Trash Amps - A California company re-uses trash to build amazing little amps for your iPod

We recently got to know Adam, the creator of Trash Amps, a company and growing community dedicated to playing music and creating new uses for old things.

The guys at Trash Amps turn everyday objects (soda cans, coffee cups & more) into great sounding, portable speakers for MP3 players and musical instruments, a rad way to combine music and the love for the environment!

http://www.trashamps.com/

Time Management for Musicians

I found this interesting article on time management for artists that I would like to pass on to you guys. Here it is in its full length:


1. Prioritize

Make music. Make art. Before all else, do this. Social media and marketing are essential to your band’s success, but they can also be its downfall when not properly managed. If you find yourself blogging and tweeting more than writing new music, you’re doing it wrong. Social media and online promotion are meant to strengthen your music, brand, and fan engagement. If you’re not putting out good music or increasing your musical skills, all the social networking savvy in the world won’t help you. Prioritize. Know what to put on the chopping block for online activities. Creating music, artwork for your band, and videos needs to be at the top of your list. All else can be cut. The good news is these activities generate content for you to use with online marketing.

Now that you have your priorities, you need to…

2. Respond

Twice a day, quickly go through and respond to everyone and everything. Don’t linger or read more at each site. Just speed through it as quickly as possible. If you have notifications set up with your e-mail, you will know quickly what new followers, comments, or updates are happening on each of your sites. You won’t need to go to Facebook if no one has responded, so use your e-mail as your time gatekeeper. On Twitter, check your @Mentions and Direct Messages and respond. Then add any new followers. Quickly respond to your Facebook profiles and your YouTube. Follow back, add friends, and subscribe to all appropriate people. Remember, don’t linger! It’s easy to get sucked in and start reading everything. Only do this TWICE per day. Constantly checking your e-mail and Facebook is a tried and true way to completely lose your valuable time. Try checking at noon and, then, 6pm.

3. Interact

Social media is about being social. To build your fan base, you need to reach out and engage them. One on one, and one at a time. In addition to fans, you will need to be engaging with multiple media outlets: mp3 blogs, local newspapers, and other industry related figures. In this context, I refer to interacting as responding to other people’s posts. Put the focus on others and not yourself. Creating posts is dealt with in the next section. Interacting is, unfortunately, a giant time-suck and needs to be approached with discipline. You can constantly be spending time searching through blog posts, Facebook, and Twitter updates. You will need to give yourself time limits for each online service. Go through each and add comments, re-tweet, and share other people’s posts. Have a goal with these interactions, so you get the most value before you run out of time. Fans first. Venues and bookers second. Local media third. Responding and commenting on people that don’t care about your band won’t win you much. Focus on those with the highest social value to your band. Fans support you and go to your shows. Venues and bookers need your fans. Local media helps you get fans and shows.

Important: Keep a time limit for each! Get a timer and be strict.

4. Create

By “Create”, I mean creating posts, blogs, and e-mail newsletters. Anything that you put out there. Your Twitter update. Your Facebook status. Start easy and be consistent. If a blog post per week is too much for you, try once every two weeks. If tweeting 20 times a day burns you out, keep it at once a day. Daily “Facebooking” draining all your time? Do it every other day. Develop a strategy that you can keep up with daily, weekly, and monthly. One to two tweets per day. Once a month, pop out a new e-mail newsletter. Do not “Interact” or “Respond” when you “Create”. Dedicate yourself to putting fun, interesting updates in the social-verse. Get your mind on track to blaze through this. Focus intently on only creating new content. Be interesting and have a strategy for each of your online accounts. Twitter is stream of consciousness. Facebook is like talking one on one with a group of friends. Blogs relate interesting stories and adventures. By focusing solely on creating, you can reduce the amount of time you spend online. Facebook update? Done. Next. Twitter update. Done. Next. Once you’ve mastered your routine and reduce the time engagement, you can then consider doing more, a little at a time. Tweet 4 times a day. Facebook updates twice a day.

(See below on “Batching” on how to create multiple updates in only one sitting.)

5. Expand

Reach out for new people to follow, but intelligently. Find someone new that adds value to your online experience. A new, potential fan that likes your music. A blog that covers your band’s type of music. Seek out those that you can interact with. Just blindly adding everything on Twitter isn’t the goal. Finding someone who would be into your music is. Seeing updates that let you know what’s going on in your community is. Add another local band and see how they are using social media. Slowly grow your online reach. Grow it in a valuable way that enriches your band’s online presence. It’s not a number game, but a quality game. Don’t spend hours hunting down new people. Just add one or two at a time. Limit your hunt to a few minutes.

