Three Very Important Tips to Consider While Buying a Guitar

If music were the food of love, play on. A cliched concept today, but the fact is that music still plays a central role in life. Some consider music to be something that de-stresses them, while others actually are so passionate about music that they pursue it as a serious hobby or even a career, and they all have a favourite musical instrument. For some, it is the flute, for others it is the piano, but probably the most famous one would be the guitar.

While most intend to one day take guitar lessons and buy a guitar, few actually go to the rigmarole of learning a new skill, investing money in a device, so on and so forth. If you are one of the few who wish to put down some money and buy a guitar, it is important that you know exactly what kind of guitar you should buy, and here are some tips that will help you do just that.

To begin with, though you might be able to spend a fortune on buying just the right guitar to make awesome music, many would suggest you to start small. Just like how a photographer first invests in a digital camera and then goes upwards to learn every trait of cameras and photography, a guitar player should buy the basic guitars, spend some time learning them and then invest in one of those more expensive models. One disadvantage of this is that you might end up paying a tad bit more than you'd pay for one of the higher models in the end, but you do get a lot more experience when it comes to playing as well as managing and maintaining guitars.

Before you finally buy a guitar, start with renting or using one of your friends, so that you know what goes into maintaining and owning a guitar. There are different types of guitars today, and you would not know which suits you the best, unless you use them for a couple of months. Right from the electric ones to the traditional, acoustic ones, you need to spend time playing one them to know which is right for you. The brand and the model also play a major role in deciding which one to buy. Some might be heavy, some might be light, and yet others would need additional, different props for playing.

When you finally decide on the manufacturer and the model that you wish to buy, take some time out and research both, and find out whether they have good after sales service, whether they are easily maintainable and whether spare parts for them are available easily or not. You could even go online and browse through any of the music and music instrument-centric websites to find this information and more. In some cases, you could even buy these instruments online for a much lesser price that what they are available in the brick and mortar shops.

Always go for guitars manufactured by well-known companies such as Gibson, Ibanez and others for superb sound quality. Visit this website to know more.

Important Things to Consider When Selling Your Concert Tickets Online

If you or your loved ones can't use the concert tickets you purchased, why not sell them and give others the opportunity to enjoy the event? By selling your tickets you not only make a profit, but you also make someone else happy. To maximize your time and audience reach, however, it is best to sell the stuff online. You almost do not have leave home to complete the transaction, and you get to cover a much a larger geographic area at a very short time.
Online services allot a web page to advertise and list down your tickets, complete with product description and payment methods. You get to choose whether to mail or e-mail your tickets in many websites; it's up to you how want it done.
If you've decided to sell your spare concert tickets online, please consider the following guidelines before you fully set out on putting up an ad:
Honesty is the best policy. Decide to be honest, particularly when providing details about your ticket. If your ticket is for a seat in a far corner of the hall, indicate so in your advertisement. Don't give false information or half truths just to make a sale. If a customer complains, particularly if you're selling through a broker, you might get penalized heavily and marked with a bad record. And, of course, there's the proverbial "what goes around comes around" pitch...
Price. Set your price about 10 to 20% lower than the face value. Prepare yourself for some haggling, however, particularly when you're close to the concert date or when there are many other tickets to similar seats being sold. Keep in mind that when you bought the tickets you incurred a loss, so by reselling them actually you gain a profit.
Have a PayPal account ready before you start advertising too.
Who to sell with. There are many options available for selling your tickets:
Use your accounts in social media websites such as Facebook to quickly get the word out to your friends and family. Such websites make for managing the entire selling process and answering buyer queries fairly easy. You might want to make a firm stand on your prices, since these are your loved ones you are dealing with. Loved ones can be the worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) hagglers.
eBay is one of the best ways to sell your tickets if you are looking to make a fairly large profit. You can choose to auction off your tickets or have it sold immediately. If you have premium seating tickets, you can go ahead and put it up for auction. However, it is best to sell at the first offer if yours are tickets to seats that are similar to many others going around.
Online classified ads. There are many online classified ads where you can advertise for free. Don't expect to get a large markup in this method, but it is efficient enough when it comes to audience reach. Some of the more popular online classified ads are Oodles, Craigslist and USFreeAds.
Ticket brokers. Ticket brokers can be your most efficient choice because they can offer the widest range of services, including advertising and selling. Some of the top-rated brokers are Ticketmaster, Stubhub, and Vivid Seats. Selling fees, commissions and other charges and services differ between companies, and you'll have to ask around to find the ones that best suit your need. You may also find some of their policies overbearing. To understand them better, put yourselves in their clients' shoes. Clients want to be protected and assured that they're getting their money's worth. Ticket brokers' policies are designed to do just those (well, ideally they should).
Mode of delivery. You can choose to ship your tickets, will-call them or send them via e-mail, depending on the website's policies. Check with them to see if they offer what you want-some do not allow e-mailing of e-tickets nor will-calls.
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4 Important Tips On How To Promote Your Music

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This past year I've been focusing a lot of time on how to sell my music online. I truly believe that internet has changed the game for musicians and I want to be one of those musicians that knows how to use the internet to help promote my music. I've been reading articles, watching videos, taking notes and buying different programs to try out. Here are just some points that I've learned along the way. Hopefully these tips will help you with your album promotion, those who want to promote a band, or for those who just want to get your songs heard.

