If you talk about the music business, you have no doubt gotten an ear full about people’s feelings about crowdfunding and Kickstarter. A while back we posted a link to a discussion on PunkNews where their readers discussed their feelings on the tool and now AbsolutePunk has gone and one the same. This thread and poll is a great insight to how your fans feel when presented with the option of funding your music and a must read for anyone thinking about going down that road.
One of the things musicians can rejoice about is that we are past the “MySpace Days” where your choices were between the world’s worst sounding player and or a couple of players you had to hack into the MySpace player. Now you can can choose from a wide variety of great players all with their own awesome features. Some music fans I talk to seem to prefer one player over the other, so why not give them options? While you can only choose one page as a landing page (and hopefully you did this to your favorite music player) you can always give your fans an option to do another one. This means you can have a RootMusic or MyBand as a default player that has tons of info but also have Bandcamp so that your fans can know they can go there to stream your latest record and/or buy it.
In case you haven’t heard, Pintrest is being touted as the fastest growing website EVER. This means you should probably be thinking about how to market your music there. Thankfully, they already have some great tools for you to do so! If you head to this page you can get share buttons and badges for their service and start introducing your music to this fast growing, hip community.
Many of our users really love One Sheet as a platform for a simple website for their music. Since everyone is so into it, we have great news – The service has added a wide variety of features that can be great for musicians.
They are also presently beta-testing custom URLs. Exciting stuff! Check out all these features info here.
In the past, we offered our feelings that “pre-liking” for a track from a group can actually deter getting more fans. When I wrote this, I wrote it based on my own personal feelings, but now Jason Tate at Absolute Punk has opened up the flood gates to a great discussion where many die-hard music fans on his site have shared their feelings in an open thread on the subject. Check it out here and gain some clear insight on how fans really feel about this practice.
Apple’s iTunes Match is one of those services that is supposed to start rescuing us all from piracy and the evils of file sharing and start making royalties drip back to musicians. TuneCore has great news, in that this has already started! Check out their blog post on the subject and get the whole story.
CD Baby’s DIY Musicians blog has up an interesting showing of their service from 2011. Check it out to get some great insight on how most groups are making money on their service.
YouTube’s viewership keeps growing and growing and you have to know that it is one of the most powerful music discovery and marketing channels out there. While it is obvious you should be using YouTube, but what type of video should you have on your channel?
Vimeo has always been the choice of those who want their videos to really look fantastic on the net. Their video service has always been better looking than YouTube and served as more of a community for those looking for good looking videos instead of more videos of cats yawning. If you are making great looking videos, you should always be using Vimeo to connect with those who appreciate them. If this is the case, the great news is they have many cool features. The most notable for music marketing is there is now a Tumblr like interface that delivers a feed so that you can take in the newest videos from your favorite video makers. Check out all the new features here.
Cash Music, makers of cool web tools to make your website and sharing work better have finally made it official! They have launched a platform filled with great tools for marketing and showing off your music on the web. They have free tools to trade tweets and emails for downloads as well as ways to make pictures and music play well on the web. They pride themselves on the fact that you will not need to know how to program much of anything to use their service as well, so those looking for a complex but awesome web page, can look to their platform to make it happen. Check out more here.
Doing graphic design for your music is a rough duty, but one you are going to have to do at some point. Whether it is making things look nice on your website or making a flyer, at some point you are probably going to have to do some graphic design and font work. Odds are you also come across websites with great fonts you would love to use every day. Thankfully the What Font? web extension (Chrome, Safari and Firefox compatible) will tell you exactly what font is being used on a website. This can help you take your design skills to the next level with some quick answers.
It is easy to start to not believe the hype of how much Tweeting and Facebook sharing can do for your music. TopSpin who make some of the finest sharing widgets out there, has just announced a Sharealytics feature that allows users to see the number of shares, the amount of traffic created by those shares and the number of new fans acquired from the shares. This means you will be able to hone in and focus your marketing on te channels it is working best. Check out more details on their blog here.
Lately I have felt a critical mass of friends talking about using ReverbNation’s Promote It in order to get new fans and concert attendees. The service has the ability to take the thinking out of Facebook promotions and ads for those who find their interface complicated and annoying. They offer pre-designed plans for you to either promote a song, an upcoming show or just get more Likes for your page. Get more info on this service here.
Our first post of 2012 was on that it is way past the time when you should delete your MySpace Music profile. Since we wrote that we have deleted the MySpace for all of the artists we work with. What we have seen since than was a pleasant surprise. All of our sites whether they are websites designed on WordPress or OneSheet have all seen at least 25% more traffic. This means more people are discovering music and information on our music in a much better way and e are making a much better impression on new fans. This is news that tells us you should get rid of that MySpace as soon as possible.
