DubMC

Seven Social Media Strategies to Nurture Global Music Fans

   1.  Keep your content personal, and your persona colorful.

You’re an artist—so post like one. Maybe you’re from a place lots of Westerners don’t know much about. Facebook and Twitter are simple ways to send out short, bright blasts about your life, your surroundings, your ideas.

You can imagine you’re a travel guide and reveal little-known sides of your country, region, or town. You can let people into your artistic process. You can show different facets of your personality and culture, things you may not get a chance to reveal on stage.

Your posts can do anything. Chronicle a beautiful meal or a moment from a traditional (or not so traditional) event with a striking photo. Talk about a funny interaction on the street or in the studio. Link to other music from your scene that has yet to be heard internationally. Write briefly about your favorite market vendor, your family’s livelihood, your drummer’s sense of humor, your most passionately felt social cause.

In other words, this is your world. Get it out there.

2.  Work in English—but don’t sweat the small stuff.

English is the lingua franca of global music business, for better or for worse. You should post in it. But you don’t have to sound like an Oxford grad (or a native speaker who grew up on the slang-rich streets, for that matter).  A few mistakes here and there that don’t interfere with your overall message won’t hurt. They may even add character.

So don’t be shy. Try writing your posts yourself.

If you’re worried about your English, see if you can find a committed friend who’s willing to glance at a particularly tricky passage or complicated sentence you’d like to post.  Or focus on interesting images and video, keeping your text simple.

3. Offer value by making followers insiders.

Don’t waste the opportunity to reach people by simply posting gig details, release dates, or glorified advertisements. Let people in.

There’s nothing more disappointing than receiving something akin to musician spam from an intriguing artist, particularly when it reads like a press release written by (jaded) management. Talk about you, not how groundbreaking your new songs are, or simply that you’re playing on Friday.

If you get nominated for an award or have a big show coming up, tell folks how you feel about it; how you really feel. If you’re posting a funky remix as an mp3 on your website, let your friends and followers have access to it first.

When people sense something matters to you, you’ve made them insiders. You’ve given them something of value: your insights, time, attention (especially if you’re good about tweeting back or jumping into a Facebook exchange when someone posts on your wall or comments on a post). Insiders will care much more deeply about your art and are more likely to become hardcore fans—fans who will support you financially and refer you to others.

4.  Balance quality and quantity.

Content is key, clearly. And it needs to have a certain personal, engaging quality. But if you only post once every three weeks, you won’t necessarily gain much of a following. Keep posts fairly regular, so that you stay on your followers’ radars, without flooding people with overwhelming updates on your every move.

But when it comes to finding followers, the opposite is true: Look for quality, and forget about numbers (they’ll grow gradually). Focus on finding people who will actually take an interest in you and your music. People worth cultivating as contacts, fans, and even as friends. People you’d love to see at your shows. People who are eager to talk about your art.

5.  Avoid shortcuts.

Reposting press about you is fine. Retweeting nice things about your music is fine. But if that’s all you do, you’re missing the point. You need to be sparking a conversation and drawing people in.

And while it’s a good idea to cross-post between blogs, Twitter feeds, and social media sites like Facebook, make sure to think about ways you can use each platform fully, appropriately, and uniquely.

Lastly, don’t bother mechanically boosting your numbers. A gazillion robotically added friends or followers might make you feel important, but are unlikely to spread the word about your music.

6.  Stick with it long-term.

Social media, as the latest big thing, may feel like a flash-in-the-pan medium, but to make it work, you need to commit to it for the long haul. Facebook and Twitter have an immediacy that’s deceptive; to get a return on your investment of time and energy—a significant investment—you have to be willing to pursue a social strategy for a while.

Be willing to let things build slowly and be committed to making the effort for more than a few weeks.

7.  Use social media responsibly.

Just say no to games or strange quizzes that post results to your friends’ news streams, and the like… and learn how to keep truly private posts, photos, and other info private by managing who can see your posts and what is public on your profile.

Bob Marley: The Transformative Sound of Selling Out

Bob Marley comes across as the ultimate musical rebel, though everyone—from American frat boys to Malian army officers—loves his music. Wildly successful, Marley is an enigma: Someone who managed to put obscure local music on the world map; who turned a marginalized community (Rastafarians) into admired trendsetters; who remained a humble barefooted guy even when tooling around in a BMW; who sold a boatload of records by sticking to his guns and making his music, his way. How did he do it?

He didn’t. Marley sold out.

Before you protest, think about it. Imagine, for a second, that a major figure in a subcultural movement—Minor Threat/Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye of the U.S. hardcore punk scene, let’s say—joined forces with a mainstream hip hop producer like will.i.am, and made a really great record that stayed on the charts for eons and moved units in the gazillions. Though some die-hard fans might scream that he’d sold out, he would have transformed the musical landscape.

And that’s exactly what happened with Bob Marley.

To create the Wailers’ breakout world hit, Catch a Fire, Marley compromised. He followed the lead of a producer from outside his scene and changed his music just enough to redefine reggae (including who listened to it). He did this with seemingly perfect and unrepeatable timing, but what he did has clear relevance for global musicians today. “Selling out” smartly can mean changing the game forever—and arguably for the better.

Truth be told, Marley and his fellow Wailers had been trying to sell out for a decade or more. They wanted to make money from their art. They had scored hit after hit in Jamaica, evidence that their work with an outside producer was not the only ingredient to their success. They had landed an international record deal and toured with a major pop name at the time (the reggae-inspired crooner Johnny Nash). But they were utterly broke and increasingly bitter, as producer after producer ripped them off or disappointed them.

Enter Chris Blackwell, a White Jamaican from a very wealthy family who used his resources to found Island Records. Blackwell wanted a reggae act for the mostly rock-oriented label, as Jimmy Cliff, flush with international stardom in the wake of the film The Harder They Come, bailed on Island. Blackwell signed the Wailers on the spur of the moment, and the band soon delivered the furiously recorded Catch a Fire.

Blackwell liked what he heard. But he also heard something else for the music. Marley, determined not to get screwed yet again, joined him at Island’s London studios, sitting with Blackwell in the booth as Blackwell sliced, diced, and expanded the Wailers’ reggae tracks. (Journalist and biographer Christopher John Farley tells the story well in Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley.)

What Blackwell did was instructive.  He made a series of changes that were fairly subtle, but propelled the album from obscure Jamaican music into the realm of rock. And Marley approved.

Blackwell cut the number of tracks on the album to nine, which he felt made it more rock in feel. He added instrumental solos, calling on other Island artists to lay down rock guitar licks and keyboard parts. (Several of these White players were not credited on the album until reissues came decades later.)

Blackwell and Marley together fudged the framework of one genre—reggae—to make the music fit into another, more commercially viable genre, rock. They found the commonalities that would allow the Wailers' songs to be heard as rock, without, thanks to Bob's insistence, pushing it too far out of reggae (and Rasta) territory.

Thanks to Blackwell and Marley’s efforts, reggae became a kind of ”Black adjunct” to rock, a genre where the African diaspora could sound raw, rebellious, and raucous, without pushing racial buttons. (It is the sunny sound of Jamaica, after all, and it's in English.) To get it there, Blackwell mixed in “White sounds,” but maintained the image of Marley and the Wailers as bold Black musicians. A complicated racial dance, to say the least.

Yet, even with all this gerrymandering of the Wailers’ music and identity, Marley won greater control of the final product, greater exposure, and greater compensation for his work than ever before. We don't listen to Catch a Fire and think, wow, what a decent slice of 70s rock guitar playing or what a good bit of rock engineering. We think, wow, the Wailers are amazing and authentic and the epitome of reggae.

And isn’t this what happened with Ry Cooder and World Circuit’s Nick Gold on the Buena Vista Social Club?

What's intriguing in this process for a global artist today is how musicians can pick up on fairly subtle cues in more mainstream music, and use them to break new ground. Musicians who want to take a cue from these crossover successes might think about:

• changing track length, by expanding or paring down;
• adding instrumental sections or solos where they traditionally do not feature in the music;
• playing with arrangements, by moving traditional melodies to new instruments associated with another genre;
• getting traditional instruments to play in different modes or explore different rhythms associated with another genre;
• experimenting with bilingual approaches or using indigenous forms of English within a traditional format, to get your lyrics or message across without completely abandoning the original cultural and linguistic context;
• jamming with musicians from other scenes or countries or regions, just to see what happens;
• reaching out to producers, remixers, or audio engineers whose work you like but who don’t normally tackle your music.

Marley’s “sell out” points to the potential commercial and cultural benefits of working with producers outside one's generic comfort zone, folks with an intuitive sense of where to find the mainstream touchstones in unfamiliar music. When a relationship like this really works, the artist shines through.

