This looks like it could be a useful online application, Presskit.to, is the music industry’s first cross platform portfolio web app designed to aid individuals in organizing, protecting, & sharing their creative identities. Consider it a digital business card for the 21st century that houses all of your relevant career info and media without the clutter of social networks and official websites.
Presskit.to, the first product from Boston-based music-tech startup Indie Ambassador, was created after its founders, all of whom are lifelong music entrepreneurs in their own right (see below), realized there was no tool designed to allow their demographic to neatly and securely showcase their projects in a manner that was ideal for industry professionals to access and interpret.
The app allows users to grant select access to unreleased content (audio, video, images, & files) via private streaming and download, while assigning custom expiration dates from a mobile accessible dashboard. A recent integration with SoundCloud is the first of many third-party services that will be built into the app in the coming weeks.
Currently in private Beta, Presskit.to is optimized for use across all Internet connected devices, enabling users to proficiently network in-person and online.
I tweeted about this yesterday but want to make sure that everyone knows about it.
One Sheet is a very simple online presence for artists. The cleverest thing about it is that it links to the API (the exchangable information) in all your other online profiles at places like Facebook, YouTube, Songkick etc and therefore it updates itself.
It takes 2 minutes to set up and, in theory, you can leave it alone after that.
I also like the clean and simple design with a single large image background and the clarity of the layout and usability.
Genius.
I expect most artists to build one and use it as an online business card. I can see industry folks using it as a quick reference on any band as well.
You need to ask yourself two hard questions. Questions which may lead you to retire from the music business, but questions that need to be answered before going anywhere near Wikipedia:
Has your band achieved anything of note, that deserves an entry? I.e., sold any records? Or played any big festivals?
Has your band ever been reviewed in any serious publications?
If you can answer yes to either of those questions, it’s okay to start thinking about writing a Wikipedia entry.
This is a great post that has a bunch of ideas for how to get your music noticed by people that have influence.
Some great suggestions and methods.
If the music business is a lot about who you know…is there a way to systematize networking so that you can make friends with the right people on a steady and predictable basis, even if you’re more shy than Bigfoot?
Imagine being friendly with a top radio DJ and personally sending him your latest track to play on his show, or calling up a popular music blogger to offer her a cut from the proceeds of your latest music package.
One of the best ways to impress potential fans is to get an endorsement from people that they respect.
This is intelligent and precise thinking on what the growth of social media has done to the relationship betwen artists and their fans. The positive and the negative.
It's from Nancy Baym, an online fandom expert, and is full of insights that every artist ought to be attuned to.
There's a two part interview from the Bandzoogle blog and a follow up video from NMS.
Here's a snippet:
Fans and friends are not the same thing. Individual fans may become friends (as they always have), but real friendships are mutual – friends choose to be connected to each other, they do things for each other, their relationships are based on equality, they spend time together. It’s not a kind of relationship that scales to a large fan base. Artists can’t be expected to take the kind of interest in each individual fan that the fans take in them. That said, the boundary is often not clear (if it ever was), and each artist has to figure out the boundaries that work for her or him, because it’s not the same for everyone and there’s no right or wrong way to draw those lines. Some people feel fiercely private and want a strong difference between friends and fans, others are totally happy to treat fans as friends and to meet them and see where it goes. Just like some of us are gregarious socializers and love to go out and meet new people and others of us are homebodies who are happy with the small social circles we’ve got.
For the full text, click the links and watch the video.
This is something that you should do when your online profile reaches a sufficient level that makes it worthwhile and it's well set out in this post on DIY Musician.
Make sure that you follow the links to the 'how to' posts for each of the sites at the bottom of their main post.
The two places that I think really count are Amazon's Artist page and Wikipedia.
The hidden reason for getting your Wikipedia page sorted is that the links that you can put on your Wiki page to each of your online presences (Website, YouTube channel, Facebook Page etc) is very strong. Wikipedia has what is called high 'Page Rank' and that tells Google to rank the pages that it links to very highly - just what you want.
Getting a Wikipedia entry to stick when you have no real online profile is difficult and not worth the effort - do it when you are noteworthy enough and use it to 'juice' your other sites.
I posted this yesterday when the people that I'm doing it for sent me the link, but it deserves a post!
I'm doing my first ever speaking gig as Make It In Music on 13th July in Bristol.
It's called 'How to break your band using the Internet - methods, tools & tips'.
I'm really looking forward to it, although, like most people, I don't relish public speaking!
If I get enough time before the event I'm hoping to turn it into a pdf that I'll make available afterwards - to all our readers, not just those that come to the event. Given that I am always overworked, this might fail to materialise!
