When you’re thinking about ‘Getting your music out there’, there are quite a few choices. We’ve already covered MySpace, to a certain extent - though it’s worth mentioning a pretty good bit of coverage about How to Promote Yourself on MySpace on Wired.

You’ll notice that Wired article is a Wiki. That is to say, it’s an online article that anyone can edit. If you have useful things to contribute to that article, you should absolutely go and make changes. This is a large part of how the web is grown these days - by leveraging broadly distributed knowledge. And it also reminds of us of one of the most important sites for musicians these days: Wikipedia.

Wikipedia pretty much universally comes up in the top ranking search results for any given topic. If there’s a page about your band on Wikipedia, that will be one of the default places to look when people are searching for you. Your page, your MySpace page, your Wikipedia entry.

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DJ Cro supporting Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings in Birmingham

One of the problems of recorded music is the issue of price. With mp3s being an essentially infinite and perfectly replicable resource, the market price is a theoretical (and quite often practical) zero. But one strategy to set a price has been to turn this on its head, and introduce scarcity through physical collectibility.

Radiohead did this, you’ll remember, by letting the market decide what the price of the mp3s should be, but setting a premium for the physical box set. This was, I remarked at the time, a pretty good understanding of the difference between the digital and the physical media.

A friend of mine demonstrated this principle pretty well recently, by working with something that was pretty much completely unavailable, but highly sought after - and making it a little bit available in a short run at a premium price and with a great bit of packaging and additional merchandise.

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This one’s easy. No, no, no, no, no (yes, occasionally) and no.

By and large, venues, festival organisers and promoters who insist that musicians bring a certain number of ticket-buying punters to their gigs should pretty much have their licences revoked in my book.

The argument goes something like this: playing at our venue / performing as part of our festival / taking part in our Battle of the Bands competition will be good for your profile - and you may even get a record deal out of it. Or something.

Promoters know it’s shonky, which is why they often go to some lengths to make it something of a secret that this even goes on. One recent local example is the rather shambolic PR disaster that is the Surface Unsigned festival.

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I’ve had this question in a number of forms. The most common one is the artist who doesn’t really sell many CDs through retail, but every time they perform live, they go through 20, 50 or even 100 CDs over the merchandise table. The question is - if I make the leap to mp3, who’s going to buy that to take home as a souvenir?

A similar question is the one about music as a gift. The simple fact is that it’s quite difficult to gift wrap an mp3. CDs have long been a great present to buy. Simple, personal, and always well received. Buying someone downloaded music doesn’t have the same give-ability.

I’ve even heard this question as ‘I’m essentially a busker. But I make decent money selling my CD wherever I play. Should I change what I do?’. These are all essentially the same questions: when the physical characteristic of the recorded medium is the main point of the purchase (ie: tangible souvenir, presentable item), how can digital files replace physical products?

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