Showing posts with label tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tips. Show all posts
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Making the Most Out of Online Resources
Written by Daylle Deanna Schwartz
Author of "Start & Run Your Own Record Label" and "I Don’t Need a Record Deal!"
© 2009 All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission
Indie artists often complain about not having the budget they’d like to market and promote their music. Nowadays, digital marketing offers a plethora of opportunities for marketing yourself and your music that doesn’t cost anything in dollars. But, it can be hard to know where to begin—and end. While much of it is good for those of you with small to no money budgets, there’s still a big expense for taking advantage of so many opportunities—TIME.
The good AND the bad news: the cost to break an independent act can be more in time than in dollars. It’s great to have free tools! But you could spend all of your waking hours going onto all the different social networking sites and other avenues of promotion and still not make a dent. With all the artists and labels vying for online attention, you must work to make your music stand out.
It’s important to brand your name online. The more people see it, the more curiosity can be generated, which leads to potential fans or clients checking you out. The more you respond to fans who write to you, the more loyal fans you’ll have. But so much of the efforts to find fans is one by one, which accounts for a lot of the time you need to put into it.
It’s not enough to just register on all the websites. While there’s unlimited space for everyone online, you can get lost in it all and not make any constructive progress. I know. I’m always getting links to sites I “should check out.” People email me both to my server and on the social networking sites. It gets overwhelming. Another day ends and I haven’t done any writing. So I must get tough with myself in order to function.
Time isn’t FREE when it costs you your sleep, your personal life and even your sanity. But you can take control of online activities to make the most of the best opportunities. Here are so DOs and DON’Ts for getting the most out of your online resources.
DON’T jump around to everything that seems interesting or the new flavor of the month.
DO force yourself to stay on track. Put aside things you want to check out for when you have some time or accept you can’t look over everything. Learn the benefits of hitting DELETE.
DON’T immediately answer emails when they come in or click when you get a link.
DO: Prioritize what most needs to be done at this point. I have a NEED TO ANSWER folder and put personal emails and those asking questions into it. Have a block of time set aside when all you do is answer emails. When time is up, leave the rest for the next block!
DON’T jump from one site to another and register with every one you can.
DO plan your direction carefully and prioritize your needs to work them properly. Social networking sites allow musicians to seek fans out and interact with them. But working one or two hard is strongly advised as opposed to doing a little bit on many. If you have too many, you don’t work anything well and you can spread yourself too thin. Decide which sites are best for you and concentrate your energy to build up relationships with fans on them.
DON’T try to do everything yourself. DO mobilize fans to help. Get volunteers to assist you in following up with online activities. Ask them to tell other musicians on the site about you, use your music as their default on their MySpace page and drive potential fans to your sites. If you have a budget, hire an online marketing specialist to direct your efforts and do some of the legwork.
DON’T register with any social networking site that you’re not prepared to follow up with.
DO answer every email and make your presence known. Respond to comments. Nowadays, when people hear an artist they like or see you perform, they’ll leave a comment on your MySpace page. It’s important to respond. Musicians who keep in touch with their fans religiously build the strongest communities and get the most support.
DON’T focus just on MySpace and Facebook.
DO diversify. While pure social networking sites are great to exploit, get your music in places where people can find it. Do as many things as you can that don’t require constant attention that give your music potential exposure. Create iMixes up in the iTunes music store. Get your music into streaming radio sites, such as Last.fm, Pandora, Launch, iLike, etc. Send it to MP3 bloggers who review your genre of music. Post videos on YouTube. And get yourself on wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. These efforts often just require doing something once and can drive people to find your music.
DON’T think that selling and promoting your music online is all you need.
DO everything you can in real life too. Touring is still important for creating a strong connection with fans. People do live a good part of their lives off the computer so follow traditional promotion routes too.
DON’T put all your energy into inviting people you don’t know to be your friend or worry about having big numbers of them.
DO be more concerned with connecting to real fans. Successful artists say they don’t worry about how many friends they have on MySpace. What’s important is that they’re real fans who care about reading bulletin posts and getting invitations to your gigs. Of course you can invite people to be your friend if you want to know them. But do that with an email to introduce yourself so they know who you are and why you’re requesting them as a friend. Just inviting for the sake of upping your numbers is a waste of time these days. I don’t have thousands of friends on MySpace but every one of them came to me. I like that better! www.myspace.com/Daylle
Before you begin, make sure you’re ready to commit the time. Even with limits, you’ll spend hours a day keeping up. Find sites that are the likeliest to reach your audience and work them with a vengeance. Take advantage of every function they offer. Join relevant communities. Interact on them as much as you can so people get to know you. Eventually some will come to your page and hear your music.
Being online can be a full time job and you might only have a limited amount of time to devote. ReverbNation www.reverbnation.com has many helpful tools that can save you a lot of time and maximize your online reach. Some people hire a promoter to do it for them. If you don’t have a budget, I highly advise that you put aside time every day to work this new model for marketing and promoting music online, with a real plan.
Author of "Start & Run Your Own Record Label" and "I Don’t Need a Record Deal!"
© 2009 All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission
Indie artists often complain about not having the budget they’d like to market and promote their music. Nowadays, digital marketing offers a plethora of opportunities for marketing yourself and your music that doesn’t cost anything in dollars. But, it can be hard to know where to begin—and end. While much of it is good for those of you with small to no money budgets, there’s still a big expense for taking advantage of so many opportunities—TIME.
The good AND the bad news: the cost to break an independent act can be more in time than in dollars. It’s great to have free tools! But you could spend all of your waking hours going onto all the different social networking sites and other avenues of promotion and still not make a dent. With all the artists and labels vying for online attention, you must work to make your music stand out.
It’s important to brand your name online. The more people see it, the more curiosity can be generated, which leads to potential fans or clients checking you out. The more you respond to fans who write to you, the more loyal fans you’ll have. But so much of the efforts to find fans is one by one, which accounts for a lot of the time you need to put into it.
It’s not enough to just register on all the websites. While there’s unlimited space for everyone online, you can get lost in it all and not make any constructive progress. I know. I’m always getting links to sites I “should check out.” People email me both to my server and on the social networking sites. It gets overwhelming. Another day ends and I haven’t done any writing. So I must get tough with myself in order to function.
Time isn’t FREE when it costs you your sleep, your personal life and even your sanity. But you can take control of online activities to make the most of the best opportunities. Here are so DOs and DON’Ts for getting the most out of your online resources.
