Being a Good Hang, Having More Fun & Getting More Gigs

This post originally appeared on Music Entrepreneur HQ.

This comes naturally to some musicians, but for others it can be a challenge. If you’re easy to work with, chances are you will negotiate better deals, play more gigs and earn a better reputation overall.

Here are several tips to help you navigate this sometimes complicated field.

It’s Not About Adding 100% – it’s About Adding an Extra 1%

If what you’re doing isn’t working, it’s easy to think that you need to be doing a lot more. For some musicians this is true.

But for most of us it’s just a matter of doing a little extra. What does it mean to do something extraordinary? It means to add a little extra to your ordinary.

Write “Thank You” notes. Give away a few download cards. Send new contacts an article they might be interested in.

Don’t be a Drone

You don’t need to agree to every deal or sign on every page. If it’s making you feel uncomfortable, walk away. If it doesn’t fit your schedule, see if you can reschedule or just drop it.

Don’t be someone you’re not. If you’re honest, you don’t have to remember what you said. You don’t have to mask your personality to sell people on your ideas. There will be people who are drawn to you, and there will be those who don’t like you. You’re doing something wrong if you’re not coming up against some walls.

Treat People Like People – Not Like Dollar Signs

I can’t stress this point enough. If people are merely dollar signs or opportunities in your eyes, get out of the business. Seriously.

At the end of the day, you are selling you, not your product. In other words, you are selling relationship.

Every person you meet has thoughts, feelings, emotions, likes and dislikes. Relate to them as people.

Who is more likely to visit your website? Someone who is interested in learning more about you or someone you randomly told to go to your website?

Deliver What You Promise

This is not rocket science. If you say that you’re going to bring 30 people out to your show, then bring 30 people out.

Don’t make lofty promises you can’t keep. Play for two hours if you said you were going to play for two hours.

Don’t Complain

Don’t complain if you’re asked to cut your set short, or if you’re asked to play a few extra songs. Get the audience to applaud other acts on the bill. Send a special thanks to the staff at the venue.

Be courteous and love on people.

Have More Fun – Don’t Try to Impress

People aren’t easily impressed by anything these days. They know a good musician when they see one. They know a hard worker when they see one. They know when you’re having fun.

You don’t need to be intimidated by those who you think are “better” than you. Stick to the game plan, play your set, and enjoy yourself. That’s what’s going to get you more gigs. People have a hard time denying those who are having fun.

Pex Acquires Dubset Media: Rights-Tech Leaders Join Forces to Bring Digital Copyright Solutions to the Music, Film, and Video Industries

(Los Angeles, March 5, 2020) Pexeso, Inc. (Pex) is announcing its acquisition of Dubset Media Holdings. For the past three years, Pex has provided copyright search and content management tools to the largest rights holders in the music and film industries. Rights holders using Dubset’s rights management platform for music distribution on major streaming services will now have access to their catalog’s use and performance in any audio and video content across social media and user-generated content platforms.

“Dubset is a company we’ve been interested in for some time,” notes Rasty Turek, founder and CEO of Pex. “There are very few companies in the music business that have successfully licensed as much catalog as Dubset, and the music rights database they’ve built is massive and rare. Our technology’s scale and speed enables broad market access by all rights holders to our rights management and analytics services, built on top of the 20 billion video and audio files in our indexed database. We feel this will prove to be a game-changing combination.”

Pex is the only company capable of providing music, film, video, consumer brands, and enterprise companies an accurate and complete picture of what, where, and how much of their copyrighted works are being distributed and consumed across all of the world’s leading digital platforms.
“The distribution of digital media via social media has outpaced rights holders’ abilities to track, license, and manage their audio and video assets,” said Bob Barbiere, formerly of Dubset, now SVP Digital Rights at Pex. “Dubset was timely and successful in filling an industry need around identification and licensing of music in mixes and remixes. This acquisition will immediately expand rights holders’ abilities to locate, protect, and monetize use of their catalog within any form of music or video currently being shared on any of the world’s largest UGC and social media sites.”

