Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Fear. It's Ryan and I'm in the music business and you can't be too. Let's talk about I'm Ferris and I'm a creative I manage multiple projects. One of my projects is Ferris Ryan. Designs on another is the well set up start. While many people did not know about the music industry is that music can actually be a business and they can actually make you passive income, this class is about creating a music out from start to finish, and I will give you my step by step process of how to do just that. Let's get started when I noticed about the music industry is that many people, especially independent artists, don't know how to market their music. Well, now you could make beautiful music. You can record it. You could put it out, But will people listen to it now? I believe there's tons of people out there in the world that actually want to listen to your music. They just don't know about you yet, so there's a block there in that block involves marketing. What I want to do is give you some of my marketing tips and tricks about how to bridge the gap between creating your art and then sharing it with people who actually want to listen to it and growing your audience, growing your music business so that you can have passive income regularly. So what is Pacifico? Passive income is money you are making passively. It is income that no longer requires active work from you. That being said, it takes time up front, and sometimes it takes money to make money. However, passive income is like a money machine that you can set it and forget. It can sometimes be a little more complicated than that. But that's the basics. So why am I qualified to teach this class? Well, I've released five albums and many singles along the way through multiple music. Artists have worked with and written with many musicians in their creative process of writing their own albums. And I'd like to help you. If you're a musician, a singer, songwriter, novice producer or someone who is interested in how things are made, then this class will be great for you. This class will probably be best received by the singer songwriters, the instrumental music producers who have dreams of releasing their music online digitally . By the end of this class, you'll have an album name, a piece of album art that you've sketched and you have ready to you send to graphic Designer a list of song titles that you want to include in your release and a checklist that will keep you on track to marketing and reaching your goals for your album release. If you have a friend that wants to release their music online, then I recommend you send them. This class sharing is caring. For this class. You'll need a pen and paper, a computer or a laptop or a cell phone with a note section that you can write down your creative ideas in. Along the way. You'll want something that you can draw our sketch or design your album art during the course. So go ahead and grab those things and I'll see you in the next lesson.
2. Motivation / Backstory: so you're interested in putting your music out of line. I'm so excited. I have two words for you. Do it now. There's a little bit about the creative process that I want to reveal to you. You know, releasing an album is a lot of fun. However, it takes real time and motivation. Let me show you what I call the motivation graph on the graph. There's an X and A Y axis. The X axis represents time, and the Y axis represents motivation. In any project, it's pretty easy to have motivation when you just start out and over time. It's also really easy to lose motivation in the middle of a project. Whenever more time is involved in any creative process, there will be more opportunity to lose motivation the short of the amount of time a project takes, the less time there will be for motivation to be lost. Don't let yourself lose motivation. Don't give up. It's really fun to say Hey, I have my music streaming on apple music or Spotify. Go listen to it and it's even more fun to say. Be sitting back in bed and sleeping at night or playing football with your friends and be making money passively. Let me tell you a little bit of my story. Now, currently, my wife and I are musicians, producers. We record our own music and put it out online. Here's one of ourselves. You came north when I went so and we met in the middle way live in a little white house. You sing high when I sing low and we met in the middle and now we never have to sing So I've been reading with him since I was impressed When I was four years old, I started learning the piano. When I was eight, I picked up a trumpet and in high school re top myself piano and guitar and other string instruments and brass instruments. I started writing songs and recording them with bad microphones and blankets from my bed at age 16. I then bought ancient laptop, and I blew it up, trying to record on it. I then progressed into recording on my iPhone and my touch. Next, I went to free recording software called Audacity, and it was the best thing out there for free at the time. From there, I wrote it up with a friend. We actually travelled to India and produced it. And then I got to go on tour, and it was a lot of fun. Now that stories for another time. What I wanted to tell you is that after that, technology got dramatically better is actually quite a few companies out there that are offering a free version of their recording software called a Dog. A Dog is a D A W stands for digital audio workstation. And two years ago I released two different Children's albums and that I produced the entire albums using their free instruments on priests. Honest Studio One. For now, we're gonna go or some really simple steps in order to help you record your own music and then get to that album release. I'll see you in the next lesson.
