Blogging for Musicians

Blogging is a phenomenon that many musicians have embraced since the internet began to boom. So much so that musical award ceremonies have started running "best blog" categories. So what's the fuss about? Why have so many musicians taken to it, and is it something you should be embracing?

Personally, I think blogs are a fantastic opportunity for us music types, and not just because I'm writing a blog post now! A blog is a way to communicate with friends, fans and contacts in the industry, including a blog on your website, or even replacing your website with a blog is a way of turning a static, brochure style site into a living, breathing online representation of yourself, and your work.

How to approach your blog.

Successful blogs, musical or otherwise, always manage to strike a chord with their readership. Base your posts on what type of band/artist you are, if you're a band who deals with political and sociological issues, write about current events, give your opinion, stir things up a little. If you're an electronica artist, post about your studio, your gear and your techniques. Of course, talking about other musicians can help you too, and linking to their sites or blogs - build a few alliances and you'll be well away. Talking about relevant subjects that don't revolve about how good your latest track is or when it will be released or how people can buy it can not only keep your fans interested in what you're saying, but can even drive traffic from google, or, if you get people talking, provide some word-of-mouth marketing.

Post regularly but not too often, a couple of posts a week is enough to keep people satisfied without overloading them.

Communicate! Blogs, like everything else you do online, should be another way of communicating with people. Industry professionals, fans, even friends. Make sure you encourage people to participate, and respond to all the comments and emails you get, people will think a lot of you.

Be constructive with your blogs, and you'll reap the rewards.

Twitter Tips for Musicians

Twitter can be phenomenal tool for promoting music if used correctly. But it's a confusing place, what with all those retweets and tags and trends flying all over the place. How do you get the most out of your twitter from a musical point of view?

Follow relevant people - Finding people on Twitter who are relevant to what you want to achieve can help you build relationships. If you're an electronica act, follow electronica artists and labels, you never know when a conversation can spark up.

Utilise your relationships - Talk to people you've already built relationships with elsewhere, friends, contacts, bloggers, people you already know will be ready and willing to engage on Twitter.

Be real - Don't pretend to be something you're not on Twitter, talk about your interests and other aspects of your life, it may press someone's buttons!

Avoid overkill - You probably don't need to be told, but if you tweet every three minutes, and tell people every time you put the kettle on, your followers are going to stop paying attention, they might even stop following you. Base how often you tweet roughly on somebody who you enjoy reading on Twitter.

"Join the Conversation" - Tagline it may be, but it's particularly appropriate for Twitter, the rules you'd apply to a social situation are just as relevant on Twitter. Contribute, start conversations, ask opinions, give your opinions. Also make sure you listen to others, and be a part of what they talk about. This will gain you followers, but more importantly it will ensure that you stick in peoples' minds, they'll be much more likely to pay attention when you tweet.

Don't worry too much - Twitter should just be another tool in your arsenal, fretting over how many followers you have won't make them magically appear, just drop in now and then, join in, and get on with more interesting aspects of your career in music (you can tweet about these later).

I'm sure you'll be tweeting like pros in no time.

Know Your Niche

One of the most important lessons you'll learn in your quest to get your music heard is to find out exactly who enjoys it. It sounds a bit too obvious to be writing an article about eh?

Well I'm sure you've all got an idea of what kind of music you make, you know your influences, and you probably have some idea of the kind of people whose iPods you're looking to creep onto. However I'd also wager that you haven't researched this as much as you could've. Us musicians can get quite a warped view of our own music. I make electronica, and once made a track I thought sounded like it had a Massive Attack feel to it, only to be told it sounded like The Knife, something I hadn't considered. There's nothing wrong with this, but a second opinion on who your music sounds like can really help you work out who you're aiming it at.

Being compared to specific artists isn't particularly helpful though, what are you going to do, spam their fansites? What really will help you is to get involved with communities. It's one thing knowing that there's a good alternative scene in your city, hell, you could even find the email addresses of those involved and try to get in touch with them, but they're probably not going to listen. The best way to get involved is to actually get out there and meet people, go to gigs or clubs which are relevant to your music, talk to people, meet people who will either be able to help you musically, or even just recommend your E.P to their friends, or buy it themselves. Not just any old people, relevant people, your niche.

The same applies online, post on relevant forums, talk to people from relevant bands, try to start conversations on Twitter or Facebook. No, DON'T spam, nobody will pay attention as I'm sure you know by now. Contribute, give something to your Niche, and you'll get something back. Build real relationships with these people, and soon you'll have plenty of contacts who are interested, and willing to do you favours.

