Guitar Jam

Industry Insider: What Does it Mean to Be A Pro?

By John McGlasson
I think for most people, the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the words “professional musician” is money, and for most, that equates with success, but in my line of work, I know a lot of professional musicians who make little or no money after the expense of being a pro is weighed against the bottom line. The cost of gear, travel, and basic living expenses make it nearly impossible for most to ever profit in this biz, much less base their futures on it, but this never stops them.

There are those of you who just read the previous paragraph, who may be sitting there with your guitar, rehearsing, writing, or recording, with crappy day jobs and empty bank accounts, who now think, “yeah, well what about me, who will make a living once the world hears my stuff?” The previous paragraph doesn’t apply to you, you’re working hard, you’re convinced it’ll happen for you if you work as hard as your heroes, and for that reason, you’re probably right. You’re a pro.

Pros write, rehearse, perform, and plan like pros all the time, whether they’re being paid or not, whether or not they’re happy with the venue or the crowd, they always play the same, like a pro. Pros are punctual, reliable, and flexible. Pros are respectful to the people who work hard to make it possible for them to do what they love in front of an audience.

Too many talented musicians today feel that being a professional means having everything done for them, having endless cash, parties, a full-time guitar tech, and not a care in the world other than strapping on the guitar for 45 minutes a night. Unless you’re playing to 5000 people a night or already famous, that’s probably not the case. Most touring musicians doing national club tours can’t afford to pay drum/guitar techs, or for people to carry their gear around for them, or set up, or tear down, they do it themselves.

I think what got me thinking about this, other than my daily activities, was a great article I read in a recent issue of Bass Player that feature the B3 guys; Sheehan/Hamm/Berlin, on a tour to select cities where there are enough bassists and guitar/drum geeks to make the show worth the travel, and these 3 monsters of their instruments, Gods to millions, are in a van, lugging their own gear every night, for far less money than they’re used to getting for their brilliance,  just for the love of playing. There was a picture in the magazine of Billy down on his knees soldering on a piece of gear after some rough travel, and glad to do it.

The point is, Billy Sheehan has been living that way for a long time, even when tours with David Lee Roth and Mr. Big brought him the big-time limo life, he treated this B3 tour with as much, or more, importance, because he’s a genuine pro, which happened because Billy acted like a pro long, long before he ever made a penny, money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s probably safe to assume Billy’s got the money to pay someone to tech for him on this small tour, but why? Billy knows his gear, how to maintain it, because he’s always done it, and it makes him feel good to be a hands-on guy in every aspect of the biz. He’s a pro.

John McGlasson is a life-long guitarist, producer, and founder of o.i.e. Records, Ltd., a musician-oriented independent record label based in central Illinois.

Industry Insider: Who Defines “Indie”?

By John McGlasson
These days, artists get a lot of solicitation from people and companies who want to consolidate “indie” artists and labels into a more powerful force for licensing and such. Like union organizers, they operate on the “strength in numbers” philosophy to convince artists and labels to pay them and/or sign over their rights in exchange for the promise of equal footing with the major labels, but what’s to be gained by grouping yourself in with others who are likely in the same situation; without a label and therefore without distribution? Do you really want to be classified as “indie?” Aren’t most established-yet-unsigned artists sub-par, or at least suffering from sub-par production? Aren’t most labels without distribution suffering from a sub-par catalog?

“Independent” labels make up 30% of global music sales, Nowadays anyone can be “indie” as long as they’re not on a big label, from the 15 year old in his room recording with a laptop, to labels like Sub-Pop Records, who sell hundreds of thousands, even millions, of high-budget, slickly-produced cds per year. Many labels use the “indie” description to hide the fact that they’re distributed by a major label, with the major-label promo budgets. Sony and other majors have bought many smaller labels, allowing them to operate “independently” so they can maintain their “little guy” status to combat the anti-major label feeling that grows year after year.

One such organizer claims to be creating the “5th major” in consolidating all artists who aren’t under the umbrella of the “big-4” major music conglomerates. This guy claims to be able to strong-arm the same rates for “indie” artists and labels as the majors get, based on the usual “strength-in-numbers” sales pitch, but in my opinion, the buyers will be even more likely to take the easy way out and use established, bigger-label artists for projects rather than deal with arm-twisters who will be selling largely under or poorly produced music, and demanding unreasonable rates for lesser work. Again, do you really want to be grouped in with every so-called “indie” artist?