3. Record Yourself: So you want to learn to record yourself right? That's a great idea. There's a lot of software out there that's for free, and you can probably do a lot more than you thought you could do. Plus, recording yourself will actually help bring down your cost of your album. I'm not saying that you can't work with a producer. And let me tell you, a producer is somebody that helps create the music for you, for your track for your song. If you're a singer songwriter and you don't really know how to record yourself well or arranged music in a way that sounds good, say being played on radio, then you might want to work with a music producer, somebody who records you and can at extra instruments and higher positions. But I want you to know, is that recording your music is extremely possible and it's extremely efficient if you consent a piece of a song or your own recorded instrumentation to a producer so that they can work on it for you and give you the best quality arrangement possible. There's plenty of digital audio workstations out there. If you have a laptop, there's some that can record on iPhones. On the laptop, you'll find able 10 Native Instruments Pro Tools, FL Studio Garage Band studio, one toe list, a few. And on your iPhone. You can actually record with something called Garage Band. And if you have another cell phone, there may be something like voice memos that you could just record make a sound recording and be able to send that to a producer. Believe me, it really helps them have something to go off of. Know this. Even if you don't think that you're good at recording yourself, it's still really possible and important to be able to record yourself on a simple phone recording and send it to producer. They could really use the help understanding what you want to sound like. I'll see you in the next lesson.
4. Audience / Names: Here's your next step. You want to define your audience and then you want to write songs for them. Now, this may sound a little bit strange for some people who are really creative now. It's important to understand that we're marketing now. I said that I'm gonna give you some of my marketing tips and tricks along the way, and this is trick number one. I want you to be able to define your audience. Who is going to listen to the type of music that you're gonna create? I want you to think about their feelings. I want to think about their topics that they like to talk about a theme or a specific move that they like to have. Who is the audience that's going to be listening to your music? This is super important. This is the first step in marketing point number two of this lesson is that I want you to group your songs together. I want you to group your songs that you've written in terms of style and feeling and emotion and topic and theme. I want you to put them into groups so that you can reference them later. Point number three, I want you to name all of your songs. If you haven't done so yet, I want you to name them for reference purposes. Point number four of this lesson is I want you to choose one group of songs. This group of some should have a cohesive theme. Or if it's telling a story, maybe a narrative that you're gonna be communicating to your audience. This needs to be something that your audience resonates with. Point number five. The last point in this lesson is I want you to name your album Now. I realized this seems like a lot toe asked right at this point in the class, but I want you to have a common theme or narrative or story involved in your album making process so that you have something to go back to. And then eventually you know exactly how the market people. So this album name could be your band's name. It could be one of the song titles from the album, or it could actually be one of the feelings that use referenced earlier or the motifs with themes that your songs are about. I'll see you a nice lesson
5. Album Art Sketching / Album Size: well, I'm super excited for you. You've done so much so far. You've written songs for an audience. You've gone ahead, group those songs together and chosen. One group has a similar thing. You were topic Ramo T for narrative story or feeling, and you've taken that a group of songs and named it with What Is Perspectively, your album name? That's really cool. You've done so much now what I want you to do next. Start working on your album art. Now. This may seem a little intimidating as well, but just be free. Be creative. One thing that really helps is if you create a Pinterest board or if you don't have a Pinterest account, you could take out a piece of paper and you could cut up some magazine pieces and glue them onto that piece of paper. I didn't include that in the original list of things that you needed for this class, but it really helps. It's what's called a mood board and really helps, you know, visual t the feeling that you're going for for this album, and eventually it will really help your graphic designer when you go ahead and send them a sketch of your rough album are now. While you're sketching, I want to Tell you the story. When I was younger, I released an album with my friend. I said We went to India on that album. We actually got to engulf the community in the art creation process. So we had a bunch of people bring in paintings, designs that we could then put up at a concert that we had. And we had the audience of the concert vote on which piece of art would be our album art. That's a really cool way of involving the community in your art form. Maybe your audience wants to be really involved in your album creation process. They want to follow you along the way on Instagram Social Media on Instagram. It could be really cool if you had a carousel of several different types of art ideas and you swipe through and you let people choose and number 123 or four and you let them be a part of the process. Your fans love that now, while you're sketching, if you're still able to sketch and follow along with me here, I want you to think about the size of your album. How many songs do you want your album to be? Do you want it to be like three or four songs or do you want it to be more like 10 or 15? 