Interview: Reverb Nation's Jed Carlson

The guys at Reverb Nation are huge players in online music promotion, they provide a music marketing platform, uniting artists, managers, labels and venues. Their Chief Operating Officer Jed Carlson took time out to answer our questions.

Q. How many people use Reverb Nation currently?
A. 650,000+ Artists, Labels, Managers and Venues

Q. Is there a specific genre or style of music that has latched on to Reverb Nation more than the others?
A. No, we serve all genres. We get a huge variety of genres here.

Q. How do you think you differ from all the other Music sites?
A. We provide a 'one stop shop' for Artists and those that orbit them to run the business part of their small music business.

Q. Do you think Myspace Music is falling behind in the race to be number one Music Social Networking site?
A. Yes. I think that MySpace has decided to become more of a content company than a social net. They say as much in their own statements these days.

Q. How does your 'Fair Share' feature work, and how can artists make the most of it? What sort of financial benefits can they expect?
A. We take 50% of the net ad revenue each month and pass it along to the pool of Artists who are using our site on a monthly basis. Nobody is getting rich from this, but we don't feel like we should benefit more than the Artists for the traffic they drive to the site.

Q. How does your 'Street Team' feature work, and how can artists make the most of it?
A. Artists can create missions for their fans to get them to share the content around the web and we keep track of how well any individual fan is doing at accomplishing that goal. Artists who use it to promote specific things like new CD releases, upcoming shows, etc are using it best and getting the most out of it.

Q. Any new features in the pipeline you can tell us about?
A. We don't really discuss new features until they become available. This is for competitive reasons, mostly, but also because we need to test them before they go out to the masses.



Well there we go. Here at Method Promotion we've already expressed how impressed we are with Reverb Nation, and the services and resources they offer. We've kept this interview short and sweet, because the way you'll learn more about how Reverb Nation works is to get yourself signed up. We suggest that you do.

Big thanks to Mr. Carlson!

Music Consumption Habits

When you boil it down, all Music Promotion really consists of is trying to make somebody give your tunes a chance. Obviously you have this beautiful blog to help you with your promotion methods, but amidst all the techniques we talk about, there's something we haven't really covered yet - listening habits.

The inspiration for this blog post came when I decided to listen to a band for the first time. I first heard of the band in question just before christmas, I was working in a record store at the time, and saw their C.D. - that was the extent of my interest, and I thought nothing of them, until a few months down the line, I heard one of their songs on the radio, I was doing something else at the time (eating or preparing food probably) and didn't pay a lot of attention (maybe there was pesto in the fridge, and it made me all the more excited about my sandwich) but I managed to catch the name of the band, draw a link, and somewhere in my subconscious keep this information stored. Next thing that happened? I heard that Johnny Marr had gone and seen this particular band on tour. Now, this part of the sequence was a recommendation, and though my theory as to the acceptance of new music is in its fledgling stages, I've worked out that this section is key. I can draw a direct link through my music collection based on recommendation, when I was 14, I started listening to Radiohead, I heard Thom Yorke talk about David Byrne and started listening to Talking Heads, I also heard him talking about Aphex Twin, through Aphex Twin I heard about Warp Records, Boards of Canada followed, Clark and Autechre took me to a music festival where I heard Modeselektor...and well, you get the picture. Shall I complete the sequence? I heard the band in question again yesterday, on a sporting montage sequence of all things, but this time, I had heard enough hype about the band, and in a roundabout way been recommended the band, so I payed attention. The song was really good, and somewhere in my head they've been added to a list of good music, and funnily enough that list is tied directly to my iTunes, and more unfortunately, my bank account.

The point I'm trying to make here is that for me, music has to prove itself before I even listen to it, and I'm sure it's the same for others. It's not intentional, nor is it a way to pigeonhole myself, and make sure I'm only getting one type of music on my iPod, but when you consider the shear volume of music available to us, I think it's only fair that something has to stand out. I'm sure there are exceptions, and people who are very active in their search for new music may listen to things and develop an opinion the first time they've heard of it, but what percentage of fans are going to come looking for you? Not many is the answer.

