Promoting Your Music With Snapchat

Jack McCarthy is a contributing writer for of WeSpin, a growth training platform and community which offers a free Fan Engagement course available at: box.wespin.co.

If you or your band have been steadily growing a fanbase and seeing increasing engagement online while touring and releasing music, then you know all about the constant demand for content on your social media networks. If you are not sharing photos on Instagram, tweeting and direct messaging your fans, and getting comfortable using YouTube regularly then you are probably falling behind in taking full advantage of the social platforms where your fans live their daily lives.

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What Artists Should Know About Next Big Sound

Perhaps you don’t sell too many albums on iTunes, or have that many SoundCloud plays or YouTube views. But maybe, just maybe, your music is really popular in some far off corner of the digital universe you never even knew about, and all that “exposure” you’ve racked up over the years is paying off behind the scenes.

Next Big Sound provides detailed online music analytics to measure the growth of bands on streaming services and social networks. It doesn’t cover everything, but it casts a wide enough net to shatter an artist’s dreams with cold, hard data. I know it did mine! <sniff> Cidney at NBS agreed to give me an artist credit for one month so that I could write this article, way back in April. Hopefully she’ll forget to downgrade my account.

Features

The screenshot above shows a dozen “key metrics” of my choosing. It’s an easy way to focus on what’s important to me, and not get bogged down in all those numbers. So for example, I could replace Rdio plays with Vine loops, Last.fm shouts, or unique pageviews of my website.

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Youtube For Musicians: The Advanced Guide!

The internet is full of basic advice on how to market your music with Youtube. That said, if you want to really step your game up and start reaching more of your target audience, there are only a few advanced guides that will let you know how to do that. This is one of them! So have a look for 3 ‘not often talked about’ tips that will have you using Youtube much more effectively!

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How To Make Money With Music Part 1: Gigging

Hello all, and welcome to Part 1 of what I hope will be a ongoing series on how to better make money in your music career. Whether you want to earn a full time income from your music or you simply want to make enough to cover recording or equipment costs, this series should go a way in helping you achieve that.

Today I’m going to look particularly at how you can make money from gigging. I often see musicians leaving money on the table from their gigging efforts, either through shyness, or simply because they didn’t know how best to monetize their performances. With that in mind, here are some of the main ways you should be making money from each gig.

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MusicThinkTank.com | October's Most Popular Posts

MusicThinkTank.com takes great pride in being a renowned resource for all who comprise today’s music industry. We appreciate the conversations you start, the advice you share, the projects you promote, and the feedback you share and we want to encourage your continued efforts.

Thanks to our loyal readers and contributors, October was a great month for MusicThinkTank.com - so today, we’d like to share that success with you by highlighting October’s most popular posts. On behalf of MusicThinkTank.com, thank you for your support. We enjoy providing a unique platform where the music industry really can think out loud!

Laura Schneider, MusicThinkTank.com Community Manager

34,708   MTT (Journal) 4,685   MTT - 49 Ways to Get Free Music Promotion (Journal Entry) 4,606   MTT Open - 10 Awesome Independent Record Labels [LIST] (Journal Entry) 3,967   MTT - A&R Tips: The Art Of The Press Kit (Journal Entry) 3,755   MTT - Top 10 Rules For Better Songwriting (Journal Entry)

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Online Band Marketing & Social Networking Crash Course

In our current society we are constantly glued to our tech devices and continuously downloading massive amounts of data through both our personal computers and mobile devices. In fact, over 488 million people use Facebook over a one month span with numbers growing everyday. With evidence like this it is no wonder that it is so important for artists to “put themselves out there”. Gone are the days of searching the Yellow Pages for a phone number, or buying a map to plot a course for vacation. These tasks and more are easily and efficiently carried out over the internet.

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Beginners Guide To Using Soundcloud

Soundcloud is a free to use website for uploading audio, and all you need to start is your email address or the usual Facebook/Google sign in information. I’ve noticed using a separate email is easier for bands and producers than your personal Facebook account, but if you are just using Soundcloud to listen to music and maybe upload some amatuer things for your friends, then Facebook or Google could be the way to go.

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How To Make A Music Website Like Ed Sheeran, Case Study Part 1

Hey guys, today I’m going to show you how to make a top music website which will allow you to better turn visitors into fans, capture their details for future contact, and effectively make more money from your music career. I’ve already show you how to set your site up from scratch, so I won’t be talking about that again (use that guide if you haven’t already got a music website). What I didn’t cover in that guide however, is how to structure your site to make the most of your visitors.

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Twitter #Music Is a Dud… But Twitter is Still Critical To Your Marketing

Now that Twitter’s new music platform, #Music, has been available for public use for almost two months it is safe to make the following assessment.

It is one resounding dud.

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Easy Ways to Rock Your Personal Social Media When You’re Totally Swamped!

Hey you!

Yes – YOU the artist manager/label owner skimming through this blog. Have a hard time keeping up with your personal social media platforms when you’re in and out of meetings all day or on the phone? I hear ya! I’ll keep this short and sweet. Here are my tips for managing your social media when you’re mega busy, you’re not alone!

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An attempt to get Australian Artists off the Twitter Fence. How Twitter has worked for me.

3 Wise Monkeys masterclass in Melbourne

Greetings from the land of AUS! I have just wrapped up an incredible nationwide tour of this gorgeous country called The 3 Wise Monkeys and Ralph Murphy (hear No Evil), Tom Jackson (See No Evil) and I (Speak No Evil) met some amazing and inspiring artists as well as managers, producers and songwriters. We each delivered 6 hour master classes in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne & Adelaide.

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Going Nowhere – The Pitfalls of the “Facebook Band"

Today I want to talk about what I call “Facebook bands”. This isn’t a term, of course, for every artist on Facebook (some are fully professional and use the site extremely well), but rather a term to describe those who misuse Facebook in predictable and typical ways, dooming themselves to stay on Facebook permanently without any outside exposure. Self-imposed social media prison.

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The Weekly Batch

Musicians are expected to be everywhere these days. We’re interacting on social networks, following up on blog comments, keeping our profiles on countless music sites up to date, and checking our stats and analytics with a variety of online tools. It’s enough to make a lifelong indie yearn for a label - one with a marketing department!

Most of these items don’t need to be addressed daily, but they do need to be performed on a regular basis. Tasks that have to be done on a given day, I schedule. Everything else is relegated to The Weekly Batch™ (note: not actually trademarked). I tackle the entire list as a single to-do item on Friday afternoons, when I find it hard to do much of anything else. Here’s my latest iteration:

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How to be a Rockstar at Social Media: What Every Band Should Be Doing

Are you listening?

Are you really listening?

I’ve mentioned it a few times before: treat social media more like a telephone and less like a megaphone. I’ve written about it when talking about the best social media sites for bands too. However, after talking to a few artists, I realize that some might not know how or where  to listen. This is important because like any business or organization, you want to know what’s being said about you and where are they saying it. You’ll also want to know how to respond.

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