So while the industry changes, one thing doesn’t, you’ve got to be above average at your craft to get noticed and break free of the masses. Labels, distributors, and the various retail and digital outlets still rule the industry, so even if all the unsigned artists in the world band together, I don’t see how to break away from the old model. The biggest labels with the biggest budgets will always sell the most music by reaching the most people, regardless of whether or not they refer to themselves, or are referred to by others, as “indie.” If you can’t get the attention of a label, you can’t break out of the “unsigned” category, and all the consolidation in the world can’t save you from that.

John McGlasson is a life-long guitarist, producer, and founder of o.i.e. Records, Ltd., a musician-oriented independent record label based in central Illinois.

Industry Insider: Looking at the Brighter Side of The Biz

By John McGlasson
Happy new year to all! I was hoping to write a more uplifting column this time, as I think sometimes in my line of work I’m forced to focus on the negative things about the industry, but after last holiday season, it seems there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.

iTunes reported that their traffic was up 450% over last year! 2005 was considered the beginning of the Digital Revolution, so to take that 450% higher is a huge deal, but oddly enough, our retail was up over last year, and continues to grow, where the 2005 holiday season brought us decent retail then dropped off completely for Jan.’06, this year has remained steady.

What now? Is there hope for retail cd sales? If you’ve read my previous columns, I’d all but danced on the grave of retail, but it seems that there’s a new middle ground, maybe retail can exist along with the digital option? Or is retail the option? We’ll see.

I don’t really have access to accurate numbers of what other labels are doing, and I think in conversation we’re all likely to paint a rosier picture than exists among our peers, none of us wants to be the subject of rumors of early demise, but I have to assume retail was up across the board, though keep in mind, I’m in the indie music biz, I don’t follow what the big labels do, though one can’t avoid the news reports that big labels’ retail was down this season, but it seems the indies did o.k..

If you read Guitar Player or 20th Century Guitar magazines, chances are you’ve seen our ads over the last 18 months, we have ¼ page 4-color, ½ page 4-color, some featuring multiple bands, some featuring a single artist. I have to assume these ads have something to do with our retail surge, but it was a long time coming, so it’s hard to credit ads with sales, there’s just no way to gauge such things. It seems that if you run enough ads, market hard enough, and smart enough, you start to get attention, but beyond that it seems that people are just going into record stores more lately.

Guitar Player mag did an interview with me a couple months ago for an upcoming feature on the label, something that I don’t think happens on a whim, there’s got to be a buzz created, so apparently we have? I really think the visitors to this site and other (of course lesser!) versions of it could answer that better than I…if you’ve heard the names vonFrickle,  Andreas Kapsalis, Backyard Tire Fire, Isaiah Sharkey, Curtis Fornadley, John Blakeley, Balance II, or Sons of Science (before now!) then I’ve done my job.  If you bought one or more of the cds or downloaded a track or two,the circle is complete, and we thank you!

I’d love to start talking to some new artists about the future, because if we have momentum, it’s time to start building the catalog again. I talked to a MAJOR player today, and I think I’ll be able to announce the signing very soon…this is someone we all know and respect, and would give us the boost we need to sign others like him.

I’d love to get another flood of cds from players like we got last year, it was great! Every day I was listening to new artists, we signed one artist that way, Curtis Fornadley, I got his cd and presskit in the mail early last year, I popped it in for a listen, and I was emailing him halfway through the first song! We released his album Blue Electric Cool on 07/25/06, and he’s done pretty well with it! You can catch him in LA quite often, see him, and all our artists on our site. Don’t hesitate to send me a cd and follow up with an email, I cant get back to everyone, but I do listen to, and appreciate, all submissions. There’s a submissions form in the contact section of our site, they all come straight to me. Thanks for reading!    

John McGlasson is a life-long guitarist, producer, and founder of o.i.e. Records, Ltd., a musician-oriented independent record label based in central Illinois. 

So What’s the Deal with Digital Music Distribution? (Part 2)

By John McGlasson
In my last column, I went over some facts and numbers regarding digital music distribution, and ended with the question, why spend so much time and money to compose and produce albums that flow a certain way and are meant to be listened to as an album, when the reality is, your album gets chopped into singles and sold as such? I also pointed out that there are usually 1-2 songs on an album that get many times more downloads or streams as the rest of the album, and it’s often not the song you may have intended to be a “single”. So what’s the solution? Do we refuse to sell single songs, and only sell complete album downloads? Do we keep selling singles, but lower the album price to encourage the purchase of the whole album? And doesn’t this cut into the profits, and therefore the promo budget?

