Lately I have been doing quite some consulting for small local bands looking to improve their online presence and take it further than the compulsory Myspace page. I have resumed the basic principles of what small (or every) music artist should do to build their brand online.
Myspace is popular as a platform but should not never your main presence. Take on board the following advice, use following platforms and for less than £100/year you have a great and modern online presence.
Set up an own website.
URL starts at $9.89/year at namecheap.com
Cheap and adequate webspace can be found for around £50/year: this should offer you around 5GB storage space and several GBs of traffic every month (some webhosters even give 1TB traffic monthly but I tend to not recommend those bigger providers because they like to fail on a regular basis).
Use a platform such as WordPress for your site software. This is free and entirely customizable and is used as fully fledged site software/CMS on several cases. There are thousands of plugins for WP, even free shop platforms allowing you to sell your tracks and merchandize. It should not be too hard to find online mavens who will design your site and keep it updated (give them free entrance to your gigs etc), even I maintain sites of friends for free.
Last but not least… BLOG!
Add your music to Last.fm, Spotify and Pandora
Music owners can submit their music to these platforms for free and receive royalties for every time their tracks are played.
If you are a subscriber on last.fm you can easily create playlists of your albums release and embed these on your site, thus allowing your visitors to listen to your tunes without having to pay the bandwidth host if you suddenly became the latest #1 in the country. Being a subscriber costs £1.50/month. Otherwise embed a spotify playlist.
Get a Flickr account
Stop your whining, this will cost you $25/year if done and used properly. The free account will only show your last 200 pictures and will not allow flickr users to download the high-res pictures. Upload pictures of all your gigs in high-res (at least 5MP) to your Flickr and also release your official press photos via Flickr. Allow Flickr users to download your pictures in hi-res(1).
Get the plugin for WordPress to display the last x pictures on your website, transforming your website in a ‘hub’.
Use social media.
Do not only focus on myspace to promote your music and facebook for the events. Also use services such as upcoming, eventbrite (perfect to sell tickets for your gigs), twitter (shut up it’s a powerful tool if used properly). Set up a zazzle store if you want to offer merchandize but haven’t reached enough of popularity (or earned enough of money) yet to order your own t-shirts in batch.
Do not forget to use Twitter as a tool to promote yourself, your gigs and your merchandise. You can easily embed your latest tweets in your website with the Twitter Tools by Alex King if your site is WordPress based.
Also create a Facebook page. Since the Facebook design update some weeks ago pages play a more prominent role. Page updates will now appear in the newsfeed of all fans, highly improving the interaction with your fans.
Prominently link to your social media/other online profiles on your website.
I can hear you ask already ‘If I have to link out to profiles on other sites, why bother with my own website?‘.
Do you want to be indie or do you want to allow the biggest sites, Myspace (owned by Mr. Murdoch) and Facebook (valued at $15bn) to earn from your product by framing your product in with the ugliest ads you’ll ever see?
- This is not possible with free accounts(↩)
Hmm, good advice there Franky, I’m a now gonna set up a Twitter and Facebook artist page for my solo act. Get some pre-Rebellion hyping on the go
This is useful and bookmarked for when I will more than likely need it in the future. Thanks for putting time into writing it.
-H
Heather, as if you did not know all that. Thanks for showing you’re alive though. :)
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