Archive for the ‘Musician's Tools’ Category

How can Pandora help you to reach people who already like your music…..but don’t know it!?

Posted by Amanda | October 1st, 2009

You already know that having your music available digitally is becoming more and more important in today’s DIY musician environment – essential really.

As owners of an extensive music catalogue that we have for sale in a whole load of places, we can tell where our digital sales come from by looking at traffic and our monthly digital sales reports. A very important site to us for generating the interest that leads to sales is Pandora, and it’s one key place that we would suggest you make your music available.

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help people listen to and enjoy music they already know, and to help them discover new music they’ll love using the Music Genome Project. On the site, you tell them one of your favourite songs or artists and they’ll launch a streaming radio station to explore that style and genre of music for you. The system recommends other songs and artists that they think you’ll like based on what you tell them and your listening behaviour.

Pandora  How can Pandora help you to reach people who already like your music.....but dont know it!?When Pandora accepts new music they painstakingly tag it with a whole load of identifying keywords to make the Genome engine put the right type of music in front of the right type of person to whom it will appeal. Unlike Last.fm, this is done by employees to a set of criteria (Last.fm does it by algorithms based on member’s behaviour). More info on the Genome project can be found here: Pandora Music Genome Project

So, if you have commercially available records, then clearly, having them as part of Pandora will lead people who like similar bands and styles to hear your material. Such is the nature of the Pandora community that the people who use it are very open to finding new music – all good for you, the aspiring artist.

We’ve also found that not only is the feedback about new artists very positive, but Pandora users also go out and buy music they have discovered on Pandora and evangelise about it to others – spreading the word about you even further.

However, the bad news is that getting your music onto Pandora is not as straightforward as it sounds.

First off, they don’t take everything that they’re sent – they have a subjective quality control threshold that you are going to have to satisfy – not all our records get approved!

And, secondly, Pandora can only stream songs to users in the US due to licensing laws, and as such, users from outside the US will find themselves blocked if they go to the Pandora site. Still, the US is a very significant part of the world market and worth targeting – even if you don’t live or tour there.

If you’re outside of the USA, you’ll never be able to stream music from Pandora as a user – it’s not possible. (Actually, if you’re a bit of a geek, you could do it by hiding your IP address or other things that we don’t understand!) However, you can still use the Pandora site for promotion of your music, without a fully functioning user account. How? You just need to sort yourself out with a US-based email address. If you’re in the States, obviously this is no problem to you, however outside of the States this is a whole other matter.

When we decided to put some of our catalogue up on Pandora we asked a friend who lives in the States to set us up a US email account, which we now use specifically for Pandora. It’s just a Gmail account that he set up from his US-based IP address.

So, if you have any friends or family in the USA then that’s the perfect route for you to get access to Pandora. Other options include doing it whilst on holiday to the States, or finding someone who is going and getting them to log onto a computer long enough to set you up an address. If you have no contacts in the US, ask around (try forums that you should already belong to!) and see if anyone can help you. This may seem like an annoying thing to do, but it will be worth it in the end.

So, once you’ve sorted out your email address, here’s how to submit your music!

  • Once you have signed up you will be able to submit your music through your profile by going here: http://submitmusic.pandora.com. This is now the only place that you can submit your music to Pandora, so make sure that you have the following available to you before you start the submission process:

* A CD of your music

* A unique UPC code for that CD

* The CD to be available through Amazon. Pandora cannot accept music available only as downloads through the Amazon MP3 store; you must have a physical CD for sale.

* MP3 files for two of the songs from your CD

* The legal rights to your music

Anything that you want to submit must be available on Amazon and you will be asked to provide a UPC barcode on submission. This is a 12 or 13 digit unique number that identifies your release. If your release does not have a barcode then you can get one from here: Nationwide Barcode. There are other places that you can get a barcode that satisfies Amazon – Google “upc barcode for my CD release” or something similar for the latest information.

This page is worth a read as it tells you a load about how barcodes work – http://www.cd-fulfillment.com/bar-code.asp.

By the way, we really like the service that that company (CD-fulfillment) offer. One at a time CD’s, made on demand – so you can have a commercially available CD without a minimum stock quantity. Have a look around their site here – www.cd-fulfillment.com.

If you don’t already have your stuff for sale on Amazon then the best way for you to do this is through Amazon Advantage. It is the simplest and quickest way to get your CDs up for sale through Amazon sites and is targeted at self-publishers. For information on this head over to Amazon Advantage UK if you’re in the UK and Amazon Advantage US if you’re in the States. There is a significant charge (approximately $30 per year) but it’s a good system and that fee applies across all your stuff for sale on Amazon – it’s not per CD.

