Okay so as you all know I have been shouting out Clickity Clank For Like 4 years now. Ive been trying to start it on a more serious tip now and i have been doing a lot of research reading and believe it or not a lot of this music business shit is common since.
Since it takes money to make money you either have to take out loans or spend your own money on what you need. Depending on how you want to start your company and what you want your company to be about. Or you can do something that has been working for me and my -----s over here.
First things First you have to trademark the name of your company. most of the time you can do this without an entertainment lawyer.
http://www.copyright.gov/ Sites like that are good for researching trademarks and going through the steps of doing this. Because if in fact you do blow up and start gaining traction people will try to claim your name and your company if it is trademarked you can sue if they gain any revenue lol
Second figure out how big of a scale you want your company to run. Example for Clickity Clank we want to actually rent a space set up a real booth the mixing boards and shit like that make it look like any studio you ever been too.
The space is going to be nearly 2gs a month, the mics keyboards soundproofing the booth building the booth as well as your average fixing the place up that is all going to cost. This is the way we agreed we wanted to start our company so we got a lawyer and had him make an estimate on how much all of this will cost...lets just say we are going to need about 300,000 dollars to start it the right way.
Once you have done those things smartest thing to do now is to figure out how you would get your product out. Will you distribute it yourself? Will you distribute online? You have to get business cards made their are a lot of sites where you can do that for free.
http://www.vistaprint.com/vp/ns/bcfr...x?xnav=marquee
you have to get the word out. Once you actually have a product say you put together a mixtape. you need someone who is going to work for you like a manager somebody who is going to help you spread the word because once you have put all this money into your company you are going to want to see some of it come back. Nobody is going to buy your shit if they don't no who you are. That is when myspace comes in handy. You can promote like mad on myspace. A manager can get you shows where your street team can be handing out t-shirts cards and Cds (street teams are crucial these days)
me and my manager had done things like this to get money:
Sale T-Shirts
Sale My Mixtape Collection Thugged Out Blends
Pay for other artist to go to studios to create then charge then 40% of their overall earnings
Hustling (not the right thing but we all sale anywayz might as well use it for the right lol)
and our biggest money maker is actually party promoting. Now that im djing we host parties and charge 10 15 dollars at the door.
this way we are promoting clickity clank music as well as making money.
After all of this type shit is done now its meeting the right people and getting meetings so your music is falling in the right hands and in the right ears. You can actually buy contact list.
Music Industry Contacts, director