Making True Blue Fans

So how DO you make fans today?  By making something so creative or good that people pay attention.  That's the major label formula.  They want to sign you AFTER you've gotten everybody to pay attention.  But if you make that deal you're shortsighted, because all the label can do is get you on radio and TV, two dying media, meanwhile taking too much of the upside and paying very little in advance.

In other words, one Funny Or Die clip is better than hours spent working with Dr. Luke. That's the secret of OK Go.  The videos were so creative, they were passed from hand to hand via e-mail, IM and the Facebook wall.

Yes, the words of the poets are written on the Facebook wall, the subway's passe.

So instead of handing out fliers, e-mailing everybody you know to listen to your music, the game is to stay home and create something so good, so interesting, that when it's posted online, people won't be able to stop sending it to their friends.

It's not even about genres.  There are no limits online.

And catchy is catchy.  I may have only heard Rebecca Black's "Friday" one time through, but the chorus is stuck in my head.

So stand back, take a deep breath and change direction.  Don't play by the old rules. Today you've got to be really good or really creative or both.  Your song must connect in one listen.

That doesn't mean you can't keep trying, you can't keep uploading songs and videos, but the sheer mass, just staying in the game, won't help.  You're now an inventor, looking for that one breakthrough product.  When you succeed, your history is unlocked and your fans can wallow in your past.  This is the opposite of the major label paradigm.  There's the hit and..?

Artist Branding

As 2010 draws to a close KSE(KleerStreemEntertainment) hopes everyone had success and everyone is looking forward to continued success in 2011.  Success means different things to most all of us and is measured in 'degrees' as related to enjoying what you do while being able to pay the bills and buy a healthy salad or a Big Mac....dependent upon what you enjoy eating.

Branding is what an artist should be doing in order to 'stand out' to those who may come in contact with you, your music, and all your merchandise. Above all TRUE BLUE BRANDING taps into emotions.  Why? Because emotions drive most, if not all of our decisions. A brand reaches out with a powerful connecting experience.  It's an emotion connecting point that transcends the product.

A great brand is a story that's never completely told. It's that never-ending story we know of; a story that keeps us wanting more and more. A True Blue Brand is a metaphorical story that's evolving constantly. When your brand stagnates; you loose....your fans loose.

Stories create the emotional context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience.  The larger experience is YOU constantly delivering performances, music, and lyrics that connect with TRUE BLUE FANS and all potentially NEW TBF.  Always ask yourself: Is What I'm Doing each day consistent with building a better TRUE BLUE BRAND?  If not, it's time to think about how you are spending your time versus how you should better spend your time.

Brands, especially True Blue Brands are not built in a day....they perpetuate like a snowball rolling down a mountain in 'slow' motion; a mountain with no bottom. Your brand allows you to continue; to be remembered; to preserve from oblivion.  If done effectively it continues into infinity. 

THIS IS THE "ESSENCE-OF-YOU" WE ARE TALKING ABOUT.

---end

Branding

If you take the ‘e’ out of emotion, you’re left with a word that is synonymous with action. Small wonder then, that when it comes to human behavior, nearly all of the voluntary stuff is fueled by some sort of feeling that comes from within. Whether it’s a fist pump into the air or in someone’s face, our actions occur only in the presence of emotion.

When people fall in love with brands, they don’t fall in love with its face. They fall in love with what lives at the heart of the brand. And emotional appeals can’t be forced or contrived and be successful. When they come from the heart, people will respond in kind.

These days, successful brands have a set of attributes that include:

Human - Can people relate to your brand as though it were a person? What are the personality traits of your brand? If it were a movie character, what would it look like? Is it a man, woman or child? Is it young or old? And how do these traits reveal themselves in your marketing?

Engaging - How many ways are there for people to interact with your brand? Are you producing content that doesn’t look or sound like advertising? Are there ways you could be entertaining your customers? What kinds of experiences do you provide for your audience besides a buying experience?

Authenticity - Does your marketing accurately convey the spirit or soul of your company? What kind of promise do you make to your audience about the kind of experience you provide? Do you make good on that promise during all possible interactions with your audience?

Relevance - Who, specifically is your audience? How would you describe them in human terms? What is the purpose of your brand in the lives of these individuals? How does it fit into their every day existence. Does what you offer increase their likelihood to feel positive emotions toward your brand?

