A no-holds-barred rampage through gigs, clubs, boardrooms, drugs and booze, mad scenes, brilliant signings, machine gun quotes and a resilient wild spirit. 'A true believer in the power of music and more importantly a believer in the people that make music' Noel Gallagher 'McGee was our Malcolm McLaren and Tony Wilson. An instigator and motivator, a born upsetter. I've never met anyone like him' Bobby Gillespie Music is like no other business. It's about being at the right place at the right time, following your nose and diving in feet first. It's about being plugged into the mystical electricity and about surfing on the wild energy. It's about how to fuck up and how to survive and be sustained by the holy grail of the high decibel. No-one captures this wild feral spirit better than Alan McGee whose helter-skelter career through music has made him a major force. Wilder than his bands, more out of control than his most lunatic singer, more driven than his contemporaries and closer in spirit to the rock'n'roll star he could never be himself, McGee was always in a rush. Creation would sign people and not just the music. McGee understood that running an indie label is mainly about the charisma, the game changers, the iconography and the story. It's about never being boring. His ability to start a raw power ruckus brought the visceral danger back to a moribund mid-eighties music scene. His nose for danger and his ear for classic guitar rock'n'roll brought us The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Fanclub and Ride before topping out in the nineties with the biggest band in the world, Oasis. By no means a conventional instruction manual or business book, How To Run an Indie Label tells you everything you need to know about how to be a creative force.

Whether you want to start a record label, self-release your own music, or are just an avid music lover, this book will give you information about the business of music. The Label Machine: How to Start, Run and Grow Your Own Independent Music Label is the first book to give music artists practical step-by-step comprehensive instructions for setting up and running an independent music label to successfully distribute and market their music. You will learn all about the music industry business and how to navigate the tricky dos and don'ts. You will finally understand and take control of your music copyright and get to grips with the legalities involved. You will build your music business effortlessly, learning how to professionally market your music and artists - allowing you to reach thousands of fans. And essentially, you will learn how to create multiple label revenue streams to create an established record label. It features a detailed breakdown of how every part of the industry works together, including copyright in the UK and US, record label set-up, record releases, and royalty collection. It also provides in-depth guides on marketing, covering; traditional PR, Facebook and Instagram advertising, Spotify playlisting, and fan growth. Includes templates for record label and management contracts, marketing and promotion schedules, press releases, and fan email automation.

In today’s fast-moving music industry, what does it take to build a life-long career? Now more than ever, all those working in music need to be aware of many aspects of the business, and take control of their own careers. Understanding the Music Business offers students a concise yet comprehensive overview of the rapidly evolving music industry, rooted in real-world experiences. Anchored by a wealth of career profiles and case studies, this second edition has been updated throughout to include the most important contemporary developments, including the advent of streaming and the shift to a DIY paradigm. A new "Both Sides Now" feature helps readers understand differing opinions on key issues. Highly readable, Understanding the Music Business is the perfect introduction for anyone seeking to understand how musical talents connect to making a living.

This primer offers advice to budding entrepreneurs wishing to establish and operate a record label. The book includes information on: how to open a label; protecting the rights of the artist and the label; and managing production, promotion and distribution of CDs, records and tapes.

The definitive chronicle of underground music in the 1980s tells the stories of Black Flag, Sonic Youth, The Replacements, and other seminal bands whose DIY revolution changed American music forever. Our Band Could Be Your Life is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties -- when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives re-energized American rock with punk's do-it-yourself credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging, and immensely influential. This sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing, and faith is an indie rock classic in its own right. The bands profiled include: Sonic Youth Black Flag The Replacements Minutemen Husker Du Minor Threat Mission of Burma Butthole Surfers Big Black Fugazi Mudhoney Beat Happening Dinosaur Jr.

This book covers the entire process in an easy-to-understand way by pointing out methods to increase your chances of success and showing you how to avoid the common mistakes that can doom a startup. While providing detailed instructions and examples, the author leads you through finding a location that will bring success, managing and training employees, accounting and bookkeeping procedures, auditing, successful budgeting, and profit planning development, as well as thousands of great tips and useful guidelines. In addition, you will become knowledgeable about basic cost control systems, equipment layout and planning, low and no cost ways to satisfy customers and build sales, and low cost marketing ideas. You will also learn how to get your music on sites where customers pay to download your music such as Rhapsody, iTunes, and others. With the help of this book you can turn your love of music into a highly successful business. --Book Jacket.

