- ArtistshouseMusic -

Social networking sites that you should start using today!

tessa — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 08:55:45 -0800

Social networking sites that you should start using today!

Most musicians (most people, really) by now are using, or at least are familiar with, social networking/media sites MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and Wikipedia. Same with more specific music-focused sites like Purevolume, Eventful, and Garageband (not to be confused with Apple’s software program). New sites and networks seem to be emerging weekly if not daily, and keeping up with it often takes more time than a "holding down three jobs while playing at night and waiting for your big break musician can afford." So, in case you missed them… here are some great social media sites you should check out and be active on if you’re not yet:

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that does one thing, and does it well: asks you to answer the question “What are you doing right now” in less than 140 characters. People who subscribe to your “tweets” then get those updates delivered to their computer, their IM, or their phone. It’s very addictive once you get into it, and it has several great uses: it lets you keep in touch with your band members – who, usually, you only see at rehearsals and gigs – and be a part of their daily lives; it lets you keep in touch with your fans, and lets them be a part of your life, and your band’s life; it can help you discover great new links and sites (just the other day I got a notification that a music marketing author and speaker from London, Kavit Haria, had found my twitter-profile and signed up to follow me. I, in turn, decided to check out his profile, signed up for his RSS feed, and downloaded a helpful report from his website, http://www.innerrhythm.org/. All because of these little, less-than-140-character messages.

Squidoo

Squidoo is not that new. I am just, well, sort of slow in discovering some of these sites. Because I do not have time to live my life on the Internet. And I am betting you may be in the same boat. So, Squidoo, according to Wikipedia, is a website designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about. A page is called a “lens”, and a lens is both very easy to create, and very easy to make interesting with links to other sites, pictures from your Flickr profile, YouTube videos, book recommendations from Amazon, and a lot more. A really cool attribute of Squidoo is that a straight 5% of all advertising income goes to charity, and the site then also makes it easy for lensmasters’ royalties (lensmaster= a creator of a lens) in turn to also – wholly or partially – be donated to charity. Squidoo, like so many of these sites, is all about linking and tagging, it’s free, and it’s easy to broadcast to the world (or at least to your world) that you have created another lens or ten.

Linkedin is a social networking site focusing on the professional world. Its purpose is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. These connections can then be used to get an introduction to someone you would like to know through a mutual, trusted contact; find jobs and business opportunities, list jobs and search for job candidates, and keep in touch with business contacts. While MySpace and Facebook often focus on pictures, videos, graphics, and of course comments, Linkedin keeps it focus business-like. As a musician, this is a great way to create and maintain a professional profile, and when dealing with other businesses, that can be a distinct advantage.

The beauty about these sites is that they are free, easy to set up, low-maintenance, and easy to promote. As with all sites – and with all of life – you will tend to get out of it what you put into it. In any case, you should have a profile on each, and even if you can only afford to update each site occasionally you may reap significant benefits. If nothing else, you may show up in Google search more frequently. And that, in itself, is already worth the time you will spend creating your profiles.

The Social Web

tessa — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:01:41 -0800

The Social WebWeb 2.0, MySpace, blogging, podcasting…terms that were nowhere near our vocabularies around, say, 2003. To say that a lot has changed in the world of technology is an understatement. Our online life since the start of the new millennium has been a whirlwind, and being an independent musician has a vastly different “face” now than half a decade ago. Any article on web 2.0 and social networking is bound to be out of date as soon as you hit “publish”, so this is not a complete overview – it’s not even an overview, instead it’s a fairly random list of observations and thoughts.

First of all – why be involved in these sites? For some it will actually be fun and enjoyment, whereas for others it just means one more thing to eat up your time – and a new learning curve. Whichever category you fall into, here’s why you should get involved if you aren’t yet, and up your involvement if you are:

It lets you keep in touch with your fans on a much more intense level.
Expand your fanbase – people discover new favorites on the internet every day. For some, that will be you and your music! The beauty is that you can find new fans (or rather, they can find you) that live thousands of miles away, and would otherwise never be aware of your existence.
Create community: you allow people to be a part of your life. And from the comfort of your own home/studio/tourbus/neighborhood Starbucks you can be a part of theirs. It makes people feel a part of what you are doing, and that means they will be emotionally invested.
A great way to share/test new music.
You are more than a musician – and these sites allow you to share the other parts of your life (the ones you want to share) with your fans and potential fans. And that, again, is a part of building community, keeping in touch, and expanding your fanbase.

