Be your own record label

Filed in archive Bootstrapper Tips on May 11, 2008

I've been making a list of the kinds of music that, as an amateur musician, I could probably create with minimal or no help, at least in a kind of unplugged format.

So far I've come up with blues, traditional country, jazz (some styles), traditional rock 'n roll and R&B, traditional rock/pop, avant-garde, indie music, samples for electronic music and maybe Reggae.

(This last one I've got at least a love for which could probably go a long way toward developing the ability to play/create it.)

The idea of all this is an exercise to determine what might be involved in bootstrapping and running a new independent record label with the free tools made available by the Internet and without any outside help...at least at first.

This is almost the exact opposite of something I attempted earlier with a digital music community called IndieTune which failed to generate much interest.

Such an operation would require the bootstrapper to wear many hats on the creative, technical and marketing fronts similar to late Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman's description in this clip from Eden Z Films of fellow Christian artists and producers Gene "Eugene" Andrusco, Mark Heard and Terry Scott Taylor.



Steps would include:
• Uploading original tracks to sites like Musicane for downloaded sale and to sites like iJigg for promotion.
• Creating accounts on social network sites like MySpace, MyBlogLog, Facebook etc. to attract traffic and make the on line community aware of your product
• Looking into the sale of additional related products like T-shirts, videos or CD's via print on demand sources like CafePress.com.
• Looking at the possibility of promoting concerts digitally via MeetUp or some other similar social tool.
• Creating a blog/blogs for your music, perhaps one for each genre, to keep a growing customer base apprised of what you are doing next and to keep drawing attention to the label and its brand.

Got any ideas to add? Comment below or at our Yahoo! or MySpace groups.

Photo Credits: Jacob Leistner, MorgueFile