Actually, yes you do!

And it is the single most annoying issue that I have to deal with time and time again with every musician, apart from perhaps those who refuse to listen to constructive criticism about their material.

I think it stems from the misplaced belief that when you believe that what you’re doing is great, you think that every opportunity will come to you. Sure, you must be great, but you still have to work to build a fanbase that will help you get to your goal.

Endlessly I have musicians sit in front of me and explain that they haven’t got a website because they have a Facebook page and they don’t have an email list as people won’t give up their real email, or because they don’t want to spam their fans.

Two facts

1. You have no choice. Owning and controlling your own website with your own domain means that you are no longer at the mercy of Facebook or MySpace (see what happened there?).

CD Baby's reasons why you NEED a website

Facebook really messed up your plans when they introduced Timeline the other day I’m sure. We’ll tell you more about how to combat that soon, but there’s the rub – if you don’t own your own real estate on the web, somebody else can change the game on you.

You absolutely should have a presence for your band and music on Facebook but having your own site means that you dictate how it looks, what the content is and what you want a fan or someone dropping by gets to see and hear. Your ability to design and make this space feel how you want it to and put across your image is unmatched by any social network.

Then there’s the fact that because you own it you get to use it that way….forever. No-one can take that traffic away from you and no matter what game gets changed, you’ll still have a place that your fans will want to come to. And that’s where you build the core of your relationship.

Of course, put all your videos on YouTube. But when you email your fans or tweet a link make it to the video that you have embedded in a post on your site, not to YouTube. That’s to the post on your site where they can also sign up to your mailing list, buy music and merchandise or listen to a stream of your new EP – all the way you want them to.

2. A mailing list means that you can interact with more of your fans more of the time – asking them to do whatever you want – come to a gig, buy a single, listen to a song. Whatever….you want.

People always moan to me about how people won’t sign up to a mailing lust. That’s because you’re doing it wrong. If you’re good and they like your music and you make the offer to sign up to your mailing list a good one, guess what, they’ll sign up. And they’ll stay signed up and they’ll open your emails.

If that’s not happening either your music isn’t up to snuff or you’re doing something else wrong.

And, when they want to hear from you, your emails aren’t spam.

Here’s why

I was inspired to write this post because of two things I read today. One was an old post from Ariel Hyatt on how to write an effective newsletter and this post from CD Baby about why your website is better than Facebook, from which we borrowed the image above.

Then there was this very lengthy business post about the future of the web in general and blogs in particular that completely debunked the myth that email is dying out to be replaced by messaging on Facebook and similar services. Utter rubbish.

If that’s your reason for not building a mailing list of fans, I’d urge you to read the whole thing. It’ll take half an hour, but about half way through it explains why building an email list is now more important than ever.

So, hopefully, that rant will inspire you to take on both these tasks. Every musician needs both.

Just imagine, if you have a mailing list and your own site, life can be really simple. You post something that you want your fans to see to your site and then you email them asking them to take a look. They open your email, click a link and go to your site. They like what they read, take the action you want them to and maybe buy your music or a ticket to a gig. If you’re really smart they might share it on Facebook or tweet it and spread the message further.

Rocket science apparently to most musicians. But not to you – just simple marketing.

Here’s how

We’ve written about this lots before – most recently in ’7 steps to break your band in 2012′. See steps 2 and 3 for everything you need to know about building your own website and setting up a mailing list for about $20 per month. Really.

I don’t really care whether you use the services that we recommend for web hosting and mailing lists. As long as you buy your own domain and build a website and use something to build a mailing list, that’s a massive step forward.

Check that post for all the ‘how to’ info and we keep adding stuff to our section on ‘Fan mailing lists’ here.

But, more than anything else I can tell you, do these two things as soon as you have some music that you are convinced the world will want to hear. You’ll be astonished at what you can achieve.

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.

I’ve been looking at how to promote music on Spotify.

There’s a couple of things that I needed to sort out for artists that I work with relating to their presence on Spotify. That led me to start to make some decisions about the basics of using Spotify for promotion as a musician – so this is what I have uncovered so far as it applied to the issues I was having.

This is just about getting the basics right to start with – I think I’m right, but it’s a work in progress, so let me know what else you know!

The obvious issue is that with Spotify getting serious traction in the UK and the US, any artist would be a fool not to use it, have their music on there and work out how to maximise that exposure.

I know some people think the royalties are too low and you’re better off not being on Spotify – that might work for Coldplay looking to maximise their ‘week one’ sales, but I see no justification for a DIY or indie artist not being on there. Exposure = fan attraction and relationship building. I don’t care about the ‘missed sales’ or low revenue from those plays. I want to see an artist build a long-term sustainable fan base who will pay for the ‘fan experience’ in a multitude of ways – downloads and streaming of the artist’s music being just one of those!

Get your music on Spotify

In order to use Spotify to promote your music, the first thing you need to do is get your music on there!

It’s actually pretty easy to get your music on Spotify. See their own page about that here.

If you have a deal with someone that gets your music on iTunes, then you’ll likely be able to get on Spotify easily. For example, Tunecore have you covered.

Spotify Artist Profile page

All Music Profile with biography and images

The most obvious issue that I had was that some of my artists don’t have a biography or pictures on their Spotify Artist Profile page. As far as I can tell, the Artist Profile page is generated from the metadata that is supplied by your digital distributor (or aggregator) to Spotify and then added to by pulling information from the All Music Guide.

If you have a biography and images on the All Music site, these will be pulled wholesale into Spotify. If you don’t, it looks like you need to go to All Music and submit information (although they will write the bio themselves rather than using what you submit directly). This can take a month or so but will then be pulled into Spotify. If you have any evidence that this can be done directly with Spotify, please let us know!

Send fans to your Spotify Artist Profile

I then realised that I wanted every artist site that I work on to have a prominent link in the sidebar (where you have your links to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc) direct to the artist profile on Spotify. I’d suggest that this is now a ‘de facto’ addition to the networks that you should link to.

To find the URL of your artist profile in Spotify, search for your artist name and click through to the Artist Profile page. Directly under the band name you’ll see a ‘Share’ link. Click on that and if you select the Twitter option it will bring up a pre-prepared tweet including the URL. Just cut the bit that begins with ‘http’ and that is the direct link to your Artist Profile page. (Don’t bother with the actual tweet!)

Find a Spotify icon by searching for that in Google (image search), download it and add it to your sidebar. If that makes no sense – time to ask your web nerd to help you out again!

Why do you want people to go and check you out on Spotify?

Well, it’s another place where they can listen to your music and with the addition of Facebook integration, everything they listen to on Spotify will show up in their Facebook Ticker feed (unless they bar it, which I know a lot of people have!). That could be a lot of exposure for your music to their friends.

People tend to highlight (star) or add to a playlist music that they discover on Spotify – which should encourage them to keep coming back to it. As I said at the start of this piece, I’m not bothered about the small royalty (although you will earn a little by people listening to your music on Spotify) but I am interested in them becoming fans!

Nonetheless, an obvious advantage of being on Spotify is that people can buy your music from within Spotify with one click and add it to their library.

Promote using Spotify playlists

There’s already been a lot of stuff written about how you can use Spotify playlists to promote your music once you have it on there. It’s a simple idea and one that you ought to be trying to see if it works for you.

Creating the link to share a playlist works the same way as we set out above for finding the ‘http’ link for your Artist Profile. Just go to the playlist that you’ve created in your Spotify account and ‘click ‘Share’ to get the URL.

