Archive for the ‘Social Networking for Musicians’ Category

I wanted to stick up a very quick post to bring hope to aspiring artists, yet also hammer home once again our core argument.

Maybe we’re finally getting to the time where a few artists really can break ‘big time’ without the record company machine, thanks to their own online efforts. Maybe.

Adam Young – he is Owl City – is an inspiration to the DIY musician using MySpace (still….) as their primary marketing tool. The story goes that Adam started recording in his basement and posting material to his MySpace profile with no real plan to speak of. (I’d heard the buzz and then Bob Lefsetz mentioned him today – and I got to thinking!)

Soon enough, people began to take notice and word spread – in the viral and natural way that online music discovery has long promised and only occasionally delivered. Two self-released albums and mammoth MySpace attention led to the moment of truth, and Adam, understandably, went for the old-school record deal with Universal.

Did he need to?

I think we’re still at the point in time that an international Major record company can push an artist with a groundswell of support far more successfully than they can on their own. Whilst the internet was fundamental to his early success and awareness, the world remains a big place in which to ship physical stock (and more than half the people still want CD’s!) and to drive radio and TV exposure. Sure, a lot of kids find new music on the web, but many don’t and all sorts of people still rely on the mainstream media to push things at them rather than discovering for themselves. Add to that, ‘offline buzz’ and personal recommendation, both of which can be amplified by the cash injection and expertise offered by those dinosaur record companies.

My view – they still have a lot to offer.

On the other hand, what he was doing to get noticed by those companies is exactly the same stuff that needs to be done to build the online buzz about your band and build a real fanbase – so do it anyway.

What can we learn from his experience?

1. He’s very talented and his material is great – you know we bang on about this a lot, but all the web promotion and Social Networking in the world is pointless if your material is crap. Study your craft, hone your skills and then present to the world.

2. He’s very prolific – Owl City was the third or fourth project that he had worked on. And he didn’t just sit there and do it half-heartedly. He finished songs, finished recordings, put them on the web. All the time perfecting his art and learning skills to promote himself – through experience.

3. He engaged with the feedback that he got – honestly and openly. If you’re seeking to build a following these days, you need to be available to your fans in a way that old school stars never were. It’s a mutually beneficial journey now – not you and the fan divided by awe. Look at how Imogen Heap talks to her artists and revels in their intense feedback.

4. Now that he is signed to Universal, they have amplified his web-presence with a light but skilled touch. Have a good look around his official site and see what they now offer – loads of information, his personal blog, streamed music, buy links, radio request telephone numbers, links to all his Social Networks, Street Team sign-up, mailing list, a forum, wallpapers and banners…… The site is a lesson in how to do it right. Not too flash, just nicely designed and stuffed with content that shouts out his appreciation of his fans. The only thing I’d add is a dedicated YouTube channel and Flickr page.

So, look & learn – be great at your art, push it out there, communicate and climb higher. If you do and the Major record label A&R guy comes calling, it might be the right thing to do, or, maybe, just maybe, you’ll decide to keep going it alone – and soon that really will be an option.

Read about Adam Young and Owl City below:

Owl City Official Site

Owl City Wiki

Star Tribune – article on Owl City success

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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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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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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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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.

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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

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Lately we’ve had a lot of people become friends with us on MySpace. We love this and we always check out profiles of our new friends, so we’ve noticed something that we’d just like to let you know about.

It’s not that you’re doing it all wrong, but failing to use the way MySpace works to your best advantage is

Don't be a monkey - let them see and hear what they're looking for!

Ultimately you’re on MySpace to get your music heard and make fans. Bearing this in mind, a lot of artists are not using their ‘influences’ and ’sounds like’ sections to their best advantage. This is something that we stress quite heavily in our MySpace book, but the basic premise is that you need to be as open and honest about your influences, and what you actually sound like as possible. You can try and be clever and say you sound like ‘a bad weekend’ or ‘ice cream on a hot day’ but that doesn’t let people know what to expect, and this is after all what they’ve come to your page to find out!

So here is how we think you can make the most out of these sections…

 Genre:

Genre is one of the first things you choose when you sign up for a MySpace, and you can change it by going into your account setting. This lets people know the style of music you make and allows users to search for your band through that genre section in the music directory listings. You need to make sure that you choose the correct genre for your music in order to make sure that you are available to the right fans. Putting a comedy genre down may seem funny but will not do you any favours as no one who likes your style of music will be able to find you.

As I write this I can almost hear some you shouting ‘But my music doesn’t fit into any genre’. If your music genuinely doesn’t fit into anything at all in the options available, then congratulations, you are unique, and I’d love to hear what you’ve done! However, the chances are that you’re not. Take a step back and look at your music objectively, or play it to friends and see how they’d categorise it. A lot of people who think they can’t be categorised are just too close to their music and need a little reality check.

The genre selection you choose will also be displayed in your profile, and everyone will see it so make the right choice, or risk losing potential fans.

