Using the Internet to Promote Your Band
Jon Carson,
Outer Sound
The music community was one of the first groups to embrace the
Internet, and the Web
has become a breeding ground of music-related activity. There are
loads of ways to
promote your band on the Net. This paper is a quickie guide that
gives some hints
on a few of the methods to get your efforts going.
Home Page
The most obvious way to use the Net to promote your band is by
creating and
maintaining a home page on the Web. The actual process of
creating the site
is beyond the scope here, but let's look at some of the broader
issues.
Goals: Before you even turn your computer on, you
should sit down as a band and
think about what you want to accomplish with your home page. Do
you just want some
basic exposure or are you looking to really use the Net as a
major promo tool? Figuring
this out will help you set your budget and will get you thinking
in the right direction
as you plan everything else out.
Represenation: Everything a band does should be a
reflection of what
they're all about. Their promo materials, their merchandise,
their stage show, the
packaging of their music, their videos -- all of these things
tell the world alot
about the group. Representation is extremely important on the Web
too. Your Web site
should be appropriate for your band -- it should fit in with all
the other things you
do. Theoretically, this site should be introducing you to people
who have never heard
of you before, so make sure that it paints an accurate picture to
these potential fans. Make sure its something that you
personally find interesting, entertaining and informative. And if
you are not doing the programming yourself, then make sure you
work with a programmer you feel comfortable with and involve
yourself in every stage of the creation process.
Content: There are lots of neat things you can
include on your band's
home page to make it interesting, fun and informative. Of course
you want to have the
basics: bio, tour dates, pictures, press clippings. Sound bytes
are really becoming
standard fare, so make sure you get at least a sampling of your
music on there. But
get creative and go beyond the basics. Candid photos of the
band, regular news
updates, tour diaries, contest giveaways, general philosophical
ramblings -- these
are all things that will make your house a home.
Virtual Communities: If you want to avoid the time
and money commitment
of building, promoting and maintaining your own Web site, you can
hook into one of the
Virtual Communities out there. Virtual communities usually offer
a lower price by
spreading the costs of programming and hosting over a bunch of
bands, so this is
usually the cheapest way to have a home page. The other advantage
of virtual
communities is that they attract a lot of users who would have
never found out
about you if your home page was floating out there all alone. In
fact, a lot of
bands find great success by running their own home page AND
hooking in with a
virtual community or two. A couple of music virtual communities
to check out are Outer Sound
[http://www.outersound.com] (the site that I run),
IndiSonic
[http://www.indisonic.com]
and Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA
[http://www.iuma.com].
Selling on the Net
There's an absolute whirlwind of discussion about how the Internet is going to become
the new distribution channel in the music industry; how its going
to wipe out retailers and negate the need for record labels; how it will finally level
the playing field so that music its judged on its merit rather than its marketing
team. Nice ideas that we can all get behind, but its not too likely that something that
drastic will happen for quite a few years.
But in the meantime, is there a way for your band to take advantage of the distribution
channels that already exist on the Net? Well, here are the facts.
In 1996, the music industry moved about 616 million units. Out of that, 0.2% came
from Net sales -- or just over 1.2 million units. Not bad, eh? Well, look at it
another way: Alanis alone sold over ten times more than the whole Internet. A bit humbling.
But Alanis-level numbers aren't really of much concern to those of us in the indie
world. If we can move a few hundred records on the Net, then its
well worth it. So here are some options:
The Biggie Net Retailers
A few well-funded high profile sites that sell music have cropped up in the past couple
years, like Music Blvd. [http://www.musicblvd.com],
CDNow [http://www.cdnow.com] and
CD Universe [http://www.cduniverse.com]. These, along with
a few other biggies are responsible for a hefty portion of the Net sales. Most of
these sites pride themselves on a huge selection, but even if you can convince them
to carry your little release, they're not going to put a whole lot of marketing
muscle behind it. The freedom from space limitations may allow these "stores" to
carry a deeper catalog of indie releases, but the Hooties and Bushes of the this world
will remain their bread and butter.
Specialty Net Retailers
That being said though, there are also a lot of specialty Net
retailers out there who would love to stock you. Do some research (start at Yahoo) to
locate retail sites that carry product in the same ballpark as your own and contact them
about selling your wares. A word of caution: If you're an indie or unsigned band,
you're probably used to selling on consignment. Well, its alot harder to track down the
administrator of a Web site than the manager of your local record store. I myself would
be quite hesitant to ship off a box of CDs to a Web retail site unless it had gotten
the thumbs up from people that I trust.