While I don’t think it’s the solution to our problems, I see many advantages to producing EP’s, nothing new, as the indie music world survived for a long time on EP’s for a variety of reasons, the main one being that they’re cheap to produce, but I see a lot more appeal than that.

It’s very difficult to get the attention of the press these days with so many releases out there. Even if you’re paying a well-known publicist, there are no guarantees. Most bands put out an album a year, often every 2-3 years. With each release and each new publicity push, you build name recognition among the press and the public, then after the shelf life expires and the touring stops the band can seem to drop off the face of the Earth, losing all the momentum they’d built. A year or two later when you want to release a new album, the process has to begin again from square one, at great expense for each release. 

This, combined with the fact that albums really aren’t albums anymore, but a collection of singles, lead me to think that EP’s are the way to keep the momentum, since you can release one every six months or so by simply dividing a full-length album into two EP’s. The promo effort never stops, you always have new material for the fans and for the press to review, you’re not sitting on material for months or years waiting to record the new album, as the recording process becomes almost constant, you write a song, you record it, and get it out within months. The process becomes a  true picture of the artist’s evolution, the music is fresh and new, without being picked at and scrutinized to death, and you save a lot of money by maintaining constant press and fan attention.

Good marketing requires that you offer the public a great deal, not just a good one. I’ve found that people are a lot more willing to spend $7.99 on an EP then they are to spend $14.99 on the full-length album, and this is true in digital as well, people will buy six songs for $8.00, but not 14 for $15.00. Retail stores hate EP’s because of the lower retail price, but I’ve found the profit to be only slightly lower from an EP than a full-length, full-price album, and I’m not likely to release much into retail in the future anyway.

Bottom line, write it, record it, and get it out there. Never stop the process, never stop the promo effort, play live as much as possible, communicate with your fanbase and the press constantly, and you should be able to rise above the competition. The people who can put out the best material, the most often, with the lowest production costs, will profit in the digital world, the people who overspend on production and promo aren’t likely to ever get out of the red on a release. Thanks for reading! I welcome questions, comments, or suggestions!    

John McGlasson is a life-long guitarist, producer, and founder of o.i.e. Records, Ltd., a musician-oriented independent record label based in central Illinois.

Industry Insider: So What’s The Deal with Digital Music Distribution?

By John McGlasson
Digital music distribution is new to everyone, so we’re all learning as we go how to market it, manage it,  and profit from it. Rarely does an entire industry get caught off guard the way the music biz was with the iPod and the immediate digital revolution. There are no experts, they’re being made as I write this, the people that are still around to talk about this transition two years from now will be the new experts.

For the sake of this article, I’m not discussing online cd sales, which is mail order, a whole different world from digital music sales, which is an exchange of digital files, there’s no product to manufacture or ship.

Right now digital music distribution is largely controlled by iTunes, 85% of online music purchases are made there. EMusic makes up around 7.5%, the remaining 7.5% is made up of Rhapsody and a handful of others.

The truth is that people who download music rarely buy the entire album, I can track this through our distributor, there are usually 2-3 songs per album that get 5-10 times as many downloads as the rest of the songs on the album, often it’s a song you’d expect to have the least downloads, there’s no explaining it. Sometimes the artist the label spends the least amount of time and money promoting has the highest number of downloads for the month, even more confusing. We also get a figure of whole album purchases, so there’s no mistaking the numbers, song downloads are 10-1 album downloads, often more.   

As we learn how many people are downloading music on these various sites, and chart that against the sales of various releases in various genres, we can begin to break them down and determine how many people we’re actually targeting with each new release, and spend to promote accordingly. The more obscure the genre, the more difficult it is to find your audience in the endless sea of browsers. This is where it gets scary.

It’s almost always been the case that the music press is how people find out about new music. Ads alone aren’t enough, you have to have interviews, reviews, and articles written about you, lots of them, to make the big jump. How does someone with a great new album get it to their target audience without a budget for magazine ads and the publicist required to get the attention of the writers? I don’t see how it could be done without spending at least $20k for a new release, and there are no guarantees after you do spend the money. Right now, unless the artist has a name in their genre, labels aren’t going to be very willing to fork out $20k to promote them, no matter how great they may be, until the digital returns start to justify the spending. 