My Chemical Romance using a Spotify playlist in a blog post

You’ll notice that the playlist will be from your personal user profile. Now that you must have a Facebook profile to open a new Spotify account, it might be worth setting up a ‘fake’ Facebook profile using your band name as the first and last names of your new Facebook profile. That way your Spotify account will have your artist name and that’s what will appear in your playlists as ‘Created by…’. NOTE – Facebook frowns on fake profiles…a lot! So, you’re probably better of just having the playlist come from the Spotify account of one of the band members. As with Facebook, this problem is obscured for singer/songwriters who perform under their own real name!

Simple playlist rules are that, unless you’re already very successful, you don’t want to just make playlists of your own material. Make up lists of your influences, your genre or your local scene. They don’t necessarily have to have your music in at all on occasion. Just having music to talk about by referencing a playlist can give you something to engage your fans with. For example, a short blog post on your influences with a short playlist for your fans to listen to as they read could prove very popular.

Then, of course, you can leverage other online coverage by offering your playlists to other sites. How about what you’re listening to on the tour bus that you send to all the local ‘what’s on’ blogs for each town you’re visiting on tour?

There’s plenty of other ideas for promoting your music on Spotify if you have a quick search – such as ‘piggybacking’ and recording covers as discussed in this article on Ditto Music.

Advertising on Spotify

One other option is to advertise.

You can do this to people who you know have Spotify by using a Facebook ad that is additionally targeted to Facebook users who ‘like’ Spotify.

Or, you could advertise on Spotify itself. This can be surprisingly cheap and you’ll no doubt have noticed how an element of Spotify advertising is now de rigueur for all major label releases, whether that takes the form of the audio ads that non-premium Spotify users hear or the various banner placements that you see within Spotify. You can learn more here.

I’ve been lucky enough to see what Spotify can do with their in-house promotion when working with major label acts. They post on their blog, mail to their newsletter (over 2 million strong), post to their Facebook page and so on. It can drive awesome amounts of traffic and interest to an artist.

Of course, that’s generally available to internationally recognised acts, but they do offer this ‘Platinum promotional package’ to bands that they take a shine to. Remember that Spotify is run by music lovers and they want to be seen to be helping grass roots acts.

How can you get spotted by them and offered this kind of help? Well no-one says that’ll be easy but do the things we always recommend – get some great music locked down, build a presence online and offline with a live following and drive attention to it. If you add a little bit of focus to Spotify’s blog and their Facebook page (by commenting there etc), who knows if that might help you get lucky!

Before you count on that though, get your music on Spotify, send your fans to your Spotify Artist Profile and creatively promote your music and your scene through playlists.

That’s the basics of how to promote music on Spotify. More as it develops!

What if you could track every play of your music on radio or TV, anywhere in the world….in real time?

What could you do with that information?

Would it make a difference to your music marketing and promotion efforts?

And, what else might you learn if you had this information?

Well, you’re about to find out.

Radio airplay monitoring

Until very recently radio airplay monitoring was the preserve of the very few – usually major labels and music publishers, some of the big indies, and perhaps some of those artists with a current major label deal.

It’s expensive and primarily exists to apportion airplay royalties. If you have access to it, proper airplay monitoring gives you an amazing set of data to have to hand when disputing your publishing royalties earned by that airplay of your songs. Trust me when I say that the data collection and reporting of your publisher and the various global collection societies (PRS, ASCAP etc) can leave a lot to be desired.

With accurate airplay monitoring data to back you up you can press a very strong case with the collection societies for better accounting and therefore more money returned to you.

The same monitoring is also, of course, used to prop up the radio-led, chart driven mainstream, providing data to create those same charts.

Sure, the record labels can use that data to focus promotions geographically, reward stations that are playing their artists and lobby those that aren’t and generally target their marketing efforts using real data rather than blind hope.

Now, if you’re a major label artist you might just have seen reports generated by one of these companies or their competitors:

Nielsen
Radio Monitor
Radio Wave Monitor
Mediabase

But, a new service, Kollector, looks set to stick a rocket up the lot of them by providing the same richly detailed information to all and sundry. And, in fact, the information that they supply (and the detail) promises to be deeper in some areas than anything currently on offer. And, it’s in real time!

As a DIY or indie artist you just haven’t had access to this data before.

I’ve been using the Beta for nearly a month, and, ……it is amazing!

And, right now, it’s free. Kollector will be introducing payment in the future but it may well stay more affordable than the existing competition – which isn’t designed for consumer use in the same way as Kollector.

So, what is it and how does it work?

Kollector is an online real time application that tells you where and when your song is played – worldwide. It then displays that information in a variety of ways using graphs, maps and timelines. The data breaks down into individual plays on named stations at specific times. All done in real time.

I have actually been able to catch the tail-end of a broadcast play of a song I’m tracking, live, as it is reported by Kollector.

And, it’s so simple, it’s laughable.

You sign up for an account and upload mp3′s of the songs that you want to track (your own or songs that will give you data for comparison) and within a few hours they appear in your dashboard with airplay data. That’s it.

They won’t tell me how they do it, but it’s a combination of various elements such as ISRC code identification and audio recognition, like Shazam.

The plan is to return data on 10,000 stations globally – in essence to report on airplay from every significant broadcaster. As at today, they are tracking 1850 stations over 54 countries. This is a great start.

What can you do with this information?

If you’re getting any significant airplay, then having a complete log of your airplay is going to help you forecast your performance royalties and have evidence to present should you get underpaid by the collection societies – an unfortunate reality for those with some airplay but not enough to show up well in the often used ‘sample’ methods that many stations and societies use.

A sample of radio airplay data displayed in Kollector

That’s important as it affects your bottom line. And, I’m sure that’s what the people behind Kollector were really thinking about when they set it up, but the data is so rich that it can help you do a whole raft of things, as well as royalty checking.

Since part of the system relies on audio recognition, you can upload tracks before release and see which tracks are getting the most plays. Of course, if you’re an unknown DIY artist this isn’t going to help you if you get no airplay at all. But for a swathe of the indie world (and when all 10,000 stations are online), being able to monitor all the tracks on your album pre-release and see which are getting a reaction at radio – even if the data sample is small – is of huge benefit.

Such information can help you choose singles when you know that a particular track is already enjoying some support.

It can also make your target territories far more obvious.  Knowing when you’re getting any attention outside your own country is very difficult, even in this internet age. As such, it hampers artists’ ability to know when to try to make their mark overseas. Kollector is a massive aid in finding that out.

Having station and timestamp data means that you can contact a station and talk to the producer of the relevant show as well as programme directors or even DJ’s and offer station idents, interviews, or other incentives to increase the support for your tracks at station, or even show, level.

What about touring? The data can help you pick countries, areas, cities and towns where you know the radio station supports your band. And you can contact them before your shows for competitions, ticket giveaways and more plays.

Having facts about any airplay you do get is also a massive tool in helping persuade the next show or station to play your record. Most radio stations follow others rather than blaze a trail, so knowing that your music already has media support can help tip people into playing your records. Hand them the data from Kollector.

It can also help you avoid fruitless promotional efforts. If you get asked to do something for a station that hasn’t supported you before, you will now want to know why. Perhaps they’re about to get behind you and regularly play your single or perhaps they just have some dead airtime to fill and it’s not worth your commitment.

Watch this video to see how it works in practice.

What if you don’t have any airplay yet?

Ah, but how does this really help the DIY musician who’s never had a record played on radio anywhere?

Well, firstly, if you’ve actually released anything and done any promotion at all, you might be very pleasantly surprised. Upload your songs and see.

