Hey there, Jason here with another edition of Musician’s Arsenal. This week we’re talking about
Turntable.fm, yet another new site for us to learn and love. At this point,
Turntable.fm is all the rage. It has some 140,000 users already in its first month and appears to be picking up speed. Users sign into
Turntable.fm with their facebook login, which makes it easy to find friends already using
Turntable.fm. On my first visit, I was able to find several friends right away, chat with them and check out what music they are into right now. And while I initially thought this new platform was little more than a fun time waster, after getting in to it, it became apparent this is very powerful for the independent musician.
Turntable.fm works like this: You sign in and create your own playlist by adding songs
Turntable.fm already has loaded in their database. If you can’t find the song you want, you can load any MP3 you want from your computer. This has raised a lot of legal concerns that
Turntable.fm will have to address, but I’m a music marketer, not a lawyer, so lets move along with the marketing advice. Once you build your playlist, join a room and listen with others or create your own and start DJ-ing. If people like what you play, you’ll get points and fans. The more fans and points you get, the more popular you get and the more people listen to you.
How might an independent musician take advantage? I’m glad you asked. Here at Ariel Publicity we preach posting interesting and compelling content to get fans engaged with your social media profiles. This mean you can’t be overly self-promotional and hypey. In order to do this on
Turntable.fm, it means creating a playlist that will get people to follow you. I recommend adding only a few of your own songs in this initial stage. Make sure the playlist you are building is complementary to your style of music.
Create a following and get people excited about the music you’re playing. If you can build a following and build your numbers, then you’ll have an engaged audience and you can begin to sprinkle more of your own music into the mix. Don’t overdo it though, make sure you temper how much original music you play. People are there to find new music, but they want to hear things they know and love too. That’s how you get a following.
Another idea would be to create events that you can invite people to on
Turntable.fm. Get together with other bands you know and like, record some live songs, and invite all of your fans and their fans for a ‘concert’ on
Turntable.fm. Promote the event on your social media profiles and see how many people you can get to show up.
You can have guest DJs drop in on the events as well. Make it fun and exciting. Create contests and giveaways in conjunction with the event. If you can get a lot of people to show up, you’ll most likely get other people interested just based on the number of listeners in your room.
Jump in now, while it’s early and easier to create a following. Early adopters have a chance to take advantage of this before
Turntable.fm runs into any issues. It’s a great opportunity to introduce music lovers to your music and potentially create some new fans.
So sign in and take it for a spin (pun definitely intended). Let us know what you think. Are people open to hearing your original music? Is it hard or easy to create a following on
Turntable.fm? Is this the next greatest social networking site? Have you been doing anything fun and original with this new platform?