Caroline Bottomley set up RadarMusicVideos.com in March this year. Radar is a network of over 1200 filmmakers worldwide, where labels and artists can commission videos and get them promoted. To date Radar has generated well over 2,000,000 online views for videos made through them.

Music videos are pretty essential for any artist wanting to promote their music online. Having a strategy to promote them is a whole other problem for artists and labels. Here's a few tips to getting a great music video and getting it seen.

What kind of music video?

If you want to be in it, consider how you can make it exciting to watch. Straight performance videos are generally predictable, ie boring, you can guess you're going to see a singer, a guitarist, a guitar, a drummer, some drums and so on. Two budget performance videos I think are great: Kate Nash’s Foundations and Example's Me and Mandy . We get to know the artist but we get entertained at the same time. Non-performance videos can give your video much more scope for viewer entertainment. The Wave Pictures and London Elektricity two different ways of supporting the track and being very attractive. By the way, The Wave Pictures was shot in Guatemala City for a London band – so you can also access a bigger pool of talent if you're prepared to go non-performance.

What budget?

If you've got 0, you'll be best trying the first two contact groups outlined below. You might hit lucky, but expect to get a student or starter filmmaker who wants to start or build their showreel. Which doesn't necessarily mean a bad video.

If you create a budget for your video, you'll have more experienced people interested in working for you (who have a history of delivering the goods) and you get access to the third contact group below.

How do I find a filmmaker?

1. Ask friends, fans, local art colleges.

2. Contact filmmakers on YouTube and MySpace. Both sites have 'featured video' sections where you get straight to the good stuff. Or find videos you like on music video blogs – google to find them

3. Contact a professional production company or an online service like Radar Music Videos. I'm not supposed to promote us here, but we don't know of any other online commissioning/promotion services!

How do I work with a filmmaker?

Basic principles – be clear what you want in your video brief, how much money you'll spend on it and when you want it. Get this all agreed up front in writing, preferably with a contract. Here's a sample contract. Get written references from people who've worked with the filmmaker before.

If you're spending money, be prepared to give some up-front, but hold a good chunk back against rough cut approval and a small amount against final delivery. The rough cut is as it sounds, a nearly finished version of your video. All the structure will be in place, with just some minor editing and colour corrections etc to do. It's not fair on your filmmaker to start asking for major structural changes or re-shoots at this point, so be sure to have created a clear brief from the outset. Above all, keep talking. If something isn't going the way you like it, talk about it with the aim to get a great video out of it – this may not be the same thing as getting your own way.

How do I get planet earth to see my video?

Video preparation and presentation - in order of importance:

- A good thumbnail

- A good title

- Well written metadata - the text that accompanies the video

Tags - use words people might search for. A lot of sites only allow limited numbers of tags so use the best ones ie 'indie' is probably better than 'cool'

Video distribution

Self service

Post on your artist pages. Contact blogs and music sites. If you've got any good stories from your shoot, write it into your (brief) press release – and give your press release a good title. Join video sharing sites like Dailymotion, Vimeo etc, build networks of friends and promote your video – carefully, you can get suspended very easily if you're seen as a spammer. See if you can find contacts for site editors who can front page your video. It's not easy to do this but it is possible.

Professional services

There are an increasing number of businesses who claim to viralise videos. They may work, I've never tried them, but do beware. It's incredibly difficult to get a video to go viral and most companies charge up front. Get references, check them out independently before you spend anything.

If you're considering taking on a PR or digital marketing company to generally promote you, see what they can do for your online video. Also check out what they can do to get your video on TV.

What's the point?

This is something you need to establish before you do anything else. What are your objectives? Increase your mailing list? Build your MySpace friends? Promote an album? A t-shirt? Get on TV? Adapt your strategies accordingly and use URLs in your metadata to guide people to where you want them to be (mailing list sign up, T-shirt order page etc) Set some objectives and you'll know when you're winning.

Good luck, don't give up. Promoting your great video is a pretty big job but it can win you a lot of t-shirt sales if you get it right. 

It seems the way money flows at a record label is largely a mystery to most artists who haven’t worked in the music industry for an extended period of time. It’s always interesting to lift the veil a bit on an unknown. Let’s take a look at one side of the economics of an indie record label, getting a new release to market. Below is a summary of the actual expenses an indie record label incurred for a new release:

Recording advance: $15,000
Tour support: $2,100
Mastering costs: $934.96
Marketing: $13,433.23
Advertising: $2,067.50
Publicity: $5,153.34
Manufacturing: $16,581.04
Artwork / photos: $200
Misc: $587.71

Total: $56,057.78

Here is an overview of each of the line item in a little more detail:

Recording Advance – The money for the recording advance is used to cover the cost of recording. Including studio rental, mixing, session musicians, sound engineer and producer.

