We at indieberlin are extremely excited to announce the beginning of our new “ask the experts” series on the music industry. The truth is that it’s so goddamn hard to actually know exactly what, as a musician/songwriter/band you’re meant to be doing to get somewhere.
Especially in these wild west web 2.0 days, where everyone and their mother has an opinion on the state of the music business, whether it’s actually possible to make any money anymore in the music business, which technologies you should use how and which technologies you should leave well alone….what the publishers are actually looking for, how to get the attention of labels, what you should be doing to prepare yourself to seem a good bet for when a label might take a look at you…as well as if it’s best to go it alone, or work to sign with an independent label….or a major label….or sign a publishing agreement with a major and sign to a minor….or…or….yeah, well, as we know, the list goes on.
That’s why, at the recent Berlin Music Week, we made a point of collaring the best, the brightest and the most highly-placed music industry people we could find, and extracting agreements from them that we could at some point in the near future pepper them with questions. And so it was, and so it came to be, and so here we are.
Thus: Each week for the next couple of months we are going to present a different expert on a particular sector of the music business, and we are going to invite you to ask these industry experts the questions that you always wanted to ask. You know, how sitting around in endless rehearsal rooms you would relate to each other attempts to send stuff to labels, set up meetings with publishers, try to get interviewed on the radio, and so on and so on, and these conversations (I know, cos I took part in very many of them), would end with a sad and bewildered shake of the head, cos we JUST HAD NO IDEA what these remote demigods were looking for.
And now that’s all gonna change. Got a question? Fire away. And let’s get all those questions and wonderings cleared up for once and for all.
NB: We are going to send out a mail on MONDAY each week to our mailing list, separate from our usual weekly newsletter, to specifically concentrate on this. So please open those mails, say hallo to our week’s industry expert, and shoot off those questions! Of course we’ll post the questions that we ask the person (and the answers too) on our site, and in this way we hope to build up a body of up-to-date, relevant information, and keep it there for the future, so that no one has to wander in the dark ever again, wondering what it’s all about.
NB 2: If you’re not on the mailing list and want to receive the mails so that your question has the best chance of being included, sign up to our mailing list in the box at the top right of the page!
Article by Noel Maurice