The guys at Kollector told me about one artist, an industrial band, who thought just that, but when they joined Kollector they found that they had been getting some airplay from a station in Austria. They contacted the station and discovered that the producer on the show had found their music and become an ardent fan. He hooked them up with a local promoter, they got a gig and they played with more support from the station and established a toehold somewhere that they would otherwise have overlooked.

And, if you don’t have anything released yet or you don’t have any airplay of music you’ve released so far, you can still use Kollector for comparative analysis.

Make a very honest appraisal of your music and pick a few songs and artists that are truly very similar to what you do and how you sound. Upload them and track where they are played. Mix up small indie artists with some bigger players and you’ll be able to identify hundreds of shows all over the world that play your kind of music. Even better if these are artists with whom you’ve played on the same bill.

If you’ve been honest about your comparisons you now have a list of shows that you can target when you do release something. This is not a list of stations and producers from an industry directory – this is bang up to date facts about what shows might be interested in your music. If you approach them with your knowledge that they’ve played bands in your genre, your chances of getting played are already greatly increased.

Not only that but such a comparative exercise will also tell you where in the world your style of music gets the most support. General information it may be, but it’s still valuable to know.

What’s not great about Kollector?

Not much. Like I said, I think it’s amazing.

The one thing that it doesn’t do yet that I’d like to see is an artist overall view. For now, you can only look at where a track is getting played and I think any user wants to see where anything by an artist is getting played – the overall picture. I’m assured that this will be possible in the future.

I’m also told that a mobile app to access and view the data is on the way. I’m not sure that it will add greatly to the functionality of the system but I know artists will be amused to browse their data whilst sitting in a bar and point out to their friends that they’ve just been played in some far flung corner of the world!

So, Kollector is an awesome new tool for every musician with different appeal and uses depending on what stage you’re at. But, with radio airplay monitoring now available to all, it’s undeniably useful.

Radio stations react to their audience. If you find out that someone is playing your music by using Kollector that means that they like it. If they keep playing it, it means that their listeners like it too. You can then leverage that interest by focusing your further marketing and promotion efforts on that show, station, city, area, and country.

And you couldn’t do that before.

What’s the best way to get your music noticed online?

Is it a Facebook page, a thriving Twitter presence, YouTube videos, your own site?

They are all a factor (and I’m always banging on about how essential your own site is – because that’s true), but the one thing that any musician can and should do to increase their online profile is to get coverage on music blogs.

Music blog promotion should be a key part of any online music marketing strategy, yet all too often I see musicians who don’t take this advice on board.

And I don’t know why.

Well, I have a sneaking suspicion that there are two factors involved. One is that they feel it’s a bit ‘cheesy’ to be seen to be seeking out reviews, links to their sites and general positive mentions from bloggers (duh?), but it’s the other factor that I think takes the biscuit – it requires a bit of effort and a systematic approach.

And, whilst a lot of musicians don’t like the former, they almost all hate the latter – again, because it’s not seen as artistic to take a methodical approach to promoting your art – that is if you’re prepared to hawk it at all!

Hopefully, we’re preaching to the converted here.

How to get music blog coverage

Assuming that you’ve got some good quality recordings of some great material and you’re ready to ask the world for it’s opinion, you need first to build that simple and appealing website (free music, bio, pictures etc) and a profile on the key social sites – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the current ‘must-have’ sites as far as we’re concerned, but MySpace (groan, but yes it’s still ranking in search engines), Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Last.FM and Flickr are next in line.

Then, start sending traffic to your site by using those social media profiles and by getting music blogs to talk about you and your music.

When they do, their readers who choose to then check your site out should easily be able to discover your great music because you’ve set everything up properly.

Getting that blog coverage is crucial.

It’s an opportunity that didn’t exist for artists just a few years ago. You now have a genuine chance to discover, reach out to and get real publicity from the medium where most hardcore music fans are looking for news on new artists. You must grab this opportunity with both hands!

Identify music blogs to target

The process begins by identifying the blogs that you think will like your music and where you have a chance of getting a mention. That means that Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan should not be your first targets.

Start smaller and look for blogs that are covering your genre, maybe that have even already covered bands from your local scene.

At first, don’t just look for music blogs, look at blogs that might feature your music for other reasons. Perhaps a local ‘what’s on’ blog, or one that covers a topic that is related to your genre. If you’re music is like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you’d be likely to get some joy from surfing blogs that you notice sometimes cover music that fits that scene.

And then, don’t just pitch them – get to know the blog, read posts, leave comments and you’ll be noticed by the blogger – all bloggers see all the comments left on their blogs (unless the blog is massive and group edited), and I promise you that when a blogger sees something in a comment that piques their interest they will go and check out the site of the person who left it.

This is just as true for music bloggers as for any other type of blogger!

The problem with this approach is that you’ll need to aim for something like 100 blogs as an initial target to end up with a good 20 or so that become real possibilities for ongoing support. And finding, cultivating and later pitching to 100 or so blogs requires time, effort and organisation.

Most musicians won’t bother, but they are missing one of the secrets of modern music promotion.

Music blog promotion eBook

For those that do want to embrace music blog promotion and to do it right, there is a key resource that you need – Chris Bracco’s ‘How to Really get your music on blogs’.

It’s just been updated and revised. It was already the accepted handbook on how to do this and has been downloaded well over 5000 times.

It was free until this revision but Chris has now begun to charge the outrageous sum of $2.99 for it. If you can’t commit that amount to your music career, there’s no hope for you!

We very rarely recommend other people’s work and don’t like to advise people to spend their money elsewhere, but this is a great eBook that will definitely get you more success with blog coverage of your music.

If you want chapter and verse on music blog promotion, go and check out ‘How to Really get your music on blogs’.

Florrie - Image by Paul Scala

This is a tale of a DIY musician who hasn’t quite made it yet, but  is well on their way.

There are lessons that everyone who reads this blog can take from her story so far.

This is the sort of post that I’d normally put on our Daily Tips for musicians site – kind of unplanned and all over the place – but I’m thinking about mixing things up a bit so that we get more great stuff on this main site and this seemed like a good post to start with.

It’s about a girl called ‘Florrie’, who I met about 5 years ago. I haven’t been in touch since, but I’ve seen occasional glimpses of her career as she navigated her way to success and a couple of things appeared this week that made me want to hold her up as a paragon of the DIY musician route.

Key elements of the DIY musician

There are so many things about the way she has built a career that fit with what we talk about:

• She’s embraced the ‘freemium’ model, but her fans still go and buy the same songs from iTunes et al;
• She has done her 10,000 hours, and more;
• She has collaborated with exceptional talents to learn more to advance her own talent;
• She has embraced Social Media to build a fanbase;
• She isn’t looking for a record deal until she is ready and has worked out who she is, what she wants and how to get where she wants to go!;
• She engages;
• She has leveraged a brand association to give her a push (lucky, or the result of all the above hard work?);
• She has a functional, informative and active website at the centre of her online presence

In this article in today’s Daily Mirror Florrie says that in her first effort, in a band with two friends called ‘Fi Fi Saloon’, they bombarded agents and managers with tapes. I was one of those managers!

We went and met them and they played a few tracks in their rehearsal room. As I’d done a lot of work with pop producers and writers we thought that there might be something we could do to help. Florrie was also enamoured of our involvement with the Spice Girls – as she was/ is a massive fan. I’d been managing their writers at the time of ‘Wannabe’ and had those pop contacts still (that’s a story for another day though!).

