Musicians: Get Your Facebook Page Done Right

Today artists, bands, labels, even promoters do their marketing on Facebook. Technology has become “social” and social media can create unforeseen opportunities as a communication, distribution and sales channel. It is not easy to figure out how all this works despite there being millions of social media “consultants” and wanna-be gurus. A lot of knowledge is needed, especially in technology, design (not decoration), psychology and social science. If this expertise is lacking, misunderstandings can happen easily and the potential is wasted.

Tip: in a hurry? Skip to “Let’s get to work”

Facebook and Pages

Facebook is the dominant social network in today’s world; the site allows musicians to fully harness the power of the social graph. What? Well, I mean Facebook friends. Why? Because music is a very social vertical. You would rarely go to a concert alone. If you like a song, it is very likely you will share this experience.

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The Virtual Tour, Parts II and III (OR: Keep Your Studio Slippers On!)

To successfully promote your music you need to be able to influence potential listeners from all across the web. A new and potentially effective method of increasing the recognition of your music, influencing new listeners and spreading the awareness of you, as a band or musician, is to set up a virtual tour.

In this article we look at why you should be setting up a virtual music tour, how to find blogs to host your tour and how to get the most out of the experience. In the final paragraph I share a trick that has proved to be a very powerful way of encouraging listeners to interact and leave blog comments.

What Is A Virtual Tour?

The basic structure of a virtual tour is a collection of different types of web/blog posts, hosted on a number of different sites/blogs, all promoting your band and/or music. A simple example: the tour might be six different blogs to each post about your band/music, each posting on six consecutive days. Another example might be four different blogs, one standard website, and an announced and date specified new video post on your youtube channel, over a one week period.

The idea behind a virtual tour is that the musician/band has a chance to influenc

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The Breakdown on iTunes Ping: What it means for Artists and How it compares to Cloud-Based Services

In Apple’s Keynote last week, they launched a much needed upgrade to iTunes that includes social integration.

Much like current sites Rdio and Last.fm, iTunes is finally getting a social overhaul that will transform iTunes into a music discovery social network called Ping. You can now “follow” your friends to see what they are listening to and share recommendations - all without leaving iTunes.

Initial reports indicate that Ping only displays data for albums purchased, NOT listening data. If true, this is a big disappointment from Apple’s latest social endeavor. If Ping only displays what albums your friends purchase off the iTunes store, they are missing out on a huge a

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To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Conversations about whether musicians should use social networks tend to be completely polarised, and usually take no account of the fact that there are about as many different motivations for writing music as there are people writing it.

In this recent article, we see Universal Music suggesting that they are disinclined to work with acts who aren’t knee-deep in social media tech…

“There may be some indie hipper-than-thou artists who want to let the music speak for itself. They are probably not for us. We believe an artist has a responsibility to communicate with their audience…We embrace the world of technology and the vast improvements in communication”.

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NuMuBu Innovation Connects the Music Industry

Tuneography is a social vehicle built in the NuMuBu platform to interlink the entire music industry through crediting all the creators of every song. An artist uploads a song and types the name of a person involved in that song, for instance, the producer. If that person is on the NuMuBu network, Tuneography will immediately find that person and allow the artist to select the producer for song credit. If he/she is not yet on the network, the Tuneography system allows the artist to type the producer’s email address and send an invite to set up a NuMuBu profile , at which point, the song credit selected will be automatically attached. The same process occurs for recording studios, record labels, and anyone else, even sponsors

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Simple website builder for artists launches while declaring end of recession

Canadian startup Sayvee has just launched a simple and easy way for musicians to create a professional website without the need to be a geek. Their launch is combined with an announcement declaring the official end of the recession and a creative Facebook contest.

Not often do you find a technology company with a lot of personality. Sayvee is changing that by turning the heads of their biggest competitors with their tongue-in-cheek promo videos and their latest contest on Facebook where they declared July 1, 2010 as the official last day of the recession.

“We decided that it was time for the recession to be over,” commented Steve Devries, co-founder and photographer. “We’ve been building Sayvee for the past 2 years and figured that since people are doing things like selling stars and space on the moon that we could claim a date for the end of the recession.”

