When you’re at the start of the journey the most important thing is to use your time and resources wisely so that they aren’t wasted. Try thinking like an entrepreneur and sketch out a plan to make sure that you (and your band) know what you are going to try and do over the short, medium and long term. Not only does it help focus your efforts but it also gives you a way of measuring your success by periodically checking what has been achieved and what areas maybe needs to be readdressed.

For example, one of the key areas we like to look at is social media engagement. If you don’t have a website, email mailing list, Facebook Fan Page or Twitter Feed then an obvious first short term goal is to get them in place. Medium term you might look at rolling out a ‘brand identity’ so that they are all styled with the band’s colours, fonts and logos to ensure they look visually consistent. Long term you need to examine if you are making the best use of the opportunity they give to engage with your fans and very importantly if you are translating online buzz into record sales & live show tickets.

One exercise we usually try and do is to put together a quick spreadsheet to show how many Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers, website hits and email list sign-ups an artist has received per month over a 3 to 6 month period. If their promotional efforts are working then you should be able to see increase in all of these individual numbers and the overall ‘total fan count’. If you can also plot events like gigs or music releases onto the same sheet then you should be able to see how effective those events are at building your audience. If you want to get really into it then you can also look at metrics like how many people are commenting on your posts or re-tweeting your twitter posts to see how popular the content you are putting out is and how engaged your audience is.

Dropcards are a great way to give fans at shows some music tracks in return for an email address.

The data from these sort of exercises can be really interesting and can then help shape what you do over the next 6 months to make sure you’re using your time & money effectively. For example, if these figures show that every time you post a performance video to Facebook book you see a big increase in fans ‘Liking’ you and visiting your website then you should probably think doing more of these videos. However if you see that whenever you do a gig you aren’t seeing an increase in your overall fan count then you need to rethink how you approach getting people signed up at your live shows. Maybe with something like a Dropcard giveaway that you can hand out at shows that allow people to download a free track in return for an email address or Facebook ‘Like’?

Ariel Hyatt has just posted a really good article on Music Think Tank titled A Musician’s Guide To Setting And Achieving Goals For 2012 . She also links to some other great articles by Derek Silvers on Goals and Carla Lynn Hall on How to Create a Vision Board . All are great guides on how to define goals for yourself and how to keep yourself motivated to keep working towards achieving them. I think there is probably no ‘one-size-fits-all’ system that will work for everyone but I think it is extremely beneficial if you can try and do the following.

• Meet with a fellow musician, mentor or friend to define some achievable short, medium and long term goals. Write these down and then agree to meet again to update your plan 2 or 3 times a year to make sure the goals are kept current.
• Make sure you distinguish between AMBITIONS like getting a song played on the radio and TASKS like setting up a Facebook page or finishing an EP. For the ambitions you should set aspiration timeframes like ‘within the next 2 months’ and not be too hard on yourself if you don’t achieve them but the tasks need to have actual deadlines like ‘by the end of July’. Making yourself accountable to someone, either your mentor or the rest of your band, will further motivate you to hit your deadlines.
• Think about ways you can measure success and implement them to see if the ideas you are trying are working. Are your promotional ideas resulting in increases in fans? Are your music releases making money and breaking even? If they aren’t working then how can you adjust your future goals to be more successful?

If people have some examples of the plans they’ve been working with or some templates they can recommend then let us know and maybe we’ll put together a gallery with some of the documents we use.

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In a nutshell, there are hundreds if not thousands of really good music blogs out there giving musicians fantastic advice and resources on how to promote and sell their music in the digital age. You will find some of our favourites in our links section in the sidebar but notable mention should go to MusicThinkTank.com, The Lefsetz Letter and Simon Pursehouse’s Sentric Blog who all publish fantastic articles on a regular basis. If you are interested in getting tips and advice on being an independent musician these websites should be your first port of call. We really don’t feel a need to compete with these fantastic websites by trying to write better or more articles than they do because quite frankly – they’re brilliant – and so why try to reinvent the wheel when someone else has already nailed it.

So instead we are going to concentrate on what we know and what we know we ARE good at, I’ve been meeting with various musicians and artists in the last year or so to offer them individual help and advice on their unqiue situation. We’ve batted around pretty cool ideas during those conversations and have been trying out some of the less crazy ones to see if they just might work. In some cases they’ve worked better than expected and in other cases, well lets just say they looked great on paper!