DON’T jump around to everything that seems interesting or the new flavor of the month.
DO force yourself to stay on track. Put aside things you want to check out for when you have some time or accept you can’t look over everything. Learn the benefits of hitting DELETE.
DON’T immediately answer emails when they come in or click when you get a link.
DO: Prioritize what most needs to be done at this point. I have a NEED TO ANSWER folder and put personal emails and those asking questions into it. Have a block of time set aside when all you do is answer emails. When time is up, leave the rest for the next block!
DON’T jump from one site to another and register with every one you can.
DO plan your direction carefully and prioritize your needs to work them properly. Social networking sites allow musicians to seek fans out and interact with them. But working one or two hard is strongly advised as opposed to doing a little bit on many. If you have too many, you don’t work anything well and you can spread yourself too thin. Decide which sites are best for you and concentrate your energy to build up relationships with fans on them.
DON’T try to do everything yourself. DO mobilize fans to help. Get volunteers to assist you in following up with online activities. Ask them to tell other musicians on the site about you, use your music as their default on their MySpace page and drive potential fans to your sites. If you have a budget, hire an online marketing specialist to direct your efforts and do some of the legwork.
DON’T register with any social networking site that you’re not prepared to follow up with.
DO answer every email and make your presence known. Respond to comments. Nowadays, when people hear an artist they like or see you perform, they’ll leave a comment on your MySpace page. It’s important to respond. Musicians who keep in touch with their fans religiously build the strongest communities and get the most support.
DON’T focus just on MySpace and Facebook.
DO diversify. While pure social networking sites are great to exploit, get your music in places where people can find it. Do as many things as you can that don’t require constant attention that give your music potential exposure. Create iMixes up in the iTunes music store. Get your music into streaming radio sites, such as Last.fm, Pandora, Launch, iLike, etc. Send it to MP3 bloggers who review your genre of music. Post videos on YouTube. And get yourself on wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. These efforts often just require doing something once and can drive people to find your music.
DON’T think that selling and promoting your music online is all you need.
DO everything you can in real life too. Touring is still important for creating a strong connection with fans. People do live a good part of their lives off the computer so follow traditional promotion routes too.
DON’T put all your energy into inviting people you don’t know to be your friend or worry about having big numbers of them.
DO be more concerned with connecting to real fans. Successful artists say they don’t worry about how many friends they have on MySpace. What’s important is that they’re real fans who care about reading bulletin posts and getting invitations to your gigs. Of course you can invite people to be your friend if you want to know them. But do that with an email to introduce yourself so they know who you are and why you’re requesting them as a friend. Just inviting for the sake of upping your numbers is a waste of time these days. I don’t have thousands of friends on MySpace but every one of them came to me. I like that better! www.myspace.com/Daylle
Before you begin, make sure you’re ready to commit the time. Even with limits, you’ll spend hours a day keeping up. Find sites that are the likeliest to reach your audience and work them with a vengeance. Take advantage of every function they offer. Join relevant communities. Interact on them as much as you can so people get to know you. Eventually some will come to your page and hear your music.
Being online can be a full time job and you might only have a limited amount of time to devote. ReverbNation www.reverbnation.com has many helpful tools that can save you a lot of time and maximize your online reach. Some people hire a promoter to do it for them. If you don’t have a budget, I highly advise that you put aside time every day to work this new model for marketing and promoting music online, with a real plan.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Setting Up for a Mix in the Studio
Very good tips on setting up for a mix. He is speaking about real drums, but you can get some basic pointers about mixing. Especially the order.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
I Really Dont Want To Get a Regular Job
Written by Jason Isbell
Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit's eponymous album will be released on February 17, 2009 on Lightning Rod Records . Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit is Isbell's second solo release and his first release with his band The 400 Unit. Prior to his solo career Jason was a member of Drive-By Truckers from 2001 to 2007.
When giving anyone advice about the music business, or anything in general, I find it necessary to have a sense of what the person or group of people is trying to achieve. The trick to manipulating the entertainment industry is knowing your specific goals and being willing to work very hard, cut dead weight, and take some chances in order to get there.
For most musicians, at least most that I know, expectations change as time goes on. When I was thirteen, for example, I spent a great deal of my time daydreaming about fame and wealth. In my mind, I had already chosen jobs for all my friends, though there weren't that many, and I had planned out every initial conversation with all my heroes. While these dreams haven't left me altogether, my priorities now line up far more evenly with my reality. Today, my wildest dreams of rock stardom can be boiled down to this: I really don't want to get a regular fucking job. I think that's an achievable goal that, in the long run, can make me very happy, indeed.
It's clear that this isn't enough for everyone. If you want to be a star, which I don't advise, you should probably stay with a more traditional method of using the business. Audition for anything that comes your way, network until your iPhone is full of numbers and your soul is locked away in your inner monologue (the soul just gets in the way of celebrity), and listen with feverish intensity to that wisest of fanny-packed and man-sandled sage, the A&R person. Allow that person's creative input to guide your creative output, and he or she will be your guide to credibility and artistic worth, at least in the eyes of the average. If you write songs, don't scare anybody. Keep it short and don't try to impress. Dress accordingly. Find a manager that demands at least twenty percent. Anything less, and you'll find yourself up saddle creek without a paddle. You'll probably want to devote every realized thought and every waking hour to understanding and pronouncing the word 'yes'. Make it your mantra. You'll get time for yourself later, when you're loaded and can afford to hide.
This is clearly not the path for folks like us. I write songs to teach myself how to feel about something, and when I see a crowd of people in front of me, singing along to those songs, I can't help but think I'm not alone in this world. This interaction is a plant that must be grown and cultivated. Find people you trust to water it when you're away. At this point in my career, the best tip I can give anyone is this: Work with your friends. Oh, and don't have stupid, greedy, negligent friends. Seems easy enough, I guess.
Internet, internet, internet. Any discussion of the music business would not be complete without the inclusion the of the mighty mighty media, the new Goliath killer that allows all of us shoe-gazing Davids access to the most powerful slingshot in history. With a click or two, we can propel our music to all corners of the world, or receive music form the least popular new band in Belgium. Become familiar with it. Unknown bands now have the ability to spend their spare time spreading the word without anyone else's help or authorization. I could sit in front of my computer and connect with hundreds or thousands of people in a day's time. If only a small percentage of these folks ever become fans of my band, that is a big step in the right direction. MySpace, Facebook, iTunes, YouTube... It's as if these sites have been custom built for emerging bands and artists, and they're easy to use. Don't complain about their power, and don't underestimate it.
