Hi, I'm Martin Atkins, author of Toursmart. Here's my top five pieces of advice for you
as an independent artist. One, if you can sustain, you can succeed. So don't blow
everything on one crazy idea. Be careful. Don't drive 2,200 miles to LA to play.
Succeed 50 miles away from your hometown before you go 500 miles away from
your hometown. Have a t-shirt, but have more than one t-shirt. The
question needs to be, which one of these shirts are you going to buy? If you sell
five more shirts a night, that's 500 more shirts after a hundred shows. Not
about the money, it's about 500 more people are wearing your shirt. Don't be
an asshole. Things are so difficult, you don't need to make it harder for
yourself. And I've seen people, their worst enemy is themselves. How many
pieces of advice is that? It sounds like three. Three. Get to a show early. You
know, if you're going to be an opening band, spend time rehearsing, not just
rehearsing your songs, but rehearsing the set up and the tear down. Consolidate all
the fucking cables around the keyboards and all that bullshit that like takes a
long time and then someone threads on a cable and it's like, oh my god. Consolidate
all of that. Consolidate your equipment if you can, so you can be on stage and
off stage really quickly.
Let's have your golden rule. Golden rule? Well, you need more than one
album. You need to grow your band and grow your music organically, so you don't
make 5,000 copies of your first album. Make 200 copies, even if it costs you
five dollars a copy. That's fine, because you're going to want to change that album
after two months anyway. So don't get 5,000 copies of it. Get a couple of
hundred, even if the unit cost is higher. Put your DNA all over the album in
whatever way you want. Hand stitch the sleeves. Teach yourself to
screen print. You can make your own shirts. Screen print the jackets. Rubber
stamp them and boss them. Chisel them out with stone. Take a CD and bake it in a
cake. Do something fucking different with your stuff that communicates to people
what your band is all about. Your physical album can be a physical
manifestation that communicates what your band is all about, and it might just
make more people download your album if it looks really cool. And people can get
information like this from your book, which is? TourSmart. You can go to the
TourSmart Touring site. You can come to my new school in Chicago, revolution number
three dot com, or you can see me out and about on the road. Like we have it on
convention. Thanks for your time. Thank you.