So the IndieLab website is now going to become more of a way of documenting some of this creative process so that other musicians and artists can share in it, hopefully be inspired by it and hopefully even apply some of the successful ideas to their own work.

To facilitate this change in direction we’ve redesigned the site and integrated it more closely with social media sites. After all, one of the things we’re encouraging the people we’re working with to do is to try and drive their audience to engage with them more on Facebook & Twitter. Therefore it makes sense for us to try out some of those ideas and tools ourselves. I’ll still be posting up links and articles from other sites but hopefully the most interesting stuff will be the articles about the ideas we’re trying out and the projects that we’re going to be running.

So please keep in touch with us, update your RSS feed, Join us on Facebook or Follow Us on Twitter and let us know what you think of the new direction.

If you want a quick insight into the sort of advice we’re giving people – read our new Manifesto.

Comparing Music Marketing Platforms

TopSpin – A Review from Berklee to Implementation

I have personally always used a combination of different tools, Bandcamp for setting up the shop where people can download music and redeem download codes and then other tools like MailChimp to deal with emails. However I know other people have used tools like Reverbnation very successfully and I know that many more established bands are using TopSpin to manage their touring and merchandise very effectively. It really is just a matter of shopping around to find who has the tools most appropriate to the job that you currently need to do. For example, if you’re just starting out and want a place where people can buy your music without you losing a slice of commission to iTunes then Bandcamp is perfect. If you have a big tour booked and need a way of selling tickets to fans then Topspin’s annual fees will begin to be worth the investment.

A brilliant article by the artist and writer Austin Kleon, written from experience it has some brilliant little inspirational insights.

How To Steal Like An Artist And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me – Austin Kleon.

A song in 7:4 time, it has 52 Bars and 365 beats, and it’s available as a free download….

Other programs and websites are beginning to offer similar services, my program of choice Tweetdeck seems to have added scheduling into the latest release along with support for MySpace status updates etc. Whichever program you use though it’s worth spending some time thinking about ways to use tools like these to keep the conversation going with your fans, even when your busy doing other things.

Also on Music Think Tank is a great series of articles about creating a good digital music strategy. A PDF of the whole article is also available for download.

Finally there’s a great article from SoundCloud listing 5 Powerful Ways For Bands to use SoundCloud .

The Un-convention team pulled off another fantastic event last week with the debut of Un-Convention Factory. It brought together about 300 people to discuss and debate working as an independent musician in the post major label digital age and (more importantly) record, design and distribute an album in a day. The concept of the album was to record Iggy Pop’s The Idiot with 8 top bands, including Reverend Soundsystem, The Whip, I Am Kloot, New Education and The Virginmarys all contributing tracks and to the discussions. The performances were understandable a bit ropey considering the constraints the artists had to work to (30mins to get onstage, record and get off again!) but the energy and vibe of the day was great with no one pulling a diva strope and instead fully embracing the vision of the event.

The day really demonstrated what can be achieved with the tools available to musicians today, the recordings were captured with fairly affordable pieces of equipment and sound fine to distribute as demos or B-sides to fans. In the  top left hand corner of the photo you can spot the ‘design studio’ where all of the artwork for the release was designed by volunteers and professionals, in the bottom left corner just out of shot of the camera was where Soundcloud had setup a workshop to showcase the tools they can offer musicians to distribute their music online. There was also panel discussions and workshops run throughout the day, many of which were filmed and recorded and will be posted online within the next few weeks so check out the Un-Convention Blog for updates.

Un-Convention are currently running conferences around the world so check up on their website to see if they are running anything nearby where your based. The team running it have a great vision for the format and hopefully if they can attract the same funding and sponsorship that they did on this event (including Converse ) then hopefully it’ll be repeated again in the near future. Until then, here are the tracks recorded at the event…..

The Day Of The Idiot by Un-convention

The design of the book is more magazine than text book (hence the Mag Book format), which not only makes it visually attractive but also easy to read in small chunks. The advice in it is mainly taken from industry professionals and generally speaking it’s thought out and helpful with some really good insights. There are some really good sections the contractual issues you might face along with the pitfalls to look out for when signing publishing and management contracts. These sections are based around industry professional’s experience and go into more practical detail than many other similar books that I’ve read but manage to do it in a way that is still easy to read and understand.

