This site is a blog for musicians and music industry people. It is a free educational resource and it is also the way I advertise my music consulting services. I am an entertainment professional with deep roots in the music industry. Throughout my music career I have been a major label A&R representative, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a reality show producer, a bass player and the head of a digital record label.
Brannon McAllister is the co-founder and designer of NoiseTrade, an online service that offers free music to fans of artists in exchange for their contact information: an email address and zip code. Prior to working with the site, Brannon did record packaging and websites for a variety of artists in the Nashville music scene. However, he attributes most of what he learned about the economics of free music and the music industry in general to being part of the process of building NoiseTrade.
I recently chatted with Brannon about building a successful free music service, how his platform can benefit artists and strategies artists can increase their chances of success within the current climate of the music industry.
So How does NoiseTrade work?
BM:
When artists sign up for NoiseTrade, they can post a single, a live show or a full album. Fans then download the music in exchange for their emails and zip codes, which can be imported into any mailing list application, including FanBridge, Emma, Constant Contact and MailChimp. Many of these services allow artists to send localized email blasts to promote specific shows and / or manage mass mailings to promote upcoming albums, song placements, festivals or national tours.
The site widget can be embedded on artists’ sites, either on a splash page in front, on the home page or even within an online store.
How many artists are currently using your service?
BM:
The site has approximately 4,000 artists. We handle well over 100,000 downloads through the site per month, and about five-ten artists join the site every day. The quality ranges from 14-year olds with a microphone to bands like the Civil Wars, a band that used NoiseTrade to gain thousands of new fans, and currently (Early Feb 2011) has the #1 spot on iTunes.
How did the idea for NoiseTrade come together?
BM:
The first I heard about it was back in 2006. Derek Webb, who’s a songwriter that I’d followed for a few years called me up and said he wanted to meet up at Jammin Java, which is a coffee house based music venue down in Columbia, SC. I drove down from Greenville where I lived at the time and we met up for coffee and talked a bit. He explained this idea he’d had for a while. His own record Mockingbird had come out recently, and there were the seeds of the idea for the whole platform at this time. In September of 2006, he gave away Mockingbird and just required fans to type in five e-mail addresses and zip codes. In about 3 months time, he gave away 80,000 copies; 20,000 was in the first day, the next 20,000 was in the next week and so on.
I’m not very familiar with him as an artist. Did he already have a pretty big fan base?
BM:
The record he’d given away had released earlier that year, and he’d sold about 20,000 copies. He had a pretty decent-sized following. From there, it was a proof of concept. Because the album giveaway went so well, we were sure we had a great idea to apply to the overall platform. We started working on it, and it took quite a while to launch. We launched the site on July 4, 2008 and required fans to enter five email addresses. Some of the other platforms like Twitter and Facebook weren’t quite as dominant as they are now. And at the time, having fans refer their friends by email was our best way forward.
Tell me about the product as it is today. There are so many platforms now. What are the strengths of NoiseTrade vs. any of the other folks collecting email addresses: Nimbit; TopSpin, etc.?
BM:
I think our first priority is been to make it free on both ends of the equation. We make it free for our artists and our fans. We’re making free music, but we’re also providing the platform for free. At this time we find providing the basic level of service for free to the artist enables more artists to join the platform than would otherwise. It encourages a long tail vs. just artists that already understand the economics of free. Initially we did have a sign-up fee of $250 for our artists. Over time, we found the way to run our business without having to charge the artist that startup fee. It just made a lot more sense to provide it for free.
How is it that your business makes money?
BM:
Fans can tip the artists at the end of the download process. They type their email address and zip code and are given a chance to give the artist a tip, anywhere between $1 and $100. NoiseTrade keeps 20% of that transaction, and the artist gets 80%. What’s nice about that model is that it immediately covers all our bandwidth costs. As long as the proportions stay pretty regular, that scales along with the overall growth of the site and covers all the costs of running the site.
Which percentage of people actually do tip in exchange for the free music?
BM:
I’d say 5%, so it’s not very many at all. But I will say that when artists ask fans to tip a certain amount of money, the percentage goes drastically up. Left to their own, 5% of fans are going to give money if they are given a choice. But if an artist actually builds a landing page for a campaign and leaves a message for fans saying, “We think this is worth $6” or “We think this is worth $8,” a much greater percentage will tip at a higher rate. And then when people do tip it’s pretty good. The average tip is between $4 and $5.
