Today´s post will look at the lessons to be learned from the story of Making April, a band who are one of the major DIY promotion success stories. They managed on their own steam i.e. without a marketing department, to sell over 1000 singles a week on iTunes. So how on earth did they do it? Well, put simply: hard work, dedication and a plan. By approaching their task in a serious manner, setting goals and spreading their work load, the members were able to achieve what they thought they never could. To do it they exploited fully one thing the internet is superb for, reaching out to fans, and oh how they reached!
In an interview with Ariel Hyatt of Ariel Publicity, they spilled the beans and filled us in how they managed this impressive feat. You can read the full details on Ariel Publicity, but here are some of the key factors which contributed to their online promotion success.
Planning and setting goals: Every morning three band members would meet up in what they called the “War Room” to plan their daily efforts and set targets for what they wanted to accomplish. This planning and coordination was key to their success.
A solid Social Networking Strategy: Making April used MySpace to engage with and develop potential listeners and fans. The way they did this was to scope out similar sounding bands to who already had large friends list, and then contact their friends and encourage them to check their own matterial and leave a comment on their profile.
Getting personal: To develop the relationship with their myspace contacts, Makin April contacted all those who left a comment on their MySpace profile and thanked them personally. Importantly, they left their instant messenger details in their signature. Their IM contacts grew exponentially. They would sit, literally all day long, chatting away to fans and giving them information about the band. At this point they would send their fans free samples of their music, which they could share with their friends, giving even more people the chance to check out their tunes.
Continuing on our series of promotion articles, we would like to talk about writing a musician/band bio. Having a well written and professional musicians bio is vital. It is often the first contact that media have with your band, and it does a lot to form their impression about you. If you have an unstructured, badly written and unexciting band biography then this will significantly decrease your chances of being considered by blogs/magazines, fans, booking agents, radio, podcasts etc. Having an engaging, inspiring and well written bio which draws upon the unique “selling point” of your band will do the opposite.
The best bio´s are those which engage the reader quickly and make them genuinely curious about you. Don´t bore them down with a long introductory paragraph, keep it short, snappy and to the point. And yes, your band is unique, everyone is unique, but don’t make the mistake of saying that you don’t sound like ANY OTHER band, or that you can´t be defined by ANY genre set. This will leave the reader lost and may annoy rather the provoke curiosity. Better to grit your teeth and put in a few references so that the reader can place your music (more…)
We have received feedback recently from artists who would like us to post more articles about how to promote and market music as an independent/DIY musician. Not ones to ignore such feedback, we will put on our promotion hats and post a new promotion related article every Monday. Here is the first of the series!
The Mailing List
The importance of a well managed mailing list cannot be understated. Having a strong database of email addresses to fans is very important, and if you are not putting some effort into developing your mailing list it is fair to say you really should be.
A mailing list is your number one way to communicate with your fans about new releases, new videos, upcoming concerts and tours and other news. If used correctly, a mailing list can also help you nurture and solidify new relationships with fans. Asking for feedback on new songs, videos and photos, holding competitions, giveaways and generally engaging fans and making them feel more involved will do alot to strengthen your their ties do you.
We are pleased to announce that Meteli.net have now made the relevent modifications to their website and our promotion partnership with them will soon be in full force. A week or two ago we announced that we would be working with Meteli.net (on of the leading Finnish download stores) to support independent artists in Finland and around the world, and this is the first step towards it. Among other promotion opportunities, the Meteli.net website will contain a feed of all the new music making its way onto their store from Record Union, introducing it to the thousands of listeners which frequent their store everyday. You can see how the feed looks here.
This is one of many partnerships we are working on to ensure that listeners discover the fantastic independent and unsigned music being released on Record Union. Stay tuned for more!
Have you been using Deezer´s embeddable widget? If not, you should really check it out. For those who dont know about Deezer, they are one of the largest streaming services in the world, with over 9 million registered users. Record Union are proud to have them among our many distribution partners.
The Deezer widget enables you to embed a music player containing a selection of tracks on your homepage, myspace, blog or other online location where you can add HTML script. People viewing the site can then stream the tracks contained in the player while the artist recieves royalties from Deezer. But, even better, the player links directly to the iTunes store so that people can purchase the album. Pretty neat huh? A great adition to your homepage as it enables listeners to both listen to full song samples, and if they really like it, to quickly head over to iTunes to purchase it.