As it turned out, we kept in touch for a while but we knew that we weren’t the right management for them at the time. I felt that the band as it was would not make it in the way she obviously hoped to, although I remember thinking that I’d feel differently if the focused girl on the drums could also be the front-person. Of course, the fact that she would clearly turn into a head-turning beauty doesn’t hurt in the world of pop either.

Keep going!

But, she didn’t give up.

She changed it around and took a chance, moved city and hooked up with some writers who had offered to help.

That didn’t work, so she changed it again, and…..because she had put in the hours honing a talent, she got a break.

Her talent made that chance. She’s been playing drums for 15 years already and she’s only 22 – we’ve talked about the 10,000 hours of practice before – buy this Malcolm Gladwell book if you don’t know what we’re talking about -Outliers: The Story of Success

And, following on from that, she has taken the time to focus on her own music before floundering around desperately looking for a record deal.

On her site, she has written a piece explaining to her fans why she doesn’t want a record deal, yet! How cool is that?! In fact, I can’t ever recall someone being so upfront about their plans, clearly stating that they have ambition but also making the fans feel that they are right there in it with her.

This is what she says:

“The reason is that I believe there are certain things that I need to do first to give me the best chance of succeeding in the future and also allow myself the time to experiment and create the music I really want to make. I’m also having loads of fun and that is what it’s all about.

The most important thing is to keep getting my music out there to as many people as possible and hopefully finding new fans along the way. The best way for me to do this is to continue to make my music available for you guys to listen to whilst not being afraid to develop my sound as I go along. I’m also going to keep touring, practising, and perfecting my live performances. At the same time I’m going to start releasing my own records independently for a while.”

It’s so refreshing!

You can read the whole explanation here.

And, her site is also a paragon of ‘best practice’ for all artists – lots and lots of free music, but there’s a shop too, lots of social media links, and an email sign-up. Interestingly, she doesn’t ask you to trade an email for the free music, which I always recommend, but instead she comes right out and asks you to tweet or post on her facebook page – and asks for your opinion on her music.

Most of all, it comes across as completely genuine.

Songwriting secret

One more thing, in the Daily Mirror piece there’s a hidden gem about songwriting. I know that Florrie has had the good fortune (born of her hard work) to write with some very successful songwriters – and whilst doing so, she has done the right thing – listened and learned.

She says;

(She has) “benefitted from Higgins’ “scientific” songwriting. It’s a very specific method. They write lots of different bits, lots of melodies and after the lyrics are written they pick the four or five best. I can write 25 melodies for one song, so you never know how a song is going to turn out. It works.”

That’s a tip worth knowing – Brian Higgins has only sold a few million records!

I hope that she goes from this pivotal moment and becomes a great artist. She has the talent and is trying to uncover her art before looking for mainstream success. I think she will become a household name with a great deal of musical integrity.

What can every DIY musician take from this? Well, look at her steps, her dedication to honing her talent and the way she’s using the modern online world to build a fanbase before she looks for success and a helping hand.

Sure she’s been lucky, but that luck comes from her hard work.

This is a guest post. Nick Lewis is a digital strategist working on behalf of Zimbalam – leaders in digital music distribution.

One of the first things everyone learns about social networking is the importance of keeping up a regular stream of content. This can be daunting for people more interested in micro-tones than micro-blogging, and this social media 101 lesson often ends one of two ways: social media diarrhoea or just plain giving up.

Obviously, neither of these outcomes is going to help you sell records.

What is going to help you sell records is putting up content that gets people interested, that gets them talking and that people link to.

Quality counts

There’s no sure fire way of doing this, but one thing is for certain: it’s quality not quantity that counts.

Think about what happens every time OK Go upload a new video to YouTube. It causes a storm. It shows up in thousands of Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds, blogs and even ‘real world’ media. Their video for ‘This Too Shall Pass’ (the Rude Goldberg Machine version) has had over 25,000,000 views and counting.

If you’re an enigmatic glitch-hop wizard, dancing with dogs is unlikely to match your tunes. It’s also worth pointing out that OK Go have had a tough time translating their YouTube success to record sales.

Arguably, OK Go’s problem stems from their real talent lying in making music videos rather than albums. I, along with the other 99.9% of people who watched ‘This Too Shall Pass’, and didn’t buy the album, find the video more entertaining than the song. Why would I want to buy the music when I can have the video for free?

Even if you manage to accumulate thousands of ‘fans’, you may not have accumulated many ‘real’ fans. If you want them to buy your record as well as follow you on Twitter, you’d better have a bloody good record; otherwise, they’ll just like you for your (hopefully) witty tweets.

Being popular is great, but it’s not the same as making a living from what you love.

Social media success for musicians

Clearly, the key to success online is stringent quality control across all aspects of your profile, starting with the music itself. If you’re going to ask people to listen to you, you’d better have something to say. Less frequent but quality updates will keep people paying attention to you, whereas constant streams of drivel will make people switch off.

The overall lesson is simple: be great at everything that you do.

What this means for social networking for musicians is picking the channels that you relate well to and putting some thought into your updates.

Regular is good because it keeps you in people’s minds, but being in their mind as ‘that annoying musician who doesn’t stop talking about toast’ is not what you’re after. In fact, if you talk about toast too much, your followers may forget you’re a musician at all.

Stay focused, talk to your fans.

Make great music, upload it, talk about it.

Don’t get carried away with stories about your Nan’s dog. You want people to follow you because they’re interested in your music.

Stray too far off topic and you risk losing those that are interested in your music, as well as attracting those that aren’t.

You know the old saying: ‘if you don’t have anything to say, put your phone away and stop tweeting.’

At the upper end of the scale, you might end up with a viral hit the likes of OK Go’s videos. At the lower end, you’ll steadily accumulate genuine fans who care about what you do and what you have to say.

If you’re lucky you might even get enough to sustain a career.

Image by aintakhart

This is a guest post. Chris Rockett is a musician and music marketing consultant from London who uses Direct-to-Fan marketing tactics to help level the playing field between DIY musicians and major label artists. Feel free to follow along on his Music Marketing Blog or Facebook Page.

A common email I get from up and coming musicians…

“Dear Chris I’ve been reading your stuff for a while, and I know that I should be using Facebook but my page is just dead, I have a lot of fans on Twitter and the blog but when it comes to Facebook nobody seems to be interested. Can you help?”

Well in this post I’m going to lay out a few of the “instant win” things you can do in the hope that we can cure this Facebook problem.

The first thing you need to know is that Facebook is very different from building a following on your blog or Twitter. Some would say that it’s a little bit more tricky because you’re dealing with real people who cannot hide behind a fake Twitter profile or anonymous blog comment.

This means that interaction on Facebook is much more real and rather than being scared of this fact you can use it to your advantage if you approach things in the right way.

Why are you on Facebook at all?

The very first step is to sit down with a pen and paper and work out what you are trying to achieve from the big daddy of social networks in the first place.

• Are you trying to build your fan mailing list?
• Is your goal to build a strong relationship with your fans?
• What do your fans get out of following you on Facebook, that they can’t get anywhere else?
• Do you have your own website or is Facebook your main presence on the web?

For most bands and musicians the aim will simply be to get more fans faster, but I would also like to suggest that there is a lot of benefit from just building a close personal relationship with your fans because they will then feel protective of your music and responsible for letting others know about what you do.

It’s good to get a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve in the beginning so that we can steer the musical ship in the right direction. When you’re sure of your aims, get started.

1. Promote Your Fan Page

To be honest, it’s easy to let people know about your page because Facebook have made a whole bunch of widgets and like buttons available for you to use.

