Ask Yourself This One Question Today 👇 Why are you doing this? No seriously. Why are you posting stuff on social? Because the answer to that will tell you exactly how to create your marketing strategy. It’s that simple.  (And yes, there’s a very important reason I’m bringing this up — we’ll circle back to that. Pin it. 📌)

Your videos don’t need to be perfect. In fact, striving for perfection can often makes them about as exciting as watching paint dry. The secret sauce is owning your mistakes. Trip over a line, spill your coffee, walk straight into a lamp, whatever it is, keep it in. People don’t connect with flawless robots; they connect with humans who can laugh at themselves, make a mess, and still get back up smiling. Perfection is boring. Cock-ups are magic.

Producing music videos during the Covid pandemic was a bit like cooking with half the ingredients missing—you had to get creative, or go hungry. I ended up doing it three times, and with each attempt the projects got braver, stranger, and more ambitious. This one, though? This might just be my favourite. Not only because of the final result, but because of the inspiration (and a few happy accidents) that shaped it.

Yep, you read that right. Every year I produce one music video for free and now is the time. If you'd like that video to be yours ... keep reading. I've now done this for three years and below you can see previous winners Molly Chadwick, EM Kane and Anthony Hughes. Take a look and then scroll down to read more about the competition, how to enter and a little more about our approach to promoting your music.

I'm comfortable with music streaming. It's here to stay now, we've gone too far. In fact we've gone very far. When you consider that illegal downloading from the likes of Limewire and Napster began in the early 2000's, there's now a generation of people who don't know another way. But things have moved on and recently they moved in a direction I'm really not comfortable with. 

As a documentary producer I get to film a tonne of interviews. Thankfully with a background in broadcasting I'm pretty good at asking the questions as well as running the cameras. Filming an interview is a handy skill you can benefit from too. An interview can take a number of forms from stopping someone in the street (vox pop: voice of the people) to filming a review or even a whole interview for something like a podcast. Doing it right can make for some compelling footage you can get the best us of on any number of platforms. So this is my guide to filming and conduct a successful interview.

Last Thursday I woke up to some bad news. I was sitting having my morning coffee, I opened up my Instagram and got a message from the Meta gods. "Your account has been deactivated" Apparently, they thought I did something that went against community guidelines and if I disagreed with this decision I could appeal. So I appealed. Saturday morning I checked the account again and it was working normally, like nothing had happened. No explanation from Meta about what I may or may not have done wrong. So even though I’m none the wiser I learned a few things and if you rely on Instagram for your business you should probably be doing what I did next.

It doesn't matter what kind of business you run, if you're using social media to promote what you do you could be missing something important. Turning followers into fans. Independent musicians, in particular, are terrible at this. Many focus on the numbers and post endless videos of them performing either live or in a studio. To truly succeed you need to start talking with your followers and not just singing at them. Here I’m going explain why engagement is the key to generating fans and give you three ideas to help you start conversations with your followers.

Throughout the whole of 2024 we're doing something really special. We're donating 2,024 minutes of our time to help the future of the music industry. Why? Well it's because we're frustrated. Frustrated by seeing so many independent and unsigned musicians struggling to get their music heard and ultimately make a living from the music industry. Here's how you can get some of those minutes this year.