To those of you who are interested in developing a career in music as independent artists, I hope the spiel below goes some way to helping you navigate the indie jungle. To the rest, I hope it is at least an interesting read.
Under these circumstances, it is important to get the word out by gigging a lot. And by ‘gigging a lot’, I don’t mean play 5 nights a week in the same underground club for months (cos you’d end up playing to the same people all the time). Instead, play in as many places as you can, cafes, clubs, shopping centres, churches etc etc. And when you play, do not be too shy to go round asking for people to join your mailing list – as an indie, your mailing list is your lifeline – build it!
2 Co-Bill
Get your friends who have bands and co-bill gigs (3-4 bands per event is ideal). This way, everyone bring their fans and they ‘share’ fans – (i) so that you’re not playing to empty halls (which is ALWAYS bad); (ii) and so that your fans will discover new bands and your friends’ fans will discover you.
This is one reason why I am so against peer-group bitching and politicking – it makes no sense and it cuts out this very effective avenue for new bands to gather a fan base. Unity is power.
3 Maximise Your Skill Sets
Understand that promotion is just a factor of exposure – nothing more. There are two ways to do get exposure:
(i) spend loadsa money to buy it; or
(ii) get the exposure by doing stuff that requires no money but a lot of labour.
When I first started out, I didn’t have a marketing and promo budget too – but I knew I could write – so I offered my services as a writer to publications and newspapers in exchange for ads rather than writer’s fee (e.g. the serialisation of my Studio Diary in Sunday Times’ Nuance Magazine got me months of free publicity and 4 side bar adverts when ‘Rustic’ was released). Now, writing just happens to be amongst my skill sets – yours may be different.
The trick is to know what yours are – and then see if you can utilise them in a way that increases your public visibility. Ask your band members and willing friends to contribute to this too. These skill sets may range from writing ability, to techie ability, to design ability etc. Once you have identified the skill sets available to you, then find out who needs these services and begin bartering for exposure.
And remember you don’t have to start with BIG MEDIA – at the begining, any media, however small, is better than no media. You’ll find that the more visible you are, the easier it is to leverage on other skill sets to expand your visibility.
4 Persevere
I see a lot of young bands do this – launch a record and then work hard to market it for 6 months, which is great – but most of them also stop pushing after 6 months, which is kinda crap. Remember this – it takes time to build a fanbase – this is especially so in Malaysia, where the general public tend to regard local music as inferior to imported ones – however unjustly. So you’ll have to persevere – may be for years – before your fanbase is big enough to matter.
Therefore, the first thing to do is to strategise for multiple albums release rather merely hope to ‘make it big’ on your debut album. If you can’t see a way to do that, then it’ll be tough – because the chances of you ‘making it big’ with your debut album is very small, especially if your don’t have a major label investing loads of money into your publicity campaign.
I had a 3 album strategy – first album to build profile domestically, second album to expand local support but also begin to build regional profile; and third album to expand on regional fanbase etc. Naturally, these lines are not static and must be dealt with dynamically.
But the point is this – it will take time – unless you are Britney and has zillions of dollars behind you in publicity money – in which case please give me a couple of million worth of loose change and I’ll see about getting hip replacement surgery for me mum...
5 Define Your Objective
Determine what your objective is. There are many ways to be a musician – not all of them involves turning ‘pro’. If you wanna turn pro, however, realise that the domestic market for English music in Malaysia is very small and is very unlikely to be able to offer you a chance to make a living out of your music.
Thus, the choice is
(i) stay semi-pro forever; or
(ii) have a plan to export your music (eventually) to bigger markets.
You’ll find that the best plan is to keep your day job for the time being, and then work like a dog to build your music career alongside it. When the time does come to ditch the day job, you’ll be the first to know it.
6 Export You Stuff
Without developing an offshore fanbase, it is very unlikely you’ll be able to do this for long. As said, the market in Malaysia is too small. But with the internet, you can make small moves to build an audience outside of Malaysia.
There are many ways to do this – e.g. touring with the help of friends abroad who know the local scene, get your music uploaded to as many download portal as your can, or (as I do) offer free downloads of extra material you have to anyone who cares to download it. Either way, there are as many methods as there are bands – just keep looking out for opportunity to expand your audience beyond our shores.
7 Get Multi-Dimensional
Don’t just have one dimension to your music. Try and cultivate different versions of your music (electric / acoustic / solo / stripped down / no drums etc). This is REALLY important because unlike in big markets like the USA, there aren’t many music venues to play in Malaysia – especially if you do original material. This means you must maximise every gigging opportunity that comes your way, whether they are in cafes or stadiums.
This sounds fine in theory, but in reality, different venues will require you to play differently – e.g. a cafe is unlikely to want to have a loud band with drums – and so in order to play it (and you do), you’ll have to ‘strip down’. For this reason, 80% of my gigs are solo and acoustic.
It is also for the same reason that singer songwriters music as a genre is expanding very rapidly in Malaysia – because singer songwriters are by definition very mobile – they can play anywhere – from shopping centres to cafes to bars. Try and do the same. Developing different dimensions to your music will also develop you as a musician – so there is very little reason not to do it.
8 Make It Happen Yourself
It is very unlikely you’ll be able to find a manager when you start out (or at least a manager who has the requisite contacts and skills to be helpful to you). So get use to making things happen by yourself. Fundamentally, this means changing your mindset from being ‘a musician’ to ‘a musician who understands the business’. The latter is partly a factor of being not afraid to ‘self-promote’.
Thus, study how press kits are done and then write it yourself, manage a mailing list of fans, design your own leaflets when you gig, create your own opportunities and do your own publicity. Now, you can of course enlist the help of friends to do this – but it is important to realise that very little publicity happens by itself – instead, they are all ‘made to happen’ either by the artist’s management or label, or by the artist himself or herself.
This is the same for U2 as it is for you (except the scale is very different!). The worse that you can do is to make a record, then sit there and do nothing except expect the record to move off the shelves by itself. Trust me, it won’t. You’ll have to make it move by creating a buzz for your band – and keep doing it again and again and again.
9 Be Good To Your Fans
Other than the fact that life is too short to be an arsehole, truth is – without fans, you are not going to go very far in this business – so be nice to folks who like what you do. Sign autographs, reply emails, give free things away once in a while (however home-brewed, it is not the value of the freebie that counts but the thought).
Add a blog to your website so that you can keep your fans informed of what you are doing on a very regular basis, and where they can write stuff to you. You’ll find that the best advertisers for your music are your own fans. A few hundred fans will soon spread and become thousands if you do it right (always assuming your music is good enough to attract an audience in the first place!). But no artist start out with a fanbase – you’ll have to build one. Build one person at a time if you have to.
10 Develop A Unique Voice
Many Malaysian bands are ‘copycat’ bands. This is partly because they haven’t shrugged off their influences (normally foreign bands) yet. Hopefully, they will develop their own unique sound as they make progress.
Still, my advice is this: try to make music that is unique rather than try and sound like xyz – i.e. have your own sound that no one in the world has. Other than it being more fun than trying to sound like your heroes, there is another reason to so this – i.e. if you are serious about exporting your music to the USA or Japan or Europe, you cannot sound like some famous band in the USA or Europe or Japan and hope to be taken seriously in these markets. However, if you sound like no one on earth, you may have a decent chance.
Besides, (as said) having a unique ‘artistic voice’ is creative and challenging – so even if you’re forced to give up on this music lark in 5 years time, your effort to develop a unique artistic voice would have made the journey interesting and rewarding.
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