We usually tell our artists that they can expect between 3% and 15% of fans to tip, depending on how much they are willing to push for it. If you’re an artist that is mainly concerned about building a mailing list, you just focus on telling your fans it’s free and don’t worry about the tips. Many artists earn a few hundred dollars on tips, but a couple have netted as much as $4,500 in a few months.
Say you were trying to explain NoiseTrade to my mom- she’s never used a computer. How would you explain this platform to her? What is the value proposition for a band?
BM:
Basically, it’s simply a way for artists to exchange music for information about their fans. Ultimately, it’s providing the fans with what they want, which is free music, and the artists what they want, which is fans that have never heard of them through recommendations and information about where those fans live and how to contact them. We still collect zip codes and emails.
Is there a back end? Is that dumped into a .csv, or do you have a mail management client as well?
BM:
We provide the artists with a .csv. They can easily click a single button and down comes the contact file they can drop into Emma or Mail Chimp or whatever they choose.
What about sharing options? Where can you move this, embed this, place this?
BM:
As far as simply sharing a link, you can obviously do that through Facebook and Twitter. But we use an embed code to be able to let artists embed the widget on any website. We even have some artists that build a simple landing page that explains to fans what to do and what the album is, so they can brand it however they want. Using the NoiseTrade landing page is also really helpful and gives fans a more direct way to share and find information about the artist.
Who have been some of the DIY artists that have had success on the platform, and what is it you think they’ve done with the platform that was more effective than others?
BM:
I think that artists that have the most success with it are those that actually turn it into a campaign. Rather than simply uploading music and expecting people to show up and download it, they’re messaging their core fan base already. They’re prepping them for it by building anticipation towards the free music and then messaging their fans hard about it throughout a campaign. Artists that have done a really good job in various ways would be Katie Herzig. She has a growing fan base and often opens for Brandi Carlile. At her shows she can mention she has free music available. I think some of the ways she’s done a great job is that depending on the situation, she’ll change up her strategy. For example, if she has a song that’s featured on a television show, she’ll feature that one single on her widget for a short period of time, for a week or so. As people find out about her after hearing her song in the show, they’ll find that same free song available for the cost of signing up for her mailing list. In some cases she’s even given away a full album.
Artists that post music and don’t put in any effort may see very little results: only 50 or 100 downloads. But some of our most well-known artists have seen anywhere from 15,000-40,000 downloads over the course of several months. Most professional artists that give it a real effort tend to fall between 1,500 and 7,000 downloads.
I’m going to switch gears on you a little bit, because you actually have the design skill set that makes your perspective even more interesting. I would love to talk to you about some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen with artists packaging themselves from a design perspective with their album covers, press materials, websites and other materials. What advice would you give to artists looking to find and hire a designer, or things they should keep in mind when designing their own stuff? Let’s start with an album cover.
BM:
I think in the days when artists’ records were going to be stacked up on a shelf, where you’re seeing the top spine as you’re flipping through it, the pressure was on to make sure the title or artist’s name was high up on the artwork. I don’t think that’s as big a deal these days. The key things for artists now is to not make their name too small. They need to design it with postage-stamp-sized icons on iTunes in mind. This might help artists lean towards a bolder design in their color scheme that will be more eye catching on a smaller scale. I even see artists on NoiseTrade making the name of their band absolutely tiny, and it makes no sense for a 240 pixels square.
That’s true. You are really left with a Chicklet of the album artwork sometimes. What about from a web design perspective?
BM:
One thing that’s true is that I think artists can get away with a lot more simplicity in their web design than they think they can. I think most artists could actually do fine with a single splash page that has all their connecting points on that one page. I’m thinking in terms of a Twitter feed, a Fan box from Facebook, tour dates, some album cover and a link to iTunes and Amazon. As long as they have that on a single page, I feel like they should go ahead and use that for their website and then spend most of their time out on social networks talking to fans and using the social media space as a home base, rather than creating a huge website presence. There are artists that need to create a huge community and do a huge main site. But I think the majority of artists are going to be served just fine by a single splash page.
————-
To learn more about Brannon and NoiseTrade visit the NoiseTrade website. You can also keep up with Brannon via his blog or Twitter.