The main restriction of the Mag Book format is that some big subjects are over simplified because there is no time to go into the counter arguments or contrary opinions but if your willing to dig a bit deeper online then it’s a great starting point for having a better understanding of the issues.

To add some inspiration to the advice there are several interviews with independent musicians who have seen various measures of success playing on the live circuit or promoting their music through innovative projects. Each story has a different moment or event that lead to the moment of success, predictably though (despite the book’s title) there is no killer formula will lead you to ‘make it in music’ but it is encouraging to hear about great musicians breaking through and getting their music heard.

Overall I’d say it was well worth a look at if you happen to be looking for a solid general overview of the music industry and the various aspects of it you’ll have to deal with as an independent musician. It’s also affordable which is never a bad thing!

How to Make it in Music is available now from WH Smith, magbooks.com and amazon.co.uk for £7.99.

[INDIELAB] You’ve just independently released your debut album ‘Plainsong’, some of the songs were originally on an EP recorded in Ireland but the final album was recorded in your apartment in New York and mixed in England. Tell us a bit about how that happened?

[Susan Enan] It was a bit of a long process but the short story is that I made in EP that was getting quite a bit of good feedback. Although it did fairly well for an indie artist I was still pretty much unknown and felt like I’d be throwing the songs away if they weren’t also included on the debut album. By that time I had moved to NY and the whole thing had taken on a different life so we re-produced the original 4 and added 6 more.

It turned out to be quite a deliberate decision to record the album yourself rather than work with a producer in a studio, why did you go down that route and how did it influence the sound of the album?

I did have an opportunity to work in a studio for a bit and in many ways it just didn’t work out. One thing I discovered was that I was not then confident in my ability as a musician to give it my best in front of others while recording, and then I found my feet doing it at home. I remember my engineer encouraged me to at least record some vocals with someone else in the room (and I did), but when I asked him which were his favorite vocal tracks it turns out they were the ones I did by myself. Making this record has taught me a lot about my limitations but also when to follow your gut. I think the more you are aware of that, the best you can get out of yourself and the better music you are going to make.
That being said, even though I was going to produce it I didn’t want it too sound “home-made”. I love albums with polished sonics and that’s definitely where having a co-producer (Alan Bezozi) and an amazing engineer (Alan Branch) came in. Bezozi would keep it out of the “kitchen sink” as he called it and I’d send off the tracks to London and Alan Branch would take out all the background noise you get in a Brooklyn apartment with no soundproofing whatsoever. It was the best of many worlds as I got to make it at home but yet I think the final product sounds like it was made in an expensive studio. I couldn’t have done it without them.

You had several large indie labels interested in releasing the record, especially after your track featured on Bones. What swung you to release the album yourself and go independent? Any regrets about your decision?

No regrets at all! I would have taken a deal if one felt right. The problem is though, that signing a deal, almost every deal, is a huge risk. I know the horror stories. I think everyone does now, or at least they have access to them. When I put myself in the worst case scenario with each deal, I would always end up with pretty much nothing. Sounded like suicide to me.

You’ve had some great support from Amie Street and Paste Magazine, how did that come about?

I posted a couple of songs up on AmieStreet a while ago and they sold really well on the site, so they e-mailed me and it kind of went from there. Paste, ah… I LOVE Paste!!!! i just really like what they are about. In the very early days of the magazine someone sent them an EP of mine and they loved it and put one track on a sampler CD. It got a fantastic response and they’ve been good to me ever since.

Do sales equate to success? If so do you feel that this album is on it’s way to being successful?

Well, it certainly is encouraging when I get up in the morning and see that someone has bought the album from the online store. If I’m in NY, I ship out all the ones to the US and Canada and my parents do the rest from their village in England so every one is greatly appreciated! I’ve been living off the sales for a few months now and that’s incredibly rare nowadays. I think true success will be to have it grow so I can make the next one and be able to afford new gear etc. I’d really love a sound proof room that I can go to work in every day. Being creative is only free up to a point!

What have been the best websites/services you’ve found for promoting your music?

The best for me, by far, has been Tunecore. If you are not with a big label who can get your music on all the online stores, Tunecore is the way to go. They are incredibly clued in to what’s going on in music right now and have a fantastic team to deal with any issues.