So how can we work around this theory of having to prove yourself? Or even use it to our advantage? Well you need to start with quality of course, nobody is going to recommend something they don't like. But if your tunes are up to scratch, perseverance is key. Having targeted an audience, you need to find them in more ways than one, 'cos one wont be enough. I think people need to hear about you three times to give you a chance. So, if you can get yourself in three blogs somebody may read, or somebody they know becomes a fan on facebook and you get in two blogs they read, or you get on a radio station they listen to and two blogs...Well you get it, people will very rarely hear about something once and think it's worthy of their attention, make sure they hear about you a few times. This doesn't have to be tough either, you don't exactly have to get on television - just persevere on Facebook (but don't be a pest), if it takes three invitations to three separate gigs of yours for them to press the play button, then so be it, don't spam, don't ask people to listen every three seconds, just persevere and be patient.

Make sense?

Good.

Bandcamp - Online Music Store of the Future

So, one of our musical ventures "Method Label" has just relaunched. Previously it was called something different, and used Paypal to accept people's money. We're a "pay what you like" label - which made any sort of online shop very difficult to set up. Not many support this method of payment. And neither did Bandcamp, until this month...

Yes, as if by magic, I was trawling the internet looking for an outlet for Method Label's tunes when I heard the news that Bandcamp had just started letting their stores charge what they like to download (if they choose), and not just this, they've started supporting shops for Labels as well. Perfectomundo!

"Well good for you" you might be thinking, "but why bother us with your tales of Ecommerce?". Well I wanted to make sure nobody else ended up settling for mere paypal buttons as I used to, or the STUPID shop that your web provider think is a good idea to include in your package which you CANT EVEN DECIDE ON A DESIGN YOURSELF!

Ok, deep breath, I'm back...

Bandcamp provides an accessible, thorough and FREE service, which I'll wager would rival any paid service you could find. You get your own .bandcamp domain, or you can host your store on your own website. The store is customisable, flexible, and detailed, and allows you to both track and promote your sales with some brilliant features, such as embedding your tunes on blogs and sites, and statistics on plays, downloads and purchases. What's more, the guys that run it are helpful, and have a sense of humour about the way they run their site, which is always refreshing to see.

Am I biased? No, I'm not getting anything out of mentioning this, no freebies from Bandcamp, nothing. I had such a frustrating time trying to find somewhere to sell our music - if I can save one person that effort from writing this article, it really will be worth it. Also, a music resource that's run so well deserves a mention here and there. Check them out!

Giving it Away? Get it right!

The value of music is something that's been debated a huge amount in recent times, and if the music industry is to get out of this rut, that's no bad thing. Sure, the internet has allowed people to steal music in huge quantities, and in this post I have promised myself not to rant about the positives and negatives of that, so I wont. Another thing the industry has given us is the ability to give our music away for free, as a way of building hype, building reputation, and building a fan-base. Great.

And it is great. Before the internet we couldn't have dreamt of finishing a track, and being able to distribute it to fans all over the globe simultaneously, at the click of a few buttons, and letting people have your music for free is an effective way of persuading people your tunes could just be worth the listen. Easy? Well it sure sounds it, but trust me, there's an art to giving your tracks away. I've devised some ground rules.

1. Collect email addresses. I cannot stress this enough, I've said it before, and I will say it again. Every opportunity you have to take the email address of somebody that might be interested in your music now, or in the future, take it. Plus, in the instance of a track giveaway via your site, it makes it feel legitimate. Check my previous articles for info on why a Mailing List is so damn important.

2. Keep it bitesize! If I see somebody giving away a whole album for free via their myspace, or a link on sendspace, I feel like it's something they've made in their room over the course of a week, on a terrible computer, with terrible speakers, and terrible software. I think it's gonna be terrible, if you hadn't already gathered. This could just be prejudice by me, granted. For somebody who runs a record label I should probably be more forgiving of this kinda thing. But I'm really not, and I'm sure that the connotations of a free album from an artist you've never heard of are the same for most people. Give away a track, maybe two, in the run up to an album or an E.P release, and it will make fans feel like they're getting something exclusive, and build some hype for when the release does come. Sorted.

3. Try and include some artwork. An image for peoples iPods wont go amiss, and it'll make sure they remember who you are. Again, it can make it feel more official and professional too. It's the little things, guys...

4. Get it featured! Your giveaway doesn't have to be exclusive to your own websites and social networking. Get Blogs to feature it too. They're often keen to have the content, and find some new music, and indeed draw people to their site. Using a company to spread the word for you, such as Method Promotion can get your music to hundreds of blogs at once, and even if only 20% were to feature it, you can still reach thousands of readers.

That's it folks. If you have any more tips and ideas, stick them in the comments, hell I may even come back and edit the post if they're good enough.