Tour Support – Artists have traditionally sold more overall units when they tour so record labels will often times financially support a tour. Tour support money can help pay some of the expenses of touring such as gas, insurance, hotels, food and supplies.

Mastering – Mastering is a post production process that takes the final mix of the recording, edits minor flaws, adjusts volume and stereo widths, equalizes tracks, etc. It’s usually expected that the person who masters the recording will be different from the person who mixes it so there is typically a separate line item in the budget.

Marketing – The marketing line item is entirely for retail co-op marketing expenses. Co-op marketing dollars are expenses distributors incur from retailers for special product placement, in-store promotions, listening stations or advertising. The amount of co-op marketing dollars the distributor (and ultimately the label) are willing to spend on a new release has a direct correlation to the amount of product the retailer orders.

Advertising – Advertising expenses can include any print, radio and online advertising the record label incurs to promote a new release (outside of retail co-op dollars).

Publicity – It’s fairly common for a record label to hire an independent publicist for a 90 day period to help promote a new release to press, print and online media, bloggers and anyone else who can help influence music fans.

Manufacturing – The manufacturing costs for a CD with jewel case can vary but is still around $1.00 per unit for a distributor or label with measurable volume.

Artwork – The cost of custom creative and / or photos for the release.

Miscellaneous – Just like the name implies this is the catch “everything else” expense category related to a new release. For example, legal fees or video production expenses charged to a new release could end up here.

For this particular release to break even it must generate $70,072.23 in gross sales ($56,057.78 + the 25% fee of sales paid to the distributor ). The typical deductions a distributor takes on sales including return reserves and breakage (to name a few) further impact cash flow on sales back to the record label.

It’s important for artists to fully understand how the basic economics of an indie label work since they will not get paid any royalties from sales until the record label recoups all the expenses incurred in getting the record to market. This is true of both traditional record label agreements and even “50/50” licensing agreements. It is very common for artists to never receive royalties on sales from their record label since many new releases never fully recoup their expenses.

Being signed to a record label is no guarantee of sales success. Artists need to carefully weigh what a record label is going to spend on a new release to determine the level of sales that will be needed to achieve profitability before signing a recording contract. Even though the artist might sell a lower number of units on their own there is a very real chance they can actually earn more money without a record label being involved. 

Most indie record label owners are simply trying to get music they love heard by fans. They aren’t in it for the money. In addition to the above mentioned costs of getting a new release to market they have to cover multiple other expenses such as insurance, rent, payroll, travel and mechanical royalties . Making money as an indie label is no easy task. Needless to say, label owners give it a great deal of consideration before signing a new artist and committing to releasing their music.

It does take a lot of money and resources to get a new release to market. However, real transparency in accounting for these expenses is still largely lacking. Inevitably this leads to conflict between the record label and artist around recoupment of expenses and payment of royalties. Hopefully, as artists better understand the economics of record labels they will be able to make more informed decisions about when it makes sense to sign with a record label and when go it alone.

David Harrell  is the Editor of Digital Audio Insider and has blogged about the economics of digital music since 2006. With his indie rock band the Layaways , he has self-released three albums. The latest, "The Space Between," is now available for free streaming and download from Last.fm.

The best I can remember, the class was called something like "the scientific method." A graduate biology seminar, it consisted of meeting once a week to watch an old science fiction movie, followed by a discussion about the treatment of science in the film. For the students, it was a low-stress way to add a couple semester hours to our schedules, and for the tenured professor who "taught" the class, it seemed like an incredibly easy way to pad his course load.

But unlike most of my college classes, there's something specific that's stayed with me. It was the professor's contention that there is no such thing as a truly repeatable experiment, at least not for biological sciences. The classic scientific method depends on the notion of repeatable results -- running the same experiment again should give the same results as those obtained in previous experiments. His point was that no matter how careful a researcher was, there'd always be some alteration in a small detail, such as a different batch of food for the lab animals or the health of the laboratory personnel. He wasn't implying that most scientific research wasn't valid, just that there was no such thing as a perfect do-over for most experiments.

Why am I yammering on about science experiments in a music business blog? Well, as anyone reading this post knows, over the past few years, the music industry -- from the largest record companies and the biggest selling artists down to the level of self-released artists -- has been experimenting like crazy. Free music, pay-what-you-want music, "360" deals, exclusive deals with Wal-Mart sans digital distribution, iTunes exclusives, etc. And after every large-scale experiment (Radiohead's "In Rainbows," Kid Rock's no-iTunes strategy, AC-DC's current Wal-Mart exclusive), music industry analysts, the news media, and bloggers attempt to assess the relative success of the approach.