Tour, tour, tour. My final piece of advice for those interested in making a living in music is to get your ass on the road. You don't have to wait on labels or radio or anything else. The Ford Econoline van is the greatest automobile ever made. Get one, load it up, and call in every favor you can. Trust friends to tell you where to play and put in a good word with the booker. If you're any good and you work hard, you should be able to find someone to take over your booking. Once you get an agent, you can usually find a manager. Once you have an agent and a manager, you can usually find a label. Don't be afraid to fire any of these people at any time, and remember that they work for you, not the other way around. In many cases, you could do their job, but they can't do yours.
If you work very hard and still have no success, there's a chance that you might be making bad music. If that's the case, I can't help you. However, if you put all of your energy into achieving well-thought-out goals, like that of not having to work a regular job and making the best music you can make, something might accidentally catch fire and you might find yourself with a hit. Stranger things have happened. More than likely, though, you'll build a relatively small but loyal group of fans that will follow you to your grave. That can enable you to make music for a living for the rest of your life, and that's way better than being famous. I hope.
www.knowthemusicbiz.com
Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit's eponymous album will be released on February 17, 2009 on Lightning Rod Records . Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit is Isbell's second solo release and his first release with his band The 400 Unit. Prior to his solo career Jason was a member of Drive-By Truckers from 2001 to 2007.
When giving anyone advice about the music business, or anything in general, I find it necessary to have a sense of what the person or group of people is trying to achieve. The trick to manipulating the entertainment industry is knowing your specific goals and being willing to work very hard, cut dead weight, and take some chances in order to get there.
For most musicians, at least most that I know, expectations change as time goes on. When I was thirteen, for example, I spent a great deal of my time daydreaming about fame and wealth. In my mind, I had already chosen jobs for all my friends, though there weren't that many, and I had planned out every initial conversation with all my heroes. While these dreams haven't left me altogether, my priorities now line up far more evenly with my reality. Today, my wildest dreams of rock stardom can be boiled down to this: I really don't want to get a regular fucking job. I think that's an achievable goal that, in the long run, can make me very happy, indeed.
It's clear that this isn't enough for everyone. If you want to be a star, which I don't advise, you should probably stay with a more traditional method of using the business. Audition for anything that comes your way, network until your iPhone is full of numbers and your soul is locked away in your inner monologue (the soul just gets in the way of celebrity), and listen with feverish intensity to that wisest of fanny-packed and man-sandled sage, the A&R person. Allow that person's creative input to guide your creative output, and he or she will be your guide to credibility and artistic worth, at least in the eyes of the average. If you write songs, don't scare anybody. Keep it short and don't try to impress. Dress accordingly. Find a manager that demands at least twenty percent. Anything less, and you'll find yourself up saddle creek without a paddle. You'll probably want to devote every realized thought and every waking hour to understanding and pronouncing the word 'yes'. Make it your mantra. You'll get time for yourself later, when you're loaded and can afford to hide.
This is clearly not the path for folks like us. I write songs to teach myself how to feel about something, and when I see a crowd of people in front of me, singing along to those songs, I can't help but think I'm not alone in this world. This interaction is a plant that must be grown and cultivated. Find people you trust to water it when you're away. At this point in my career, the best tip I can give anyone is this: Work with your friends. Oh, and don't have stupid, greedy, negligent friends. Seems easy enough, I guess.
Internet, internet, internet. Any discussion of the music business would not be complete without the inclusion the of the mighty mighty media, the new Goliath killer that allows all of us shoe-gazing Davids access to the most powerful slingshot in history. With a click or two, we can propel our music to all corners of the world, or receive music form the least popular new band in Belgium. Become familiar with it. Unknown bands now have the ability to spend their spare time spreading the word without anyone else's help or authorization. I could sit in front of my computer and connect with hundreds or thousands of people in a day's time. If only a small percentage of these folks ever become fans of my band, that is a big step in the right direction. MySpace, Facebook, iTunes, YouTube... It's as if these sites have been custom built for emerging bands and artists, and they're easy to use. Don't complain about their power, and don't underestimate it.
Tour, tour, tour. My final piece of advice for those interested in making a living in music is to get your ass on the road. You don't have to wait on labels or radio or anything else. The Ford Econoline van is the greatest automobile ever made. Get one, load it up, and call in every favor you can. Trust friends to tell you where to play and put in a good word with the booker. If you're any good and you work hard, you should be able to find someone to take over your booking. Once you get an agent, you can usually find a manager. Once you have an agent and a manager, you can usually find a label. Don't be afraid to fire any of these people at any time, and remember that they work for you, not the other way around. In many cases, you could do their job, but they can't do yours.
If you work very hard and still have no success, there's a chance that you might be making bad music. If that's the case, I can't help you. However, if you put all of your energy into achieving well-thought-out goals, like that of not having to work a regular job and making the best music you can make, something might accidentally catch fire and you might find yourself with a hit. Stranger things have happened. More than likely, though, you'll build a relatively small but loyal group of fans that will follow you to your grave. That can enable you to make music for a living for the rest of your life, and that's way better than being famous. I hope.
www.knowthemusicbiz.com
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
iTunes Success in 12 Steps
How Indie Artist "Making April" Systematically Went from 0 to 1,000 Sales a Week on iTunes in One Year
by Ariel Hyatt, Ariel Publicity
© 2009 All Rights Reserved
I recently was having lunch with my dear friend, music attorney extraordinaire Dan Friedman, who was in town to showcase a band he represents who he mentioned was selling 1,000 singles a week on iTunes.
My jaw almost hit the table. 1,000 singles a week on iTunes?
Who is this band? And how are they doing this? And he coughed up the answer (and luckily for me their phone number).
A few days later, I cold called Greg from "Making April", who it turns out are an emo/piano rock band (kind of like Ben Folds Five), and we spent an hour and a half on the phone. Greg generously spilled the beans as to how Making April got to where they are today: selling 1,000 CD singles a week on iTunes and signed to a record deal.
How They Did It…
Greg explained that they decided to make a full time business out of their band. Everyday at 9 AM, three of the four members met in what they called "The War Room," which was a room reserved in one of their homes. They took it seriously, just like a job, and every day they would set simple goals.