To embed the widget onto your website, you must first register a free profile with Deezer so that you can take advantage of their playlist function. Once you have created a playlist from their catalogue (say, of a selection of your own tracks, or an album) look for a button near the top right of the screen called “embed”. See below:
You will the be faced with a few options, such as language, autoplay, size etc. Once you have customized the player to how you would like it, its just a matter of copying the HTML code provided and pasting it into your website, blog etc. If you are using a Wordpress blog, the widget can be embedded in the post by pasting it into your post when you are in HTML view, else in your sidebar by adding the “text widget” and pasting the code there.
We dont want you to start thinking we worship Stebe Albini, no no. But browsing a few of the clips of him on You Tube we found this one, and we thought it was well worth posting. In it, he advises artists and bands to handle and manage as much to do with their band as possible, as this leaves you in control to make the decisions which will have a large effect on how you develop your music. The “system”, by which he means the industry built up around providing services to bands (booking agents, tour managers, publicity people) is designed largely to support itself. A provocative clip, to be sure, and a somewhat prophetic one. 5 years ago maintaining control over your music through “DIY” management would be a harder feat that it is today. With all the new services popping daily to help artists and bands with not only managing their band (Bandize), but marketing it (social networking sites, music sharing platforms, reverbnation) and distributing their music, the tools and support for artists who which to “go it alone” have never been more available.
It is easy to forget that even before an artists music has been able to describe itself, people must hear about it. This is Derek Sivers (founder of CD baby) talking about the importance of artists being able to talk about their music. Before your music is able to do the talking, you have to use words in order to invoke curisostiy about your art - and these words better be invocative, titilating and well thought out. Bear this in mind when you are asked: “so, what kind of music do YOU do?”.
Greetings ladies, gentlemen, comrades and fellow humans. Just a quick post today to say that there is now a new “page” on the Record Union blog. This page is entitled “online promotion directory” and features a list of services which we think are useful for aspiring independent and unsigned artists which are looking to use the online environment to their advantage. We hope that this will help artists find out about new services which can help them expand their fan base and generate exposure for their music. It contains links to blogging services, podcasting services, tools to make your life easier, online marketing tools and links to online promotion advice. The directory will be updated whenever we find new service to add, and if you would like to recommend services to add to this directory, or think we have missed something out, please contact the Blog Team at dogblog@recordunion.com. We will also be writing more articles dealing with online promotion advice here on the Dog Blog, which you can find by clicking on the “promotion advice” categories section (on the right of your screen). Happy time!
Music bloggers are the opinion formers of the digital age. They are individuals passionate about music who dedicate some of their time to writing reviews and articles about artists they like in order to reccomend them to their readership. Some, called MP3 boggers, focus on posting music for download and free circulation, while others are more journalistic. They are one of the great promotion channels available to aspiring indie musicians, as they are open to recieving music from anywhere. A good article written by a respected blogger has the potential to generate great exposure for you, and it has been proven that blog articles written about an album release can significantly increase the amount it is downloaded.This post should help you to understand how you can contact bloggers and hopfully to get an article posted about you.
Firstly: more on bloggers
• Bloggers generally group around specific genres and sometimes affiliate themselves with certain scenes. So do your research! Take time to get to know which bloggers are keen on the kind of music you play.
• Many blogs may want to post free samples of your music. So prepare a few promo tracks in MP3 format which you are happy to give away for free.
If the online music industry had a holy book, Andrew Dubber´s free eBook “20 things you must know about music online” would be it – it is the absolute must read for any artist who wants to make headway in the sometimes treacherous and often bedazzling online music business. Actually, it is a holy book; it expounds 20 undying and immutable truths which should guide your online music strategy; though shall not, on pain of eternal damnation, question 20 things! Ok, perhaps this is going a tad to far . The truths are not immutable, because like reality the music industry is everchanging, but it does provide some pretty sound guidelines. Containing sound insights crammed with useful tips and strategies it is a great resource to get potent advice and information about how to best utilize the possibilities now available to aspiring musicians in the advent of the web 2.0 (or 3.0?) era.