If you tie that up with on-demand CD manufacture from CD-fulfillment (or other companies that are out there offering that service), you can get CD’s on sale at Amazon for less than $50 all-in.

To start your submission process you will need to send the two mp3’s from your CD via the Pandora site to their approval team. You will be told that your upload has been successful and then it’s all a case of waiting. It may take a while before you hear from the submission team again as they get a huge amount of music to process but eventually you will get an email telling you if your submission has been accepted or not.

An updated status message for your submission can always be viewed here:
http://submitmusic.pandora.com/submit/status and you’ll need to sign in with the same Pandora account that you used to submit your music in order to see the status.

If it has been accepted you will then be sent an email providing you with a link to download a full submission form which you must then complete and sign before returning to Pandora with a full, finished copy of your release for them to add to their catalogue.

Once this has been received, your music is uploaded onto their systems and becomes available for everyone with a Pandora account to listen to, with the option of buying if they like it!

It can only help spread the word about your music to a receptive audience – and once done it’ll sit there giving you a little exposure all on its own – not like all the Social Networks that you should be beavering away at day in, day out!

It’s as easy as that. So, if you’re music isn’t on Pandora, go get it on now.

For further discussion on the Pandora requirements have a look at this topic on Artists House: http://community.artistshousemusic.org/forum/topics/the-new-pandora-requirements

If you like the idea of this, you can get some similar listener driven promotion at www.last.fm. Have a look here and read this great blog post about it.

http://www.last.fm/

http://www.jimmyshelter.nl/blog-75-Using-Last.fm-to-promote-your-band-in-6-easy-steps.html

http://www.knowthemusicbiz.com/index.php/BIZ-BLOG/BIZ-BLOG/How-to-Promote-Your-Music-on-Last.fm-by-Fiona-McLaren.html

And here’s a pdf on how to promote on last.fm. It’s a few years old but still worth a read. http://www.quaxle.com/ebooks/quaxle-ebook-lastfmpromotion.pdf

How to promote music online – practical examples and theory

Posted by Admin | September 22nd, 2009

A Guest Post by Bas Grasmayer

To the readers of the Make It In Music blog, I would like to present my paper looking into some of the best practices of the online promotion of new music releases.

The paper identifies trends at play in the online practices of music promotion, looks at five different case studies and draws some observations and conclusions based on these case studies.

With the great, and some times not so great, examples set by Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, DangerMouse & Sparklehorse, Mos Def and Groove Armada, the paper aims to show very simply what works well when promoting music on the web and what does not.

Are you familiar with the phrase ‘freemium’ yet? Where you give something away for free, only to give yourself more opportunities to sell your premium content (fan packs, high quality versions, bundled packages, etc.).

Something else the paper discusses is that when you give something away, you should really give it away. So no DRM (copy protection), no sub-par quality versions (anything below 128 or 192 kbps), or other things which might actually disappoint people expecting to be delighted.

Without further ado, I present to you my paper about the online promotion of new musical content, click the link to download: Online Promotion of New Musical Content by Bas Grasmayer

This article was written by Bas Grasmayer, an International Communication Management student at INHOLLAND University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He’s currently writing his thesis about successfully using the web for monetizing music and wrote this paper as a side-project.

As part of his studies, he’s completed an internship with the Bulgarian National Radio in Sofia with excellent results, studied new media and PR at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, Turkey for a semester and has combined two of his biggest loves, new media and music, into one research objective for his thesis, which will be finished and made public somewhere within the next few months.

Bas regularly tweets about innovation in the music industry on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spartz


Bas’ contact info can be found on his blog: http://www.basbasbas.com/


You can also find him on LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Facebook. Be sure to check out his Google Reader shared items for many more interesting articles about the music industry and web 2.0!

You need to….. and how to make your links in emails clickable!

Posted by Admin | August 28th, 2009

I just got back from two weeks holiday and cleared out my inbox – well over 1000 emails, including over a hundred from artists asking me to check them out.

I try to check out all the bands who send me mail – both to us for this site and also people checking in with us for management.

But, more than half those emails had either no link or what they thought was a link, but it wasn’t ‘clickable’.

Now, I care more than most who do my job, and I also spend time advising artists here and one-to-one, so I know how it feels to get no response to a demo or email. But, most people in this business are sharks who are too lazy to do anything you want of them. They’ll claim that they’re too busy (most aren’t), but whichever way you look at it, when you’re asking them to do something, you need to make it as easy as possible.

