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August 13, 2012 As you know (hopefully), social media websites provide you with a platform to grow your fanbase, and expand your reach to people that you never could have connected with before.
What you need to understand is how to utilise your social media fanbase in order to market your music, promote gigs, and hopefully become commercially successful (If that’s what you’re going for of course). First, a brief introduction…
January 20, 2012 Hi guys, just a short post for you today. I wanted to share with you a free guide I’ve just written on promoting your music with Twitter. In fact it’s not just about promoting your music with Twitter, it’s about how to take your Twitter promotion to a whole new level, and get in front of a load of fans of your genre pretty much on tap!
You can skip to the bottom of this post if want to download this free ebook now (Click the blue button) and don’t want to read the background info.
From what I’ve seen, Twitter is one of the best forms of online promotion you can do as a musician. It’s easy for new musicians to get in front of potential fans relatively fast (Faster and easier then say building up your Facebook fan page), but it also does a great job of driving fans to any new material you may put out there.
December 26, 2011 Musicians and independent record labels: As a music reviewer and internet radio station operator, I have a heartfelt plea. Please, please stop sending links in your press kits to your Myspace page. As a reviewer, I often receive dozens of submissions every day. That means I have a lot of artists to choose from, since I only publish a few reviews every week. With all that selection, do you really think I am going to try to listen to your music on a website where I am constantly bombarded with music players that don’t play, assaulted with pop up ads, and tortured with pages that take forever to load? Quite honestly, I am going to simply skip over the press kit with the Myspace link, and review somebody that provides links to one of the numerous quality websites designed especially for musicians, such as ReverbNation, Bandcamp, or Soundcloud. Myspace seems to be run by 5 year olds, and greedy, incompetent five year olds at that. To any musician that wants to convey a sense of professionalism, I would recommend that the only thing one should post on their Myspace page is a link to an actual functioning website where fans and reviewers can have an enjoyable and simple listening experience.
Matt Hundley is a musician and creative director of www.IndieReviewer.com
award show, social media for musicians | tagged Reviews, myspace, social networking October 6, 2011 So you’ve got a great Google Plus profile set up, you have videos and links to your music posted, and you’re connecting with as many music industry professionals as possible. (If you don’t have a profile, you should). The next logical step is start converting other Google Plus users into rabid online fans of your music. There are two ways to go about this.
December 23, 2010 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.
December 14, 2010 I’m going to keep this one short and straight to the point. The music industry is a hard one to make money from, we all know that. When it’s all said and done however, if you’re talented, have been making music for a while and don’t make any money from it, you’re doing the wrong things!
For a lot of people, their idea of promotion is adding people on Facebook and Reverb Nation and messaging them about their music. In all honesty, this is doing next to nothing for your music career. How much money do you ever make from doing this? My guess is none, at most you’ll get a small ego boost when the odd person replies saying your music’s good.
The thing is, this type of marketing is very short term and a big waste of your time. While social media should be a part of your strategy, looking for fans one by one isn’t the best use of your time. If you stop and analyse your results in terms of sales from this promotion, I’m sure you’ll come to the same conclusion.
October 5, 2010 Originally I was going to classify this post in the Dear Christian Music Industry section but the more I thought about it, I realized, I think it goes way beyond that. While I primarily work in the ‘Christian Music Industry’, I think when it comes to “Social Networking” there is so much going on that to pin-point it to one section of one industry doesn’t seem fair.
The bigger SkörInc gets and the more client promotion things we are behind, the more I get asked about different aspects of the web. I was asked the other day, when it comes to Social Networking, how do I know when something will work. How do I know that this campaign will be more effective than that campaign? How do I know where to lay my ‘chips’ that day? I thought it was a pretty interesting question considering things are so new and it seems like we are in a stage of the game where there’s a crazy amount of options for promoting things.
If I’m honest, I don’t.
August 30, 2010 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”.
social media for musicians | tagged social media, social networking, tweet, twitter August 2, 2010 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
July 26, 2010 Mailing lists, one of the most under used tools of an independent musician. But why is this when major labels have been using it to good effect for so many years? It seems no one’s let the “little guy” know of the power of mailing lists, instead allowing them to carry on thinking social networking is the only way to effectively communicate with your fans online. However, this simply isn’t the case.
If you’re not sure why mailing lists are effective, here’s a quick summery:
June 13, 2010 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!
November 30, 2009 Musicians and bands should take notice of Stephen Fry’s comments on BBC’s Analysis programme “Stephen Fry: The Internet and Me”. Fry points out that Twitter and its ilk have made it easy for celebs to bypass the press offices and gossip columnists, and tell the world what they’re doing as soon as it happens. Why though, are there not many bands and musicians on Twitter? Why aren’t there many bands from Manchester (UK) not tweeting that they’re doing a gig on Friday night? No DJs either, plugging their new set?
November 30, 2009 Recently Hypebot readers, myself included were able to put questions to indie artist Amanda Palmer about here approach to DIY promotions. The interview took place on November 19th at The State Theatre in Falls Church VA. Jim McDermott (a former major label digital and artist development guy) hosted this special event.