Terry McBride is the CEO and one of three founders of the Nettwerk Music Group , which includes Nettwerk Productions (Canada’s largest independent record label), Nettwerk Management (artist and producer management), Nettwerk One (publishing), and Artwerks (graphic and fashion design). Founded in McBride's apartment in 1984, Nettwerk has corporate offices in Vancouver, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Hamburg and London. Nettwerk Management’s exclusive client roster includes Avril Lavigne, Barenaked Ladies, Dido, Stereophonics, Sarah McLachlan, Sum 41, Jars of Clay and Jamiroquai, among many others.

So what is a "song"? Is it a copyright? A melody and lyric?  Who owns that "song"? What rights do the owners have to control its consumption?  These questions are at the heart of today’s debate within the music business. On one side there are the record labels, publishers and a great number of artists, on the other side a large number of music consumers. I have spent a lot of time listening to the opinions of all parties and have expressed a lot of my own points of view. So as this debate evolves, what do I think today?

Well, all parties are correct. Each has a valid list of reasons and a deep passion for what they believe. So rather than keep myself in this ongoing debate, I took the summer off the public speaking circuit with the exception of doing a fun artist brainstorming session with the UK based Musictank group. I left the debate thinking that all perspectives are "right".

During this time I immersed myself in various psychological, scientific, and wellness books as part of my own personal journey. I did a lot of yoga, listened to a lot of Kirtan music, and traveled back and forth to Asia a few times. Understanding how the brain works made me more and more curios about music and the neurological science behind it. What does music do to us on an emotional level? Looking at how we bookmark our life’s journey to various emotions with music being one of the strongest sensory marks.

The more I soaked this in the more apparent to me is that a song is in fact an "emotion". When a listener relates to that "emotion", they attach their own personal emotions to that song. In a sense creating a new emotion or a co-collaboration. This neurological wiring within the brain creates a conscious sense of ownership within the listener based on the emotional level they have infused into the song.

Today such collaborations are seen on many more levels than just a few years ago. The ability to do music mash ups, video mash ups, remixes, perform the song in a virtual space with friends. The personal and social emotional connection is now even more amplified than it ever has been.

I see this emotive impact in how music is used in movies and TV shows. Some music placements have little to no effect on sales, yet others have a profound effect, even if it’s the same song used both times. If the song connects to the emotion being expressed within the visual, it amplifies its effect on the viewer, and the emotional glue now has multiple sticky points. Sarah’s McLachlan’s song “Angel” a 5-minute piano ballad became a #1 hit single at top 40 radio. This would never have happened without its placement in the pivotal part of the movie “City of angels”. Sum 41’s “With me” saw a placement in an emotive scene in Gossip Girls, which caused digital sales to explode over night and help drive the song past 175,000 sales in just a few months as the clip spread through Youtube.

Clearly, the future is not the ongoing debate on control and ownership of copyrights, with the big stick approach of suing fans. Music, along with all the other forms of rich media, is going into the clouds where it will be pulled down from servers when and how the consumer wants. The new values reside in what is behind this media; the meta data. The quality and increase in value of this meta data will have a profound effect on the future. Digital maids will be cleaning up your media locker, moving files to where they belong and propagating your custom and peer based playlists. Digital valets will be pulling down media from these cloud servers and prepping it for the consumer’s consumption. Songs will not only be just the music, but will contain data that will allow foreign lyric translations, edited versions, sheet music, instruction on how to play the song and so on. Future economic models will be based on monetizing the behavior of the consumer by adding true value.

This thought process is not a huge step from what I have been publicly talking about, but it is a key shift in my perception as to music and its psychological effect on us.

Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan are the authors of The Indie Band Survival Guide: The Complete Manual For The Do-It-Yourself Musician published by St. Martin's Press/Macmillan in the US and Canada and founders of the open and free musician resource, IndieBandSurvivalGuide.com. They are also lead members of the horn-powered Chicago indie-pop band Beatnik Turtle . Their latest project is the The DIY Music Manual: How to Record, Promote and Distribute Your Music without a Record Deal from eBury/Random House in the UK, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand to be released in February 2009.

