“I used to read a lot of books about the music business…and the biggest thing everyone always said was that it was not about looking for [labels and managers]. When it was time they will come looking for you…I thought it was not really accurate,” Brian Mazzaferri, the lead vocals and guitar player from IFD, said. “But in our case it really turned out to be true.”

Mazzaferri started IFD with his friends as a concept band. He began writing music that both integrated the sounds from various video games and was composed with video game hardware. Soon he found out that there was an entire genre of music in this style called chiptunes.

As the band was developing and writing music, they also took a serious approach to the business side of the band.

“I really did treat this as a business from day one,” Mazzaferri said.

According to Mazzaferri, one of the first things the band did was hire a social media coach. He wanted to avoid the pitfalls a lot of bands fall into, like wasting time and energy when trying to promote themselves on the web.

“It’s not about paying someone to do something for you,” Mazzaferri said. It was about learning how to become a part of the community, and not just spam everyone out there, he added.

One of the most unique marketing techniques IFD uses is giving free music to fans who sign up for their mailing list. It seems counterintuitive, because they are giving their content away for free. But not completely. By letting IFD send them e-mails, fans are paying for the music. They have created an audience who listens to new IDF material often and knows about IFD promotions and events.

Detone8.com writers have been on the mailing list for several months. We have noticed IFD sends few e-mails, but they ones they sent had great content.

Two of the most interesting promotions IFD have had were the 1,000 first fans certificates and the lifetime subscriptions for music and shows.

When the mailing list reached 1,000 subscriptions Mazzaferri wanted to create a special experience for their oldest fans. He said that everyone who is fan of a band likes to show that they were a fan before the band was big, so IDF gave their fans this opportunity. Any fan who was one of the first 1,000 people on the mailing list can receive a laminated card verifying their “original fan of the band status.” Several hundred people signed up.

IFD got creative again in order to fund the band’s first tour when they opened up for MC Chris. IFD has six members , with a lot of gear, so Mazzaferri knew touring would be very expensive. Their solution? Sell 100 lifetime memberships to shows and free music. Members are given a wallet-size USB drives with the IFD logo on it. The membership includeds a lifetime free pass to any IFD show ever, and access to a free digital copy of anything the band ever releases.The $100 memberships sold out within 48 hours. In two days the band made $10,000.

One of the more amazing aspects is not did locals fans signed up, but worldwide fans purchased memberships. Fans as a far away as Australia and Singapore became members.

The difficulty the band faces now is finding the time to share with an expanding fan base. The e-mail list has more than 10,000 members, and it’s harder to give time to every fan.

It is not luck that the band is successful. They learned early to take the same serious approach to connecting with their fans as they did with writing and performing their music.

People who struggle to advance in the music scene can get caught up in the concept of “paying your dues.” Yet, today IFD is working on their first label-produced album a little over a year after forming the band. Perhaps paying your dues means writing great music and having a serious marketing plan.

Since spring of 2007 the members of Barefoot Truth have been working full time on the band. Recently they have received national attention and an undetermined amount of money from success on Pandora Radio. The internet radio site exposed Barefoot Truth to a much larger audience, and that audience can’t seem to get enough of Barefoot Truth. The band has had more than 4.5 million plays on Pandora.

Although the band had little influence on promoting their music on Pandora, their dedication to making quality music and their professional approaches to the band are key to this success. The band is doing everything right. They made the band into a small business and keep track of all of their money. They even get tax write offs at the end of the year.

Discoll took the time to help answer some our questions about Barefoot Truth’s success.

How do they afford to be professional musicians?

“We have a pretty good situation, we all live together. So a lot of the money we make as a band stays in the band going towards our own rent…it really just cuts down on costs.”

“When there is downtime…we’ll have our own little things going. Odd jobs and things are always coming up.”

What was the first step to becoming a regional band and getting shows in different areas?

“Show swapping is defiantly a big thing for us. It has been for breaking into new places…We’ve also been lucky to have interest from a lot of colleges and high school students [then we] go to their student activities board and tell them [the students] would like us to play at their school. It’s been cool to break into new markets. From there we try to get into local clubs.”

How does Barefoot Truth handle management responsibilities?

“Right now it’s pretty much mainly handled by the band. We’ve been though management a little bit and had booking agents and had some help with different tours…but beyond that we are constantly booking shows ourselves. We do a lot of the admin stuff ourselves which definitely gets tedious.”

Barefoot Truth’s first recording was produced by a Grammy nominated producer and has worked with the band Dispatch, how did that come about?

