ScottoRobotto
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ScottoRobotto
ParticipantI’ve had people call me up and the very first question they have is, “How much will it be to fix my computer? It won’t turn on.” Obviously at this point I can’t give them an ironclad quote because I have no idea what is wrong with it. I tell them my rates are $50/hr and most jobs usually take no more than 2 hours at most. Then I tell them that I can take a look at their computer and I can give them a more accurate quote and we can proceed from there, however I have a half-hour minimum charge.
I work off a hourly rate rather than a flat rate because it’s impossible to know what will happen with a repair or how long it will take. However I provide a typical time frame so it won’t feel completely open ended and gives the client a price of about $100 to hold in their mind without having to commit to it. I try to see up a meeting immediately because by agreeing to meet the client emotionally commits to fixing the computer. The minimum fee weeds out people who aren’t serious or looking for free help and makes sure I make some money if negotiations break down, if I conclude it isn’t cost efficient to fix the computer, or if it happens to be an incredibly repair I can do on the spot.
Thus as a DJ I would provide a range of prices that’s low enough to show you can accommodate, wide enough to show that the price is highly dependent on the size of the wedding and the level of service, and high enough to give you room to negotiate down from.
I would try to lock in an initial consultation meeting because it pushes out people who are less serious and also tends to set the tone that you are a serious professional and charge accordingly, I feel it gives you a position of power in negotiations. I prefer to cultivate a warm and friendly attitude with an utterly professional bearing and dress accordingly. It puts everyone in the right frame of mind while softening the edge a little.
ParticipantLance, I would say it depends on what you’re trying to do with your website. If you want to use it to get new gigs and expand your client base then it needs significant work. If you simply want it as a landing page so potential clients you’ve spoken with or may have been referred by others then I would still polish it up a little but I wouldn’t invest too much money in it.
ParticipantI don’t know anything about those labels or their business practices but my impression is they can’t be compared to a traditional music label. As far as I can tell from a quick scan they are just music retailers masquerading under the name music label.
The first thing I would ask is what do those labels actually do to promote the artists? Do they do more than list them on their website, social media, and mailing lists? If not then they are the digital music equivalent of Amway. You would be better off paying someone to build you a website with a CMS and shopping cart system that can sell and deliver digital content instead of paying someone else 60%.
In the book publishing world there are publishing houses called vanity presses. They will print up anything you care to submit, get you an ISDN number, file a copy with the Library of Congress, and offer promotion and sale through their website that is only ever visited by the other authors whose books they publish. They are interesting if you want a professionally made copy of something you’ve written as a gift or whatever. It is not a vehicle for a professional writer, there is a saying, “Be paid to publish, don’t pay TO publish.”
ParticipantRelate to it? It is a summary of what happens when an artist signs with a label. If you have an anecdote from someone who had a different experience from their label I would love to hear it, but otherwise what do you think would happen if a label picked you up and what is that belief based on? I think you have a romanticized view of the music industry, labels are out to sell music to make as much money as they possibly can while paying artists as little as they possibly can. What makes you think they wouldn’t try to catch an artist both coming and going?
As for what promotion is, as I mentioned promotion is basically selling yourself at every opportunity to do so. I believe it was Dale Earnhardt Jr. speaking about racecar drivers who said, “When the sponsors are watching, we are all whores.”
January 24, 2015 at 2:48 am in reply to: EDM Performance, What Gear Do I Need To Have or Learn? #2127991ParticipantI don’t have practical experience but here is what I think you would need:
If you plan to play a static, pre-recorded show, all you need is a playback device like your laptop and a PA system. If you want to do some mixing you’ll probably want DJ software and a controller or a DJ mixer. I don’t know enough to tell you about things like MIDI pads or Ableton but if that’s the route you’re going to need more hardware/software.
You’ll also need to cover your bases with the basics like a table or a booth, extension cables, power strips, gaffer’s tape, and a tablecloth or tableskirt.
You could focus purely on the music but I think it is a mistake because frankly most people don’t care about just the music. Lighting effects aren’t really all the expensive and they make a huge impact. ADJ just came out with Mini-Dekkers for about $100 which I think is a great deal. They have DMX so you can link them together, they strobe and they throw off RGBW light beams. Add in a small fogger and a light stand and you have a light show for about $300.
