfers to this site. Still the best way to get in the ears of the people that might like what you do is offline media, radio, newspapers, trade mags, movies, TV etc. The Internet is a great tool, use it that way, but don’t expect it to do all the hard work for you. Just like setting up in the Hall for a live show or setting up your website, this is just the beginning. Lately I have put more energy into http://facebook.com/mrdc.music Its clean people interact with it more and it’s easy. I also like http://www.thesixtyone.com/mrdc it has an interesting way of presenting new music. On the music discovery side of things check out http://mufin.com they are trying to serve up songs their engine thinks sound the same. Play around with it, its kinda fun.
I’m going to go back a few years to the beginning when I started putting MRDC tunes online. There was a site that I used, it was the original mp3.com. I have not seen a place that has been able to combine all the artist promotional tools with results like it since they sold mp3.com and completely ruined it. The chart system was fantastic, I received requests from real radio stations for my songs that at the time were #1 on one of the genre charts. Artists were paid $0.005 by mp3.com per stream as I remember. These days it’s up to Sound Exchange to track and collect it for you. This was before high speed Internet so yeah, 2000-2002. They had CD’s on demand like Amazon now does, no download store. Point I’m getting at was it worked for me. I was starting to make money. It all looked promising then poof! Gone, killed by Vivendi. Then sold to downoad.com. No longer artist friendly.
MRDC came together a couple years after I had split with my then writing partner. I had been writing and recording music for visual media. My friends suggested I put out an album online and see what happens. I never intended to take the songs live. I had recorded all the tracks on my own. There was no band. So I conceived that I would be a solo Artist / Producer in this strange eclectic electronic landscape I had created, put the songs online and see if there was an audience. After all, at this time Moby was not touring, and neither had Enigma. Was the internet going to allow all the artists out there like me to post our songs, yes, be discovered, yes, earn a living, maybe. This blog is my journey thus far on what worked, what I’ve tried, and what I’m doing now living in maybeville.
After mp3.com was gone my revenue stream stopped. Fortunately I still had my day job and SOCAN was starting to send me checks for all the AV cues I had on TV. I decided that for the time I would stick with what really worked. Licensing music to television shows.
All new artists and bands out there recording tracks need to get registered with your local PRO such as SOCAN, BMI, ASCAP etc. This is the first step. When doing this also start your own publishing company and make sure it is registered as well. Next is building a relationship with people in the visual media arena such as video production and motion graphics houses. They all need tracks to go with what they are doing. Just look in the phone book and make some calls. Don’t call the big guns right away they might not need you. Call the little guys offer them a track for free, even if its just a corporate presentation. Providing the track free and ensuring you are in the credits at the end gets you out there. If people like the music this little guy will come back for more. These little guys want to advance their careers as well and if they like working with you they will take you with them, and eventually you will get on a TV production or commercial they are working on. At this point you should be paid something up front and you definitely want to collect an AV Cue sheet to send into your PRO. If no cue sheet is created (common in small video houses) then even if the production air’s on TV nothing will happen financially for you. Being an Indie you own 100% and the cue sheet should split 50% to the artist and 50% to your publishing Co. This is very important because in the USA you won’t get the publishers share of the royalty if no publisher is listed on the sheet. The USA uses a 100% + 100% system where here in Canada it’s a 50% + 50% system. So you could be outing yourself 50% of the royalty revenue owed to you. I’ve just recently found this one out the hard way. All of the Cue sheets from the early days and even some of the new ones were wrong because I did not have my publishing company set up and registered with SOCAN. Fortunately I have cut a deal with an Administrator to fix my catalog. I’ll be posting the results of this when I get them. It could take a full year to get corrected.
So can you make money off of your music ? Yes, licensing works once you get it rolling. It will pay you much more than the small amount you are going to get form the one download every 3 months from iTunes. I’m going to get into that much later though.
This is an example of a group of people I worked with over time. At first I gave them my music free. Eventually it became huge.
