Creative Ways To Strengthen Your Band Image

Most musicians either start or join a band because they love music and they want to share their talents with the world. It’s nice to think about all of the perks and exciting things that can come with a successful music career, but ultimately, most musicians aren’t entrepreneurs.

In order to find success as a musician, though, you have to think of your band more like a business. You might have the greatest talent in the world and the catchiest songs anyone has ever heard, but if you can’t attract people to your band, you’ll never have an audience and your career will fade out before it even gets off the ground.

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6 Tips For Musicians Marketing Themselves For The First Time

One of the hardest things about the music business is marketing yourself. Bigger artists are able to hire professionals, but what about the myriad other skilled yet overlooked musicians out there?

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4 Ways Musicians Can Use An EPK

This post by Dave Cool originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog. 

An electronic press kit (EPK) — sometimes also called a digital press kit — is essential for making a strong first impression on promoters, bookers, media, and other music industry professionals.

You can think of it as your interactive artist resume, where anyone interested in your music can find all the information they need in one place. You can use your EPK to help you get more press, more gigs, and come across as a serious artist.

Since your website is the first place people will go to learn more about you and your music, you should host your EPK there. Then as you progress in your music career, you should keep your EPK up to date with new music, press, photos, and videos.

So, how exactly can you use an EPK to help your career?

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Find Your Fans: Using Data To Analyze Your Audience

Whether you like it or not, every social media site and music streaming platform is collecting loads of data about their users. This information can be used to your advantage to draw powerful insights about your audience.

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Submit Hub - A Scam

I’m part of a band that has had its fair share of false-starts over the years. Preparing for these false starts, I’ve repeatedly put together lists of potential blogs to pitch our music to when we’re building up to a release. To do this, I head over to The Hype Machine, head to the indexed sites, filter what’s relevant to my music, and then take down the details from the list I’m presented with. I’ll generally head to each blog, look up their submission guidelines, and make a couple of notes to personalise my emails to them, where possible. A couple of years ago, the vast majority of the blogs suggested the same – a variation on sending an email with a link to stream, be it via your own email or a web form. Since then, there has been an increasing trend towards using a service called Submit Hub.

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How To Submit To Music Blogs, Magazines And Radio And Get Heard

How To Submit To Music Blogs, Magazines and Radio and Get Heard… It’s extremely annoying and very unprofessional trying to get the attention of music blogs and radio when the artist is private messaging or has an automated message saying, ‘Yo, check out my music’. Not is it unprofessional, but it shows that you do not have the respect for others, including artists’ or place any effort into wanting to have your music really listened to as this is seen as being lazy…. ….It is obvious to every station and blog site when an artist has not really had a look at the site or station to understand or know what it’s about and what the protocol is.

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Fail To Succeed And Stop Rushing Your Music!

Why is it so many talented artists don’t see the light? Why do so many artists release so much music without thought or learning more of what is required outside of the music.

As mentioned in various music tips on Music Talks I still fail to see so many artists not taking up opportunities to learn. Instead, they are releasing one single, EP or Album after another in the hope it sticks. 

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Are You A Brand Or A Mouse?

Music has always been a business. At least since the advent of the recording “industry” in the last century. There’s little doubt about that: it’s a big money-making machine and little more for a good portion of the music world.

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7 Email Marketing Tips For Musicians To Reach Out To Their Fans

Guest post by Nora Mark of Academized and Stateofwriting.

While writing email marketing content might seem like the sort of thing a big business would do, especially if they’re trying to sell you something, there are plenty of benefits a musician such as yourself, or your band can enjoy from running an email list.

With the ability to reach your fans on a one-on-one basis directly into their inbox, the opportunities to further build a community are endless. However, this is only if you get it right! Today, we’re going to share seven need-to-know tips to help you write emails in the best possible way.

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Do You Know Who's Reading Your Music Blog?

Guest post by James Shotwell. This article originally appeared on Haulix

Building and retaining your audience begins with understanding who is clicking on your site.

Search the name of virtually any artist or group on social media, and you are bound to find people discussing that act. Opinions on music are a dime a dozen, and when it comes to bands, everyone already knows their value is worth even less that. Young music writers around the globe cut corners on a daily basis to be among the first to cover the latest news about the biggest acts in their area of interest. It doesn’t matter if their site has few to no visitors or if much larger publications beat them to the punch, they want to ensure that their readers learn the latest breaking news directly from them.

But who is the audience for the average blog, and who visits websites for news before scrolling social media?

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How Do Indie Music Blogs And Radio Survive? A Harsh Reality

How Do Indie Music Blogs and Radio Survive? A Harsh Reality. Over the past few years I’ve watched many indie music blogs and independent radio come and go like the wind. We often hear about supporting the artists, which is exactly what these independent platforms do. The people behind the indie platforms sacrifice their health, families, lifestyle and quite often go into debt struggling to pay for the necessary costs associated with running such platforms. MusicTalks recently ran a poll on twitter which asked the question; ‘What would you do if all the independently run blogs and radio disappeared? Who would you get to place your new releases, interviews etc. up?’

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8 Essential Pages For Your Music Website

This guest post from Dave Cool is an excerpt from Bandzoogle’s free online guide How to make a website for your music

When you’re designing a website for your music, one of the most important decisions you’ll need to make is what menu options to have, and how to organize them. Here are some key points to keep in mind when mapping out the navigation for your site:

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Email Lists for Musicians – Where The Heck To Start!

Did you know that email marketing is the top way to get people to move from being fans to fans who actually buy your music? 

It’s true!

Email marketing has come a long way since the early days of AOL and it is the perfect things for musicians to incorporate into their music strategy. Emails can help you build deep relationships between you and your fans. They can help you launch a new album with massive sales. And they don’t have to be a standard newsletter of tour dates. 

So how the heck do you start if you’ve never thought about having one before? 

Let’s chat about where to start with email marketing, how to get people to sign up, and what to send those new fans.

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How To Release Your Own Music – Full Presentation

In January 2019 I was asked to present a talk on how to release your own music to a group of people in Riga, Latvia.

It was the first time I’d done anything live, with regard to self-releasing, but I took up the challenge and wanted to fit as much information into the talk as possible.

Turns out, I went overboard and spoke for almost TWO HOURS on the topic! I had so many stories, tips and things I wanted to discuss.

Anyway, I re-recorded the presentation here, and was more concise and a little faster. I managed to get the presentation down to a little over an hour.

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