You’ll probably know that I’m a great fan of the ramblings of Bob Lefsetz. I heartily recommend that you sign up to his newsletter.

In one of his posts this week he referred back to an interview with Jerry Greenberg on Bite Me! in which Jerry makes a major statement on how to build your fanbase.

It almost passed me by but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it is exactly the ideology that we now follow with our artists and which we suggest you should too.

The piece said, “Bud Prager—who managed Leslie West in the old days and Felix Pappalardi—he’s a great producer who I have the utmost respect for. One day we went for lunch…it was 1979/1980 and MTV had just started. Warner Communications funded MTV in the very beginning along with American Express.

Steve Ross had a vision of creating music on TV and having it be a marketing tool. Bud said to me as MTV progressed that he felt MTV hurt the record business. His whole philosophy and, I have to agree with him, was that we broke bands by them going out and getting a fanbase – a real fanbase. AC/DC started out in a little club called Max’s Kansas City then they worked their way up to the Fillmore then the Forum and then the stadiums. They built a fanbase, but so many of these artists just became these video stars and you could see them on video. The only way you could see AC/DC, before videos, was to wait until they went on tour.

Bud felt that in the long run it hurt the artist and hurt their career and then it also created a lot of what we call “The One Shot” video artist – who were really acts that people got because of the video but when they really had to go out and do it there was no substance.”

It’s obvious really isn’t it?

If you are hyped and leveraged into the national (or international) consciousness, you’re going to have to be spectacular to make it last. All the kids who get the big break on the TV talent shows cannot sustain the level that those shows give them.

Why not? They just aren’t actually talented enough, but, more importantly, they haven’t built a fanbase. They get instant recognition but it fades in the public interest when the next series comes along.

I can see that the same was true with MTV – and the same is still true for major label artists today that are over hyped and simply manufactured. Sign someone half pretty and get them a load of songs from the current writer / producer du jour. It all sounds good enough but 99 times out of 100, there isn’t anything to back it up. I’ll accept that there will occasionally be an exception.

BUT – if the right thing to do in order to build a career is build a fanbase, then how do you do it?

Look at Arcade Fire – how did they do it. Quality material, no bullshit, slow build of momentum, unreal live shows, true talent.

No-one wanted to sign them when they started, so they did it on their own!

The message is the same now as it was for AC/DC when Jerry Greenberg remembered how they started.

Get your material strong and go out and play it. Watch this video of legendary Island Records boss Chris Blackwell telling how a live show and word of mouth is all you need.

So now that the music industry has changed and everyone wants music for free, how do you build that fanbase and why is that change a good thing?

Well, you can still do what AC/DC did and go out and play. You must! You’ll improve, you’ll bond as a unit and you’ll find champions who will tell everyone how good you are.

BUT - you now have an advantage that outdoes MTV in it’s heyday and will allow you to build momentum slowly, reach a global audience, perfect your style and sound – all the while sticking two fingers up to the old music industry hegemony.

The internet. You must use the internet to build your fanbase.

Here’s what you do:

1. Get your act straight. Right people, right look, right sound and BRILLIANT material. Not ‘good enough’ – brilliant is what is required.

2. Buy domain hosting for your band’s website. Use Hostgator. I know you have loads of choices, but, trust me, this works really well and I have never had a problem.

3. Build a website – Use Wordpress, hosted on your own domain (that’s downloaded from wordpress.org not hosted at wordpress.com). Personally I always use Thesis as the theme for the site for a host of reasons that I won’t go into here. It is awesome. If you think you can’t build a site in Wordpress and/or Thesis, you will be able to. Honestly – there are loads of videos on YouTube to talk you through it and if you get stuck, find someone at your school, college or even on Elance to do it for you.

4. Build a list of fans using serious email software. You can use Fanbridge – it works fine – but if you are really serious, there is only one choice – Aweber. It will do more than any competing mailing list software and it will last you your whole career.

5. Give people something really valuable in return for joining your mailing list. Sure, give them mp3’s of a few tracks. But, you can do so much more. Give them a whole album and ask them to get their friends to come and sign up for it.