6. Consume

This one is the worst. Consuming is just blindly reading, refreshing, going through post after post. Though necessary to see what’s going on with others, spending all day reading your Facebook news stream is counter-productive. Tightly limit your time here. Especially on Facebook and Twitter. Give yourself a half hour and be adamant about stopping “consuming”. Unfortunately, you need to “Consume” in order to “Interact”. Make sure you are consuming the right things that are relevant to your band and your fans. And once you’ve finished your goals for the day, you can always resume “Consuming”. Accomplish first, consume last. How important to your life and your band were those Facebook updates from last week?

7. Filter

To help with your “Consumption”, develop a filtering strategy with your sites. These filters yield the “must read” content. “Must Reads” are the content that have the most value to you and your band: Music blogs relevant to your band, your die-hard fans, and other bands and venues that have helped you along the way. On Twitter, use lists to group the relevant followers. For instance, I have a list for bands, another for venues, and another for fans and friends. You can also group a more exclusive list of “must read” followers. This is important for Twitter because you can be completely overwhelmed in tweets and never see the more important people. In your RSS feed reader, group the most important blogs into a category. The mp3 blog most likely to feature your song, the local rag most likely to write up your band. Facebook, unfortunately, sucks for filtering. “Groups” are the only way to do it, but Groups automatically e-mail and notify people that they are in a group. Every little thing creates spam for everyone. There’s ways to turn it off, but most people will just quit the group you just created. Facebook needs a silent list option (which I think they used to have). Until then, you’re screwed on Facebook. However you do it, have a smaller list that you can get through quickly. Those days that you simply don’t have time to do all the social media stuff, you can get through your “must read” list. Another way to filter? Learn to forget about it. I’ve had all these back lists of blog posts to read, tweets, and Facebook updates. You miss one day, and it’s like a mountain of information that you need to spend hours on. Forget them. Mark everything as “read” and move on. There’s way too much info to get caught up. It’s a losing battle. Just restart and move forward (…and learn to speed read).

8. Batch

Why create just one Twitter update when you can create all of them for the entire week in one sitting? Using HootSuite, I’m able to schedule updates through the entire week for both Twitter and Facebook. I sit down, reserve an hour, and I have a full week’s worth of posts. Batching is the act of doing a large amount of similar work in a short amount of time. Do you have ideas for multiple blog posts? Write them up on an off day, but don’t release them at once. Schedule them to be released over a period of time. One day of work saves you a large amount of time over the week or month. When your brain is focused on one activity, you can get much more done. This is the opposite of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is inefficient because humans aren’t wired that way. We’re really good at doing one specific thing at a time. Use that brain power to do a lot at once. Write a ton of music. Shoot a ton of video for YouTube. Create multiple blog posts. Pop out all your Facebook updates.

Batch it to save time.

9. Automate

Use every plug-in, automated posting thingy, cross posting widget you can. Use ReverbNation to automatically update your Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter whenever you have a show or new song. Grab plug-ins for your website to automatically update your blog when you upload to YouTube. Use sites and services like Ping.fm and ArtistData.com to automate your postings. If you’re going to update each of your sites with a new show or song announcement, just do it once from Ping.fm and have that announcement show up on all of your sites. However, be careful these services you use don’t make your updates look like impersonal spam. Be aware of how your updates may look to your fans.

10. Delegate

Do your band mates have half a brain? Can they form complete sentences? Can they communicate in less than 140 characters? Give ‘em a job. Kidding aside, if you have 3 or 4 people in your band, there’s no reason one person should be doing it all. I’ve given my guitarist the responsibility of Twitter. I told him to do it once a day, and to use HootSuite for scheduling. Responsibilities can be split between the band members. There’s no need to be overwhelmed if you have a strategy with 4 people implementing it. Unless the drummer’s involved. All bets are off with the drummer.

11. Schedule

Determine what time you can give for a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule. How much time do you have free daily? On your days off from your job, how much are you willing to spend on your band? When looking at your schedule, figure out what you can sacrifice. Do you really need to spend as much time at the bar with your friends? Do you really need to watch 2 hours of TV every night? Yes, Portal 2 is awesome, but how far does it take your music career? Remember to leave time for yourself, your friends, and family. You can easily overbook yourself. That means you forget to leave time to eat, do your daily chores, or isolate yourself in an unhealthy way. The purpose of time management isn’t to fill up every single second of your day. Instead, a good time management schedule allows flexibility while achieving consistent results.