Do it Yourself!
If you've already got a good Web site of your own running, then you should certainly
sell your stuff through that. You don't have to get all fancy and go out and blow big
bucks on a secure server (guarded with encryption software that scrambles data so the
outside world can't access it). Different companies handle payment acceptance different
ways, but here are some of the options I've seen out there:
Give really explicit mail order (or phone order) instructions on the site.
Possibly even include a ready-to-print order form that they can print out, fill
out and then fax or mail to you.
One of the best lo-fi methods I've seen was a record store that had an on-line
form so that the user could make their entire purchase right there, and then the store
just called them up to get their credit card number to finish the deal.
Do it directly on the site with an on-line form or e-mail. There's lots of talk
about the security issue, but for right now there are a hell of a lot easier ways to
get someone's credit card info then cracking into e-mail transmissions. Still, you
should put some kind of warning on your order page explaining the potential risks.
Find a group of bands and labels to get together and share the costs of a secure
site through which you can all sell your goods.
Ideally, you should offer a couple of choices for ordering. Warn your users about any
possible security hazards and let them choose the payment and ordering method they are
most comfortable with.
Audio Jukeboxes
Note: All of the info for this section was provided by
Rich Newman of the band TagYerit and label Wabbit Wecordings.
E-mail him
[Rich@Tagyerit.com] or check out the
Tagyerit Web site [http://www.tagyerit.com]
to express your undying gratitude.
Internet juke boxes keep a bank of songs that users are able to select and then
listen to as they surf the Net. The jukeboxes use "streaming technology" that
allows the user to listen to the file in real time rather than waiting for it to
download. The most popular streaming technologies are
Shockwave
[http://www.macromedia.com],
RealAudio
[http://www.realaudio.com] and
Xing
[http://www.xingtech.com]. Internet radio
stations work very similarly to the jukeboxes, as they usually provide a bank of
shows that the user can play at any time. The big downside to this technology is
that it takes a moderately sophisticated computer set-up to actually use them --
and even then, the sound quality isn't all that great. But the technology will
improve rapidly in the coming months, so its good to get up to speed now.
To promote yourself with these Web sites, you pretty much just treat them as you would
any magazine or radio station. Do a bit of research on their site, make contact with
them, send off your stuff and then follow-up. The great advantage here is that these
sites are all pretty new, so they'll be excited to receive your goods in most cases.
You can find Net jukeboxes and radio broadcasts using your normal search tools, but
here are some starting points to help you out.
AudioNet Jukebox
[http://ww2.audionet.com/jukemain.htm]
This is the premier site out there, as they get written up in just about every magazine
article discussing music on the Net. There was a bit of controversy with AudioNet as
the major labels threw a tissy fit when they loaded up tons of CDs onto their Web site
without getting permission form the labels. If you're interested in copyright and
publishing legal issues, this was actually pretty interesting. AudioNet argued that
the streaming technology is played just once and therefore constitutes a "broadcast,"
as opposed to downloadable sound clips which actually travel to the recipient's hard
drive for permanent storage (and are therefore subject to mechanical royalties and the
need for permission from the label). So if streaming was classified as a broadcast,
then AudioNet could put up whatever they wanted and just pay ASCAP, BMI and SESAC the
appropriate fees. Obviously the major labels didn't like the idea of consumers having
instant access to their product without having to buy it. Eventually AudioNet backed
down. So anyways, the point of all my endless rambling -- AudioNet is pretty friendly
to indie and unsigned musicians. Rich from TagYerit says they were getting 200 hits a
day when they first submitted their CD. Not a bad promotional tool!
Internet Ghetto Blaster
[http://www.igb.com]
Stocks lots of hip-hop music, particularly independent stuff.
Sam n Ella's Punk Rock Cafe
[http://www.sitegroup.com/samnellas]
Accepts lots of underground punk stuff.
Internet Radio Stations
Crux Radio
[http://crux.marion.org]
Cyberville Radio
[http://www.compulink.co.uk/~cyberville]
Hard Radio
[http://www.hardradio.com]
In the Red
[http://www.intheredradio.com]
iRock
[http://www.irock.com/main.html]
Premiere Radio
[http://www.premrad.com]
Netradio
[http://www.netradio.net]
Radio HK
[http://www.radiohk.com/radio]
Electronic Zines
Because it is so cheap to publish on the Internet, a huge wave of Web-only publications
(e-zines) have cropped up in the past couple years. They're easy to find -- search for
them as you would any other topic (Yahoo and The Ultimate Band List are both good
starting points). Once you find them, pop off your press kit as you would to any
other publication.