The definitive, essential guide to the music industry, now in its eighth edition—revised and updated with crucial information on the industry’s major changes in response to rapid technological advances and economic uncertainty. For the first time ever, the guide also includes advice on the Canadian music scene from entertainment lawyer Chip Sutherland. The past two decades have seen file-sharing technology and digital streaming services transform the music business across the continent, and the changes keep coming at breakneck speed. How are record labels adapting to the demand for instantly accessible, low-cost music while coping with piracy? How can Cana­dian musicians break into the global market? And what does it all mean for aspiring and established artists today? Donald Passman, one of the most trusted music law­yers in the United States, offers his sage advice for creating, selling, sharing, and protecting your music in the Infor­mation Age in this updated Canadian edition of All You Need to Know About the Music Business. And now Cana­dian musicians have a voice of their own, as Chip Sutherland, one of Canada’s most distinguished enter­tainment lawyers, offers insight into the industry trends and particulars of the Great White North. Executives and artists, experts and novices alike will benefit from these detailed yet easy-to-understand expla­nations of the latest technologies, legalities, and practices shaping the music business, such as: • Royalties for music transmitted via digital down­loads, streaming services, cloud lockers, and apps • Updated licensing regulations and industry agree­ments • Selecting and hiring a winning team of advisors—personal and business managers, agents, and attorneys—and structuring their commissions, percentages, and fees in a way that will protect you and maximize these relationships • Mastering the major and the finer points of con­tract negotiations In a bonus Canadian content section at the end of each chapter, they give guidance on the basics, such as how to: • Navigate the Canadian marketplace and the tran­sition to a global presence • Find Canadian financial grants and bursaries • Understand regulations governing Canadian content development • Recognize the unique features of Canadian deal structures • Maximize concert, touring, and merchandising agreements in Canadian and American market­places Anyone interested in making and marketing music—musi­cians, songwriters, agents, promoters, publishers, managers, and record company executives—needs this crucial text to keep up with the frenetic pace of technological and legal change. No one understands the music business on both sides of the border better than Passman and Sutherland. Let them show you how to “make it” in one of the world’s most dynamic and challenging industries.

Listening to popular music and watching television have become the two most common activities for postwar generations in Britain. From the experiences of programmes like Oh Boy! and Juke Box Jury, to the introduction of 24 hour music video channels, the number and variety of television outputs that consistently make use of popular music, and the importance of the small screen as a principal point of contact between audiences and performers are familiar components of contemporary media operation. Yet there have been few attempts to examine the two activities in tandem, to chart their parallel evolution, to explore the associations that unite them, or to consider the increasingly frequent ways in which the production and consumption of TV and music are linked in theory and in practice. This volume provides an invaluable critical analysis of these, and other, topics in newly-written contributions from some of Britain's leading scholars in the disciplines of television and/or popular music studies. Through a concentration on four main areas in which TV organises and presents popular music - history and heritage; performers and performances; comedy and drama; audiences and territories - the book investigates a diverse range of musical genres and styles, factual and fictional programming, historical and geographical demographics, and the constraints of commerce and technology to provide the first systematic account of the place of popular music on British television.

As a member of Poster Children, Rose Marshack took part in entwined revolutions. Marshack and other women seized a much-elevated profile in music during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)—Marshack chronicles the band’s day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk’s DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs. An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman’s life in the trenches and online.

Understanding the Music Business offers students a current overview of the music business. Going beyond what most music business texts offer, Weismann delivers a contemporary approach that addresses the unanswered questions for today's music students, such as, "Is it really possible to make a living as musician?" Understanding the Music Business covers the basics in the first part of the text. This first section deals with the fundamentals of the industry, including recording, music publishing, agents, managers, radio and television, unions, the internet and new technology, and regional and international music markets. However, it is the second half of the text that breaks new ground by covering the career paths of new artists in the industry, the development and need for entrepreneurial skills, and the ways that individuals forge careers in the industry.