“We’ve always looked up to [Dispatch] and we went to what was planed to be their final show back in 2004. We happened to meet them, and we actually had a cassette tape. We played it for them in our car. They were really cool to us, and they said if we were really serious about making a CD we can hook you up with our producer Jack Gauthier. We said yes. We got to record our first few CDs where they recorded their CDs.

We’re never afraid to talk to people. We love meeting new people in the industry and learn how other people have gone about their career.”

The band has gotten a lot of exposure from Pandora, but how much has it helped Barefoot Truth?

“We started getting requests from different parts of the country to play, then we started seeing CD Baby sales from all different parts of the country. When someone buys your CD on CD Baby they get a chance to tell you how they have heard of you. About 80 percent was coming from Pandora, and we thought wow this is cool. Then our music got on iTunes, and we were making way more digital sales than physical sales…It’s grown exponentially.”

What advice does Barefoot Truth have for young bands?

“The biggest thing for us has been to put all the money back into the band. You can’t grow without putting money into recording, gas, graphic design or publicity. There is so much to put into the band you need to have a money flow. Just don’t get greedy with the money you make at gigs.

And don’t be afraid to play anywhere. One example that I remember we played a very small bar gig we were hesitant to play. We were pretty sure no one was going to come hear us who knew of us, but it ended up meeting a kid there who is an IT guy. He was able to do an internship for us, and he was able to build us an entire website and graphic design and get credit for it…you never who you are gonna meet and what each gig is going to bring to you.

And don’t drive in the snow…We got into an accident, and that sucked.”

Learn more about how to get your music onto Pandora, advice from Pandora’s founder and getting royalties from internet and satellite radio.

Avatar:

• Avatar has an application process, and it is not guaranteed they will take your music.
• If accepted, your music should be available on iTunes within 3-4 weeks after you submit all the required items (contracts, CDs, W9, etc.)
• Avatar does not charge a set up fee, but will keep 20% of earnings as their distribution fee.
• Payments will be made 45 days after the end of each quarter (mid May, Aug, Nov, Feb)
• Better Business Bureau: No Rating, no complaints.

Catapult:

• Catapult offers self sign up, and includes multiple stores in their distribution agreement including iTunes, Amazon MP3, and Zune.
• Expect a 4-8 week time frame from the time you submit your music, to the time it will be available for download (varies by store)
• Catapult charges a $25 setup fee, and has a tiered distribution fee starting at 9% and scales down to 5% as downloads increase.
• Catapult does not require a physical CD, so you can start the process while your music is off to the replicator, or you can choose to scrap CD replication altogether.
• Payments are made once a month via Paypal.
• Better Business Bureau: A Rating, no complaints.

CD Baby:

• CD Baby is also a self sign up service, and includes over 20 stores in the agreement.
• Expect your music to start showing up in the different stores after 3 weeks.
• CD Baby charges a $35 set up fee, with a distribution fee of 9%.
• CD Baby issues payments the Monday after they received the sales reports from iTunes, Amazon, etc.
• CD Baby also has a physical distribution offering that includes Amazon (which is required if you plan on submitting to Pandora).
• Better Business Bureau: A- Rating, BBB processed a total of 18 complaints about C D Baby Inc in the last 36 months, our standard reporting period. Of the total of 18 complaints closed in 36 months, 14 were closed in the last year.

The Orchard:

• The Orchard has an application and approval process.
• The Orchard distributes through iTunes, Verizon, Amazon MP3, Zune, and many more.
• Better Business Bureau: No Rating, no complaints.

QuickStar Productions:

• Quickstar also has an application and approval process.
• Quickstar distributes through iTunes, Amazon MP3, Napster, and “almost every other mp3 retailer on the world.”
• Better Business Bureau: A Rating, no complaints.

TuneCore:

• TuneCore is completely self service and includes 19 different stores (iTunes, Amazone MP3, eMusic, etc.)
• TuneCore does not retain anything as distribution fee, however, it does have 3 different setup fees depending on single, album (standard), or album “a la carte” distribution.
• Better Business Bureau: No Rating, BBB processed a total of 2 complaint(s) about this business in the last 36 months, our standard reporting period. Of the total 2 complaint(s) closed in the last 36 months, 0 were closed in the last 12 months.