Categories

One thing that has helped me greatly, as an independent musician, is thinking of the different online social media outlets in categories. It’s the problem of the proverbial forest – can’t see it because of all the trees. Anything that brings a little structure in the maze helps. So here we go:

1. Social networking

These sites can be great advertising for your band and your music endeavors, but probably their most effective use is to keep in touch with and develop your fanbase. MySpace and Facebook are the two most well-known ones: MySpace is up to more than 221 million profiles, and Facebook last year opened up to the non-student crowd, and recently started a “Facebook Music” part of the community. But there are lots of others, many of them focused on music: PureVolume, Garageband, iSound, ReverbNation. A site like ReverbNation, for example, will not only let you build a profile for free, but also provides you with certain tools – a calendar to post on Facebook, banners for any of your sites, touring widgets, and FanReach – a simple but helpful online street team building tool. With all the different networking sites, which one(s) do you choose? In my, non-scientific, opinion: all of them. Or at least as many as you can find time to create a profile for. Keeping up with them takes time, and doing it well can take a lot of time, so at that point you may want to choose a few and really invest in the community: not just respond to friend requests and keep your calendars up-to-date, but also leave comments on others’ profiles, write blog entries, post pictures, and answer questions. In these cases, like with most anything else in life, you get out of it what you invest.

2. Social bookmarking

Perhaps a little less-known term than social networking, social bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages with the help of metadata. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. (definition: Wikipedia) One of the most unique characteristics: you organize your bookmarks through a system of informal tags. The most well-known examples: Digg.com, and Del.icio.us. Not only are these sites a great way to find information and keep track of it, by sharing your links and bookmarks and by tagging them appropriately and creatively you can make it easier for people to find your band and your music.

3. Blogging and podcasting

Publishing an online journal, and producing your own online radio show – those are the basics behind blogging and podcasting. Keep a tour diary. Write a history of your original songs. Broadcast your own radio show – just make sure you stay on the legal side of copyright law. Good and simple examples of blogging software: Wordpress and Blogger. A newer form of blogging is Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates up to 140 characters long to the Twitter website and then posts them. People who subscribe to your “tweets” then get those updates delivered to their computer, their IM, or their phone. Limited? On purpose. But suddenly your fans can be much more involved in what you do and what your days look like – and even if they don’t attend a show, you keep your shows and music in the forefront of, well at least their computers and phones!

4. Video/photo sharing

Remember 35 mm cameras? Me either. Digital cameras have become the standard, and even most cell phones can take basic video these days. Digital pictures are not only easy to take, they are also easy to share, and through tagging, they are easy to catalogue and draw attention to. Share pictures of shows with fans, with band members. Store your pictures on a site like Flickr.com or Slide.com, create slideshows for your MySpace or Facebook, and those are just a few options. Want to be more adventurous? Take a picture of your audience everytime you play, post it on your site the following day, and the first person that can identify themselves in the picture and lets you know gets a free download. Or something like that.And then there is YouTube - it’s hard to believe YouTube only started in February of 2005. A quick review: YouTube lets you upload, view, and share video clips. So, footage of your latest show (original material only, please!) is suddenly easy to share with not just your fanbase, but with rest of the world as well. Record a tutorial on your latest guitar riff – post it on YouTube, and become a resource. Well, maybe it’s not quite that simple, but you get the idea.

5. Content sharing

The key to web 2.0 is that it is interactive – websites are no longer static sources of information, but readers now become contributors. Everyone can contribute to Wikipedia, the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet, with over 7 million articles in more than 200 languages. There is not one editor that keeps track of accuracy, but all contributors together carry the responsibility. Not only is it easy for independent bands to sell their CDs on Amazon.com, fans can write reviews for that same CD on Amazon or other sites. Which is a great way to get your fans involved: ask them to write a review for one of your CDs, and post it on Amazon, or iTunes, or both.