Most musicians, when they think about where to get their music heard, think radio. Unfortunately, commercial radio is essentially off limits to indie musicians unless you spend tens of thousands of dollars, and even that's no guarantee. College radio is in reach, but time consuming. And new license rates have even curtailed webcasting.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. Podcasting has emerged to become the radio of the internet. In fact the September 2008 Pew internet study estimates that 19% of internet users have listened to a podcast. And unlike radio, podcasters are hungry for music to use for their shows. But the best news is that the major labels have made their own music nearly impossible to use on podcasts.

That's right: podcasts are a major-label free zone.

How Podcasting Works

Podcasts are like internet radio shows. They are simply sound files, usually MP3s. In fact, anyone with a computer and a microphone can make one using free recording software such as Audacity . The magic isn't in making the MP3, it's in the distribution mechanism. Podcasts use feeds similar to blogs (using RSS or Atom) that allow programs like iTunes to subscribe to them and automatically download shows. It's similar to how a Tivo will automatically record a show except listeners can download the episode any time after it is released without having to wait for a "broadcast". Also, listeners can go back and hear all of the previous episodes if they want to.

Since anyone can make a show, there are podcasts about every topic you can imagine. To get an idea of the variety, go on PodcastAlley.com or PodcastPickle.com and search on any topic that you are interested in; from the profound to the profane, from the popular to the picayune, podcasts cover it all. Since podcasts are released through the Web, they have a global reach. While some have only a handful of listeners, others have hundreds of thousands. And, best of all, podcast listeners are more engaged than a causal radio listener since they've actively sought out the content.

Getting Podcast Play

The simplest way to get podcast play is to make your music "podsafe"-- a general, non-legal term that lets podcasters know that they can use your music in their shows. Since copyright law sets everything to "all rights reserved", telling podcasters that your music is podsafe lets you carve out an exception so they can use your music and not get sued. Or, if you want to be formal, license the song under a Creative Commons license.

To make it easy for podcasters to find your music, you can register songs at a podsafe music collective—websites that make it easy for musicians and podcasters to find one another. Podcasters routinely go to sites like music.podshow.com or podsafeaudio.org to find music. If you join these collectives, read their agreements carefully and make sure that you are comfortable with the rights you are granting to your music in order to turn them podsafe. In return, podcasters must tell their fans who the band is, and link to you (more than you ever get from a radio station.)

Another way to get play is to contact podcasters directly, usually with just a friendly email. While there are music podcasts, you will get better exposure and have an easier time getting played on non-music podcasts. Your songs will stand out better, since they often play just one or two feature songs in the middle of their show. According to PodcastAlley.com, the current top 50 popular podcasts are not music podcasts, instead covering topics such as politics, Harry Potter, and learning Spanish. Most likely, these popular podcasts have tens or hundreds of thousands of listeners--and have a need for music.

We have two suggestions if you get a request: Firstly, give them a high-quality WAV version of your song. There's nothing worse than hearing your song garbled because the MP3 you sent them got re-encoded as an MP3 a second time. Secondly, mention each podcast play in your own blog and website to give the podcaster exposure to your fans in return. That makes it even more likely that the podcaster will start requesting more of your songs—something that happens the more you get played. We found that after years of doing this, and getting play, they now come to us looking for music. Something we're happy to give them.

Just think, when was the last time a radio station asked you for your music?

Steve Spiro is the VP Marketing at Myxer.com, the leading provider of mobile content. He has over 30 years of marketing experience, having worked at both global corporations and technology start-ups. He spent 15 years at Motorola in various senior management roles both in the U.S. and Japan, and also helped lead 4 Internet start-ups over the last 12 years.

