7 Ways to Bring Back the Physical Album Experience in Digital Music

I’ve been meaning to write this article for a looonnggg time, and I am finally finding the time to get around to it. It really irks me whenever I hear somebody say they are dissatisfied with digital music. It doesn’t have to be some boring, robotic thing, people! Despite what some industry folks may tell you, there are still tons of music fans out there that prefer the experience that a physical music item can provide. I am one of them. Believe it or not, there are ways that artists can bring some of the physical album experience to digital music. Some of it is common sense, and some of it takes a little “out of the box” thinking, but it is indeed possible.

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HOW TO: Use Viinyl to Help Promote Your Latest Single

Viinyl is a fairly new service that popped up in late 2010 that allows you to create “song-based websites.” They ended up being one of my top picks for 2010’s most interesting and innovative music start-ups, and I’d like to dive a bit deeper into the free service with this post.

If you ever find yourself wanting to promote a single, using Viinyl is an excellent way to provide your fans with a rich media experience surrounding a single song. In this post, I want to show you how you create a one-song web page with Viinyl, and how you can link to it via a subdomain on your official website (e.g. “singleimpromoting.mywebsite.com”).

1. Sign up for a beta account

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6 Simple Ways to Give Back to Your Fans

Your fans are the lifeblood of your career. Without fans, you don’t have a music career, you only have a music hobby. Fans buy your products, listen to your music, give you feedback, share you with their friends, come to your shows, and wear your t-shirts. They are the people that enable you to become a full-time musician, and live the artist lifestyle. The most loyal of fans will stand by your side through thick and thin, buy all of your swag, and help you in many ways throughout your career.

It’s the end of the year, and showing some appreciation to your fans for all the support they’ve given you can go a long way. They deserve a bit more than music and t-shirts.

1. Don’t give your fans live music. Give them a live experience.

Your fans were awesome enough to pay money to see you perform, so the best way to give back in that regard is to put on an incredible show that fans cannot wait to talk about with their friends afterwards. Do something fun and unique that portrays your personality in a positive manner, and make it memorable. Whatever expectations that your fans held with them at the beginning of the gig should be shattered to pieces by the end. Blow your fans away, and give them more than what they believed they paid for.

The possibilities are really endless, but here are a few simple ideas that you can try out to give your fans a more memorable live experience:

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10 Things Bands Can Do to Book More Live Shows

Assuming that you have strong songs and an kickass live show, here are ten (10) simple things you can do to get more gigs:

1. Create a YouTube channel for your band.

Upload a live performance video on YouTube that represents your band at its best. Include a phone number and e-mail address too, so that anyone who wants to book you can contact you easily. Say something like “Contact ________ to book us for a live show.” To show professionalism and interest, try your best to respond to every inquiry within 48 hours.

2. Print up nice business cards

…with your band name, links to your music, live videos, and a phone number and e-mail address that can be reached for booking purposes. Also, include a link to your website so they can learn more about you. You’d be surprised how many bands STILL write down their phone numbers on dirty napkins and torn pieces of paper. Wherever you go, tell people who you are, how good you are, where you are playing next, and how easy it is for them to book you directly.

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Structuring an E-mail Newsletter for Your Fans [Free Template]

One of the most valuable assets you will obtain during your music career is a healthy list of fan e-mail addresses. Unlike posting status updates on social networks, which tend to get lost in the mess of everyone’s news feeds, sending an e-mail to a fan is a direct channel of communication. A fan that opts into receiving your e-mail newsletter usually means that he or she wants to hear from you, and is interested in you and your music.

Since you are communicating directly to your fans, it is important that you get it right from the beginning. One big element of developing a newsletter strategy is the overall look, feel, and presentation of your newsletter. Is your newsletter just simple, plain text at the moment? If it is, consider livening up your newsletter a bit with this free HTML template download.

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How to REALLY Get Your Music on Blogs: Tracking the Results of Your Hard Work

After sending out all of your pitch e-mails and following up, you will probably receive a healthy amount of replies from bloggers. It’s really fun to get all psyched up about this, reply immediately, and watch the features pop-up all over the web. However, while basking in promotional glory, many artists completely forget the most important part of the entire process: tracking the results of your hard work!

The main reasons for undergoing a full-fledged music blog promotion campaign are to raise awareness about your music, and drive web traffic back to your official website, where people can interact with you, become fans, and ultimately buy whatever it is you are selling (CD’s, digital downloads, Uzi-Shaped USB drives, t-shirts, sock puppets, etc). Don’t just blindly assume that your web traffic, number of fans, and online sales will automatically increase because of your recent efforts in blog promotion. There are tons of tips and tools out there that can help you track and measure the effectiveness of your blog promotion, so you can figure out what worked and what didn’t. Try some (preferably all) of the following simple methods to track the overall effectiveness of your blog promotion campaign:

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How to REALLY Get Your Music on Blogs: Crafting a Killer Pitch Letter

Writing an excellent pitch letter is really an art form in itself. Popular music bloggers receive TONS of e-mail daily, and it’s impossible for most of them to read and respond to every single submission that they get from an artist. So how do you stand out in the crowd, and make sure that bloggers open up YOUR e-mail while scanning their inboxes?