I love Pretty Lights and what he does – 3 albums, 2 EP’s and some live material. All FOR FREE. How does he make a living? He sells merch and has a massive live following. If he hadn’t given this music away he would not have gotten anywhere. The free music gave him the momentum. Now he makes more money from his music career than if he had signed to a major – by a factor of 20 or more. Plus he gets to be a true artist and do exactly what he wants, when he wants with his art.

6. Put the sign-up box for the free stuff on the top right of every page of your site – what designers call ‘above-the fold’. Why? Because it works. Also – have a dedicated ’squeeze page’ on the site or even on another domain that you can send people to. He doesn’t do this, but Pretty Lights could have a squeeze page at freeprettylights.com. It’s easy to remember and you just put a single page site there with just a small pitch and a sign up box for your Aweber list.

7. Build a quality profile (and interact – don’t ignore any of them) at MySpace (yep, still – it is the music directory and you need to be there), Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. This is the minimum – there are others that you might wish to add.

8. Shoot LOADS of video of your band. Writing, rehearsing, gigging, in the van – goofing off. It doesn’t matter. Send emails to your list at least once a week telling them to check out something that you have posted somewhere online. DO NOT just email them the week of a show asking them to come. Be in regular content. Put those videos on your YouTube channel and all over the place.

9. Post on Twitter and Facebook all the time. Not inane stuff but things that your fans will want to know.

10. Don’t neglect the art! Keep writing. Write much more than you record and rehearse as much as you write. Recording is important and you need tracks to give away, but it is having great material that is going to make your fans talk about you to their friends and build that fanbase. Writing is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing.

11. Play live. Anywhere for anyone. Not to the extent that your fans can’t keep up. But spread wider, cross genres, make new fans. Obviously, collect every name and email address that you can at gigs. Go to other band’s gigs – hand out cards with your site address on them at those gigs. Hang out, meet other bands and meet their manager, agent, sound guy….whatever.

12. Be tired. No, really. If you’re working a full time job and you’re doing enough to succeed, you are going to be exhausted. The people who can keep going when they are exhausted will win.

There you have it – I think that’s a blueprint on how to build your fanbase. I’ve just read it over and, in essence, that is all there is to it.

Of course, I can and will expand on many of those points and go further another day – how do you move from this point to selling records, how to go up a level etc.

But, right now, that’s not important. It’s not important since you MUST build a fanbase to get started and to achieve anything – whether that is DIY and Direct-to-Fan success or the aim of getting signed. Either route will happen much more easily if you have built the fanbase yourself – that’s what other fans will see so they will want to be in the in-crowd – and it’s what agents. managers and record label A&R will see that will help take you to the next level.

One last thing. This is not ’selling out’. This is ’selling’. It does not cheapen the art. It gives you a chance.

It will only happen if you do it – start now.

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In ‘Part 1’ we looked at why you should be building a mailing list of fans and some of the basic ways of going about that, both online and at gigs.

This second part is a look at what options you have in setting up your mailing list, in which will decide that it must be web hosted In a 3^rd part, we will look at how you can best use it to build your relationship with your fans.

Often when we first meet a band they tell us that they have a mailing list already. The two most common things that this means is that they have a list of names scrawled on sheets of paper that they have had the brains to get filled in at their shows. Or that they have managed to get these names (and others) on to a spreadsheet or in to the address book of their email client. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it is very much stage one and obviously fraught with possible cock-ups.

Firstly, there is the perennial problem in getting that information from drunken scrawl on a sheet of paper from the gig the night before onto a database of some sort and being able to accurately transcribe people’s names. That problem can’t be overcome when collecting details at a live event from people. That is, it can’t be avoided unless you plain just take a laptop, which I would heartily recommend, and get people to type in their details themselves in some way. These days you can get a very cheap netbook that will do all you need and it’ll save so much time, whichever way you choose to manage your list. There are clever widget bits of Champion Sound and FanBridge which will allow you to do this, or you can get your own cool techy system – which we’ll look at below

If you have managed to get a way to also collect details on your MySpace page, facebook, and on your own website etc, you still have to get them into your one combined database. Often what we see people doing is manually transcribing this collected data with that from shows on bits of paper into a spreadsheet or their email address book and then mailing fans from there in small groups. OK – it works, but it’s a load of grief and you’ve missed out a load of very cool and useful stuff that comes from being in the 21^st century and using what’s available.