J Sider is a guitar player, singer, songwriter and the Founder / CEO of RootMusic Prior to founding RootMusic J booked and promoted bands in a variety of venues and on tour. I had heard great things about the RootMusic Application for Facebook and J was kind enough to take the time to speak with me about his career path and his relatively new company.
J- Thanks again for your time. Tell me how you became involved in the music business?
JS:
I grew up in a musical family and I’m a musician myself. I wanted to start to take my career a little bit more seriously. I grew up in a small town, and I asked around among the folks that play music and said, “How do you make it in music?” Nobody gave me a really straight answer, so I decided that understanding the business of music would help me meet my goals as a musician. I started working at a local coffee shop, booking bands and paying them out, marketing for them and getting lineups ready. It was there I began to see how that whole process happened and why people decided to book certain shows on certain night and what the best marketing practices were. I was just starting to get out into the world of music and take it more seriously. That was in Virginia. Over the next six years, I just kept stepping into the next level. I went from that coffee shop to a small venue, getting my foot in the door, mopping floors, whatever I needed to do while showing them I had a little bit of knowledge about how to do things from the previous experience. Then I went on to the medium-sized venue and then a larger venue and then the last venue was a 4,000 person capacity. I oversaw a 30-person team and managed everything from ticketing to the lights and sound. That was the Great Salt Air in Salt Lake City.
Were you able to continue your own music while doing all this?
JS:
I kind of got wrapped up into understanding and working inside the business side of things and really loved it. It gave me the opportunity to have a paying job and get to be around everything I loved. Because I was managing these venues and had access to the stage at every level – whether it was local bands at the coffee shop or regional bands at the medium-sized venue or bigger bands at the larger venues – They would come to me and say, “Get us up on stage and get us booked.” I started to make friends with different bands and started managing a few bands as well in the different cities I was working in. I certainly kept writing and recording music. I was thinking that the more knowledgeable I could be about how to be successful as a musician by learning through these different experiences, the more likely I would be to really take my music and do it right. I’m still at that point where I’m still writing songs and playing music, but right now my time is wrapped up on RootMusic, but I still play music and play with friends. I grew up singing a lot in choirs and picked up guitar and started writing songs.
. What did you learn were the best marketing practices for getting people out to shows? You started at a coffee shop where most nights you are dealing with the hardest job of all – getting people out to see an unknown commodity – what did you learn doing that gig?
JS:
There are a number of different marketing strategies depending on what level you’re at, what resources you have and what kind of a budget you have. What it boils down to is being creative and authentic. Instead of just getting out on the street and putting up posters and fliers- you need to understand the type of people you’re marketing to. At the coffee shop level, see which of your friends are coming to shows and what kind of people they are, where they hang out, what type of music they like and try to meet that demographic.
Be authentic and go up to them and say, “Hey, we have this show tonight. I know you haven’t heard us before, but we kind of sound like this, and we’d love to see you. We’ll buy you a beer.” Some of the best turnouts I’ve seen are when bands get really creative. For example, there’s a band that had a show and there weren’t a lot of people supporting them at that point. One of their shows was in the middle of the week, and of course it is hard to pull people mid-week. They found a house that was just around the corner from the venue and threw their own happy hour at the house, so when people got off work, they invited all their friends and their friends’ friends and had a keg or two. The band went to set up at the venue, and when the band was about to go on, the person at the house got called and shut everything down. Everyone had to leave the house, and the whole group went straight to the venue, paid at the door, enjoyed the show and the band got to have a great crowd and expose them to their music. You can’t pressure people to go to your shows but making them want to come to your shows is essential.
Does this apply as much as the shows get bigger? I would imagine it becomes more about advertising, right?
JS:
To a certain extent but for the bigger shows you can also run specials. Depending on what State you are in you can do things like telling your fans that if they come in groups of three or more, they get specials at the bar, or they get to meet the band with a group of five. There are a number of incentives you can give to your fans. They love you already, but give them a few reasons why they should bring friends, and you’ll get more people through the door. The marketing that’s used these days is still traditional, and there’s a lot of room for people to be creative and authentic which goes a long way. You need to understand that your fans are similar to you and would love to come out and be entertained, but you have to give them something different. The most important part of course is the music, and making sure you have great tunes.