How many of your fans have cellphones?   It’s almost a rhetorical question these days.  There are over 250 million cellphones in just the U.S. alone (over 3  billion worldwide) so there’ a real good bet that it’s close to 100%. 

ringtones create great word of mouth buzz every time a bands’ fan phone rings.   Similar to word of mouth buzz, mobile content can create viral online buzz by sharing widgets and links. Ringtones, wallpapers, mobile videos, etc. can be offered from your website, your MySpace page or sites with large communities that focus on offering mobile content to their audience. A vital part of a bands success depends on their ability to direct their fans to their physical, online, and mobile offerings.

Beyond just online and word of mouth buzz, artists can promote their mobile content on all of their flyers, promotional items, stickers, T-shirts, album covers and more. You can create customized text codes for each of your ringtones or wallpapers and promote those codes directly from stage or on any of your printed materials.  This has a great impact on the fan that is just discovering your music for the first time because they can leave the show with your music on their phone to take home with them. A great guerilla marketing campaign would be to create stickers that only feature customized texting codes for free ringtones, then place them around you local area in bars, on stop signs, and hard to reach places on college campuses; then see how many hits you get.

Traditionally the ringtone industry only dealt with the hits thus providing a market where $1.99 or $2.99 ringtones were the only way to get new ringtones to fans’ phones. As more artists begin to offer ringtones and fans find new ways to create their own ringtones we have found that the promotional value of the ringtone can outweigh the money generated from just sales alone. You may choose to give free ringtones either as part of your promotional efforts, or as means to build up your list.   You can even use the free ringtones to help drive sales of digital downloads from iTunes, Rhapsody, Amie Street, etc. or to help sell other merch.

Speaking of lists, indie bands are also creating their own mobile fanlists so they can access their advocates right on the day they are performing to get additional people to hear them play at the venue. New trends in the online and mobile music industry have all pointed to the ability to engage your audience with updates and announcements as a very valuable tool to work with other online and mobile businesses. If you have the ability to get your core fans to download your new release or buy tickets to your shows just by keeping up on your email and text messaging updates you will have the power to run successful publicity and marketing campaigns very easily.

It literally takes only a few minutes to get your MP3’s converted into ringtones and many services are free.  Plus, your fans---virtually on any phone on any carrier worldwide will have access to your content.   You don’t have to try and fight to be on a carrier’s “deck”.   Why not take advantage of this excellent marketing tool?

The future is a mobile future and it’s here now

• Legitimize your band as cutting-edge and ready for advancing mobile technology.
• Interacting with fans via the mobile phone will start to create awareness of the mobile phones’            potential to close the gap between artists and fans.
• The mobile phone will become a place where artists can handle fan education, sales, publicity, promotions, street team management, and more.

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.

A Question from Jen in Atlanta

Hello John,

I was thrilled to finally get to see X on tour this year. The band was incredibly tight and the energy of the show was "off the hook"! I'm in the process of forming a new band and wanted to get your take on what to look for in bandmates. Everyone in the last band I was in shared an interest in the same type of music, had similar favorite bands etc. But once we started playing together regularly it became clear we all couldn't be more different in our approach, work ethic, songwriting and so on. Needless to say it didn't work out well in the end. What's the best way to find out if new potential bandmates might be a fit? A friend suggested I put together a list of questions to ask but I'm afraid the "vibe" of that process could be a real turnoff for people who might be a great fit.

I would love to hear what you think.

Thanks,

Jen

hey Jen,
  Yeah a questionnaire might be way too much like a job interview or some Harmony.com dating service, so . . . NO.  How about dinner & drinks?  How about just hanging out for several evenings & see if you actually do see things similarly?  how about playing cover songs in yr living room? Always trust yr intuition.  Be sure you're in a big enough city to have a "talent pool" that's large enough. There are always exceptions but it's rare that you find everyone all at once. Most bands that I know have grown over a period of time.  A gtr player here, a singer there, a drummer etc, you get my point.  There is something to be said for fate & it seems that the best combinations & meetings have that as an element.
best of luck, hope this helps
& as always, thanks for writing 
JD

 PS: Make sure to vote on November 4^th. It’s important.

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 .