If you want to promote yourself you’ll also probably want signage, flyers to post up around the venue, and business cards. You should set up a webpage or at least a Facebook page so you can get feedback or keep in contact with show goers for future events. Personally I also think your appearance plays into this as well, your clothes, shoes and props are all part of theatrics that is part of putting on a show.
ParticipantI don’t have experience with music labels personally but I do have some understanding of how they operate. Most signed artists have a rude surprise once they figure out that the game is rigged badly against them. First off, the label doesn’t promote your music for free; they advance you the money to pay THEM to promote your music.
Basically when you sign on to a label they front the money for promotion, publication, travel, etc. along with an advance sum for future sales so you can buy houses, fancy cars or whatever. However, you still owe the for the ENTIRE bill. You have no say on how the money is spent or on what rates they are charging you for the services. Basically they have a company charge card with your name on the bill. The saving grace is that they can’t get back money if you don’t earn anything so they will actually promote you. However, the money you make from royalties goes into paying them back before you ever see a dime. An A-lister like Katy Perry gets a higher percentage royalty, as high as 5%. A relative unknown would likely see less then 1%. If the label spends $2 million on promotion, booking venues, recording costs, travel and accommodations, etc then you need over $200 million in sales just to break even. Even if you signed on with a tiny label company that only spent $50,000, you would still need $5 million in sales to get off the hook with them. At $15 for a digital release, you would need to sell over 330,000 units.
Most artists are lucky to break even with their labels, they have to take advantage of the publicity and go on tour because concert ticket sales is where they make their money. The other ways they make money are commercials and celebrity endorsements mostly in Japan although Korea and China are getting kind of big for it these days. Most times these deals are brokered by agents who get a percentage of everything their clients make including that 1% from the label (This, of course happens BEFORE the money gets applied to paying the label back.)
Basically, in order to make money or at least not die broke you can’t just be a success. You need to be an overwhelming, blowout success. From the labels point of view the best thing they can do is just keep you from paying back the initial nut, even when you come up “short” they are still swimming in money because they are selling you services at a markup that makes hotel room service look thrifty. As long as you owe them they basically have you in indentured servitude until you’re no longer profitable and they cut you loose. They won’t promote you anymore but you’ll still owe them for the outstanding balance.
ParticipantIf you absolutely want to be at the top of the search results page, here is how you do it. You need to have a professional web developer do your website, assume at least $1000 for a robust CMS based website. You’ll want to pay the developer every month to continue optimizing the website every month because trends change and other people are working against you to take the top spots as well. I would figure about 2-3 hours at least, the last place I worked at charged $80/hr for SEO.
You will need to continuously generate content every month, an article every few days at least if not more often. It doesn’t have to be long, even a page or two will do but it needs to be consistent. If you have a CMS website you can set publication dates so you can write the articles ahead of time and publish on schedule. Alternatively you can pay a developer to generate content for you or use what is called user-generated content. This website itself is an example of how to make it work for you.
You need quality links to your website which means you need other people to write articles about you or link to you. This could happen completely organically if you were to break out(But if that happened you wouldn’t need to work on SEO) or you need to work really hard promoting yourself online and offline so people will promote you online.
You also need to be active on social media both for organic growth and to improve your search results.
To put it bluntly, if you aren’t actively working to promote your business at least 20 hours a week like someone is paying YOU to promote THEM, it isn’t enough.
Alternatively you could pay Google for ad placement so you appear at the very top above the normal results. This gets expensive very quickly. Depending on the search terms you want placement on they could charge you anywhere from fractions of pennies to $0.50 per view(Not per click, per VIEW). If you put $50 in your account at $0.04 a view then after 1250 views they will take your ad down and it won’t show until you add more money to your account. Click-thru conversion rates for ads are about 0.5% so you might get 6 people to check out for page, about $8.33 per person. Personally, I think you might get better results buying someone a beer at a bar.
ParticipantOkay got it, in that case you’re exactly the kind of person who needs a professional in marketing. I know it is going to seem like throwing away money but marketing is sort of like research and development, you’re throwing money into a black hole with the uncertainty it will produce results. Certainly there are a lot of people who will take your money and leave you with nothing and even with honest marketers its possible to blow through thousands with virtually nothing to show for it. On the other hand, I think marketing is very important because often without it you won’t achieve the critical mass to make your business self-sustainable.