Jumping forward to the recent past. You were booking a 4,000 capacity in Salt Lake City. Where did you head from there?
JS:
Intermittently through these different venues I was managing I went on some big-budget marketing tours which helped me even understand more to how people reacted to things I put out there. I went on the road for six months and set up a big display that was two tractor trailers long for different companies. It would be at music festivals, and you’d have about 4,000 people at these festivals and would be able to interact with people and understand what they respond to and what they don’t. After that, I came off tour and had some money saved up and for six years had been thinking about different ideas and how they could be more efficient. I looked at a couple different industries that were using technology to really improve the way the work was done and make things more effective and efficient with day to day activities. I kept getting frustrated with the lack of solutions there were out there for musicians and venues. I was going to manage a band or start this company, and I decided to start the company.
Tell me what RootMusic is about…
JS:
RootMusic is all about being authentic and being creative to the point where we’re finding solutions for the real day-to-day needs. I feel like a lot of music companies out there are either too tech heavy or too music industry heavy, and there’s not a good balance there. But I also feel like they’re trying to come up with a new way of doing things or some grand idea that’s going to solve all these problems. What I was always frustrated with was that nobody was helping me solve my practical day-to-day needs as a musician or a band: to get in front of my fans; to organize my e-mail better; to do all these different things. That’s what Rootmusic.com is about as a whole.
A good way to go about it might be to go over the key problems you chose to tackle first and how your company is proposing to solve them.
JS:
The first one and the biggest gap we saw was on Facebook, where all your fans often are quite regularly. There was not a good way to represent yourself. The way Facebook works is you sign in and go around and look at friends’ photos, etc. But the reason it works is because you are also sharing your photos and showing what you’ve been up to. We also wanted to build in music into that experience. You generally trust what your friends send you. We started Rootmusic to directly address that issue, whether you’re a local band just starting out or a hugely popular act. You have to represent yourself if you’re a local band, you want to have a place to point to where you can say, “Here’s the sound, here’s what we look like, here are a few songs and videos. And if you like what we’re doing, please send our music around.” We built in that functionality where anyone can go into your band page on Facebook and share it with their friends, and they will send it directly to their friends’ wall and it can be played directly off the wall. The same thing goes for major artists that have been using this already. The Grateful Dead and Snoop Dog have sent out their songs to their fan base and in only a few hours have 100,000 listens to the music player.
I have to ask the tough question – there are some companies out there that do similar things. ReverbNation has a music tab, iLike has a music tab. I don’t believe either of those have the viral sharing mechanism you just mentioned, but I noticed that yours is also a paid service. Why RootMusic over the other solutions?
JS:
There are a few things. First, we allow you to represent yourself and have a professionally. Right now if want to do what we allow you to do anywhere else it would cost you $500-$5,000 to hire a design firm. That’s what it costs minimum for you to get a custom tab made for you. Working with bands at these different levels, I know folks don’t have a lot of cash to spend so we wanted to make it possible for them to do that. At the same time, we wanted people to take it seriously. If you make everything free, your customers aren’t really dedicated to your product. Some other companies might have more tabs implemented, but we’re now the second largest music app on Facebook. Bands are using the marketing tools we built in to get in touch with fans and the fans are coming to the page, spending time there, getting more fans and higher fan engagement. It’s a professional look and has a viral feel to it, and you’re paying more attention to it, even if you’re only paying $2 to have it up. It’s $2 per month or $20 per year.
Where can people learn about your service?
JS:
www.Rootmusic.com. We have a tour and info videos. We focused a lot on making the user experience really great, so you should be able to find all the information you’re looking for within a click or two.
How long has RootMusic been a company?
JS:
We’ve been up and running for five months. I think it’s the same thing as promoting a good show. If you have a great product and it’s really about making it easier and putting something great into other people’s hands, it will work out. It’s just getting the word out. As of today (8/31/2010) we had over 25,000 bands that have signed up all over the world. It’s really interesting to see some of these bands that sign up. I’ve seen a few of my friends’ bands that I haven’t seen in a while pop up, and it’s great to see.
Another thing – we’re always open to suggestions. This is all about the musicians and the managers of the bands and what you’re looking for. There have been a number of times where we’ve completely switched what we were doing because there have been hundreds of e-mails coming in asking for something. The video tab was one. We took time out of what we were doing and built that out. We’re very much all about listening to what you need as a musician and building exactly that and nothing less.