“In the beginning we really did not know what we were doing,” Greg recalls. “The daily goal was to make the maximum amount of friends on MySpace, which is 400 a day. Between three of us, that was 133 each.” Here’s how it went from there.
Step 1: Find sound alikes – famous bands similar to you. - They started by looking at similar bands in their genre that had large friends lists at MySpace. Dashboard Confessional, for example. They would go and they would ping each and every friend in Dashboard Confessional's friends list…
Step 2: Ping each person. And then they would go to the comments and post:
"Hey if you like Dashboard Confessional, you're probably going to like Making April. Would you please come check us out and leave a comment?" Then, people would check them out and leave comments.
Step 3: Get personal. The band would then personally respond and personally thank everyone that left a comment. And they always signed their name using a sig file, which included their IM address.
Step 4: Instant Messenger bonanza. Then they would get their new fans’ information through Instant Messenger, and they would sit all day long on Instant Messenger chatting back and forth with their new friends, and according to Greg it was crazy. They actually couldn't turn on their IM because the minute they would open it up, they’d get thousands of people trying to ping them. So they had to post their status as “Away” on their IM because their buddy list was insane.
TIP! Give your music away. The whole time, they were giving away their music for free to build their audience.
Step 5: Run contests. After several months making thousands of personal contacts, a new marketing idea struck them: Making April decided to create a contest to run for their fans. They asked fans to add them to their “Top 8” friends. This success of the contest manifested in the band getting even more MySpace traction.
Each of the 20 people in the contest got points for convincing others to add their video and/or song. According to Greg it got completely out of control.
After this successful contest, a company called Brickfish took notice and offered to help them launch a second contest. Entrants had to design a T-shirt, and in return the band would write a song for the winner.
So, out of a well planned T-shirt contest they got an additional 100,000 hits to their page in two weeks, and the winner got a shirt, a personal call from the band, and an original song written about them. “It was unbelievable.”
Step 6: Engage your audience consistently. Another of their strategies was to send out a bulletin every single day. Not a hypey bulletin pushing themselves, but a simple one that would engage their fans by asking a question like, “Should we get chunky peanut butter or smooth”
They felt that there was no reason to blog because they weren't really on the road, and they didn’t have a lot of news to report, so they just kept asking questions on their bulletins, day in and day out. And they had a call to action: They would ask everyone on the bulletins to comment back on their pages. They would get hundreds of responses from people, which then would add a track play and a front page hit to their MySpace page. Just due to the question, they would get 500 messages instantly, and 600+ comments a day.
Step 7: MTV action. After their wildly successful Brickfish contest, they got a song placed on MTV’s “Laguna Beach.” They don't really know how they ended up on that show – they think a fan probably e-mailed the track to MTV – but the episode aired three times, and all of a sudden they noticed people started to buy the download.
Step 8: Get ready to charge for tracks (after a solid fan base is built). It was only after all of this traction and attention that Making April started pushing their iTunes page. This was after a full year of solid online promotions. They took the free MP3s off of their MySpace page and they started seeing their sales pick up.
Step 9: Repeat and repeat and repeat… and repeat. They put a big wall-mounted dry erase board on the wall of the war room, and every day they each had a goal to make 150 friends and comment back personally.
Step 10: Measure your goals and write them down. Then they laid out a weekly plan to hit their goals and numbers at iTunes, which were 200 plays and 400 friends a day. They also went after the friends of another a band called Secondhand Serenade (who blew up after becoming the number one unsigned artist at MySpace).
Step 11: Be masterful at one thing. I asked Greg if they did blogging, podcasting, Twitter, or other social networking sites, and to my surprise, he said “no.” They did this all on MySpace alone. The goal for MySpace was to consistently add 200 friend requests and 400 plays to the traffic they were already generating.
Step 12: A record deal. Because of all of their solid dedicated focus, Universal Republic Records took notice and offered them a deal. The moral of the story and the end result of all this work: Making April got a deal.
Was this process easy? No. It took solid dedication, trial and error, and a hell of a lot of time invested, but Making April managed to be one of the top selling bands at iTunes in 2007 and they beat a vast majority of artists signed to major labels.
I think this is a phenomenal and an inspirational story and one that teaches us lots of lessons. From my experience, musicians tend to give up too easily and lose focus, and then become defeated and give up. Making April proves that with a plan and some dedication, you can get very far with the tools available to anyone who wants to give it a go.
Check them out here: www.myspace.com/makingapril
by Ariel Hyatt, Ariel Publicity
© 2009 All Rights Reserved
I recently was having lunch with my dear friend, music attorney extraordinaire Dan Friedman, who was in town to showcase a band he represents who he mentioned was selling 1,000 singles a week on iTunes.
My jaw almost hit the table. 1,000 singles a week on iTunes?
Who is this band? And how are they doing this? And he coughed up the answer (and luckily for me their phone number).
A few days later, I cold called Greg from "Making April", who it turns out are an emo/piano rock band (kind of like Ben Folds Five), and we spent an hour and a half on the phone. Greg generously spilled the beans as to how Making April got to where they are today: selling 1,000 CD singles a week on iTunes and signed to a record deal.
How They Did It…
Greg explained that they decided to make a full time business out of their band. Everyday at 9 AM, three of the four members met in what they called "The War Room," which was a room reserved in one of their homes. They took it seriously, just like a job, and every day they would set simple goals.
“In the beginning we really did not know what we were doing,” Greg recalls. “The daily goal was to make the maximum amount of friends on MySpace, which is 400 a day. Between three of us, that was 133 each.” Here’s how it went from there.
Step 1: Find sound alikes – famous bands similar to you. - They started by looking at similar bands in their genre that had large friends lists at MySpace. Dashboard Confessional, for example. They would go and they would ping each and every friend in Dashboard Confessional's friends list…
Step 2: Ping each person. And then they would go to the comments and post:
"Hey if you like Dashboard Confessional, you're probably going to like Making April. Would you please come check us out and leave a comment?" Then, people would check them out and leave comments.
Step 3: Get personal. The band would then personally respond and personally thank everyone that left a comment. And they always signed their name using a sig file, which included their IM address.
Step 4: Instant Messenger bonanza. Then they would get their new fans’ information through Instant Messenger, and they would sit all day long on Instant Messenger chatting back and forth with their new friends, and according to Greg it was crazy. They actually couldn't turn on their IM because the minute they would open it up, they’d get thousands of people trying to ping them. So they had to post their status as “Away” on their IM because their buddy list was insane.
TIP! Give your music away. The whole time, they were giving away their music for free to build their audience.
