JP Music Festival from Jamaica Plains (near Boston) has shared with the music community their guide to starting a local music festival. The group focuses on how the economy had affected live music and what to do about it.
Apr 252012
Mar 222012
Something that had limited capabilities within the old Facebook Pages was custom design in a color sense. With the increased photo sizes, the cover, and other details, users can now make colors a more prominent part of their Facebook marketing efforts.
Utilize every portion of the Timeline that can include photos. The cover, profile picture, and highlighted posts at the top of your page can provide a burst of color, presumably in your brand’s color palette.
Mar 022012
As of Wednesday, all brands have the opportunity to make their Facebook Page run Timeline. Though it’s not mandatory yet, it well be at the end of the month, so you should at least familiarize yourself with it now. For those of you excited to take full advantage of all Timeline has to offer your band, I have a few suggestions.
- Familiarize yourself with the layout, and preview everything before you hit that Publish button.
- If you have the ability, create a photo specific to your cover. Include any new promotions, albums, singles or show dates. Don’t make it too text-heavy, though; one announcement is sufficient.
- Do NOT tell your fans to Like your Page in the Cover. This is against Facebook’s rules.
- Make your info a little longer, because its new location gives you more space at the top of the Page.
- Fill out key dates and events in your band’s history. Timeline gives you the opportunity to highlight big shows, events, album releases, etc.
- Keep in mind that dynamic and engaging content is more important than ever, because you no longer have a landing tab to work with.
- Again, proof everything before you publish! You don’t want something reaching your fans before you are ready?
Have any of you already activated Timeline? Share your links and tips in the comments section. If you have any questions, leave them there, too!
Mar 012012
Since the explosion of Twitter, more and more musicians are taking advantage of all it has to offer. Whether you are trading a tweet for a track or just connecting with fans, it’s a huge platform on which to market your music. TwitMusic gives you even more to work with.
Aug 032011
When attending a concert, many fans will check in using Foursquare, but instead of checking into the band that they are seeing, they are checking into the venue. This is a great resource for the venue, but how can a band take advantage of Foursquare? Pretty easily, now that the service is allowing anyone to create their own Page.
What do you need to begin?
- 1. A personal Foursquare account.
2. A Twitter account for your band (which you already have, hopefully).
As always, make sure that your twitter name is recognizable to your fans, because it will also become your Foursquare URL.
To begin the setup, head over here in a new tab or window.
First, you will be greeted with this:
Thanks to Foursquare.com for these images!
After creating your Page, you will be directed to your Page settings–do not put this off for later; you need to complete it right away so that you can be entered into the Page Gallery.
Be sure to complete the most important parts of the profile, including a photo and banner.
Here, you can link to your Facebook account, but I would wait until you get comfortable with the updates before doing that if you can.
If you’re not sure what kind of tips you should leave, I would recommend submitting tips for the next five venues you’re going to play (or have played in the past). Not only does this help the venue, but it will allow fans of the venue to see your name.
As long as you’ve completed each of these steps, you’re free to click the Feature Me! button and be placed into the gallery!
What other ways have you been using Foursquare as a musician?
Aug 012011
Earlier today, I tweeted a contest idea for musicians using Google+: Create Hangouts and use one as a prize. As Hangouts include up to ten people, this could be a free, fairly exclusive prize that wouldn’t take much on your part, but would mean a lot to fans.
Google+ is now offering the chance for Hangouts to utilize YouTube Live streaming. This opens even more options for you to be creative. Watch a live-streamed concert with your fans. Watch a sporting event. Watch anything!
Thanks to the folks over at Mashable for giving us step-by-step instructions of how to manually include the live stream. They believe, like we do, that Google will certainly make it easier in the near future. For now, the steps are fairly easy to follow:
- 1. Start the Hangout, and invite your chosen contacts to join you.
2. In a new window/tab, go to YouTube.com/Live and select the stream you want to use.
3. Grab the YouTube video ID from the URL.
4. Go back to your Hangout, and enter the ID in the video tab.
5. Click play, and you’re all set!
Do you have any other ideas for how to use Hangouts?
Aug 012011
As an artist or a fan, the influence Spotify has created quickly within the U.S. is obvious. Additionally, we have seen in the past that it is extremely popular in Europe, even having people say that it has conquored music piracy all together in some places. Forward thinking musicians then go on to the next question: How can I get my music on Spotify? Luckily, artists do not need to be signed to a label to be able to do this. It’s actually a fairly simple process, but you don’t go through Spotify directly.
The people you need to go through are the artist aggregators who work directly with Spotify to help artists license their music. Currently, the music streaming service works with the following companies:
-
■CDBaby
■Record Union
■Ditto Music
■AWAL
■The state51 Conspiracy
■Emubands
■Zimbalam
■Tunecore
■La Cúpula
As you can see, there are a variety of options within this list. As an artist, you should look carefully at the benefits of each aggregator and see which suits your needs, and budget, the best. Also, it is important to be sure what you, as a customer, need to do to make sure your music gets on the streaming service.
Spotify also tells artists to be patient, as it can take four to six weeks before you see your music there.
Jun 062011
Mike Venti over at We All Make Music gave some great suggestions in this article. He has 7 suggestions as to how musicians can sell more merch:
1. Have a good location for your merch table: if no one can see you, no one will buy anything.
2. Be able to process credit cards. I’m going to have some suggestions for that up in an article soon, going over your different, low-cost options.
3. Bundle your shirts, CDs, etc. Everybody loves a deal.
4. Display your prices prominently.
5. What do people love more than a deal? Free stuff. Give away smaller items or music with every purchase or for signing up for your mailing list.
6. Always be at your table–no one can buy anything if you’re not there.
7. Have stuff that people actually want to buy. Put effort into getting a great design, because it’s important for you to sell it.
Do you have any other suggestions?
May 312011
Mashable gave us some ideas of how to creatively reward your Facebook (or other) fans. You want to show them that you care! Here are the four basic concepts, but head over to the article to check out their examples.
1. Offer Exclusive Discounts, Coupons and Content
2. Help Fans Give Back
3. Show You’re Listening
4. Recognize Individual Fans
What else do you do to keep your fans engaged by rewarding them?
May 232011
There are more and more services coming out that allow us to shorten links (especially helpful within Twitter and our limit on characters). Beyond the Twitter use, it’s also good to shorten links for other reasons. It’s aesthetically more pleasing to see a very short link than to see a link that could take up three lines. There’s no need for that. There are plenty of sites where you can go to shorten your links, and many social media tools you already use might have them built right in–like WordPress, Twitter, and Hootsuite. While you could just use these built-in options, I don’t recommend it. (Don’t get me wrong–I love all three of those sites and am not knocking them in any way; there is just a better option for being able to track and analyze your links.)
This is where Bit.ly comes in. Bit.ly is an extremely user-friendly site where you can not only shorten your links, but do many other things right from your homepage. You don’t even need to click anything for your link to be shortened–as soon as you paste it in the box, Bit.ly does it for you!
Something that can be a problem when running a site is figuring out the best content to be sharing. You can track exactly which of your links are getting clicked using Bit.ly. By paying attention to what headlines and keywords you are using along with these links, you can further see what your fans like to click on. Through the (completely free) Bit.ly service, you can shorten, share, track and manage all of your links. In addition, they have great resources, which I’ve shared below. After you check them out, head to the Bit.ly site, where you can begin managing your links–and your content–even better than before!
Do you use Bit.ly now? How do you use it along with other tools to make the most of your link sharing?