Here’s an example of a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule:

Daily:

Respond (10 – 15min)(Twice daily)
Practice: (30min – 1 hour)
Write music: (30min – 1 hour)
Create (20 min) X Interact (20min) X Consume( 20min)

Once a week:

Create Blog post (1 hour)
Batch (1 hour)
Once a month:

E-mail newsletter (2 hours)
YouTube video (4 – 6 hours)
Song recording (5 – 6 hours)
12. Discipline

So far, I have been following my own advice for “Responding”. Twice a day, I go through my multiple media sites and respond. Results? I’ve definitely freed time. Unfortunately, there’s an “ache” to keep hitting refresh. To keep coming back and checking up on what I just did. It’s so easy to do, just check that Facebook again real quick. Each little refresh costs you time you could be spending elsewhere. To effectively manage time, the greatest enemy isn’t the lack of time, but the lack of self-discipline.

Crow's Nest interview on Italian music blog

Crow' Nest Management was just interviewed for Sigmund, a brand new blog on music and art in Italy. Check it out at http://www.sig-mund.blogspot.com/2011/04/intervista-maike-both.html

New artist on board: Blackbird

Crow's Nest Management is thrilled to announce a new passenger on board: L.A. based artist Blackbird. To call him a rapper wouldn't do him justice. Known for his physically explosive performances, he couples synth-driven melody with tightly crafted beats, adds a heavy dose of punk frenzy and delivers a finished product that suggests Iggy Pop snogging with the Violent Femmes in a room with pink shag carpeting and the barely there smell of air freshener.

His recent collaboration with producer/emcee Thavius Beck, resulting in his third album, Black Electro, is in the process of being released. Stay put for updates!

Eminem Lawsuit May Raise Pay for Older Artists

Taken from an Article in the New York Times by BEN SISARIO

The most closely watched lawsuit in the music industry asks this question: how much should a song on iTunes or another digital music service be worth to the performer?

The artist at the center of the suit is Eminem, but some of the biggest beneficiaries of the case may be thousands of older artists who have not released an album in decades.

Four years ago, the producers who discovered Eminem sued his record label, the Universal Music Group, over the way royalties are computed for digital music, which boils down to whether an individual song sold online should be considered a license or a sale. The difference is far from academic because, as with most artists, Eminem’s contract stipulates that he gets 50 percent of the royalties for a license but only 12 percent for a sale.

“As of now it’s worth $17 million or $20 million, but on a future accounting basis, five or 10 years from now, it could easily be a $40 million to $50 million issue,” said Joel Martin, the manager of F.B.T. Productions in Detroit, which first signed Eminem and continues to collect royalties on his music. (Marshall Mathers himself, who performs as Eminem, was not a party to the suit, although he stands to earn millions from it.)

The suit reached its apparent end last week when the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal, letting stand a lower court’s decision that digital music should be treated as a license. Lawyers and music executives say that few younger artists are likely to be affected by the decision because since the early 2000s record companies have revised most of their contracts to include digital sales among an artist’s record royalties. Eminem’s first contract was signed in 1995.

Many older artists, however, whose contracts predate digital music and have not been renegotiated, stand to profit significantly from the decision.

The lawsuit argued that record companies’ arrangements with digital retailers resembled a license more than it did a sale of a CD or record because, among other reasons, the labels furnished the seller with a single master recording that it then duplicated for customers.

“Unlike physical sales, where the record company manufactures each disc and has incremental costs, when they license to iTunes, all they do is turn over one master,” said Richard S. Busch, a lawyer for F.B.T. and Mr. Martin’s company, Em2M. “It’s only fair that the artist should receive 50 percent of the receipts.”

A federal jury ruled in favor of Universal in 2009, but that decision was overturned on appeal last year. The label petitioned to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

Universal said the implications of the decision were limited.

“The case has always been about one agreement with very unique language,” the company said in a statement. “As it has been made clear during this case, the ruling has no bearing on any other recording agreement and does not create any legal precedent.”

Although current hits get more attention, older music still represents a huge portion of overall music sales, and over time durable hits can rack up significant sales. Last year there were 648.5 million downloads of “catalog” singles in the United States, meaning songs more than 18 months old, compared with 523 million for current tracks, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Fred Wilhelms, a lawyer in Nashville who specializes in collecting royalties for musicians, said that sales of older music had provided the labels with steady income at low cost.

“The labels make tens of millions of dollars a year from the deep catalog without paying a penny in promotion costs,” said Mr. Wilhelms, who estimates that the Eminem ruling might apply to tens of thousands of artists. “Anybody who ended their recording career before 1978, and probably before 1992, is in the decision,” he added.


