There are so many companies creating audio players and widgets; some are great and some, well, not so much. But all we really want to do is just get our music heard. And while the magic player that ensures everyone hears your music hasn’t been created yet (be patient, I’m working on it), there are some that do a fantastic job of increasing the ‘share-ability’ of your music. One such player is Official.fm. Official.fm is a platform that provides artists the ability to create players and promo pages. Now I know that doesn’t sound very exciting, but what makes these players cool (besides how slick they look) is that they are embed-able, share-able, track-able, download-able, email address capture-able (work with me here), everything-able!
Let’s say you have one of these bad boys up on your website, then a friend comes along and listens to your latest track. He loves it (of course) and decides to embed it on his own personal blog. One of his readers listens, loves it (of course) and decides to share it to his Facebook Timeline. This particular person happens to be rather popular and, consequently, has countless friends who all listen (because they just have to press play, and don’t have to leave Facebook to listen, very cool) and all love it (of course)! A few of those countless friends also happen to be bloggers. They grab the embed code and put it on their own blogs and…. you get where this is going. Back on your side of things. While your song is busy going viral, you’ll be busy looking at how many plays you’re getting and where they’re all coming from. This is one of my favorite parts (I’m a sucker for stats). Official.fm not only tells the geographical location of the plays and views, but it also tells you what site they came from. So if you get your player on 4 different blogs, you know exactly how many plays you got from each of those blogs. Hip.
But what about these promo pages I talked about earlier? I’m glad you asked. With Official.fm you can build ‘promo pages’ for individual songs or playlists you have loaded. This gives you the ability to direct to people to a specific URL that contains the songs you want them to hear. Building on this, Official.fm recently put out ‘Official Pages’ which displays selected tracks as a ‘gallery’ of songs. These pages are highly customizable and are a great way to present your music to fans. The savvy artist might turn on the feature that allows users to download the songs in exchange for an email address. Imagine in our example from before how many email addresses could have been collected. Admittedly, it was a fanciful example, but the point still stands. Official.fm players encourage sharing like few others.
Official.fm didn’t forget about usability. One of the key features of Official.fm is collaboration. Some artists can handle everything themselves, but many have ever growing teams handling many different sides of their business. Official.fm makes it easy to invite team members in as collaborators so the promotion of your music can move forward unencumbered by everyone searching for user names and passwords. But the biggest reason to use Official.fm is this video:
Have you used Official.fm yet? What to you think of their player? Is their collaborator feature truly useful?
Let us know what you think in the comments section or hit me on Twitter, @jloom718!