In addition to the digital rights services and data Pex now offers to rights holders, the company has  announced its best-in-class copyright compliance solution, Attribution Engine. Attribution Engine identifies, licenses, and administers royalties for content across a rapidly shifting international copyright landscape. Platforms can seamlessly “plug in” Attribution Engine and be assured they have a complete copyright control solution. Attribution Engine mitigates significant copyright liability, meeting or exceeding all requirements contained within Article 17 of the new EU Copyright Directive, which promises to close the value gap between content creators and platforms.

About Pex
Pex (www.pex.com) delivers independent video and music analytics and digital rights management services to enable creators and rights holders to audit, measure and monetize copyrighted content across the Web. Pex automatically finds snippets as short as 1 second across dozens of platforms worldwide. Clients include online platforms, major music and film rights holders, and other key content producers and administrators.

MOD Devices announces partnership with Cycling ‘74 for cross-platform integration with new MOD Dwarf

Just weeks after launching a successful Kickstarter campaign to support production of its new MOD Dwarf, multi-effects hardware, cutting-edge audio tech innovator MOD Devices is now announcing a partnership with American music-software developer Cycling ‘74. The collaboration will ensure continued compatibility between Cycling ‘74’s unique MaxMSP gen~ patches and MOD’s next-generation hardware – a cross-platform integration offered first with the MOD Duo and Duo X and now with the MOD Dwarf, as one reward/offer for contributing to the unit’s Kickstarter campaign.

Known for its problem-solving approach to developing community-driven hardware and software that bring simplicity and utility to musicians, the Berlin-based music tech firm set out to create a one-stop solution for musicians who want a compact, economical, and customizable modular effects processor. The latest emanation of that solution is the MOD Dwarf, an ultra-compact, portable multi-effects pedal that boasts the capacity to house a vast array of effects, virtual instruments, amp simulators, and MIDI utilities. Features include two independent audio channels, each with independent gain controls, as well as three fully assignable knobs, three footswitches, and three pushbuttons.

Yet what makes any MOD device truly unique is that each unit is made endlessly customizable by allowing users to patch in their own sounds -- each user’s patch creations can be saved, uploaded to a cloud, and shared with an ever-growing, open-source community. And this is where Cycling ‘74 integration comes in.

“In 2017 MOD Devices and Cycling ‘74 set out to establish a streamlined and easy-to-use integration between Cycling ‘74's innovative plug-in design and MOD Devices' like minded platform. Among our rewards/offers for contributors to the Dwarf Kickstarter, the MOD Duo MaxMSP package, allows users to turn their ~gen patches into MOD Plugins and install them with a simple click. The Dwarf’s powerful processing capabilities and streamlined controls are the perfect tool to unleash ideas so far unrealized on the market,”  said Gianfranco Ceccolini, the CEO of Mod Devices.

Cycling '74 (also known as "C74") is an American software development company, headquartered in San Francisco, California, and owned by Ableton. The company is best known for its work with the digital signal processing software environment Max.

Said Cycling ‘74 Content Specialist Tom Hall, “MOD Devices’ MOD Duo & MOD Duo X have been my go-to devices when wanting to incorporate my MaxMSP gen~ patches into an outboard workflow. They're powerful and tactile and I'm excited that these possibilities are extended with the Dwarf."

Pledge on the MOD Dwarf Kickstarter here.

SoundStorming, the Social Music Platform that Challenges Music Discovery

9 out of 10 artists are left forever undiscovered. Chances are, the next potential hit by an undiscovered artist is stashed away in a garbled voice memo right now.

A new social music app, SoundStorming, is going to change how artists are discovered by making music’s process of creation social. Today's musicians are continuously recording song ideas on their phones, this means that artists have hundreds of potential great songs or sounds that are never shared or further developed. Translated globally, this means millions of beats, rhythms, melodies, remixes, and collaborations never see the light of day -- and millions of wasted opportunities for fans and other creators to discover new sounds, new artists, and collaborations.