So why spend countless hours recording an album that flows a certain way, that’s meant to be listened to as an album, only to have it chopped into digital bits for what amount to little bites of an entire meal, for which you get pennies per play? Do we refuse to sell single tracks? Do we price the album so cheap that it encourages the purchase of the entire album over just one or two tracks? And if we do that, doesn’t it reduce the promo budget accordingly?

I’m beginning to think the solution is an old one, EP’s. the indie world survived on them for years. My next article will be on the benefits and beauty of EP’s. I welcome suggestions, comments, etc. Please support independent music, find a great cd today and buy it!  Thanks for reading!

John McGlasson is a life-long guitarist, producer, and founder of o.i.e. Records, Ltd., a musician-oriented independent record label based in central Illinois.

Industry Insider: The Entitlement Mentality

By John McGlasson
Anyone who plays guitar knows that just learning the basics can be a grueling process, and if you want to do something new and unique, you have to make that the centerpiece of your life. I get cds in the mail every week from artists all over the world, but mostly from here in the US, cds from artists who've worked very, very hard to do something new with the instrument, with varying results, though most of them seem to share the same feeling; entitlement to fame and fortune.

This business is unlike any other on the planet, and it's changing so fast that nobody knows the formula for success right now, we're still discovering it. Yet many artists' mentality towards the label's role in their success hasn't changed much, they want a label that'll pay big money to produce and promote their work, they want money from the label to live on so they can create more music, and they want the label to pay to keep them on tour endlessly, regardless of sales. they want the label to continue spending based solely on a belief in their talent. These things aren't going to happen folks! It's a different biz today, sales are much lower for everyone, digital has not really exploded yet, so it's not a viable source of income thus far, and profit margins are lower because of the higher promo budgets required to sell less cds than before.

Labels want/need to sign artists that already have a well-produced cd ready to go, and some form of marketing in place. Unless you're an artist with good name recognition nationally, it's not likely that a label will be willing to put out the money to record you, regardless of talent or ability. So how much are you willing to spend on yourself? When you solicit the label, are you sending them a poorly produced 3 song demo, or are you sending them a slick, well-produced cd that's market-ready? Have you run your own magazine ads, done your own grass-roots marketing, your own press and publicity work?

Artists get themselves into debt by allowing a label to do all these things for them too soon in their career. Many labels are willing to put out this cash for the artists early on, because every dime of spending on the artists' behalf is recoupable by the label, (most labels anyway) which generally holds 100% of cd sales until the often on-going promo, production, and manufacturing budget is recovered, which often doesn't happen, resulting in zero for the artist. Once the label feels a release has run it's course, the spending stops, but the artist's debt remains. Once the contract ends or the relationship ends for whatever reason, the debt remains, and the label often owns the cd, leaving the artist worse off than they were before signing, even if they benefit long-term by having their disc in the label's catalog. Even more common is that the artist would owe the label another album at that point and be in default.

So what's the point? Why can't you just do it yourself? It's yet to be proven if you can or not. The odd thing is, if more artists would spend their own money producing their own records, making their own slick website and presskits, running a few small ads in strategic magazines, and sending out hundreds of cds and presskits to build name recognition, labels would be alot quicker to get involved, it's like jumping on a train that's already rolling rather then using up the fuel to get moving. If you can create some name recognition on your own, a label will be willing to pick it up where you left off, spending alot more money then you could alone, and using the power of the label and distribution to take you to the next level, or two. Good labels have their own fanbases that you share once you become part of that team.

The most important thing to remember is that this biz is gambling, pure and simple. We can lay out the most brilliant marketing plan for the most brilliant artist with the most brilliant cd ever made, we can spend twice the money than the plan called for, and it still may fail. All the talent, hard work, drive, desire, motivation in the world doesn't guarantee you're success, so try to keep in mind why we do this. If it's for money, I'd say not to bother. Money is a bi-product of success in this biz. Many artists have success from the outsiders' point of view, but have no money and/or large debt. Play because you love to play, play live because you love to play for the people, make records because you like the sound of them, because things are too uncertain right now to plan your retirement on cd sales.      

John McGlasson is a life-long guitarist, producer, and founder of o.i.e. Records, Ltd., a musician-oriented independent record label based in central Illinois.  

The Generation Gap

By John McGlasson
At age 39, I've lived in 5 different decades that were all very different musically. The 60's brought so much revolutionary music to us that our heads are still spinning! Then, from a guitarists' point of view, the 70's brought musicianship to a pinnacle with Mahavishnu, Jen Luc Ponty, King Crimson, Gong, Brand-X, Yes, Rush, Gentle Giant, etc. When I was around 10, the radio top 40 was Rush, Led Zep, Yes, Styx, Kansas, Boston, Journey, Cheap Trick, ELO,etc. the bar was very, very high back then, even your local cover bands were ungodly musicians, look at what they were covering!

