Your post-Rally game plan?

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Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by hummingbird » Mon Nov 09, 2020 5:47 am

This year, for the first time ever, even if you weren't able to attend all or part of the TAXI Road Rally, every single session and panel is available online. Each one of them is worth watching (and re-watching) as there are nuggets and gems even in the topics that might not fit your wheelhouse.

What I loved about this Rally was that from Day One I felt the spirit of the Rally was alive and well in the Youtube chats and in Robbie Hancock's Zoom Hangs each day (thanks again Robbie). I also loved that, in a way, we were 'up close and personal' with each speaker, could see their face and expressions and that we could 'see' examples of how things are done. In one way, we learned more because we could see the DAW and how the plug-in was being used or how the mastering was being done. And I really loved that I didn't have to choose between 6 things that were happening at the same time, all of which sounded interesting!

Perhaps we all didn't meet in person but we got to say hello and learn a little about each other. We shared website info and our list of skills, a bit about our goals, asked questions, perhaps felt a little close to our TAXI tribe.

This right here, this Forum, to me is a crucial resource, along with TAXI TV, the forum and the TV shows allow us to connect and communicate, commiserate and share knowledge.

I 'left' this Rally as I always do... sad it is over, my brain bursting, feeling inspired, and having more clarity of my path and what to do next.

For me I want to take inspiration from everything I heard and saw, but particularly Steven Pressfield (War of Art) and Steven Memel (Rejecting Rejection).

I'm going to get Composer Catalogue and organize my tracks, stems, metadata, etc.

I'm going to make my weekly plan every Monday morning.

I'm going to take a leaf from Robin Frederick's book and make the daily TAXI listings my educational guide to what's wanted and who sounds like what's wanted.

I am going to make sure I include practice and education (tutorials, courses) as part of my weekly plan.

I am going to write at least one finished track per week. (I'd like to say two or three but I'd rather be realistic and have a goal I can actually reach)

And, I am going to go back to Facebook as there are some good groups there (GYAWS, TAXI Rally Friends). I started yesterday going through my FB as I belonged to a ridiculous amount of groups and it was overwhelming me. So I am cleaning it up in hopes that going there won't feel so 'noisy' and distracting. I actually thought I might bookmark the groups and then I can just swing in, see what's up, and leave, without having to see a newsfeed.

There were some great resources mentioned this Rally, check them out:

Books by
Steve Barden
Dean Krippaehne


Books and courses by
Robin Frederick
Fett


And there were the great presentations by several sponsors, highly recommended as I learned something from each one.

That's my early post-Rally Monday morning thought process. How about you?
"As we are creative beings, our lives become our works of art." (Julia Cameron)

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Re: Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by PDebik » Mon Nov 09, 2020 6:22 am

- I will become contemporary by listening and analyzing all this terrible Top 40 hit music that I outgrew twenty years ago. Already started on it, will be on Spotify now regularly to listen to Spotify curated playlists.

- I have added a "Paypal.me" Link to all my outlets, following some ideas presented in the Bandzoogle sponsor presentation.

- Have registered several songs and instrumentals with the Federal Copyright Office yesterday, following the lawyer's explanation. Not my cues, but all the stuff that is likely to succeed in the market.

- More than ever I am convinced that my competitors are focusing way too much on production and way to little on marketing. So I'll continue focusing on marketing of what I got while continuously growing my repertoire.

- Considering to get MasterWriter, but not comfortable with the subscription model. A one-off purchase would be the better buy for me.

- Definitely need to solve the GEMA issue with Youtube video monetization (no content ID = no GEMA monetization as songs are only included in Youtube general reporting; it's most likely the same for BMI AND ASCAP). This will require 4,000 streaming hours and 1,000 subscribers. Will achieve the subscribers, but the streaming hours are still a big issue. Not yet sure what to do, but RR helped be to realize how important it is to use all opportunities to earn money from productions. So getting your content ID on Youtube and be allowed into the league where you can monetize a channel is very important.

Some more stuff, too, but once in while I'll need to get back into actually producing stuff, too ...

