Another year over and what have you done?
That imperfect Lennon quote is the question that every musician will be asking themselves as this year ends and the next starts.
If you feel or know that you didn’t achieve what you wanted with your music in the previous year, what are you going to do to change that in 2012? What can you do to break your band?
“How do I make it” is the question that we get asked all the time and the one that we and lots of other bloggers try to spend a lot of time answering.
Reading our blog and the others like it will give you lots of great ideas on methods to market and promote your music and some insight into how to be a better musician.
But, we are asked this question so often that we felt the best thing that we could do on this last day of the year is make the most basic plan possible for every musician.
Step 1. Make sure your music gets a reaction!
This is the starting point and you will only have any chance of success if your music is good enough to attract some kind of audience.
This doesn’t mean that you need to make some commercial mainstream dross that isn’t true to your art. Far from it. Your music can and probably should be targeted to a small niche. It just means that you need to be able to tell whether you’re on the right path. This is VERY difficult and we wrote more about it here – Is my music good enough?
The second step in that process is constantly improving your art until what you do is so good that people can’t help but become fans – some more on that here – Never give up.
Step 2. Build a website!
We get bored telling people this.
Facebook and YouTube are essential to spreading the word about your music (see below) but you need a ‘home base’ – a place that is completely in your control where people can come and discover your music and you can control all the elements.
To begin with it can be simple and can grow with you but as soon as you have material that you know is good enough, build a site.
The other thing we get told all the time by people is that they don’t have the skills or can’t afford to build a site.
We understand – it looks expensive and difficult, but most people can build a website for an initial outlay of $13.94 and an ongoing cost of $3.96 per month. That’s the cost of a domain name and the first month’s hosting for a site.
Although it might seem daunting, pretty much anyone can learn how to launch a website. And learning how will seriously help your online marketing skills and therefore your chances of music success.
There’s loads of info and videos on the web to help you learn how to do this yourself. Give it a go. If you mess up, you can still find people online who will fix it for you for pretty small amounts of cash.
Try first and call for help if it doesn’t work out!
Buy your domain name from Namecheap here. Just use the name of your band if possible and buy the ‘.com’ if you can. If ‘yourband’ domain name is gone, get something like www.yourbandmusic.com or www.yourbandband.com.
Buy your hosting from Hostgator here.
Buy the $3.96 ‘Hatchling’ Plan if you only plan to have a single domain name. A lot of musicians will have a later need for a second domain and therefore buy the ‘Baby’ Plan.
Don’t buy the domain and the hosting both from either Namecheap or Hostgator. There are good reasons for not doing so – trust us!
There are loads of hosting options but Hostgator has a great reputation (we use them) and some of the training links below are about the Hostgator set up.
Once you’ve bought a domain and hosting, the simple choice is to build a site using WordPress. Again, there are loads of reasons why and we’ll look at those in detail another time but it is easy to use, simple to update the design and lots of people are on hand to help.
There’s a video below that shows you how to get your WordPress site live on your Hostgator hosting. In this video Chris Rockett buys the domain at Hostgator as well. As we said above, we’d advise you against that, but the rest of the video shows you how to actually get the site live.
Once it’s live there are a bunch of things you can and need to do. Go and look at the series of posts that follows Chris’s video in his ‘music marketing challenge’ series, where he shows you a lot of the steps you need to take to improve the site you’ve just launched.
Alternatively, there’s a great video from serious music marketers Michael Brandvold and Brian Thompson for $5 that deals with all the steps in launching your own WordPress site. Get that here.
Of course Google or YouTube searches will help you find an answer to almost any issue that you find when setting up a WordPress site for the first time.
Once you’ve launched a site, you’ll want to find an easy way to make it look great to represent you and your music. When you first launch the site it will have a default design – which can then be altered.
The design of a WordPress site is controlled by the ‘Theme’. You can get lots of these for free and there are endless ones available to buy.
Check out these two articles, both of which have a great list of Themes that you can use for your site.
- Free WordPress themes for musicians - A great list from Chris Bracco’s great site.
- Best WordPress Music Themes. Loads of great themes – all paid rather than free but starting at $20.
You can also find loads of themes by Googling for things like ‘band wordpress theme’ or ‘music wordpress theme’. Have a go and see what’s out there.
Lastly, there is a great WordPress theme designed by music marketer Greg Rollett called Band WP Theme.
This is a custom designed theme that is specifically set up for musicians to build a website using WordPress and is also designed to work with our favourite email software, Aweber.
The training videos for this theme are superb and easy to follow and the sites look great and work well. It costs $47 but if you want to avoid some of the learning issues with building your own site this may well be the right solution for you.
