I downloaded an interesting document last week which I have been reading slowly over the past few days. It’s a book from 1988, written by the guys from the 80’s house/hip-hop group the KLF. It’s called then manual, and what it sets out to be is a manual for how to get a number one single.

They wrote it from experience, as it came out just after their big hit “Doctorin’ the Tardis” went to number one. It is a fascinating, tongue in cheek humorous look at the music business, but with a serious cynical insightful side that offers up some great truths and strategies for having a number one.

All through reading it I kept being reminded of how different things were in the late eighties, early nineties to today in the way of music production, and in general what you can do at home. There is a whole section of the book that deals with booking a studio etc that could be avoided with the right computer equipment these days, and the internet has revolutionised the last third of the book that discusses distribution and promotion.

Here are a few passages that I found memorable.

The basic Golden Rules as far as they apply to writing a debut single that can go to Number One in the U.K. Charts are as follows:

Do not attempt the impossible by trying to work the whole thing out before you go into the studio. Working in a studio has to be a fluid and
creative venture but at all times remember at the end of it you are going to have to have a 7? version that fulfils all the criteria
perfectly. Do not try and sit down and write a complete song.

Songs that have been written in such a way and reached Number One can only be done by the true song writing genius and be delivered by artists with such forceful convincing passion that the world HAS TO listen. You know the sort of thing, “Sailing” by Rod Stewart, “Without You” by Nilsson What the Golden Rules can provide you with is a framework that you can slot the component parts into.

The basic process that they outline in the book is as follows :

1. Listen to as much top 40 music as you can, and as much up coming dance music as you can

2. Hire a studio, an engineer and a programmer

3. Loan $20,000 from the bank, tell them that you are a small business owner starting a label

4. Pick some grooves (drum and bass riffs) from the albums, give them to the engineer and programmer, say you want to have something just like that

5. Manage the engineer and programmer through the creation of the track, if they are any good they will take the component parts and mash them together.

6. No matter how cheesy , gimmicky or hook laden the Frankenstein beast you create, just go with it. Push through it and go there.

7. Professionally master the finished product

That’s all I am up to at the moment. Interesting how with the advent of better digital audio workstations and software, the engineer and programmer parts are now the musician. We really do live in a golden age of music if you are into the process that goes into making it. The next stage deals with getting promotional and distribution support for your work.

I will keep you posted on what they have to say…

By the way if you have the time read the wikipedia entry on the KLF. Interesting characters, did some crazy blatant sampling which made them have to burn the whole pressing of one of their early singles. And they also dumped a dead sheep at an awards ceremony once… classy.

I am having a little bit of a change of direction for this site going forward, with more of a concentrated effort to showcase my work as a writer of fiction, non fiction and free thought. As I have said here over the past few weeks, there are enough blogs out there about people making money online, internet marketing and blogging in general. All are fine topics, and there are some pearls of wisdom to be found in the other 100000000 sites out there that talk about there subjects.
BUT, 95% of internet marketing is marketing in the pure sense. What they are marketing to you is products that allow you to market the concept of marketing to others. If that sentence doesn’t make a lot sense, the reason lies purely in the reality of the situation, and not my grammar. It is a pure caste made of air, a house of cards, the emperors’ new clothes. People telling others how to basically sell nothing. MLM pyramid schemes, get rich quick sales pages, too good too be true offers. Not for me thanks…

With latest Google page rank fiasco, I don’t really see the point of building a business who can have its profits halved, quartered or decimated completely by a giant corporation. That is not building an asset or a legacy. It’s a ticking time bomb, being fuelled by the time you put into it.

Sure if you love it, then do it. But do what you love, express the ideas that are in your head, the ideas that are yours alone because you thought of them. Create, don’t chorus with every other opinion or business plan or genre that you feel everyone wants to hear.

What I will share with you are ideas of how people can make money from their creative works, from their songs, novels, short stories, designs, graphics, games and un-categorisable projects. I will also detail my journey from unknown writer to hopefully known writer. I know that inside every blogger out there flogging some useless affiliate program (Hey that’s a new word… flogger : someone who writes purely for the commercial aspect online to sell ads) is a novel, or a screenplay, or a killer new bit of software just bursting to get out.

That is the revolYOUtion, letting that creative bit of you out, and making the systems of the internet and the commercial world work for you, not mindlessly selling your talented self after 10 cents of adsense dollars every day trying to make it rich, writing content that every other person is hashing out pursuing the same goals.

I think that I have made my point.

I was thinking this morning about John Chows post about people not being able to monetize Facebook applications effectively. It seems as if the developers are great at making these things, but so far suck at turning the know how into dollars… until now that is.

Here is my fantastic idea of how you, or anyone else you know that can develop a Facebook app. Or, if you are a company, I would be going out right now and hiring two gun Facebook application developers to start work TODAY. Facebook developers do charge a bit for spec work (the best way for them currently to monetise their skills), but if I was a company, a large corporation like Coke, or Nike etc I would be paying a team of developers to build the next killer Facebook app.

It would have to be something amazing, that users just could not do without. A revolution.

Facebook is fairly new territory, so I am sure that there is at least one fantastic idea that no one has thought about. What i would then do is embed my branding in the app every way that I could. Not enough to distract people from using it, but enough so that there would be no mistake who made it. If people familiarise themselves with your brand via repeated viewing, AND also associate it with the great time that they are having on Facebook then it is exposure that is worth major money. People are addicted to Facebook, the use it to plan their lives, keep in touch with friends and have fun. A captive audience if I ever saw one.

The beauty of the idea is that you don’t have to be a big player to get this reach and exposure. A small business, or even SEO consultant or pro blogger could gain a huge volume of traffic to their site and and the way that it could build your profile would be phenomenal. Why not team up with someone that has come up with a fantastic Facebook app, get joint naming or branding on it and then promote it as hard as you can online

If you already have a great Facebook app, go out and try to directly sell advertising for it to a major corporation. Show them the reach figures that your application gets. How many pages it is installed on, how many views those pages get per month. I am sure that they will be staggered at the numbers and pay you something. An up front fee, a licensing fee per month. It has to be better then earning the pocket change that Facebook developers are getting at the moment.

I think I have given away enough money making advice for today, just remember me when you are driving that Porche.