Step 5: Run contests. After several months making thousands of personal contacts, a new marketing idea struck them: Making April decided to create a contest to run for their fans. They asked fans to add them to their “Top 8” friends. This success of the contest manifested in the band getting even more MySpace traction.
Each of the 20 people in the contest got points for convincing others to add their video and/or song. According to Greg it got completely out of control.
After this successful contest, a company called Brickfish took notice and offered to help them launch a second contest. Entrants had to design a T-shirt, and in return the band would write a song for the winner.
So, out of a well planned T-shirt contest they got an additional 100,000 hits to their page in two weeks, and the winner got a shirt, a personal call from the band, and an original song written about them. “It was unbelievable.”
Step 6: Engage your audience consistently. Another of their strategies was to send out a bulletin every single day. Not a hypey bulletin pushing themselves, but a simple one that would engage their fans by asking a question like, “Should we get chunky peanut butter or smooth”
They felt that there was no reason to blog because they weren't really on the road, and they didn’t have a lot of news to report, so they just kept asking questions on their bulletins, day in and day out. And they had a call to action: They would ask everyone on the bulletins to comment back on their pages. They would get hundreds of responses from people, which then would add a track play and a front page hit to their MySpace page. Just due to the question, they would get 500 messages instantly, and 600+ comments a day.
Step 7: MTV action. After their wildly successful Brickfish contest, they got a song placed on MTV’s “Laguna Beach.” They don't really know how they ended up on that show – they think a fan probably e-mailed the track to MTV – but the episode aired three times, and all of a sudden they noticed people started to buy the download.
Step 8: Get ready to charge for tracks (after a solid fan base is built). It was only after all of this traction and attention that Making April started pushing their iTunes page. This was after a full year of solid online promotions. They took the free MP3s off of their MySpace page and they started seeing their sales pick up.
Step 9: Repeat and repeat and repeat… and repeat. They put a big wall-mounted dry erase board on the wall of the war room, and every day they each had a goal to make 150 friends and comment back personally.
Step 10: Measure your goals and write them down. Then they laid out a weekly plan to hit their goals and numbers at iTunes, which were 200 plays and 400 friends a day. They also went after the friends of another a band called Secondhand Serenade (who blew up after becoming the number one unsigned artist at MySpace).
Step 11: Be masterful at one thing. I asked Greg if they did blogging, podcasting, Twitter, or other social networking sites, and to my surprise, he said “no.” They did this all on MySpace alone. The goal for MySpace was to consistently add 200 friend requests and 400 plays to the traffic they were already generating.
Step 12: A record deal. Because of all of their solid dedicated focus, Universal Republic Records took notice and offered them a deal. The moral of the story and the end result of all this work: Making April got a deal.
Was this process easy? No. It took solid dedication, trial and error, and a hell of a lot of time invested, but Making April managed to be one of the top selling bands at iTunes in 2007 and they beat a vast majority of artists signed to major labels.
I think this is a phenomenal and an inspirational story and one that teaches us lots of lessons. From my experience, musicians tend to give up too easily and lose focus, and then become defeated and give up. Making April proves that with a plan and some dedication, you can get very far with the tools available to anyone who wants to give it a go.
Check them out here: www.myspace.com/makingapril
Friday, February 13, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
What Makes A Winning Music Business Strategy?
by Kavit Haria, Music Business Consultant
I asked myself this crucial question when writing my latest e-book, "What are the important skills and practices required to create a winning and profitable music business apart from good music?"
The answer rests in being a good leader of your ship, having a well-designed and communicated strategy and a good marketing plan that can be executed to promote your music in a structured way.
If you re-read that last paragraph, you'll see how much I emphasize the idea of strategy and structure. It is with this careful planning and well-understood principles that your music business will become profitable.
STRATEGY
A strategy comes to life through its ability to influence hundreds and thousands of decisions, both big and small, made by anyone from the director level to the street team level. It is, at its core, a guide to how you behave and provides an external reflection of your music business.
A good strategy fuels and ignites your fire to more compelling actions and results. It leads you to a destination that is clear in your mind. A bad strategy on the other hand leads you to a less competitive, less differentiated position. It is simply a waste of time and energy as it does not move you forward; instead, it keeps you where you're already at.
The word "winning" is important in this context. An average strategy plan, when executed, gets you mediocre results and may not be a fair reflection of your true talent. A winning strategy plan on the other hand transforms your current situation into monster success through developing the right tools, people, techniques and street teams to share your art with the wider world.
As musicians, we are explorers. As explorers, our job is to explore the depths of our hearts and souls to share the music that feels most at home to us. Our job is to experiment, and experimentation takes time before it is successful.
Your music business needs a framework for achieving results that can be built upon to achieve your specific goals in your specific music genre. When you start to put together a puzzle, you would start by finding the corners and the edge pieces before building and assembling the inner pieces. It is the same with putting together the framework for your music business.
Constructing a music business plan is the first step in gaining clarity and direction in what you'll do, how often you'll release an album, how you'll market your music and how you'll make money. The framework of your music business is what holds it all together - the operations, the marketing, the management and the finances. Let's look at each one separately.
OPERATIONS PLAN
Your business operations is the activities your music business will do in order to share your music. These are usually gigs (what type of gigs?), recording (how often? when?), distribution (whom? how?), sponsorship, and other avenues of generating revenue.
MARKETING PLAN
The activities and tactics you will undertake to promote your music through your music business. These may include PR, social networking on Facebook, Myspace, etc, blogging, podcasting, video blogging, flyer and poster marketing, etc.
MANAGEMENT PLAN
Who will form your core team for your music business and what will they do? Regardless of whether you have the capacity to get these people involved, knowing what you want is core to getting a framework to build your music business.
FINANCE PLAN
Knowing what money goes out and what comes in is crucial to understanding how your music business can be successful. My accountant often tells me that the success of my business is equal to how well I can understand the numbers on my cash flow sheet. He is right and I pass this advice on to you.
I asked myself this crucial question when writing my latest e-book, "What are the important skills and practices required to create a winning and profitable music business apart from good music?"
The answer rests in being a good leader of your ship, having a well-designed and communicated strategy and a good marketing plan that can be executed to promote your music in a structured way.
If you re-read that last paragraph, you'll see how much I emphasize the idea of strategy and structure. It is with this careful planning and well-understood principles that your music business will become profitable.
