Bandcamp provides you with a free home for your music and gives you all the tools to promote it in this Web 2.0 world. Their approach to promoting music on the internet has made me question how good our band’s approach is on various topics such as: search engine optimized track pages, quick streaming and downloading of music, clean album layouts, and stat tracking for music plays.
Upload your music, cover art, and custom header graphic to your page, which is clean and ad free, unlike Myspace. Your discography is displayed while fans can stream your music and read your track description, lyrics, and links to your other websites or band blog. Check out their video below.
Need a free concert and tour listings plugin for WordPress? GigPress is a great WordPress plugin for all those performing musicians out there with blogs. Manage your upcoming shows and past performances through your WordPress dashboard.
This plugin is nice because of the many features it includes such as: listing chronologically upcoming and past shows, auto linking Google maps to venue locations, and it can create an upcoming shows RSS feed. The website does a great job describing more in detail the plugin’s features and provides great screenshots.
As I used Myspace recently, I came across Myspace music profile pages that had cleaner looking designs. I used sites before like Strikefile where you basically customize every section of your profile, and change things such as table border and color scheme. This time around I wanted a clean layout where the customization was minimal and the look stands out.
DesignMyspace has 25 free layouts for your Myspace page. The difference with this site than many of the others is they have several layouts with clean, defined headers that could aid any musician in describing their music.
There are instructions for those new to Myspace. The rules stay the same, Copy and Paste their code into your Bio Section and you are ready to go. From there, just replace their text with your text in the appropriate sections found in your code.
The main reason I liked this was because I wanted to promote our band blog and other websites, along with other networks such as Twitter in the header. The layouts load quick, look great and allow for a better way to spread your marketing message.
With so many music conferences being held, Music Pin has thrown its hat into the arena with their service. Music Pin is a digital marketing company, based out of West London, that provides promotional tools to labels and artists to maximize their exposure through download cards and their online media platform.
The simple fact is they provide a way for you to give out promotional cards with pin codes to redeem your music online. They manufacture it and its the job of the artist or label to sell it. They deliver you the pincodes and host the content on their site.
Here is the video from Derek Sivers that has a great interview with Nayo Abidoye who discusses the service in more detail.
The mobile music market is expected to grow from $10.6 billion in 2008 to $16.8 billion in 2013. These stats were taken from Strategy Analytics. One important part of the analysis is that growth is expected more in developing countries which made me think of how good is my mobile marketing plan. Implementing some strategy can have you on your way of covering your band and exploring new territory. I found these articles recently describing mobile music mobilization. These articles are definitely worth the read.
Music Think Tank author, Ariel Hyatt, gets the conversation started with “Going Mobile-The Future of Marketing For Musicians“. The key of this article is how can musicians fully use the mobile technologies to their potential. How does your mobile strategy match up?
The second article by Hypebot is a great way to begin thinking about your options. “Map Your Mobile Strategy” Thinking about selling ringtones, mobile downloads, and communicating with fans via mobile. Begin creating a list of things to stimulate your mobile marketing.
