One of the problems involved with effective social networking and online promotion as a musician is the amount of time it takes. If you have a profile on all the relevant sites, and update your shows and news on relevant listings sites then you’ll slowly find yourself spending more and more time online and less time doing what you love; writing songs and developing your music like you should be.
So what’s the answer?
Well in most cases you’ll find that the general advice to you would be to employ someone to take care of your online sites, or get one of your fans to help you out in a ‘street team’ capacity. However, chances are, if you’re just starting out in the music industry you’re not going to have the cash available to pay anyone as every spare penny you have will be used on your music, and you may not have a fan you can trust with your online presence.
So what happens then? Well, you can either carry on regardless and split your online work between yourselves or you can have a look at www.artistdata.com. By the way – it’s free!
The people at ArtistData are working tirelessly to build solutions to automate as much as possible of the monotonous tasks of updating your social network profiles as well as your artist website and local and national concert databases. The idea being that you input all of your information once, and they update all of your sites in one go, therefore taking the hard work away from you and giving you more time to be creative.
Below are some examples of things that ArtistData allows you to do through their site. Have a look and see how much time this could save you:
They can automatically update your MySpace calendar with new shows and when you post news, blogs, or shows, links to these updates will appear on Twitter and Facebook. They also post a reminder each day-of-show about where you’re playing that night.
The ArtistData Concert Syndication tool allows you to automatically promote your shows to fans everywhere using an ever-growing list of concert databases. And when you announce a date in a new town they can automatically notify local publications of the show, and provide them with your show and contact information.
They provide simple solutions that help you keep information up-to-date on your official artist websites, so you don’t need to worry about learning HTML, or forgetting to update your site, and they can give you your own RSS feed to give to fans, supplying bite size pieces of news, blog and show information. In addition to this they can help you create effective eBlasts to enable you to email your fans directly with important news, shows and information, by applying your ArtistData content to your existing mailing system. They’ll even remind you to do it.
If you’re about to embark on a tour, or find touring hard, then their tour management tools allow you to organise your dates quickly and easily making sure that you’re completely organised on the road. They also generate a formatted list of pertinent information for each day to print out and hand to band and crew, making sure no one misses sound check…or the van.
Unfortunately this isn’t a perfect solution yet as there are some sites that they are unable to work with at the moment. However, in these cases they will endeavour to help you keep these sites updated through the use of custom formatted CSV files. They are also working on a more thorough solution for Facebook which they promise will work seamlessly to integrate your profile and artist page, so that any info you input to ArtistData will be published directly into Facebook.
ArtistData has been in beta testing for a while but has just rolled out a brand new dashboard and is linking with more sites daily. It could revolutionise the way that artists promote themselves on the internet so is definitely worth a look if you haven’t done so already.
We’ve started using it with our clients and they love it. We can’t recommend this highly enough and think this may well become a de facto tool for all musicians. And, seeing as it’s free, how can it not be worth a shot.
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Wow. We can’t thank you enough. Not only did you cover ArtistData, but it’s clear you spent time really learning what our site does. And we thank you so much.