With the so-called hair bands in the 80's, even the worst guitarists out there were woodshedding hard to keep up with guys like Warren DeMartini, George Lynch, EVH, Malmsteen, etc. so, what happened? Why are the vast, VAST majority of today's guitarists such a dissapointment for most people my age?

Well, as Sebastian Bach called it, it was the Revenge Of The Nerds, the grunge revolution. Curt Cobain made it cool to be a crappy guitarist! He made it cool to constantly ask, why me? and write song after song after song about how crappy mere existence can be, while pushing out-of-tune barchords around in various box patterns. He made it cool to be an unshowered, depressed underachiever, and he made it cool to be a really, really shitty guitarist. Soloing, good technique, good fundamentals all became "showing off". And this is the "voice of a generation"?!? My generation was hearing songs about how great life is, how we should celebrate and grab it by the balls and get all we can out if it! And it had a huge affect on my outlook, guiding me to do what I'm doing today. 

Yeah, I know, every previous generation of guitarists complains about who the new guys are ripping off, but this is different. This is paint-by-numbers, clip art. There is no effort whatsoever to be original by the vast majority of modern musicians. Even the young players out there today who are technically proficient are such obvious hacks that I turn them down every day at my label, mostly pure Satriani clones. So what's next? Where are the new guitarists for people like me to work with? People who want to spend money on them, make great albums, promote them globally. and bring the world the Next Big Thing in guitar?

With such a deficiency of new, original guitarists out there, I've had to change my focus a bit as a label owner, and work to sign some legendary guitarists who've gone unnoticed to the kids up to now, but who led the way with their originality and hard work. I feel an equal responsibility to making sure the kids today know who started it all as I do with finding the next generation of great guitarists, maybe more so at this point. It would appear that the only way for guitar playing to advance is to shove the likes of Morse, Holdsworth, McGlaughlin, DiMeola, Uli Roth, etc. right in the kids' faces and show them how high the bar used to be, and how we've slipped backwards because the grunge generation made all these overachievers, with their flashy, impossible techniques "uncool."

Punch in the names Holdsworth, Zappa, McGlaughlin, Fripp, DiMeola on YouTube and spend some time hearing how exciting that time period was for guitar, the competion between men who probably could've been achieving near-light speed or curing cancer were they not so in love with this contraption made of wood, strings, magnets, tubes, and circuits, all tied together with cables and pedals into a single electrified unit of self-expression the pen could never match! This isn't nostalgia, it's necessary to bring the bar back up to eye level, and off the floor.

Distribution: Death of the Middleman?

By John McGlasson
In my first column, I called myself out as a label owner first thing, to look at whether an artist/band even needs a label in these days of digital, and stated my opinion that labels are still necessary for success. This time I'm calling out the music distribution industry to determine if the middleman is necessary today.

If you read my first column, I gave great credit to our distributor for securing an artist exclusive feature pre-release on a major download site, but in this column I'm going to shed some sunlight on some dark, ugly secrets about distribution and its relationship with big retail, not our distributor in particular, because I don't think they do anything out of the ordinary, in fact I think we come out better then with others we could've signed with.

With the inevitable death of big, corporate retail, to which every major music distributor is tied, what will be left for distributors to do when there are no more big retail stores to ship to? As I mentioned in the last column, Best Buy is eliminating the cd as their loss leader, and now rumors are flying that Barnes & Noble will end music sales after the holidays. Tower was the largest, so if people don't see their doom as a sign they're just in denial - Tower was not mismanaged. It doesn't matter that Virgin's stores are slick and huge, that's where people go to buy Justin Timberlake, and do I really want our catalog in the same store?

The truth is, our kind of stuff is not selling in big retail anyway. Only the major labels can afford to play the big retail game, spending $10million to take in $10.3mil. But old-world distribution forces every label to play that game, shipping your goods to major operations where at best you can expect to move only a few cds, but it costs hundreds or thousands per store to get decent placement to make that happen, so what's the point?