15 is a lot of tracks, and I know many people who have done that, and I want you to know that it's okay to start out with something small. Many people released what's called an experimental playoff first or release a few singles and then released their experimental play album that, in short, is called E. P. Now there's also something called an LP. This actually came from the vinyl records. They were called long playing albums, and you could play one side of the disk and flip it over and play more. And that's where the LP in the E. P come from. Now it's perfectly acceptable to release an E P, an experimental play album, a short album that's probably around 3 to 5 songs and give your audience an appetizer, a taste for what they're on. Trade is gonna be like later. A long play album is a lot of work. It's again even more time in the process to create, and you want to be conscious of your motivation, how you feel if you're really good at creating long projects, then work on something long. But if you're really good at creating short projects and long things seem to intimidate you , start out with something small. Maybe even release a single at first and then release your E P and then release your elope . That is a good way to build your audience over time. There's a quick marketing tip now. The last point in this lesson is that you may need to write more songs now. What we did originally was we wrote our songs for our audience, and then we took those songs and group them together and choose one group. Right now, that group of songs you may like a lot of them, but you may not like a few of them. You may need to replace them. Another thing that might happen is that the group of songs that you originally had is not as many as you would like to release on your final album. So you may need to write a few more songs in order to make your album say an E p or an LP. That's all we got for this lesson. I will see you in the next one with.
6. Reference Material / Research: Hi there. Welcome back to the class. I'm really excited to see your class project, which is gonna be your album art. Keep working on it. Keep writing your songs, keep creating and crafting your album. What you want to do next is you want to create reference material. Reference material is not well understood. Not a lot of people know how to do it well, because there's a lack of musical training now. That's okay, because producers will often work with you with your idea, especially if you have a rough recording of some kind. Now there's three different ways that you could submit reference material to your producer . Let me tell you about number one. You could chart your music number two. You could create court sheets, and number three could record your music roughly. Now. What is the rough recording of your music? Sounds like it sounds like something that's recorded on your iPhone. It may sound like something that's been more well produced in your free digital audio workstation or your professional audio workstation. If you wanted to purchase that, if you wanted to go one step further, but you could do is you could take all the lyrics of your songs and write them out on a piece of paper and then play your song with your lyrics. And whenever you're chord changes on your guitar or on your piano, you want to write that chord letter, the letter of the note above the lyric or the word where it changes. This will really help the producer. When he's looking at your reference material, he's reading your lyrics and seeing where the chord changes in hearing where the courts change in your song, it will help him produce for her produce your music. The last thing that you could do is you could actually go as far as charming your music. Now this is for those people who know a lot of music theory and understand how to write music on paper. Some people will be able to write their music out with the notes and the melody and chords , and orchestrate melodies and harmonies and different instruments to play a different times if that's you, go for it. If you want to send that chart of music to your producer and they know how to read that type of music really well, go for it, the more the better. The next thing that I want you to do is I want you to go on YouTube or Spotify apple music or wherever you listen to music. And I want you to compile a list of songs in a style or a feeling that sounds or feels like you want to sound or feel. I want you to be able to give each one of those tracks to your producers so they'll know what you want to sound like. Even better now. What's really helpful for some producers is if you will take one of your songs and parent with another one or two of the songs that you found so that they'll have even more reference material to hear what you want your son to not only be produced like with that instrumentation, but also being mixed, mastered like later in future. Now, the last step in this lesson is that I want you to research producers. Now you may be thinking, I thought all producers were the same and they could do the same things, but that's not entirely true. Some producers have different style than others, and you might want to figure out who's local in your area. I have a list of different ideas to help you with your producer research and choosing process. Here they are. I want you to find a local producer or a local audio engineer, especially for your vocals. Then I want you to think about another producer that maybe would make all the music of your tracks, somebody that you'd be able to send those vocals that you recorded, too. Maybe your producer can record vocals for you. That's a plus. I want you to find a mixing engineer if that's not the same person is your producer, and I want you to find the mastering engineer. If that's not the same person, that's your producer, and I want you to ask for quotes. Now. Some producers like to keep everything all in the same house. They like to help you from start to finish of your album, and that's great. Now other people have the opinion that you should be giving your music toe. Multiple people toe listen to other ears, listening to project and giving their own opinions and critiques and taste. A lot of people in the music industry don't just work with one producer, but they also send their song after it's been created to a mixing engineer and then a master engineer. Now, if you need a producer or mixing or mastering engineer, I offer some of those services through my own business. Reach out if you're interested, I'll see you in the next lesson.
