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The D2F-U skill sets are all focused on creating an ongoing cycle of giving your fans reasons to engage and reasons to buy. Whether you engage the fan or get a direct sale first, it really doesn’t matter. Once you create a direct sale, it takes only a few simple D2F-U skills to create a life long relationship that you own! Finding the balance, and maintaining a regular cycle of engagement and reasons to buy, builds fan loyalty and grows your business. Growing your business means you get to have a career doing what you love.

Is it really that easy? Yeah, it is. If you create great products, the rest is easy by comparison. Keep in mind that all content can be of value to you. Fans devour content, so you need a lot of it around to keep them engaged. Never throw anything away or decide a track shouldn’t… more here

I’ve finally started getting my rants organized into blog form! With a little help from Scott Feldman in Marketing, I hope to get a series of articles up at Nimbit. Here’s a taste:

Since you haven’t heard this enough times, I’m going to say it again: the key to a successful release is constantly engaging your fans and creating reasons to buy. A new body of work (DVD or an album) is the most common motivator to get an artist and/or team brainstorming about marketing. Marketing is all about engaging your fans and creating reasons for them to buy. Sound repetitive? Sound like a valid product cycle? Yeah, it is. Seriously.

Here at Nimbit’s D2F-U (Direct to Fan University) we would like you to consider a different, creative, yet more controlled approach to releasing a new product.

D2F is a bottom up business. Using the concept of one to many, your base grows via the power of fan-to-fan viral marketing. Your mission, what you need to be doing ALL the time, is to become a catalyst. By constantly creating reasons to buy and reasons to engage your fans will continually spread the word about you. The better job you do, the faster… read the rest here.

Read the rest on Nimbit’s website:

The Copyright Alliance and A2IM (the U.S. independent music label trade organization) have informed me of this welcome invitation from the Obama Administration to share my thoughts on my rights as a creator. So I sent this out today. As a business owner, musician, manager and creator, it is extremely important that the US lead the world in finding a solution to protecting the rights of intellectual property holders especially in the music business. More importantly there is a great need to move swiftly towards a model that addresses an enforceable solution for today’s interconnected world.

Tomorrow’s music business requires a legal foundation with enforceable regulations that provide a path to predictable and reasonable income streams for both creators and business’ so they both can continue to innovate. The current system is too complicated to enforce and has created a culture of uncertainty throughout the world. I urge this administration to take the lead in creating world wide solutions that can fairly and simply compensate creators while encouraging business’ to expand. I am very concerned that the US government is going to fall short of protecting intellectual property by “fighting” Piracy with unenforcible laws.

(I added this for my blog) I’m not entirely familiar with the concept of one royalty rate and I believe it’s not necessarily the best solution but its a new approach that has a chance of being enforceable. I believe that songs are still getting to millions of fans yet few are selling more than 100,000 before piracy overtakes sales. It seems natural for humans to share what moves them emotionally and emotion often takes over common sense. So, not making an excuse, emotion can make you want to share a song without thinking that the person receiving it is not paying for it. Try this: if we used existing technology to track file transfers worldwide and ISP’s paid a small royalty for the file transfer, then artists could be paid for the dissemination of their intellectual property. So a song that got transferred a million times with a royalty of .10 would make the artist $100,000. I’m working these numbers with absolutely know factual knowledge of how many times a popular track gets transferred. But I’m thinking that the numbers don’t sound too bad and in a world in which fans knew that a small portion of their ISP subscription fee was going to the artist, there would no longer be a piracy war and artists could continue to create content.

I hope somebody who really knows this stuff reads this blog and tears me apart. I’m very interested in learning more here!

If look at today’s music business landscape as if a nuclear bomb was dropped on the comfortable little monopoly that dominated the last half of the century, the present unfocused scramble for domination starts to make sense. We are presently in the part of the mushroom cloud where every aspect of the business is rolling over and over itself. When the explosion subsides, nothing about the music “business” will be the same. The cockroach hiding under the rock IS Direct to Fan and the direct patronage of music. Consider these practices the only defense. I’d go one step further to say that we are also seeing fallout effects on the stronger population of “old school” business’ giving birth to abnormal mutant offspring that look scarier then their parents. When it’s all over, the landscape will have been wiped clean of the music business as we knew it and what shows up in it’s place will be a model that looks absolutely nothing like what we have seen before.

Now that I’ve ported over my 3 year old website, I’m ready to call it “good enough for my house” and start blogging like I’d always meant to. I have high hopes for SXSW this year. There is so much going on in the Direct-To-Fan business, it’ll be great to see who’s really getting anywhere with it. I’m psyched as Nimbit is going there to show our new platform which I’ve been waiting an awful long time to see completed. Now an artist can be selling direct, tracking fan activities and then be able to message those fans from the same platform. It’s pretty powerful.

So I had to join the ladies two days late for vacation and, OF COURSE, I missed the last ferry to the island. (Boy was I in deep S–T) So I looked around for a B&B, nothing to be found under $100!

Through a series of phone calls that started by dialing the number on the side of a WW2 troup landing craft, I was able to locate an ex- mechant marine trained shipping company at the local bar. Me and my new slightly drunk friend set out to get to Swans Island. Course I thought we were going to go on the transport but little did I know that he had other plans!

It took us a while to figure out the physics / evil kinevel ramp system to get the bike into the skiff, god knows we really were not even considering how to get it back out…

But my merchant marine friend was the real thing and after we strapped the bike down and got the tow boat, he pulled out a computer and gps system and we headed out into the fog. We acually did the 40 min ferry trip in about 20 mins. I wish I could have got a picture riding the bike, all I had was my phone. Numerous times it crossed my mind that I might witness the skiff flipping over and the bike sinking to the bottom of the ocean. I really was a peace with it, my only regret would have been not having a video camera!

All’s well that ends well. I made it to the cabin and got to see the family.