Tension - What kinds of ideas do you present to your audience that challenges their current thinking about the world? Is there enough drama in the content you put out into the world? Can you identify the audiences “enemy” and somehow insert your brand as a hero?

If you have covered all of these bases in the development of your marketing, you have established a strong foundation for building an emotionally charged brand with which people can identify on a deeper and more meaningful level.

Everybody Doesn't Have To Like You

 

Yes, rejection sucks, but it's all part of the music process. The process of becoming a good or great artist/entertainer.  Or, worse case, part of the reality of knowing you don't have a future as a self supporting artist/entertainer.  Maybe you were meant to be a great writer, producer, road manager, etc.

Becoming a successful INDIE ARTIST entails so many areas, even having a 'little luck' along your journey.  Success, in this blog, is defined as earning a living that pays all your bills without having to work a second job. Yes, music success is a real business that must have your attention 24/7.  I know many artist who believe music success is nothing more than being able to play, sing, and entertain people and fans regardless of income earned for total support. 

Rejection impacts artist in many different ways.  Everything from anger, to hate, to depression, to developing a very thick skin, that propels most to work harder each day to gain more acceptance and fan support.  Which means less negative emotional attitude.  Learning to handle all the downs is but part of this process to reach the next higher level of your music career.  All valleys have hills, sometimes mountains; all valleys change directions many times.  A music career is a job, albeit a demanding and difficult one. But it can become a fulfilling and fun one provided artist remained focused on continuous incremental daily improvements.  Most all artist start with high expectations only to find the road is not always paved and straight.  Realizing all the family and Opry support was great, but, not extremely relevant in the real world of music.  Rather, it more like pushing a heavy rock up to the mountain's top, before you can push it over to a more successful career.  It's been labeled: PAYING YOUR DUES!  In sales and marketing I call rejection a positive opportunity to develop and overcome adversities.  Rejection must be allowed to roll off your shoulders, thereby, making you stronger, more determined, while keeping you moving forward.

Reviews that don't show you the love you expected are nothing more than learning experiences.  I can assure you there will be many more to come.  An artist grows and matures once they realize this is nothing more than a part of the music process.  Today's critics can become tomorrow's biggest supporters or are dismissed by your fans and friends as totally non-credible because their opinions are just that....Their Opinions. 

But, if the criticism is constructive, get over your bruised ego and make changes you think will work.  Most of all, remember you are in the early part of your career and are after fans that support you.  Those True Blue Fans will generate more positive support than any critic or disgruntle fan. Plus, you are looking for the first 100; then the first 1,000; then the first 5,000; then the first 10,000 fans, etc.  If you must have an ego (most all artist and musicians do) try to develop an ego-free filter that processes only what is relevant while disregarding all the other garbage. 

Make an "ANGER" file that will become your best listener with no criticism.  Put one on your laptop or make one where you write with 'bottom' line clarity what you are really feeling....put these writings in your "ANGER" file and move on.  This way you can move forward without the possibility of someone your trusted spreading rumors.  You may even want to name the file: OPPORTUNITIES.  Who knows, somewhere down the road you may write a great song from your ANGER/OPPORTUNITY file.  Great songs do tell stories about real people's real feelings/experiences.

Rejections or being turned down are all part of the music business and part of life.  If you believe in God, as I hope all artist do, mostly likely being rejected or turn down was not part of HIS plan for you.  God always has a "HIGHER CALLING" for all of us...have faith in HIM to lead you in the right direction. He loves you and will never lead you down the wrong path.  No one can ever take away from you what HE has for you.  Sometimes not getting what you wanted, will save you from larger disappointments.  Continue to work harder towards moving forward while pushing that rock up the proverbial mountain.  Make personal time for yourself and look up....today the mountain top is closer than it was yesterday and have faith it will be closer tomorrow.  Thank God for all your successes along this journey and ask HIM to continue with his daily guidance.

Final thought.....It's impossible to please everyone....so be like a duck that repels water regardless of how hard it's raining.  You belief in your music will become the energy to discover those that feel the same. 