Here's the blurb:
An in-depth and interactive seminar on how to use the Internet to build a fanbase for your music. The latest and best practices that every musician should know and use including what you need to know about the artist website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, music blogs and more.
The seminar will give you a workable plan that you can apply to stand out on the web and attract a fanbase that can underpin your success.We will look at: Building an effective website for pennies Why you need a mailing list How to best use Facebook Why Twitter is a key tool that you need to master Effective promotion using music blogs How, why, where and when to sell your music for maximum sales ….and more.
I think you'll read about this everywhere today, but I can't ignore it as it's important and resonates with some consultancy that I've been doing.
I was asked last week to work on the marketing for a forthcoming album for a major label established artist and one of the things that they wanted to look at was the use of 'affiliate marketing'.
If you don't know what this is, it's when somebody is paid a percentage of a sale in return for sending a buyer to a website. It is used a lot by many online retailers (such as Amazon) but hasn't been used a great deal by musicians (Joe Bonamassa being the exception and trailblazer - reading his 'affiliate page' will help explain it as well).
So, I was gobsmacked when the Kaiser Chiefs announced the online digital release of their new album this morning - available only from their own site and in an innovative way. There has been no pre-release to the press for review (save a single sent to radio earlier in the week) and they have decided to make the recordings of the new album available to all at the same time.
In an official statement, the band said their intention was “to create a music experience that can be shared and enjoyed by all and at the same time revitalise and subvert the industry standard”.
"It can re-engage the excitement and spontaneity of offering new music immediately to fans, allowing them to hear the record at the same time as media and critics alike and hopefully giving people a fun experience at being the Kaiser Chiefs A&R department,” they added.
Fans can go to the band's official site - http://www.kaiserchiefs.com/ - and create their own version of the album by selecting 10 of the 20 available tracks and designing their own artwork. The digital album is then bought for £7.50 and then a page is created for that version of the album as an affiliate page.
Fans can then promote that page (i.e their version of the album) and earn £1 for every copy sold.
Sure, there is some seriously cool coding going on on this site to make it all seamless, but it's not an impossible thing for a DIY musician to acheive - there are affiliate systems available available to all budgets. What's more important is that Kaiser Chiefs fans are lapping it up. Alerted by an email from the band (see how that mailing list is important), they are embracing the idea and tweeting about it like mad. The band have very cleverly engaged their fans.
The process of selecting the tracks and designing the artwork is very nicely designed and the code that builds the affiliate page is very smart - helping to make the experience for the fan simple, as well as new and exciting.
There's also a clever little film introducing the idea which connects the online album creation to a real world experience in a very well thought out way as well.
Whether you're a fan or not, you ought to check it out and go through the process of creating the album to see how it's been done.
The best piece on it that I've seen today is this one from the Guardian which details the concept and also some of the band's reasons for doing it this way.
Of course, there will be a definitve physical CD release in the near future as well!
Mashable have a recent piece on creative ways that people have come up with to create resume's when job hunting.
But, you can use these same tactics for various parts of your music promotion.
How about creating a video that you have on your press kit page of your website where you or you and your band answer some typical questions that a blogger might want to know the answers to.
Or how about creating a QR code that takes people to that press kit page or your music store page (or wherever seems like a good idea) and get it out to your fans - on a poster at gigs, on a badge, sprayed on to your merch table etc.
These people have come up with some very creative ideas for their resume's - look at them and apply them to your needs!
I found this post whilst looking for a link to Martin's book for the previous post. He's quoted in this piece.
It's from the start of the year and isn't really about one thing but it sums up the state of being a musician in a web 2.0 world really well and covers some of the things that are essential - YouTube, mobile, live shows.
I want a bass player who can fix the van. I want a keyboard player who can screenprint some shirts. I want a drummer who can shoot some video, throw it into iMovie, and put a YouTube thing together—second largest search engine now—and fuckin’ sell some more tickets. I want a lead singer who can shag the world.” – Martin Atkins
That's just one little bit. It's all really good stuff!
Making the most of your album release is something that almost every indie or diy musician falls short on.
You slave away and make a great record and then put huge effort into the release, but within a few weeks, it's all over.
These two posts look at this issue in different ways.
This great post from We All Make Music sets out five things that you really ought to be doing to maximise the impact of your release.