In order to install a theme, go back to YouTube and look for a recent instructional video with a search of ‘install wordpress theme’. Just bear in mind that WordPress is constantly improving their software so if you watch a recent video it will look like your dashboard of the site you’ve just launched – and hopefully won’t therefore confuse you!
The last thing to remember about Themes is that you can always change them in the future.
The key is to get your site up and live!
And, if this part scares you and defeats you, just got to Fiverr and search for ‘wordpress’. You’ll find lots of people who will help you get your site launched. Look for people with at least a few good feedback comments.
The other place to look for help is elance.com. It’ll cost more – $100 or thereabouts – but you’ll get a more specific service.
Step 3. Build a permission marketing list!
Why permission marketing works for spreading your music and making sales!
I would say build an email list, and that is the key, but it’s not the only ‘list’.
Permission marketing is where you send marketing messages to people who have given you their permission to contact them – i.e. it’s the opposite of spam.
These people want to hear from you again and again!
So, as well as an email list, you need to be building real engaged fans on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – these fans, followers and subscribers are another permission marketing list that you can promote and market your music to.
But, the daddy is your own email list.
Despite the claims that email is dying and that messaging over social networks will take over, everyone I know still has an email address and still checks it.
Build the other lists and communities, but don’t ignore a list of fan emails. This should be primarily built by collecting those addresses on your new website by using an opt-in form.
We have written more about this in our Fan List section of this site. All the main email list software systems have lots of ‘how to’ videos to show you how to set up the opt-in form and trade the future fan’s email address for free music.
Our preference is to use Aweber as it is the very best email software that you can get and it will grow with you and your career. The more you learn to use it, the more you realise how powerful it is. Some feel that Aweber is overkill for some musicians though and so we’d gladly recommend FanBridge as the musician focused alternative.
We also love Topspin as a full website solution that builds music players, shop buttons and more on your website. Its email element is, however, its weakest part.
It does the basics required of it but often we use Topspin as the main engine of a website but move all the emails that we collect using Topspin into Aweber. There is a free starter option with Topspin but the basic plan cost is $9.99 per month.
To encourage people to join your fan mailing list when they come to your site you MUST give them something in return. Some music is the default option but don’t give them one poor demo track. Give away a 3 or 4 track EP of some of your best stuff. Why would people want to become a fan and come back if all you want to give them is your cast-offs?
It’s been proven by many DIY music leaders that the more you give away when starting to spread the word about your music the greater the effect.
Have a look at those three options and decide which is best for you. At the outset we’d recommend any of them.
If you’ve used Namecheap and Hostgator and now choose Aweber, their first month costs $1 and is then £19 per month. So, if you’ve managed to do it all yourself with a free WordPress theme (and we think you can with some YouTube help!) you will spend $14.94 in the first month to launch your site with an email list building tool built in and then $22.96 per month as your ongoing hosting and email software costs.
That is a sum that every musician NEEDS to invest in their career!
Step 4. Build a presence and following on social networks.
We just mentioned that you need to build a permission marketing list on the three biggest social networks – Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
But you need to do more than build lists of followers and fans – you need to engage them and create music and videos for them to discover, enjoy and share.
We have for a long time held that you ought to still have a presence on MySpace – there are Google search benefits and it still has a lot of traffic – but 2012 might be the year that we decide it’s no longer worth the effort. It’s definitely not worth a lot of time even now. Current advice is to build a quick simple page with basic info and some music and send people from there back to your new website.
The ‘Big 3’ are a different story – they are now central to all your music promotion and marketing efforts.
Why YouTube is ESSENTIAL for music discovery
This article tells us two core things that ought to inspire you to be an avid YouTube creator!
YouTube is the second biggest search engine and 80% of the searches are music related. Not only that, but people are 3 times more likely to listen to music on an audio & video stream (i.e. YouTube) than they are to buy a download.
Just last week a UK artist, Alex Day, had a number 4 hit, largely propelled by his long term building of a YouTube fanbase. Read more about that here.
Put everything you write, record or perform on YouTube in as many forms as you can!
YouTube isn’t just the best place to have your music discovered – it’s also a social network and you need to learn more about building friends and subscribers. Until we write more tips for YouTube make sure you read their own free guide on how to make the most of all your videos.
We’ve already written the definitive guide to using Twitter as a musician. It’s really good and you can be become a Twitter master if you read the whole thing.
But, it’s Facebook that’s the king for social interaction and the viral spread of your music. We’ve got some great posts on Facebook music promotion here but will be giving some more detailed step by step advice in the near future.
Build a Fan Page, offer some more free music and engage your fans is the basic plot!