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Re: Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by CharlieErnst » Mon Nov 09, 2020 12:23 pm

Great post, Vikki. I have a lot of the same feelings.
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Re: Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by RPaul » Mon Nov 09, 2020 2:52 pm

Hi Peter,

A few thoughts on your thoughts, for whatever they may be worth:
PDebik wrote:
Mon Nov 09, 2020 6:22 am
- I will become contemporary by listening and analyzing all this terrible Top 40 hit music that I outgrew twenty years ago. Already started on it, will be on Spotify now regularly to listen to Spotify curated playlists.
I really had to laugh at this one. Back in mid-2015 I'd resolved to put a pop album out in the first half of 2016 (I just made it, releasing on June 30, 2016). I hadn't really been paying attention to what was on pop radio at the time, probably not for a number of years. I might put it on occasionally, but I wasn't listening to a lot of radio, really only when commuting to my day job, and, when I was home, I'd generally be working on something musical, so I couldn't be listening to other music. I wasn't expecting what I'd record would be current Top 40 radio material, but I was curious what was going on, and to get production ideas based on what I heard. (This had nothing to do with TAXI, as I was not a member at the time.) The main idea was to collect some pop-flavored songs I'd recorded over the years that might be finished or need remastering or minor remixing, record some more of the pop-flavored songs I'd written over the years, and maybe even write a few new ones. I didn't know what to expect on the radio front.

I was 55 at the time, but I'd grown up on pop, being influenced by many different artists, perhaps most prominently Elton John (his "Goodbye Yellowbrick Road" album was a huge turning point for me on the musical front, and I play and sing many of his songs live), but lots of others as well. But I'd gotten off on a country tangent during the 90s since that was where the main market for outside songs was, though I'd also lost interest in country around the time the Dixie Chicks got kicked off for political reasons, and especially when "bro country" took over.

The bottom line, though, was I fell in love with quite a number of modern pop and adult contemporary artists, from Taylor Swift's pop stuff (I hadn't been much of a fan of her country material, but the Max Martin factor was there with her pop stuff) to Pink to Ed Sheeran and loads more. More recent favorites have included Niall Horan, Halsey, Post Malone, and Ariana Grande, and Selena Gomez has even grown on me. I'm bad with remembering names, so this is only a very short list, but the point is really that I found a lot to like. Also some stuff that really didn't grab me (e.g. Drake, though there are a few of his songs here and there that I like). I think the key is listening to enough to find what works for you, but the good thing about pop radio is they repeat stuff so much, that it's easy to hear songs and artists enough to start developing preferences.

PDebik wrote:
Mon Nov 09, 2020 6:22 am
- More than ever I am convinced that my competitors are focusing way too much on production and way to little on marketing. So I'll continue focusing on marketing of what I got while continuously growing my repertoire.
At one point I had a quote on Myspace (or maybe it was my website?) that read, "a song is a terrible thing to waste." It is obviously a paraphrase of the more famous, "a mind is a terrible thing to waste," but I meant it in two dimensions. One was that, if a song is worth writing, it is worth writing well and making sure you get to the potential of the concept in the finished song. The other was, once a song is written, it does no one any good if it just sits on the shelf, so the next part of the challenge is how to get it out into the world and fulfill whatever potential it might have. I've had a fair number of minor successes on this front, with somewhere on the order of a dozen artists having recorded my songs, even one who had a top 5 hit for radio and video airplay in Mongolia back in the first half of the 2000s, but, at least thus far, nothing big enough to actually make a living. But a song, once written, will always be there, and can be recorded again and again for anything it might fit. I've been pretty lax in recent years on the marketing front, but, ideally, each song might have a mini-marketing plan to consider where it might have value and how to get it wherever it needs to be to realize that value.

Of course, if you're also marketing yourself as an artist (I'm doing a pretty bad job of that, but I am doing that to a degree), then the marketing is all the more important, and that is the sort of thing Tony Van Veen's prequel and RR presentations were really aimed at with his 50/50 suggestion on promotion and recording costs. It's probably valid for time spent, too.
PDebik wrote:
Mon Nov 09, 2020 6:22 am
- Considering to get MasterWriter, but not comfortable with the subscription model. A one-off purchase would be the better buy for me.
I got a 2-year MasterWriter subscription at one point a while back when TAXI advertised a discount. I'm also not fond of the subscription plan, though I also have one for Adobe's Photography Plan and, more recently, one for Microsoft 365. I'm also not super wild about MasterWriter itself, though I do use it when writing lyrics, and sometimes when doing other forms of writing. It is mainly user interface considerations that feel fairly clunky to me, and also some of the workflow decisions they've made.