So, make sure that in every mail that you send, you have a link, to your MySpace, band website, Facebook Fan Page etc.

Despite the title, I’m not going to give you the full rundown here on how to make a link in your email or Biog / Press release (both because it is really easy to work out and because there’s some links at the bottom), but I am going to reiterate the point of this post – that you need clickable links!

Remember to put the link in and make it clickable.

In most cases, all you need to do is put ‘http://’ before your ‘www.ourbandsite.com’ bit of your web address, so that you have ‘http://www.ourbandsite.com’. That will make it clickable in most email applications.

In some mail programmes, you don’t even need to do that (Gmail, for example) as the mail programme will make the link clickable for you if you just put the www in.

I’m not going to go in depth on what else you might need to know – the links below pretty much cover that (as well as making a text phrase clickable) – as almost everyone reading this will know how to do it anyway.

At the risk of overdoing it, the point is – don’t forget!! I know I’m right when I tell you that if a link isn’t clickable maybe half the people who would’ve checked your site or MySpace page out, won’t bother.

Did I make my point? Sorry to bang on, but it’s important!

Useful links on how to do this in many programmes below:

Copying & Pasting hyperlinks in email

How to Insert a Link in an email using Microsoft Outlook

Hyperlink your Gmail content

Music Marketing Plan for Indie and DIY Musicians

Posted by Admin | July 20th, 2009

This is essential reading.

I came across this the other day and rather than just tweet it, it’s one of those things that needs to be on here for people to go off and read in the longer term, as it’s so important. I was impressed that a group of respected Musician Resource Bloggers had come together to pool their knowledge and skills in such a way. And I am very impressed by the content of what they’re doing.

Spearheaded by David Rose at Know the Music Biz (itself a great resource site), this is what it’s all about, “the goal of the Indie Artist X Project is to develop a basic, actionable music marketing plan designed around simple strategy, prioritization of tactics, tools and a reasonable budget that can be implemented by any indie artist who has the inclination to follow it”

What this means for you as the aspiring artist is that these folks have gotten together and written down a blueprint of their current thinking as to how an artist, aspiring to a major label ethos or fervently DIY, can get themselves noticed. There is a wealth of information and this will be updated over the next four months as they apply their ideas to a currently secret test case artist. They’ll be filing reports as they go.

Read David Rose’s full explanation here – he puts it better than me!

Then you can check out the very cool Google Documents workbook that lists all their plans split into easily digested sections here.

As I said above, I am impressed by the content, and, if you’re not up to speed on all the latest ideas on how to market yourself as a musician or band, then this sets out a very easily followed plan.

As with a lot of what we comment on, I would always caution that before you rush into a new phase of marketing your band, you have a critical re-appraisal of your material and where your band’s development is at beforehand. In order to get the world to take you to its bosom, you need to be really good, really great songs and a polished performance. It’s that simple, but, of course that doesn’t make it easy.

If you can assess your current state of development disp[assionately, and if you’re ready to earn the love of a noteworthy fanbase, then go and read the Marketing Plan and you will get better results than 99% of wannabee rock stars.

These days, if you’re good and you have a web savvy marketing plan and you stick at it, you will succeed on your own terms.

Building a fan mailing list, Part 1 – the why and the how.

Posted by Amanda | June 17th, 2009

One of the most important parts of your self-promotion is your mailing list and your relationship with the people on it.

Getting people to sign up and provide you with their contact details enables you to reach them directly for a whole host of reasons and create that genuine relationship between you and them.

This will foster their fan loyalty to you and will ultimately help you be successful.

But, how do you go about getting people to join your mailing list and how do you get people to stay there? Here are some things for you to consider…

1. Make sure you’re giving people the opportunity to sign up.

This may sound like common sense, but you need to make sure that your potential fans know that you have a mailing list and where they can go to sign up.

The first step for this is to make sure that you have a sign-up box anywhere that you have an online presence e.g. your Facebook profile, MySpace page, band website, blog etc. This is the easiest way for your fans to sign up, and if the casual browser finds your site interesting it enables them to sign up to receive a bit more information about you.

You should also try to make sure that you include a signature file on any message you send to people who contact you. All this needs to be is a few lines at the end of each message including a link to your website and a link for people to sign up.

mailinglist Building a fan mailing list, Part 1   the why and the how.You should also use your current mailing list subscribers to help you recruit more subscribers. A really simple way of doing this is by adding a couple of lines at the bottom of any emails you send to your list just saying that if they found this email useful, interesting or entertaining then could they please forward it to anyone else they think might like it, along with instructions on how to subscribe.

