—newent lake; dusk; 12.04.12
counterpoint - 12.04.12
recorded at newent lake, gloucestershire at dusk on 12.04.12. amateur campanology, wildfowl and evening songbirds colliding very beautifully. at around the 00:29 mark if you listen very carefully you can hear a grey heron take off and fly down the length of the lake. i was about 2 metres from this.
in continually working on getting the website/social media balance right for indie artists using one-page websites, it seems that one particular online service needs to be added to my post of february 12th. big thanks to danny at red eyed and blue who has been working with me on this in conjunction with the brute chorus website and who is the source of most of the articles i’m referring to here.
bandsintown.com: in my previous article i talked about artistdata as the one place you could put your shows in online and have them appear wherever you like, including on your website. as a result i didn’t go over the plethora of websites you can ask artistdata to populate for you. there is one, however, that does require special attention, and that’s bands in town.
initially a listings site like any other, bands in town has very cleverly opened its doors to artists as well as concert-goers and is allowing you to take the information it has on your shows and do things with it. they also work using individuals’ last.fm and pandora profiles to tailor the shows they pitch, and they offer an app for smartphones. this is essentially why bands in town seems to be becoming the go-to platform for both bands and fans.
there are a pile of articles online introducing bands in town and singing it’s praises, like this one (thank you danny), which i suggest you read so i don’t have to repeat them whilst trying not to copy their content.
here’s what’s so special from my point of view - bands in town seems to do some of the things artistdata will do for you, only better, or at least differently. and the best bit is that artistdata populates bands in town automatically for you, so you are still only inputting your info once.
bandsintown.com and facebook: this is where the real benefit of this complication lies. look at the brute chorus facebook profile for an example of the bands in town integration. it’s much sexier and more useful than the artistdata version. so, here’s a suggestion:
go back into your artistdata account, and disable the facebook tool. make sure that artistdata is feeding your info to bands in town, and then go to the bandsintown facebook app and create a link between your public profile and bands in town’s database. the difference to the accessibility of your information is worth the effort.
bandsintown.com on your website and other spots: bands in town also offer a tweeting service and calendar widget like artistdata, so you can include all of their info on your site and around and about. whether you pick one or the other service to do this for you will really be up to you, and a matter of taste, although it would be problematic to have two services auto-tweeting the same info for you, so pick one. here’s the other warning i’d offer - if your shows have to go from artistdata to your site via bands in town then you are adding one level of complication, more potential for things to go wrong, and a time lag in getting your info up online.
artistdata, bands in town and time lags: at the time of writing there’s been no response to the support ticket submitted to bands in town about how long it would take shows inputted to artistdata to then show up on facebook via the bands in town platform, so no official numbers on this yet. however, experiments with the brute chorus dates showed that everything was in place withing 24 hours of adding a show to artistdata. not bad at all…
finally - if you’ve not seen the infographic that begins below yet then click here, and remember why this stuff is important.
my first foray into the joys of calligraphy in many many years. this for a website for norwegian experimental jazz improviser orchestra friensemblet. the very first time i turn my own hand to vector tracing, too.
is this my favourite song right now? maybe. loving the video work from southern souls, too. who can you love with the heart of a chicken?
The following is extracted from a document I wrote this week for clients having one-page websites built. I hope it can be of wider use, or can generate some responses that will tighten all of this thinking up.
In order to keep your one-page website up to date and maximize its ability to allow people to connect with you in whichever way they prefer, it is important to have accounts with and use certain social networks and media hosting services. I also recommend the use of some of these as a way of avoiding having to pay for updates to your site where often-changing items like news feeds or tour dates are concerned.
There’s nothing worse than arriving at someone’s site to see that it clearly hasn’t been updated for months, showing old tour dates and news items that now bear little relevance to the activity of your band. Relying on expensive back-end updates can result in this very quickly.
People use social media as a way to organise their lives, share things with friends and discover new interests. If you are not present on your audiences preferred network, they will not easily come looking for you elsewhere. If they love Facebook and they find you there, they will probably click ‘like’, if Tumblr or Twitter is their thing and they are able to follow you there, they will be excited to do so.
Being present in people’s social media feeds means that, provided you follow up with good content, you will never be far from their minds where music is concerned, and they are unlikely to forget that you exist. They won’t have to come looking for you, they have given you permission to come to them.
