Music for Profit

(This post is the first part of a series of posts regarding the business exchange of goods and services inside and outside of the music industry.)

One of the books I read as a child was a number of Aesop’s Fables, only instead of Aesop and a bunch of personified animals, it was a wise old judge and an unruly village in ancient China. In that book was the tale of a poor man in china who was telling his friends that in order to make his very plain rice more palatable, he enjoyed the scent of the buttered rice floating up from the restaurant below. Meanwhile, the restaurant owner overheard this conversation. To the poor man’s dismay the restaurant owner came upstairs and confronted the man for the theft – using the smell of butter to improve the enjoyment of otherwise boring white rice.

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Tags: Business, butter, china, finance, How To, Intellectual Property, ip, Musicforprofit, Sales, stick figures, value, wikipedia

Beyond Authority: The Principles of Persuasion and Influence from Haas Alumni Network on Vimeo.

In the post a week in tweets where I took the best of my very active week on Twitter, there is a post via @workfromwithin – a video from the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. I have repeatedly been referring to this video in conversations with, well, everyone. There is so much content in this video, it’s like a dense book.

If you’re this type of geek like me – interested in sales, marketing, and the psychology behind it, then do yourself a favor and watch this very long video. If you’re super busy like me, then do it in chunks. I’ve been watching it 20 minutes at a time over breakfast.

Here’s a couple of one minute tips I picked up from the video:

• Physical proximity is a strong indicator of the strength of an online relationship (ie you email and connect online with whom you see more frequently in person)
• The “four walls” sales technique is a great way to generate copy that focuses on the benefits of the benefits that are of interest to your psychographic, instead of the features and tech specs. Example: Customer cares about their offspring’s education, not how many entries are in the encyclopedia.

There’s more, but you get the idea. Watch this video and pick one thing that you can apply to improve your daily life and business in a non-manipulative fashion.

Tags: Videos

Tags: business models, Getting Unstuck, Inspiration, Musicforprofit, pausch, priorities

Turn down the suck with this volume knob from thesuckdial.com (photo credit: The Web Hounds)

There’s a famous recording studio near Berklee College of Music in Boston that, like most recording studios, has a nice mixing console. If you sit behind it, your eyes will scan the typical buttons and faders, until you come across a big red button with the label “SUCK.” The joke is that you could be trying to record a track from a Grammy-winning musician, but take after take just sounds awful. Before recording any more unsatisfactory garbage, it’s your responsibility to quickly check the SUCK button. It’s very possible that button accidentally was pressed several tracks ago, so disable it before you continue wasting the precious time you or the musician have left in this life.

Note that the button is actually fake. It was glued on and doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t even light up, so it’s not a very GOOD fake. The point, however, is that there may be a metaphorical SUCK button in your music career, and it’s about time you found it and turned it off. (more…)

Tags: Berklee, Musicforprofit