Email Marketing: Do's And Dont's For Musician Bands

Who ever said that music and business do not mix? 

Sure, you might think that being an artist means you are above such mundane things as paying the bills, but if you are really an artist, the only way you can continue to be an artist is to take care of business.

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How To Find People That Will Listen To Your Music

Do you ever get this strange feeling that someone is watching you? Maybe I’m crazy (don’t answer that), but I do. I hope they don’t watch me too closely because that’ll get weird very fast. I’ll have to scare them away by walking out to the van in suspenders and a buckwheat hat “HEY YALL HOW YALL DOIN” *van screeches away* The other day I was thinking about getting some hot wings. And sure enough, Facebook gave me coupons to Wingstop. HOW DID YOU EVEN KNOW ME SO WELL FACEBOOK THAT’S A…

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Conversion in a Box: Why 'Website Visits' Are a Worthless Metric for Musicians

A few weeks ago, our good friend Wes Davenport put us on to a new service called ‘Conversion In a Box’, which is a simple email-for-media form creator aimed at helping musicians to easily create a newsletter sign up form for their website that offers a download in exchange for an email address.

While most email services offer some sort of opt-in form, and many do also include an e-for-m option, it’s not always the easiest thing to set up / customize. For instance, Mail Chimp offers a great newsletter service but won’t allow you to upload a song directly to their server so if you are going to offer a song download in exchange for an email address, you’ll have to find somewhere else to actually host that song.

Conversion In a Box on the other hand will host your files, allow you to set up a highly customizable sign-up form in mere minutes that can be embedded to any website with ease. And for those of you who already have a newsletter set up through another service, the email addresses you collect here can be easily exported in .csv format and imported back into your newsletter service.

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Musicians: How to Get More Likes, Subscribes and Shares Using Newtons First Law

I just read an article on Marketing Prof’s about a technique that will make it easier for us musicians to get new and existing fans to like, share or buy more of our music and merch.

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How to Use Facebook Events to Promote Your Shows/Tour

If you’re like me, you’re bombarded with Facebook event invitations everyday. Most of them are for events out of town and I end up blocking/ignoring the people or pages that continue to send this spam out. However, every once in a while, I get a great reminder of something: an old friend playing a show in town, a birthday party, a wedding, and so on. It’s not all bad. So let’s talk about how you can use Facebook events properly to promote your gigs. Follow these steps:

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How to Ensure that Your Music Never Gets Reviewed

Even high quality music can be overlooked, which, more often than not, has everything to do with first impressions.   From the point that a submission email enters their overflowing inbox,  reviewers want to minimize the roadblocks necessary to developing an objective (and hopefully good) opinion of your music.  Not approaching submissions with this in mind will guarantee their failure to pique reviewers’ interest.

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Music Marketing: It's More Than Just Putting a Bird on it

The comedy series Portlandia kicked off their tv show with a brilliant music video entitled “Dream of the 90′s.” There’s one punchline that has become a running joke in the city: “In Portland, you can put a bird on something and call it art!” Of course, this kind of shortcut logic doesn’t work in most areas, let alone indie-hipster art created in the City of Roses.

In the world of musicians, it’s easy to think that we can just sign up for social media or put a QR code on something and call it online marketing.

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Tips for contacting a music website

As you can imagine, a music website will receive many bands sending in their music for possible inclusion on the website. Sadly, due to time constraints working in music journalism, and generic emails that look like EXACTLY the same email has been sent to countless websites, some bands don’t even get heard!

Therefore, try and follow these simple guidelines when contacting music websites…

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