This week I got this marvelous little gem through the email. It went like this….

Congratulations Donna Williams!

Listeners on American Idol Underground have rated your song among the top 50 tracks in the Jazz genre during the previous week.

See your place on the charts by clicking here.

See you on the site,

The American Idol Underground Team

Get Your Music Heard!
www.idolunderground.com

So, how did I do this?

How did I get in this top 50?

Well, first of all, you stop waiting to be discovered by ‘a music company’.

Virtually nobody ever is, so why be in that 000000000000.1% of people when you can simply be your own music company?

An autistic person?  Create their own music company?  Why not?

How do you become your own music company?

Well, you can do it formally by registering a company/business name – which is about $50-$100 and then you get an ABN and are a company – yes, you are your own record label –

or you can just practice your music till its GREAT –

find yourself any musicians, singers, arrangers in your budget that you need to make that great final production,

then book your time in that recording studio within your budget,

have a sound engineer record your great tracks and mix them so all the levels sound great,

then design a cover for your CD perhaps with the help of the duplication house that’s going to duplicate them for you,

pay for a small number of copies (maybe 250-500) to be professionally made and packaged as well as the barcode necessary to sell them – yes you can purchase all this (and CD Baby can sort this)-

and then go to one of the independent musician sites like www.cdbaby.com where they’ll make you your own all singing all dancing sales and blog interface with the world as well as hear samples and this site will cost about $30 but its your shopfront and CD Baby is like a heavy traffic mall where people wanting alternative and independent music go shopping – so here you can sell your CD directly to the public and get your costs back. They take $5 for each one they sell so anything over that $5 is yours to go make another CD. They also will get your CD into thousands of other places – itunes, Tower Music, Idolunderground – you name it – and these folks will all pay you when people download tracks from your CD or purchase your CD.
How cheaply can this be done? Well, probably the bottom price might be around $500 all in if all your musicians and singers volunteered their own time and you did your very READY recording at a very cheap home studio and did your own duplication, cover design and packaging.

If you haven’t got that, try busking as a fundraiser.  If you’re good, it’ll make you better and hopefully you can raise the funds to then produce your own first CD. Many independent musicians/songwriters will pay around $5,000-$10,000 to produce a ‘radio ready’ album – one that’s truly of the quality ready for radio. If your CD is at that standard then community radio stations will often gladly play it if you send them a sample for their studio. Don’t expect the commercial stations to come on board. They’re probably too busy still doing mutual back-scratching with big business record labels of ‘stars’ you’ll only ever speak to via a poster.
A CD is around 6-12 tracks so you might wait till you have enough GREAT material that ALL your tracks are worth listening to and purchasing the download of. That can take time but takes self honesty too. If you were a teacher, would you give your track an ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C’? If its an ‘A’ or ‘B’ then it may well appeal to people ‘out there’ but if you and your friends think its just ‘ok’ not ‘great’ or ‘gobsmacking’ then keep writing till you have enough tracks that are really CD ready, not just as ‘fillers’ but as ‘sellers’. A ‘seller’ gives your audience something, its a product worth having, it takes them some place. A ‘filler’ makes your audience feel ripped off, taken for granted, so don’t insult them with mediocre tracks. Fill a CD recording only with your best. Even if you then only ever make one album at least word of mouth will tell everyone that was a GREAT album. And that’s what will help your album sell.

So, what are you waiting for? To be ‘discovered’? That’s your job. Discover yourself and then the world may discover you.

🙂 Donna Williams *)

author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter and eccentric.

http://www.donnawilliams.net

http://www.auties.org

http://www.cdbaby.com/donnaw

http://www.cdbaby.com/donnaw2