Your site is where Google searches for your band name will take people. It’s the place you can control and organise to be exactly what you want, and to which all your other web presences refer in content and design. It should be simple and say something clear about your product with its style and design. It can offer select video and audio examples, but these should always link back to a place where the rest of your media lives, can be paid for, shared, connected to or somehow interacted with. Your site is at once a hub at which your diverse networks and presences feed into one another and a springboard from which people can discover you in whichever way they like.
Go to meet your audience. Don’t wait for them to find you.
These are the services I recommend using in order to get the most of of your one-page site build:
Artistdata: A fantastic free tool for touring musicians. Enter your tour dates into their very precise system (and it takes some attention to detail, but it’s worth it), and Artistdata will feed out info about your shows to all the places you ask it to, including Twitter (“5 new shows announced!” / “Playing a show tonight at the Scala in Milan 8pm”), Facebook, Songkick, etc etc. their list of tools is extensive and getting better all the time. They can also provide a calendar widget which sits in your site and pulls your dates in without needing updates (see it at kirstymcgee.com, thebrutechorus.co.uk, boreasband.com…).
NB. Artistdata was recently acquired by SonicBids, so if you already have an account with the latter you could look into how to get your shows to feed through to Artistdata from there (sadly at the time of writing this can’t be done the other way around).
NNB. (sic.) see the addendum posted on 04th march for a development to the way in which i’m suggesting using artistdata, especially in relation to facebook.
Mailchimp: A mailing list client with a generous free account and options for upgrades if your list gets huge. These guys manage your list(s) (if you are in more than one band, or run a label etc, a single account will allow you several lists), offer you fully editable WYSIWYG html email functionality, mail client optimisation features, sound advice on how to write great updates, customiseable signup forms, etc… The statistics and analytical data you can get from them on your campaigns is not only really useful but also very easy to understand. They are a real asset to the independent musician. Also their simple embeddable signup forms - check out the way that boreasband.com has one in English and one in Norwegian!
Bandcamp: It is impossible to stress how important what these people are doing is. Bandcamp offer a paypal-powered audio interface from which bands can sell, promote, give away and stream their audio. A clean interface, impeccable metadata management, high quality output (your customers can choose from an enormous number of audio options to download from your single upload), digital packages, physical sales, combination deals, cross-band promotion, and a wealth of tiny details that you never knew you needed make Bandcamp the best online shop out there. Their share options allow for Facebook integration and their embed codes work almost anywhere. Their back-end stats pages are fantastic. They will also provide download codes and allow you to set secret ‘discount codes’ as rewards for fans. They also have no exclusivity deal so selling through them doesn’t preclude you selling in any other way. And they’re the friendliest bunch of people, too. They take 15% of sales, and personally I’d be happy to give them twice that, given what they do for us all. Bandcamp essentially is the music page of your site - listen / buy / discography / lyrics etc etc…
Facebook: Everyone knows about Facebook. At least half of the UK population is signed up at time of writing this. It is the one way in which people can connect to you with a single click and stay connected to you with minimal effort on all sides. They are there anyway. You should be too. The biggest mistake for bands seems to be differentiating between personal and public profiles though. Make sure that you have a public profile (you need a personal account to run this from) - you should be encouraging people to ‘like’ what you do rather than ‘friend’ you personally. The public profile means that your personal FBing doesn’t get mixed up with the message you are trying to put out there, it offers plenty of tools (for example it connects with mailchimp and bandcamp very well) and loads of really easy sharing options for your fans to tell their friends about you. Make sure you put a ‘like’ button on your site, linked to your public profile (see it at kirstymcgee.com, thebrutechorus.co.uk, boreasband.com…).
Tumblr: Arguably the most elegant and simple of the three main blogging platforms (Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger), Tumblr is a simple news feed, designed to be more like an online scrapbook than a straightforward blog. It is like an older brother to Twitter - you can follow users who will end up in your timeline, re-blog others’ posts, and are invited to put up not only text but photos, links, audio, etc. Tumblr will create an RSS feed for you which people can subscribe to in their chosen reader and which a web designer like me can pull into a feed for your home page, again removing the need for regular updates to the back-end of your site. If you’ll be doing this it is important to update your blog in a consistent way so that the formatting looks good at its destination (since that’s where most people will see it first) and to update regularly.