And finally, make sure that you always have a mailing list sheet (or some cool techy app) with you at any shows you play!!

2. Don’t ask for too much information

Think about how you are going to realistically contact your mailing list and I guarantee in most cases that the main way you will do it is by email. Therefore, this is the single most important thing that you need from anyone who subscribes!

Don’t ask for any additional information from your potential sign ups unless you’re actually going to use it. If your fans are faced with a huge form to fill in to join a mailing list then the chances are they’re not going to do it. However, if all they have to fill in is their name, and email address then you’ll find they’re much more likely to subscribe.

If you really have to have them, the other data to consider are maybe date of birth or phone number (for SMS) and city or state (depending on your plans), but I really don’t recommend this. I’ll admit that some idea of where people live is useful (particularly for touring bands in the US) but you have to balance the need for that information against the effort required by a fan to give it, and therefore the fact that they might not bother at all.

It’s also worth your while to put in a brief statement on privacy and how you’re going to use their information. You need to make sure that your subscribers know what they’re signing up to, so let them know what to expect (email updates, special offers, frequency of emails etc.).

Always make them aware that you’re not going to spam them or pass their details on to anyone else. In fact, it’s a good idea to tell them this before asking them to sign up, so that way they know what to expect beforehand and can make an informed decision.

We’ll look at the systems available in Part 2, but, in short, I’d go for something that lets you communicate with your fans by name – so an email system that asks for their name (or first name) as well as their email address is preferable as you can then address all subsequent emails to them personally and that builds your relationship in a very natural manner.

3. Benefits of sign up

One of the best ways to get people to subscribe to your mailing list is to offer freebies and special offers if they do – things that can only be achieved by providing you with their email, and that they will miss out on if they don’t.

This doesn’t have to be something huge, and should include an immediate freebie as well as long term benefits. Good immediate freebies include money off your latest releases, or free downloads, whilst long term benefits could include a free download every month, access to a members only forum, or the chance to buy tickets for shows before everyone else.

Think about what you have to offer and tailor your free gifts to what you and your fans would like to have, but make sure it has a real value to your potential fans. You want them to be impressed, happy, and to recommend you to other people.

Once you have people on your mailing list then you need to make sure that you give them a good reason to stay subscribed. Every email you send them gives someone the opportunity of un-subscribing. So keep in mind what your fans want, not what you want them to do and make sure that you’re not sending out emails for the sake of it.

If your email is not offering something, providing your list with entertaining insights into your day to day life, or giving information, then don’t send it.

More on the systems we recommend and email content tips in Part 2, as soon as I write it!

Make like Radiohead with ‘In Rainbows’ and have your fans pay whatever they like for your music

Posted by Ian | June 16th, 2009

You can’t argue that when Radiohead announced the release of ‘In Rainbows’ a matter of days after it had been completed and just days before it was made available and announced that fans would be able to get the mp3 download for whatever they wanted to pay, they sent shockwaves right through the recorded music part of the industry.

anjuno Make like Radiohead with In Rainbows and have your fans pay whatever they like for your musicIt was groundbreaking in two ways – obviously the choosable pricing was a first, and headline grabbing, but time will perhaps show that the fast turnaround from album completion to being made available to fans might yet be the bigger revelation. The band made much of it at the time – wanting to be able to get their music to fans as soon as they had created it rather than going through a 6 to 12 month build up in an old school label approach before release.

Nonetheless, the pricing initiative turned out to be very profitable for the band, but, of course, they were already a world class act with a massive and rabid fanbase – would that approach work for you?

Well, now there’s a new service that will allow you to find out – anjuno.

If you know how the Radiohead release worked, then you pretty much know how anjuno works.

It’s free to join and anjuno then takes a percentage of any income from sales of downloads. You upload your stuff (I say stuff, because the system works for music or ebooks – so how about doing a tab book or lyric book for your fans at the same time?) and then set the system to accept payment at a level that a fan wants to pay – including free.

It’s brand new, and who knows how this is going to work for new artists. Personally, I think it’s a great idea and I’d follow the Radiohead model and use anjuno for an early release blitz followed up by a physical release  (with superior packaging or otherwise of collectable value) and continued availability on itunes etc.

Of course, you’re going to get some people going for the free option, but as the Radiohead release showed, faith in human nature will pay off and a record will find a natural price level if its good enough!