Step 5. Play live as much as possible
Hopefully there’s a live element to what you do. If you’re making dance music, this might mean DJ’ing to build a following and to road test your tracks, but in any other genre you ought to be able to have some kind of live performance.
If your music is good enough (see point 1!) and you play locally and promote your shows properly you will get a reaction and the beginnings of a fanbase.
Have a look at this post about getting your first gigs.
And this brand new free eBook from Seth Jackson gives some great advice on how to make sure each show is properly promoted and therefore well attended. Get it here.
For the very best advice on how to get the most out of live shows there’s no better book than Martin Atkins’ ‘Tour : Smart’. I’d recommend it to every artist. Check out his ‘Five pointed inward facing Crush Strategy’ video below to see how this simple touring advice can help you build a following.
I also highly rate Jeri Goldstein’s book, ‘How To Be Your Own Booking Agent: The Musician’s & Performing Artist’s Guide To Successful Touring’ (rightfully considered the ‘how to’ live bible for DIY and indie musicians) and her more recent course on the same subject. You can check that out here with a discount that she offers for our readers.
Lastly (and every time I recommend him I have to point out that all his training is expensive) if you know your live show needs to be improved the acknowledged expert is Tom Jackson. He consults with some of the world’s biggest artists and his experience shows. Have a look at his training here.
Don’t feel that you need to invest in Jeri or Tom’s training – it really isn’t necessary for everyone but if you recognise that you need what they’re selling, we vouch for the fact that you’ll get value from it.
The key is to get out there and play live and build a local following. Expand the area and do the same thing. This is how a live fanbase is built.
Step 6. Spread the word on the internet
Now that you have a website as the hub of your online promotional activity and you have made sure that your material is getting a reaction, you need to do more to spread the word.
That means adding to your network of sites where people can find you. SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Flickr are obvious candidates.
But, the killer promotional outlet that most musicians just don’t spend enough time applying themselves to are blogs!
No need to repeat ourselves on this though as we have already written about Music Blog Promotion. Read that post and think about spending $2.99 to buy Chris Bracco’s eBook – it’s worth it!
Step 7. Have a plan for the year!
I keep meaning to write a detailed post about the need for a plan, but here’s the sketch.
If you get steps 1 to 6 all set and your music is ready to be embraced by a wider audience, you need to devise a plan.
It’s not very artistic and sounds a bit like a job (or being an accountant!) but the last piece of the puzzle to breaking your band is to outline all the steps that you are going to take and make sure that you have all the tools and ‘assets’ ready.
Take a year long diary and schedule the releases you plan to use as promotional and marketing hooks and levers for the year, Not just traditional single releases on iTunes – in fact these should be the final and largely irrelevant aim. More importantly the timed releases of free tracks, YouTube videos, picture sets on Flickr, SoundCloud tracks and remixes etc.
On top of that schedule when you will make videos (lyric videos, rehearsal videos, in the tour bus videos, as well as the more traditional music videos), write posts on the blog of your site (and what they will be about), contact other blogs for reviews, play local shows and shows farther afield, make major Facebook posts and how and when you are planning to make every major step in your band’s year.
Only if you make this kind of detailed plan and work out with your band members who is going to do what can you hope to achieve the success that you, your music and your marketing set up is capable of.
You need endless amounts of music and video to keep your newly acquired fans engaged and to have for them to pass on to build more fans….and it all needs to be made!
If you plan it and share the workload you will have a chance of keeping up with it. If you don’t you are way more likely to fail.
Will these steps work for me?
Yes.
Right at point 1 we made the most important point – if your music makes people sit up and take notice you’re on to a winner.
All the other steps are ways to make sure that your music gets in front of people online and in the real world. Obviously if you make amazing music but it just sits on the hard drive of your computer, you cannot succeed.
The more concerted your promotion and marketing efforts are the greater chance you give yourself of building a fanbase that can support you and spread the word about you further.
Follow these steps and put your own website at the heart of your music and your music promotional efforts and you will give yourself the best chance possible to break your band 2012.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Brilliant post as usual. I check your daily blog everyday. But I noticed you had not updated it in a while so Im happy to see you wrote this great article. One piece that is missing from your website article is which wordpress plug in will allow musicians to sell bundles Tshirt + CD + Poster and other variations as they add value to fans. The reason I say wordpress plug in is because Its very tough to have to do it in topspin and have to pay 10$ per month and 20% of your profit to them. Or 20% to bandcamp or 10$ Per month plus 20% to Nimbit. We need a wordpress plug in that we can use that looks slick and presentable that we can just purchase and mail the stuff out ourselves. Any thoughts?