For perspective, my old "lyric writing support system" consisted of using IdeaFisher (brainstorming, idea generation, word associations, etc.), the American Heritage Talking Dictionary (dictionary and thesaurus), and RhymeWizard (rhymes of all sorts, including phrases, near rhymes, etc.). I'd be writing alongside those, in Notepad with all visible in different windows, at least as they were needed. It was, for me, a great system, very easy to use, and did not slow things down by having to switch modules for workflow purposes like you do with MasterWriter (e.g. if you want to go between rhymes and thesaurus and word families, which are the closest thing they have on the front of idea generation). However, they were all 16-bit programs, and none of them are available at this point. I've tried a number of other rhyming dictionaries, even buying a copy of Rhyme Genie, but they just don't compare in terms of workflow considerations and friendliness. MasterWriter is at least somewhat better than the others I've tried, but still not as useful as RhymeWizard was.

Anyway, if you don't have programs you like for lyric writing, and you do, or intend to do, a lot of lyric writing, I do think MasterWriter is worthwhile -- I now use it alongside OneNote for the actual lyric writing. I personally don't use features other than its various dictionaries and references, but I do use the rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and word families function quite a bit, both in trying to come up with ideas for songs (I usually write lyrics first) and in fleshing the lyrics out.
PDebik wrote:
Mon Nov 09, 2020 6:22 am
- Definitely need to solve the GEMA issue with Youtube video monetization (no content ID = no GEMA monetization as songs are only included in Youtube general reporting; it's most likely the same for BMI AND ASCAP). This will require 4,000 streaming hours and 1,000 subscribers. Will achieve the subscribers, but the streaming hours are still a big issue. Not yet sure what to do, but RR helped be to realize how important it is to use all opportunities to earn money from productions. So getting your content ID on Youtube and be allowed into the league where you can monetize a channel is very important.
I don't know if there are differences in Germany, but I'm an ASCAP writer, and I do get paid for YouTube uses of recordings of my songs. I don't have anywhere near enough subscribers or streams for direct monetization of stuff on my YouTube page. However, when I, say, put up a lyrics video of one of the songs that I've released through CD Baby and include in their YouTube monetization program (or it just goes there directly as an audio plus cover art video), I do get paid (small fractions of pennies) for plays through content ID. In fact, if I put up a lyric video of my song I pretty much immediately get a copyright notice due to inclusion in the CD Baby program (this is not CD Baby Pro, but just the YouTube monetization option), and I get revenues from both CD Baby (for the recording) and ASCAP (for the song).

What I do not get paid for (to the best of my knowledge), however, is if I put a live performance video of one of my songs on my page since that won't have content ID.

Rick

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Re: Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by PDebik » Mon Nov 09, 2020 4:54 pm

Let me just quickly respond to the Youtube part (and thank you for all the other valuable information!): Yes, if you publish through a publisher and the publisher has your video up in his/her channel, then this will monetize. The publisher has a content ID for it, and this is run as a special report to the PRO.

But: If you have the same video in your own channel, you don't have a content ID for it, so Youtube will report it to a PRO in their "general reporting". The PROs cannot make any use of that general report, because it is not clear from that who exactly the artist is, if this is the person who really owns that song etc., because the data fields are not set-up so that machines can easily match the data. And here is where my issue comes in: I have songs with many streams on Youtube, far more than what my publisher gets for the same video, but I only get paid for the low number of the publisher's streams, because despite the high number of streams I have not reached the Youtube criteria to get my own content ID. So everything I have in my own channel is currently "lost" in terms of Youtube royalties. It is not that much, but for the future I definitely want to change that.

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Re: Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by RPaul » Mon Nov 09, 2020 5:40 pm

PDebik wrote:
Mon Nov 09, 2020 4:54 pm
Let me just quickly respond to the Youtube part (and thank you for all the other valuable information!): Yes, if you publish through a publisher and the publisher has your video up in his/her channel, then this will monetize. The publisher has a content ID for it, and this is run as a special report to the PRO.