What do you think – do you like the idea? Let us know.

Facebook Username change announced – essential information & the clock is ticking!

Posted by Ian | June 10th, 2009

Heads Up!

You may or may not be aware of this already, and you might agree with the policy change or not – opinion seems divided. But, whichever side of the fence you’re on, this is a critical opportunity for all facebook users, which will apply particularly to bands and artists.

facebook3D Facebook Username change announced   essential information & the clock is ticking!This Saturday at 12.01 Eastern Daylight Time (That’s 5.01 PM for Brits), you will be able to register for a user name on facebook for your existing account – for the first time ever – and they will be dished out on a first come first served basis!

Some people hate the idea as too much like MySpace, but whether you like it or not, you want to be ready to get there and get your band name. I’m not quite sure how much SEO benefit there might be to it, but I know it’ll look better and be easier to remember and therefore direct people to.

You will have the option of all alphanumeric characters and a full stop (period for the US readers!) but that’s about it. So mine will read, if I get it, www.facebook.com/ianclifford. You could also just use your band name followed by’.com’ if that’s your usual web address.

There is obviously going to be a major rush to get names and facebook will have a disputes process, but the best advice is get there and get your name bagged.

Everything you need to know is covered here at facebook – http://www.facebook.com/username/

Promoting your band and music on Facebook – a quick tip for musicians

Posted by Ian | June 5th, 2009

We are in the process of writing what we hope will be the definitive guides for musicians on how to use Social Networks to promote and market your music and your band – the single most important development in music marketing in the last 75 years. Since, in fact, the shift from sheet music to recorded music that allowed you to take home a piece of the act that you loved with you to play over and over.

Social Networking is both about that experience of having something to listen to (in the case of most sites), but it’s also about discovery and that’s why it’s so important for the modern musician.

It’s our view that the step that almost all bands and performers miss in their development is sufficient dedication to developing their talent (songs, performance etc) and thus don’t have the necessary potential greatness to be discovered. That said, and we do bang on about it all the time, once you’ve put yourselves through a rigorous development process (because record companies won’t these days), you need then to get very, very proactive about spreading the word and Social Networks are the best way to do that. Of course, you ought also to be playing live!

But, which Social Networks?

I remain a massive fan of MySpace - I’ve talked about why on the Blog elsewhere, but in short it is the place that people go to look for music and information on bands. So, you have to be there and be active.

facebookcartoon Promoting your band and music on Facebook   a quick tip for musiciansAmanda, on the other hand, loves Facebook. You have to have a profile there too because that is where people of the age and with the interests that you need to be reaching spend all their online time hanging out. It’s not as easy to market and promote your music on Facebook as it is on MySpace, but it does make better and deeper long term connections with people who become fans from discovering you there.

I’m not the expert on Facebook, Amanda is. She is 20,000 words in to writing our comprehensive guide which will reveal all that she knows and more! No idea when it’ll be ready as we can’t rush these things as we need to make sure they are as good as they can be, like our MySpace guide.

Meanwhile, I came across the official Facebook blurb on how to promote music and bands today. It may have been there for ages – I don’t know – but I just discovered it today. It’s very basic and simple, but if you aren’t using Facebook for your music, then it is an essential primer. Download it here

If you can’t wait for our guide, the information that I think is the best to date for musicians on how to promote on Facebook is in a book called ‘Facebook Marketing’ by Nick Jag. If you click on that link and have a look down the page, you’ll see the book. It’s a worthwhile investment in my opinion…..at least until our book is available!

 Just to round this off, where else do you need to be active? – simple, at the bare minimum, you need a Twitter profile and a Youtube channel as well. There’s some stuff about both of those to be found here, but these are the other two books that we are working on to complete the set.

It’s tough to juggle interacting on all these sites and maintaining your own site (which is also essential) but it needs to be done, so learning the best ways to do it is invaluable.

Oh, and if you were looking for a specific tip – the headline suggests that there is one after all! – well, I meant that the tip was to go and get Facebook’s free official guide. But, something that I have seen work incredibly well is using Facebook Social Ad’s. One guy I know has refined this into an art where he spends less than $100 per month but adds 100’s of real fans each month – people who come to gigs and then buy stuff from him.

That’s the tip – if you look into it on Facebook (just click on the ‘Advertising’ tab at the foot of their pages) and read their instructions, you’ll see it is incredibly easy. It’s also very, very targeted. Amanda’s forthcoming Facebook guide will have more detail and either a section or a bonus guide by our mate who has mastered the art of using it for finding fans.

