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the music is the msot important aspect of any music business. rehash generic chord progressions and your non-musical clients will fall in love with your services

At 9/14/10 01:57 PM, brokendeck wrote: TO: JOSH
Well Josh, if you got an ace up your sleeve, I hope it works out for you. Your investment return will still hard to recouperate thogh. Have you thought about opening a retail brach to support the studio? Something like a music gear sales / rental department? I know several music supply / music academy stores that are in reality a recording studio with the retail sales keeping it afloat. or maybe even rehearsal space rental. Just some ideas...

Yup, I'm already planning on using one of the control rooms (or areas) for lessons/workshops/teaching as well as having a stable inventory. We have enough talented people onboard that I know I can cover guitar, drums, piano and mixing and production lessons/tutorials. We are going to be running some pretty inventive ideas to create parallel low-maintence areas of income for the studio. I can't really go into too much detail but be appraised that they are going to be very progressive implementations of production concepts. I've already ran some numbers for many scenarios dealing with a revenue forecast (monthly) and while it won't be a "cake-walk" - it's very doable if we play our cards right to become immediately profitable, as I plan to do.

Believe me, I wouldn't be doing what I am doing right now if I didn't think there was a staggering amount of potential behind the business direction...

I should probably be more specific, reading back over the thread: when I say marketing, I don't mean 'advertising', I mean marketing. The way your company presents itself to clients is a big deal, the way you present your products or services to clients is a big deal, and most especially the way you SHOW these things to the client is a big deal.

Image is everything; get somebody good at making an image to help you make one - making it yourself is going to be tough without the experience. The website needs designing, the logos, the taglines, the wording, all of it must be professionally put or people will doubt your credibility.

As RandomInternetGuy65, I have worked in the marketing department of a major corporation, and believe me when I tell you marketing is REALLY IMPORTANT in all the ways you would NEVER think about. All of those minor details of just how something is worded, just where that image is, how many images you have, what they're of, the composition of the shots, even in just a boring example of text and pictures on a web page there's so much that needs to be tweaked to look professional that an amateur really can't handle that you would never believe it if I told you.

I just talked to the friend that does web-design today (who I'm also working for currently) and he walked me through a basic rundown of server-side vs. client-side scripting and how php works. It seems like it may not be to difficult to get the stuff I need off the ground with a little extra help. Next thing I will be looking at is designing a logo I believe.

Good luck Josh! I really hope that this all works out for you! You're obviously (and I could tell from our meeting a few years back) really passionate about this kind of stuff, and it's good to hear that people other than the big major label douchebags are trying to get out there into the business!

Keep us updated :)

At 9/14/10 09:52 PM, Nav wrote: Good luck Josh! I really hope that this all works out for you! You're obviously (and I could tell from our meeting a few years back) really passionate about this kind of stuff, and it's good to hear that people other than the big major label douchebags are trying to get out there into the business!

Keep us updated :)

It's been interesting to see how an absolute obsession for me (audio engineering, composing) has made these recent steps so exciting. It's really really fulfilling to go this direction and see that it can work. Time will tell but each day is another day to move forward on the project...

I'll be posting updates as the month goes on.

At 9/14/10 09:17 PM, joshhunsaker wrote: Next thing I will be looking at is designing a logo I believe.

Don't worry, I've got ya covered.

*looks at logo*

*looks at signature*

*looks back at logo*

*nods in understanding*

I'm not doing the quote reply thing, I fucking hate reading stuff when it's written like that. But, yeah, I follow where you're coming from. But I still think you're referring to the Major Label side of things - which isn't unfair, there's lot of money in it and it's easily the most visible. But already with the million and one "Indie labels" with Majors acting as distributors, we're seeing the larger labels essentialy turning into management groups. These 360 deals are a symptom of Popstar being a cultural rather than a purely musical figure - it's the spectacle at concerts, music videos, merchandising and interviews that compel people.

I suppose the thing I'm getting at is Major label music is a bygone age, according to Wiki's piecharts by 2005 the Indie Label group had as much selling power as EMI and WMG. The problem is it's a little scattered and hard to quantify - but these people still need to record. And to be honest, the indie labels I can think of (Ninja Tune, Ecstatic Peace) have really good production values. Unless these band members have some serious hidden talens, they're hiring someone.