7. Production: Hi there. Welcome back to class. On this lesson, you're actually going to learn about working with a producer and what that's like. So we have four steps. First step is that you need to send the documents and music files that you made in the last lesson. We need to send those over to the producer so that they can get a style and a feel for your music. You need also send them all those files of or the names of the songs that you want to sound similar to. Each track should sound similar to that will really help them get started. Now you want a contract time with your producer and let me tell you why that's important. Contracting time with the producer means they're gonna set apart days and hours of their schedule so that you can pay them to record you or so that they can work on producing a song for you recording this song for you and then you come in and sing over it. Now they mean, even need to hire some musicians in order to come in and work with you or work on the music apart from you being there so that you can actually have the best experience possible. So your producer really wants to work with you, and it's their job to actually make sure that you're getting the attention you deserve, that your music sounds just the way you want it to. Now you can always get your music to sound a little bit better and mawr like You want it, Teoh. But you know, know that not all art is perfect. You need to know how to stop and say I'm done with this song. I'm done with this album. I need to move on. So make sure that you have a budget set for yourself, and that producer knows about it so that they don't You don't overspend when you're working on this project. The next step. Step Number two. It's actually to choose one song toe work on. You're gonna record one song really well with your producer and then you're going to model the rest of the songs after the style and feel of that song. Now some people may disagree with me on this process. This is how I do it. This is my creative style. I like to work on one song and the rest of the album is shaped by how that song feels or sounds, because when we get one song, dial that really well, then we know what we're looking for, kind of in an essence for the feel of the rest of the album, you want to start with one some. That's what I suggest in order to then have your producer be able to help you create more songs in a similar style and instrumentation. So the third thing that you're going to do is you're going to listen to your mixes and you're going to listen to your masters so you're mixes. This may be done all at the same time, and it's really important to know that you may need to contract a mixing engineer or a mass nearing engineer. I'll tell you about what those things are. Just a moment. Just know that sometimes your producer doesn't mix things or master them. They want that toe will be done by other people. Like I said earlier, in the other lessons, sometimes people need to contract out mixing engineers and mastering engineer. So let's gettinto what? Mixing and mastering ISS really simply mixing is taking all of the different instruments and your vocals that you've recorded and then putting different effects on each thing and then putting volume levels on each thing so that they sound like a cohesive unit or a band that's playing live to you in your ears When you're listening. Now I want you close your eyes and imagine for a moment you're at a concert. Now the vocalist has just come out on stage there, right in the middle of the stage, and they're singing now. You noticed their positioning there, right in the middle of the stage. Now where's the drummer? Drummer is typically directly behind the vocalist. Where's the guitar player? You know, they may be off to the right or the left. Where is the basis they may be off the right or left? The keys might be in between them. It's super important to notice this, because when you're mixing, you have to make a sound sound high or lower side to side, so that in your ears you feel like you're experiencing the music as it's played live. And that's a super important thing. So mixing sets all the levels and makes your music sound like it's live, so mastering is next, and mastering is I'm gonna show you a picture Here is taking a sound file that looks very jagged, that you said a lot of different levels of sounds and volume for and you want to bring all of those highs low and all of the lows high so that they more or less equal one another so that they sound more similar to the ear. Another thing that mastering does is you want to take the volume of the overall track because a lot of times we record them very quietly. You want to take the volume of the overall track and you want to raise it so that it can be played next to another song on the radio and it sounds about the same level. The fourth and final step of this lesson is that you want to choose your songs. Choosing your songs is super important. Not every song that you record can be released. Some songs sound different from what you originally thought they were going to be like in some songs that you thought we're not going to be very good turn out to be your best song on the album. This has happened to me again and again and again the songs that I thought were going to be perfect. We're going to be the single the hit. Those actually don't always become the single or the hit. Sometimes they do. But just saying not everything becomes perfect in the music creation process. Give yourself grace and know that you get to move on. You get to finish the project. That's what this album release is all about. You put in so much effort. So for so much time you're working with the producer. You're about halfway through, and now you're going to finish something. So take a deep breath and finish the project. Choose your final songs. Which ones are you going to feature on your album? Maybe you wanted to write 10 or 12 or 13 songs, and then you want to cut it down to five. Just release an E P. A first. That's OK. Maybe you wanted to write more songs and cut it down to 10. A lot of people do that. Choosing your songs and setting the order of your songs now is super important again, like I said. A lot of people want to tell a story with their album. A lot of people want their album to sound very similar. So the tracks that sound similar again you should group them together like we did earlier and release those as a single unit. I know that this could be hard sometimes. So give yourself grace. Give yourself time, asked the opinions of others like your friends maybe asked opinion of your producer. What songs would sound good together? Maybe you want to leave one of them out. That's just the suggestion that I want to give you in the next lesson.
8. Copyright Protection: All right. So you've made it to the next lesson. Your little over halfway through your album creation process, you have gone so far through what we call post production. And now you just finished preproduction and you're getting excited. You have all of the files that you want. They're mixed in their master. You know what your final songs sound like. Now hold on to them, cherish them. You don't have to release them yet. And I advise you that you don't. Why? Maybe you don't want them to be stolen. Maybe you don't want them to be used by anybody else. What you need todo is copyright. So it's very important is now you either register them on line to be copy, read it or you can just use what's called a poor man copyright. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that it has a little bit less protection. So what a lot of people do is they write something down on paper, they type it up, give it a date, and then they mail it to themselves. And that document has been copyrighted. Now will it hold up in court? Will, to a certain degree however, something that's been filed the Library of Congress will hold up even Maurin court because it is a government document. If that makes sense, so you can either copyright something yourself with what's called the poor man's method. Or you can go ahead and spend money and copyright something officially with the government . It will hold up better. It makes some sense if you're going to be putting your music out there to be licensed, and it makes more sense if you're going to be collaborating with other artists, making sure that they get their portion of the profits that they deserve, let me show you a couple ways to do this. So if we go on the Library of Congress, stop calm. You're gonna see a place where you can upload your own documents to be copyright it. Now what you want to upload this year. Original song files that you have probably some MP threes, and then you also want to record the lyrics and all the lyrics of your album in one place. I highly recommend that you put them all together. Some people choose to do them individually. I like to do them all together because it costs less. Let me show you where to go on the website for a moment. You probably want to upload your documents and e file. If you follow the funnel that they've set up here, it will bring you all the way to uploading your documents and registering your music and your lyrics together. And usually what's called a live performance type of copier get excited. This next part of the lesson is where passive income begins. Now you won't be making million's right away, so this is where it begins. I want to talk to you about as captain Be Emma ASCAP in B m I. R. Two different organizations that you registered your music with and whenever your song title is used in, say, a live performance or your song title is used in a movie or used in a production of some kind, and you get live performance rights or royalties, and that gets paid to you Now if your music is created and then put out but you don't register with as capper b m. I. You're not going to know if it's been used, so it's super important to start with this account if you would like. If you're not looking to be that big of an artist right out the gate that it's okay, you might give yourself time to breathe. Time to sell some CDs and make some money first. And then you might be able to afford the cost of annual membership toe one of these companies as cat or being let me show you one of the websites here on this website. There is a place for people to register their music as artists, and there's a place for people to report the songs and that they used in their productions . Now it's important to note that your ASCAP, where you're being my membership you can only be a part of one, will actually be working for you on your behalf. It's really important to note that you don't have to go looking for those people that are performing your music live or performing your music on the radio or selling your music. This is where people report to. After they've used your music toe, let them do the work. The reason why they do it is because you paid them so as capper b m i. If you choose to be a part of those groups. It helps protect your copyright, and it's about $50 a year. The price for the Library of Congress and filing something with an E document is more or less $55.1 single time. After a few months, your documents will show up in the mail, and it will show you what you have. Copyright it. You off a physical copy and it will be stamped with the Library of Congress is Thank you for listening. I'll see you on the next list.
9. Marketing / Designer: Welcome to this next lesson about releasing your album from start to finish. Guess where we're at. We're in the end zone. We're almost there. What you're gonna do is we're gonna start marketing. That's a joke, because you should have been marketing all along. What you've been doing is you've been setting up something for an audience and hopefully you've been sharing some things on instagram, giving some people some sneak peeks because you really are getting excited to release these tracks you worked on so hard. And you probably want to start making some money so that you can really benefit financially from the passive income that can come in from your music on a streaming platform. So what happens next? Marketing market, market market? I can't say enough. You should be recording video during your whole process. So far, you should be taking photos. Like I said, posting things on social media. You want to get the news out there, that you're going to be releasing an album and hopefully you've been doing it. Maybe you upload a single. Maybe you've put out some little bit of the taste so that people want to have more like I said earlier, you want to bring in the appetizer and then you want to give them the entree. Marketing builds momentum for your release. There's lots of different ways to do this. There's lots of different social media platforms to do it on, and the most frequent way that people do it right now is through Facebook. At there's YouTube ads, there's interest adds. There's old hands of different places where you could put your music. Now the next thing that you want to do is we're on a research and hire a graphic designer. Maybe you know somebody that could help you out with this for free, to keep the cost low. But you want to be really attractive in your brand visually and also with your music, right? So you need to pair your music with something that is pretty. What is that? Usually that's album art. So the thing that you've been sketching and designing this whole time, you're now going to send that off to a graphic designer. Now they may have some other ideas. If you want help developing your album art content, the next thing that you want a pirate designer for is for a website. Web developers can help you give a really beautiful image to what your brand sounds like. I know that seems a little bit complex, but we're in the business of creativity. Here. We want to pair images like our Pinterest board that we created earlier. We want to share those things with your music so that it sounds cohesive. It feels comfy sieve, and your audience loves it. Your audience hypothetically, eats it up. This is really exciting. This is a service that I provide. I'm a graphic designer. I really love hearing visuals with sound and all the senses combined. That's why I think it's super important to improve your brand and develop your brand. That's the main service that I provide in my personal design business. Reach out if you're interested. I know that a lot of people like to listen to music and look at the album are at the same time. I know that I like to do that. I like to feel that connection. During the album Art. Try to feel what it's trying to say what the heart of the album is trying to show me or evoke themes and topics that is trying to communicate. I know that that's super important, not only to do on with audio, but also visually. Now your album art needs to be in about a square formation, and then you're gonna have to upload it online later. So make sure that you're not just creating music and then uploading it without a picture. You need to release it with the picture of some kind. Maybe you want it to be really simple. If you want it to be really complex. It's important for you to research a graphic designer so that you can get out of them what you want. Look for the person that will best represent you and your brand and what you want your album to feel like. I'll see you in the next lesson.
