Jon Clarke's Articles

How to effectively promote your music on the Internet

Jul 14
4 Comments

Have you ever seen a local, unsigned band and thought to yourself, why aren’t these guys huge? Conversely have you ever heard a band on the radio and thought, these guys are terrible, I hear better than this at my local. All too often great musical talent goes unnoticed, and it isn’t down to a lack of good songs or live performances. The main thing holding back independent bands is a lack of good self promotion.

With the huge wealth of outlets for promoting your music online there really is no excuse for poor self promotion these days. The Internet has completely opened up underground music and made it much easier for bands to reach their audiences and build up a relationship with their fans. Through this article I will give you some useful tips for starting out when marketing your band online. I am in the process of starting up a new band myself, and this is what I’ll be doing once we get moving along.

The first thing you must do is without doubt the most difficult. Define your sound and write some killer songs and work on an amazing live show. Sounds hard right? Well it is. This is the stage that my band is at right now, we’re just writing a load of songs and trying to find the style that fits us best. Once we’ve written ninety minutes worth of material we’ll start work on our live show and then start gigging.

What you must do when writing your music is work out who you want your target audience to be. You may like all kinds of genres of music but generally when people turn to your band they will expect your sound and you’ve got to deliver it to them. There’s nothing wrong with being able to put your band into a category that people will look for. If you class yourself as heavy rock then that’s good as people that like heavy rock music will be more likely to find you.

As you start to finish up writing your songs and start working on your live set I believe it is a great time to start working on your band website. I would absolutely recommend purchasing the .co.uk or .com domain of your band’s name. I would even go as far as to name the band specifically so you can get the web address you want. If someone tries to find your band online they’re bound to type in yourbandname.com and so ideally you want them to find you.

Once you’ve bought your domain there are a few different ways to get a good band website together. One is to hand build it yourself. It can be quite difficult to do, but gives you complete creative control over the look and content of the site. If none of you can build your site then ask around your friends, maybe one is a budding web designer and wants to add to their portfolio.

Failing this you can choose one of the free blog software sites such as WordPress or Blogger and build your band website as a blog. The advantage of this is that you can post news as new blog posts and you can have the band all contribute here and there. It requires no real knowledge of web design and there are a bunch of great templates for you to use. You can integrate band pictures and add extra pages to your blog site to make it into a great website. Your fans can comment on news posts and you can build a great rapport with them this way. I would actually recommend starting a site like this for your band, if only for the community aspect of it.

If you choose to use blogging software then make sure you write regular updates for your site. You can even write articles about music that is similar to your own. By doing this you will gain a reader base quite quickly, and they’re much more likely to try your music if they like your articles. By writing regularly you’re helping your page ranking in Google. It is quite important for you to rank highly for your band name in Google, as that is the first place people will go when trying to find you. You can litter your posts with keywords so that when people search for you, they get you and not anyone else.

For tips on writing for Google then try searching the web for search engine optimisation (SEO) tips. It is quite a complex topic and you probably won’t need to fully understand it, but certainly a grip on keywords and page ranking will help you when promoting your band online.

So you’ve got your band website up, you’ve got some articles written, maybe about favourite bands or gigs and you’ve started to attract some visitors. Hopefully you’re highly ranked in Google for your band name as well. You’ll want to put up some of your music so people can actually hear you. You can upload mp3s of your songs to your own site as well as many others. When uploading I would honestly recommend giving away your music for free. With the huge wealth of quality music available online if you charge for your music then people just won’t give it a try. At this stage you’re trying to create a following and a fanbase so free music really is the key.

Once you’ve uploaded your mp3s to your own site then it’s best to get moving onto social networking to really help push your band. Social networking has taken the net by storm and now almost everyone is a member of at least one social networking site. They’re fantastic tools to promote your music and can really help you reach people you never would have otherwise. The first stop you should make is MySpace. Set up your profile there and upload some songs for people to listen to. There are fantastic tools there to help push new music so make sure you make the most of them.

Facebook is the most widely used social networking site and there are actually some really neat things you can do with it to help your band out. There is a great application available on Facebook called Facebook Flyers. What this does is enable you to place and ad for your band at the side of people’s profiles. The key here is that you can tailor the ad to your sound so it will only appear on people whose taste matches your band. It is a great tool for your band. You should also set up a Facebook group for your band and add everyone you know to it. This way people can discuss your band and will get notification of when you’re playing and access to all kinds of pictures and information.

Your band should also take the time to record a video and upload it to YouTube. It is just another place you can go to promote your music online. There are a couple of ways to go about making a classic YouTube video. One is to do a fairly serious music video like you would see on MTV. Another is to try to create a video that will generate it’s own buzz and get loads and loads of views purely based on the content of the video. Aussie rock band Sick Puppies used this method of viral marketing to great effect with their ‘Free Hugs’ video. They filmed a guy going round town giving out free hugs with their song playing in the background. The video has been viewed over 19 million times and the band are now signed and on tour with Evanescence.

