Leverage your online presence

All the mechanisms to market and distribute your music are available online. The downfall is that you have to do it ALL yourself. And while this may at first sound simple and easy, the bigger it gets, the more complex it gets. In my experience of bands, they are most often not equipped to handle the complexity and intensity of looking after their own business. This is, after all, why managers were invented in the first place. But if the band or a manager can master the basics, you can certainly utilise this amazing tool to your best advantage and, if not actually put yourself in a position where you can sell your music without a label, certainly put yourself in a very strong bargaining position so that you can get a deal out of a label that is the most helpful to you and contains the least onerous obligations.

 

Knowledge and proactive behaviour

 

The key to successful use of the internet by musicians is knowledge and proactive behaviour. You have to know what is available, where you can go and why. You have to be proactive, move fast and use whatever tools you can to keep one step ahead of the game. The internet is a dynamic and fast-changing environment. It is not enough to merely put up a website and hope for the best. Look how Facebook totally superseded MySpace in about a year. This will continue to happen all the time. So make sure you are online a lot, keeping up to date and working it. Otherwise, it simply won’t work for you.

 

The key approach to have is one of dynamism. Make sure you have a lot to say and that you keep your online content updated often. This doesn’t necessarily mean posting a new song or a new video every second day, but it does mean keeping your online platforms busy with gig updates, news, opinion pieces, links and what have you. As we go on to explore the various options below, keep in mind the idea of a living, constantly changing environment where you can grow a community of fans by being continuously active.

 

Band website

 

Due to the advent of free social networking sites, there is some debate as to whether a band actually needs a dedicated website anymore. It costs money and labour to maintain and is harder for fans to find than the social networking pages are. The thing about a dedicated website is that you can control every single aspect of it, you can use it to recruit members to a database, you can monitor exactly how many visitors you get and most importantly, you can change it entirely at any time.

 

There is some information that simply MUST be on your website: the band bio, a discography, contact details and gig details. But this is really the bare minimum that you need to justify a site’s existence. A news page is a very important addition to this list. This is a place where you can announce new gigs in a story format – that is, with a press release. You can also announce sponsorship deals, tours, video shoots, and recording sessions. In fact, anything you like. You can even use the news page as a kind of letters page where members of the band take it in turns to write up reports on gigs. This is a really cool thing to do because it gives fans insight into the personal workings of the band and develops a stronger sense of relationship between your audience and the band. So when you have been out of town in particular, it’s a good idea to get one band member to review the shows, say what was cool, thank people and generally have a few words to say about the shows.

 

 

Keep them coming back

 

Once you are getting good traffic to your site, your next task is to keep them coming back. One highly effective way to do this is to set up the site with a newsletter and to aggressively drive your visitors to become members. This means the sign-up for the newsletter must be very visible on every page. You can motivate viewers to sign up by having an ongoing competition where once a week you choose two random newsletter members to get into the next gig for free, or give away stickers or something else easy but desirable. You want people to sign up for the newsletter for two main reasons. Firstly, you want to build up a database of email addresses so that you can send information about gigs, merchandise, your recordings and so on to as many people as possible. Secondly, you want to use the newsletter as a mechanism for getting people back to the site as often as possible. Once you start getting large volumes of traffic to your site, you will start to see more happening commercially. That is to say, if you have things to sell on your site, you will only really start to see sales happening once you achieve a decent level of traffic. Your newsletter is a prime way of achieving these traffic levels. Send it out once a week, with links back to pages on the site where you have made updates such as: news, gigs, new photos, a YouTube video etc.

 

Digital strategy

 

Of course this implies that your readers can actually buy stuff off your site. This is where your digital strategy kicks in. Your own official band site MUST offer your goods for sale, whether as digital downloads, physical CDs or merchandise that your fans can buy. Make sure you put mechanisms in place so that you can link to an online retailer to sell your goods. This can effectively turn into passive income for your band, but it requires dedicated planning and forethought to achieve. Unless you have the contacts and the knowledge to implement a really good site that can justify itself by generating a lot of traffic and actual sales, you may be better off using the free social networking options.

 

Originally published in David Chislett's One, Two, One, Two: A Step By Step Guide To The South African Music Industry. Download a free copy of the book at www.davidchislett.co.za.