What are /r/musicindustry's favorite Products & Services?

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Music Industry

• All You Need to Know About the Music Business: Ninth Edition

Band Business

• Managing Your Band: 5th Edition

• Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock And Out

• The Musician’s Guide to Licensing Music: How to Get Your Music into Film, TV, Advertising, Digital Media & Beyond

• Music Marketing for the DIY Musician: Creating and Executing a Plan of Attack on a Low Budget (Music Pro Guides)

• Music Industry Forms: The 75 Most Important Documents for the Modern Musician (Music: Business)

• Roadie,Inc. Second Edition: How to Gain and Keep a Career in the Live Music Business

• Music Law: How to Run Your Band’s Business

• This Business of Artist Management: The Standard Reference to All Phases of Managing a Musician’s Career from Both the Artist’s and Manager’s Point of View

General Business

• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t

• The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition

• Outliers: The Story of Success

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

• The Art Of War

• Personal Branding For Dummies, 2nd Edition

• Business Plans Kit For Dummies

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Start here.

https://www.amazon.com/Need-Know-About-Music-Business/dp/1501122185/ref=asc_df_1501122185/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=385629034058&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8133828175223159379&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m...

Get More Fans: The DIY Guide to the New Music Business by Jesse Canon. He has a YouTube channel under Musformation as well. Found it to be pretty helpful.

https://www.amazon.com/Get-More-Fans-Guide-Business/dp/0988561301

Not a music lawyer, but I own a small label.

The person above is right that pretty much ever recording contract has an auditing clause.

When you say you don’t receive statements, do you mean royalty statements? Because if you do, that’s pretty shady and potentially I would be looking at auditing them.

This is a UK specific thing and I’m not sure if where you are or if you’ll have an equivalent but thought I’d mention it anyway: The Musicians’ Union have some amount of legal services accessible by membership. Might be worth having a look at for wherever you are?

This book also might be helpful. All You Need to Know about the Music Business.It’s written by a music lawyer and has some really good stuff about contracts, broken down in a way that makes it a little easier to digest.

Send me a message if you want or have any other questions. I’m really sick of seeing artists hurt by bad contracts.

Pick up part time work at a music venue - ticketing, merch, concessions, security, promotions etc. Radio stations also have street teams that usually hire people with no experience to sit at a table at events and hand out t-shirts. This will set you up to meet people at every job. If you discover live music is not your favorite, having this experience will be enough to get you in interview somewhere for an office job like at a record label, management company, talent agency, tour promoter or even streaming service.

If you'd like to be closer to the artist, start with reaching out to local acts and offer to help out but be upfront about your intentions and lack of experience. It helps to offer general assistance bc you don't know their specific needs but also offer suggestions on what you might do for them and they'll more likely respond. Examples depend on your personal skills: Put up posters when they have shows, help load/unload gear, update their social media, create strategic fan accounts, start a tiktok trend, design merch, have a photoshoot etc.

If you're looking for knowledge, you need this book: All You Need To Know About The Music Industry - Donald Passman. There is a chapter on each component of the music industry and discusses how they intricately work together. This is good if for example you don't know the difference between agent and manager or publishing rights and performing rights. The book was recommended to me when I was first starting as an intern because it is incredibly well known by music professionals and it often gets brought up casually in conversations because most people I know have at least heard of it.

Not classy or professional to add your own DistroKid discount link over someone doing the exact same thing.

Not much else I can do here but add mine! Do the right thing, people who are interested! lol

http://distrokid.com/vip/liamkillen

Also as a DistroKid rep who is being commissioned, I don’t think it’s wise or tasteful for you to talk up competing companies. Of course different companies have their pros and cons, but you’re sort of trampling on a lot of feet here, if you see what I mean. Best of luck.

Well, if you like paying for things the people behind Fandalism are also the creators of DistroKid. For $19.99 one can upload as much music as they want for a year.

