If you play your cards right, you could end up as happily successful as this fellow!

If you really have an interest in succeeding in pop music, there’s one way to avoid having to do many of the things we’ll suggest in this piece: be an absolutely f***ing brilliant songwriter with solid musicians to play your broadly accessible music. Then some top-notch management will find you, and your only battle after that will be not getting screwed by all the deals you’ll be offered. Since you almost certainly don’t have that particular set of attributes in your possession, ask yourself a few more questions about why you’re seeking to promote your music: Do you want to make a living at it? Are you convinced for some reason the world just needs to be exposed to your genius? Do you think you might have some reasonably marketable music, and wouldn’t mind getting paid for it? Have you been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard again? The fact is that even the established music industry has one of the highest failure rates of almost any business, and you’ll be entering one of the “noisiest” markets on the planet, alas, with a “naked” product. For some interesting thoughts about the new marketplace, check out Digital Music Can’t Be Marketed, which points out that you can’t really package and deliver your music, your only hope is to be “found”.

So out of the thousands of sites on the web that focus on indie music distibution, which one should you focus on? The simple answer is: Don’t worry about it yet. You have a long list of things work on first. Unless you’re a Lo-fi artist, get a decent master. I did live sound for several years, have had a home studio, and have worked with some great engineers in “real” studios. Give up the idea that you’ll create market-ready music on your cracked version of Logic Studio. Devote the first part of your budget to having tracks that are actually worth releasing, something you almost certainly won’t achieve without real studio time and quality mastering. While you’re busy breaking up the band by fighting over final tracks and money, get a UPC Bar Code. You’ll be using those a lot. Also make sure you’ve gone over a legal checklist like this one, because to actually make money, you’ll need copyrights and you’ll probably want to join BMI and ASCAP, among other things.

If this first round of work hasn’t “knocked the stew outa ya”, think about the realities of the current marketplace. The same thing that makes the fantastic new indie marketplace possible makes it almost impossible to cut through the noise. The buzzword for a while has been Social Networking, a phrase that is quickly becoming the next most-overused and utterly meaningless phrase in the business world. Use the term, and people immediately say “oh, like Twitter and Facebook, right?“, which is kind of a brain-dead view. You can’t overlook this as a marketing angle, but you’ll have to find the type of networking that works for you. MySpace Music is currently a no-brainer, but in terms of actually putting social networking to work, you have to have a sense of where your likely audience is active, and focus there. What makes a lot more sense is to have a decent product in the first place, and to use any guerrilla or viral marketing method at your disposal. In an ideal world, you would get written up in a top-level site like PopMatters.com,  DrownedInSound.com,  or PitchforkMedia.com, but without some smart management and PR, this isn’t likely to happen early on. Think about video, and think about YouTube. The indie band Matt & Kim – while relative uknowns a year or so ago – are now making the decisions that any indie artist would love to be struggling with, like: should we sell out to Mountain Dew ? One of the things that propelled them into the pop press was simply getting naked, and putting it on YouTube.

Granted, perhaps neither you nor your potential fans want you naked, but there are other clever approaches to this kind of marketing. We’ll cover that topic, explain why you shouldn’t waste money on your own web site, and provide a roundup of digital distribution channels in Part III.