Prior to spending a ton of time on a business plan or an investor deck, create a simple Haley Pitch. It's the most efficient way to obtain valuable feedback from advisors, mentors, and the critics you respect. You should be able to demonstrate that you have invested at least one hundred hours discussing prototypes, mockups, storyboards, or wireframes with potential users and/or customers.

I frequently get into discussions and debates with friends and founders about the viability of new products and services. Product scaffolding makes it easy for me to rapidly evaluate the opportunity size, branding, and believability (is it possible). In my experience, if you can’t describe your product or service using simple, harmonious product scaffolding, your venture will struggle.

You can't find Austin anywhere. He's barely on the Internet. His unmastered recordings are decaying on a hard drive in a defunct studio, and the venues that loved him have given up trying to find him.

My father was a successful businessman who built an auto recycling empire. Despite the fact that he spent his days amongst a sea of wrecked cars, bent metal, and burly men, my dad went home each day to his beloved trees, his blossoming flowers, and landscape designs. He was a junkyard dog with a soft spot for pansies, pine mulch, and asparagus.

This post on my blog is an odd duck for me. However, I realize this post is useful to others. In 2016, I did in fact consider investing in a huge restaurant concept with some friends. If you found this post, I would love to know if the spreadsheet was useful. Please send me a note and/or feedback to brucewarila on Twitter or Gmail.

You could choose to have no website, no Facebook page, no videos, no album, no Twitter, no centralized location on the Internet, and never do much of anything on the Internet that could be called self-promotion, and that your fans can and could effortlessly do everything for you…

A windhorse is not a strategy. It’s not a relationship. It’s not a routine. It’s not a drug. It’s any of the above. It’s what you ride that takes you to a place where you didn’t know you wanted to be.

The name of your brand, the URL you use, the first word you type, the sequence in which you release your songs, your lyrics, the images you feature, the videos you release, the messages you type, and everything you put into your online presence should be part of an elaborate plan to seduce fans.

Do you believe crowds of humans will ever (or do now) sway as much control over the rate and depth of media dissemination as the established media machine does now?

When a westerner (an American for example) walks by the office of a co-worker, and the co-worker is quietly sitting there doing nothing, the westerner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is lazy and probably slacking. On the other side of the world…

The Click Control business-copyright model is one in which rightsholders will (someday) simply and easily suspend and reclaim their copyrights. It makes sense to be able to temporarily and selectively suspend one’s copyrights to encourage adoption (including commercial usage), and then (via the click of a mouse) reclaim their suspended rights someplace along the way to becoming a classic…

If someone shows you, you will obtain confidence that the problem or puzzle can be solved. If someone shows you, and teaches you, you will solve the problem. If nobody shows you, and nobody teaches you, the stone can teach you what you need to know.

The formula stipulates that for a song to obtain maximum traction, all the variables in the formula have to push up and max out. If you plug the formula into a spreadsheet and play around with scenarios, you will notice (it’s all multiplication), that a single low variable sinks a song (this is important). In other words, you need ALL the variables to work for you to maximize the conversion rate from listeners to fans.

The more that I read about the latest and greatest music marketing trends, the more I want to stand up on my desk and shout “don’t go over the cliff with the rest of the lemmings!”

The cost of acquiring a music collection is approaching zero, while the cost of listening to whatever you want is no more than a 30 second ad spot for every sixty minutes of music…

In any business, a good manager should be able to tell you the ‘end-date’. The end-date is a hypothetical day in the future when cash reserves will run dry if expenses continually exceed revenues. Knowledge of the end-date is a huge (negative) motivator. When the boss says: "We need to generate X by next Thursday or else...", people respond like soldiers going to battle.

Written in 2013: Today, a great wireless device has to be a phone, a camera, a computer, a GPS, an e-book reader, an application ecosystem, an entertainment center, a social instrument, a business toolbox, and a great music service. Music probably consumes more device-time than any other phone feature. So, it’s clear that device manufacturers understand that music-as-a-service (MAS) is a core feature that’s essential to competing. However, the current music stack that includes: MP3 acquisition and management, playlist management, playback control, music discovery, music recommendation, and social sharing is outdated and cumbersome.

Does death by obscurity really happen to great songs, or does lack of traction only happen to mediocre songs?

I think this is one of the most important questions that we can ask ourselves. Do most fans just want your music, or do most fans want something else from you beyond your music?

Music absorption is the process that occurs between music discovery and the (self) conversion of an average music consumer into an active fan. I believe the music absorption process is radically different now than it was just two years ago, and understanding how this process has changed should impact your approach to succeeding in the music industry.