At The Music Clinic we’re here to help you get your music career off the ground. We provide the best advice from industry experts and answer your questions on all things music. This week Bob Allan from the UK’s leading music development agency, Generator, explains how to build an online presence and connect with fans.
“There are many different ways to build an online presence and various available platforms of interaction with your fans, from websites, mailing lists, blogs, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, Soundcloud, Bandcamp etc… (It is important to note that the music needs to be right before uploading music and interacting with people).
An artist website is an important tool when concerning yourself with online presence but is not essential, with Myspace and Facebook offering free profiles a website can be an unnecessary cost. Though if you can afford to get a basic website done it makes a difference being able to own your own data as opposed to a third party. You might have 4296 myspace/Facebook fans or 2635 followers on Twitter but if something happens to those sites you could lose everything you’ve built up. It’s better to have personal email addresses and be able to contact fans from your own database, it’s also better to have a central hub with everything in one place that you can send people to and they can then follow links to whichever other sites they use personally. A band website can get the bands personality across and there are no little annoying ads popping up everywhere.
When it comes to using the other platforms available then it just depends what works well for the artist, tweeting might work very well for an emerging post-dubstep artist but might not work for a folk singer songwriter. The general consensus is that Myspace has lost its appeal, especially with the recent profile changes but it is still a first port of call for most people wanting to check out music so musicians should still have a profile (if it works for them). There is also a Facebook app called BandPage that allows musician profiles to add gig listings and ticket links as well as syncing to your Soundcloud player.
Blogs and online media are a great way of building a ‘buzz’ for a band, a lot of bloggers have become tastemakers and influential people in the industry do check to see what’s going on in the blogosphere. Hype Machine is a blog aggregator where you can type in artists with a similar style of music and see which blogs are writing about them, you can then contact the writers with a personal email and some of your music. If they like the bands you sound similar too they are likely to at least give your tracks a listen and maybe feature them in their blog (make sure you send a personalised email that mentions their blog, no blanket emails!)
It is vital that you connect with your fans and give people who make an effort to interact with you online something special, give away exclusive tracks to people on your mailing list, ask them be in your videos, let them design your artwork etc… some good examples from the panel at a recent Generator Panel, ‘Music Futures‘, include We Are Scientists emailing people who’d signed up to their mailing list at a live show sending them a personal email that night with photos from the gig, Little Comets filming guerrilla performances in Marks & Spencer’s, on Trams & Metros then putting them online, Mike Skinner replying to fans tweets by writing a song especially for them. It’s just about being creative but also interacting in a fashion that works well for the artist, some people don’t come across well in video blogs others do but as long as you are engaging with your fans in a creative and relevant way then you’ll get something back and your fans will feel valued.
There is also something to be said about giving too much away, if your sites are full of content and you update your Facebook every time you have a practice then people will lose interest but if you hold back a bit and give people just enough so that they are always wanting more then you’ll have a better online presence. The band Wu Lyf held back so much online at first that they didn’t have any music online and through word of mouth and industry frustration people were travelling to Manchester to see them. This is the other extreme of having too much online content, it’s just about getting the right balance that works for your music.
Get more advice on ‘Getting Noticed’ at Generator’s support page for Musicians here”
Bob Allan, Generator – The UK’s leading music development agency
If you have questions about your band’s next step or if you’re just a bit curious about the music industry, leave a comment here, tweet @amazingtunes, facebook us, or email me at ben.brown@amazing-media.com.