DubMC.com is sponsored by rock paper scissors, inc., a "world music publicity firm." Contact rock paper scissors, inc. about publicity campaigns for your album release, tour, festival, or other global music project.

5 Things to Avoid When Creating a Bio for Publicity Purposes

1. Avoid abstractions, especially ones that are literal translations of expressions in your native tongue. You can't just translate a bio and make it work.

2. On the other hand, if every other word is italicized, your bio is not in English. Ex. This uligerchin sings khoomei to appease the gazariin ezid.

3. If every other sentence includes a list of festivals, collaborations, and "important" concerts or awards, you haven't written a bio. You've written a CV.

4. While you may be very proud of your Argentine Jazz Award, if no one else has ever heard of these awards, they don't help you make your case.

5. Please, please, please don't create a DOCUMENT IN ALL CAPS. Or in comic sans. Or with !!!lots of enthusiastic punctuation!!! It makes you look crazy.

DubMC.com is sponsored by rock paper scissors, inc., a "world music publicity firm." Contact rock paper scissors, inc. about publicity campaigns for your album release, tour, festival, or other global music project.

Applying Lessons from the Hedgehog and the Fox, Part 2 of 2

This is Part 2 in applying Jim Collins' Good to Great business book to the business of independent musicians. Part 1 is here. We talked about confronting the brutal facts and introduced the hedgehog concept (having one trick that works every time for making money). Collins breaks a solid hedgehog concept into three elements:

The Hedgehog Concept (continued)

1. Pick something that you are passionate about. If you are not passionate about it, you won’t be able to sustain it. It’s easy to get sidetracked or distracted from something that your heart is not fully in. (Oh and saying you’re passionate about “all music” is like a corporation saying they are passionate about business or a chef saying they are passionate about food. Of course they are! Be more specific. The more specific, the better.)

2. Pick something at which you can be the best in the world. Not one of the best. THE best. You don’t have to be the best at it when you pick it. But if you do not have the potential to be THE best, then don’t bother. Pick something else.

3. Know what your economic engine is. What actually makes you money? If you are not sure, then you haven’t found your hedgehog concept yet. Another way to think about this is “What is your profit per X?” In this equation “X” could mean: fan, album, song, studio hour, band member, concert, tour, etc. What is your profit per song? What is your profit per concert? Think through all the possibilities. One of them might help you understand how to tweak the variables in your career to make more money and sustain what you do.

Collins says there are three overlapping circles, each representing one of the three elements above. In the middle, where all three of these circles overlap, is your hedgehog concept. That space, where your passion meets what-you-can¬-be-best-in-the-world-at meets your economic engine, is the idea that will lead to your success.

Rinsing Your Cottage Cheese // Culture of Discipline

Collins found that the “good-to-great companies” consistently used words such as: disciplined, rigorous, dogged, determined, diligent, precise, fastidious, systematic, methodical, etc. “People in the good-to-great companies became somewhat extreme in the fulfillment of their responsibilities, bordering in some cases on fanaticism,” Collins writes.

The author goes on to tell the story of an athlete named Dave Scott, six-time winner of the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon. Scott’s daily routine was to bike 75 miles, swim 20,000 meters, and run 17 miles. He believed that a low-fat diet would give him an even more competitive edge, so he would literally rinse his cottage cheese to get the extra fat off before eating it. Collins goes on to say, “rinsing his cottage cheese was simply one more small step added to all the other small steps to create a consistent program of superdiscipline.”

The question is: have you personally, or your band or management team, developed enough discipline to do whatever it takes to become the best at what you do—your hedgehog concept—and continuously improve on it? You can apply this to the discipline of rehearsal—lots of good musicians apply it there, practicing their technique for several hours a day. Have you developed your own personal discipline around the business side of being a musician? Even applying it to your stagecraft—the skills that make all the difference between being someone who plays music and being a fully engaging performer and entertainer who engages all five senses of their audience—could be a huge breakthrough. Apply this level of discipline to all aspects of your career: your visual presentation, your personal interactions, your use of databases or spreadsheets to track fans and concert presenters, every detail that relates to your hedgehog concept. If you struggle to have that discipline, do you have the will to do whatever it takes to turn your potential into reality? Would you rinse your cottage cheese?