Just because you have 500 copies of your new record sitting in your apartment doesn’t mean you should start selling them at shows or online right away. If you just spent three, six, maybe even ten months creating a new album, the least you can do is spend at least three months (if not more!) promoting it. Here are a few steps that every young independent band should take to ensure the release of their record is as successful as possible:
And then there's this post from Greg Rollett. Greg looks at music promotion and marketing in a way that nobody else does. He is an internet marketer, and experts in that field really are at the cutting edge of how to use the internet to market stuff - anything - but Greg applies it to music.
In his post and video he focuses entirely on how to extend the shelf life of your album once it's released so that it's not all over in a matter of weeks.
This is a great post that EVERY artist should read.
It's a detailed look at why music bloggers are now very important to your success, how to approach them and what not to do.
I have added my own rather good (if I say so myself!) comment in the thread below the post that sets out how we approach bloggers when promoting an artist release. It's a handy, short 'how to'.
But, I thoroughly recommend you read the whole thing.
If you want someone to blog about your band but can’t be bothered past the point of spamming a collection of mailing lists, you’re wasting everyone’s time including your own. Whatever you do though, don’t give up. That next email you send or blog you read might lead to you finding your biggest supporter. It’s always worth a shot, but unless you’re sensible with your expectations and are willing to be at least a little bit honest with yourself along the way, you’re not likely to make it past a single blogger’s delete button.
This is a great post that EVERY artist should read.
It's a detailed look at why music bloggers are now very important to your success, how to approach them and what not to do.
I have added my own rather good (if I say so myself!) comment in the thread below the post that sets out how we approach bloggers when promoting an artist release. It's a handy, short 'how to'.
But, I thoroughly recommend you read the whole thing.
If you want someone to blog about your band but can’t be bothered past the point of spamming a collection of mailing lists, you’re wasting everyone’s time including your own. Whatever you do though, don’t give up. That next email you send or blog you read might lead to you finding your biggest supporter. It’s always worth a shot, but unless you’re sensible with your expectations and are willing to be at least a little bit honest with yourself along the way, you’re not likely to make it past a single blogger’s delete button.
OK, maybe not all, but I've seen a bunch of articles over the last few weeks, which, when grouped together, will give you a very solid training in what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is and why you need to do at least some to further your music career.
I'll let the articles do most of the talking, but, in short, you need to learn what things you should aim to have your music website rank for in Google (and other) searches and some basic techniques that will help you do that.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is process of organizing the content of a website in a way that will be most easily understood and indexed by search engines. If you do it right, you will be closer to the top of the list when strangers search for terms relating to your website. For instance, if you are a punk bluegrass accordion trio, you should be at the top of the listings whenever anybody searches for that genre of music.
Then their follow up article talks about how to apply your new found SEO knowledge to other online sites that can point people (and search engines) back to your main website:
Musicians needn’t be overly concerned with SEO on their own website if it’s for mostly promotional and informational purposes. This is very true, and the last thing a working musician needs is one more distraction from their instrument. However, the concepts are important to understand as you expand your internet presence because better optimization helps more people find your music. In this article, we’ll apply these concepts outside the musician’s website and into other online communities.
Then I'd recommend moving on to this article on Music Think Tank that goes into some specific but very basic and simple methods that you ought to know:
Search engine optimization (SEO) often gets passed off as a sort of snake oil — some gimmicky trick that people do to manipulate search results in their favor.
SEO is really about one thing: making what your website is about clear to people and bots alike. There’s no tricks or gimmicks, and if you can make a website or manage a wordpress installation, you can do some very simple things to make your website more search engine and people friendly.
Then, last but obviously not least, there's our post and video on Band Website SEO which covers a lot of the same stuff but you get to hear my dulcet tones to boot!
Really - do take some time to read and digest this info. It's a good basic training that will help you in ways that you can't really understand until you try them. It won't break your career instantly but it will, with luck, bring in some new fans and may create opportunities out of the blue!
I've been using Topspin for a little over a year and have learnt a huge amount about the platform and also the methods that work when you are trying to build a two-way relationship with your fans.
Let's just say that DTF is going to work for you if you already have some momentum and, crucially, if you, the artist, get involved and want to see it work.
If you leave it to the 'manangement' or the 'office', you might as well not bother!
That said, Topspin looks set to be 'the Daddy' when it becomes available to all artists this month.
Eric Hebert has written a great piece about the opportunities that this presents to all artists.
Well it looks like Topspin’s up coming public release just might be the real solution I’m looking for. Now, I’ve been keeping an eye on Topspin for years now, and have a kind of love/hate relationship with the service. I LOVE the widgets and overall look of the tools they have, they are very well designed, fast loading, look very customizable, have no branding whatsoever, etc.