1. Focus on Digital

Ever since Napster started back in the mid-90's people have fallen in love with digital and have never looked back. Physical CDs, while still good to sell at shows, are slowly becoming the least cost efficient way to sell your music. Think about it. You have to send the artwork out, get it printed, get it shipped (which is usually way more than what you expect), and then lug them around at shows trying to get people to buy them. Selling CDs is a traditional way of getting some money from live shows, but to be a successful independent musician you have to move with the trends. Everything is going digital nowadays.

Think about it. You can go on YouTube and find somebody's video from Japan. They might have a link in their description where you can download the song for $1. In an instant you can have downloaded a song from across the world. It's truly amazing. People want it now and they want it fast. People are getting used to buying online now as well. I remember people were kind of touchy about buying online and how safe they would feel about it. Now everybody is getting into the action of buying online.

2. Use Social Media

If you haven't guessed it yet, the way music is being promoted is completely different a few years ago. The boom of social media changed everything. It first started with sites like livejournal and then MySpace came into existence. You remember MySpace, right? The mass amount of spam and also the profiles that were so super busy it took 3 minutes to load?

Now the world has found a new handful of social media sites to dive into... Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, etc... The options out there are endless. The best part of social media is that it's all free and if you have a good following, your post about your latest single can get shared around the world with a few clicks of a mouse.

How to Use Social Media

However, social media is more than just starting a profile and starting to send out messages and tweets and shoving your music in everyone's face. You have to know how to use social media so that you don't become a pushy salesperson. You've seen those people on a social media site. Sending out a post every hour...

"Buy my CD""I've got a show this weekend""Like my Facebook page"

But those people that send out those postings never asked themselves the simple question... why should they?

Really think about that for a second...

Why should somebody who doesn't know you from Tom want to share your information or support your music? You're just going to be considered another spammer because you have a bunch of followers who don't know who you. You failed to establish a relationship with your social media fans. I'm not saying that you shouldn't let people know about what's going on with your music, but you also need to communicate with other people too and have a conversation with people online before selling your music to them.

So how do they get to know more about you?

That's the true power of social media that some musicians don't understand. Social media gives you a chance to really say who you are, what you believe, what kind of music you perform, why you love music, why you do anything at all. It's pretty easy to let people know who you are. Just join a conversation or reply to a tweet. Or share another musicians music. Start to collaborate with people online. The options are endless.

3. Collect Emails

A lot of people think that collecting emails is an outdated practice. People think that it doesn't make much sense nowadays because people are on Facebook and Twitter so much that they just think it's best to market on those sites. That is true, but there is an even bigger truth.

Social media is a fad. They come and go.

What happened to all your contacts when everyone left MySpace? Did you have to try and reconnect with many of them or did you just lose them altogether? Think about how easy it would have been to email all your fans and say "I have a new Facebook page, check it out". How many times do people change their email addresses? Another thing is that people still check their email everyday. Your email list is one of the most valuable marketing tools you have.

4. Get Your Own Domain

What is a domain you ask? It's your own real estate in the world of web pages out there. Whenever you see a .com, .net, .biz, or .gov... those are all domains. This means you should have a website that you can direct people to at all times.

Why not use a Facebook page as a website? A lot of people have asked me that and I think that if you do that you're OK, but you also might face some issues in the future.

What if something happens to FB?What if their server goes down?What if they don't like what you said in a post and decide to turn your account off?

When you own your own domain, you have complete control of your own site. It doesn't matter if FB goes away. You still have your own server with your own domain. Plus it looks cleaner.

How My YouTube Account Got Cancelled

I'll give you a little story of mine and why I believe so much in the whole "get your own domain" and "get your fans emails". I had my YouTube account for about 5 years now. In the past year, I recently started using YouTube more to make videos and share them with people. I would go and message people that I thought would like my music. While some people didn't like the message I had 1000's of people support me and share my music. Some even signed up to my email list. I absolutely love YouTube and it is one of my favorite social platforms.

The sad part about it is that YouTube shut down my account last month. I had to start all over again. Why did they shut me down? Because enough people said I was spamming them for them to shut my account down. They didn't give me a warning. They just shut it down. It was my fault for not backing up my videos, but I lost most of my videos. I had to re-upload all my videos which means I had to put the description in again, put the keywords in and do all the annotations over again. It took me a whole weekend of burying myself in my apartment to get it done.

The worst part of it all? I lost 95% of all my contacts. People from all over the world that really liked my music and would comment on my channel are now gone and I might never get them back.

Master How To Market Your Music Online

I hope that you found this article helpful. As musicians we have to move with the trends. The internet and digital age has changed everything for every business and music is no different. As musicians we should be leading the charge on how to get creative using the internet. After all, most of us don't have big budgets behind us so we have to carry most of the load ourselves.

Has marketing your music online been a mystery to you?

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