The inverse of this is just as important: if it does not fit your hedgehog concept, don’t do it. Collins says to start a “stop doing” list. Don’t do side projects that are not in the plan. Don’t get distracted by the latest internet service or “fun” music biz conference if it does not fit the goal. Don’t just show up because everyone else is. Don’t put out an album or a single “because it is time.” Don’t play that weekly gig that nobody is showing up to or that does not pay. Unless these things fit your hedgehog concept. And if they do fit in, know why you are doing these things.

Technology Accelerators

The final concept I will discuss here—Technology Accelerators—is NOT a major concept of the Good to Great book. But I shine a light on it because technology tools are such a strong focus in the music industry “literature” (a.k.a. websphere/conferencesphere, etc.) and I think more musicians and music biz professional should take heed of Collins’ warnings on the subject. He argues that technology is simply an accelerator. If you take a business (or the business of a band) and throw technology at it, you simply accelerate what is already happening with the business.

To oversimplify things, if you are spending money without a clear plan and throw technology at it, you will simply speed up the spending of that money. If you are successfully, gradually building a fan base, and you have a plan that uses technological tools to further build that fan base, your fan base will grow more quickly. Technology is not an ANSWER to your problems. It is an accelerator. Use it accordingly.

Understand what will make you money, understand the steps to get there, do it WITHOUT the use of technology, and then develop a plan for how specific technology tools will help you further that strategy. If nobody is going to see your profile on website X, there is no need for that profile. If you have nothing of significance to say on an email newsletter, nobody is going to read that email newsletter (you will simply be accelerating their boredom or burnout). If you have no plan to engage fans in a financial exchange through social media, fans will not pay you money in that online space. Are you on Facebook to sell albums or MP3s or to sell tickets or to seek investors or to find collaborators? If you don’t know, then how do you know you are friending the right people? No clear plan + technology = even less of a clear plan.

“When used right, technology becomes an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it,” Collins continues by writing “you cannot make good use of technology until you know which technologies are relevant. And which are those? Those—and only those—that link directly to the three intersecting circles of the Hedgehog Concept.”

Conclusion

Be honest and confront the brutal facts of the current state of the music industry. You’re your own personal economy. Search for your hedgehog concept: the intersection of your passion, what you can do best at, and what your economic denominator is. And don’t add technology into the mix until you really know the driving concept behind the business of your music career.

DubMC.com  is the brainchild of Dmitri Vietze and is sponsored by rock paper scissors, inc., global music publicity firm.

Good to Great: Applying Lessons from the Hedgehog and the Fox to the Business of Independent Musicians (from One of the Greatest Business Books of All Times), Part 1 of 2

It’s risky business taking a book based on research of what makes large corporations great and applying it to the likes of a musician or band. I’m sure that Jim Collins, a rigorous researcher/author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, would say his book can’t be directly applied to such an unrelated field. Yet some of his concepts serve as a great launching point for musicians. We are faced with an increasingly saturated marketplace where the writing on the wall is that new internet applications will save us all, but there is little evidence to show the way. Here I tackle four relevant criteria of great companies according to Collins (he has nine in all).

Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)

Great organizations are really honest… brutally honest… about what is going on around them. Instead of denying tough times or bad decisions, they face them head on, so that they can address them, make course corrections, and learn from their mistakes. “It is impossible to make good decisions without infusing the entire process with an honest confrontation of the brutal facts,” writes Collins.” He says that when you’re honest this way, “the right decisions often become self-evident.”

In the case of the music business, this means truly recognizing things like:
- CD sales suck
- digital sales have not replaced CD sales
- not every musician who makes an album—no matter how much blood, sweat, and tears they have put into an album or repertoire—can have a record label, distributor, agent, or manager
- just because you have music on the main online retailers, does not mean you will sell any
- you’re probably not going to be one of those bands who really breaks through thanks to YouTube, MySpace, Pitchfork, etc.
- you might need to keep your day job a lot longer than you hoped
- you’re not going to be able to pay off that studio time debt with album sales

That might sound depressing. But more depressing is to not acknowledge these brutal facts. If you block this information, you cannot develop a strategy for addressing your economic reality as someone trying to make a living as a musician.

The flip side of this concept is Never Lose Faith. Great organizations (and musicians) are so passionate about what they do that they are committed to wading through mines and hurricanes. The balance between honesty about the brutal facts and faith in your mission is key to staying on course while developing strategies for being successful. 