It’s also a major pain sending emails from one account and copying it to all the other addresses in your list – plus it can get you into trouble as a spammer!

In short, it just about works, but why would you, when there are much, much better solutions available, some of them for free.

We’re only going to look at some of the possible options, some in much more detail than the others. There are other options and we cover a lot of them in the resource section of our MySpace book, and will get that on to the forthcoming ‘Resources’ section of the site as soon as we can!

All of these systems are web-hosted databases for your fan’s emails and other details and will give you varying degrees of ease of use and control. No single one suits all and some are more difficult to use than others. But, you must use a web based email mailing list tool! There is no debate!

1. ReverbNation

ReverbNation is, quite simply, awesome, and I make no apology for spending the longest on it.

I think that using ReverbNation’s mailing list system, called ‘Fan Reach’ is the easiest and most obvious route for many, at least up to a certain level.

We’ll have a good look at the whole site’s great in depth features another time, but it’s certainly somewhere that you should have a profile and where you should send your fans.

There’s always a lot of chat about ReverbNation on the forums at Taxi, so go over there and get an impartial view.

For now, I’m just going to have a very quick look at their email list system.

The reason it’s so good at what it does is that it’s simple to set-up, import lists that you already have and, since you’ll be running a profile here anyway, it makes it easy having it all in one place. What it’s not so good at is offline data collection and some major tracking and detail tools that others offer, but they aren’t exactly slack in that department either. Oh, but it is free, nada, zilch! Well, at least for the basic version which is all you need to begin with.

So, the main ways that you’ll be getting new emails for your list will be by having sign-up forms, widgets or boxes at various places on the internet, or by collecting names in the real world – at gigs or wherever (a band we worked with had a sign up form at their local record store – owned by a friend – and when he played their stuff he left a sheet out for people to sign up, and it worked, building them a very healthy young local fanbase). ReverbNation excels at online widgets to create the sign-up forms. Their widget creator is set up to automatically make the form for most of the Social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc), so it’s really easy to do. The system will also create html code for you to use anywhere else – or to give to your friendly geek fan who helps you out to deal with – you do have a friendly geek ‘fifth Beatle’ don’t you?

The widgets also integrate seamlessly with all the other elements of a ReverbNation profile so that it’s very easy to offer a free track in return for an email address and it’s all done automatically. When you see how this works in practice and how your new fans can take parts of your profile to spread around the web for you it makes sense to use such an integrated approach – and the email element won’t let you down

To start you out, Fan Reach will allow you to import any existing mailing list you have, either from your email address book, a Word or Excel file, or just by typing them straight in. To ensure that you’re building a valid and useable list, these names get quarantined for 72 hours whilst ReverbNation’s systems ask people to opt out if they don’t want to be on your list. That’s fair enough and actually means your list is better targeted.

Lastly, you can email people a link automatically from your email client asking them to join your list. You can also use the same link as your usual email signature.

It’s a great system that covers all the online bases. What it doesn’t do….. is have a straightforward answer to the issue of getting people to sign up offline. OK, you can still use the pen and paper routine and transcribe the addresses very, very regularly (preferably the day you get them, so that you can send a thank you email immediately – preferably with a freebie), but that’s what we’re trying to get away from.

You could take the html and get your geek to make that into an application that you run on a laptop at shows for later uploading when you can get to the web, but that requires some skill. I’m pretty sure that ReverbNation will come up with the solution in the near future –as others have – see below!

The last thing to cover on Fan Reach is the upgrades available – ‘Fan 360’ and ‘Fan Reach Pro’. Fan 360 is a paid upgrade and basically helps to flesh out the information that you have about a fan – name, location (useful if you’ve not asked for that in the first place, as we suggest is sensible) and details from their Social Network profiles.

Fan Reach Pro is a further upgrade that includes the Fan 360 features but also adds a load of customisable templates and integrates with your ReverbNation content, which could be song players or your digital download store.

For the pricing and all the other details you need on thisclick this link – ReverbNation Pricing

This is a great option!

2. FanBridge

FanBridge comes next as it deals with the one current flaw in ReverbNation’s system – it has a totally cool offline widget that is called the ‘Merch Table SignUp Form’.

