 
How do I promote myself as an artist?
Success in the music business at any level requires motivation, dedication, energy and dedication. It really isn't good practice to wait for an audience to find you.
You must reach out to your audience and find them. Talk to successful artists in your area, and borrow their technique.
Most importantly, you must take charge of your own career development.
How do I get my music on the radio?
The radio has always been one of the most difficult links to crack in the music industry, and with many radio stations now being owned by a number of corporations
that make centralized programming decisions - it is now a tough world to enter in to.
The days of DJ; s choosing their own music is long gone. Those decisions are now made by Music Directors and Program Directors.
A way in is to try to make links at your local radio stations. Offer to play at any live charity functions that they may be sponsoring. Don't give up even if the road you're on is rocky, stand firm and eventually you will reach your goal.
How can I build a fan base?
Offer to play at the clubs for free that are reluctant to book you. If you win over the crowd, they will have you back again.
Do this in a rotating circle, returning on a regular basis, and you will end up with a huge fan base. Always look for opportunities to add names to your mailing list.
Keep them up to date on your gigs and any other important news that they need to know about. Build and maintain a database of email addresses of fans.
Offer free tickets, t-shirts or other incentives.
How do I book my own gigs?
Call club owners and bookers and send them a CD. Offer to play for free if they are reluctant to take chance on you at first.
Offer to be a support act for popular bands. When you get a gig, market and promote that booking to the best of your ability.
Get as many people in the club as possible.
How do I get a booking agent to book gigs for me?
Booking agents can be hard to come by when you're first starting out in the music industry. Ask club owners and bookers that play your kind of music to recommend a suitable booking agent that they work with or know of.
Make an appointment to see them and play them your CD.
What does A&R stand for?
The term A&R stands for Artist & Repertoire. A&R's are a group of people that work at record labels.
They are in charge of finding and developing new talent. This includes finding the right material for the artist to perform if they don't write their own songs,
hooking them up to the right producer, engineer, and studio.
They decide which of the songs have the most potential, and then guide the making of the record.
It is not uncommon for the A&R person to be responsible for getting the other departments such as retail sales and radio promotions ecstatic about the record so that they do their jobs well.
If the record company work well together the artist might just have a hit.
Today, A&R people seem to concentrate less on developing artists, and often look for artists that have developed themselves.
It's not unusual for the boards of directors to look more at the bottom line and less at talent development.
Hence, A&R people are under pressure to find hits rather than finding potential hits and nurturing them until they bear fruit.
How do I get music to an A&R guy?
The best way to get your music to an A&R person is to persuade them to come to you.
You can do that by building a fan base through constant touring and relentless self-promotion.
Also making, marketing, and selling plenty of your own CDs, and it's likely that you will show up on their radar.
When you do, they'll call you.
Many people ask the question, can you get through to them with an unexpected phone call? Very unlikely.
If they took calls from every person who wanted to give their music to them they wouldn't have time to do any of their other work.
The next common question that is asked is, can you send an uninvited demo? Yes, but it is most likely that it will come back to you or end up in the circle file.
A&R people are extremely busy, and generally listen only to the material that comes to them from a trusted source such as a high-level manager, a publisher and a music lawyer.
What makes an A&R person want to sign you is hit songs and superstar quality but by doing your own artist development and providing evidence that the public likes you and that they will buy your CD, it makes your case even stronger.
How do I improve my songwriting?
The best way is to frequently and intensely study what hit songwriters do.
Learn from the best. Listen to the radio and take notes on what hit songs have in common. What is their structure like? Do they have a bridge?
Reading helps to keep a writer well-informed and clued up to what is going on around them.
The more things you know about and understand, the more you can write about it. Reading books about songwriting will give you that advantage and the stepping stone to study and write every day.
Write songs that will appeal to today's audience.
How well-recorded do my demos need to be?
This is a frequently great question that is asked over and over again.
For song pitches, the recording can be much less "produced" than it should be for artist pitches.
A&R people are far more interested in the song's potential and the artists appeal, rather than the quality of the recording.
The majority of artists that are signed to major labels will record their album over again with a pro engineer and producer.
The demo is only a demonstration of the recording and not the final cut.
Nevertheless there are some demo's that can be mastered because the quality is so superb and ready to be distributed to the public.
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