---KleerStreem Entertainment
    Female Artist Development

Music Business Other Sides

Music biographies mesmerized me when I was a kid. Whether it was Glenn Miller or Elvis Presley, it was always the same fascinating formula: talent and tenacity leading to the precipice of success, with the artist always searching for that one elusive element to define his signature sound, to breakthrough. With Miller it was the addition of trombones. The proceedings always put me on the edge of my seat and the breakthroughs set me reeling. I guess it was in my blood.

It persists. The other night I watched two great documentary-style biopics on TV, one on Johnny Cash, another on Willie Nelson. Willie, as many of his fans may not realize, was actually a Nashville songwriter penning such classics as “Crazy,” which Patsy Cline etched into the music lexicon. Despite his preeminent status as a writer, Willie couldn’t get arrested as an artist in Music City. His quirky phrasing was way too off-beat for the 60s sound, which was infused with sweet strings and pop arrangements.

At the age of 40, Willie returned home to Texas. Such a move would have meant a life sentence selling insurance had history not intervened. As fate would have it, Woodstock Nation had opened the doors to multiple music movements by the early 70s, and Willie realized that such hippie hangouts as Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters were ready for a new kind of country artist. He enlisted his buddy Waylon Jennings, among others, and set about launching a novel sound to a new audience. His ultimate success turned country music, and the music establishment at large, on its head. Ultimately, he was responsible for redefining music, establishing its “outlaw” class and creating the Austin revolution as well as worldwide social activism that persists to this day.

Despite his huge outsider success, Nashville rejected this giant yet again. By the 1980s, you couldn’t find a Willie song on mainstream country radio, and forget about a major label deal.

Okay, let’s get right down to the hard part. Cash was just another music god to be tumbled unceremoniously from Olympus. By the 80s, he, too, was cast out like so much trash. His popularity was dwindling, and he was struggling to find an audience and make a living.

So these outlaw outcasts banded together, literally, forming the country supergroup The Highwaymen, along with Waylon and Kris Kristofferson. Talk about a Mount Rushmore of talent. They had taken fate into their own hands and, once again, set out to redefine the music scene, outside the establishment, all on their own.

A Bronx boy, I was still getting my country legs under me, when I hit Nashville in the late 80s. At the time, I couldn’t understand why the likes of Willie and Johnny weren’t getting mainstream air play, why I could eat lunch with Emmylou Harris but couldn’t hear her songs on country radio, why Nanci Griffith was considered a darling in all the clubs, to all the execs, but couldn’t get the chart toppers and eventually carped about it in interviews.

I was just getting introduced to the hard truth of the music industry: bitterness. Griffith was bitter, my friend Artie Traum (from back home in Woodstock) — one of the sweetest guys to ever grace the business — was expressing a degree of bitterness, too, in interviews of the day. I was just learning.

The songwriting trade in Nashville was rough. By year two, I was saying you had to learn to live on a diet of stones. Rejection was the blue-plate special everyday. It took me two years to get my first major song contract and more to get my first staff writing job and my first cut. Everyone who stuck with it had war stories: the song on hold that never happened, the artist cut that got dropped by the label or never got released as a single or didn’t make it above 20 on the charts. But, despite eventual successes and even industry support, I left after a decade to pursue a career as an artist, packing scars and wisdom, love and hate.

But back to Johnny Cash. One of the greatest artists to “walk the line,” he faced the pure pain of artistry more deeply, more movingly than anyone before him. Late in his career, with the help of producer Rick Rubin, Johnny faced his inner darkness, his demons, his truth, his soul. With such albums as “American Recordings” and “Unchained,” he found a vast and vital new audience, just years before his death. His new material was so raw that family members had a tough time listening. They told him it sounded like he was saying goodbye. He told them he was.

In the Cash bio, artists such as Sheryl Crow, John Mellencamp and Vince Gill expressed the true painful tumble that all artists must face. Mellencamp himself recently penned a telling if rambling article on the biz in HuffPost, a blog post that established a wellspring of conversation in the social media sector.

So, this little Bronx boy, who reeled from the Glenn Miller story and cut and broke his teeth on Music Row, finally came to understand bitterness and the role it plays in any music career. No one is exempt. It may be (excuse me) a bitter pill to swallow, but I recommend downing it to develop a good artist-immune system. Another words, one has to learn to deal with it, embrace it, pain and all, and find a way to move on. Carry it on your back, in your suitcase, in your heart, on your skin — the rose tattoo of the music artist.