**All the distribution fees are based on earnings after the retailer fees.

Good Luck!

image by DeusXFlorida

Tim Westergren is an award-winning composer, a musician with more than 20 years of experience and has even owned his own digital recording studio. Yet, Westergren’s greatest impact on the music industry has been as Pandora Radio’s founder and CSO. Pandora Radio has grown to more than 40 million users, and for last year they paid out more than $20 million in royalties.

Still, Westergren has even bigger plans for Pandora and ideas on how musicians can utilize current and future marketing tools.

In late January we talked with Westergren about what Pandora’s value is to musicians, and his thoughts on how to find success in this new decade.

What is the Music Genome Project?

“[The Music Genome Project] is the connecting tissue that powers Pandora.”

“I spent a lot of time in bands and as a film composer as well. And specifically when I was writing music for movies, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why people like what they like.”

“I kinda developed this taste profiling method, an informal genome in my head. And that eventually became the foundation for the idea of the Music Genome Project.”

“The genome project itself is this enormous musical taxonomy. So it’s a collection of hundreds …of discrete musical aspects that collectively describe a song.”

How are royalties paid by Pandora?

“We pay a publishing fee and a performance fee for every song we play. And a publishing fee is paid to the composer and the performance fee is paid to the performer.”

“We pay the publishing fee to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, and we pay performance fees to a company called SoundExchange. And they in turn distribute that money to artists and labels.”

“The nice thing is that musicians are getting paid. It’s been a real strain for us on a business standpoint, and I think it still remains a pretty unjust fee.”

Can musicians get feedback on play counts and thumbs up/thumbs down from listeners?

“It’s certainly something we would like to offer and eventually will. Where an artist can go in and investigate that, and ultimately make use of that.”

“So, not just find out what songs people are liking and who your fans are, where they are. But, communicate with them as well. So you can maybe plan a tour and e-mail all the people who ever thumbed up a song of yours to let them know you are coming.”

How can artist promote themselves on Pandora?

“[Musicians] can go in and buy advertising. That would essentially mean buying graphic visual advertising that surrounds the tuner, banners around the tuner. That currently is the only method we have for artists to advertise.”

What advice do you have for new bands starting out?

“I think it’s time now where if you’re a musician you need to take advantage of the web.”

“In order to do that you need someone to help you. If I was starting a band now, one of the people I would add to the band is a person whose job is to be the online member, not necessarily some one who plays an instrument…But, this person’s full time job is just to figure out all the ways in which you can take advantage of the web.”

“Think of that person as a member of your band just like anybody else. But they play a mouse instead of playing guitar…give them a cut of the door, credit them on the album and make them part of the band.”

How will musicians fair as labels are struggling to stay vital?

“I think there will be now a potential for a musician’s middle class. And in some ways you are going to see a compression overall where… the top selling artists aren’t going to make nearly as much, and that’s not news, so you’re going to have this layer of artists that [in the past] couldn’t quite make it that can start making it. Meaning, make a living.”

This is part two of a three part series on Pandora Radio. Part one was how to get your music on Pandora Radio.

The third part of the Pandora Radio series is on promoting your band and making money on Pandora. We will we talking with the band Barefoot Truth, a band with more than 4 million plays on Pandora Radio.

Michael Zapruder, music curator for Pandora, faces an onslaught of 400 to 800 songs every month. Yet even with a never ending supply of new music, Zapruder and his staff don’t cut any corners. Every song submitted to Pandora is analyzed by the experts at Pandora to be considered for inclusion in the collection.

“We are proud we listen to everything,” Zapruder said.

With over 40 million registered users, Pandora is not a market you want to miss out on. And, you should not. Submitting to Pandora is relatively easy, and all the steps you need to get on Pandora are steps you should be doing anyway.

———————————————————————————————————————————————-

The steps to getting your music ready for submitting.

• First, you need to have a CD copy of your music with a bar code. When a recording studio agrees to record and replicate an album a bar code is often included in the fees. But watch out, it can cost as much as $99 to buy a bar code. Pandora recommends Nation Wide Barcode which charges only $10 for a bar code. You can get it the same day.

• Once your music has been reproduced into a CD format, Pandora requires that the music must be available in the physical Amazon CD store. You will need to create an account for Amazon Advantage, but there are no fees to join. It cost $29.95 per year plus a 55% standard commission on the sale of your CDs. Don’t forget to enter in all the information that Amazon lists about your music. Most importantly you need to upload the cover art for the album.

• Speaking of albums, no matter how awesome all the other songs on a CD might sound you need the rights to use every song on the album. Once Pandora accepts your music they may use all the songs on your CD.

