The Business of Music

[RamanSidhu]

Sorry if over these past days I have been throwing out a lot of post, just have a lot of questions and find this to be a perfect place to ask. Hope I'm not irritating anyone and if I am I sincerely apologize.

But to get to the point I want to discuss the Business of Music. So, today I caught up with a couple of old friend and found out that they were getting into the music business. Their focus is Rap/Hip-hop. Having an interest in business and music and having my old friends going into such a big market I wanted to offer some help. I already told them how music has its business and its a hard one. We just talked a little about it. I am personally in the E-commerce business, which does help, but wanted to know more(on top of the already big thoughts I have) on where we should go.

Just want to open a general discussion to start on what all you think should be the big steps to take for a new Rap/Hip-hop group.

[ucavik]

You mean creating a new hip hop band?well first of all you need to have the most essential ingredients in place ,good hip hop performers and musicians.get your act togather,practice hard ,churn out some sample songs. then circulate those songs along with a demo video to all the music companies.remember do not get disheartened by rejection but constantly better yourself.

[SCJeff]

Well as someone who's trying to get into the music business as well, except more on the business side of hit, managing, recording, producing, etc. It's pretty much the same formula for all artist across all genres of music. You have to have a good live performance to get yourself out there initially. If you can't connect with an audience then you don't need to be in a music group at all. The point of starting off with doing live performances, even before recording demos, is to grow a fan base around the group. Once you start playing enough venues, and you have people that are willing to take the time to come out and see YOU. That is the time when you need to get some "good" recorded material and start to market it and continue to grow outward from your "home crowd" if you will. Ideally you need to be playing somewhere two or three times a week, so you can continually make more fans and meet new people. From there it's really just marketing the group, sending out your demos to everyone and their mother. Send one to every radio station you can find, put them up on myspace, facebook, and other social networking sites. And this is where a little bit of luck comes in, by doing this you are either going to grow your fan base to a point where you can start touring, or find out that you don't have what it takes with the current direction to continue making music. But once you start touring, you can generally make enough money to atleast support yourself financially while on tour, there are times where you'll lose a lot of money touring as well though. Then once you have an even larger fanbase, nation wide, thats when you can start putting together an album and basically do it all over again, market it by touring, and hope that enough people enjoy your music to come out and support you.

Thats just a rough outline of what needs to be done to get music out there, but if you have anymore questions, ask and I'll do my best to answer.