A key to unlocking that hidden treasure trove of creativity is SoundStorming, a social music platform where musicians, songwriters, and artists can connect, collaborate, and promote their talent by sharing their in-progress musical ideas with a global community. The SoundStorming team’s ambitious goal is nothing less than to change the industry – to fill the gap between the music that is consumed and the music that’s being created while incubating the next generation of top musicians in a collective space that focuses on sharing music as a creative process rather than a finished product.

“We see ourselves as connecting the fragmented worlds of music creation, collaboration, and distribution, in one place,” explained SoundStorming co-founder, CEO & Musician, Arnau Bosch. Together with co-founder and COO Alicia Rius, he created a new mobile app designed to allow musicians to record, share, and brainstorm with other artists across a social platform, ushering in a new wave of collaboration and innovation.

An artist, for example, can record a melody, and another musician from the other side of the globe can collaborate on it and give the original song a new twist. On the other hand, a renowned artist can use SoundStorming to share the first chords of her latest hit, before playing it live, or from the hotel room before the show. The platform has an auto time-stamping feature that ensures each musician owns the rights to his or her own contribution to the composition.

SoundStorming’s brilliance is in its simplicity. Just record, share, and then collaborate. Says Bosch. “Music is the top category on social media, making it a potentially powerful tool for artist discovery -- but musicians usually engage with audiences through content that has nothing to do with music on these platforms. Social Media is about creating an outside image: fabricated, filtered, unreachable, and egocentric. SoundStorming is about talent, not looks, making it the first true social music platform”.

Music has always been Bosch’s passion. Since buying his first Spanish guitar at seven years old, he has been playing and using music to meet and connect with other people, often sharing sketches of songs with friends across the map via his phone’s voice memos. Fast forward to the last four years: as Creative Director for Apple at TBWA\Media Arts Lab, Bosch was instrumental in the launch of the Apple Music platform and was fortunate enough to get exposure to the real data of the music industry. It was while working closely with top music industry professionals in this capacity that he had his light-bulb moment. “As a creative agency, we found ourselves spending dollars creating secondary assets to promote the real assets: their music. There's a need for exclusive content in all streaming platforms, and we know that more than 95% of musicians record ideas on their phones. If I could go deep into their phones, I could actually start taking out some ideas that tell the story behind their music. Ideas that tell way more stuff about the real artist and what is to come. That is the most exclusive Music content there is.”

Under the existing model, musicians reach their audience through distribution -- after a long process of writing, producing, mixing/mastering and relying on the good graces of the industry’s traditional gate-keepers. SoundStorming throws a liberating wrench in that system with the goal to allow artists to share their music with an ever-growing and supportive community from the very beginning of their creative journey.

The strategy is to roll it out in three phases. The first step is empowering the next generation of musicians with a streamlined, user-friendly platform that makes it easy and rewarding to network and collaborate with other artists. The second step will be to bring the professional community of established musicians, producers, A&R folks, etc. into the mix; people who can give well-needed advice and mentoring to emerging artists. The third step will be to open the doors to audiences so artists will be able to use the creative process as exclusive content to engage with fans and be discovered.

“If you open those doors, you can really imagine what kind of interaction and engagement we're bringing between artists and fans – something that’s never been seen before,” says Bosch. “I would love for artists to understand the power that they have with their ideas, and to be able to give them the tools to really utilize those ideas.

Five-Second Transformation: Super Hi-Fi Turns the Space Between Songs into Listening Experiences with Sophisticated AI

Five seconds. That’s the usual span of silence you encounter between tracks on a streaming audio service.