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10 Essential Tips For Musicians To Improve Their Facebook Page

Facebook Pages are the most effective way for musicians to get their name out there. While each application has its own stand out features there can be some overlap between what each application offers. Choose the apps you use wisely, you don’t want to hit your fans with information overload and leave them overwhelmed and unlikely to return to your page. Whether you use one application - or a combination of a few of them - make sure your fan page stays well-organized and users can easily find what they’re looking for without searching through a bunch of clutter. After all, wasn’t that was wrong with a majority of MySpace pages?

1. Promote Outside Content

Your fan page is a great place to aggregate all the content you’ve created on the various social networks you belong to. Your fan page can be the ultimate destination for your fans to find your tweets, blog posts, and even other people who have acknowledged your work. 

Here are a few ways you can share your content with your fan base:

Sync your Twitter account with your Facebook page. This will save you the hassle of having to update Facebook AND Twitter. There are a few different options out there that will automatically update your Facebook page with your Tweets but one of the most popular is the official Twitter application. If you would like control over which Tweets are posted to Facebook try using Selective Twitter which will only upload Tweets to Facebook that end with “#fb”.

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'BandPage' On Facebook; Is This What Will Replace MySpace?!

MySpace, once the best place for anything music related. If you wanted to hear audio from your favourite musician or discover up and coming talent, MySpace was the place to go.

These days however, MySpace is full of musicians promoting to each other. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it led more sales, but the truth is most of the people on MySpace are only in it for themselves. The ‘real people’, the potential fans, have more or less all left, choosing to instead use the multimillion pound social networking website Facebook.

Those forward thinking musicians instantly jumped onto the Facebook train, hoping to pick up fans with their newly set up ‘Facebook fan page’. But while Facebook has allowed musicians to create their own fan pages from near the beginning, it’s never been a complete music solution… That is until now!

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"When Will We See You On MTV?"...Thoughts of an Independent Musician

“So when will we see you on MTV?” “When will we be hearing your stuff on the (mainstream) radio?”  “You should be famous by now.”  “When you’re famous we can say we knew you when.”

These are all questions and statments that I’m certain many relatively well-known touring independent musicians and bands (including myself) hear on at least a fairly regular basis.  I don’t know about you, but I usually feel slightly taken aback when I hear statements such as this even though I know the person or persons making the statement/s probably mean well.  I’ve sat down to think about why these feelings arise when I hear such statements.  When I think about it though, certain key words from such statements that are frequnently uttered when they are made: MTV, radio, and (most prominently) FAMOUS.  That then raises the question; What exactly is fame nowadays? 

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Collaborative Music Licensing for Co-Writers

Online music collaboration and licensing - made easy

Notethrower.com Overview Tutorial from NoteThrower.

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Rock The Biz - watch all about: "Tips&Tricks", "Future Of Music", "Income" and more

Finally all our chapters of Rock The Biz - the documentary about the new musicbusiness in Europe - are online. Feel free to watch here 4 further chapters for free:

Tips & Tricks:

Professional musicians, labels and player in the musicbusiness give hints, on what to focus, go’s and no go’s and many more

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Put a Ring on her Finger- The Social Web & Music Marketing are Married

The world is moving at a faster pace than ever, and technology is the cattle driver of the modern world taking us all to magnificent new lands. Innovation is changing the way we live our lives on what seems like a daily basis. The landscape for which/where/how we do business is in constant motion. The challenge is no longer ‘how do we get there’ its ‘teach me how to drive.’ I am a heavy enthusiast for the marriage between tech and business.

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Rock The Biz -The Movie: Chapter 3 "Selfrelease"

In the chapter “selfrelease” european bands, labels and player in the music biz talk about the most important tools, go’s and no go’s if you want to release your music on your own.

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Is the RIAA to blame for reinforcing music piracy?

I want to be completely upfront before you continue reading. This is my first post, and i do want to share a new technology that we launched today of which i am a co-founder. I do promise one thing, if you continue reading you will form your own opinion (whether you agree with me or disagree). However, i believe i have a radical alternative to piracy which we have been developing for the last 2 years. I believe being transparent comes first & foremost, that’s why right now, or forever hold your peace, i offer anyone not interested in reading about our new website, Webceleb.com- the opportunity to stop reading. If you’ve decided to continue reading, great. Let’s begin…  I want to make it very clear, this blog post does not touch on everything, otherwise it would be a thesis.  This is a quick deconstruction and reconstruction of how the RIAA brought down the self-inflicting hammer upon itself!

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