The Importance of Building Up A Team For Your Band

Chris    Music     band promotion, team building

My band has just recently come off a New Zealand tour supporting Disturbed, P.O.D. and Alter Bridge, you can read more about it on the Redline blog.

It reinforced the idea that you need to build up a good team around your band as every successful band has a great team supporting them, you can’t do everything yourself.

The band itself is like the public figure heads of the team but you also have their crew which go unseen to help make things happen.

The more your band grows, the bigger your team will get.

The Concert Team
Instrument Techs – to ensure the music equipment is maintained and operates as it should throughout the shows.
Sound Engineer – to mix the band for the enjoyment of the public.
Stage Manager – to make sure the scheduled show itinerary is adhered to by all involved.
Security – to maintain crowd control and safety of artists.
Concert Promoter – responsible for the publicity and promotion of the event.
Staging and Production Crew – responsible for setting up the staging, lighting, sound system and rigging required for the show.

The Studio Team
Producer – responsible for squeezing the best performances out of an artist for a recording.
Studio Engineers – assist with the recording efforts within the recording studio.
Mixer – creatively brings together the various recorded parts to create the song or record.
Mastering Engineer – finalises the song so it comes across well in most listening environments like a cd or radio.

The Music Business Team
Record Label – responsible for funding and distribution of recorded works.
Public Relations(PR) – liaising with various media to create awareness and publicity for an artist ie. media releases, reviews, news articles, bio’s, etc.
Pluggers – network with radio and tv to pick up, play list and promote an artist.
Street Teams – help with ground level promotion ie. stickers, flyers, word of mouth, etc.
Band Manager – responsible for managing day to day business activities on behalf of the artist.

Most of this is off line based but I listed it to give you an idea that there are many people involved in the successful day to day operations of an artist.

Leverage Other People’s Experience
You need to build a team and leverage off the experience other people can contribute to aid in your musical quest for world domination.

This is no different than when a business is seeking to expand and grow.

Unfortunately, the catch 22 is that it costs money to take advantage of someone else’s experience and utilise them as no-one likes to do anything for nothing.

Hence why music is such a tricky industry to work in.

Making The Band Profitable
You need to build up your band so that it becomes a financially viable entity for others to want to work with you, then you can get the skilled, experienced help and then that’s when things have the potential to really take off.

How on earth do you do that? My thought is just like any other business, you need to create demand which comes from the awareness of people knowing that you exist.

D.I.Y. Marketing and Promotion
As an artist, you need to go out, fully back and promote yourself. I believe the internet today can provide a lot of tools that can help you communicate and stay in touch with fans.

There are a lot of ways you can start to get yourself known online so do as much as you can for yourself and don’t rely on others.

Network with other artists, pool together to do shows, share fan bases as it all helps each other out.]

Start building your team today
Find people early on who want to help you succeed and start building your music team from friends and family. Sometimes feeling like you’re a part of something is much more fulfilling to them than money.

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How To Start Your Own Blog In Under 5mins!

Chris    Online     blogger, free blog hosting, free blogs, livejournal, vox, wordpress

Blogs have really exploded in the last few years and are a perfect solution for anyone wishing to have a web presence without the hassle and cost of a traditional website.

You can set up a custom blog on your own web host like I have done with this blog, it will require some technical experience to do. I’ll explain how I did it in another post.

However, the much easier option is to sign up at any of the following FREE blog service providers. You can then have your own blog up and running in under 5mins usually!

• Blogger
• WordPress
• LiveJournal
• Vox

If you’d like even more options, check out this post from Mashable: 40+ Free Blog Hosts.

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How To Start A Website With No HTML Experience

Chris    Online     blinkweb, build a website, free website, make a website, website builder, weebly

If you’d thought you needed to get a web designer or learn how to use some tricky web page application like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, think again!

With simple drag and drop functionality, you can have a website up in a short time with very professional results.

Sign up for a free account and then start building at Weebly or BlinkWeb.

Weebly is great for general websites.
BlinkWeb is more useful for internet marketing ie. creating sales pages or squeeze pages.

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Band Promotion Tip – Always Build Up A Mailing List

Chris    Music     autoresponder, aweber, band promotion, mailing list, music marketing, phplist, promote your band, promotion tips

The first and most important suggestion I can give to help you promote your band online is to collect names and email addresses of anyone remotely interested in your band, both from online and off line sources.

I’m not talking about collecting random email addresses either and spamming them!

Build up your mailing list
What you want to do is collect people who willingly wish to hear from you by way of them signing up or opting into your mailing list or band newsletter.

You can then stay in touch and communicate with them, letting them know what you’re up to and continuously promote your music to them.

If they don’t dig what you do, they can easily unsubscribe which is a good thing as you only want interested people on your mailing list.

Why build a list?
Simply because unless they are extremely motivated, they could see you live for the first time or bump into something online, think it was kind of cool but then completely forget about you.

Without a mailing list, you have no way of communicating directly to the very people that are interested in you.

Mailing List Software
PHPList is great, open source, newsletter software and best of all, it’s FREE.
Aweber is a powerful autoresponder service that works on a monthly subscription.

With PHPList, you install it on your web server and send out messages whenever you like.

Aweber differs in that you can write a predetermined sequence of messages which will begin to be sent out when someone signs into your mailing list. This is really handy if you wish each new mailing list member to receive messages that perhaps explain more about your band, your history, anything really.

Both allow you to send personalised messages so instead of them saying just ‘Hey’ or ‘Hey everyone’, you can say ‘Hey John’.

It makes it seem like you’ve personally sent your message to him which is much nicer than just broadcasting a group email.

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Do You Use Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer?

Chris    Online     add-ons, firefox, mozilla, roboform

A few years ago, I stumbled upon this open source browser called Firefox by Mozilla. It had a small faithfull following and claimed to be much more secure in its browsing ability over Internet Explorer.

As time went on, I kept reading from various sources about the security vunerabilities of IE. I decided to make the switch and try Firefox out.

Today it is my preferred browser!

Firefox kicks ass!
Aside from the better security and constant updates you get with Firefox, they were also the first to have multiple tabbing and allow you to include ‘add-ons’ to enhance your browsing experience!

Internet Explorer 7 has since copied these concepts.

Firefox Add-Ons I Can’t Do Without:
Gmail Manager – At a glance in the lower right end of your Firefox browser, you can see whether you have new mail or not. You can also check multiple Gmail accounts in seconds without having to log into each individual account.

Better Gmail - This adds some very cool extra features to Gmail when using Firefox that you don’t get normally.

Adblock Plus – If you’re sick of seeing Adsense ads everywhere, this does a really good job of filtering them out and making them disappear when you’re browsing the net.

There are tonnes of other add-ons available, you’d be best to visit Mozilla and see what else there is that you might find useful.

Roboform – It’s not an add-on but it can be added to Firefox as a toolbar and is indespensible for storing all my various logins and passwords. You can then log into your websites with a single click and it makes you almost invincible to any phishing attempts to steal your login details!

You can also get a portable version of Roboform that installs on a USB drive so you can even take all your passwords with you for easy access on another computer.

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