If you had the budget, what would be the first element of your business life that you’d like to pay someone else to do? Eg. PR, Booking Agent, Manager, Sales & Marketing etc.

Booking agent or manager right now would be really helpful!

Complete this sentence – “To be a successful independent musician then you have to be…”

If you mean a singer/songwriter trying to make your own records, tour etc, then I think you have to be truly creative in every area of what you do, even in business, and that means being adaptable. You’ve just got to go with the flow of what’s happening, but be as creative as you can with it. That’s why the major labels are struggling right now. They are stuck.

If you had one piece of advice for an aspiring musician it would be….

I was at SXSW a few years ago and the one thing I remember from the key-note speech was ‘If there is another job you would be happy to do, don’t become a full-time musician.’ If you really believe you were chosen for it however, jump in with both feet.

What does 2010 hold for you?

I’m very excited about this year. I’m setting up a world wide house concert tour and blogging about my adventures on my YouTube page. I’ve still got some dates free so if anyone wants me to come and perform in their home they should email me at bringonthesong@susanenan.com. I’m also starting to think about some news songs and how to get them recorded. Pretty much feeling like the world is my oyster right now

Susan’s Album is available from the Susan Enan Website and Aime Street.

Follow her on Twitter // MySpace // Facebook

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

The introduction of music streaming websites like Spotify that pay the artists ‘per play’ was meant to introduce another stream of revenue for artists and labels but in reality they have seen little of the advertising and subscription money generated. This week it transpired that Lady Gaga got paid a paltry £108 for over a million plays of ‘Poker Face’ on Spotify!

David McCandless at InformationisBeautilful.net has illustrated the challenges facing musicians with this graphical representation of how many CDs/internet plays it takes an artist to earn the US average wage. For the data sources and the full article visit How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? | Information Is Beautiful.

As the graphic shows, compared to selling CDs at gigs the revenue from streaming is virtually pointless and I think it further emphases how important it is really focus on doing incredible live shows and offering your audience some really solid music and merchandising items to take away with them after the show.

Steve Lawson makes the astute point in this article asking DO musicians earn online? that in many ways streaming and CD sales should not be compared because they are actually part of a cause and effect cycle. Spotify streams shouldn’t be regarded as a revenue generator but as a method for fans to discover you and then come to your gigs & buy your album. Certainly music discovery has been at the heart of sites like Spotify and Last.fm and was even what initially drove the MySpace boom. How to turn that discovery into an income stream that you can live off remains a huge challenge that I think can be different for each individual artist and is as much down to hard work and perseverance as it is about producing music that connects with people.

UPDATE: Really good reply to the initial graphic and great discussion in the comments from Bruce Warila at Music Think Tank.

[IndieLab] The site has everything from mixtapes to live sessions, how do you discover the artists you feature and how can artists get in contact with you with music for you to review etc?

[Julian from EyeSeeSound.tv] Ah, the pain and joy of discovering the bands that we’ve managed to feature. Initially we simply trawled through MySpace and a couple of other sites of that ilk, working through the friends of bands we had found and liked, simply listening to lots and lots AND LOTS of music on a poorly coded social networking platform (cheers MySpace!). Unfortunately a lot of what we heard was either not really ready yet, simply not to our taste or in keeping with our ethos and vision of ESS. But, and this is the joyous side of things, after spending ages clicking, listening, clicking, listening, ad-infinitum, when you do find an amazing DIY, independent or unsigned band that is different, musically articulate and intelligent, and exhilaratingly exciting then it makes all those previous hours melt away. Truly.

Since things have taken off a bit more we do get PR companies popping bands through to us, though I think we’ve only shown an interest in 4 or 5 as mostly I think we’re just seen as another possible media outlet and, well I guess every PR company has to believe in who they’re pushing but we don’t always see it… Sometimes the bands are good, but just not our cup of tea.

As for bands getting in touch: some do, they send us links to their MySpace, which is great and flattering, but again I don’t think they actually look at the site and what we do but rather see us another potential publicity platform and so almost all the bands who have contacted us simply haven’t been ready and/or right. A recent exception though, just to prove it isn’t a closed shop, are Varney & Sons, unsigned students at the University of Birmingham who heard about us and we simply adored. We put their song Snobs onto one of our mix tapes (an adorable indie pop gem vaguely reminiscent of Nothing But Flowers in places) and they came down and did a live session with us .