Overall it just seems like Pop music revenue is down. That is to say the market is saturated enough for people to not feel the need to buy the music. In smaller countires, such as Ireland, I feel there's frankly no point. People are sick of a song before the radio takes it off rotation.
I'll agree that CDs are not going to be the consistent future medium, but I don't see us moving to soft mediums exclusively. I also don't see how this changes the neccesity for a recording engineer.

However, I'm not really interesting to get into this too much. It's kind of off topic and unconstructive. But I would like to say that Josh is probably going to be supplementing his Studio income with outside work. Or I would imagine so. It's not an uncommon thing, my lecturers do it.

At 9/15/10 04:45 PM, Rig wrote:

At 9/14/10 09:17 PM, joshhunsaker wrote: Next thing I will be looking at is designing a logo I believe.

Don't worry, I've got ya covered.

I was having kind of a down day until I saw that LOL!!! I'm going to host that somewhere on the site

So how's business?

:At 9/18/10 06:46 AM, brokendeck wrote:

Yeah, Josh covered that bit with me after my last big post. :D Good luck with the studio man! It sounds like it's going to be a lot of new experiences in store for you and josh :D

Haha, cool! Hope I didn't come across too harsh, but I think the panic in the Music Industry is kind of overblown - especialy by the top cats - so people can keep their share of the pie. Everyone does it, my lecturers are like "There's no money in music lads...oh and here's a picture of my vintage Moog synthesizer. Bloody expensive things, really.".

I think Josh should start a blog, actually. I'd certainly read it!

At 9/18/10 11:34 AM, Chris-V2 wrote:

At 9/18/10 06:46 AM, brokendeck wrote:

Yeah, Josh covered that bit with me after my last big post. :D Good luck with the studio man! It sounds like it's going to be a lot of new experiences in store for you and josh :D

Haha, cool! Hope I didn't come across too harsh, but I think the panic in the Music Industry is kind of overblown - especialy by the top cats - so people can keep their share of the pie. Everyone does it, my lecturers are like "There's no money in music lads...oh and here's a picture of my vintage Moog synthesizer. Bloody expensive things, really.".

I think Josh should start a blog, actually. I'd certainly read it!

Actually, I was telling my computer genius friend (the guy who owns the business I work at) that he should do the same thing...he's absolutely amazing at predictive analysis for the IT sector - he called dead-on google's entry into the cell-phone market more than 3 years ago...he would have made retarded amounts of money if had something to invest with back then and had done it during the spike where google's stock went up to $600 a share from about $200 in a matter of months. Yeah, no friggin kidding...

This is really a good idea TBH - I know that with the website design, I'm definitely going to be setting up a forum (was talking general database design with my boss Cody two days back) and licensing system where people can purchase commerical-use licenses for loops and instrumentals via our site (probably be doing the hosting and shopping cart via go-daddy). I should really see about getting a blog setup though as you mentioned. I'm excited to start planning out the inital website design.

At 9/17/10 11:55 PM, Rig wrote: So how's business?

It's good, a litle slow this week as I've had to deal with calling the police on my downstairs neighbor to get him evicted (finally!) but Chris should have gottent the measurements for the space we are planning to go into today and we finished a rough floorplan 2 days ago. Tomorrow, I'll be having a BBQ at his place and get a rough draft of the proposal hopefully fully written-up so I can forward it to some saavy business owner friends that I have back in California for inital advice. Got a couple more pieces of equipment in this week - another 20" high-end HP LCD monitor, Focusrite Saffire Pro 10 firewire interface and a Evolution 2-octave keyboard (MIDI controller). Things are definitely rolling along. I'm going to try to step up the pace next week with our plans.

Just finished my first blog post!

http://audioandit.blogspot.com/

hooray!! the place where I can house all my most inner audio + IT desires and aspirations!! haha

I'd favourite it but my hard drive shat itself and died last week and I'm on the folk's PC till my new one comes Monday (hopefuly).

Good start. Shoulda bought a Hackintosh, lollerbots.

Reinstalling OSX might be your best bet. The mechanics of Macs are the same, they're just specific to the hardware they work with - a few select Intel board + CPU combos and they read the HD in a different format - so they can go straight into machine code. I'll subscribe to yr blog and put the posts their on future occasions!

At 9/25/10 12:36 PM, joshhunsaker wrote: Just finished my first blog post!

http://audioandit.blogspot.com/

hooray!! the place where I can house all my most inner audio + IT desires and aspirations!! haha

Nice. I'll be reading it.