The Fox and Hedgehog

The core concept of Collins’ book is articulated through the parable of the fox and the hedgehog. Every day the fox wakes up with tons of energy, ideas, and motivations for eating the hedgehog. He is always ready to try something new, always coming up with a new plan. One day he might try a full speed head-on attack. The next day he might hide out in a cave all day waiting for the right moment to attack. Another day he might plan to dive off a ledge. On and on come the ideas and attempts. Meanwhile, every day the hedgehog—which looks like a small cute porcupine—bumbles around looking for its next meal. She doesn’t have infinite tricks like the fox. But every time the fox attacks her, she has one trick that works every time: she curls into a ball making her spiky spines stick out and keeps the fox from eating her. 

Collins argues that every great organization has a hedgehog concept: one primary thing that they can count on time and time again to work. Collins cites as examples: Walgreens, “to run the best, most convenient drug stores with high profit per customer visit;” Wells Fargo, “run a bank like a business, with a focus on the western United States, and consistently increase profit per employee;” Circuit City, “‘the McDonald’s’ of big-ticket retailing, able to operate a geographically dispersed system by remote control.” As a musician or music company you may not need such a complex hedgehog concept.

In today’s era of endless Internet tools and services designed to help the independent musician, it’s hard not to think that you need to “do” them all: Twitter, Facebook, Sonic Bids, ReverbNation, iTunes, CDBaby, Amazon, MySpace, etc. Having a hedgehog concept gives focus. A simple driving concept helps you to stay focused on that one thing that will actually make a difference in your career.Furthermore, while many professional musicians continue to look towards an archetypal model of success in the music industry, what Collins’ corporate research suggests is that an entity does not need THE concept that will lead them to financial success. An entity needs THEIR concept that will lead to THEIR financial success.

He further breaks down three elements of a solid hedgehog concept. Read Part 2 of the Hedgehog article to read about these three elements (picking something you are truly passionate about, something at which you can be the best in the world; and understanding your economic engine) as well as why you should rinse your cottage cheese and the pitfalls of new technology for musicians).

DubMC.com  is the brainchild of Dmitri Vietze and is sponsored by rock paper scissors, inc., global music publicity firm.

Big Idea: The World Music Concert Exchange Program

Start booking a weekly or monthly gig in your local city. Develop a local following where your audience knows that each gig is going to be a little different. Maybe there are seasonal themes or special guests; or maybe alternate repertoire from gig to gig. Give special deals or greater access for people who sign up for your email announcements. Then once you have a good following coming to your regular gigs, set up an exchange with a band that has done something similar in a nearby town. Offer to host them at your monthly gig in exchange for them hosting you at theirs. Find a half dozen bands you can do this with and you have the beginnings of a tour. Once other bands see this, they will replicate what you have done. Eventually a network of world music bands can have a regular exchange. And once that is established, the network can host bands from overseas either for a profit or as the beginning of an international exchange program. Comment your progress below!

Big Idea: Your Conscious World Music Image

You have invested every bit of your soul into your latest compositions and arrangements. And you have scraped together more money than you knew you could to get into a studio and have your first thousand albums pressed. You are in the final hours of production: “What should we put on the cover? Who do we need to thank in the booklet? There is not enough time for a photo shoot.”

STOP! WAIT! After all of that hard effort, are you really going to just slap a mediocre snapshot or some clip art on the cover? Are you relying on some substandard graphic design program to make a cheap-looking collage?

Studies show that as much as 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues. Why would it be any different in getting your musical message across? Do not undervalue the importance and power of the visual image you emit as a musician.

Even “world music” artists, whose music itself often has a more compelling message than other performers, are ultimately entertainers. You must convince audiences and fans to buy your recordings and your concert tickets. From the package on your album to the way you dress on stage, your visual image is the first thing people are going to absorb. Will they even give your music a chance if they are not convinced by what they see?

Here are some tips to take into consideration as you formulate your visual image:

1. When performing and in press photos, wear something that is visually compelling, unique to you, and conveys something about your singular contribution to the world. Your “look” should match your essence. Making your visual message match your musical and lyrical message combines to create powerful emotion that makes you memorable and deepens your listeners’ experience of your music.

2. Get an actual artist to create your album covers and marketing materials. Yes, it costs money. But it is money well-spent. If your album looks cheap, if your concert poster looks cheap, what message are you giving your potential fan? Do not use your cousin who is just learning PhotoShop and who thinks that the cartoon font is… fun.