Now that I had built relationships locally I wondered if there was an online audience for licensing music. The idea was instead of finding fans to buy albums, maybe I could find more video production people on the internet that needed to license my music for their productions. The more avenues I could find to earn a living from music the less time I had to spend working another job. The first thing I thought of was music for flash presentations. So I set my site up with loops for Flash and had downloads for sale. This worked sort of. There was huge competition out there called “Royalty Free”. These libraries crossed over between film, tv, and the web. They had so much music there was no way I could even come close to competing with them. The killer was it is all buyout, royalty free. This kills licensing for real artists because when a production house uses this music they don’t have to fill out cue sheets etc, they pay once and its usually not more than $19.99 for a CD of about an hours worth of music. Their attitude is why would I pay you for each sync when I can get this so cheap & have multiple usage? Well that’s a bit insulting, if you’ve ever heard some of those tracks, to think they can’t tell the difference makes you wonder. So I stopped trying. I continued with the relationships I had and started to offer custom scores for productions. This was one way I could compete and justify my fee. Licensing them something unique took what they were giving their clients to a new level. This continued to work for me. Still I felt the need to find a replacement for mp3.com so I had been looking and trying things out. One of the things I tried was Magnatune. At the time I found them they were so new and cutting edge I had to submit some tracks. Long story short I signed up with them. There was quite a buzz around magnatune.com because of what they were doing. Letting the fans decide how much to pay the artists for their music. Giving 50% of all proceeds to the artists really worked and I was making money again just from the sheer traffic they were getting. They had online licensing that also worked and most of the money I made at Magnatune was from licensing the use of my songs to things like fashion shows, web presentations and video. The buzz lasted about a year or so, then slowly seemed to fizzle as the Internet got faster and P2P got more popular.
At the time there was a site starting to get attention but I didn’t see how it could really help me. Social media in its infancy was myspace.com. Good for exposure, definitely, hard to use absolutely. The site was and still is so slow I was convinced it wouldn’t last. I was wrong and I still don’t get it, every time I am there it doesn’t load something on the page I am trying to see. I don’t use it much but I think you need to be there. It does show up in my logs as sending traffic to this site. To compare I was doing well on the myspace charts too, but a strange thing happened called “nothing”. Myspace would not replace mp3.com and neither would Magnatune things were changing fast. Still the most my music career had contributed to supporting my family was Licensing the use of my music to other people. The relationships I built before I started using the Internet were what was working best so far. I think online Licensing is a hard thing to crack. On a site with a huge catalog you are a small fish in a big sea. I'm not even sure if these sites are really working for anyone. There is no human contact. its much easier to talk to someone and explain the cues needed than to search aimlessly with keywords that the right song may not have listed.
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conceived that I would be a solo Artist / Producer in this strange eclectic electronic landscape I had created, put the songs online and see if there was an audience. After all, at this time Moby was not touring, and neither had Enigma.Was the internet going to allow all the artists out there like me to post our songs, yes, be discovered, yes, earn a living, maybe. This blog is my journey thus far on what worked, what I’ve tried, and what I’m doing now living in maybeville." 
URL’s you put in your list. What I am getting at is this is one thing you should do not the only. I make every effort to respond to posts on my Facebook page return emails and DM’s from Twitter. You need to keep in contact with the people that are interacting with you. Its just good manners. What I’ve found out in my experiment is that people stumble on you. They may not be actively searching for “
there is a more popular band down the street yeah maybe. But wait you have a web site and all your songs are on it, damn no one checks that out either. Just like the kids that saw you from the street you have all your meta tags in place and 
songs that at the time were #1 on one of the genre charts. Artists were paid $0.005 by mp3.com per stream as I remember. These days it’s up to Sound Exchange to track and collect it for you. This was before high speed Internet so yeah, 2000-2002. They had CD’s on demand like Amazon now does, no download store. Point I’m getting at was it worked for me. I was starting to make money. It all looked promising then poof! Gone, killed by Vivendi. Then sold to downoad.com. No longer artist friendly. 
I continued with the relationships I had and started to offer custom scores for productions. This was one way I could compete and justify my fee. Licensing them something unique took what they were giving their clients to a new level. This continued to work for me. Still I felt the need to find a replacement for mp3.com so I had been looking and trying things out. One of the things I tried was Magnatune. At the time I found them they were so new and cutting edge I had to submit some tracks. Long story short I signed up with them. There was quite a buzz around 