Not counting my work as a musician, my first "music business" job, other than record retail, was street promotion. I would literally go out into the street and try to get people to shows, promote new albums, and otherwise make money for the companies who hired me.
Like my job at record retail, this was a great experience, because it put me face-to-face with music buyers. I had to get their attention, get them open to having a conversation with me, and hopefully, get them excited about what I was promoting and to take action (buy an album, see a show) within a few seconds.
As a street promoter, one of the biggest issues I faced was when I was distributing flyers (known as handbills or leaflets in some parts of the world). Like a lot of traditional advertising options, such as billboards and print ads, there is often limited space when flyering.
Depending on where you are, flyering isn't always legal. Even if it is, it's often looked down upon. Because of this, a person promoting music (or anything) in this way has a couple of problems.
1. Somebody won't like your flyer and will tear it down.
2. Somebody won't like your flyer and will put something else over it.
The solution to either is make it so your flyer is "bulletproof" and can neither be easily taken down nor covered up.
Baby oil.
Depending on the type of flyer you're using and the surface you're attaching it to, spraying baby oil around the area will make it so it's not easy to stick anything on that service and/or it's not easy to remove your flyer.
Is it nasty? Hell yes, it's nasty. But like a kid in the lunch room at school who licks the cookies his mother packed from him so nobody else will take them, it keeps people from messing with your stuff.
Forget the flyers for a minute. This technique still works and, if flyering is part of your music marketing strategy, by all means try it, but the "baby oil" concept is much bigger and will protect all areas of your music business.
Even though the music business is a "creative" business, there are a surprising number of copycats. And who can blame them? It's much easier to do succeed with something that already has momentum than start from scratch.
Then there is the "commodity" problem -- the fact that high-quality music can be copied and downloaded for free (or close to free), so the income stream that was once there no longer exists.
Fortunately for you, I have the solution -- "baby oil."
Not "baby oil" as in the slick stuff from Johnson & Johnson, but something that keeps others (and technology) from knocking you off or knocking you down.
The "live experience" is a good area to build upon, because a live experience is so personal that it can never be copied.
The feeling and experience a person gets when attending a live show is 100% unique. Even if you copy the "essence" of a live performance, such as an audio or video recording does, the experiences of audience members, which not only include what happens during performances, but also before and after them, are impossible to replicate.
You have more "live experiences" to offer then just performing, too, so the options to work this into your music business, even if you don't like to perform, are plenty. You can make great money allowing your fans to be part of the creative process (rehearsal sessions, studio sessions, etc) and other events once thought off limits or worthless to fans.
Don't think you're at the level to do this yet? You're wrong. The time to start is now.
Every business needs "baby oil." What is yours?