Trent Reznor posted yesterday that the Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication reissue is “how you sell music today”. As a rebuttal to the usual “that only works for established artists” replies, he’s followed this up with an extended post on what artists who haven’t reached the Beasties or NIN level of profile can do to get established.

NIN’s $300 deluxe edition of Ghosts sold out in under two days, grossing $750,000. The first week combined sales grossed $1.6million, despite being released for free under a Creative Commons license. (Photo CC Nick Humphries)

Having been part of a reasonably high profile band with an album released through the label system, Trent’s post reads like a list of “how I wish it had been”. Every point he makes is absolutely spot on. The article is filled with active verbs. Make. Give. Sell. Share. Release. Start. Engage. Film. This is the crux of how creators succeed in the digital age: They do things. Rather than waiting for someone else to tell them how to make money from a product that can be easily garnered for free, the people who are doing well are making it up as they go along, trying new things. You know… being creative.

As a web developer, director and general creative tech geek, Trent’s closers are especially poignant:

The database you are amassing should not be abused, but used to inform people that are interested in what you do when you have something going on – like a few shows, or a tour, or a new record, or a webcast, etc.
Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace – it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay). Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any – Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

Check out the rest of the article.

For digital artists, a lot of the web and technological networking comes easier than to rock bands. When a laptop is part of your rig, hopefully you understand computers better than someone who exclusively hits their instrument with sticks (SPD20s aside), because you use the computer for music regularly. Ed.: This is a simple fact – if you’re a digital artist, regardless of your instrument, you spend more time behind the screen than people who are conventional instruments – so you should have no excuse for making the most of that technology once the production and performance phase are done. -PK We’re also in the middle of a huge mobile web expansion phase. Now that everyone has web enabled computers in their pockets, what you can do while you’re out there playing shows is getting better and better; I just spent the evening configuring an online store which can be administered via its own iPhone app. If this had been available two years ago, a whole lot more CD orders would have been delivered on time.

Giving some solid metrics to bolster Trent’s advice, Michael Masnick’s (founder of Techdirt) recent presentation at the NARM 2009 conference is truly fantastic.

NARM 2009 State Of The Industry: Michael Masnick from NARM on Vimeo.

The presentation is quite long at 31 minutes, but he breaks it up with 515 slides, so it feels punchy. It expands on many of the points Trent makes, and touches on some themes we’ve been interested in here at CDM. Interestingly, he gives some revenue and sales statistics on the Nine Inch Nails “Ghosts” release: $1.6 million gross in the first week, from an album which was released for free under a Creative Commons license.

Having been quite deeply involved in the “old” way of doing things, and having experimented in the last year with faster, cheaper live performance videography and similarly streamlined “studio” production, I feel that I’m replete with the kool aid, and comfortable with a future in which I’m not looking for “a contract”. In fact, this evening I called my bandmate over and convinced him that the album we’re about to record and shoot will be released entirely under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Finished tracks and stems, music videos and source files, animation sprites, live footage, album artwork, and whatever else we create.

I’ve long believed that “free” and “open” is a big part of the future of creative industries. The label system has kept creators and fans at arms length. Last year I was a rightsholder on an album which spent a week in the top 5 sellers on iTunes in Australia. I know nothing about any of the listeners who put it there. Next album release, I want to know all of those fans by name.

Should you quit your day job and go on tour with a rock band?

That’s the question answered by cellist Zoe Keating at Ignite, the 5-minute hyperpresentation series put on by O’Reilly. (At an NYC event, I gave a talk explaining why understanding basic programming concepts was as important as calculating your tip on a bill.)

Zoe Keating on Should you join a rock band? [Ignite's Brady Forrest]

Zoe debunks the myth of the glamorous tour with some sobering realities with which I’m sure at least some readers here are already far too familiar. The presentation is snappy, sharp, and more than occasionally hilarious, a perfect Igniter.

If that’s got you down, though, the same post points to this brilliant “Quantum Cello” piece in which Zoe explains how she works with loops, blending electronic techniques with a 17th-century instrument. That’s the kind of old meets new sensibility we love. And by the way, when Zoe tours with a rock band, she does have good taste — she hit the road with the Dresden Dolls’ fabulous Amanda Palmer.

Quantum Cello, WNYC Radio Lab [Audio podcast / interview]

Selling merch on the road – whether your band has CDs and shirts or you run your own enterprising business in geeky goods as our contributor Liz McLean Knight does – is a big challenge. Buying a full-blown credit card terminal is expensive. That’s why I’m absolutely with Hypebot’s Virgil Dickerson: running credit card numbers on an iPhone is a game changer.

iPhone App Adds Mobile Credit Card Processing to DIY Toolkit

The application in question is called Innerfence, and Apple gets it, too, as they’ve added it to a new TV ad. The app is US$49.99, pricey for an iPhone app but a whole lot less money – and a whole lot more convenient – than a big, clunky conventional terminal. Right now, you also get a $50 gift certificate to iTunes, so you can catch up on LOST and buy the new Depeche Mode and feel like the whole thing is free. The back end is powered by Authorize.net, one of the major vendors of online credit card processing. Unlike Authorize.net’s tangled website, though, this is a beautiful, polished app that works the way you want. Ironically, it puts to shame the terminals Apple employees themselves use at the Apple Store. (In fact, it sounds as though Apple will indeed — unsurprisingly — replace those Windows Mobile-powered devices with iPhones, says AppleInsider.)