The HATE part comes from simply not being allowed to use the service, as I’ve never had a client with an established fan base to meet the Topspin requirement. For years Topspin seemed to only cater their service to somewhat established acts. In a way I guess I was always just jealous that I wasn’t established enough to be in the cool kids club.
But, I'm still waiting for the killer platform. Topspin is not as good as an email system as the best (such as Aweber). It needs better automated follow-ups (known as autoresponders) and better segmentation so that you can follow up with people who do or don't open your emails. Plus, you have to enter much of your music's metadata to use Topspin so it would make sense if it could distribute to iTunes and other digital stores as well. And thirdly, it doesn't auto-integrate with Facebook like RootMusic or DamntheRadio. It would be great if it did!
I reckon Topspin knows about these three things and will maybe bring them in.
If not, then that's the killer platform that we're waiting for - Topspin plus those three!
Following on from the previous post which highlighted how many artists don't have their own band website, is this great post from Ariel Hyatt.
Astonished by the number of artists that she met on a trip to Australia who had no web presence of their own, she put together this great guide on how to get a Wordpress based site up and working in no time and at very little cost.
It's well worth checking out the older post on Music Think Tank that she links to in the first few lines as well - it proves the need for multiple online presences.
I got a slap in the face in Perth, Australia two weeks ago. I went there to talk about Apps, Foursquare, and advanced web marketing strategies.
I had many one-on-one sessions with artists and a vast majority had a big problem:
They didn’t have web sites.
When I say they don’t have web sites, I mean they’re only using MySpace and Facebook. Which is a critical mistake. See here why: http://bit.ly/musicadiumpaper
I’m not saying this to make anyone wrong or to be righteous. Websites, as I soon found out in Australia, are very expensive to build with local web designers. A few artists showed me quotes of $5,000 for a website. It’s not 1997 anymore and those quotes are not OK.
An effective website can be created $20 or less a month with no upfront costs
And, if you do go the Wordpress route (which we think you should) it might well be worth your while investing $47 in this great Wordpress Theme that makes building your band website very easy. Specifically designed for musicians, it is very easy to use.
Chris Rockett is building a great resource at his blog - Promote Your Music.
And, I have to recommend this article as it really is a run through most of the major things that you can do to promote and market your music.
And it's good.
He promises to go into more detail on each over time, but, as an overview it ought to tell you a few new things to try.
If you do a simple Google search on “how to get more music fans” you will come up with hundreds of thousands of pages packed with ideas for the best way to get people listening to your stuff.
What we must keep in mind is that not all these methods are created equal, and though most of them have some basis in reality there is a good chance that you can focus on the gold rather than just trying to do everything.
Then you will have a much better chance of success.
One thing I have found while learning music marketing information is that even though a tactic is sound and makes sense, there are certain things that suit me better and that I just understand right away. I think if you see the whole picture in your mind it’s much easier to stay focused.
So try a bunch of stuff for a few weeks and see what works best for you.
But it's a killer little technique for getting your music genuinely heard and purchased. It's something that you should be doing to promote your music.
As Cameron Mizell says in that post:
I’ve stumbled across a way to sell my music on iTunes to hundreds of people that otherwise have never heard of me without getting any page space or paying for advertising. This has become quite successful for me, and I hope it can help you, and we can all help each other. All you need is an iTunes account. Here’s the deal:
iTunes allows you to publish playlists that you create (on the left side of iTunes). The playlists can be rated from 1-5 stars by other customers, and top rated playlists appear on the page for every album that has a song in the playlist.
Following on from our piece about the Topspin presentation on direct to fan I checked their blog yesterday and found this interview with a digital marketing guy at a major management firm.
In the piece he talks about his experiences with Topspin but also covers a huge amount of stuff that amounts to a 'best practice' guide in direct to fan music marketing.
I think there’s been a major shift in the last few years from website as an extension of the creative project to website as a functional business tool. You’ll still see the occasional site that’s a crazy experiential art piece but it seems a lot of people are really thinking about keeping it minimal and highly functional, or at least I am. My favorite sites are the ones that make getting the information I need clear and easy.
I also see a lot of indie bands using platforms like Blogger and Tumblr as their sites which is an approach I think is great. It costs nothing and maximizes artist participation. If your whole site is a blog and you don’t post anything interesting, no one is reading your site, so artists have to stay on it with the updates. It seems really up front and honest to me. What I also like about this is it allows you to easily mix in marketing messages with more interesting personal content, which seems to work much better than having an all marketing copy all the time approach. Again, not for everyone, but I like this approach.
Following on from our piece about the