Influences:

Here you need to put down as many bands, artists and songs that have inspired and influenced you as possible. Rather than being pointless this is hugely helpful to anyone who visits your profile and can initiate conversation between you and your potential fans. For example, if you like guitar music and are given the choice of two bands to listen to, one inspired by Oasis and the other inspired by Girls Aloud then you have a pretty good idea of how their music is likely to sound and therefore which one you’re going to prefer.

Remember, you’re not trying to show how cool and obscure you are, you’re trying to gain fans. Users can search for new bands to discover based just on this, so don’t waste it. Provide as much information as possible and be honest!

Sounds like:

What does your music resemble most? Make as accurate a comparison as possible here because, as above, people will search out new acts based on what they sound like. Don’t lie about your sound or pretend to be something that you’re not as you will quickly be found out. If you can then compare yourselves to other bands and artists who sound like you, and make friends with these artists. Their fans will be more open-minded to you and your music than anyone else.

This is the one that people are most likely to fill in with an amusing quip as we said at the start – sounds like ‘a ten day hangover’ or something like that. Since people are searching for bands who sound like other bands, why would you shut that chance off?

This may sound simple, or just plain common sense, but the number of profiles we’ve come across that don’t follow this is amazing, and you’ll be surprised at the difference it actually makes!

So, once you’ve amended your profile to let the whole world know who influenced you, what you like and sound like, here’s a quick traffic tipfor you. Comment on the MySpace pages of any of the artists you’ve mentioned. It doesn’t have to be a huge comment, just a quick note along the lines of ‘you’ve inspired us’ or ‘we aspire to be like you’ or just tell them how much you love them. The fans of that band will then be able to click through to your profile and check you out, providing you with a whole new pool of potential fans. Lovely.

Our eBook ‘Make It On MySpace’ covers many more issues like this in detail. It’s not a guide on how to just put a MySpace profile up, it’s aim is to show how that profile can be and needs to be at the centre of your relationship building with your fans. People who find you on MySpace can become lifelong active fans, not just meaningless friend numbers. ‘Make It On MySpace’shows you how.

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A Guest Post by Juanita Appleby

I know what you’re thinking…”oh no not another social networking site”, right? But just bear with me.

LinkedIn’s appeal has widened beyond pocket-protected IT geeks to boasting over 39 million members across varying industries globally.

So how can you use this more upmarket social tool to advance your music career?

Simple.

Display a professional profile

Because LinkedIn works on a different platform of a CV-based profile you don’t have to be embarrassed to forward the link on to an industry exec.

It also allows you to display up to three links on your profile so it can be a portal to your other websites.

LinkedIn is well ranked within search engine results, which means that you will get the free organic traffic to your profile page and referrals to your other websites with minimal effort.

Network with others in the industry

This is the key benefit to getting up close and personal with LinkedIn. Once you are set up with a profile, then do a group search for “music”. Then sit back in amazement at the 25+ pages of networking groups with members from all walks of life in the music industry – management, media, publicity, marketers and other fellow musicians.

Mark Carras (in his post ‘If LinkedIn isn’t fun, why should my band care?’) touched on this subject and this is the feature on LinkedIn that will help get you out of that garage you’re practising in and closer to a money-making journey in music.

The important thing to know about LinkedIn is that you must demonstrate that you know the contact you are adding to your network in some way be it through a common group membership or say an ex-colleague.

So you may want to start with using LinkedIn’s contact import tool from your existing email address book to lay a foundation of connections.

Second to that, you can use the question and answer features of groups to enhance your reputation and raise people’s interest in connecting with you.  I touch on how the question feature can help later but don’t be afraid to answer people’s questions too. 

Networking may be uncharted territory for you so be patient, ooze intellect, swap “virtual” business cards and always keep in mind that in business a one-sided pitch will almost always fail.  Be prepared to forge relationships on LinkedIn that are beneficial for both parties.

Promote your news

You can post your own news in groups and even link those news items back to any other websites you might have. Many members have weekly or even daily updates of group activity so your news will get delivered straight into their inboxes. Can’t get better than that.

Get advice from those that know

Trying to find a recording studio in your area? Need some tips on publicity? Request for reviews of your latest demo?

Yeah, LinkedIn can help. Once you’ve joined some groups and been accepted as a member, then you can start discussions in that group and other members can comment back or contact you directly via the website’s internal mail system.

Remember, don’t spam! That’s the quickest way for you to get your account banned. Stay topical and humble and you’ll find the help you need.

Find opportunities for your music

You’ll find that people will post job listings on LinkedIn and in music industry terms those are requests for songs for licensing deals, films, TV, you name it.

So while other social networking sites may be the platform to building a fanbase and getting your music heard by a wider indie audience, LinkedIn helps you focus on gaining visibility with the business contacts and advice to actually make it in music.

Good luck and keep rocking.

Juanita Appleby
Juanita Appleby, born and bred in America, has over a decade of experience in marketing and promotions.  She is currently studying music and arts writing with the London School of Journalism. 

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