The return policy is what kills labels, as the distributor keeps their portion of the sale no matter what, and if that cd gets returned, you pay the retailer the full price they paid, the shipping back and forth, and a restocking fee to the distributor, essentially buying back your own cd at nearly full retail, up to 40% more then you would've made had it not been returned. With the rate of store closures, and an open-ended, limitless return policy provided to retailers by distributors, this is just bad business in this new industry.

So what's the alternative? When one good selling title’s profits are eaten up by return charges from a title that's not doing as well, how does one ever sell music and get paid for it? We're looking at many new ideas for direct-marketing to indie stores, nothing new there, but I believe that the return policy must be changed in the industry for labels to be able to continue to provide goods to retailers. Indie labels like ours must be willing to sell less, for less, to get paid, and retailers must be willing, in exchange for the much better pricing, to carry a title longer before returning it, if they can return it. We'll sell at a very low price to indie stores outright with no or a limited return policy, ensuring it stays on the shelves long enough for our promo efforts to bear fruit.

With the distribution business now becoming the returns business, it appears that the labels will soon become the distributors. We welcome it.

Record Labels: Do You Really Need One?

I'm John McGlasson, owner of o.i.e.Records,Ltd., an indie record label based in Central Illinois. Our catalog is oriented towards musicians, since I'm a guitarist first, and wanted to see a new label that's guitar-oriented, yet diverse.

I offered to write this column, as I think I can offer some valuable insight to guitarists out there about the rapidly changing music biz, from the label's point of view. Which brings me to the topic of this column, the first of what I hope are many for this great site, Record labels...do you really need one?

As the industry evolves into a digital-only world, retail is dying. While many are in denial of this fact, all you need to know is that the mighty Tower Records, the largest, for the longest, is bankrupt. Best Buy will be phasing out cds as their loss leader as early as the end of this holiday season. Indie record stores are becoming just that again, selling vinyl records, both old and new, in addition to cds. The only ones hanging onto big retail are the big labels, who are about to be stuck with warehouses full of cds that will soon be headed for the Dollar Store...remember how fast those places filled with cassettes? The cd's day is coming, at least for the big labels. I believe labels like ours will be manufacturing cds for at least another decade, as they do sell at shows, in great numbers, if it's a great band, and we sell good amounts on our website globally. And face it, they sound much better then mp3's.

The role of the music distributor is in even greater question then that of the labels, because if there's no retail, there's nobody to distribute cds to, do the labels need distributors to handle their digital? No, but the good distributors can get you features and digital rates per play or download you likely couldn't get on your own negotiating with i-tunes or Rhapsody. Our distributor, RedeyeUSA, got Rhapsody to feature one of our releases as a Rhapsody Exclusive for one week before the official release, and allowed the artist to do Artist Picks, of great songs he loves and wants to pass on, all on their main page. We never could've gotten this ourselves, so Redeye proved again that there is enormous strength in numbers, in consolidation, and in a great list of contacts like Redeye has.

Labels provide strength in numbers for artists, or they provide a crushing death under the weight of an overstuffed, under-promoted catalog. It's up to the label to find that balance between having enough great artists to "feel" like a viable label, but not having so many that you don't have the money or manpower to promote any of them properly. We have a small catalog for that reason, though we will be announcing a huge new addition in the coming weeks!

It's yet to be proven whether or not a previously unknown artist, especially in our world of instrumental guitar, can come through the indie channels with no label, no distribution, and find success. I haven't seen it. I don't know of anybody who's ever sold enough cds on CDBaby or any other outlet of that kind to make a living from it, and while anybody can get digital through theorchard.com and others like it, you're just a face in a sea of guitarists putting their poorly recorded cd up there right next to your slick, well-produced work.

The great thing is, the playing field's even for everyone. The horrible thing is, the playing field's even for everyone. There were 65,000 new releases last year, how do you seperate yourself and stand out? Even if you have more talent then 99.5% of the field, how does anyone find out? Unless you have $50k to run your own magazine ads and hire a publicist, you can't stand out, you can't get press, and Myspace isn't going to do it if your target demographic is over 21, so what do you do?

Get yourself on a great label, let their promo people do what they do, let them hire the publicist when needed, do the manufacturing, get it distributed, run the ads, and then work just as hard as you would if you weren't on a label, doing your own promo, publicity, booking, in-store appearances, etc. It's a team effort.

Finally, and most importantly from my standpoint, do something original. Does the world really need another Eric Johnson, Satriani, or Vai clone? there are thousands. No, what we need are the NEXT Johnson, Satriani, and Vai. Nobody is going to invest in you in this scary market if you're not very, very good, and very, very original.