So, not only do you get all the same online widgets that are dead easy to use and place in all your internet profiles – all going to one central mailing list database – but you also get this cool way of dealing with sign-ups offline!

This form installs on a laptop and runs full screen so that fans can walk up to your merch table at a gig and put in their details. It’s all saved to a file and uploads the next time you log-on to the web and the fan is added to your list. They’ll receive whatever welcome email and freebie you’ve set up.

A great addition and, of course, makes you look like a very switched on band to everyone at the gig – fans and promoter alike.

The best way to look at FanBridge is as the cut-down email-centric little brother of ReverbNation – it doesn’t have all the other stuff that ReverbNation offers for a full band profile, but it does the email bit just as well, probably a bit better in fact.

FanBridge offers all the sign-up boxes and widgets that you’d need and allows a significant degree of editability. Its tracking stats are fantastic too, giving you information about who opened the emails, when and whether they clicked on any links in the email you sent them. All good data to have.

You lose nothing in the ‘offer for email’ department either as FanBridge allows you to automatically offer tracks or images in return for a fan signing up. It also has clever methods to incentivise fans to share your newsletter to spread the word and build your list even further.

The other difference that it has as an advantage is the mobile marketing that’s possible if you’ve collected mobile numbers on your sign-up forms. Being able to update fans via SMS at the last minute before a gig is a major plus.

Downsides? It’s not free. Well, it is for the first 400 messages per month. This is calculated as a total number of messages sent, so that 100 people on a list sent four messages in a month use up your 400 total. After that, it becomes paid – see the rates here – FanBridge Pricing – but it’s a small investment to make to have such a powerful tool to communicate with your fanbase at your fingertips.

3. Champion Sound

Champion Sound is a smaller company that doesn’t yet have the reach of FanBridge and ReverbNation, but it’s a really great alternative that some will decide suits them perfectly.

It does most of what the first two do, but with a little less sophistication overall than FanBridge in terms of pure email managemnent (although it’s still very good) and none of the bells and whistles in addition to email list management of ReverbNation.

You can offer free downloads for an email sign-up but you’ll have to do some of the work to deliver that mp3 or image yourself – setting up a page on the web where people can download it. Not hard but not slick. You do however get a public profile page on which to do that.

So why’s it mentioned? Well it has great tracking and list sub-division (so it’s easy to split the people in one town from another in an email blast) and does the main task of building a list and mailing newsletters without any drama. Users also like the way that you can blast out the email messages to Twitter and Facebook. And it builds guest lists too!

But that’s not why we include it here. It’s maybe a bit sad for us to be excited by it, but the thing that makes it different is the iphone app! I know, it shouldn’t come down to that, but it’s a great idea and it works brilliantly.

The app allows people to sign up on your phone at a gig. Simple as that. It does other stuff too but that’s the cool trick. One of our clients uses this platform and people at gigs love it!

Using Champion Sound is effectively a paid service unless you have a tiny list and don’t use all the features (and that’s not the point is it!). Check the pricing here – Champion Sound Pricing.

We like Champion Sound – it’s another good option.

4. Aweber

So, what’s left?

Well, we’re going to be a bit perverse now and recommend the service that we use to contact all of our subscribers on this site and which we have used in the past for our bands. Aweber.

The reason that this is perverse is that it isn’t an email list system that is designed for musicians to build a mailing list – it’s actually a system that is designed for email list marketing for any business and it’s the market leader in that field. The number one system that businesses use if they need ultimate flexibility in email list management.

That means that for the job of building an email list and communicating with the people on that list, it is the best that you can get.

Why is it so good? Well, basically it comes down to the depth of the functions and what you can do with them.

The big advantage is that Aweber is not just an email management system it’s also an ‘Autoresponder’. That means that it can be set up to automatically send a series of emails that you pre-load into it at any given intervals. So, you can send all the new people that sign-up to your list an email the day after they signed up asking them if they liked the free tracks you gave them, and then a week later asking them to leave a comment on your blog and then two weeks later asking them to buy a single – and, once you’ve set this up once, Aweber will send all these emails automatically.

This is a very powerful way of communicating with your fans. You can actually set up as many pre-determined emails as you like. It could be one a week for a year.

You kind of have to use an autoresponder to see how clever and effective it is. Explaining it doesn’t really do it justice.

