Welcome to the Guide

IndieBandSurvivalGuide.com is an open community created by indie musicians. It's the place to share all the practical information, tools, and resources that's available to indie musicians with one another. Think of this site as your band's back office - a place to plan, share knowledge, network, and otherwise help you promote your music, get heard, and ultimately, win fans.

The Goal: A Home For Everything Related to Music Creation and Promotion

With the advent of the web, worldwide distribution, and digital recording, there's never been a better time to be a musician. The problem is there's no home on the web to collect all the useful resources, tools, services, information, and websites that can help musicians.

What we need is scattered across the multiple sites, books, catalogs, forums, or stuck in musician's heads. It's disorganized, not easily accessible, and often goes lost.

What if there was a place on the web where all this knowledge could be stored? What if any information surrounding the act of making music were located all in one place? Open? Searchable? Commentable? Editable?

Now there is. And together, we're building it.

Here’s a sample of what you will find here: 

For Musicians, By Musicians

Who better to know, use, and comment on everything that's out there for musicians than we musicians? Whether you're an indie band, a solo artist, a re-mixer, DJ, hobbyist, recording geek, or just an individual who loves music and wants to help musicians be creative and get noticed, this site is for you. We encourage you to join us and help make this site as useful and complete as it can be - add whatever is missing, Wikipedia it up, discuss, and share what you know. Use whatever you find for your own music and music career, and then tell your fellow indies what works, what doesn't, and why.

How Do I Get Started?

It's easy:

• Register for free
• Participate and share what you know.

You don't have to register to use IndieBandSurvivalGuide.com, but then you can also play an electric guitar without an amp, too. And isn't it better to be heard? Plus its free, so there's nothing to lose. Once you register all sorts of doors open up for you, from commenting on any of the resources (i.e. venues - how's the sound? who should you talk to there to get booked? what's the take at the door? is there room on stage?), to joining discussions and adding resources of your own.

How Do I Use The Site?

Information is organized in two ways at the Guide:

• It's organized by activity, or as we say, topics. In other words, information is organized by what it is you want to do (i.e. make a CD, get press and publicity, get booked, etc.). Most topics break down into smaller, more specific categories (i.e. Get Heard - podcasts, college radio, non-commercial radio, etc.). And, we'll be adding new topics all the time as we grow the Guide with information.
• It's tagged and searchable.

Coming Soon: Future Enhancements & Features

Are these all the topics that an indie should know about? Heck no, but it's a start (and that's why we're in beta)! There's a lot to being an indie musician - from recording and playing music to getting it heard, sold, and publicized. So, what you're looking at is just the start. Our crack I.T. team is probably working on it now if it's 2AM. If it's like 10AM, they're probably sleeping. You know the hours that they keep. But even then, they're dreaming of new features and functionality. Oh, and if you have an ideas for the site? Give us a shout. We listen.

Let's Build This Thing

The site is what we indies make it. There's a handful of us who started this and see it's potential. But, it's going to rely on you as well. So please share what you know, add whatever you find missing, chime in on stuff, and tell your other indie friends about the site.

Wait, What's In It For You?

While writing the book, The Indie Band Survival Guide, we realized the need for us indies to have a free and open resource like this. We did a lot of research. You shouldn't have to. Rather than build a typical book website to promote our book, we rolled up our sleeves, drank some caffeine (a lot of caffeine), and started coding to create the musician resource we always wanted (er, and to promote the book). You can support us and our ongoing development of this site by purchasing a copy. In the future, we are likely to display some unobtrusive advertising on some of the pages to help us provide for the ongoing support, maintenance, and development of the site as a free resource for all musicians.