STRATEGY
A strategy comes to life through its ability to influence hundreds and thousands of decisions, both big and small, made by anyone from the director level to the street team level. It is, at its core, a guide to how you behave and provides an external reflection of your music business.
A good strategy fuels and ignites your fire to more compelling actions and results. It leads you to a destination that is clear in your mind. A bad strategy on the other hand leads you to a less competitive, less differentiated position. It is simply a waste of time and energy as it does not move you forward; instead, it keeps you where you're already at.
The word "winning" is important in this context. An average strategy plan, when executed, gets you mediocre results and may not be a fair reflection of your true talent. A winning strategy plan on the other hand transforms your current situation into monster success through developing the right tools, people, techniques and street teams to share your art with the wider world.
As musicians, we are explorers. As explorers, our job is to explore the depths of our hearts and souls to share the music that feels most at home to us. Our job is to experiment, and experimentation takes time before it is successful.
Your music business needs a framework for achieving results that can be built upon to achieve your specific goals in your specific music genre. When you start to put together a puzzle, you would start by finding the corners and the edge pieces before building and assembling the inner pieces. It is the same with putting together the framework for your music business.
Constructing a music business plan is the first step in gaining clarity and direction in what you'll do, how often you'll release an album, how you'll market your music and how you'll make money. The framework of your music business is what holds it all together - the operations, the marketing, the management and the finances. Let's look at each one separately.
OPERATIONS PLAN
Your business operations is the activities your music business will do in order to share your music. These are usually gigs (what type of gigs?), recording (how often? when?), distribution (whom? how?), sponsorship, and other avenues of generating revenue.
MARKETING PLAN
The activities and tactics you will undertake to promote your music through your music business. These may include PR, social networking on Facebook, Myspace, etc, blogging, podcasting, video blogging, flyer and poster marketing, etc.
MANAGEMENT PLAN
Who will form your core team for your music business and what will they do? Regardless of whether you have the capacity to get these people involved, knowing what you want is core to getting a framework to build your music business.
FINANCE PLAN
Knowing what money goes out and what comes in is crucial to understanding how your music business can be successful. My accountant often tells me that the success of my business is equal to how well I can understand the numbers on my cash flow sheet. He is right and I pass this advice on to you.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
43 Million Reasons to Use MySpace.com
by Andre Calilhanna, Discmakers
The indie music universe is constantly waning and expanding: new bands emerge, old ones dissolve, conferences come and go, new web sites pop up as older ones fall out of fashion. As with any other industry or business model, these indie music offerings fail and succeed with their ability to create and meet market demand for their service.
Enter MySpace.com. Incorporating successful elements of MP3.com and IUMA, and eclipsing PureVolume and Friendster as the place to be online, MySpace is the epitome of what an online community can be. In it’s short life it has adapted and evolved to meet the evolving needs of its user base, and it has expanded to a network of over 43 million users in the process. Thanks, in large part, to the bands.
Billionaire Boys Club, from Jersey City, NJ, boast the distinction of being the first band ever to grace the front page of MySpace. Through good timing and good tunes, BBC caught the attention of MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson and ushered in a new wrinkle in the MySpace universe. The band is still listed as one of Anderson’s MySpace favorites.
Fireflight, from Orlando, FL, recently signed to Flicker Records, and attribute a lot of their growing fan base to their efforts and presence on MySpace. Through their page on MySpace, the band sees continuous growth and interest, which should only increase as they release their album in July and start playing a full regimen of shows.
We sat down with these two indie music veterans and gleaned some insights into the finer points of MySpace marketing. Here’s our list of five phenomenal reasons to use MySpace!
One of the tenets of good marketing is to target your market. You wouldn’t pitch your Crunk Speed-Metal band with an ad in Today’s Grandparent magazine. The idea is to figure out who your market is, find out where they are, develop your message, then figure out how to get that message in front of the people who might want to buy what you’re selling.
MySpace delivers this in spades. Pockets and niches of users, called “friends,” gather around each other and share info on bands they like. For instance, let’s say you like My Chemical Romance. You can go check out their site, listen to their music, and read their blog. Then, if you want to find bands with a similar sound, you can check out the band’s friends, which include a host of other bands. Presumably, these are bands that have something in common with My Chemical Romance, so you go and check them out.
There are also fans listed as friends, and they typically have a bunch of bands on their pages. So someone into My Chemical Romance will have a number of other bands posted. You might be interested in checking some of them out. It’s viral marketing in its purest form, and the friend network is what really sets MySpace apart from other band sites.
It’s also why Isac Walter, who does marketing and programming for MySpace, says major labels are clamoring to get their bands on the site. “With 43 million users, it’s almost better than going to TV, what with the way people watch TV nowadays. People come to this site to discover new music, and what better way to expose an artist than to leak a band to this audience?”
As a band, this works the other way, too. Once you start developing a fan base, you can communicate to them when you have a show or a news event to broadcast. MySpace provides a service where you can target the friends you contact by region.
Billionaire Boys Club, from Jersey City, NJ
“They added this feature,” says Leigh Nelson of BBC, “where you can set up an event, and you can say I want to invite all my friends in a radius of x number of miles from this zip code. So we’ll do a show in New York and set up an invitation and invite all of our friends within 50 or 100 miles of the city. So we’re directly targeting that audience, where with email you end up sending show announcements to people in Germany. These are things that get added one little bit at a time. Tom really seems to get how people are using MySpace and what they want to do with it, and they’re always adding functionality based on that.”
Communication Runs Both Ways
The internet has completely changed the way we communicate, particularly in terms of marketing. Take something as simple as a band mailing list, for instance. In the early 90’s, that meant printing post cards, labeling them, putting stamps on them, and lugging it all to the post office weeks before the gig. It sounds like the Dark Ages, doesn’t it? It cost a bunch of money, and fans could only communicate by seeing you at a show or writing a letter. Email changed all that. Now it’s free to email your announcement, fans can immediately reply, and you don’t need to plan your promotion months in advance.
MySpace has taken that even further. MySpace not only allows you to communicate with your fans quickly and cost effectively, but it allows them to communicate with you and each other.
Fans can tell you what they think of everything on your page – a picture, a song, a blog entry – and their response is posted immediately. They can then spread your news to their friends with a couple of keystrokes. It’s an amazing development, and there are many ways to take advantage of it to create drama and stir up a buzz.