The point is that you want to give your fans a way to like your pages even if they are not on your website.

Watch the video below for information on how to add your Facebook page to your blog.

2. Commit to Four Posts Per Day

As you may have heard before, my golden rule for success online is “quality and consistency” and this is true of nearly every aspect of your career.

If you really want to make more of a Facebook splash, commit to producing four quality posts each day, and remember that you don’t have to always go on about what you’re doing. Most of the time you should find the coolest new stuff in your music scene and start a conversation about it.

If you use bit.ly you can keep track of which of your posts gets the most clicks and at what time of the day. That way you can see when your fans respond the best.

3. Lose the Auto Posting Tools

I love tools that make life easier and there are a lot of sites out there like ping.fm which will let you post to all your social networks in one go.

The problem with using these kinds of tools on Facebook is that your page success is all about the interaction you achieve with your fans. So if you post up something cool, get a bunch of comments and never even reply, your fans will move on.

People want something unique on Facebook and not just another version of the same message they’ve seen on Twitter, Stumble Upon and Digg.

The other problem is that auto-posting sites just post the link with no image, and if you have ever been on a band page which has automation set up you will know how crap a spammy list of links really looks.

4. Post Your Thoughts and Ask for Theirs

The main area of your fan page is the wall – this is the heart of the action and the place where you’re going to have most participation with your fans.

The secret when you’re posting is to say something like…

“Hey guys I just found this link to a great thing, have a look and let me know what you think.”

Each time that somebody makes a comment on your wall all their friends see it and it will be a like a little recommendation for your music.

5. Don’t Just Post Links

I would say that about 90% of the stuff on most Facebook pages is just people finding a link to a website and then posting it up. This can get a little bit boring after a while.

If you start to paste in YouTube videos, Flickr images and slideshow presentations, you will make your page stand out from the crowd and people will be more excited by your content.

Fans really love visuals and a lot of people aren’t using them to their best advantage.

6. Quality and Consistency

One reason that people will fan you on Facebook is because they know that you regularly post up great stuff that they can share with their friends.

It’s kind of like a time saver; they can look cool to to their friends by piggy backing on your greatness!

Never forget this…

Quality takes longer, but the benefits in the long term (and even in the short term) are so much better.

Always ask yourself if what you are giving to the fans is really going to impress them.

You want to be their secret source of fun, and not post a bunch of crap and noise just because it kind of relates to what you do.

7. Create a Cool Homepage

The truth is that Facebook kind of sucks for creating a unique design. You will always have the simple blue Facebook stuff everywhere, which we all know and love.

But the fact is that you can use this to your advantage.

You need to create a ‘landing page’ that lets the music fans know what you’re all about, and asks them to “like” what you are doing in exchange for something cool.

You could even put a welcome video on your page.

It’s likely that your fans will have never seen anything like this before, and you will stand out from the crowd.

Facebook’s latest change, by introducing iFrames for Fan pages (and letting FBML die a death), has made this more complicated, although there are lots of apps coming out to make it easier.

I know that Ian is going to do some posts on this on this blog, but for now, check out the video below from a marketing blog that has great ideas.

How to build a Facebook Landing Page using iFrames.

8. Be a Chat Monkey

The whole point of being on Facebook in the first place is conversation and friendship, not just a one way stage for your ideas.

If you can catch your fans the minute they post on your page you have the chance to build a back and forth conversation that all their friends will see, and which will give your page a big boost.

This is the underground tactic that successful Facebookers use to build a loyal following to their fan page.

The problem is that you don’t want to spend your whole life just watching the news feed in the hope that people may comment. No problem, you can use a cheeky little service to send you an email each time somebody posts.

Visit Hyper Alerts.

9. What is The Sweet Spot?

I referenced to this in another point, but it is so important I want to go over it once more.

Time matters on Facebook

If your fans all work ‘nine to five’ then there is no point posting all your content at 11am because unless they’re doing some sneaky underground social networking, nobody will be listening.

There are no rules here because each set of music fans is different. The best thing to do is to shorten your links with bit.ly and then try posting at all different times of the day.

After a week or so you will be able to see which times work best for you.

10. Check Your Stats

All the stuff I work on has a “Daily Dashboard” which is just a spreadsheet I use to track things like how many albums were sold, how many people joined the mailing lists and how many people visited the sites overall.

But remember that tracking can be like crack for music marketers and you should limit yourself to 10 minutes a day and then start to implement your findings.

From my point of view, the main goal of tracking anything is so that you can stop doing things that have very little impact. Put your time and money investment into the tasks that will get you to your outcome the fastest.

Facebook makes tracking very easy with a tool called “insights” which you can see above. You should check in there every day and see what is working for you.

Final thoughts

Well that’s my brain dump over!

This is not a comprehensive list, but just a starting point for you to begin taking real advantage of the biggest website on the web right now.

I’d love to hear what’s working for you and any secret tricks you have learnt to boost your page.

Let the comments below be your playground!

Talk soon,

- Chris

Facebook Photo Strip on our Fan Page wall

There is a way to use the new Facebook photo strip and photo viewer to maximise the engagement of your fans on your Facebook Fan page. You can effectively use them as free adverts for whatever you might want to send your fans to look at off Facebook.

We’ll look at how in a moment.

The recent update to the Facebook Fan Pages has given a vast overall improvement to the scope of your music promotion and music marketing efforts on Facebook.

Admittedly, some of the things that many people had learned how to do, such as ‘Welcome’ or ‘Landing’ pages, are going to require more technical ability with the introduction of iFrames. But, provided that you can master the learning curve to do it yourself, or find a tech-savvy friend to help you, the scope of what you can now do to promote music on Facebook has massively increased.

Of course, the companies that currently offer tools for developing your Facebook Fan page without any programming skills will all be offering solutions that will suit most musicians needs.

We’ll look at the options for dealing with the iFrame issue soon, but the first thing you need to do with your new style Facebook Fan page is familiarise yourself with the layout and make use of the obvious changes.

Facebook Profile Picture

As you’ll no doubt be aware, the new layout has moved the old tabs from the top of the page to the left side and replaced them with a row of five photos.

The main profile picture has been slightly altered so that the maximum size is now 180 pixels wide by 540 pixels tall (180px by 540px).

Clearly, if you were using a smaller picture or had a larger vertical picture in the old profile the first thing that you want to do is change that as soon as you have upgraded to the new layout.

Using the new dimensions, create a new image that has some branding connection to the look and feel of your band website and other social networking profiles.

Make sure to remember that you will later have to pick an area of this image to appear as your Fan Page profile ‘thumbnail’ picture all over Facebook (and now all over the internet, in comments on other sites). Facebook needs to edit a part of your new larger image down to a 90px by 90px square for that purpose, so make a part of the larger image ready to look good when cut down.

Once you have a picture in those dimensions, go to ‘Photos’ on the left side of the page, click on profile pictures and ‘Change Profile Picture’.

This will allow you to browse to your computer and upload the photo. Once it’s uploaded, just remember to ‘edit thumbnail’ by clicking the blue link on the picture itself in the upload area to set the smaller area of the image that will serve as the thumbnail.

Facebook Photo Strip

Once you’ve done that, you can turn your attention to the new photo strip and using them as ads for your music.

The 5 photo strip was introduced on personal profiles a while ago and some people got very creative, cutting up images to make strips of 5 photos across that were panoramic shots or part of a larger image. You can find examples here.