I'm not a recording musician, just work in entertainment, so I've never used either service. I'm just putting it out there for anyone who's interested.

just a heads up that “minor” labels do not exist, its majors and indies

this may seem obvious, but have you tried cold messaging people on LinkedIn? Especially 1st/2nd connections & alumni? remember when you reach out initially that you arent asking for a reference, youre asking to learn more about their work, their company, the industry, etc. once you build a meaningful connection, then you can start asking for referrals / sending them job openings you want to pursue.

also, what’s your financial experience? if youre trying to do finance at a major, most people in my experience work at a bank for a bit and then pivot out into music. also keep in mind that you can quite easily make 3-4x the money at any midsize bank in NYC as you can in the music business at an entry level role, and orders of magnitude wayyy higher in later years.

if youre not trying to do finance, it would really help if you narrowed down what youre trying to do. “marrying my business acumen and love for music” is the most stale, overused pitch in the world. what unique skills do you bring to the table? are you skilled in analytics or data science? do you have a valuable network of successful upcoming artists? you mentioned photography, how’s your portfolio? graphic design skills? etc

would also recommend to read this book if you havent already, and start browsing sites like [music business worldwide](musicbusinessworldwide.com) to dive deeper into industry happenings.

good luck!

I went to community college for general music first then I transferred to University of Hartford (The Hartt School of Music) for Music Management. They also have Performing Arts Management (you don't have to audition for that one) and Music Production and those 3 programs have a lot of crossover. They all require an internship.

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I graduated in 2019, but then Covid happened and there wasn't many job opportunities for a while. Recently, though, I got a job at a local performing arts venue that's slowly getting back into the swing of things. Personally, my heart lies in music publishing and licensing, but I'm still so happy that I'm working there now.

If you're serious about going into the industry as a major, get a head start by buying the Donald Passman book "All You Need To Know About the Music Business". The 10th edition came out 2 years ago, right after I graduated. That will be your bible.

https://www.amazon.com/Need-Know-About-Music-Business/dp/1501122185/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=music+business+passman&qid=1624933981&sr=8-3

This book is a good starting point for some of the initial things you'd do as an artist manager.

The most important thing is building and maintaining that network.

Other than that, get to work and just really try to hustle your artist into opportunities.

You don't need to pay for any courses or anything, just get out there and hustle your artist!

There's a book by Paul Allen called Artist Management for the Music Business which is great. Couldn't find a PDF of the most recent edition.

Amazon link (UK): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Artist-Management-Music-Business-Allen/dp/0240809246

I have a load of collected resources sitting in a DropBox folder somewhere that covers marketing, management and general research etc. Drop me a pm if you'd like me to send it to you

Remember that the industry changes so quickly that books become out of date not long after they've been published.

This is a good read that will give you some insight into music distribution and marketing, with some names of the existing companies that are out there: https://www.amazon.com/Get-More-Fans-Guide-Business/dp/0988561301

The thing with touring is that, sometimes management decides on road crew, and hires from word of mouth or third party (provided by record label). Agents and managers work together to route tours. Try talking to some of the crew when you see your bands live and see if they could help you out. Get some contacts.

404 link

Here, fixed http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/the-exploitation-machine/Content?oid=17178038

article is a book plug

the book http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TIZFO2W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

This is the best advice. Be like a business man and an artist. The best teacher is direct feedback from customers (the crowd) and experience. Just produce produce produce.

Also, thisonly has 4gb ram, but its 5th gen i3 and should be more then enough to produce. An absolute steal for the price.

The Donald Passman book linked above is requisite reading but is very educational, mechanical information. Absolutely must read. That said, it's not specifically a management book. Something like this might be useful. I'd also heavily recommend finding some manager biographries or books that have a bit of non-fiction narrative. After you have the functional understanding of the business, you need to understand the social dynamic of it. That can only come with experience really but you can start purposely thinking about it and exploring it on your own.