If you wanted to be cool back in 1625, the thing to do was to be a musketeer. In the 1950's, it was pretty cool to be a mouseketeer. Now, if you want to be so cool you're hot, you've got to be a marketeer.

Where the whole musketeer and mouseketeer fields were pretty limited and required either special skills or good connections, being a marketeer is open to almost anyone. So why not jump in?

Here's the scoop, and I'm writing this primarily for indie artists but it applies to all kinds of people, so pay attention even if you don't know a whole note from a donut hole. This is the age of the niche industry, and you are part of it.

Oh sure, there are still big companies around, but the amount of revenue and services provided by all the little guys far outweighs them. Now if you work for a big company and look around for a few days you'll find they have a marketing department. They might even have two, especially if they are a high tech company, but let's keep this simple.

In that marketing department are people who think about, pay attention to, and possibly even like marketing. They know how to craft messages, they understand demographics, they pore over tables of click-through rates and banner ad CPM costs and magazine circulations. They know which newspapers get picked up and tossed and which ones get passed on to secondary readers.

If you are like most indie artists I know, your marketing knowledge reaches its apex with "If you build it, they will come."

Except in the movies and extaordinary (meaning it does not apply to you) circumstances, that simply isn't true. So you either need to become a marketeer or you need to hire a marketeer, because without a little marketeering no one is going to know you exist. Even if you are the baddest base player or the most dynamite drummer in fourteeen states, if you don't do some marketing you'll simply become an outstanding starving artist.

There are millions of indie artists out there, and if you are one of them and want to rise above the crowd and get noticed by enough fans to put supper on your table, make sure you spend part of your time on marketing.

I'll post an article on the DGM web site about how you might jump in and some steps you might take to get into marketing. In the meantime, though, simply accept the fact that even the best products in the world are still marketed. Yours should be, too.