• It is also suggested that before submitting you should collect relevant information about your fan base, selling power and music reviews. This will not help with the Music Genome Project, but it can be a good indicator to Pandora if people want to hear your music.

The simple submission process.

• Go to Pandora’s submit music form and give them all the information you have prepared. You will want to submit your best two songs from the CD you put on Amazon. Zapruder also suggests not putting in more than one submission until you know if your first CD has been approved or denied.

———————————————————————————————————————————————-

You can check up on the status of your submissions, but be patient. Not only are there hundreds of submissions ahead of yours, the review process takes a long time. You just need to have the patience to wait as Pandora works their way through the songs ahead of yours. Zapruder said this process can take up to three months.

“We listen to the songs and if necessary and relevant we look up the supplemental information that the artist provided with their submission,” Zapruder said. “A decision is made on whether to accept the music or to pass on it, and that decision is added to the original submission.”

Once Pandora gets to accepts your submission, the Music Genome Project is used to analyze your songs. This process is a long list of music attributes that are rated by a group of music experts at Pandora. The rating process is extremely rigid so that all of the music analysts can give a consistent answer to questions like, “how distorted is this guitar?”

No matter what the genre, Zapruder is looking for quality music. Yet some of the more crowded genres, like four piece pop rock, can be difficult to get into. Also, some genres of music have yet to get their own genome, so Pandora would not be able to take any music of that genre regardless of quality.  Don’t worry. It is very unlikely you would run across this problem if you are writing any kind of music heard in clubs in the U.S.

Good luck.

This is part one of a three part series on Pandora Radio. Part two is an interview with Pandora Chief Strategy Officer & Founder Tim Westergren. He talked with us about how Pandora works, the future of the music industry and his advice for young bands.

The third part of the Pandora Radio series is on promoting your band and making money on Pandora. According to Westergren, 70 percent of the music on Pandora is from artist not on major labels, and Pandora pays royalties for every time a song gets played on the site. Last year Pandora paid more than $20 million in royalties.

The newly launched site, The Banded, is basically a way to upload and share music with fans. The site’s goal is for fans to vote on songs they like and help undiscovered bands (bands on major labels are not allowed)  make money and get exposure.  The site is clean and easy to use for fans, and even allows for Facebook Connect, so no one has to learn a new password.

For bands there are several ways to make money, or gets discounts, but the biggest potential is “The Band 2.” This is an award for the two most popular songs each month. According to the site , “Each month, artists behind the top 2 most highly voted songs get a percentage of our site revenue (for life!) and ownership in The Banded in the form of stock options.” So if the site makes money, you do too.

The site is still in beta mode, so there is little chance of making money from the start, and the site is not yet set up to sell merch.

Still, the first “band 2″ has started for December, so this might be a great time to get your band’s foot in the door.

Because MySpace.com has so many advantages for musicians, only the foolish would not have an account. MySpace may no longer be the superstar of social networking, but for musicians it’s almost perfect.

Almost.

One of the biggest drawbacks to MySpace is the owner. No, I’m not talking about Tom. I’m talking about Rupert Murdoch.

In an interview with Australia’s Sky News Murdoch threatened to remove all websites he controls from Google. In the interview he said that people who find his sites from search engines are of little value to his advertisers. “We’d rather have fewer people coming to our websites, but paying,” Murdoch said.

Does this mean he wants to make MySpace an unsearchable, pay-for-content site?

Unlikely, but as long as Murdoch controls MySpace musicians need options.

One option in the not so distant future will be .music.

Based on Constantine Giorgio Roussos award winning project from his days at USC, .music is the idea of an exclusive Internet extension for all things music related. Tools will exist to for selling music and merchandise, getting recording deals, and even musicians trading services with each other. Roussos is trying to make .music a near replacement for .com in the music world.

Roussos’s business plan was started almost a decade ago, but his first venture, Unsignedperformers.com, was too early. The concept was similar to MySpace today, with personal profiles, but few people were ready to share pictures and personal information.

Yet by 2004 MySpace and Friendster changed the way people used the Internet.

The way Roussos saw things, as much as MySpace helps musicians, it can also be a waste of time.

“MySpace does not increase the money you make for the amount of time you spend working on your site,” Roussos said. “Do you think is it work making $200 a year for the hundreds of hours your band spends each year on MySpace?”

MySpace and .music will differ in majors ways, starting with getting paid for advertising.