There are limits to your time when you are an independent musician – and without a large team of volunteers it’s virtually impossible to take full advantage of all these sites. The key is: use them as much as you can, learn about them, become a part of the community, and keep your eyes and ears open - in six months there will be new sites, new concepts, new systems. It’s all part of building community, and that is really one of the goals we, as musicians, have. The tools are just ever-changing, and they are becoming more accessible every day.

An Artist’s Guide to Artists House Music

tessa — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:32:11 -0700

An Artist’s Guide to Artists House Music

Hey I'm Jeanine, and I am the lead singer for a Richmond, VA based band that tours the Mid-Atlantic region and is starting to expand to the rest of the East Coast – and hopefully the rest of the country! As an independent musician I am learning to pretty much be a jack of all trades – writing, recording, producing, managing, marketing, booking, designing, publishing, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. That also means I am continually looking for inclusive resources, and when I came upon AH several things struck me: how current the site is, the extent of the content, and the quality of the content and the contributors.

Current

AH keeps up with the latest developments in the music industry. George Howard just wrote an excellent article about the revolutionary Apple/Starbucks announcement – with the proverbial ink barely being dry on the agreement. Mike King and George Howard just posted an excellent article on the new Radiohead album. This is stuff that is happening now, and shaping the music industry now – and AH gives me a way to not just keep up with it, but also to understand its significance.

Extensive

There are many helpful websites for independent musicians, but one of the struggles I, and I am sure many others have, is limited time to actually find and evaluate these sites – let alone use them. At AH, I can get a birds-eye view of lots of significant topics – but I can also go deeper if desired, and if I need a more thorough understanding of a certain subject. Additionally, a lot of music resource sites focus on one area – music business, songwriting, music education – AH is not only deep, but also broad – whether you are a performer, a manager, a teacher, a booking agent (or a little of all of the above), you will find helpful and thorough information on the site.

Expertise

It never ceases to amaze me to see the names and credentials of AH contributors. Artists, professors, music business specialist, label executives – all experts in their field (in fact, I feel oddly out of place writing here!). A few examples: former RCA CEO Bob Jamieson, Loyola University and Berklee College of Music Professor George Howard, founder of Island Records Chris Blackwell, founder of Ticketmaster.com Fred Rosen. And the list goes on.

There are three main ways AH is structured as far as the format of information offered goes:

Articles

In-depth and informative articles on topics like:

• Promoting your music on MySpace

• The importance of touring

• Getting people to your gig

• Starting a record label

• The anti-genre of psychographics

• Developing a small rock band/jazz combo program

• Tips for concise writing

• How to get your CD on – and back off! – the shelves

Essential Questions

Quick reference articles on topics like:

• What is Soundscan?

• How to create a press kit

• How do I record someone else’s song?

• What is Creative Commons?

• How do I get someone to review my record?

• Where can I find free music lessons online?

You can also send questions to the staff writers of AH, and if the question has a broad enough range they will answer and post it.

Videos

The shorter videos tend to be between 2 and 6 minutes, and I usually run them while I am doing mindless things around the office. It’s sort of like a podcast, but you also get to see the person talking, which can be cool. A random selection of topics:

• Excellent video on copyright and copyright laws

• Building your online fanbase

• Artists management ethics

• How to market a new artist

• How to succeed as a career musician

There are longer videos as well, complete classes that run between 30 minutes and close to an hour and cover topics like sound design, in-depth instrument lessons, and an extensive interview with Todd Brabec of ASCAP.

Editor’s Guides

There are longer pieces that help to connect the dots using all of the above resources. How to create a marketing plan, How to find a good lawyer, An Editor’s Guide to Management, and more. These pieces are like having your own personal mentor walk you through some of the important topics that all musician’s and industry folks are dealing with everyday.

Miscellaneous Cool Things:

• Really good links. From Tunecore to The Future of Music Coalition, from Newbury Comics to the Music Manager’s Forum – AH is an amazing source of links that you should check out.

• An extensive tag-section with keywords site pages, and contributor pictures. All searchable and linked.

I hope that has been helpful in providing a guide to the rich resources on AH.

All the best to you in your musical journey!

Jeanine