To start a record label involves many steps, and you will be the one in charge of making it all happen. Your actions will directly cause its success or failure. Carefully research this business venture and you will see exactly what your role is. The following compilation of tips, dos and dont’s should help any entrepreneur.

You should first know that when you start an independent record label it will take up all of your time. You can forget any free personal time for awhile. Until you get the label going and money coming in, you will have to do almost all the work yourself.

Having accepted that, starting a record label will consume all of your free time, and all points should be carried out with a sense of urgency. That includes getting the necessary business license and choosing and registering an appealing name. Your business license should have the name of your record label on it.

The next step is to make your presence known. When you start an independent label you have to have places that people can go to see what you’re doing. Web pages are needed. Make a Myspace page. Make a Facebook page. Get your internet presence strong. These pages can be used later to sell your music also.

After you start a record label a good amount of promotion is necessary. While hiring a promoter is the sensible thing to do you may not have the funds. You can do it yourself; many have had success doing it this way. Just put out ads in papers, magazines and online. Ask radio stations to mention your record label on air.

Actually, getting your music on the air is a must. Ask or beg radio stations to play your record labels music, mainstream radio stations and school radio stations are fair game. Offer to supply prizes for the radio stations to give to callers. This is a good way to pass out t-shirts, cups, and other things with your record label and website address on them.

Live concerts are a great way to promote your label and music also. Make sure that you have banners with your website on it. If the audience likes you they will go to your website and keep up on your progress.

Make ring back tones of your songs for cell phones and give them away on your website. This is a new thing that labels are doing. When you start an independent label you need to be creative with things like this.

When you start to distribute your music, make as many copies as you can afford. It is usually cheaper to make more copies. When you first start a record label money can be tight so you need to think about the best way to do things financially.

So now you have the essentials to making a successful record label. You can see that its easier said than done, but with determination and enthusiasm it will work for you.

Tags: entertainment, Music, music industry contacts, music record labels, record company business plan, start independent record label

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 8:13 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.