Dear Readers,

Happy New Year to one and all! I hope the Fall semester went well for you and that you are off to a great start this spring.

In this issue I would like to focus on a “new” interest of mine – teaching business skills to students outside of the Music Business program at our school. I have taught an Entrepreneurship course twice through now with great reviews, so I am confident that the students appreciate it – and have gotten good feedback from faculty as well, so I am encouraged that this will be an avenue that we will continue to pursue and hope this new nationwide initiative will continue to grow.

But, before I go off on that tangent, I wanted to share some resources on a topic that I use with all of my students – the concept of goal setting. I have my students setting personal/professional goals for themselves, and also for the artists that they work with in Marketing and Management seminars. Some of you may already quote the Harvard goal-setting success story that can be found at http://www.articlequery.com/got-goals--your-gps-to-success-article-659.html. This evidence does seem compelling, however, I will add the disclaimer that I also read that the same story was attributed to Yale, and was “proven” to be nothing more than urban legend. Either way, I do believe in the importance of making goals, writing them down, and then making sure that you see them every day. Students in my classes roll their eyes, but at the end of the day, they claim it does work. Of course, there are hundreds, if not thousands of sites that talk about goal setting – just one that I like is http://www.topachievement.com/goalsetting.html.

Now, on to sharing our skills with performance majors (and composition, conducting and B.A. students). These folks desperately need our help in creating ways to develop a career - since we all know that they are so unlikely to walk into a full time, good paying orchestra job that they will keep for the rest of their lives straight out of school. Last year I joined NETMCDO which is a great organization of music/arts career counselors and Musical Entrepreneurship enthusiasts. I learned a lot from Angela Beeching – the lead organizer of the group and a name familiar to many of you - as well as all the participants in the NYC annual conferences. You can check out their website at www.musiccareernetwork.org. From their ‘Resources” page you can follow the “Career Guides” link to get to a great list of the currently used books in this area. You can continue on to a very useful list of links – including one for sharing syllabi. I followed the one to www.musicbizacademy.com. On this site, I first read the article about CDBaby selling over $35 million dollars of Indie Music product and then went right to the articles section (free content) at http://www.musicbizacademy.com/articles/index.htm. I really liked some of the articles there and spent some time looking around. A new artist to the business, on the classical or pop side of things would do well to visit. There is very practical advice – starting with all you need to know about setting up a website under the Internet promotions section. When reading this particular article, I learned about “HostBaby” – a web hosting service offered by the same folks that run CDBaby. According to their promotional materials, they are set up to help musicians specifically with presets for streaming music, email list mailers, concert calendars, etc. I have not used this service, but if they are as user friendly and customer centered as CDBaby, I would say this might be a great option for artists getting started. Other articles sections include radio promotion, artist and product development, and publicity. Next time I have a few moments, I’m going to spend more time with these articles!

Lastly, I want to share what looks to be a fun site. The site is located at http://www.betchaican.com (Betcha I Can – for those of you who didn’t “get” it right off). It is a site for people to set up goals (challenges) and then track them with or without the help of a virtual community. If you make the goal, you give yourself a predetermined treat, if not, you make a contribution to a charity of your choice. It seems only fitting with the turn of a new year to encourage all of you (and your students) to set goals, and to follow them through. I have my goals, have them written down, and have a clear plan to meet them this year – really. Do you?