Promote Your Band and Double Your Odds of Achieving Success
It isn’t enough to have a MySpace and expect fans to find you. And, it isn’t enough to print flyers and post them at Guitar Center and the club you’re playing in. Yes, you have to do all of these things but even these three together aren’t enough any more.
Add these 7 tactics to promote your band online and watch your odds of success soar.
Create a website. Yes, this is in addition to MySpace. My favorite band website builder is Bandzoogle. It’s simple to use. You don’t need to know anything about building a website to use it. You can post information, photos and even music. You can sell your music or give it away. You can create and house a database of fan emails and send emails out. And best of all, you can try it for FREE!
Craigslist. As mundane and monotonous as it is to post to Craigslist, you must do this every week. Yep, every single week. Learn to write creative headlines and drive fans to your website.
Ideas for headlines:
“Music Download At No Cost This Week Only” (You do have music available on your Bandzoogle website, don’t you?)
“If You Like (Name An Artist You Sound Like) You’ll Love This Band.”
“Just Get Dumped? This Song’s For You.”
“Not Suitable for ________” Fill in the blank with your exact target market. Then in your ad put something like “unless you’re really cool.” People can’t resist knowing why they are excluded from something.
Zvents/City Pages/etc. Be sure you list your upcoming gigs on EVERY FREE EVENT site you can find. Zvents is one we use all the time. But there are many more. Not sure where to look? Try googling “live music” + your city and see what sites come up. Find those that list your genre of music and begin submitting your gigs to every one of those sites. It takes a bit of time to find them all and set up accounts but once you have, it doesn’t take so long to update them for future gigs. Just be sure to keep a list of all the sites, your login and password information.
Internet Radio Many internet streaming radio stations accept submissions from unknown artists. Black Velvet Deluxe worked with Maximum Threshold when we first got started. Great guys to work with. We had our guitarist record “This is Nate Beck with Black Velvet Deluxe and you’re listening to Maximum Threshold” on a usb drive and we mailed it to Maximum Threshold to use. That got the band even more exposure than simply playing the band’s tunes.
It’s also important to build relationships with the internet radio stations. Befriend them on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Promote them on your social media as well. “Shout out to Maximum Threshold for playing our tunes” type of thing on Twitter will go far.
Jango If you have a little money to invest, I highly recommend Jango. From a listener perspective Jango enables you to select the bands you like and stream their music for free. From an artists perspective you pay Jango to play your tunes. You tell Jango the bands you sound similar to and they serve up your music to fans of the better known bands. Those fans, when they hear your music, can reject it or become a fan. If they become a fan, your music is played for them in their rotation.
You can target fans by age, sex, geography. You can post information for your Jango fans. Your fans can email you via Jango and you can reply. Fans can elect to share their email address with you to get ongoing information from you.
It’s a great way to start to build an online fan base.
YouTube Yes, post videos of you playing on YouTube, but you can do so much more. Have a friend conduct an interview with the entire band. Watch a TV interview of a band. Jot down the questions that the interviewer asks and have a friend ask you and your band mate those same questions on camera. Post it to YouTube. Take a video of you and your band at rehearsal, creating new music. Post it to YouTube. Take video backstage before or after a concert and share that with your fans on YouTube.
Become Friends With Your Fans Seriously. Build relationships with the fans you develop online. Email them. Ask them for help. We had one fan who emailed a local music festival, telling them he and his friends had been to their festival three years in a row and they’d really like to see our band, Black Velvet Deluxe, play at the festival. We had another fan who went to a taping of a Eddie’s Trunk and took our CD and personally gave it to Eddie.
A band needs three things to be successful; talent, marketing and luck. Unfortunately most bands only rely on the first one – their talent- and wonder why they never “made it.” But you have control of two of the three elements of success. Do you want a 33% chance of success or a 66% chance of success? Use these marketing tactics to promote a band and double your odds of achieving success.