First and foremost, your pitch letters have to be personalized. This doesn’t mean that you have to start from scratch with every e-mail you send, but there should be at least a sentence or two (preferably a paragraph) tailored specifically to the blogger you are e-mailing. Your pitch needs to sound more like a conversation, and less like an actual pitch. If your e-mails usually sound dry and generic, then you’re e-mail will be instantly lost, forgotten about, and/or deleted from the blogger’s inbox. Here are (in my opinion) the ESSENTIAL steps to follow in order to craft the perfect music blog pitch letter:

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How to REALLY Get Your Music on Blogs: Becoming an Active Community Member

Once you have a healthy list of blogs related to your music, lifestyle, location, personality, and fans, it is time to pick a few and start participating in the conversation.

Pick 10-20 blogs that you feel are most relevant/beneficial to your music, and just start reading and commenting furiously. Your comments must be absolutely genuine, and encourage further discussion about the topic. Get to know people, agree with some, disagree with others, and be real.

Resist the urge to self-promote right away. You must gain some respect and establish yourself as an active community member FIRST.

While participating in the ongoing conversation, share articles you enjoyed with your social networks, and let bloggers know that you did it via comments, or even a personal e-mail. Being the first to give is a great way to get on the good side of a blogger.

Sing their praises - they will remember you when finally ask them to check out your music.

If you are gaining respect in the community, if the discussion is extremely relevant to your music, and if somebody else could truly benefit by your plug, then MAYBE consider asking other community members to check out your tunes. This is the most appropriate time to do so.

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How to REALLY Get Your Music on Blogs: Finding the Best Blogs for Your Music

This post is part two of the “How to REALLY Get Your Music on Blogs” blog series here on Tight Mix. You can download the entire series for free in the form of a .pdf e-book here.

In the first part of this blog series, I suggested that you write down some defining characteristics about your music, your lifestyle, and your fans. I hope you kept that piece of paper, because now you are going to use those keywords in your search to find the best blogs to approach with your music.

Where to start your search

Searching for anything online can be a complete waste of time if you are looking in the wrong places. It is often difficult to figure out the best place to begin your search, and can be quite overwhelming. I have tried out dozens of search websites in my days with Ariel Publicity & Cyber PR, but I always find myself coming back to the same few resources. Here is a list of some excellent places to start searching for music blogs:

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search is basically just Google, but only focuses on content published within the blogosphere. The search engine indexes blogs by their site feeds, which are checked often for new content. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your search terms, which can be a very helpful tool if you want to get the freshest content related to your search sent straight to your feed reader.

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How to REALLY Get Your Music on Blogs: Defining Your Music, Your Lifestyle, and Your Fans

Music blogs have become an extremely effective medium for artists to garner positive, and sometimes career-changing exposure for musicians. Getting featured on a blog can cause significant boosts in music and ticket sales for an artist, and there are tens of thousands of new music blogs springing up each day. The potential reach for your music in the blogosphere is HUGE! However, getting featured on blogs is a very meticulous and time-consuming process. Blog promotion can be frustrating at first, but if you are persistent and work hard at it, the benefits for your music career can be astronomical. As with anything, it’s important to have a plan before taking the leap.

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The “HTML5 vs. Flash War” in Regards to the Music Industry

[This article was initially posted on Tight Mix]

In addition to music, I also like to read up on technology (the two have always been closely related), so I subscribe to several tech-related RSS feeds. I have been loosely following the feud between Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs and Adobe, the creator of the popular “Flash” web plug-in. Steve’s passionate hatred of Flash kind of intrigued me. Apparently, there is a new version of HTML (the main language used to code the Internet) that may rid Internet of those web plug-ins (like Flash) that you are annoyingly forced to download (and that public computers never seem to have) in order to view certain websites. There is currently a working subset of the code that is already in use, most notably by popular video sites YouTube and Vimeo. Should companies in the music industry that use Flash to create their websites and widgets be concerned?

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Preparing for a Vocal Recording Session

Lets face it — preparation for anything tends to be kind of a bitch. Practicing all the parts of the music to a metronome, setting up microphone stands, setting levels/compressors/effects, laying carpets and other ghetto ways to deaden ugly frequencies. All in hopes that it will make your music sound sexier.

Last summer, while recording my band a few demo tracks, I seriously underestimated how long it would take to prep for each recording session. It was the sole reason our demo project turned into a rush job, and our recordings definitely suffered because of it!

Vocals, in particular, were a super-robo-bitch. It figures I’d find an article giving advice on how to prepare effectively NOW, and not 6 months ago. Anyway, this little ditty makes some excellent points that I’d like to share!

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