Indie Music Marketer .com

The music business can be a dangerous place for the unprepared artist. There are some shady characters promising great things and making allot of money from misinformed musicians. This article will give you some pointers on what to watch out for and the operation of these bogus deals.

If you remember anything from this article remember this: Never sign any contracts without first having a lawyer look it over. Just using this technique can save you years of frustration avoiding the bogus deals. Get an lawyer (perferable an entertainment lawyer) to look at the contract. Ask him or her if it is a good or bad deal. Ask the lawyer to add a stipulation clause, for example, the said booking agent must get your band $1,000 worth of gigs per month or the contract is null and void. This will protect you if whom ever you are dealing with doesnít keep up their end of the bargain.

These can be a great deal however, I would be careful on how much the company is asking for to be included on their album. I personally would not pay any more then about $250 to be included on these albums. If you add up the numbers you can see how a company can make allot of money on these deals. $250 dollars from 20 bands = $5,000. The company of course has production costs to manufacture the CDs and mailing costs for shipping to the artists, labels, radio stations ect...

If you can get a contract with club then great. This is the best way to protect yourself. If you are traveling out of town for a gig than by all means get a contract. I have found it is difficult to get a contract with clubs in your own home town. However, there are way to protect yourself from getting ripped off. If your deal with the club is a percentage of the door put a friend at the door with a clicker counting people coming in. Stipulate that there are no free entries for anyone (unless they are part of the industry) if they are not on your guest list. I once got roped into this deal only to find out that the club owner let musicians in for free. Half of the people that showed up were musicians, I got ripped off! Try to get a guaranteed amount of money, I have found there is less hassle this way. Make sure you talk about who supplies the PA and the sound man also who will pay for the lights and light man.

You must be very careful when you are looking for a person to help shop your tape for you. The most common rip off here is that the person asks for alot of money up front and promises you that your music will be heard by all of the industry movers and shakers. If you do decide to go with a person like this ask some key questions. Who have they helped in the past? Try to get names and contact info of these bands and get in touch with them to get some feedback on this person. If he or she is reluctant to give out the references you should question their integrity. Ask for receipts on how your money is being spent and a log of the phone calls or the emails being made by this person in efforts to getting you a record deal. Again, if they say no to this or give you some kind of lame excuse, question it.

The best advise I can give you here is to shop around. You may want to check out the prices to purchase the gear through the mail. Musicians Friend is an excellent mail order company with pretty good prices, you should at least get their catalog or checkout their web site to compare the prices between them and your local stores for any equipment that you are interested in.

If you plan on buying an ad in a local newspaper to promote your act make sure you find out what the amount of distribution is. The slightly higher priced magazine or newspaper might be a better deal because they have a much higher distribution number which means more people will see your ad.

I have found most of these companies to be complete ripoffs. Their ads they usually read something like: Send in your lyrics and if they are good enough we will put music to them and send the tape to the industry so the big name artist can record it. Yeah right! Believe it or not people do fall for this one. What usually will happen is after the lyrics are sent in the company sends back a letter saying that the lyrics are great and they are sure that it will be a big hit. They just need $1,000 to help pay for the musicians and recording costs. Once the $1,000 is sent in the company places some horrible music with the lyrics (which probably only cost them $200 to produce) and you get back a bad tape. To make matters worse this company probably will never send in this tape to any record company, put your money in their pocket and they are done. I recently read an article on a guy who tried one of these deals and purposely send in the worst lyrics he could come up with. The company came back with a letter saying how great the lyrics were and they were sure that they could get an artist like Madonna to cut it only if $1,000 was send in to cover the recording cost. Unbelievable!

I have found most of these to be ligit. Make sure you check out the sponsors of the contest. An entry fee of about $25 per song is a normal price. If there are no sponsors or if the admission price is high I would question the integrity of the contest.

I want to close with something that has happened to me. I seen an ad in a local magazine about a company that can help get my music into major labels. When I met with this company the rep talked a great game and he seemed very knowledgeable about the music industry. His game was that he wanted money up front to help shop my music for me. He also told me he needed the money now because he was going to LA tomorrow to meet with industry people shopping other bands. I did ask about a contract and he said there wasn't enough time to deal with that and if I didnt give him any money now and agree to the deal he couldn't help me. Well, I was pretty young a naive (this happened years ago) and I forked over $100 and my demo so he could shop my CD the next day in LA. That was the last time I talked to him. I tried calling and left him countless messages which he never returned. And to make matters worse, I had no idea where his office was as we met in a club to discuss this deal of a lifetime and his business card only had a PO Box number on it. I suppose I could have taken him to small claims court but I was young and stupid. I did learn a valuable lesson, If the person can't wait to draw up a contract and take the time to have your lawyer look it over it is a rip off! Learn form this and dont make the same mistakes I did! Beware of the sharks!