This just goes to show the power that great Internet marketing can have for your band, and the great thing is that you can do it all yourself easily. The web really has opened up marketing opportunities for emerging musicians but always remember that you’ll only get out of it what you put in. No-one is interested in you to start with, you have to make them interested. Good luck, and above all remember to write great songs. Without great songs all the marketing in the world can’t help you!

Posted in Guitar, Music
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Social Networking – Are Facebook and MySpace a positive influence?

Jul 08
3 Comments

Bebo, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter. Chances are if you’re reading this you’re a member of one or more of these websites or any of the other plethora of social networking sites out there on the net. They seem to have become unavoidable, and spring up wherever you go. Without doubt the fastest growing here in the UK is Facebook. Starting in September 2005 Facebook linked students across US universities. Through 2007 Facebook experienced exponential growth as it opened up for everyone to join and now has in the region of 80 million users worldwide.

The birth of the social networking phenomenon has seen a shift in the way that many people browse the web, and especially in the way that people interact socially. Facebook has even changed the way that people interact offline with many social events being organised solely through the web.

For the sake of this article I will primarily talk about Facebook as it seems to be the most widely used social networking site (SNS) among people that I know.

Facebook has taken a generation by storm. It has enabled long-lost friends to connect to each other again, and made it easy for friends living apart to keep in touch. The site adheres to the common formula among all SNS in that it gives the user the chance to make a profile of themselves and then add profiles of their friends to their friend list. You can post messages to your friends profiles and join many different groups that are specialised around a common interest. Where Facebook is unique is that it enables users to install a wide variety of plugins to enhance their pages, enabling them to take movie quizzes against friends, or play scrabble and similar things.

With sites such as Facebook becoming ever popular the era of the egocentric web user has arrived. Everything about social networking is based on the self, the profile. People spend hours updating their profiles just to let the world know that they’re cutting their toenails or whatever other mundane things they happen to be doing. Suddenly it seems that everyone must know your intimate details on everything from your address and date of birth to your musical tastes. There has been a significant shift away from topic based communities on the web such as discussion forums to communities based around user profiles and the e-persona.

With this free willed disclosure of all kinds of personal information comes risks. Social networking sites can be seen as a hacker’s paradise. So far social network sites haven’t been hit by anything too major, just relatively harmless worms, adware and phishing attacks. However, with the amount of personal data so readily available it is certainly feasible that these sites could come under a serious attack and people’s data could become compromised. Your name, address, date of birth and in fact just about everything about you could become available to hackers to use as they please.

The worrying thing about this however, isn’t just the fact that this data could become available, but it is that sites such as MySpace and Facebook could become platforms for more serious Trojan attacks that can sit on the system and then log online banking data and other more sensitive information. With many people using Facebook and not being up to date and knowledgeable about computer security there are certainly a lot of gullible people out there that are just waiting to install that new plugin that is actually a disguised Trojan virus.

There is also the worrying thing that so much data is out there in the public domain and it can lead to vigilante-like attacks. In China this is quite a severe problem. For example, the 21 year old Gao Qianhui posted a video lambasting the coverage of the earthquakes in China. While her views are questionable and worthy of derision she was hunted down and eventually she had to be detained by police. The only reason she was found was because of data found on social networking sites. While promoting free speech on sites such as YouTube we are also exposing ourselves to attacks from extremists by posting so much personal data on Facebook.

They’re an interesting phenomenon, people scramble to get as many friends as they can, even if they’ve never met the person, they add a vast swathe of plugins while bloggers and YouTube video makers are all trying to score as many hits as possible. It seems that everyone is trying to live as their own mini celebrity and gain social acceptance through the web. The desire to have the most friends, or the most hits, comes from the need for acceptance. While the user generated content definitely produces some of the best things on the web it is almost getting to the point where the good parts are getting lost in the sea of friend request emails, add plugin spam and videos of dogs on skateboards.

Security risks are perhaps the biggest threat to these sites, but I genuinely believe that they are an overall positive influence on the web. The ability to keep in touch so easily with your friends no matter where they live is most definitely a positive thing. MySpace has proved to be a positive influence on the music industry, whether the record companies like it or not. It is so much easier for bands to push out their music to new fans via the Internet than it has ever been at any point in the past. In fact, many of today’s big acts were discovered by word of mouth through social networking sites.

The ability to so easily carve out your own webspace has really opened up the Internet to the masses and released it from the grip of the computer geek. The Internet is the most important invention for a very, very long time and I believe that it will play a massive role in our future. By unlocking this to everyone and enabling it to play a significant part in the everyday lives of everyday people then the Internet will continue to grow and prosper.

What social networking needs to do now is to push for a much more streamlined and secure approach. I just hope that eventually the hype will die down and my email inbox won’t be full of requests to virtually give people cake or poke them. Given the power of the net it does sometimes seem disheartening to see it used in such a trivial manner sometimes.

Posted in Internet
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