Craig Elkins – I Can’t Stop Being a Dick

Craig Elkins, ex-frontman and key songwriter for Huffamoose, has a new song called “I Can’t Stop Being a Dick”. Click HERE to uh… hear. The song will appear on his new album that’s being recorded in LA where he currently lives. And if you like the song and want to help support the cause, visit Craig’s page on Kickstarter – a site that helps artists raise the funds they need to record and release an album. Craig will be throwing it down at The Grape Room this Friday with The Spinning Leaves and The Double Wides.

Still can’t get enough Craig? Then read this May 2006 interview he did with City Paper.

Why even successful bands struggle financially

From altpress.com:

Recently, Ace Enders announced that due to financial constraints, he would likely not be able to continue touring, and the album he’s working on now may very well be his last. Since Enders revealed this, he’s received a massive outpouring of support. Fans have sold T-shirts and wristbands to benefit Enders, his wife and young child. Supporters have solicited donations to help the musician continue being, well, a musician. The response has not been entirely positive, however. Some people think that if you’re a famous musician (or at least relatively well-known) you shouldn’t need or accept financial support. The circling question seems to be: If musicians sell records and merch and get paid for playing shows, why don’t they have any money?

The idea that musicians—even well-known musicians who sell out large club shows—have money is a misconception for the most part. Financial concerns and viability obviously vary from artist to artist; no two musicians are exactly the same when it comes to money and how it’s made and spent. But what most fans fail to realize is how much it costs to be a musician and how much more it costs to be a musician on the road.

Read more HERE.

Joe D’Amico – Listen To The Loons

Joe D’Amico has released another free download on his website to coincide with his Tuesday night residency at The Grape Room during the month of January. This weeks track is titled “Listen to the Loons”. Songs from previous weeks are also available.

Phantasm Interviews The Memorials

In an effort to promote their upcoming show at The Grape Room, the members of Phantasm arranged to do a web chat / interview with The Memorials.

Step 1: Become One of the Most Well-Known Local Bands

From Gazzmic.com:

There Is No Substitute for Hand-to-Hand Flyers!
Some call it canvassing, handbilling, flyering – regardless of your preferred term, the best way to build a local club draw is to hand out flyers. It doesn’t necessarily even matter if the people receiving the flyer ever attend the show in question. When you go out to clubs and hand out flyers, you become friends with people. Additionally, each recipient gets the opportunity to process your band or project’s name, which, according to most statistics, must happen around 7 times before they will remember it.

While hanging up posters is helpful as well, hand-to-hand promotion in clubs is absolutely necessary for a number of reasons. First of all, it connects the name with you as a person. Also, when you attend other local bands’ shows to hand out leaflets, you become known as a supporter of the local scene. Other bands will see that you hand out flyers, and they will want to play shows with you so that they can benefit from that.

Read more HERE.

The Politics of Price Matching

While I understand the idea behind price matching, $40 for a simple t-shirt is just silly. At what point do bands go from ‘anything to make it and get the word out’ to we think ‘$40 for a t-shirt is a fair price for our fans to pay’. I know it as fact that more t-shirts will be sold when they’re $10 – $15. Sure the profit margin is lower, but I’d rather 5 people have my t-shirt than 2. – Anthony Caroto

From altpress.com:

Recently, 3OH!3’s Nathaniel Motte penned a thoughtful, lengthy blog on his band’s website decrying the practice of “price matching.” The blog was spawned from a specific instance at a holiday radio show in Sacramento, California, where 3OH!3 were required to price their shirts at a equivalent cost to the headliner’s merch—an amount Motte and bandmate Sean Foreman deemed too expensive for their fans. The incident, which Motte describes in detail in his post, is indicative of a larger issue, one that affects bands and music fans across the board. Motte’s post raises a slew of intriguing questions: What is price matching? Why is it done? Who does it benefit and who does it harm? And, most importantly, what is and what should be the purpose of selling merch?