Personally I haven’t been doing DJ stuff very long but I’ve been an entrepreneur and some things don’t change across industries.
If you’re serious about making a living and breaking out as a performer you need to be working harder than everyone else combined, particularly on the business side of the equation. Talk to venue owners about getting a gig or playing on open mic nights if that’s what it comes down to. Talk to other performers and bands about doing a gig together. Go to companies and speak to the office manager or human resource director and offer to play for free at a company party or function. If you get a gig open to the public, pound the payment and plaster flyers everywhere around town, in stores, on bulletin boards, etc. Tell other performers you know you’re playing they may show up to support you and it’s a good networking opportunity, remember to reciprocate and go to their gigs.
When you show up to a gig or are doing promotional work, look presentable. Dress well and present yourself as a professional and someone to be taken seriously. In some genres you may want to cultivate a certain look or persona but you also need to know when to turn it off and present another face. All ways be ready to sell. Carry business cards and other promotional material with you at all times, you never know when the opportunity will come up. Keep a pen on you to write down people’s names and contact info and always follow up. You should be able to strike up a conversation with anyone, even a complete stranger and have pleasant conversation, everyone is an opportunity to build your business.
Remember people’s names when they introduce themselves, keep repeating it to yourself for a few minutes so you don’t forget it. When the conversation ends, use their name to show that you remembered it because they are important, for example, “It was nice meeting you ______.” or “_______, I’ll remember to look up that thing you mentioned earlier.” If you don’t remember it at the end, ask for it again before you leave and let them see you write it down. This shows them that they are important and worth remembering. If you ever meet them again, greet them by name to show you remembered or if you don’t remember apologize and ask for their name again. Whatever you do, don’t play it off and pretend you remember.
Another area that can be a point of contention is what you’re willing to do to get work. I’ve advised photographer friends to take photos for cars for used car dealerships, houses for real estate agents, and product shots for restaurants and retail businesses for their webpages. They refused because it’s not real art or the type of work they want to do but none of them are working as photographers today, all of them are working regular day jobs. That type of work is bread and butter that could have kept them working in the field even if it wasn’t exactly what they wanted to do. Similarly, you could rent out your equipment and work as a sound tech, most people just need a PA system and someone to play music off a playlist. They would also likely need a microphone or two for speeches. It’s not glamorous but it gets your foot in the door and any of the people in attendance may need a sound guy themselves, maybe even a DJ. You could rent out your PA, microphones, and lighting to other musicians who are just starting out or want to improve their impact, you can make some money or make some contacts which could lead to more gigs.
ParticipantLet me ask you something, what do you think having 50,000 followers will do for you? Are you just playing the numbers and assuming that with 50,000 followers someone of importance will have picked up on you? Are you planning to leverage those numbers into the sale of music, gigs or advertising? Basically what do you want marketing to do for you?
As for how to get those numbers, you can’t just sit back and wait for people to find you. If you were producing tutorials, reviews, or music videos then your content would be able to develop a following for you. As it stands as a performer, social media will just make it easier for people to start following your gigs or your new releases, you have to build yourself up the old fashion way, person by person.
ParticipantPaying for marketing is par for the route whether its paying for ad space in a newspaper, paying a graphic designer to make your flyers, or having your brick and mortar storefront setup by someone with retail experience. You’re not marketing professional which is WHY you hire a marketing professional. They help you develop a marketing plan including how marketing will advance your business.
ParticipantI’ve done web design work and specifically SEO so I think I can help you out a little here. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is designing your webpage in a way to improve it’s visibility to search engine like Google or Bing. Search engines use algorithms to evaluate a web pages content to determine it’s relevance to the search terms. The goal of SEO is to have a webpage appear on the first page as close to the top of the search results page as possible and preferable above the fold (on the first page without having to scroll down, the term comes from newspapers when article headline appears above the fold in the newspaper.)
First off, while it is possible to try to maximize your result for a search term like “Tonecraft” it’s not recommended. The only people who will find you are people who already know about you, generally with SEO you are trying to attract new people who don’t know you. Second, the term is already in use by several other people including ones who have already laid claim to facebook.com/Tonecraft and tonecraftaudio.com. It would be like trying to start a company called Apple Electronics and Computers, its difficult to market.