That flash of time is all that seperates a bunch of random audio content from a branded, highly differentiated listening experience. It’s the deciding moment when you can lose interest and go do something else. Super Hi-Fi is using artfully calibrated, sophisticated AI to close these gaps. The approach echoes the distilled expertise of decades of broadcast radio, promising to dynamically personalize audio, but with the scale of AI.

“So far, the streaming services have virtually become commodities,” explains Super Hi-Fi founder and CEO Zack Zalon. “You can’t tell them apart. They all sound the same. AI audio techniques can change this and create long-term relationships between a service and their customers. There is a lot that can happen in the space between the songs. Today that space is a missed opportunity, and we aim to change that.”

Brands like Peloton, ad platforms like TargetSpot, media like the Associated Press, and music companies like UMG, iHeartRadio and Napster have grasped the opportunity. All have tapped Super Hi-Fi to tackle that five seconds and craft custom listening experiences on top of their existing offerings.

Super Hi-Fi’s AI can automatically deploy a range of techniques to transform silence into sonic engagement. It can be as simple as volume leveling or song-to-song transitions that keep the energy high; to a tapestry of sonic branding, interstitials, artist interviews, song/artist IDs, news, weather, and sports updates that turn once-dead air into insightful moments. These elements can be subtle or bold, yet they all work to make sonically diverse tracks into a cohesive experience.

“Our technology can calculate the ‘right’ transition between any two songs because it’s doing it in real time, even if these songs don’t seem like they’d work together at all,” notes Zalon. “We’ve found you can take, say, a hit by a 90s pop artist and make it sound great segueing into a 50s bebop track. Normally, that would be a pretty jarring experience, but because our technology knows what to do with it, it sounds amazing. The result effectively reconnects the presentation techniques of radio with the modern availability and quality of streaming, two formats that developed independently without exchanging ideas enough.”

The Super Hi-Fi team developed this tech over the course of several years, combining intensive research into AI and machine learning with a deep understanding of how radio stations and online personalities shape the listening experience and create audio brands that listeners instantly recognize. “We can create unlimited combinations and approaches built from customized components. Our system is extremely flexible and can sound radically different, but every use-case utilizes the same AI,” explains Zalon. One key aspect of this recipe: “It should sound like a human produced it and sound distinct when it comes out of the speakers.”

This is more than a cool tech trick. It adds value by differentiating services, creating brand identities, and increasing listening times. As an example, Super Hi-Fi and a commercial partner tested this approach on approximately 400K listeners and discovered that their AI song transitions alone increased listening time by 10%, a notable jump in engagement and revenue potential for thin-margin music services.

Executing this is no mean feat: Super Hi-Fi already handles more than 300 million real-time transitions a month and is prepared for far more. But building complex, large-scale tech products came second nature for the startup’s seasoned tech and product experts. The Super Hi-Fi team previously built and operated Muve Music, Cricket Mobile’s music service, which had 3.5 mil subscribers at its peak. They designed and launched CBS Radio’s consumer music streaming platform as well as AOL Radio, Yahoo Launchcast, and ran Virgin’s global music streaming platform for Sir Richard Branson. Additionally, members of the founding team had key roles at Deezer, TIDAL, Flipagram, and TikTok rounding out a diverse set of music industry experiences.

Thanks to this background, the team at Super Hi-Fi understands how to tailor the near-infinite possibilities of its tech to what services, brands, or other customers need. “Each one of our customers has used our technology in a different way,” Zalon notes, with new uses cropping up regularly, including in retail and dining environments and via branded curation applications. Yet no matter the use, they all eliminate the gaps between songs and help customers find their own distinctive sound for an enhanced, exciting listening experience.

About Super Hi-Fi

Super Hi-Fi uses artificial intelligence to improve the digital listening experience by transforming gaps between songs into relevant and personalized content. The company’s patented technology is capable of understanding the infinite nuances within music with the expertise of a human DJ to improve transitions between content and create better extensions of digital brands. The result is perfectly transitioned streams of music, podcasts, interviews, news, weather, branding, advertisements, and other audio content. Based in Los Angeles, California, Super Hi-Fi is integrated by digital brands like Universal Music Group, Associated Press, Peloton, Napster, and iHeartRadio.

