How to launch a rock super group

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There is a new rock super group on the horizon made up of drummer Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana), vocalist and guitarist Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age & other bands) and bassist and keyboardist John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin).

They are calling themselves Them Crooked Vultures and have started creating a bit of stir without an album, without a record label and mainly just using the internet!

You can read more about this story at WebInkNow.com

Book Review: Music Success In Nine Weeks by Ariel Hyatt

I found this ‘Music Success In Nine Weeks‘ to be quite an informative and valuable read.

The author Ariel Hyatt runs her own business Cyber PR that specialises in providing online PR services for independent artists so she knows a thing or two about promoting an artist online.

Each ‘week’ in this book really is an aspect that you should look into and incorporate as part of your overall online promotion and marketing strategy as an artist.

The first week is about getting you to think why you are an artist and about setting tangible goals for you to always aim for and hit.

The second week gets you to think about and craft your elevator pitch for your music. This was one of the most insightful sections of the book for me as most musicians always struggle to convincingly answer the question “So what does your music sound like?”

You need to be able to concisely describe what you do to someone who may never have heard you before, make it sound compelling and pique interest.

Week three is about optimising your website so it is actually useful and not just a pointless use of webspace ie. capturing the details of visitors

In week four, Ariel explains four web 2.0 resources that finds invaluable for cyber promotion.

Week five is about how to effectively use your mailing list that you should be building and encourages the use of a regular newsletter rather than random email every once in a while.

In Week six, we learn of some effective methods to help build your mailing list.

Week seven is about other creative ways you can get people onto mailing list through some offline methods.

Now week eight was a very informative section for myself too. Most of the time, we think the only things we can sell are cds and tickets to live shows to our fans. This section is about expanding the products you can potentially sell to boost your income as an artist, where you provide various products and services of higher increasing value to your fans.

Last but not least, week nine contains some valuable tips on traditional PR, how to create a good press kit and how to format a proper press release. Ariel also provides tips on how to be your own publicist.

There is a lot of useful content in this book targeted towards the musician who wishes to take control of their promotional activities specialising in online methods.

Yet another useful resource for the artist that wishes to take control of their own music career and not have to rely on a record label to pick them up and do everything for them!

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Are You Using Twitter For Band Promotion?

Twitter is one of those newer web 2.0 things that a lot of people don’t know about or unsure of as compared to say something like Myspace or Facebook.

I’ve also heard from other people that Twitter should definitely be looked into as another useful promotional tool.

I came across this really interesting blogpost the other day about using Twitter for Music Promotion.

Check it out, it’s a good read!

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Music Marketing Your Band Using Google

You should always be building a mail list of people interested in your music.

In Using Google as a Marketing Tool, Bob Baker shares a couple of ideas how you can use Google’s services to help promote your band and they’re totally free!

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Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
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Have You Sorted Out Your Band Press Kit?

A really valuable tip I picked from the music marketing workshop I attended the other week was the need to have a press kit available 24/7.

You should have both an online and offline version available for press, promoters, booking agents, etc.

The press kit would include things like:

Band bio
Press photos
Music samples
EPK or video bio

By having both an online and offline version, if you don’t happen to have any physical press kits on hand for whatever reason to give to someone, you can direct them to your website where they can get all the necessary information they require.

Your website is available 24/7 so put it to work!

Keep your bio concise
Also try and keep all your information current and concise, a bio that’s 10 pages won’t get read. Trim the fluff and just present the most compelling facts you can.

Image thumbnails
When you upload hi-res press pictures, make sure you create thumbnail images for people to preview.

EPK (Electronic Press Kit)
It’s worth the little effort needed to create a 2 or 3 minute video where you can present what the band is all about.

Anything that can help make life easier for the person seeking information on you is a plus and a video can present a bit of personality that won’t come across on a written bio.

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Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
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Do You Have A Music Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a systematic process which people go through in order for you to establish who is seriously into what you or your band does.

The marketing funnel looks like this:
Suspect -> Prospect -> Customer -> Life Long Customer

The Suspect (Unknown interest)
With a marketing funnel, everyone is a suspect until they raise their hand and express an interest in what you do. You can’t be sure who is interested in what your band does until they give you a sign they are interested.

You can’t convince someone to like your music if they don’t, you just want to sort through and find the people who are interested.

The Prospect (Known interest)
As soon as someone indicates they are interested in what you do, they move on and become a prospect. This can be indicated by someone joining your mailing list or becoming friends on Myspace for example.

They have now qualified themselves as someone you should establish more contact with. The point now is to see if they are interested enough to move on and buy your music to become a fan or customer.

The Customer (Fan)
These are the guys and girls who have proven they like you enough to spend money on you. Treat them well and look after them as these are the people who most likely to spend more money with your band buying more music, merchandise, tickets to shows, etc.

The Life Long Customer (Raving fan)
These are the hardcore fans who will back you no matter what. They eat, live, breathe and believe in what you do to the very ends of the earth.

These are the people who are keen to help spread the message about your band, join your street team and want to help promote you. They will support and buy almost anything you do.

Why is a marketing funnel important?
It gives you a way for figuring out who is at what stage and how that can benefit you as an artist. As people move through the different stages, the numbers become less and less but their value to you becomes more and more.

A hundred raving fans will benefit you in so many more ways than a thousand interested prospects. What you need to do is nurture your relationships with people and figure out who is who.

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Youtube Tips For Musicians

Since Youtube is the third most visited site in the world according to Alexa, it makes sense that you get a presence for your band on there asap!

Aside from music videos, you can use Youtube for video messages to your fans, posting live performance clips, showcasing any news articles or interviews you may do or have, basically anything that you can communicate with video.

People like to view the personalities of the people behind the band these days so show them!

What camera should you use?
The cheapest and easiest option would be to use the video option on a standard digital camera. Download your video off your camera through USB and then upload to Youtube and viola, you’re done.

If you feel the need, you can always upgrade to a camcorder later which is certainly handy if you wish to film live performances.

What about editing software?
If you need to edit your video, I’d recommend using Windows Movie Maker or Apple iMovie. They’re free and more than capable of performing the basic editing required, you can even add titles and captions to your videos.

Add your url to all videos
Yes you can place your url in the video description box but it doesn’t quite grab the attention of the viewer as when its watermarked and displayed the whole time throughout the video.

It will help drive interested people back to your website which you should then encourage to sign up to your mailing list so you can stay in touch!

Using Youtube annotations
If you’re too lazy to learn how to use editing software for adding text and titles, Youtube has a feature called annotations where you can overlay text onto your Youtube videos! Handy for adding your band url and extra comments that you wish to convey.

How to make a dirt cheap music video
Find some cool video footage of something and add your song as the ’soundtrack’ to that footage, skateboarding, surfing, motor racing, whatever!

People searching for videos on surfing, for example, will find your video, if they like the song they’ll see your url and visit your site. Add them to your mailing list, show them what a great band you are and encourage them to buy your music!

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Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
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The Importance of Building Up A Team For Your Band

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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Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

Band Promotion Tip – Always Build Up A Mailing List

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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Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce