You are in a band because you offer something musicially to the group you are playing with. But what else do you bring to the table?

In this day and age, it isn’t enough to just play bass or just play guitar.

Having computer skills, the desire to oversee some online marketing endeavors, the ability to maintain or write code for your website, or simply the ability and desire to personally network in your local music community – these are all important additional traits that are helpful and necessary for young bands.

Every member must have a role. Below is an example based on a five member band:

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November’s Blog Post of the Month comes from Hypebot’s Associate Editor Kyle Bylin. The Elsewhere Musician: Making Connections in a Fragmented World highlights two key points: (1) all musicians (and especially the “successful” ones) must continuously work harder on the business side of things, and (2) the trend of shorter album cycles.

From Bylin:

Leisure time once spent doing creative things — where an artist could take time away from it all — has turned into work that ranges from learning how to market themselves online and off, answering an endless barrage of messages from fans, bloggers, and managers, and trying to keep all of their profiles, blogs, and social media tools relevant and up-to-date.

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Since 2006 people have begun to realize that all social networks are not the same. We’ve at times advised folks not even to bother with a myspace page. This advice is wrong.

As the various social networks diverge and segment their appeal, we all need to be focused on what we can do to get the most out of each segment.

CNN’s technology section recently wrote about this topic and calls this a “class divide.”

MySpace has one population, Facebook has another…. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.

These differences, however, do not highlight that one network is worth your time while another is not. That the largest social networks are segregating into niches is a positive in that you can now better target your message.

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In addition to my work as a Web designer at Kosmix, I manage a San Francisco band called Seconds on End. We play at places like the Boom Boom Room in San Francisco, the Little Fox in Redwood City, and the Pioneer Saloon in Woodside. We’re known for experimentation, and we have a eclectic but loyal following of passionate fans. In lots of ways, the band is exactly like a startup.

At first glance, the worlds of music and technology are polar opposites. The rock star and the geek seem to come from two very different sides of the social spectrum. One is about sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. The other: Long nights, hard work, and sitting alone in front of computer cranking out code.

But startups and bands have one key thing in common: both have to attract and grow fans. And to get a hit, you need just the right mix of quality, promotion and image. Here are a few things I’ve learned from my experiences with bands and startups:

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MTV recently accounced that they will enable any artist-unsigned emerging act, indie cult fave or major-label superstar-to submit songs for possible inclusion in the Rock Band game.

The plan isn’t as simple as uploading a song to iTunes or anything like that. Rather, artists and labels will submit songs to a community of trained freelance game developers and other interested programmers who will prepare the tracks for Rock Band. Additionally, labels can either hire trained developers or school their existing employees to do the work in-house.

Songs submitted through this process must then be reviewed by other developers to check for playability, inappropriate lyrics, copyright infringement and so on. Then approved tracks will be posted to an in-game download store separate from its existing “Rock Band” store where creators can set their own price (50 cents to $3 per song) and receive 30% of any resulting sales. Gamers will also be able to demo 30-second samples of each track.

If this process works and allows for any musician to have a fair chance of getting their music uploaded for games, it could obviously be a great way to attract new fans, as well as allow fans to add some individuality to their game playing experience.

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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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If anything, the Internet provides the ability to locate many things you may not have been expecting to find. This means that in order to reach your market (in this case, your music) you may need to find creative ways to get yourself noticed by those potential fans that may actually be searching for something else.

The previous V11 post quoted “The Fall of Communization and the Rise of the Music Fan.” Once again a quote from that post is relevant here, as it pertains to the perspective of the music listener/music purchaser:

As music fans we are now walking in a crowded room where everyone wants our attention and what happens naturally is that we’ve tuned out the frequency of noise in our lives. The permeability of the walls we put up around ourselves now only lets certain messages through. You now have to be smarter about what you do, because it’s no longer as easy to buy your way into our headphones.

Because of this, we need to find different, more organic ways to get over those walls so that people hear can your message.

Creative Marketing is required. Think of it as a combination of web surfing mixed with the long tail business approach.

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Every once in a while you come across an older post that starts sparking new thoughts. Kyle Bylin’s September 2008 post for Hypebot recently came across my screen.

He states: We now form communities around our favorite bands, we want to establish a connection or relationship, and we have a strong desire for music that is real, authentic, and meaningful.

This is consistent with Seth Godin’s now well known Tribes approach: what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies [or musicians, as the case may be].

Bylin continues: The permeability of the walls we put up around ourselves now only lets certain messages through. You now have to be smarter about what you do, because it’s no longer as easy to buy your way into our headphones.

So he asks musicians: What relationships are you building, where is your community, what connections are being made, how authentic is your message?

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I was reading Spin Magazine’s April article on U2 (What Makes U2 Run?) and came across this quote from U2′S bassist Adam Clayton:

“Think about the big bands, the big orchestras that used to tour,” he says. “Then the stock market crash came and they slimmed down to quartets, because that was cheaper.”

His comment was in response to a discussion about music’s relationship to outside economic forces as a constantly mutating cycle.

So if at some point big bands had to reduce their numbers from 20+ to 4 to become financially sustainable, then are we now seeing a time when 4-6 member bands will need to be reduced to solo musicians to make touring financially viable?

After all, pay split between one is certainly much better than when split between five. So, is one > five?

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A recent report issued by the Jewish Moms For Independent Musicians (JMIM) stated that 9 out of 10 Jewish moms support the “pay what you want” model for selling music online.

“We think it is a good application of the morals we like to teach our children,” says Stacy Schwartz, President of JMIM and mother two young musicians with myspace pages. “My kids put a lot of time into their music. Right now they are giving it away on myspace. But they should be compensated for their time and effort like anyone else. The newspaper delivery boy gets paid for delivering the paper every morning. My kids should get paid too.”

Added Lauren Gold, Vice President of JMIM: “If you can’t get someone to do the right thing, guilt is always a great last resort.”

Okay…. enough of my attempt at an Onion style article. The truth is this model seems to be working.

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