A note about blogs and news feeds: These can be problematic for bands, and no matter which platform you pick if the content you’re generating isn’t engaging people then you’ll be missing out on enthusiasm and engagement from fans. What you should get up there will vary depending on your own style and the preferences of your audience (most blogs will offer you stats of some kind - take a look and learn something about how engaging different posts have been to people), but as a rule I like to try and get a balance of serious, professional fact (“We’re going to SXSW - here’s the fundraiser link” / “Album launch party this Saturday”) and personal opinion / openness (“We had such a great time on tour, thanks for coming out. Here’s a fun story from the road…” / “Whilst making this new album we’ve come to considering the state of the industry, and here’s what we currently think of the way we have to change what we’re doing. What are your ideas about this?”). As seems to be true of Twitter, people engage much more if as well as getting what you’re trying to sell them they get the sense that they are getting to know you as a person.
These are the services I strongly suggest using alongside your site, with ideas of how they can be integrated:
Soundcloud: Even if your audio is hosted on Bandcamp put it up on Soundcloud too. Their SEO is great, helping searches for your tracks and band name show up useful links on Google, and their platform will let people share your music with each other. People can follow you here and receive updates when you post a track - they have a great commenting system too. You’ll be able to manage any podcasts very easily from here, and their embedable players are getting better and better. A lot of people these days are using Soundcloud as one of their principal ways of listening to music, so it makes sense to be discoverable there.
YouTube: Love or hate YouTube it is apparently now the second biggest search engine on the Internet. Not only for music and video, but for everything. Crazy as this may seem we don’t get to tell people to search elsewhere, so it is very important to make sure your YouTube content is good. Not only that, but you should upload it yourself (even if it’s already there on someone else’s account). It’s important to keep hold of your assets, and video is one of the most valuable. Make a channel of your best videos and direct people there so that you can control what people are watching. Make sure that your catalogue is represented and that your music is available, even if it is just with a still image or slideshow. think about making interviews and organise some live performances in controlled environments which can be done cheaply and give great results.
Vimeo: As with YouTube, create an account and upload your content yourself. Make a channel, too. If you are embedding video anywhere else online Vimeo players are beautiful and work very well - I try to actually use Vimeo as much as I can but make sure everything is doubled on YouTube for those people who go to it automatically.
Twitter: Twitter takes time to get to know. Strange, perhaps, since it is probably the network with the simplest premise. As with your news feed, make sure that you balance your updates between the professional, the personal and the trivial and pay attention to which tweets engender most replies, retweets, follows and unfollows, and adjust accordingly. follow plenty of people and interact with them. It soon goes from being an effort to make to being a fulfilling conversation, so persevere. Don’t forget to link your Artistdata and Mailchimp accounts and your Tumblr blog to your twitter, too, so that those updates are announced to your followers there.
And finally, here’s why MySpace does not feature in either of the above lists (courtesy of @dubber):
I’ve tried to explain this, but I have never done a better job than is done in the following articles. Please read them. Please quit MySpace.
http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/happy-quit-myspace-day.html
http://andrewdubber.com/2010/09/myspace-now-with-glitter/
http://newmusicstrategies.com/2010/10/23/the-time-has-come-its-quit-myspace-day/
another of the one-page websites i am beginning to specialise in. this time for boreas, a scottish/norwegian folk quartet. really great music, too. this is also my first site with a language option - top left of the page you can flip from english to norsk. check that shade of blue, too!
another design job for kirsty mcgee - whose pledge music campaign is gaining quite wonderful attention. love the way that this flyer is actually a postcard, pre-written to forward to a friend the old-school way. just add an address and a stamp, and you’re done.
donate towards kirsty’s new album at http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/kirstymcgee
one of my all time favourite artists in any media, jim jarmusch, endorsing theft.
friday. the end of the week. been working up to the wire on a new site for london band the brute chorus and managed to get it up as the sun was going down, in time for a weekend of activity for them.
also up today is the site for mix-up, a manchester night run by the magic hat ensemble. interesting brief - a site that gives style and branding and minimal content quickly and efficiently, and that never needs updating.
both one-page builds in muse, still in beta-test mode but doing me proud nonetheless. working on two more to come within the next couple of weeks.
finally a complete update to my web presence, including this blog & bandcamp, which demonstrates the new type of web design work i am doing as well as the musical portfolio. a combination of one-page and multi-page approaches to site design wih a limited colour palette.