The Facebook app with the video functionality are the first steps by the sound of it. Are there other products that are live yet?
JS:
It’s just the band page application right now. We’re adding to that every day. Once a month, we roll out with new features. We just integrated with YouTube, so now on the music player itself, for example, if you go to the Grateful Dead or 50 Cent’s page, you can play the music player with the sound cloud track. But if you want to get paid performance royalties for those songs that are streaming, you can drop a YouTube link into the music player at RootMusic.com and then on Facebook it will show up and the music will start playing as it does with any track, but in the banner page above the track, the YouTube video will start playing automatically. So your fans are getting some extra content to watch your video. But if you’re a bigger artist, or you’re getting paid royalties, you as the artist will get paid for having the video stream itself. You can actually make money off this platform by just having people stream your songs through that YouTube integration. Of course the music keeps playing while your fans look at your photos or write on your wall or look at your Twitter.
Tell me what the future is for the company. What are you looking to tackle?
JS:
I can’t go too far into that right now, but it’s very much built on what we hear from our users. I can’t wait to get more ideas from them. We have a number of things we want to build out and have talked to tons of musicians and managers, all the way from the ground, up. Just to make it more efficient. We already know you’re looking to represent yourself and distribute and market yourself. Some of the next steps are trying to market more efficiently and understanding where your fan base is and making sure you can get in touch with them easily. You can look at the product we have out today as a very basic version, and just know it will become much more powerful the more we have to work on it. Any ideas and thoughts are greatly appreciated and sincerely looked at as options to build out.
From your rather unique vantage point- do you have any suggestions of things people should be doing as best practices or common mistakes you think are easy to avoid when promoting on Facebook?
JS:
The first would be don’t spam your fans on the wall. If you’re just constantly throwing stuff out there, they will turn you off and not come back. One of the main things to remember about Facebook specifically is, if you have 500 fans and then you send out something to the wall that syndicates out to your fans’ news feeds, your 500 fans only get that if they’re interacting with the page. You have to give them reasons to come back. That’s why with the band page, we’ve made it so that you can share a photo, video or a song or upcoming show to all your fans from that page. What we suggest is sending out a song and then above that in the message box say, “We have some new tracks up on our page. Please make sure to send a few songs out to your friends and let us know what you think.” Always give a little bit of direction to your fans when you send something out and give them a reason to interact with you. Not only does that help spread your music, but it also makes it so when you send a message out through your wall, more of your fans are more likely to get that message in a news feed.
—-
Learn More about J Sider and his company RootMusic
Lou Plaia is the Co-Founder and Vice President of Industry Relations for ReverbNation. I know Lou from my days at Lava / Atlantic where Lou was the head of Marketing prior to starting ReverbNation.
Musician Coaching:
Why and how did you start ReverbNation?
LP:
We pretty much started ReverbNation based on all the stuff we were seeing that was going on out in the music space about three and a half years ago. MySpace was growing like crazy and not allowing artists to take full control of a lot of things; artists were not able to extract a lot of things or see who their fans were. So we wanted to create a non-fan destination site, a marketing software platform to give artists marketing tools to get their music out there, syndicate their content everywhere and try to funnel in fans to the fan management system we also provide. We have 485,000 artists and are growing at about 20,000 per month. We also have 15,000-20,000 managers, labels and “other industry professionals” – anything from publicists to third-party marketing companies.
Musician Coaching:
What are the most popular widgets that you have right now?
LP:
One of the most popular is Tune Widget. It’s basically like a “Website in a box.” It puts everything on your ReverbNation profile in one nice widget so people can see information about you, your shows, your store, they can join your mailing list and share it with their friends. It’s got your music, your videos, your press, pretty much everything on a profile all in a widget form. And you can post that anywhere on the social networking sites. It’s just html that you can post anywhere. Our Show Widget is probably our second most popular, and that’s another widget you can put anywhere. We try to be the home base of everything for an artist. So artists can upload all their shows into their ReverbNation profile or enter them one-by-one and take the widget and copy and paste the code anywhere on their own Websites. Anytime a show is added to their ReverbNation profile or edited it automatically gets added everywhere else that widget lives. So it saves you a lot of time and effort. You put your shows up once on our site and it posts everywhere else. We also have feeds from Live Nation, Jam Base and Eventful. So if your shows are already posted on any of those sites they automatically come up into Reverb and vice versa. So if you’re on ReverbNation, those sites automatically post out to those other venues as well.