There’s no physical scanner, but for casual sales that’s probably okay.

You’ll need to pay US$25 in fees monthly, though, so this is probably something you’d choose if you’re also interested in running Authorize.net on your website for CC sales. The transaction fees aren’t that bad, and you get some hard-core fraud protection features, Apple Keychain support, and all the Authorize.net features – email receipts, QuickBooks accounting integration, and the like.

Cool, but this immediately makes me wonder why we aren’t seeing more of this sort of thing. I’m a fan of apps, so to me the app here looks a whole lot friendlier than a web page. But that said, theoretically if you don’t have an iPhone or use someone other than Authorize.net, surely there’s a way to access some of the Web virtual terminals via our mobile device’s increasingly-powerful web browsers, right? 

One key advantage to having an app may be that your fans would be a little less nervous watching you key in their Credit Card number, but maybe there’s a way.

PayPal and Google Checkout, I’d love to see some apps that run with this idea, too. (Google, it seems your own Android OS would be a primary target, eh? I’m hoping all those Google employees who now own G1s are starting to think about their stuff running on the phone.) The advantage of PayPal in particular – which a smart on-the-road merch seller could offer alongside a real terminal like this – is that hipster eBay addicts may already have some cash in those accounts ready to spend.

I also imagine we’ll soon see more netbooks with data plans, which will open up another way to do this. (Radio Shack has a deal with Acer and AT&T that makes the netbook cost almost nothing.) So, perhaps the follow up for this story ought to be a) how do you make some good merch and b) how do these credit card payment plans compare.

I know there are times where I wanted to buy a CD but didn’t have cash handy, so I might use this as a customer.

Found via:

http://twitter.com/artistshouse

… Artists House Music, a great blog/Twitter feed to follow for more on making business work for music.

http://blog.artistshousemusic.org/

Thanks:

http://twitter.com/TomDavenport

Here’s a unique chance to step onstage with electronic duo Justice – well, through photos, at least – on tour in Brazil. Behind a stack of Marshall Amps and other gear that looks ready to push back an invading horde of Barbarians with a battering ram, these two have some very lovely goodies for live laptop performance. No plain-vanilla DJ sets here.

Our friend Fabio “FZero” writes:

I came across some pictures of the gear Justice used to play in Rio. They were taken by a guy which works on Circo Voador (the place were they played) and uploaded to orkut. I’ve downloaded and zipped them to make things easier.

The name of the photographer is Henrique Kurtz and his orkut profile is at http://www.orkut.com.br/Main#Profile.aspx?uid=3218703684024828269

3 x Jazzmutant Lemur (THREE LEMURS. It’s good to be rich, I guess.)
2 x MacBook Pro (one is probably backup)
1 x Korg MicroKorg
1 x Korg ZERO8 Live Control
1 x Pioneer DJM800
Software: Ableton Live

Get up close and personal with the laptop rig itself. Okay, you may not be able to afford three Lemurs, but this wouldn’t be hard to scale to other setups. And there’s plenty here to make a “live PA” performance really a performance.

All photos © Copyright Henrique Kurtz. Used for createdigitalmusic.com by permission of the photographer. (Thanks, Henrique – beautiful shots!)

I usually try to steer clear of the marketing crud, but this is too bizarre to pass up. Taco Bell, anxious to jump on this whole “indie music” bandwagon, is using the only currency it has: combinations of refried beans, cheese, rehydrated ground meat, and tortillas.

Here’s the plan: they find 100 bands, and give them $500 in Taco Bell food while they’re on tour — just in case the burritos were the one thing breaking your tour budget. (Okay, there is that whole fuel cost and lodging thing, but get some bikes and a tent and you should be fine.)

The grand prize: the kind of fame that can only come from including hot sauce packets in your marketing plan. And to think, all this time people have been chasing music press and blogs and word of mouth and such. PR helpfully tell us that they’ll get “a well-known indie rock producer” to record the single. (Wait — aren’t “indie” and “well-known producer” supposed to be mutually exclusive?) But it’s really the hot sauce packets that seal the deal:

The singles will then be promoted on www.feedthebeat.com and through online advertising and in-store efforts in the Spring of 2009, as the Web site address will be featured on Taco Bell’s iconic Sauce Packet, which reaches more than 208 million people in about a month.

Oddly, talking about this has only made me hungry. I know, I know — I’ll try to find a real burrito, not a Taco Bell.

If a CDM reader happens to win this, we’ll be proud to see your name in lights extra spicy.

feedthebeat.com

Reader Mark notes that, as covered in Pitchfork, Girl Talk got the right idea after last year’s contest and shared their taco winnings with fans. Now that’s good publicity.

Readers: got better ideas for viral condiment marketing? (Oooh, wait, I shouldn’t say the word “viral” in the same breath as a fast food joint, should I?)