Well, you can’t quite do the same thing on your Fan Page because you can’t control where each of the images that are in that strip will go – they are random. They can’t be ordered like they can on personal profiles. Every time the page is refreshed, or for each visitor, the order of the photos on the strip is different.

The photos in the strip will automatically be the 5 photos that you have most recently uploaded to your page – either into the ‘Photo’ section where you may have placed them in an album, or if you have posted them to your Wall through the ‘Share’ status bar.

Photos uploaded by your fans will not appear in the photo strip and you can ‘hide’ any image that you have uploaded that you don’t want to appear in the strip by clicking the ‘x’ in the top right corner that appears if you place your mouse on the picture as it appears in the strip.

Now, using the photo strip as we suggest, you will want to only allow the pictures that you upload specifically to be in that strip to appear there. Just be aware then, when you upload anything else, that it will disrupt this strip and you’ll need to ‘hide’ them.

Using the Facebook Photo Strip as adverts

So, you’ll want to create 5 images (or more as they will randomly rotate in the strip) that will sit in the photo strip and act as adverts for stuff that you want your fans to check out.

As a band, this might be albums to buy, gig tickets or a video you want fans to watch. For us, and we’ll show you how we do it, we want to draw people’s attention to parts of our main site (as you might want to) and get them to download our free eBook.

We’ve also tried to do a very simple design that connects across all 5 images no matter where in the strip order they come up.

Facebook now allows all images to be viewed in their new photo viewer. Therefore, you want the images that you use for the photo strip to open up large if clicked on. When they are displayed in the photo strip the images are each 97 pixels wide by 68 pixels tall (97px by 68px).

But, if you upload them at that size they will appear the same size – i.e. tiny – in the photo viewer.

Most people have been recommending that you simply make your images 970 pixels wide by 680 pixels tall (970px by 680px), and this is fine, to a degree! It’s the same ratio, just 10 times bigger.

The problem is that Facebook then shrinks the images to fit in the photo strip, but it doesn’t centralise the image – just to be difficult.

Correct dimensions for images in the Facebook Photo Strip

For best results, we recommend making the image 720 pixels wide by 720 pixels tall (720px by 720px) with the image that you want to appear in the thumbnail sitting in an area 534 pixels wide by 374 pixels tall (534px by 374 px) offset as we’ve set out in the layout image on the right.

The measurements of the ‘Thumbnail area’ are in the same 97/68 ratio that Facebook shrinks to, and the location of it is a little bit of guesswork – let us know if you think we’re a few pixels off, but it’s working for us.

The main reason for going for these dimensions is that it’s easier to format a square and a lot of images that musicians will want to use will be squares – such as album covers. You can, of course, go bigger or stick to the 97/68 ratio for the whole image but you’ll need to figure out where the thumbnail area needs to go!

Now you’ve got your photo strip images, you need to upload them and turn them into ads.

Uploading is simple.

Just click on ‘Photos’ in the left side bar of your Fan Page and then the ‘Upload More Photos’ box. Upload your images and you’ll be asked to name the album. The name of the album will appear with the photo in people’s News feeds and in the photo viewer so it’s a good idea to name the album something like ‘Your band – special fan offers’ or similar. Once you’ve done that you’ll have a chance to enter a description for each one.

This is the final step in making them each an effective ad. In the relevant description, write what marketers call a ‘call to action’ (basically something that asks the viewer to do something) and put a link to where you want them to go.

So, for us, on the image advertising our free eBook, we’ll say something like ‘Click here to get our free eBook full of tips and advice on how to make it in the music business’ followed by a link to the page on our site where you can sign up for that eBook.

For your band, you might have an image of a new single and in the description have something like ‘Click here to get our new album on iTunes’ with a link to iTunes. Better still, have a link to some free tracks in one image, an album for sale in another and latest gig tickets in another – all linking from the description to the relevant web page.

Publish all the images when you’re set and they should appear. When anyone clicks on any of them, they will expand to full size in the photo viewer and your relevant link will be underneath in the description.

It might well actually prove to be better to upload the images one at a time over a period of a few days. This is because every time that you upload a new image it’ll appear in all your fans’ News feeds, together with the description. Spreading them out will give you more visibility.

And, don’t worry if you want to change the description to point somewhere else as you can always change that later.

Even if you don’t want to go down this route and create images that’ll work like ads, at least use the strip to it’s fullest possibility – perhaps just with a well centred shot of each member of the band and the description linking off to their personal Twitter page.

Lastly, and not wishing to repeat ourselves, only 5 images will show at any one time, but you can have as many as you like set to show in the photo strip. Just remember that Facebook will randomly display them so you want them to look good in any combination and to be consistent with the overall look and design of your Fan Page.

Watch the video and we’d love to see what you do with this advice. If you do set up a new Facebook photo strip, leave a comment and point us to it.

This is part 6 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. You can find part 5 here -Twitter for Musicians – Involvement & Music.

26. Follow big wigs

….and network like you would at a gig.

We posted the other day on the Make It In Music Daily about how a ‘quantum event’ can shift your career up a gear – and it’s true.

Those kinds of events are generally opportunities that arise from someone in a position of power creating an opportunity for you and your music that you couldn’t make happen yourself. Studio time, a chance of a ‘synch’ (your music in a commercial or a movie), a meeting with the right producer – it could be anything.

And these kinds of things really do happen because of who you’re connected to. Yes, these days, you can make a vast amount happen with your own determination and online savvy, but good old-fashioned patronage will help too.

So, just like you would get to know the players in your scene offline at your local clubs, bars and record stores (as we’ve discussed in this piece), target some national and international players that fit your genre and that you know are active on Twitter…..in person.

Richard Russell, MD of XL Recordings

Richard Branson (@richardbranson) looks like he has people do it for him, but Kanye West (@KanyeWest), Richard Russell (@richardXL), Russell Simmons (@UncleRUSH), Jared Followill (@youngfollowill) and Rob Thomas (@thisisRobThomas) are all doing it personally, as are thousands of successful artists, managers, promoters, record company execs, music synchronisation people, radio DJ’s etc.

I know it’s a lot to expect Kanye to reply to, or even see, your ‘@reply’ to him! He’s an example, not a suggestion!

Hopefully you’ll know a bunch of people in this area that you’ll want to follow – just from your media awareness – but there are two other ways to turn up the lesser known, and therefore probably easier to reach execs.

The first way to find these people is to turn again to Follower Wonk and find people whose bio’s say they work in  the ‘music industry’, ‘music synch’, ‘promoter’, ‘booking agent’ and so on. They love to tell the world how important they are in their bio, so this is very effective.

Look at their streams and see whether they are the sort of person who might have a musical connection with what you do.

The killer method though is to look at the medium to big artists that you’ve already identified as your targets (as we’ve looked at variously, such as in point 4 for followers and 24 for superfans). If they’re on Twitter personally, look at who they follow.

Often they only follow a hundred or so people (although they may have 10’s of 1000’s following them!) and in amongst there, hiding, will be the personal feed of their PR person, stylist, A&R man from the label, live agent, tour manager, manager, video directors they’ve used, and all sorts of motley music industry characters that you can unearth. It might take a bit of detective work clicking on profiles to see who’s who, but it’ll be worth it. This is gold! Follow these folks and you’ll be surprised how you might be able to open doors.

Just as an example, look at Florence Welch (@flo_tweet). In her ‘Following’ list, which is only 20 people at the time of writing, you’ll find 3 of her producers and her manager – who you can now contact directly. Pretty useful, huh?