In simple terms, price matching is a practice in which the headlining band on a tour set the merch prices. If that band sell their T-shirts for $40, every other band on the bill must comply with that price. David Galea of The Agency Group, who books Paramore, Dredg, Relient K and Four Year Strong, explains that price matching is just one element the headliner controls in the business of touring. “The headliner dictates everything from production to amount of merch items, to number of comps the support gets, to how long they play,” he says. “It is common practice for support acts to fall in line with what the headliner is dictating on any and all things—from clubs to arenas.”

Read more HERE

Article submitted by Derek Miller

2010 — a fascinating year in Philadelphia semi-acoustic music

From montgomerynews.com:

“Remember when the Grape Street Pub was on Grape Street? When it moved on to Main Street Manayunk, it gained in size but lost the vibe a bit, according to many fans. Then, the bigger spot was sold. Now, at the original location is the Grape Room, run by some of its original staff. It has its own fan club, but some of the shows are special, such as the Bricklin Reunion gig that took place in the fall. It was a fund-raiser for Cori Cross, who has ovarian cancer. Ian Cross is her brother, an original member of Bricklin, and has produced albums for Usher and Janet Jackson and many others. Of course, the Bricklin brothers were the namesake of the band and are both still very involved in music.”

Among the artists mentioned in the article who frequent The Grape Room are Hannah Zaic, Christie Lenee, Fooling April, Brian Flanagan, Early Ape, Blair Bodine and Kuf Knotz.

Read the entire article by David W. Wannop HERE.

Hey, Bands: Search Engine Optimization Tactics

From gazzmic.com:

Websites like Pandora and Last.FM associate different types of musical content with each other based on various parameters. My band Look What I Did is associated with a lot of bands that we’ve toured with (e.g. Animosity, Ion Dissonance, The Human Abstract), that our fans like (Dillinger Escape Plan, Faith No More, Shudder To Think), and to whom we have some sort of professional connection that is frequently mentioned (Foxy Shazam, Horse the Band, Jane’s Addiction). These connections result in our music getting played more frequently on services like Pandora and Last.FM. Our music videos appear as related to those of other artists on YouTube. We also appear on Google searches in various places according to different terms.

Send Your Music to Be Reviewed by Any Interested Blogger, No Matter How Much Traffic His or Her Site Gets

This is key among SEO tips for bands. Musicians are too quick to judge the cost-benefit analysis involved in sending CDs to bloggers. Yes, you are going to get more traffic from a large E-zine, but said publication is going to take much longer to review your music. In some cases, they may not get around to it at all.

Read the rest of this article by Barry Donegan, HERE.

Pawnshop Roses: Live Footage from “Solid Gold” Release Party

Footage from the Pawnshop Roses December 10th performance can be viewed below. The band was celebrating the release of their new album, Solid Gold, to which fans of the band were treated to a free copy. Awesome show too.

www.pawnshoproses.com

Charities Selected for Buffalo Medicine’s Half 4 Humanity Tour

From Buffalo Medicine:

Greetings and Salutations!  Alia and I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for all your support of the Half 4 Humanity Tour. We had an amazing time, meeting and playing for all of you. It was an adventure that we both will never forget.

We’d also like to inform you that we have chosen our specific charities for Hurricane Katrina and Haiti victims.

For the people of New Orleans, we chose the Make it Right Foundation. Founded by Brad Pitt, this organization is rebuilding homes in the lower ninth ward, the community most affected by the hurricane and the failure of the levees. Not only that, they are doing it in a “green” sustainable manner, which means a lot to us as well.

For Haiti victims, we chose Doctors without Borders. Although they help many communities, villages and people around the world, we asked them to use our donation specifically for Haiti. Yes, people are struggling in many corners of the world but we set out in the very beginning with them in mind so we wanted to stick with whom we intended the money to go to.

Thanks again everyone for your generosity and support.

In true Buffalo Medicine spirit, we are very grateful to be connected with all of you and for the opportunity to share our gifts, while contributing what we can to humanity.  See you next go around!

Peace, Love and Rock & Roll,

Eric and Alia

www.buffalomedicinemusic.com