10. Release Date / Distribution: This is great. You've made it almost all the way through this class. And if you're working alongside this class creating your album, you made it almost there almost all the way to your album release. What's next, your marketing and your album release? You need a plan. How to release your album because you have your music files. You have your album art. What are you going to do? You need to set a date, right? Let's set a date together. Now look at a calendar. Here's some things that I want you to consider. I want you to plan a release date at least two weeks to a month into the future. This is really important because a lot of distribution platforms don't let you release right away, and it takes several days, sometimes weeks, in order to upload your music to all the different platforms and stores that you want your music to be sold or streamed on. Maybe you want to release your music near a holiday. Maybe you want to release your music near a season of the year that your album feels like maybe you want to have Halloween music for Halloween or Christmas music for Christmas or summer music for summer or spring music for spring. It's really important to do that with your marketing. You want to feel like spring. You want to sound like spring. You want to give spring images. The next thing that you want to do is distribute your music on the platform that I just mentioned earlier. The way that you do this is through 1/3 party, and you can use anybody from District Kid CD baby. There's all kinds of options out there. I think this trip it is a very good price to work with. It's about $20 a year, and it's very base price. Also an added benefit. Here you're working with Destro, kid. I just wanted to tell you that you can specifically cover other people's songs and then upload your music, District it and check a box that says This is someone else's song. I actually want to write in the artist's name here so that you can take care of getting a license for me in my music so that I am not breaking any laws here recording someone else's song and then releasing it. They need to be paid their royalties for this music that you created Now this class is not about physical CDs. It's not about getting something printed into a CD or onto a vinyl record or onto a novelty cassette tape. Who has one of those? I don't know Many people that, like still play those or a track or maybe a USB flash drive. Some people still buy physical copies of your music. If you want to get that, if you want to invest in that, it could be a great way to market your content. You can say I have CD's. I'm giving one away. I can send them out to you. That could be a really great way to market. I want you to pay attention to what your audience wants. You might ask people on social media. Hey, does anybody want a physical copy? Somebody want a CD that they can still play in their car? A lot of people will still purchase your music and see you for even though they could stream it on their iPhone. I want you to think about that. One of the companies that I like to go with is United manufacturing. They have a lot of eco friendly packaging and thinks that they use when they're printing. I would recommend them as a great option for creating your physical CDs. I'll see you on the next list.
11. Marketing Momentum: So welcome back. We're talking about marketing. We're talking about scheduling your release here a few points. I don't want to give you about how, Teoh. Go ahead and start marketing involved in your community and getting people excited for your album release. You could set up whatever shenanigans you want to do to celebrate your album release. You want to create hype on social media. You want to give samples away. You want to create fun videos. You want to start a YouTube channel and feature a single of the week before the release. You want to get creative. You want to inform your social media community to share your music. Were at least share the idea that your album is coming out. It's so important to involve the people that really support you. So started email list. Collect emails, start a countdown countdown to the release of your album and then have a party. Maybe you have a listening party where people come over to your house where some where were you player music or some music videos or some lyric videos so that they feel excited and involved in this project, and then they want to share It is a huge part of your marketing, an organic process. Again. You want to market this to the people that are your audience, the people that are feeling the emotions, feeling the themes or topics that like to gather around things like summer, if you like summer than maybe your audiences surfers. If you like Halloween that maybe your audience likes dark things, spooky things and you want a theme, your entire party or celebrate your own release like that. I know some people have released their albums on YouTube live, so they put up a video and it's streamed for the whole world to here at a certain time. And that's how they do it. A lot of people released their album on Soundcloud. A lot of people just want to get their music out there somehow for a specific group of people. And then those people love that. They were with the only ones to hear it, and then they push it out to the greater community, their network. Here's a really quick tip. You can actually go to song duct link, and you can go on their search, your artist's name, your album name or the music that you just released the song title, Maybe, and you can find it anywhere online. What's really cool about it is when you search that album name, they give you a link. You can copy that link, and you can put it in your bio of your instagram or in a post on social media so that people can click it and find your music anywhere They like to listen to music online, whether it be YouTube or Apple music or spotted five or title or I heart radio, you can send them wherever they want to go, and that is really convenient for your fans. So I wanted to carry that tip, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
12. Review Cost: Hey there, Welcome back to the lesson. We're really excited because we just released our album. That's great news. Now let's talk about cost in the process. You possibly done it for free. That's exciting. You got to a point at distribution process where to get it into the stores, you probably have to pay 1/3 party service around $20 or more in order to get it out. All the stores. So you didn't have to copyright If you didn't want Teoh, you didn't have to use as capper. Be a mind to protect her copyright. You didn't necessarily have to even contract a producer. A mixture of mastering engineer. If you know how to use those programs, you could have done this entire process for about $20. So if you did, that's really exciting. If you didn't, I really want you to make passive income from this process in the way I want you to make passive income. Now let's look at what our costs were for this entire album. Number one recording and producing. You could have done this for free or up to about $3000 say if you were spending $300 per song for 10 songs. I wouldn't pass about $3000 on your first album. Number two Mixing and mastering Free to up to $1000 graphic design free to up to $1500 especially if you're just starting out. Copyright could be free. You probably should do it, and it'll cost you around. $50 to $100. Distribution can cost you around 20 to $40 a year. It is a must in this process of releasing your music online Physical CD production, depending on what you wanted to spend, might cost you $100 to $400 for your 1st 100 CDs. That is normal. So thank you for watching this lesson. Let's move onto the next one. We're almost finished.