Hi Chris – We’ve taken a break from the daily posts for the holidays, but they’ll be back on Thursday.
I don’t know of a plugin that enables the selling of bundles. I’ve used the eStore plugin for digital sales and various eCommerce plugins in the past, most of which (not the eStore one) would enable you to set up bundles, but they aren’t designed for that – more usually those kind of plugins are used to create store pages.
But, I think you miss the point about paying a fee and percentage to Topspin, Nimbit or Bandcamp – in the old days before DIY you’d be paying a massive percentage (85% plus) to your label for the privilege of selling records. Having a platform on somewhere like Bandcamp and using their service for 15% is a good deal, especially for those who find building their own store pages beyond their skills.
Equally artists shouldn’t really be trying to sell anything to anyone until they have a few thousand fans on a mailing list and at that point the costs of running a store through a provider ought to be worth it.
That said, I take your point and let’s hope someone like Vibedeck will enable physical and package sales – they take no fee at all!
These are great and simple ideas to help bands succeed for the new year. I think advising bands to think ahead as far as a year is a great thing to do. Many bands don’t think five minutes ahead of that they are doing!
If bands were this organized, they would not need managers, or at least manager’s lives would be much easier!
Great post!
.jordannah elizabeth
thinklikealabel.com
Jordannah – couldn’t agree more.
Good posts on your site – I keep meaning to read your eBook too.
What a great post! Thank you! I’m just getting started marketing new music, and I’ve been pretty overwhelmed and sometimes wondering when I’ll have time to actually MAKE music.There’s so much to think about! I read this interview of Martin Atkins last year and have been reading up on stuff about him since then: http://musiciancoaching.com/music-career/touring-smart/ Besides social networking sites, I think shows are probably one of the biggest things I have to improve on.
Hi Jane – I know what you mean – there is a huge amount to do and learn – as well as actually making the music. Make sure that comes first though – without that you have nothing and it needs to be off the scale good!
Martin is the real deal.
Bst of luck.
Ian
Thanks for this post, great tips and links, it’s got me really psyched to make 2012 a big year! I’ll definitely be following Chris Rockett’s music marketing challenge, and cheers for the link to Chris Bracco’s ebook. Getting talked about on blogs is one thing we need to work on, so this is invaluable, making $2,99 a bargain!
Neil – You’re welcome. He ought to be charging more for it!
Great post.
This is a rather advanced and strategic list to teach a band to market themselves a viable brand.
I don’t mean to seem pessimistic, but there are a lot of bands out there who really don’t feel like they have the patience to complete the tasks like these tactics. I believe bands should rely on publicists and managers who have experience to help guide bands through these types of marketing tools and ideals.
Bands are so busy creating, that it could become a burden to work so hard had becoming famous.
The indie, DIY, and professional music industry is nothing but an enigma and a crapshoot, and the only ones who really succeed do… tour their asses off, but they also know to work with labels and network with people who can launch them in a way they may not understand.
Nonetheless, amazing post. Very well done.
.jordannah elizabeth
thinklikealabel.com
Hi Jordannah
You’re right that there are lots of bands who don’t have the patience to complete these tasks – and they will FAIL!
I think it’s fair to say that a band can rely on management and publicists to help them with these tasks, but when? They need to learn how to do this themselves and put in countless hours at this promotion and marketing (as well as creating music) to build the start of a fanbase to attract the help of a manager.
I’m a working manager and if an artist can’t be bothered to do this work themselves, I am very unlikely to take any notice!
All great advice here. In terms of Bandcamp, I strongly advise setting no minimum price for downloads. The Wilful Missing album, which has been available for a month, has found its way onto numerous filesharing websites already. So, if fans (or potential fans) want the music for free, they will get it for free. Best that they get it direct from the artist, in exchange for an email address, and thus the relationship is started.
Today I’ve had a really heartening Twitter conversation (with me speaking as @wilfulmissing ) with @O_Kwadrat from Indonesia, and I think 2 of his tweets really encapsulate why I feel we are doing exactly the right thing with our pricing policy:
“I really do love your music. At first, I stole your music on the net, never thought that you share it for free on bandcamp”
“and now, I already order your CD via bandcamp. Greetings from Indonesia, and keep up making great music! Sorry for my English”
This also highlights another reason why a “pay what you think it’s worth” pricing model works well. What the album is worth in Indonesia will be different to what the album is worth in the UK, so why make an Indonesian fan pay a UK price? My experience is that to let the fan name the price, we have more sales. The average price isn’t really all that low, either.
Albert – Thanks again for sharing real world experience of your efforts.
It’s simply great to know that you can discover a true fan by offering free tracks.
Your pricing point is also very valid!