It’s a tightrope to walk, obviously. You can’t just spam these people. Not because they’re ‘important’, but (especially the artists and execs with media profile themselves) because they’re going to have a lot of followers trying to reach them and they are very, very used to being approached by people looking for help. They are very well practised at ignoring you!

Just get inside their mind and see what makes them tick and if a chance appears for you to help them (rather than asking for help), jump in with your advice or skills and see if you can make a connection. Recommend another band – not your own – if they ask for a tip, and then work your music into the mix from there.

Sure, you’re going to need to be lucky for this to lead somewhere. But, if what you’re doing is great, and you’re watching the tweet stream of some of these players, you might get a chance to parade your wares right in front of them – and that is an opportunity that struggling artists never had before web 2.0!

Be alive to the possibility and maybe fortune will favour you.

27. Use TweetDeck or Hootsuite

If you haven’t used one of these, don’t worry – they’re free (well there is a paid option with Hootsuite which I use – see below) and they will revolutionize your social media use.

We’ve mentioned TweetDeck already in this post series at least a dozen times. And, that’s because it’s undoubtedly one of the best third-party clients for Twitter that you can use to enhance your Twitter user experience. The other leader of the pack is Hootsuite – and they’re neck and neck depending on your personal preference. I actually use both at the same time!

A massive advantage of Twitter over other social media is that it’s fully useable wherever and whenever you like. I know you can use Facebook on the go on a mobile but it’s not such a fully mobile integrated experience. Something about the 140 character limit and the exchange of pictures and video makes Twitter the de-facto ‘on the go’ social network for many.

And a third party client like TweetDeck just improves the whole experience because it’s more streamlined, customisable for what you want to see and has more features. It also synchronises between your computer and your Smartphone.

To get the very best out of either you’ll need to register for an account – that allows your settings to be synched across computers or on the web and, in the case of TweetDeck, is necessary to access TweetDeck support.

The key difference between the two is that one is a desktop app that you download to your computer whilst the other is hosted online, meaning that you can access it from anywhere – much like Twitter itself.

This might be enough to determine which you go for.

For TweetDeck, head over to TweetDeck.com and register an account and then download the desktop application to your computer and play around with it.

Then get TweetDeck for your iPhone or for your Android – it’s free. As long as you’ve set up an account, TweetDeck will have the same layout and functions whichever you’re using.

So why is this better than using Twitter on its own site?

Firstly, it sets up whatever feeds you want across a single page that scrolls left to right – as wide as you want it to be – i.e. as many columns as you want.

And, on TweetDeck, you can:

• Run more than one Twitter account at the same time – your personal one and your band one. No more signing in and out!
• Watch activity in your Facebook feed and update from TweetDeck – and do the same for MySpace, LinkedIn & FourSquare;
• Display the information from Twitter in columns with each column showing you pretty much any specific sub-set of feeds you want – All Friends tweets, Tweets that mention you, DM’s, Lists (either existing ones from your Twitter account or new ones made in TweetDeck), Facebook feeds, search results, hashtag searches, trending and on and on;
• Schedule tweets to be sent at any time you wish;
• Add locations to updates;
• Watch videos from links in tweets you receive within TweetDeck – and the same with photos;
• Add pictures and video directly within TweetDeck, including recording from your webcam;
• Auto-shorten your links by setting up your TweetDeck account with the API from your bit.ly account. This is a real timesaver for musicians tweeting lots of links (as you should be) – see the Sentric Blog post we referenced before to see how this is done;

And, there’s loads more functionality that makes using Twitter so much easier with TweetDeck – playing around with it is how you’ll find the best way for you to get the most of it.

There’s a great option to add a column that only shows the Bio’s of your most recent followers (‘New Followers’). This is fantastic, since it allows you to show some real interest and interact with people when they first follow you, thereby creating a deeper long term engagement. If you follow a huge number of people this is a very valuable filtering tool.

TweetDeck also has a directory where you’ll find a whole host of Twitter users listed in various ways – by genre, in user-compiled lists and even in a word cloud. You may well find some interesting people or lists to follow there.

Lastly, they’ve just introduced a new auto tweet extender called ‘deck.ly’ which automatically allows you to go past the 140 character limit when tweeting from within TweetDeck. I’m not a massive fan as I like the fact that users of Twitter are compelled to say what they have to say within that limit – that’s a great part of the attraction, the brevity – but I have been using it on occasion!

So, what’s the difference between TweetDeck and Hootsuite?

Well, not much in terms of functionality, and, as we said above, the key thing is that Hootsuite isn’t running on a computer but on the web – meaning you’re accessing your account from whatever device you’re using and all your settings are saved within the site.

Hootsuite has pretty much the same functions as TweetDeck. The layout is a little different and more flexible than TweetDeck in that the default is to have each profile in its own tab. So, it feels like you have more room to play with. For example you can have a personal account on one tab and a band account on another and keep them separate whilst both are at hand to be flicked through.

I also personally find the display of my Facebook Page wall much better in Hootsuite – not to mention that it’s a pain to set up in TweetDeck!

Hootsuite Screenshot - my set up

The automatic shortening can only be done through their own ow.ly URL shortener (or its related ht.ly) but when you use that you still have to drop the link in the shortening box as you compose a tweet rather than the fractionally quicker auto bit.ly shortening that you get on TweetDeck.

I do prefer the actual click stats that I get from bit.ly, but, overall Hootsuite wins the stats battle – it has more depth and some great stuff like showing you all the ‘influencers’ who have mentioned you and your tweets and how often. These are people that you ought to be in touch with!

It also has your Google Analytics and Facebook Insights account right there in Hootsuite – and that can be a real advantage for spotting stuff and then sending it out as a tweet or responding to something that the data shows you.

Two more tools that Hootsuite has to fight its case are the ‘Hootlet’ that sits on your browser taskbar and you can click on it whilst browsing the web to automatically send a tweet of a link to that site. Seems simple but having it there does encourage you to tweet interesting links to your fans.

Last but not least, and one that make it the default choice for some is that Hootsuite will auto tweet an RSS feed. Not going to get too into that for those that don’t know what that means (sorry!) but in essence you can set it up to automatically tweet things such as posts on your band’s blog. This is obviously pretty nifty!

Because they both do different things and because I don’t want to miss out on bits of information that I might only get from one or the other…I use both.

I set up scheduled tweets in TweetDeck, usually, and have it running on one machine all day. I then occasionally check into Hootsuite where I can check stats and set up search streams more easily.

I’d recommend checking both out and dipping in and out as needed.

Never simple though, is it, as they aren’t the only options!

One of the major contenders threatening to depose the two leaders is Seesmic. It appears to have the best of both worlds with desktop, mobile and web based versions all linking through one account. It doesn’t have embedded stats as yet but it is growing and changing rapidly and I for one will be keeping an eye on it.

Your other options are:

• Cotweet, which is designed for teams of people to share one Twitter account. Therefore seemingly perfect for musicians in a band, but to get all the functionality (and to add Facebook), you need the ‘Enterprise’ version which costs. And, how difficult is it for a band to share a log-in on one of the other platforms?

• UberSocial began as a SmartPhone client that I was hearing great things about (I guess we should have put this in point 12!) But it’s now growing very quickly with a desktop version and very positive users. Well worth looking into

• Echofon is, for me, the surprise package. It runs as an app in Firefox or on a Mac desktop or on a Smartphone. People love the way it syncs unread tweets across its platforms and it appears to be growing aficionados at a very rapid pace. It’s another I’d check out.)

28. Embed it in your site

It’s a key part of your online promotion to be able to reach people in a variety of ways in as many places as you sensibly choose.