Fireflight, from Orlando, FL
“We started leaking the news about our signing to Flicker on MySpace because we knew people were going to be reading our blog,” says Justin Cox of Fireflight, “but we got way more response than we thought we would. That generated more interest in our page than anything had in a long time. You could see us singing a contract but you didn’t know with who, and that blog is the most visited we have. We put it on our regular site, too, but we don’t have it set up where people can comment, so it’s cool to know that so many people were keeping track and were genuinely interested.”
There are examples of bands booking shows to meet the demand of their MySpace fans, tells Walter. “There’s this band Cut Copy from Australia who did the Franz Ferdinand tour, and when they played Los Angeles they had enough people on MySpace saying, ‘Oh I wish you were playing your own show!’ So they booked a show at a smaller club called The Echo and gave discounts to their MySpace friends and sold the place out. Bands like that who keep in contact and get a little more personal with their audience can really have success.”
And Nelson explains that opportunities are coming to them by way of MySpace. “We used to get a decent amount of fan email, but now all those comments are pretty much coming exclusively from MySpace. Also coming in are show offers, booking people who are interested, soundtracks who are interested in songs… a lot of that comes via MySpace. It makes us more likely to follow up, too, because we can get a better idea of who these people are by looking at their page.”
Motivated fans who find you and help promote you
Indie bands need help. It’s a lot of work to do promotion, book gigs, sell merch, rehearse, write, and do the hundreds of little details involved with a band. Street teams and helpful fans have been the solution to much of that, though not always easy to assemble and coordinate. MySpace, with its younger demographic and infectious network qualities, makes it easier to find folks ready to jump on and paint your bandwagon. Sometimes, the band doesn’t even know it happening.
“We have this banner on our MySpace page,” explains Cox. “I was surprised to find that people who were our friends were taking it and posting it on other people’s MySpace pages, trying to drive traffic to us. So let’s say there was no MySpace and you had a web site, and you had that same banner. It’s cool, but what are people going to do with it? Now that we’ve got MySpace, they take those banners and post them as comments on other people’s pages and blogs, and people read the blogs and then automatically they’re going to your site for no other reason than that it’s there.”
Finding where your MySpace fans are coming from can lead to unexpected market research, like expanding your gig radius based on fan input. “I can search for BBC across the whole site and see how many people have added us and said we’re one of their favorite bands,” says Nelson. “It’s really cool to see fans crop up in markets we’ve never even been to. All of a sudden we see there are a lot of friends in upstate New York, we get in touch with them and find out where we should play and then go do some shows. In the past there was no way to find that kind of information.”
Crossover Marketing
At its best, one marketing endeavor feeds another, and spills into your other efforts. As Walter says, “The bands who promote their MySpace pages become the biggest bands on MySpace, hands down.” By linking from your regular web site, adding your MySpace URL to all your stickers, t-shirts, etc., you drive people to your site, and more likely broadcast to all those MySpace users that you’re on there, too.
It also works in reverse. MySpace traffic drives traffic to your regular web site, and people to your shows. “Traffic on our site has increased drastically as well,” says Cox, “and I’m sure that has something to do with MySpace because it’s been a steady ramp since we’ve been on there.
“I can also remember instances specifically where people have come up to me at a show and say they heard us on MySpace and decided to come check us out, which to me is the best. It’s just a big network and a big word of mouth kind of thing and you can’t get that kind of exposure unless you’re playing shows every night. It’s just been this awesome marketing tool.”
Free Marketing is the Best Marketing Ever!
Sounds obvious, and it is! But it can’t be understated or undervalued. Many of the band web sites out there offer great services, and there’s no reason not to be on every site you can get to. MySpace has the unique distinction, though, of offering just about everything you could imagine wanting all under one roof: a potential fan base, an opportunity to broadcast your music, a place to hang your photos, a web presence with a decent amount of customization… the list goes on. Not to mention the features and functions that allow you to be a smart marketer.
“The thing that sets MySpace apart from sites that are just for bands,” touts Nelson, “is people sign onto MySpace every day, just to check their messages, read, and communicate. I use it every day, to check in and see what’s going on, look for any bulletins from bands, figure out what’s going on tonight in the city. So just by putting your journal or show dates or advertisements and songs up there, you’re simply going to get a lot more exposure than people just randomly checking your web site. People spend more time on it than anywhere else. I guess credit to Tom there, for setting it up in such a way that makes it so addictive!”
The indie music universe is constantly waning and expanding: new bands emerge, old ones dissolve, conferences come and go, new web sites pop up as older ones fall out of fashion. As with any other industry or business model, these indie music offerings fail and succeed with their ability to create and meet market demand for their service.
Enter MySpace.com. Incorporating successful elements of MP3.com and IUMA, and eclipsing PureVolume and Friendster as the place to be online, MySpace is the epitome of what an online community can be. In it’s short life it has adapted and evolved to meet the evolving needs of its user base, and it has expanded to a network of over 43 million users in the process. Thanks, in large part, to the bands.
Billionaire Boys Club, from Jersey City, NJ, boast the distinction of being the first band ever to grace the front page of MySpace. Through good timing and good tunes, BBC caught the attention of MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson and ushered in a new wrinkle in the MySpace universe. The band is still listed as one of Anderson’s MySpace favorites.
Fireflight, from Orlando, FL, recently signed to Flicker Records, and attribute a lot of their growing fan base to their efforts and presence on MySpace. Through their page on MySpace, the band sees continuous growth and interest, which should only increase as they release their album in July and start playing a full regimen of shows.
We sat down with these two indie music veterans and gleaned some insights into the finer points of MySpace marketing. Here’s our list of five phenomenal reasons to use MySpace!
- Super-targeted viral marketing.
- Communication runs both ways.
- Motivated fans.
- Crossover marketing opportunities.
- Free marketing is the best marketing ever!
One of the tenets of good marketing is to target your market. You wouldn’t pitch your Crunk Speed-Metal band with an ad in Today’s Grandparent magazine. The idea is to figure out who your market is, find out where they are, develop your message, then figure out how to get that message in front of the people who might want to buy what you’re selling.
MySpace delivers this in spades. Pockets and niches of users, called “friends,” gather around each other and share info on bands they like. For instance, let’s say you like My Chemical Romance. You can go check out their site, listen to their music, and read their blog. Then, if you want to find bands with a similar sound, you can check out the band’s friends, which include a host of other bands. Presumably, these are bands that have something in common with My Chemical Romance, so you go and check them out.