[IL] How & where do you record the live sessions? Any tips for people wanting to do something similar to promote their music?

[Julian] We hire out The Luminaire in Kilburn. It’s a proper (and wonderful) live venue with a great space both on stage and off it. We get a soundman thrown in with the costs (we love Amir) and record the live session onto an Alesis HD-24 digital recording desk. We then mix and master the wavs in Logic. We have been doing 5 bands in a 12 hour day but we’re about to drop it to 4 as it was a little too much.

This isn’t an ideal scenario for recording nice clean sound… there’s lots of spill into each mic, but the whole point is that we love live music and the energy and rawness of it and we want people to see that these bands can deliver live and hopefully go “yes, I want to see them”… so for us it works. And in fact most the bands we’ve recorded have been bloody exciting live. I can truly recommend going to watch them.

As for doing something similar: well, it’s costly. We shoot with 4 cameras and experimented with a 5th in the last session which we may keep. That costs a bit, even though we own 2 of them. The venue space costs and you need a decent stage and soundman who knows what’s he’s doing. Simon and I are lucky in the fact our skill sets allow us to mix, master, edit and then colour grade the footage to make it look like it does. If you need to hire people in to do this then that is going to cost a bit as it takes a fair bit of time.

We have discussed offering what we do as a paid service though if we were to record 5 songs with a band the whole deal would probably cost around £2500. Which is a lot of money but it does equate to 5 music videos, 5 mp3s and a sellable DVD.

[IL] The shows you do look like a lot of fun to produce, what’s the source of all of the ideas and do you think this sort of DIY niche internet music show is going to be the way of the future rather than mainstream media shows?

[Julian] There is a fair bit of headache involved in producing The Show, we got lucky finding Emily and Pete (presenters) and they are a joy to work with. Not that we are wishing them away but we hope that both go onto more mainstream bigger productions as they’re both great!

The ideas come from Simon and me… and our inability to forget we’re no longer of student age. We’re both culture lovers and love the theory of post modernity, referencing things from our cultural past & things that made us laugh or are just a bit random. I’m also quite obsessed with narrative, which is why each episode has a loose narrative arc and the first series has a loose narrative arc. If you watch all the bits with the presenters over the whole six shows we tell a slightly sardonic failed love story which ends in premeditated murder on Christmas day. The most important thing for us was to not use Emily and Pete as traditional presenters so an unwritten rule of thumb was “if it could be on T4, don’t do it!”

In my opinion DIY TV can, and should, be the next evolutionary step of media. The biggest current problem is the ability of DIYers to do something of quality with high production values on a low budget… and to find a way to pay for it. We haven’t tried to make a penny yet (although we’re about to start trying – did I mention we’re going to be selling DVDs?) but it is costly. For us we believe in the project as a whole so we have simply stuck our savings and earnings from real life into this project and muddled through with a business plan which can be boiled down to ‘build it and they will come’. So there are obstacles to the DIY scene. But it is already happening.

The most important thing to note about this discussion is that the way people consume their TV is changing. I no longer use my TV unless I’m watching a DVD. I will catch up with some on the iPlayer whilst other people will use You Tube or go to websites. Sure, watching TV on the sofa won’t become obsolete, but there is going to be a big shift away from it with younger and culturally aware audiences who are tired of the same sterile lowest common denominator product the mainstream delivers. DIY allows you to be riskier and more experimental because, on the whole, you’re doing it with your own cash and time and skills.

[IL] The website says “The web is enabling us, regular people, to compete with the establishment on a more level playing field. And in fact, we, regular people, have an advantage if we stop trying to follow the old business model and blag our way to fame and fortune. The value of music, in terms of pound and dollars for tangible goods has fallen… and well it should, but the value of music in terms of nourishing the mind and soul will never diminish… and now there is a chance to make that the most important value… and make a fair living at the same time.”

This is bold stuff! Do you think the leveling of the playing field has made it harder for fans to discover genuinely good music or made it harder to find now that literally anyone can publish a song to world in minutes? With the possibility of the value of recorded music being reduced to virtually nothing do you have any other ideas how artists can fund themselves and their creative projects? Are live shows and merchandise the way forward or have you any other ideas?

