It was a shiny day in London, and I was having a coffee with a fellow musician. I realized that the biggest part of the conversation was his ranting about the ‘bad situation in independent local music scene’.
“There’s so much knowledge out there, I don’t disagree with you, but it’s scattered all around the web. Impossible to find the really credible resources!”
And then it hit me:
“Why don’t we stop whining and do something creative instead?”
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This is a guest post by Tom Siddle of the Brighton Institute of Modern Music.
Your band’s presence and exposure on Facebook has just became all the more vital. Facebook Graph Search is on its way, and could possibly change the way potential fans hear and find your music.
There are many ways to market your band with little or no budget, and social media is an excellent place to start your online marketing strategy.
So far potential fans have been able to find your page by studying their friend’s list of recommended pages, or when enough of their friends comment on your bands posts. Facebook Graph Search however will be able to expose your band’s page to new fans in a way that Google search results have never been able to.
Read on, as we talk more about this new Facebook feature below.
This guide on forming a band was contributed by Ruth of Celtic Clan. If you have useful and practical information regarding the music industry, you can contribute a guide too.
This article is part two of the How To Form A Band series. If you haven’t seen the first part already, you can see it on Music Industry How To:
How To Form A Band – The Ultimate Guide Part 1
This is a three part series looking how to set up and run a professional or semi professional band. If your aim is to form a band which can make money from gigging (Or you already have a band but want them to do more with themselves), make sure you read these guides in full.
Start off by reading the above mentioned guide, and once you’ve done, get started on this one.
Now that you’ve caught up with part one, let’s continue on from where we left off.
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Imagine releasing your song to an audience of several-hundred million, and minutes after you post it’s gone viral. New fans from across the globe are sharing your song, introducing your creation to more and more people. You could become a star without leaving the comfort of your home studio. Understanding product promotion in the digital age is a great way to increase your exposure to the world.
That’s the potential power of YouTube. According to YouTube, more than 800 million users visit the video-sharing site each month, and more than four billion videos are viewed daily. Even more amazing? Seven hundred YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute, a percentage of those being videos by musicians.
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This is a contributed guide by Nils at Bandologie. “It’s the story of a successful promotional concert me and my band did. The scene? 9:15am in a school break hall in front of shocked pupils.” If you have anything helpful to contribute to one of our sites, contact us here.
Here you can read about one of the most powerful independent music promotion events that I participated in.
At the age of 24, I became a product manager at the major record label BMG. Before that though, I used to play the drums in a heavy metal band for several years.
Like many musicians, we often tried to get local venues to allow us to gig. This though, wasn’t always easy. Most musicians almost beg club owners and bookers to play another gig, but there is a better way: While begging can work from time to time, the only solution to carry on getting gigs in the long run is to get a bigger audience to your concerts. Not easy I know, but true. As they say, “Don’t shoot the messenger”.
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This is a guest post by Christine Infanger from Thirty Roses. Want to write for this site? Find out more here.
No matter your taste, everyone likes music. Perhaps some are more passionate about it than others, but everyone has a favorite song; a song which they relate to more than any other.
Music is a powerful, almost mythical force. And, while you often read and hear about the amazing talent of the men and women responsible for the sounds that mean so much to us all, we seldom hear about the people who make it possible for us to hear them; their managers.
It may sound like more than a slight exaggeration to say that without managers, we would never hear music. But if you know anything at all about how the music industry works, you know this isn’t much of a misstatement.
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Hi guys, I’ve got something very special for you today! This is a fantastic guest post by Christine Infanger, one of the most helpful and knowledgeable members in our members only forums. She has left more then a golden nugget or two for forum members, so I had to approach her for some information she could share here for free. If you read and enjoy this article (Which you should), please follow her on Twitter as well as sharing this article on your favourite sites (Facebook, Twitter etc). Ok, so without wasting any more time, here’s Christine:
In an era where social media is a finger-click away and virtually everyone has a smart phone of one kind or another, it’s hard to make your band stand out in a sea of artists fighting for a chance to be heard.
A few years ago I was offered the opportunity to head up the marketing and promotion for an agency based in New York City. They needed a competent go-getter (me) to handle not only the Chicago market, but the Midwestern United States as a whole. Additionally, I was in charge of establishing and maintaining Street Teams for a number of the artists on their roster – both well known and unknown – for the entire US.
This was a prospect which had me giddy with anticipation until the catch came: I was to do all of this with virtually no budget (Read: Money).
Here are a few things I learned. Hopefully, enumerating on my experiences will prove helpful for a few.
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For a while now, I’ve been using Twitter to drive new fans to IMA and a few other websites I own, both music and non music related. If you’re reading this now, there’s a good chance you’ve found a link somewhere on Twitter or Facebook, and have followed it to this page. If you have, congratulations, you’re about to learn the secret to dominating Twitter!!
If you want to skip the background info and start dominating Twitter now, click the below link for your 100% free copy of our Twitter Domination ebook. Once you have shared a Tweet or Facebook message, you will be given the link to download the ebook right away. This book works whether you’re in the music industry or not:
No Longer Available.
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Giving out you music for free is a waste of time.
Yes I know, this goes against everything you’ve been taught so far. We all know how hard it is to sell your music to new fans, so the obvious step seems to be giving out loads of freebies until people are ready to buy your music right? Ummm, wrong!
The thing is, giving your music out for free can actually be doing more harm then good. By doing this, musicians are reinforcing the view that music should be free for listeners. In actual fact, musicians have as much right to make money by benefiting other people’s lives as anyone else does. Would someone makes board games just to give them out for free? Would a cleaner clean a hotel if they weren’t getting paid? Would a bus driver allow free passengers just because they enjoy driving? No, no, and NO!
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Welcome to email marketing for musicians. Building a mailing list is one of the most important things you can do to boost your music career. By getting people on your mailing list, you can quickly and easily communicate with your fans, and keep them informed about your going ons. Fans are what push you forward in terms of how well known you are and how much money your music career brings in. Because of this, communicating with them as effectively as possible should be a top priority of yours.
In this article we look at the importance of collecting email addresses for your mailing list, and how you can use this process to benefit your music career. We also point you to a good guide at the end, which instructs you on how to set up a mailing list, and how to make sure your list is profitable.
So what are the benefits on setting up a music mailing list? Read on to find out.
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