Antares introduces Auto-Tune software to Atlanta’s Music Education Group

(ATLANTA, GA) Monday, March 30, 2020:  In preparation for a new year of programming, Music Education Group makes hardware and software upgrades to the Dunbar Multimedia and Technology Center. (DMTC)
 

The Music Education Group (MEG) – an Atlanta-based STEAM 501(c)(3) whose mission is to teach students life-skills and leadership through music, film and digital media - recently announced new and expanding partnerships and upgrades to their learning facility known as the Dunbar Multimedia and Technology Center. (DMTC)
 

A joint partnership between MEG and the City of Atlanta’s Department of Park and Recreation, the DMTC is a full service, HD Multimedia and Technology Center complete with live music capabilities, a backline and the ability to produce a show, create a podcast and record multi-track audio. The center allows young people to learn in a state of the art, highly specialized technology facility.     
 

The DMTC features a Raven MTX MKII System from Slate Media Technology - the first ever Multi-Touch Audio Production System and four individual work-stations complete with Mac Minis, UA Apollo Twins, 32 inch Monitors and creative software including Pro-Tools and Final Cut Pro. In addition to Slate Media Technologies, the facilities partners include the Kaotica Corporation and Universal Audio.
 

New for 2020, MEG is excited to announce that we have partnered with Antares Audio Technologies, the worldwide leader in the development of unique vocal processing tools. “The success of our work comes from the support of our partners," confirms James Caldwell, MEG Executive Director. "The backing from international corporations, small businesses, our celebrity network and area influencers has helped us to serve and impact more than 5,000 youth annually. 
 

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with the Music Education Group to include Auto-Tune and our other professional vocal processing tools in the DMTC. Content creation is a key part of expressive art and business and we feel this is a great opportunity to help students express their voices while learning foundational principles for future success.” said Steve Berkley, Antares Audio Technologies (Auto-Tune), CEO.
 

For more information please see our website at www.themeg.org.

“Get your hit together”: BMAT rolls out initiative to help music creators to maximize royalties in response to COVID-19

As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to disturb the world economy, emerging music artists are among the most financially affected. With tours being canceled so that ticket sales are no longer bringing in revenue and with both labels and independent artists feeling the pressure to push back album release dates in a tanking market, musicians everywhere are feeling their livelihoods threatened.

In response to this crisis, BMAT, the music innovators with a mission to index all music usage and ownership data, have just announced the global rollout of an educational initiative aimed to help independent artists prepare for the tough times ahead and maximize earnings while remaining safe and maintaining the call for social distancing. “Get your hit together” is a 4-episode web series by the music-loving folks at BMAT, which aims to help artists get paid for every play.

BMAT’s team is passionate about music, and many are musicians themselves. They know that, as rights holders of entertainment assets in a fast-paced and infinitely interconnected digital world, music creators face a daunting challenge in tracking monetizable third-party use of their work. So, BMAT is helping those who create music to maximize their earnings—and the key to doing this is getting your music properly organized, or as they put it, getting your sh*t together.

Each episode will include a video with a BMAT  speaker giving a short summary of tips, accompanied by a click-through downloadable pdf guide to help artists use this challenging time to organize their repertoires. Topics covered in the series will include top ways to organize audio files in one place, best methods for confidently curating metadata, how to properly register songs and creative assets, and how to track those assets across the global landscape of the digital-age music industry so musicians can get paid for every play. 

“We do what we do because we love music,” say BMAT. “So we’re helping those who create it to maximize their earnings and make sure they get the recognition they deserve. The key to keeping your royalty income flowing is staying organized..”

Follow BMAT’s social channels to catch each episode of “Get your hit together” over the next week and download the artist pack for free.