A word to the wise: the low publishing costs that allow anyone to put
out a zine are both a blessing and a curse. In other words -- there's alot of crap
out there. Unless you have an unlimited supply of press kits and stamps, then you've
got to spend some time identifying the most appropriate e-zines for your music. Make
sure you're sending to ones that are well-promoted and frequently updated so you know
that they are likely to get a decent number of readers.
Mailing Lists and Listservs
Any indie band that's got their act together keeps a mailing list -- a little book that
people can sign at shows to receive monthly postcards from the band with their upcoming
gig info. The Net offers a wonderful improvement over traditional snail mail for bands
for lots of reasons:
e-mail is free so there are no printing or postage costs.
people actually read their e-mail, as opposed to junk mail which usually gets tossed
in the trash.
it allows your fans to easily contact you with questions.
its immediate, so you can contact your fans right away if a last-minute gig pops up.
Clearly, any band that keeps a regular mailing list should be
doing an e-mailing list.
Of course, not everyone has e-mail, so for the next couple years,
snail mailing lists
are probably necessary to supplement the electronic version.
There are a couple of ways to do this, depending on what level
your band is at. If your
e-mail list isn't too big then you can just create a separate
group of addresses in
whatever e-mail program you use. But once you get over a couple
dozen addresses, you
should think about getting some software designed for handling
e-mail lists. The
software will make it easier for you to administer and will also
hide the long list
of e-mail addresses from the "To:" field of your message. My
company has played around
with software called
WizardWare that we have found to be pretty
cool. You can download
some shareware from their site
[http://wizardware.com] to see if you like it.
If you really want to get cooking with this technology (and if your band has a real
solid fan base), then you can start a listserve, which takes alot
of the administration crap out of the job. How listserves work technically are again
beyond the scope of this article (which is a good thing, cuz I don't have a frickin'
clue). But it should be pretty easy to either track down information on how to do it, or
to find someone to pay (a pretty small amount) to administer it for you. Once its
set up, then users can follow instructions to either "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" to
the list. There are two types of listserves. The first is a one-way listserve in
which the person running it (presumably you, if its your band) sends e-mails to
the listserve program which then magically forwards it to all of the people subscribed
to the list. Basically, it functions for the user just like an e-mail list would and its
easier for you because you don't have to keep adding and deleting addresses from your
list. Lots of bands are getting into this, so give it some thought.
The other type of listserves are two-way. That means that anyone subscribed to the list
can send messages to everyone else on the list. There are listserves like this for all
types of topics. I'm subscribed to one for indie label people and another for fans of
the writer Tom Robbins. A friend of mine subscribes to one for fans of the San Diego
Chargers. These are pretty cool, though they can get annoying as you tend to get
flooded with loads of unwanted e-mail. So if your band is popular enough that you have
a good number of fans who would like to discuss your music on a daily basis, then a
two-way listserve is really cool. But most of us aren't that appreciated. Anyways,
you can at least get a feel for how listserves work by checking a few out (again,
run a search on the Web).
Newsgroups and Bulletin Boards
Most people on the Net have some experience with Newsgroups and/or Bulletin Boards.
They are on-line areas where users can post their thoughts, ask questions, answer
questions, etc. There are thousands of Newsgroups, covering everything from "The X-Files"
to "Extreme Sports" to "The Jimi Hendrix Experience."
If you've spent time with Newsgroups, you've surely been annoyed by the number of
irrelevant self-promotion type postings. This should clue you off to the fact that
you should be very careful as to what, where and when you make postings to promote
your band. Do the readers of "alt.music.hardcore" really care that your blues cover
band is playing a bar in LA next weekend? No. Do the readers of "alt.music.country"
care that your honky-tonk band has Real Audio samples available on your Web site?
Well, yeah they might. There's no set-in-stone rules on posting etiquette. Just get
familiar with the tone of the other postings and use your common sense to tell whether
a promotional posting would be appropriate.
Jon Carson is one of the founders of
interCITIES, Inc.
[http://www.i-cities.com/intercit]
a Web development company that specializes in
the music industry. interCITIES also created and maintains the
Outer Sound Web site
[http://www.outersound.com], as well as
SCRATCH Magazine
[http://www.outersound.com/scratch]. Jon also plays in the DC band
Free Range Pilgrim
[http://www.outersound.com/band/pilgrim].