Yet in all of these cases, "experiment" is probably a misnomer --there's no "control group" receiving the placebo treatment. Absent a trip to a parallel universe where you could buy Kid Rock's last album (or the single) from the iTunes store, we really don't know for certain if Kid Rock helped or hindered his total sales.  (It's possible, of course, that some record companies have been using control groups of some sort. You could make an album available in iTunes for a specific country or region, and compare sales to those in non-iTunes regions. Though the demographics and fan bases probably aren't identical across regions, so you're still guessing somewhat…)

And even if we knew for certain if an individual experiment was a relative success, it's not necessarily transferable. Just because something worked for Radiohead doesn't mean it would work for R.E.M. Further, in addition to the non-interchangeable nature of audiences and albums, the music retail environment itself is changing on a daily basis.

Yet music is art, not science, and even if these different business tests aren't controlled, repeatable experiments, there does seem to be a few obvious takeaways. One thing that seems certain is that for acts of a certain stature, deviations from the standard sales approach will result in increased attention, perhaps enough to generate additional sales. Offering free music certainly seems to have helped Trent Reznor SELL a lot of music, music that is readily available for no charge. And maybe AC-DC's new album wouldn't be selling as well without the promotional push behind the Wal-Mart exclusive.

One problem, however, is diminishing returns. Radiohead got the attention it did for its "In Rainbows" experiment not because it was the first act to offer its music on a "pay what you want" basis. Rather, because they were the first act with that level of name recognition and artistic credibility to do so. Post-Radiohead, a similar experiment by a well-known act might not get the same attention.

What's less obvious, however, is if free or pay-what-you-want music has the same impact on the other end of the scale. That is, for self-released acts like my own, who are all trying to figure out how to compete in an environment of seemingly endless listening choices.

If you spend some time on the CD Baby message boards, you'll see that some self-released musicians that are quite indignant over the idea of "free music." They'll point to the both hard work that went into writing and recording their music and the hard-earned dollars that funded the recording, mixing, mastering, and manufacturing of their music. They simply want a chance to earn some of that money back.

But offering free music doesn't mean you don't expect to get paid for it. For musicians at ANY level, the fundamental challenge is twofold. First, you need to get people to hear your music. Then you have to convince them to buy it. For relatively unknown artists, without access to commercial radio and the mainstream music press, offering free music along with paid versions of it seems the easiest way to increase your listening audience and, eventually, your paying audience.

Anecdotally, there are plenty of examples of how free and paid music can co-exist. A few years ago, when the Strokes released their second album, they offered a free 192k mp3 of the lead single on their website. Yet that song remained their top-selling track on iTunes, despite the existence of a free equivalent. And when I look at our cumulative iTunes sales, the two tracks we've sold the most copies of are songs we've made available as free downloads.

These examples don't necessarily prove anything -- there's no way to know if the Strokes would've sold more (or less) iTunes downloads if they didn't offer a free version of the track. Nor do they reveal why some consumers are paying for music they could have legally obtained without purchasing it. Maybe some purchasers of the iTunes tracks were simply unaware of the free versions, or maybe they are deliberately choosing to support the artist by purchasing the tracks.

For our new album, we're taking the free music plunge, inspired in part by a post by David Rose on this blog. For their 2004 release "Conductor," the Comas had a level of critical and promotional success that most small bands would kill for -- things like an 8.0 Pitchfork review and strong support and airplay from KEXP (one of the biggest/best known CMJ-reporting stations).

Yet they sold less than 6,000 total units, including physical CDs and album downloads. Would the Comas have done better with a free strategy? Again, without access to a parallel universe, there's no way to know to know for certain.

But in our case, given our very modest sales, the upside seems to outweigh the minimal downside of potential lost sales. And while it won't be a controlled or repeatable experiment, there are plenty of things we can quantify over the next few months: our number of Last.fm listeners, web traffic, friend statistics for MySpace and Facebook, and -- we hope -- increased sales over our previous release.

John Doe is the founder of the seminal Los Angeles punk group X, a solo artist and actor. John answers questions from our community members in the WWJDD? blog. Photo by Autumn de Wilde.

today is the day

be part of history and

VOTE ! !

Attached is a Public Service Announcement by Yo La Tengo and Chris Stamey entitled "V.O.T.E" in MP3 format. We encourage you to forward to any of your friends and neighbors who have not yet voted.

thanks,
JD

If you have questions for John Doe about music, the music business or life feel free to email them to wwjdd@knowthemusicbiz.com.

For more information on John Doe check out theejohndoe.com or YepRoc.com .