There are also fans listed as friends, and they typically have a bunch of bands on their pages. So someone into My Chemical Romance will have a number of other bands posted. You might be interested in checking some of them out. It’s viral marketing in its purest form, and the friend network is what really sets MySpace apart from other band sites.
It’s also why Isac Walter, who does marketing and programming for MySpace, says major labels are clamoring to get their bands on the site. “With 43 million users, it’s almost better than going to TV, what with the way people watch TV nowadays. People come to this site to discover new music, and what better way to expose an artist than to leak a band to this audience?”
As a band, this works the other way, too. Once you start developing a fan base, you can communicate to them when you have a show or a news event to broadcast. MySpace provides a service where you can target the friends you contact by region.
Billionaire Boys Club, from Jersey City, NJ
“They added this feature,” says Leigh Nelson of BBC, “where you can set up an event, and you can say I want to invite all my friends in a radius of x number of miles from this zip code. So we’ll do a show in New York and set up an invitation and invite all of our friends within 50 or 100 miles of the city. So we’re directly targeting that audience, where with email you end up sending show announcements to people in Germany. These are things that get added one little bit at a time. Tom really seems to get how people are using MySpace and what they want to do with it, and they’re always adding functionality based on that.”
Communication Runs Both Ways
The internet has completely changed the way we communicate, particularly in terms of marketing. Take something as simple as a band mailing list, for instance. In the early 90’s, that meant printing post cards, labeling them, putting stamps on them, and lugging it all to the post office weeks before the gig. It sounds like the Dark Ages, doesn’t it? It cost a bunch of money, and fans could only communicate by seeing you at a show or writing a letter. Email changed all that. Now it’s free to email your announcement, fans can immediately reply, and you don’t need to plan your promotion months in advance.
MySpace has taken that even further. MySpace not only allows you to communicate with your fans quickly and cost effectively, but it allows them to communicate with you and each other.
Fans can tell you what they think of everything on your page – a picture, a song, a blog entry – and their response is posted immediately. They can then spread your news to their friends with a couple of keystrokes. It’s an amazing development, and there are many ways to take advantage of it to create drama and stir up a buzz.
Fireflight, from Orlando, FL
“We started leaking the news about our signing to Flicker on MySpace because we knew people were going to be reading our blog,” says Justin Cox of Fireflight, “but we got way more response than we thought we would. That generated more interest in our page than anything had in a long time. You could see us singing a contract but you didn’t know with who, and that blog is the most visited we have. We put it on our regular site, too, but we don’t have it set up where people can comment, so it’s cool to know that so many people were keeping track and were genuinely interested.”
There are examples of bands booking shows to meet the demand of their MySpace fans, tells Walter. “There’s this band Cut Copy from Australia who did the Franz Ferdinand tour, and when they played Los Angeles they had enough people on MySpace saying, ‘Oh I wish you were playing your own show!’ So they booked a show at a smaller club called The Echo and gave discounts to their MySpace friends and sold the place out. Bands like that who keep in contact and get a little more personal with their audience can really have success.”
And Nelson explains that opportunities are coming to them by way of MySpace. “We used to get a decent amount of fan email, but now all those comments are pretty much coming exclusively from MySpace. Also coming in are show offers, booking people who are interested, soundtracks who are interested in songs… a lot of that comes via MySpace. It makes us more likely to follow up, too, because we can get a better idea of who these people are by looking at their page.”
Motivated fans who find you and help promote you
Indie bands need help. It’s a lot of work to do promotion, book gigs, sell merch, rehearse, write, and do the hundreds of little details involved with a band. Street teams and helpful fans have been the solution to much of that, though not always easy to assemble and coordinate. MySpace, with its younger demographic and infectious network qualities, makes it easier to find folks ready to jump on and paint your bandwagon. Sometimes, the band doesn’t even know it happening.
“We have this banner on our MySpace page,” explains Cox. “I was surprised to find that people who were our friends were taking it and posting it on other people’s MySpace pages, trying to drive traffic to us. So let’s say there was no MySpace and you had a web site, and you had that same banner. It’s cool, but what are people going to do with it? Now that we’ve got MySpace, they take those banners and post them as comments on other people’s pages and blogs, and people read the blogs and then automatically they’re going to your site for no other reason than that it’s there.”
Finding where your MySpace fans are coming from can lead to unexpected market research, like expanding your gig radius based on fan input. “I can search for BBC across the whole site and see how many people have added us and said we’re one of their favorite bands,” says Nelson. “It’s really cool to see fans crop up in markets we’ve never even been to. All of a sudden we see there are a lot of friends in upstate New York, we get in touch with them and find out where we should play and then go do some shows. In the past there was no way to find that kind of information.”
Crossover Marketing
At its best, one marketing endeavor feeds another, and spills into your other efforts. As Walter says, “The bands who promote their MySpace pages become the biggest bands on MySpace, hands down.” By linking from your regular web site, adding your MySpace URL to all your stickers, t-shirts, etc., you drive people to your site, and more likely broadcast to all those MySpace users that you’re on there, too.
It also works in reverse. MySpace traffic drives traffic to your regular web site, and people to your shows. “Traffic on our site has increased drastically as well,” says Cox, “and I’m sure that has something to do with MySpace because it’s been a steady ramp since we’ve been on there.
“I can also remember instances specifically where people have come up to me at a show and say they heard us on MySpace and decided to come check us out, which to me is the best. It’s just a big network and a big word of mouth kind of thing and you can’t get that kind of exposure unless you’re playing shows every night. It’s just been this awesome marketing tool.”
Free Marketing is the Best Marketing Ever!
Sounds obvious, and it is! But it can’t be understated or undervalued. Many of the band web sites out there offer great services, and there’s no reason not to be on every site you can get to. MySpace has the unique distinction, though, of offering just about everything you could imagine wanting all under one roof: a potential fan base, an opportunity to broadcast your music, a place to hang your photos, a web presence with a decent amount of customization… the list goes on. Not to mention the features and functions that allow you to be a smart marketer.
“The thing that sets MySpace apart from sites that are just for bands,” touts Nelson, “is people sign onto MySpace every day, just to check their messages, read, and communicate. I use it every day, to check in and see what’s going on, look for any bulletins from bands, figure out what’s going on tonight in the city. So just by putting your journal or show dates or advertisements and songs up there, you’re simply going to get a lot more exposure than people just randomly checking your web site. People spend more time on it than anywhere else. I guess credit to Tom there, for setting it up in such a way that makes it so addictive!”
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