While Bands and personal profiles drive all the traffic to MySpace they see none of the profits. Roussos’s plan for .music that bands will get paid for endorsements that are placed on their page.

The creation and control of the site would be similar to MySpace. Roussos company, Music.us, would host the site for a fee and have tools available for bands to create their pages and make money.

Making .music work should be simple. Once live, .music would replace .com at the end of a websites URL. To find a band a person would just type THEBAND’SNAME.music.

The .music extension would even protect bands against squatters trying to buy popular domains and then selling them later at a high price. All the band sites would be required have to have content. Without rights to the music, no one could use a band’s name on .music.

Tools for .music would include ways for bands to sell tickets, merchandise and even trade services with each other. There is also a plan for a virtual T-Shirt store. Bands would submit designs and then shirts would be printed when a customer orders them. The bands would never have to touch the product or have to worry about excess inventory.

According to Roussos, .music will start testing over the next few months, but when the site will be launched is still up in the air. The .music approval for the Internet has not been approved. But, it’s not because Roussos is not trying.

Roussos and his investors have put in years and large sums of money to get .music going. They have a website petition with close to 1 million names asking to add .music to the Internet, and put in an investment of $200,000 to secure .music. There is just one problem. The international committee that permits URL extensions has not allowed a new extension in almost a decade.

ICANN, the committee with the power to add new extensions, said they would be adding new extensions to the Internet in 2009, but over the last few months ICANN is now saying it will likely be sometime in 2010.

“Now it is a waiting game,” Roussos said.

.music may not be available for over a year, because Roussos said he want the site to launch with full force. For those who can’t wait, invitations for testing .music will be sent out to musicians that sign the .music petition. Until then, keep working on your MySpace pages.

When a pop rock band emerges out of metal stronghold Iowa it would be a miracle if anyone came to see it. Yet through a well-executed marketing plan, The Actress Adorable was able to sell out the first show they ever played.

By bringing in close to 300 people to their first show, The Actress Adorable has been able to get any show they want from hometown venues and have given their fans quality performances from day one.

It all started with metal guitarist, Jesse Barnes’, dream of starting his own band.

When Barnes wanted to start a pop rock band, he was going to do it the right way. He was not going to cut any corners, something he had learned from previous experiences.

Barnes had played in a professional touring metal band only months before starting The Actress Adorable. His time with the band left him with bad memories of how to run the business aspects of a band.

As the newest member of the band, Barnes was paid the least from touring. Often Barnes was paid as little as a $100 while at the same time the band’s roadie was getting paid $800.

“These guys ripped me,” Barnes said.

After this experience, Barnes considered giving up on his dream of being a professional musician.

Barnes decided to enrolled in college, and shortly after realized he could not give up on his dream to be a musician. On a trip to Michigan he heard some bands that he had never given much of a chance.  He started listing to Under Oath and Armor for Sleep and realized he wanted to start a band without a being tied to a specific genre.

Barnes and three of his friends started writing music, but is soon fell apart. One of the members did not like playing anything other than metal, forcing Barnes to rethink his strategy. He now realized to create a great band, he had to start by being great from day one.

Everything had to be done right 100% of the time.

“I wanted to find five rock stars…in it to win it,” Barnes said.

Barnes looked for not only talented musicians, but musicians willing to put in the time to making the band successful.

Once the band was created members got full time jobs with the intent of paying for a high quality recording and professional marketing. The members would pay whatever the band needed until the day the band could pay them to be full-time musicians.

The Actress Adorable wrote enough songs to get a professional recording with a producer. They hired a web designer to create a high quality MySpace page with photos they got from a professional photographer. All before they set up their first show.

Barnes even made connections with a national distributor, Quickstar Productions, to have their music available on iTunes.

The launch of the MySpace page and the announcement of The Actress Adorable’s first show was released to the public the same weekend. Then, promoting the show began.

Until the day of the show, every weekend the band took off work and spent two 12-hour days out on the streets talking with people. They lived close to several colleges and spent much of their days going from dorm room to dorm room.

The band also found a way to get the local media to write articles about the show. Two local newspapers ran page-one stories about the show.

The members of the band had a friend who needed medical assistance, so some of the proceeds from the show was going to help their friend’s bills. Once the local media got information that the show was also a benefit event it became local news.

“I put 100% of my effort into promotion,” Barnes said.

When the band finally played the sell out show it was a new experience for many the members. Some had never played for that may people before.

The club owner said that if they could sell out shows that The Actress Adorable could set up any kind of show they wanted.