Making your tweets (or other Twitter feeds such as a search, favourites or one of your Lists) part of your site or other online presence is therefore a very sensible way to let your visitors get a snapshot of what you’re doing from your Twitter feed.

Having it on your own site can create a very strong first impression of what you’d be like to follow and it can be surprising how many people will add you from a full Twitter feed on your site (rather than just a follow button).

Some would argue that having a full Twitter feed on your site sidebar immediately encourages people to click off to Twitter. I don’t agree and all my testing to date shows that it actually keeps people on your artist site for longer.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument for not doing it, so get on and embed it on your site.

There are literally hundreds of ways that you can take your Twitter feed and embed it on your site – and I recommend searching Google for the latest methods that are on offer.

But, keeping it simple, you may as well use the widgets that Twitter itself offers. They are customisable to a very detailed level and let you choose what to display and how it should look – it’s a very simple customisation process.

In Twitter you need to go to Twitter Resources – and you’ll get the option of designing a widget and then grabbing the code to allow you to embed it in your site or on pretty much any web page, depending on your html skills.

That means that you can embed a widget on MySpace, or most hosted blog platforms as easily as on your main site. I’d encourage embedding a widget wherever you have a presence and can do so.

If your main site is a self-hosted WordPress blog (as it should be) then there are a bunch of plug-ins that approach the Twitter feed from the other end – i.e. by pulling the feed into them and doing the design and layout at that end. This is a perfectly acceptable option and I have often used this Twitter Widget Pro plug-in to do just that.

No discussion of feed driven widgets is, however, complete without talking about Widgetbox. This site has endless ways that you can use widgets on your website. There are loads of widgets that people have already designed or you can make your own using their very simple tools. This site can make you something that’s unique to you and your band and that displays your tweets pretty much however you want, with other functions such as following direct from the widget. Well worth a look.

Whichever way you do it, spread it around and get your tweets front and centre of your web presence.

29. Don’t Spam

If you manage to ignore all this advice and come across as a spammer then all your efforts to build a following on Twitter will be wasted. Being seen as a spammer is worse than not having a profile on Twitter at all.

Shameless self-promotion with no interaction and no genuine interest in the stuff your followers say is tantamount to spamming!

Golden rules that show you know you’re not spamming are that:

• You’re interacting with the people that you’re following, not just adding them and then ignoring them!
• You’re tweeting about your band occasionally without endlessly linking back to your site! Remember any more than about 1 in 5 self-promotional tweets is too many.
• You’re keeping the number of followers higher than the number you follow – any lack of balance looks like you’re just adding people to increase your follow count.
• You’re mixing up all the elements that we’ve covered – RT’s, photos, video, links, music etc.

Oh, and try not to get into fights either – they are there in the digisphere forever and are unseemly – people who follow you will take sides and it can blow out of all proportion. You’ll lose followers and dignity.

30. Use Tweetadder

How can I say that after saying ‘Don’t Spam’? Well that’s the point.

It’s OK. If you’re doing all the above, then it’s fine to mine other user’s followers and add more people as potential followers. We all know now, just like with MySpace, that someone who follows loads of people to get loads to follow them back is doing just that, but….if it’s done right, if the conversation is good and the activity is there, then it’s OK to do that.

The key on Twitter is the amount of adding and the pace and whether you take the time to assimilate new followers and clean up your mistakes (i.e. people you shouldn’t have followed and who you failed to engage).

What you have to remember with all Social Media, but even more so with Twitter, is that you get out of it what you put in. The key word is ‘Social’, not ‘Media’.

So, if you just add loads of people randomly and take no notice of them and don’t engage with ‘@replies’ and back and forth conversation, then you aren’t being social.

If you take all our tips on board and have a rich and varied use of Twitter, then you can add plenty of followers in the hope that they’ll follow you right back.

And, if you’re doing that selectively by searching out what they have stated are their interests, then I don’t see the difference between using a tool to do that and sitting there clicking on hundreds of user profiles manually.

I don’t agree with auto DM’s when someone follows you back nor randomising tweets and sending auto-reworded junk – which is what some Twitter adders and automation tools do. You should be able to tell that that is pointless – numbers mean nothing without engagement!

But, to add followers by careful criteria at a sensible and manageable rate and to schedule tweets – sure.

And, if you disagree, that’s fine.

It’s not for you and you’ll build an even more hyper-focused deeply engaged following. Good for you. My point is that some ragged edges are OK for most artists.

In particular, automation can help to kick you off with a healthy follower count to start with – and then let your music, personality and your tweeting prove your case.

I use Tweetadder to do that for our artists.

There are others that I haven’t used but I’ve looked at the comparative reviews and I’m pretty sure that Tweetadder is the best for the functions that I do want to automate.

If you want to spam people with crap, there are lots of other things available, and Tweetadder has many functions that I don’t use. But for targeted following of likely fans it works perfectly.

I don’t use it all the time, and we are very careful.

In fact, we run it to add people for a few days (never more than a few hundred at a time – and around 60% will follow the artist back if we filtered well), assimilate the new followers and then leave it a while – a week or so and see if those new followers are interacting (so far as you can tell). If not, we will look at why we picked up random followers who aren’t interested in what the artist is tweeting and we’ll refine our approach.

Running a survey to solely your Twitter followers using Twtpoll is a great way to try and gauge their interaction at this point.

You need to have something that you can question them about though. So, first, once you’ve added new followers, tweet an offer for some tracks that will be new only to new followers – a free download – so that longer term followers will already have had them. Tweet something like – ‘For our most recent followers get free mp3’s of A, B and C at this URL’.

Track the URL using a bit.ly link to see how many followers click. It’s a little unscientific as the link can get retweeted but it’ll give you an indication as to how many people that you’re adding are truly interested. You are able send it out to specific followers using ‘@replies’, so you can try to focus it on your newest followers only very tightly using the information in the ‘New Follower’ tab in TweetDeck for example.

All your followers will see it though – which is why we advocate offering something that most existing followers will already have and following up with a survey.

Then set up a survey at Twtsurvey (Twtpoll is for more simple polls) with multiple choice questions – free for up to 100 users (hence why adding 200 or so at a time is a good idea) – and ask the same followers a bunch of questions – saying in the tweet that sends it out that they’ll really be helping you out if they take the survey – or offer a prize to make them give up emails as well);

• How long have you followed us on Twitter (a week or less, between a week and a month, about 6 months, around a year or more)
• Have you downloaded our free tracks from this tweet that we sent out 3 times last week (Yes or No)
• Which of the two tracks did you prefer (A or B)
• Which would you like to see on video (rehearsals or us goofing around)

You get the idea.

Since the results of the survey are self-selecting and trackable, this will tell you what your new fans are thinking as well as whether you’re actively attracting interested new followers – particularly useful and reassuring if you are using a tool to add people.

Of course, you don’t only need to use this to survey or poll your followers to check how well you’re engaging them when they first follow you. You can use it for a myriad of ways to interact with them at any time. Polling and surveying fans when you have built a large following is brilliant engagement.

So, one last thing. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you buy Tweetadder and set it up to randomly add 1,000’s of followers at a time.

I left the issue of using it to the very end of these posts as I k now some people won’t like the suggestion that you use it. For me, it’s simply a time saving device and is therefore worth the cost in man hours saved. I hate the idea of pointless adding of people who won’t ever become fans of your music.

But I do like the idea of using a tool sensibly to speed up the right result.

This is part 6 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. If you wish to link to the post, you might decide to link to that page instead.