MusicBizAdvice.com (pronounced “MusicBizAdviceDotCom”) is an online publication for songwriters, musicians, and music industry professionals from the local to the platinum level. In early 1997, in the midst of a Platinum level career in booking, artist management, and concert promotion, Founder / Editor in Chief Randi Reed started an online resource for unsigned and independent musicians–while confined to bed battling the autoimmune disease CFIDS. That online resource would later became MusicBizAdvice.com.
What may have sounded like out of the box thinking to some of Reed’s music industry colleagues was a natural evolution. As Reed explains, “At first a lot of them thought it was a crazy idea. I think they were afraid of a ‘computer geek’ connotation. But I’d been active on the music boards on AOL and in the music forums on the other online services since 1993 and saw first hand that the online music community was growing. Then during my illness, indie musicians started tracking me down via IM to ask questions. So I started a website as a way to answer them more effectively. In those days, URLs were limited to a certain number of characters, and MusicBizAdvice.com had too many letters, so we went through a couple of different titles and a whacky spelling or two…MusicBizAdvc was one version. Our first site was only two or three pages.”
In 2003, that website changed its URL to MusicBizAdvice.com and is now read in more than 78 countries worldwide and utilized as a resource by newspapers and magazines around the US, as well as E! News, MTV, and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. Selected MusicBizAdvice.com content has also been licensed to Song U.
Additionally, MusicBizAdvice.com’s This Month in Music History calendar has been displayed at the Hard Rock Café Surfers Paradise.
Reed attributes such trust to high journalistic standards, along with extremely well-informed writers and staff. “I’m proud of the fact that our current writers and staff members have all worked at the Platinum level of the music business,“ she explains. “I drive our writers crazy with fact-checking. Before I got into music, I was a journalism major who came from the kind of instructors who taught thoroughly-sourced, objective journalism. Present both sides of an issue. Understand the difference between fact and opinion. Stick to facts whenever possible. State opinions as opinion. And I’m a big fan of the FTC Blog Disclosure Act.” (Reed herself is a former college journalism award winner, but freely admits to “breaking nearly every grammatical rule” to give MusicBizAdvice.com its conversational tone.)
In addition to the main MusicBizAdvice.com website, MusicBizAdvice.com has been active on Twitter since September 2008 (Reed writes and sends the Tweets personally). MusicBizAdvice.com can also be found on Facebook and MySpace.