Putting that aside, lets get into what you can actually do for SEO. There is a saying in SEO that “Content is King.” Frequent updates with relevant content will help. Google search algorithms analyze your web page for keywords that help determine it’s relevance. However, you don’t want to use keyword spamming. If the algorithm determines that it is not organically, naturally written it will actually penalize your page and it will show up lower in the rankings.
Search engines can only evaluate text, it can’t understand the content of video or images. On a Youtube video you need to write a good, meaningful title and description. Again, be careful not to keyword spam.
Another thing that improves your SEO is backlinks, links pointing at your page from other places improves your pages relevance. Quality of the backlinks is as important as quantity though, links from pages with higher rankings are more weighted then links from random irrelevant sites. So called mutual admiration societies of people pointing to each other don’t help much either and can actually penalize you. Typically links from forum page don’t help at all for SEO, there are tags in the code that tell search engines to ignore them. However, Youtube is a valuable source for links to your page if you link from relevant videos.
There are a lot more nitty gritty details to optimize going down to word choice, how you structure your article and the use of bold, headlines, etc. but for that you want to hire a SEO professional who does that sort of stuff all day.
ParticipantPersonally I would want DMX to get a slow 3 rpm rotation for slow songs or R&B. Right now I have a ADJ halogen Vertigo in that spot which isn’t ideal, no strobing, no DMX fixed rotation speed, and multi-color dots only. For slower songs I switch over to a cheap LED effect light from Spencers which puts out red green and blue dots cycling through two at a time. The dots slowly rock back and forth or they can do sound reactive or strobe but I have to manually push buttons on the unit. I got them cheap and they work adequately but if I spend a bit more in the first place I could have had more capabilities, it would have been easier to use, and I would have more flexibility for different genres. Just food for thought.
ParticipantI’m not really familiar with those lights, I couldn’t even find the ADJ Atomic Ball. If you think it will work with your other equipment and for the type of music you play, then try it out. The main reason I like the Jelly Dome is because is has DMX and a lot of capabilities which makes it flexible for different types of music.
ParticipantRight, a solid state hard drive(SSD) will have better access time and be more responsive than a conventional hard drive. It also has a benefit of being shock/impact resistant because there aren’t moving parts. The downsides are write time isn’t much better so it will take just as long to dump files onto the drive as a regular drive, you get less storage space than a regular drive of the same price, and the maximum capacity size is much lower than what’s available with conventional hard drives. For the most part though these are limitations rather than negatives, for DJing none of these are real issues so it’s hard to find a reason not to use a SSD.
Another alternative is to get a faster conventional hard drive. Normal laptop drives spin at 5400rpm but you can also get ones that spin at 7200 rpm like a conventional desktop drive or 10000 rpm hard drives. Performance increases with RPM but cost and capacity drops. A 7200 rpm drive is a good balance between improved performance and massive storage capacity. It’s more than necessary for a dedicated DJing machine but useful for a mixed usage laptop or if you do video work or production.
ParticipantI have a computer tech background (A lot less DJing) so this is how I see it. I don’t like touch screens much unless its convertible to a tablet, even then I avoid it because if it ever goes bad its alot more expensive to fix. Instead I would go with a larger size screen. You can run it at higher resolution and have more screen real estate to work with. Don’t skimp on processing power or RAM. Basically get as much power as you can afford. If you ever get into production work or post-processing on videos/mixes you want as much processing power as possible, it is pure grunt work and more power can mean the difference between tying up your computer for 8 hours or 2 hours.
RAM upgrades are the most affordable way to increase performance on a computer, particularly when multi-tasking or running multiple programs. Pay attention to how many RAM slots there are on the board and what size modules were used to fill them up. Later you can upgrade to more RAM but if for example you only have two slots and they gave you two 2GB RAM modules instead of one 4GB RAM module, you have to throw them both away and buy two 4GB modules to get to 8GB instead of just one 4GB module.
If you think you might ever work with video you may want to get a laptop with a discrete graphics card. Most laptops use onboard video which suffices for most things but gets a little overloaded when you run multiple monitors or multiple instances of video. It’s not a deal breaker but if you can afford it and think you might get into 3D rendering for video samples, definitely consider it.
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