Right from the start the band was getting a lot of respect from clubs and other bands that were more than happy to play with them. The Actress Adorable became the only local, non-cover band to play the largest venue in their hometown.

The sell out show also had a big effect on the work ethic of the band. They wanted to have this kind of audience for every show they played.

One of the biggest marketing tools they learned from that show was putting in the long weekends of hitting the streets pays off, and they have continued this practice for every show to date.

Working the streets with the full band has had great success to bring people to shows. It does a lot to help connect with the audience. First, it allows the band to talk to a lot of people in an area at once. Second, it allows different members strengths to come out whether it’s talking with girls or talking tech with music fans. Last, it helps to keep the band a tight group, something touring bands deal with every day.

Even as The Actress Adorable grows, the lessons they learned from their first show are still helping them succeed today.

Here are some of the tips for selling out your first show like The Actress Adorable:

Be prepared with marketing- When the band started promoting the show they already had a MySpace page with music for people to check out and follow. They followed this by making the music available on iTunes where fans were able to buy their music.

Meet people offline – Connecting with fans face-to-face is the fastest way to make die-hard fans and friends who can help your career.

Make the event more than just about you – The Actress Adorable’s first time on stage was also a benefit show. Give people more than one reason to come out and see you.

Don’t cut corners – Put away real money towards making the band better. Great recordings and good producers will cost money. A band is a business, and businesses need investments to get off the ground.

Don’t be satisfied – Congrats if you sell out your first show, but the job is not over. Promoting shows is a constant battle. Don’t assume that if you sold out your last show you will sell out the next one.

Test drive Google Music Search – The new search function is still very raw, but should get better daily.

image by David Paul Ohmer

Professional photographer Nick Schnelle’s has had great photo shoots with both professional bands like Fall Out Boy and his hometown bands. It’s not about the popularity of a band that makes great shots but showing what makes a band unique.

Getting the right photos

The first thing a band needs to decide is where to take photos.

“A lot of the bands they see in AP [Alternative Press Magazine, Inc.] are redundant,” Schnelle said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the band.”

Having a photographer take pictures of your band playing Warped Tour will make for great photos for a scrapbook, but it might not yield the best photos.

Schnelle suggests driving around town scouting out ideal locations for photos and ideas for what the theme of the photos might be.

“I don’t look in AP for ideas,” Schnelle said. “I get my ideas from other sources like photojournalism, portraits or even weddings.”

Sources Schnelle recommends getting ideas from non-music photography like cityscapes and street photography.

When bands do decide to take photos of a live event, they need to be aware of the limitations. Live concerts can show what musicians are best at, but the drawbacks can include bad lighting, little time to shoot and uncontrolled factors like fan presence.

Finding a cheap photographer

Schnelle charges less than $30 an hour for band promo shots when he is working for himself.

For the band The Actress Adorable their first photographer was a woman they knew who took senior pictures for the local high school. The band got licenses to use any photos they wanted for just $15 each.

Jesse Barnes, guitar player for The Actress Adorable, said he has found all of the band’s photographers from connections the band has made. And, this has helped keep the cost down.

Schnelle prefers photos shoots he gets from word-of-mouth because he can charge much less money than if he was working for a recording studio.

DIY

When bands do not have enough money for a good photographer they could try to do it themselves.

According to Schnelle any budding photographer needs to learn whatever camera they are using inside and out. Even if it is a point and click digital camera, decent pictures can be taken.

Online the resolution of photos is very low so even five megapixel cameras can take decent pictures. A 6.1 mega-pixels camera is capable of taking 3000 x 2000 pixel photos.

“Don’t get sucked into megapixels,” Schnelle said. “Try a camera out, and go for ease of use.”

It also valuable to not just learn about good photography but to steal great ideas. Atlanta based photographer Zack Arias has a large portfolio of band photos on his site and his Flicker.com account.

Learning the very basics of photography to specifics on almost anytime can be found all over the web like digital-photography-school.com and photojojo.com.

After the photos have been taken they need to be edited. Photoshop is the worlds most used photo editing program for white balancing, cropping, sharpening and whatever else one could need to do to a photo. Unfortunately the listed price of Photoshop CS4 is around $700.

For bands short on cash the lighter version Photoshop Elements can be found for less than $100 at Amazon.com. It is easy to use and has all the basic functions for photo editing.

There is also free software like GIMP or Picasa, but bands need to make sure that they will put in more time when they spend less money.

Contact the writer of this article at brett@detone8.com.