[Julian] Right, this is an important question for us, so thanks for asking it.

It is bold, but it’s also true. One of the fundamental flaws of modern capitalism is that it is based on a premise of, and need for, continual expansion, and with the possible exception of my ego (on occasion) nothing can perpetually expand!

The old music industry business model was based upon screwing people. Screwing artists by billing them for all advanced costs and paying them peanuts on the gross of the income that came in. Screwing punters by charging £15 a CD for years then belatedly coming down to £12 or £10 (which is still too high) and making 90% of those CDs fundamentally shit. There is this huge outcry from labels that P2P is killing the music business and causing a short-fall in sales and a huge loss of revenue, but this argument is much like most arguments from big corporations wanting to perpetuate a status quo that inflates their profits… a fallacy. The figures they band around about the lost revenue are fabricated and unrealistic, but more pertinently I believe that the reason CD sales have dropped is people are tired of getting shafted.

We have met a fair few bands who have produced albums of bloody high quality for very low costs. Sure, you’re still talking thousands, but not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. They prove you don’t need to spend ridiculous amounts to record something of value. If they then sell it themselves, or through some of the independent outlets who won’t mark it up 100% to cover their own costs, then their music can be available to buy at an appealing price. If you were offered a 10 track download album complete with artwork for £3.50 by a band you had seen or heard then you are far more likely to take the punt. If you offer the same person that download album for £8… well.

But the thing I think that bands and artists really need to get their head around is that in the long run, unless you’re ridiculously lucky recorded music isn’t where you will make your living. Gigging and merchandise will always give bands an opportunity to earn more money though the caveat to that is that the live music scene in this country has to stop thinking it’s a money making mafia and start treating bands more fairly and with more respect.

Bands should be giving away their singles. A single mp3 for free to promote the album or a 3 or 4 track downloadable EP for £1 where the other three songs aren’t on the album. They should want to get their songs onto peoples iPods. Embedding themselves into that person’s musical life. If their album is available at £3.50 for a download or £5 for a CD then they’ll probably buy it. Then maybe they’ll go to a gig. , buy a t-shirt, tell their friends, copy them the album and those friends will love them. It’s a slow business model & it takes a lot of graft. You won’t be on MTV’s cribs but you can carve a long-term career out of it .

[IL] What does 2010 hold for Eye See Sound? What plans are in the pipeline?

[Julian] Ulcers, poverty and a breakdown or two probably!

Actually, we have kind of a loose plan. We’ve been doing this for 8 or 9 months now and we knew that first and foremost we needed to get content onto the site, evolve our ideas and refine our execution of them. We feel that we’ve spent 8 months publicly getting ready to start, and now we’re ready. The site has 6 episodes of the Show (series one), 6 mix tapes and 14 live sessions with another 7 completed and 5 recorded. And we’re going to introduce a new format called Heads Up. So we’re ready. Now it’s all about letting people hear about us, and through us the bands we feature, and hopefully they’ll like what we’re doing and keep returning, and what some of the bands are doing and fall in love with them and help the DIY scene grow and flourish.

We are starting to sell DVDs of the Live Sessions, but they are a lot more than the three songs you get on the site. They are being designed and delivered as collectibles using good quality materials and Simon’s artwork is gorgeous. The bands have seen the value and are adding extras to make them collectible and we’re only going to sell them for £5 (50/50 deal with the bands). We remember how excited we got about bands as kids and how we’d buy the 7″, 10″, 12″ and LP if we loved a band, we’d like these DVDs to be something that people will see value in as collectibles from these acts.

We also would like to start putting gigs on under our name with bands we’ve done Live Sessions with. We know, as we’ve seen them, that these nights will be great musically, and again our hope is enough people will trust our love of music and musical tastes to think “yep, lets go to an ESS gig” not necessarily even knowing who is on.

When our ego’s are expanding we want to be a catalyst (one of many) for the DIY scene to expand and grow and for music lovers, who both make and listen to music, to reclaim music from Capitalism.

The Boxer Rebellion Shocked by Success Without a Label – The Unsigned Guide.

