The Ultimate Guide To Being In A Band..

By @Pursehouse.

The Sentric blog has been going for a while now you know. We started over on MySpace (imagine that), took it over to WordPress and now it has found its home here on the Sentric site itself. It’s had the best part of a million hits since it kicked off and lots of you regularly say lovely things about my grammatically suspect ramblings which are rather wonderful of you all. Especially given the fact an old university lecturer of mine coined the term ‘Pursehouse Syndrome’ as to describe the infliction of ‘writing how one speaks’ when he read the first draft of my dissertation. “It’s like reading Dickie Bird trying to explain intellectual copyright in the music industry”. Pfft. I can speak proper like. Honest.

Over the past few months I’ve been on panels at a few music industry conferences (Reeperbahn & C/O Pop in Germany, Liverpool Sound City, Great Escape etc.) and in all of them a blog post or two of ours were mentioned in passing (and not always by muggins here) so I thought it might be useful to whack all the ‘best’ blogs we’ve done in one handy UBER post so for anyone new to the Sentric blog they have a nice easy place to start.

So just a quick recap on what the whole bloody point of this thing is anyhow.

Advice. There’s an utter bugger load of it out there on the internet. Some of it wonderful, but a worrying amount of it utterly useless that never gets to any real crux of the issue and is simply masquerading as click bait for advertising revenue or as a carrot to dangle in front of an ulterior motive. When I started the blog, it wasn’t to advertise Sentric, that’s why it’s free for all to see and we don’t hide it in the background only for those who use our service to read. The truth is, I started it because I was frustrated. Frustrated by the seemingly basic things many, many artists/bands/musicians were doing wrong on a daily basis and I was fed up at explaining a number of these bread-and-butter examples until I was blue in the face.

The best advice I’ve ever been given over the years is by people who know the subject area well and who don’t sugarcoat it. All the advice contained in the Sentric blog tries to take heed of this ethos; it’s truthful and potentially blunt at times, but not cynical and never unnecessarily abrasive.

With that in mind, I hope you find the following blogs useful! If you know any musicians, work with any, or indeed are a musician yourself then please share this post as, if anything else, it’ll make my life better if they ever decide to email me and because of what’s below they don’t attach a 12mb MP3 called ‘TRACK 01 ‘ by ‘UNKNOWN ARTIST’. God, I hate it when they do that.

‘Just WTF Is Music Publishing?’ – Explains the basics of music publishing as simply as possible. Covering performing rights income streams (live, radio, TV), mechanical rights income (both with example figures) and synchronisation.

The Big List of Digital Tools For Managing Your Band – A gigantic list of over 90 digital tools that can assist you in managing the day to day tasks of being in a band. There is something for everyone here!

Five Simple Ways Your Band Can Start Making Money – Getting the money ball rolling for your band can be difficult. This guide shows you five ways to start generating some initial cash.

Six Music Industry Newsletters You Want To Land In Your Inbox – Keeping up with the goings-on in the music industry is becoming more and more important for any band or artist. Subscribe to these newsletters and get the news straight to your inbox

‘How To Land A Sync Deal In 9 Steps’ – Sync is a hot topic in the biz and every Tom, Dick & Harry in the music industry is trying to get their song on the next big advert thanks to the cash and exposure it can generate. By following this handy guide you’ll instantly become about 99% more attractive to music supervisors and significantly increase your chances of landing a sync deal.

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‘If I was An Emerging Artist & I Had £1,000 To Spend Then…’ – Big fan of this post personally. I basically asked that question to a boatload of music industry people and collated their answers here. It includes contributions from labels, managers, journalists, DJs, producers, distributors, engineers, sync agents, promoters & more. Genuinely really interesting to see how so many different people would spend the same amount of money in the music industry.

‘Top 10 Tips On Email Etiquette For Bands’ – That sounds like quite a boring title for a blog, eh? The fact of the matter is; first impressions are outrageously important in the music industry. The person you’re emailing for the first time has most probably also received ten other emails from 10 other bands that day and might only have the time/motivation to reply to one out of those ten. So why should he/she choose yours? Because you’ve read this blog of course.

‘Everybody Needs Good Neighbour(ing) Rights’ – Covers what neighbouring rights are, who is entitled to them and how you can collect them via the PPL.

Ask The… A&R // Ask The… Agent // Ask The… Lawyer // Ask The… Music Supervisor // Ask The… Tour Manager – These four posts were a lot of fun to write. I basically collated a list of questions from Sentric artists and pitched them to a number of people in specific parts of the industry who were then asked to answer them completely anonymously which allowed them to be as honest as possible. The results were really interesting and I’d argue some of the most useful reading we’ve ever put together on the Sentric blog.

The Big List Of Music Industry Acronyms (The BLOMIA) – PRS, PPL, MCPS, PRO, ISWC, ISRC, UPC, LOL, WTF, OMG, etc. There’s a lot of acronyms out there to keep on top of. Get this post bookmarked and you can refer to it whenever a pesky one shows its face.

‘Seven Steps To Metadata Utopia’ – Don’t send an MP3 to ANYONE, not even mother, until you’ve read this. You might have written the best pop song since Mamma Mia, but if it shows up in my iTunes as ‘TRACK 01’ by ‘UNKNOWN ARTIST’ then how am I going to find you to give you all my money? (And if it does sound like Mamma Mia then I truly mean ALL my money).

‘My Perfect Demo Submission’ – Definitely a post that’s weighted towards me personally rather than the industry as a whole, but if you’re going to send music to someone for the first time; doing it like this is a good idea.

’10 Tips On Applying For A Job In The Music Industry’ – This post was written after a busy year of hiring at Sentric and after sifting through hundreds of CVs, some of which made for incredible reading. Getting any job at the moment is tough, but even tougher in an industry which is already oversubscribed. This guide should help get the basics right and get you in for an interview (and then you’re on your own, I’m afraid.)

‘What’s That Festival Worth?’ – A gigantic list of all the major UK festivals and how much on average they generate in performance royalties. Lovely

A [DAB]ble Into Radio Royalties – How are they reported? Where do the royalties come from? All questions answered in this helpful guide.

So there you go! A lot of reading there, but invest a Sunday afternoon ingesting it all and you’ll quickly become several steps ahead of literally thousands of other bands out there all producing music as good as yours, but not doing everything else around it very well.

Please do share, it really is appreciated.

Cheers,

Simon Pursehouse