13. Labels & More Tips: welcome back to the lesson. I'm super excited to share with you a few more thoughts about the creation process because you made it through all the steps. Now I want to review a few things with you. The last lesson you talked about all the difference. Things that cost when going through music production and the entire release of your album from start to finish. Now we're going to talk a little bit about how hard that waas because if you're doing this all by yourself, you're an independent musician, your independent artists, your independent music business owner. Now what you want to know is that there are things like labels out there. If you don't know what a label is, it's a music business that represents you. They have people that produce music, that market music that are graphic designers that make videos. They do a lot of work for the artist. Now what does that mean? You're probably contracting with them and you're probably paying them money in order to use their services. Now what's important to note is that if you want to be successful in the music industry, you probably don't want to sign with a label right away. Why that's important is because you probably don't understand the music industry really well right away. My advice to you is don't take out a large loan for an album, especially not your first album. Get to know the music industry first. Don't sign with a label right away. Get to know the music industry. First. Get to know what you want out of it, what you want your business to be like. And then you're gonna understand how to manage yourself in your relationships. And no one. A good deal is when it comes along, you see, releasing an album online can be almost free, and then you can actually make some passive income along the way. Know if your dream was only to release your music online and put it out there for the world to here. Without there for your friends and family, you probably spent about 20 bucks and distribution, and you probably got a few dollars back in your royalty payment. I'm super glad and happy to work with the hobbyist that likes to write songs that put them out there for their family to hear, but I'm also super excited to work with those people that want to create a music business for themselves. Music businesses mean marketing. It means long term goals. It means taking your audio and visual putting it together. And they're putting out there collaborating with artists, putting it out there, creating more albums, putting it out there, writing more songs, releasing them, sharing with people the process of the album creation and more people will engage with you and follow you and and then in turn, listen to music and give you passive income cool. So now that you've learned how to create an album from start to finish, I really want you to not lose hope. I want you to not lose motivation. I want you to go for it. I want you to work with your friends and family and tell them what your goal is so that they could help keep you on track so that you have almost what's called it an accountability partner. They can say, Hey, don't forget your dreams over and over again. If you have a dream of putting a music album out online and I want to see what you've been working on, I'm super excited about you and your projects. So here's the class project. Please upload it so I can see all the beautiful things you've been working on and considering I know that this is a process project. It maybe isn't finished yet, so upload what you have in rough form. Here's the list. So for a class project, go ahead and upload a photo of a rough album art design. Make sure that album Mark says the title and your band name somewhere. Tell us this song names that you're considering for the album and when you release it, share the link in the comments so that we can support you. Maybe that link could be a song link like I showed you earlier. It's really easy to go online, get that link and then send everybody where they like to go online toe. Listen to music. I'll see you in the final lesson with
14. Outro: thank you for watching My skill showed class. I'm really excited for you. And I hope that I really helped you learn the process of album creation from start to finish and gave you some of those marketing tips and tricks along the way. I will be putting out more videos and lessons on graphic design and illustration and marketing and business management and creative business management. In the future, I want you to succeed at your music business and any other business ventures that you have in the future. Take that into consideration. I'm also available as a graphic designer sound engineer. Have a website that is F. Ryan designs dot com. If you're interested, you can leave me a message in the contact form. Make sure you download the class checklist that I left in the project section. It has a step by step list of things in order to check them off and finish your own creation process from start to finish. I really encourage you to set goals for yourself, said marketing goals set goals on the calendar for each of the steps in this process, because it is easy to lose that motivation. I don't want to see you lose that motivation along the way. I want to to crush it. Lots of people have done this in the past. You're gonna be added to the list. So thank you again for listening to my skills class and make sure you get that down. Have a great day.
Fariss Ryan, Audio/ Visual Designer & Entrepreneur