There is a lot of online discussion about the benefits of bands recording music videos when promoting their music online. One camp claims its always good to try and visually grab people’s attention and a good video can help you stand out from the crowd, on the other side of the argument are the people who say there are much more productive and cost effective things to spend your budget on. So when this video landed in my inbox from Pop Noodle Record’s debut act Cha-Cha (www.myspace.com/wearechacha) I thought I’d get in contact with Pop Noodle Records to find out some more about the band and about their promotional work.

[IndieLab] Cha-Cha are Pop Noodle Record’s debut signing, what was it that made you sign them up? Do you think that bands still benefit from signing with a label?

[Pop Noodle Records] I feel that the main clinching factor when I choose to work with Cha-Cha (aside from their genuinely amazing songwriting skills) was the fact that it soon became clear we would all get along well and had the same vision on what we wanted to achieve with this forthcoming album release.

Having clear communication and a shared vision is certainly key to any label/artist relationship and I feel we all know what are goals are and what’s realistically achievable in today’s rather over-crowded music industry.  In regards to going it alone, I’m totally confident that they have the ability to do that, however, it’s always useful for bands/artists to have that external help, advice, representation and in general an entity present on behalf of a band, so that they themselves can focus on what they do best, which for Cha-Cha at this moment in time, is making brilliantly catchy, enjoyable and original songs.

[IL] The video is awesome! How did the idea come about? Who found & booked the director & how/where did you find them?

[PNR] Glad you like the video! The concept came about from exploring a combination of the director’s, the band and Pop initial ideas. We had a sit down together and went through all of our creative visions looking at what we could achieve in respect to our strict timeline (about 2 months)before the single was released. Once we had all agreed on the concept Pop Noodle found a wonderful location – 10Gales Gallery in Bethnal Green, London – and then handed the responsibility of the music video to the director, editor and producer Tom Sharman- a brilliant creative filmmaker from the Midlands who I have known for some time now.

Tom Sharman went to work selecting some assistants and a suitable Director Of Photography. In addition to recruiting a fantastic crew he also came back with the highly skilled D.O.P Jaime Feliu, who after hearing both the song and the concept of the video became keen to get involved in the project.

Tom Sharman was in charge of taking the collected vision and making it actually feasible by writing detailed scripts, shot lists, call times and basically everything else that needed doing. Without this great director the video wouldn’t have turned out the way it did. We’re all very grateful for his time, expertise and knowledge and I can’t recommend him more highly for other bands or labels looking to make a brilliant music video.

[IL]  The video looks very expensive! I guess partly because you can tell it’s been professionally directed, lit properly & was shot on an HD RED ONE camera. Was it as expensive as it looks?

[PNR] I’m afraid Pop Noodle can’t disclose the budget we spent but what I can tell you is that it was made for significantly less than most other music videos that are of the same standard.

[IL] How important do you feel doing videos are for promoting your music?

[PNR] I find in this digital era of discovery, music videos are even more essential than ever before. More and more music fans are turning to YouTube first to research a band’s name they might have read about on a website or magazine instead of checking out their Myspace first. Music fans have so much power at the moment in what they choose to listen to, and it’s brilliant to see more and more processes/software/applications that enable music fan’s to have an increased amount of choice in finding great new bands and artists that are exactly what they want to listen to. Music videos embedded on a band’s Myspace page also make it easier to track what part of the world a band’s fans are coming from. There are of course quite a few applications that can do this, but YouTube’s insight feature really is very useful and simple for both bands and labels to quickly learn more about who/where their fans are.

Even if you are a self-starting band, borrowing a decent digital camcorder and making (a decent) acoustic video in a room is so much better than having no video content whatsoever- it’s essential that bands keep up with this demand for audio-visual media, or their once-loyal fans may find that all the other bands who have at least some form of music video (even a low-quality live performance) have become more interesting all of a sudden…

[IL] What does 2010 hold for Cha-Cha & Pop Noodle? Album / single releases, gig dates etc….

[PNR] Pop Noodle Records will be releasing the Cha-Cha album, entitled ‘We Are’ in March 2010, followed by a second single that is currently in the process of being selected. Cha-Cha will be hitting the road on tour shortly after the album release so go check them out when they come to a town/city near you- you won’t regret it!

As for Pop Noodle, in addition to staying loyal to Cha-Cha we’re always on the lookout for quality bands to get involved with on our label side.  We will soon be making plans to open up an online PR arm to the company in order to help give respectable under-the-radar bands the exposure, advice and guidance they deserve.