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How To Do Taxes as a Self-Employed Musician

Once you've decided to officially become a professional musician, you are faced with a problem that every working American has to face - you need to file a tax return. This fact alone is enough to dissuade some very talented...

How To Claim Your Artist Profile & Make The Most of [Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and Pandora] “For Artists”

If you’ve had music on Spotify for more than a few years, you remember the days of muddling through the mystery-laden world of Rovi, asking gatekeepers and submitting tickets into a blackhole in an attempt to just get your...

How to Create an EPK (with Examples)

Some people call this a “one sheet” because all of the necessary information is on, well, one sheet. An EPK can be formatted a few different ways. These days, most people are either making it as a single (hidden)...

Musicians Tax Guide: 11 Common Mistakes Musicians Make on their Taxes

In 2009, after working in music and venue marketing for 10 years, I started answering the phones at a busy tax prep firm in Chicago. It was supposed to be a temporary gig, but before long, my musician friends...

Songtrust vs. Sentric vs. TuneCore Publishing

Which admin publishing company will work best for you: Sentric, TuneCore Publishing, or Songtrust?

If Spotify Won’t Pay More, They Should Give Us More Data

I’ll say it. And I’m going to get shit for it.  The comment from the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, “you can’t record music every 3-4 years anymore” got blown way out of proportion. I actually did a full podcast...

Black Postmodern Jukebox Performers Pen Open Letter About Mistreatment

On Thursday, July 16th, in a brave act of solidarity and dissent against their employer, black musicians penned an open letter to the founder and leader of Postmodern Jukebox, Scott Bradlee.  Many posted this letter and subsequent demands to social...

Are Spotify Pre-Save Campaigns Worth It? Feature.fm vs. DistroKid vs. Show.co vs. Smarturl

You can create a way for fans to save your song to their library or playlist in advance of the release. Why do this? If Spotify notices that your song gets a ton of saves or playlists on day 1, it will trigger their algorithms and potentially pop your song into various algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly, Radio, Your Daily Mix, Releaser Radar, Radio, etc. And the more saves a song gets, the more likely a Spotify playlist editor will add it to a playlist.

California’s Music Economy Is About To Crash

Photo: Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee California is on fire. But this economic blaze will ignite abruptly on January 1st and will affect the California music industry so drastically that it could completely burn it down. As the fifth largest economy in the world and the...

How To Copyright Your Music with the US Copyright Office

Let’s just start by saying the US copyright office needs to hire better web developers.I just went through the painstaking process of their electronic filing system. Although it has been updated over the years, the website looks and functions like it was built in 2003. It is no...
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Can The Music Industry Be a Safe Place?

This week, Ari is joined by Katie Tucker, Founder of Sharp Edges Records, to discuss advocacy and inclusion in the music industry.
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