How To Sell Your Songs Without An A&R or Record Deal

How much money did you make today?

I don’t mean at your 9-5, I mean from your job; the place where you spend your time working.

Now is the time to ge amazingly daring in the way that you go about advancing your career. Not just because of the money, because it’s likely that the money (the good money) won’t come until you’ve been following along with a consistent type of plan for at least a few years, but because you need to capture mind share before it becomes impossible.

It is June 2008, three years from now, it will be much harder to get 100 people to buy your music, let alone 10,000.

The longer you wait to implement a solid strategy that will help you accumulate fans and build relationships, is the longer you delay your profits. People who buy music are not getting dumber, they’re getting smarter and more demanding in their expectations; and their preferences and values are changing faster than ever before.

So the question is,

how do you sell your songs without a record deal?

The challenge of becoming a music-superstar is not achieving it, but it’s taking advantage of every “pair of ears” that ever gets the chance to hear your music. If 100 people hear your music and the walk away feeling like hearing your music was just another gig, then you simply wasted time.

You can not wait until you acquire 10,000 fans to start doing things on the music superstar level; every-day is a day you must navigate your mindset, daily activities, and product quality to the level that is worthy of 10,000 fans…even if you only have 10 fans today.

You need to consider your end goals and market while you’re creating your product so ultimately your songs sell themselves. This will not only help you reduce the cost of promoting yourself, but it will help you work less; and ultimate let your music do more of the work for you and in many ways this means on a consistent basis you would:

• Spending more time on quality music (Eventually artists will release 3-4 incredible songs a year vs an entire album)
• Putting a face to your music (A central theme / message / graphic or idea)
• Planning a concert (which is far bigger than an average ‘gig’, plus it will be an investment on your part)
• Placing your music where other artists’ music can be found (competitive placement) – on websites / forums / text message campaigns /poster walls / announcement boards

You don’t need to reach 1,000 people at one time in order to achieve the goal of becoming a music superstar; you simply need to give 100 people a 10,000 seater arena performance just a few times, and the rest will happen on it’s own. Are you willing to put in the 3 weeks of non-stop rehearsal, planning, and administration in order to pull this off? Or will you only commit 90 hours? Actually when I said 100 hours (by the way that’s 20 hours more than 2 weeks of full time work) but instead of 100 hours, I really meant more like 200 hours.

There have been many articles written that claim you need to perform live in order to put your career in to overdrive and this is partly true, but it still misses the critical point that unless you do something substantial; your fans are not going to engage with you and your music.

So what you have a live show. So what you have a CD. This means nothing. Just because you own a kitchen and a pot does not mean you should own a restaurant, neither does it mean you are serving the kind of food that people want to eat.

There are so many variables that come into play when we talk about the way to sell more of your songs. But if you want to strike it big on a major level what matters most is:

CONNECTION

I’m not talking about connections you have with humans, or A&Rs, or executives but I mean Campaign Connections — where every part of your campaign must connect and be driven by a powerful theme. It’s damn near 2010; but if you are doing things very Y2K-like, then you will get results that mirror the year 2000. Every word you say is a part of your marketing efforts, every word you write to your fans, each song title, each lyric, each verse, each chorus, each website graphic, needs to be connected to everything else that is a part of your campaign.

It is a LOT more work this way, but this is the only way you will be able to successfully compete against an artist who has millions to spend on promotion, marketing, and advertising. Instead of just going to a local club to play your music, most artists will try to give away a free CD. That is great. You simply can not try to SELL people so fast so soon anymore, BUT giving your music away free, without it being connected to a larger scheme of marketing events is going to be a huge waste of time…and production money.

The goal is to build up momentum through each piece of communication so that your core message is not ignored. To create an unignorable message of course you have to be witty but you have to remember these things:

• The quality of music that a consumer bought yesterday does not mean that you can release yesterday’s quality and generate profits today.
• If you don’t have a song or songs that sound like Billboard Top 100, then you don’t have a song at all.
• If you don’t perform live, you are handicapped
• If your live performance is not as good or better than your recording, you are paralyzed
• Your ability to communicate “on-demand” with your fans is more valuable than quick cash.