I do have an ebook just on the Facebook Social Ads topic that I read on it, which I have permission to give away. It’s not music focused but it does have some good tips. If you want me to send that out to all subscribers, leave a comment and make sure that you’re signed up as a subscriber (big box at the top right if you’ve missed it!) and I’ll send it out.

For now, go and get the free official Facebook Guide and have a look at their Social Ads.

The links again:

The Offical Facebook Guide for Music & Bands

Nick Jag’s ‘Facebook Marketing’

Social Bookmarking – is it any use to musicians & can it be done quickly?

Posted by Ian | June 1st, 2009

This is a really quick post. I’ve just signed up for OnlyWire, a service that allows you to bookmark any webpage to a whole load of Social Bookmark sites at once.

It takes a while to set up but if you need to have webpages added to those sites, as I do, then it is the very best service that there is. And it saves an age.

As part of the registration, I have also signed up for Technorati. In order for that site to believe that this is my blog I have to publish this post and point them to it – so here goes – Technorati Profile

It’s been an interesting exercise and one that can be applied to your own site, or even your MySpace page. This will allow you to notify a host of Social Bookmark sites every time that you put something new on your band website. So, say you put up a video of your latest rehearsal, you log into OnlyWire and automatically notify all the sites that you have previously registered with.

Why do you do this? Well, although Social Bookmarking sites are there, in many cases at least, for individuals to host their ‘Favourites’ list in an online profile, they are far far more use for driving traffic to your site. Every time that you submit or ‘tag’ a web page to one of the sites, it gets ranked and then other registered users of that site are pointed to it by searching witihin the sites, split up into categories. So, by bookmarking your own new posts, you are increasing the chances of more traffic coming to your site from those Social Bookmarking sites. Obviously, those people may then become fans of your band.

To start with, I have set up the OnlyWire account and registered with Digg, delicious, Bebo, Reddit, technorati, and Stumble Upon. Each time I post I will bookmark to all those sites automatically by just logging in once to OnlyWire, and I should see a boost in traffic.

That’s the theory and it should work for you too. I recommend you try it and see if it works for you.

This TweetAdder can turbocharge your tweeting and add lots of Twitter followers – is it a good thing?

Posted by Ian | May 26th, 2009

TweetAdder This TweetAdder can turbocharge your tweeting and add lots of Twitter followers   is it a good thing?

We don’t often recommend specific products in posts because, as you know, this site is more about teaching you to learn the skills you need. That said, one of the parts of the site that I’m working on is a section that just has our recommendations on it – tools and advice from other people that complement our advice and that you can use, some of which are free and some paid. That’s coming soon.

And this bit of software will be in it – TweetAdder.

Reasonably controversially for many in online music marketing, I’m a fan of Friend Adding software on MySpace (and Facebook) – but NOT of the random and senseless adding of 1000’s of people that you then don’t have time to interact with.

The reason that I like them is very simply because of the automation that they give you. Now, every time you acquire a new follower on Twitter or a friend on MySpace, it’s your job to turn that person into a fan. The mistake that way too many bands make is to hunt down vast numbers of pointless followers and then fail to convert any of them into fans.

If you heed the advice that we give in our MySpace book, you’ll see a different way that is aimed at turning those followers into real fans who want to intercat with you and then spread the word about you. The core tactic in that relationship building is right at the beginning – targeting people who should be in to your genre of music. You do this by adding people who are in to bands that influence and sound like you and also by aiming for people who follow other acts in your local scene.

There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basics. Just remember that it’s about turning a Friend or a Follower into a fan – and let’s not forget that a prerequisite of that is that your act is good enough to warrant the fan’s support.

So, this TweetAdder- why’s it a good thing?

Well, basically because of the automation element. The people who have made it understand all about the pitfalls of blindly following loads of people and themselves state that their software tool is all about “tagret niche networking in mind”. In standard musician speak, that means that you can drill down and only look for people that are likely to want to be fans.

I won’t go on about it’s features as you can click the link and have a look. All I’ll say is that this isn’t a necessity and it isn’t for everyone, but, if you feel that you have everything in place for your band (songs, performances, recording and buzz is all refined and great – because that is stage 1!), then this tool will help you. I would only use it to build targeted followers and then to help automate the task of keeping those followers involved in your career and hence turning them into real fans.

If that applies to you, then I’d check it out as it looks like the best Twitter tool I’ve seen so far – TweetAdder