Promoters Promote & Musicians Invite.

Sometimes it’s important to take a step back and remind ourselves what we want from live music. Mark Knight is the founder of Right Chord Music, a company set up to bring the discipline of brand marketing to band marketing. In this article Mark critically examines the way grassroots live music is promoted. Mark identifies the roles of the key stakeholders and suggests how they could work together more effectively in the future.

Let’s start by reminding ourselves what is important.

What musicians and managers want from live music:

• An opportunity to grow their fanbase

• A chance to showcase their new material

• At atmosphere conducive to great live music; sound, lighting and staging

• An appreciative and respective audience who want to listen to their music

• Fair compensation for the entertainment they provide and / or opportunities to sell their music

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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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Bands: How to Properly Use a Landing Page on Your Website

This post originally appeared on the Bandzoogle blog. Dave Cool is the Director of Artist Relations for musician website & marketing platform Bandzoogle. Twitter: @Bandzoogle | @dave_cool

Bandzoogle makes it easy to add an intro or “splash” page to your website. When used properly as a landing page for your visitors, they can be an effective marketing tool for your music.

However, intro pages can easily be misused, which can hurt your site traffic, fan engagement, and your sales.

4 Common Mistakes To Avoid with Intro Pages

Here are four common mistakes that we see with intro pages that you should avoid:

1. Permanent intro page: Intro pages should only be used for short periods of time and for specific calls-to-action. It becomes annoying for repeat visitors to keep having to click through to your main site.

Also, Google picks up text content on your page, and if the first page of your website is an Intro page, there isn’t much to tell Google how your site is relevant to search queries, which can hurt your rank.

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5 Marketing Ideas for Your Band for Under $50

I know how tough it is for an indie band to find the funds to put up flyers around town, print promotional CDs, etc. That’s why I’ve come up with 5 marketing ideas that could either be copied, expanded upon, or used to inspire more creative juices to come up with some clever marketing tactics of your own. Not saying these ideas are anywhere near perfect, but if you’ve got the balls to give them a try, let us know how they go! The point is to get creative.

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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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11 Reasons Why Your Music Self-Promotion Isn't Working

Self-promotion in the music industry is a topic that has been explored extensively over the past 20 years. Some of the basic ground rules are the same that apply to any business or freelancer. Most people in the industry, however, bands included, don’t know a whole lot about it. Many prefer to hover around the topic of social media because it’s all they know. After all, once you call yourself a “social media coach”, there’s really not much room for expansion besides posting an analysis of every new Twitter or Facebook development/etc.  Artists flock to new music technologies, discovery platforms, unsigned networks, indie authorities, and crowd funding platforms looking for the answer, and yet, the message generally being sent to the artists tends to do them a disservice. Promises, promises. Even the term “submit your music” can be very misleading. Submit it where? Well…the junk folder, to be blunt.

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Make Better Marketing Plans with a SWOT Analysis

The start of just about every marketing plan in history starts with what’s known as a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). It just so happens to be my first go-to step as well when I’m taking a look at a new band.

Although I don’t always do it formally, a SWOT analysis is the best way to get a handle on a band’s current position in a market and what the next steps should be. Having one in hand will help you determine what the steps of your marketing plan should be and how best to approach the next 2-3 months of marketing for your band.

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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 Power of Personal - When Traditional Marketing Still Counts

Written by Jem Bahaijoub

As a new artist it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the constantly evolving new media world. With new marketing platforms bombarding us every day, it’s difficult to see the forest from the trees. So what should you do to market your debut EP? How can you build up a fan base from scratch? Next time you feel a panic-attack coming on and start screaming “where do I start?!”, take a deep breath and remember that we were sociable before we were social. So cast your smiley text faces and FB invitations to one side, and go back to basics. The foundational elements of direct-to-fan marketing all started in the physical world….

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Dominate a Market in 12 Weeks

Everyone says that flyering is dead and a useless waste of money. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t. It’s not that the people still hanging up flyers are mindless drones simply repeating the “promotion” techniques they’ve seen on TV that they think might work, it’s that they DO WORK. Flyering has to be done strategically though. There’s no use hanging up flyers without a plan in place. Over the next 12 weeks, you’ll be playing 4 shows (one show every 3 weeks) and flyering the hell out of every single one of them. By the end of the 12 week challenge, you’ll see an increase in your fan base, a huge increase in awareness, a clearer market segment that you can play to in the future, and hopefully some money rolling in as well.

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The Justin Timberlake School of Landing Pages

Justin Timberlake recently released his first song as a lead artist in almost 7 years. That’s right; 7 years! To turn this release into an event, Justin and his team at Uprising Creative made a gorgeous landing page. I think it’s a stellar example of everything a landing page should be.

Let’s take a look at how the landing page dresses up the release of “Suit & Tie.”

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The Ultimate Musician's Guide to Tumblr

I’ve briefly touched on the importance of Tumblr in other posts, but I’ve yet to dive into what exactly Tumblr can do for your band’s promotion efforts. This ultimate guide will hold your hand through the sign-up process and take you all the way through to a point where you can use Tumblr DAILY to promote your music and gain new fans. Before you know it, your micro-blogging platform will be a major part of your promotion efforts.

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Music Marketing - The Ultimate Guide For Beginners Part 2

Hello again my Think Tank friends, and welcome to part two of my beginners guide to music marketing. If you haven’t already seen part one, I suggest you check it out before going any further (Link opens in a new window). Part one looks at what music marketing is and why it’s needed, the power of leveraging established platforms to get your music out there faster, and types of online and offline platforms you could use to market your music to targeted fans of your genre.

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A Hypnotic Way to Get Fans to Open Your Emails

If you know anything about marketing, you already understand that having a growing email list of fans can be your most powerful promotional asset. But, like any good tool, you have to know how to use it.

One of the great challenges with email is getting people to open and read your messages. It’s not the end of the world if your fans see your emails pop up in their inboxes but don’t have the time to open them. At least they see your name and are reminded of who you are.

But your real goal is to motivate fans to open your emails and further interact with you. So how do you do that?

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