3. Do not use studio head shots. Ever! They look like you are trying to audition for something; which conveys the message: “We are not successful yet.” Use photos that are unique, artistic, compelling. If you do not feel confident in knowing what that means, think about who you know who is a visual/artistic person (though not necessarily an experimental/avant garde type artist) and ask them for advice. A photo editor at the newspaper in your next concert city would rather run an interesting or unique or artistic photo than another photo that looks just like any other band photo. Don’t use photos because they look the way you think they are supposed to look. Use photos that surprise, draw the viewer in, or invoke an emotional reaction.

4. Photos don’t need to be expensive. Digital cameras in the hands of a friend with a knack will often do the trick. When in doubt, take photos outside. Natural light looks better than snapshot flash photography.

5. Think about the narrative or content of your recording/repertoire and then think of some place nearby, outside, where you can visually represent those themes. On the other hand, sometimes representing a theme in very obvious ways will look cliché (“if their artwork is not very creative, how creative is their music going to be?”).

6. Make cool t-shirts. Sell them. Wear them. Mention them on stage. Put an order form on your website and in your album booklet.

7. Make cool hats, buttons, stickers, and underwear too. The more you can sell, the more you can sell. The better they look, the more you can sell. People will pay you for the honor of being your billboard. People will pay more if they look cool. Keep track of which stuff sells more and which stuff has a better profit margin.

8. It’s OK to tell your band what they have to wear. Paying tickets for a band that looks slouchy can be insulting (unless you play a genre of music wear slouchy is expected). If you are not in an Indie Rock or Folk Band, t-shirts and plaid shirts are slouchy. Individuals within the band can accentuate their stage personalities with different looks. We have already seen plenty of bands who all wear black all the time.

9. If you come from a specific tradition, you don’t have to look “tribal” to visually reference tradition. Sometimes it is even more powerful when you mix up traditional clothing with other dress. Or if you create your own style that reflects your unique role as a bridge between cultures. 

10. Think about a visual image/vocabulary/theme for each project you do. When that project is over (you made the album, you did the tour), start over with fresh imagery. It can be good to carry over some element of your visual representation from project to project—such as an aesthetic approach or a logo—but having something fresh gives past fans more of a sense that they are getting something new on the next album/tour. You want them to buy again, so give them something fresh.

The Big Idea: Touring in Concentric Circles

Though the music industry remains in flux with drastic shifts in distribution and an overflowing market thanks to increased access to tools of production, one thing has become clear: live performance is a primary profit engine for professional musicians. But you can only play so much in your local market and when you are thinking of touring you are faced with the chicken-and-egg dilemma (which comes first?): you can't tour without fans,and you can't make fans without touring. Here is an idea for gradually increasing your touring base. Create a local fan base by playing somewhere regularly. It could be weekly or every other month. That probably depends on the size of your city (the population not the height of the buildings), how much other activity is competing with you, the demand for your particular music, etc. Create a community and following with your local regular gig; reasons for people to come back every time and to tell other people about your regular gig. Once you get momentum there, look at a map and draw a circle that includes all the other towns and cities that are drivable within a few hours of your town. Identify a town that would be ripe for another regular gig; maybe every other month. Find the right venue; one that already has a following similar to your band's following, or possibly one that is totally different but for which you could create a new local scene. Tell the two scenes about each other. Fans may have friends in your new sister city. Once that bi-monthly gig is going get another on going in another town in a different direction from your home base. Once that's going, draw another wider circle on your map, encompassing towns that are a little further away from home. In the further cities, maybe you only play there a few times a year. Keep those email lists growing and make sure to categorize fans by their location, so you can target local fans every time you come back to the city. In some cases, as you continue to widen your concentric circles it might be a year between concerts in a given city. Eventually, if you can widen these touring circles further you will be able to align enough cities to have a full-fledged tour reaching to cities that were too far before, but are now within reach of the concert last night. You'll also be building a fan base all along and a touring record that a future booking agent can look at as evidence of your potential on their roster and your potential in other regions/cities. Sure, everyone wants to have a national tour... but this Big Idea could be a way you can get things started on your own as an investment in your musical career.

Has your "world music" act done this? Share your battle stories by submitting a comment with the link below.

DubMC.com  is the brainchild of Dmitri Vietze and is sponsored by rock paper scissors, inc., global music publicity firm.