Iran has had its election. A dubious result at best, turnouts exceeded 100% in over 30 towns. While the Iranian government has tried to shutdown blogs and other social networks, Twitter has become the Medium of the Movement.

What can work for political movements can also work for the music industry. To put it another way, Twitter: it is an easy, simple, and effective way to mass distribute information.

Some of you, and I know personal know many of you and have heard others say “Twitter: It’s a FAD?” A mere annoyance, the thing that people who don’t have lives use and it will go away. Sorry to say, your wrong. Twitter is here to stay.

Twitter is a service that is one to many. You post and your followers listen. Its easy to follow, you don’t need to be a friend or invite someone, they can find you. This seems works great for people to follow celebrities and bands, anyone people want to know more about. And compared to the average nine to fivers life, musicians lives are interesting. While your doing shit, the rest of us just watch, and live our lives.

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With free downloads, pay-what-you-want CD marketing plans, and the high costs of touring, the major issue faced by independent musicians is how to remain financially viable, as well as pocket some extra cash. With little doubt, the best opportunity to scale your music is to find a licensing partner.

From a business perspective, scaling involves creating a process that is repeatable and can generate money with little or no additional effort, once the initial process is set up.

However, getting yourself hooked up with a licensing partner is by no means an easy task, and many hurdles must be overcome to get there.

First, you’ll need to have final cuts of your songs, and preferably a completed CD or two.

Second, you’ll need to create a second CD that includes only those songs that you think are most marketable for film, TV or games. Right now gaming is an area that is growing, which means many opportunities for licensing new music.

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This month’s blog post of the month is Bruce Warila’s post on Music Think Tank: “Don’t go over the self-promotion cliff; crush your local radio station instead.”

His thesis – the promotion tools of the Internet are trends that come and go, and don’t offer the type of return for your time that they should.

However, if you are going to make the effort, focus on “where the puck is going to be”, which according to Bruce will be niche channels of similar content, which will develop their reputations by selecting and continuing to keep organized the best group of music in a particular niche.

Some excerpts:

Look at the fragmentation of the music consumption marketplace this way: genres are coastlines, niches within genres are beachfront properties, and standalone artists are rocks or grains of sand. Sticking with the metaphor: coastlines and beachfront properties are compelling, interesting and entertaining; rocks and sand are things that get stuck in your shorts and sandals.

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