All emails are what is called ‘double opt-in’. This means that when a fan signs up, they are sent an email that asks them to confirm that they want to be on the list. This makes for a better controlled list that only people who are genuinely interested get signed up to. It also means that your emails are more likely to be delivered when you send them which then also adds to the ‘open-rate’. This is significant and ‘double opt-in’ (not used by any of the others we have looked at) is industry standard for professional email list management.

Of course, Aweber will allow you to create a form that you can use anywhere on the web to get sign-ups. This will be html or javascript but is easy to use, to update and is super effective.

Aweber allows you to do some really cool stuff with your list. It’s easy to write a newsletter and send it to a segment of your list. And then, a few days later, you can send it again to only those that didn’t open it or didn’t click on the link you wanted them to click. Maybe you can change your offer just to those people? Lists can be segmented and mailed as often as you like. There is no charge for the number of emails sent) unlike the other systems. Aweber charges for the number of people on your list, not the number of emails that you send them.

As you’d expect, you can create as many lists from scratch as you like.

And, the analytics of who is doing what with the information you send them is more detailed than you can get anywhere else. Split tests to increase open rates and click conversion, automated follow ups and web-hosted versions that you can link to Facebook and Twitter – all very trick stuff.

What’s wrong with it? Well it’s not designed for musicians. It’s not hard to use and the tutorials, and step by step set-up, are fantastic (as is the customer support) but you will have to build your own ‘thank you’ pages where you send people after they sign up to get the free download track or whatever you’re offering. That could be a pain and a deal breaker if you have no geek / nerd skills at all.

At the moment they don’t do mobile and they don’t have an offline sign-up, but you could code one from their html form if you were smart enough. I have raised this with them though and they are looking at it as it’s something they know they should offer.

And, of course, there is no integration with a myriad of widgets and a full music profile like you get with ReverbNation. This, again, may be a deal breaker for many as it does make a whole lot of sense to have all your software tools talking to each other.

If though, you are tech savvy and are building your own site (which you should be) and can deal with creating a page for free downloads for people who sign-up, then it’s well worth thinking about. Particularly if your band is getting to the stage where the fan sign-up is more than a trickle and your fanbase is active.

We use it and we work with bands who use it and, used correctly, it is the best email management tool

5. Anything Else?

Just to confuse you a bit there are three others to consider.

Bandcamp is another brilliant multi-faceted online profile site that allows you to sell your music direct. It has an email collection element, but the reason we haven’t looked at it here is that it just isn’t up to the job like the four we’ve covered. It’s a great system overall but the email list is an add-on, not the focus.

Then there’s Nimbit and Topspin. These are the lurking wannabe giants that might change things for good.

In short they’re full service music systems that do email (very well but not with autoresponders) and manage all your digital (and physical) sales of music and merchandise and provide tools to virally spread your music.

They have subtle differences. We haven’t looked at them here as they aren’t just about email and aren’t necessary for most bands until they are up and running and selling commercially viable amounts of music.

We’ll look at them both in detail in the future. For now, let’s say that Nimbit is the longer established of the two with great tools and an expanding user base and is great for all levels of artist. A slightly more heavyweight answer is Topspin but they don’t let all and sundry in to use the platform. More another time. Just be aware of them and have a look around the web to see what people think of these before making your choice.

In conclusion, I’d recommend all four systems we looked at. My preference is for either ReverbNation or Aweber depending on your point of view and how important the added features of ReverbNation are to you.

It may be a little unfair, but if you are going to be a long term underground band that never ‘breaks through’ but makes a living playing circuit gigs and selling to a small diehard tribe of fans, then ReverbNation is probably right for you.

If, on the other hand, you think you’re going all the way and want the best solution and can find a way to integrate it with other tools to offer your fans all the things they come to expect, then Aweber is the one for you.

In ‘Part 3′, we’ll look at how to use your list and how to communicate with your fans.

You can read ‘Part 1′ of ‘Building a fan mailing list‘ on this site by clicking the link.

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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.

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!

• Using your US email address sign yourself up at http://www.pandora.com

• 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

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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!

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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

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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.

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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.

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!

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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.

It 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.

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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.

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/

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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.

Amanda, 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’

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