Royalty rates vary, but today most acts get 10 to 15 percent of their music’s net sales, minus packaging and other deductions, lawyers say. In the 1970s and before, the rates were often even lower. But for decades, licenses of music — to movies, television or other third parties — gave artists a 50 percent share, without the same deductions, on the principle that a third party was bearing the relevant costs.

Jason M. Schultz, an assistant professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped write a friend of the court brief on behalf of the Motown Alumni Association — a group that represents Motown acts but is not associated with the label — said that recording contracts made in the early days of digital music reflected the labels’ failure to recognize that technology’s potential.

“The record companies would strike these deals with artists in a way that favored them,” Mr. Schultz said. “But when the digital revolution came around, those contracts ended up favoring artists. The record companies guessed wrong.”

Although sales of digital music around the world now represent 29 percent of record companies’ revenue, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the Eminem case, and several others like it, stem from the mid-2000s, when the potential value of digital music was first becoming clear. According to court papers, the Eminem case had its origins in an audit of accounting records that F.B.T. and the rapper conducted in 2005, two years after Apple opened the iTunes store.

In separate cases, the Allman Brothers have sued Universal and Sony BMG Music Entertainment over similar contractual issues. The Sony case, filed in 2006, was expanded to a class-action suit, and earlier this month the parties informed the judge in the case that they had “reached an agreement in principle.” (The Allman Brothers and Cheap Trick, which joined the case, both settled their claims.) The Allmans’ suit against Universal, filed in 2008, is still pending.

For million-selling acts like Eminem and the Allman Brothers, the stakes are high. But plenty of other artists stand to gain from the decision as well.

“For people who had a single hit, who couldn’t afford to chase $100 in owed royalties,” Mr. Wilhelms said, “they are now looking at a couple thousand. It’s worth a couple phone calls and an angry letter or two.”

Your fans = Your tribe = Your label

I want to talk a little bit about how important it is for a band or musician to develop, build and maintain a strong and loyal fan base, and how to do that. I said it before, and I am saying it again: You are nothing without your fans. Your fans are the new record labels.

Carl Jacobsen of Nimbit agrees. In ASCAP's latest edition of Playback he writes: "Direct-to-fan marketing and sales have shown promise, but unless you actively take them on, you could miss their potential to grow your fan base and maximize the money you earn."

By now most of you have probably realized that MySpace smells funny cause it's dead. D.e.a.d. What now? Before you leave the sinking ship, are you gonna go through the list of 40,000 so called fans to figure out which ones are really there because they love your music and which ones just want to promote their own band? Probably a little too much work, a little too late ...

So lucky are the ones who have done it the good old way: having your fans sign up for the mailing list at each show. Now you not only have their email address, you also know which city they live in. Great! That will help you tremendously promoting the next show you will play in that town, or starting a street team there.

Jacobsen goes on: "The most important thing you can do when you get a new fan is say "thank you". What's second? Do it quickly. When a fan joins your email list, follows you on Twitter, or likes you on Facebook, you've caught their attention, but attention is fleeting so act fast." Well, this should go without saying ... but how many of you have really taken the time to do just that, say thank you? But that's what it takes to make your fans part of your family, become your tribe, make them walk through fire for you. They need to feel that you appreciate them, that you don't take them for granted, cause - unlike your mothers - they will leave and forget you in a blink if they don't feel that you care.

How can you show your fans how much you appreciate them? Jacobsen has got it: "Surprise a fan a month after they made a purchase with a free download .... always give your fans the privilege to be first to purchase anything new ... Give fans ways to support you: Ask for help. Ask fans to spread the word about your free download, upcoming gig, or new video. Go beyond music & merch. How much would a fan pay for an in-house performance? To be thanked on your next album? To meet and greet at a show?

These are all great and practical ideas that won't cost you any money. What they require however is that you devote time to your fans, every day, and more so that you are honest and real and humble about it and that you really want to do this. Fans will smell a fake from a mile ...

Musicians: Get your royalties from internet performances!

SoundExchange is the non-profit performance rights organization that collects statutory royalties from satellite radio (such as SIRIUS XM), internet radio, cable TV music channels and similar platforms for streaming sound recordings. The Copyright Royalty Board, which is appointed by The U.S. Library of Congress, has entrusted SoundExchange as the sole entity in the United States to collect and distribute these digital performance royalties on behalf of featured recording artists, master rights owners (like record labels), and independent artists who record and own their masters.