But: If you have the same video in your own channel, you don't have a content ID for it, so Youtube will report it to a PRO in their "general reporting". The PROs cannot make any use of that general report, because it is not clear from that who exactly the artist is, if this is the person who really owns that song etc., because the data fields are not set-up so that machines can easily match the data. And here is where my issue comes in: I have songs with many streams on Youtube, far more than what my publisher gets for the same video, but I only get paid for the low number of the publisher's streams, because despite the high number of streams I have not reached the Youtube criteria to get my own content ID. So everything I have in my own channel is currently "lost" in terms of Youtube royalties. It is not that much, but for the future I definitely want to change that.
I was actually talking about songs/recordings I put out through CD Baby, but that are in my channel, such as with a lyric video I've created and uploaded. The Content ID (through CD Baby's submission of my song to YouTube) is matched because, as soon as I upload the lyric video, I get a copyright notification. And, of course, CD Baby has my information, both for the recording and for the songwriter/(self-)publisher information. One of my lyric videos ("Hallelujah, He is Risen") has had upwards of 1,500 views, and does show up on my ASCAP statements (as well as my CD Baby statements for the recording side of things). Other songs do as well.

As long as the recording is the same as one showing up through your distributor, they should match Content ID the same independent of whose channel they show up on. In fact this is a key reason for the CD Baby (and other distributors) YouTube monetization programs -- i.e. to give the opportunity of monetizing use of your songs/recordings even if someone else is using it in their videos. So, for example, encouraging fans to use your songs in their videos could increase your odds of getting royalties through YouTube.

If, on the other hand, the recording is not one you've distributed through someone with a YouTube monetization program (or you haven't opted into such a program), you would not be seeing money from its being played in videos on YouTube. And I think it is also the case that other uses of the song (say if someone did a live cover video of your song) would not show up since they wouldn't match the Content ID. You could manually make copyright claims on those, and perhaps that might work. (Haven't tried this.)

Rick

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Re: Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by cosmicdolphin » Tue Nov 10, 2020 11:45 am

PDebik wrote:
Mon Nov 09, 2020 6:22 am
- More than ever I am convinced that my competitors are focusing way too much on production and way to little on marketing.
That's funny, I tend to find the opposite 8-)

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Re: Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by PDebik » Tue Nov 10, 2020 3:18 pm

So Mark, would you plead to invest more into quality, too, like the panelists said? I am worried that one is bound to doing this for a hobby only in that case, because the time invested probably won't pay off.

Anyway, I haven't seen you in the chat rooms, did I miss you, different name maybe or didn't you watch? Just asking out of curiosity.

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Re: Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by Casey H » Tue Nov 10, 2020 7:37 pm

I'm buying a Taxi T-shirt! :D

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Re: Your post-Rally game plan?

Post by cosmicdolphin » Wed Nov 11, 2020 10:50 am

PDebik wrote:
Tue Nov 10, 2020 3:18 pm
So Mark, would you plead to invest more into quality, too, like the panelists said?
100% agree with the panelists. Production quality trumps composition & playing skills ( I guess that's why they call it Production Music ) for Libraries. ML has reiterated this also on Taxi TV multiple times over the years.

..as for marketing I'm not even sure where that figures into the equation ? If you're an artist and playing shows ( covid permitting ), gaining fans then sure - You need a strategy to market yourself to sell show tickets, merch and downloads or physical Cds' / Vinyl.

But if you're producing music which you hope will be signed to Libraries from a home studio, the library owners or their A&R staff are not paying attention to your marketing efforts. They get sent music daily, a lot of them can't listen to all they are sent as it's unsolicited ( and that's where Taxi can help ) but it's the high quality stuff that stands out when you're listening to music day in day out for years on end. If you watched the listening panels you can just see it on their faces when they hear something good. And most of the time they all asked for a copy of the same cue/song. Quality speaks for itself.

Do you think they are going to turn down a high quality track just because the member had no website or Youtube channel ? And vice-versa ..do you think they would sign one of the track they thought not up to the bar because they Googled the person and they had a fancy website ? Not a chance.

I've got music in 2 of the Libraries with people on the Day 1 panels ( not watched the rest as yet ) and one was through a Taxi Forward and the other, I emailed myself and wasn't even aware he used Taxi but it was just a Soundcloud link I'd sent..I have no website, no Youtube channel..no marketing at all . The quality of the music is the marketing.
PDebik wrote:
Tue Nov 10, 2020 3:18 pm
I am worried that one is bound to doing this for a hobby only in that case, because the time invested probably won't pay off.


It'll take you less time if you just focus on making music and not have to do marketing ..that's a job in itself if you do it properly
PDebik wrote:
Tue Nov 10, 2020 3:18 pm

Anyway, I haven't seen you in the chat rooms, did I miss you, different name maybe or didn't you watch? Just asking out of curiosity.


I've barely got through Day 1 - been busy , too many deadlines . So no I wasn't in the live chat sorry.

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