Musician Coaching:
What is the community like on ReverbNation? How has it developed, and are there success stories?
LP:
It’s mostly used for tools. We have 480,000 artists, but I think maybe people log in every couple days or once per week. A lot of times there’s really no need, once you’ve posted your widgets, to constantly go to your Reverb Page unless you want to update songs or videos or send e-mails. We have one of the largest e-mail management systems. It is called Fanreach. We have 110,000 artists using it right now.
Musician Coaching:
Tell me about the newer tools that you have released…
LP:
A lot of artists don’t have their own websites, and we kind of believe you shouldn’t just have a MySpace page, but a lot of artists use MySpace as their official page. So we said, “Let’s see if they want to create their own website.” And we give them a tool called Sitebuilder to do that. We partnered with a company called Bandzoogle, and when artists sign up to their ReverbNation page for free, the first thing we say is, “Do you want your own website” and “Do you want your own domain name?” There is a service charge for that, because it’s one of the premium services. It’s $18 per month. We give you a Web site, templates and host it for you. We launched Sitebuilder a couple months ago. We also have the number one artist application on Facebook called MyBand. We have a million active users as of last week.
Musician Coaching:
You also do digital distribution for artists. How does that work?
LP:
It’s $35 per year per release – and a release can be an album or one song, and most people put up an album, but if you’re also putting up one song it’s also $35. We take no commission, and basically your music is up on iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody an E-Music.
Musician Coaching:
What’s the turnaround time on that?
LP:
It’s really up to the retailer, but it’s currently six to eight weeks.
Musician Coaching:
I heard some rumblings about artist insurance. What’s that about?
LP:
That’s something new. We haven’t even announced it publicly yet. We did a study and found out that 50% of the artists in the U.S. don’t have any type of health insurance. So we partnered with E-Health insurance. You go to the ReverbNation site and you can get a free quote on family coverage, individual, small business, short term, student coverage, all sorts of things. You just plug in your zip code and you get a free quote. It’s live right now.
Musician Coaching:
Where do you see this site heading?
LP:
We just launched direct-to-fan commerce –selling directly to your fans. It’s in beta right now to a couple thousand artists.
Musician Coaching:
Cutting out the middle man is better for the artist in terms of splits. What’s the challenge in doing that? Do you think that will be the future or that people will still have to have some sort of shopping experience?
LP:
I don’t think it’s the end all, and I think people will still go to iTunes and Amazon because they’re credit card’s there, they’re comfortable there. But in some cases people want to buy directly from the artist. Doing it this way, our direct-to-fan commerce engine is integrated into all the marketing tools and artist gets. So if they’re sending out an e-mail to their fans about anything, they will have their own store with images of their t-shirts, their CD, etc. There’s a widget for that too. The main function of it is as an on-demand system. So it’s really good for the smaller artist, because if they don’t have money to invest in a thousand or two thousand CD’s or a couple hundred t-shirts, they upload their image for their t-shirt and CD or digital goods. Basically, if somebody buys something, we make it for them immediately and ship it out for the artist. There’s no investment for the artist at all. You can basically start selling t-shirts at no cost at all. It’s a little different from a lot of people. If you want to buy bulk, you can do that, and we’ll just warehouse it and fulfill it for you. We’re doing pretty much everything right now.
Musician Coaching:
Do you have any success stories?
LP:
We’re such an analytical bunch of geeks. There is a band called the Clintons from Montana. Recently, they took the data they got from their ReverbNation stats component and took it to a brand – Jim Beam – and said to them, “Listen, we want sponsorship for a tour.” And Jim Beam probably said, “Yeah, so does everybody.” And the band said, “Yes, but look what we have.” And they showed them all the fans they have, where they’re located, their age, their sex, and it was totally aligned with what Jim Beam was looking for. These are real fans on a mailing list. These aren’t friends and things like that. These are real fans you can engage with. That’s all the brand wanted – to engage with fans. They did it all on their own with their own press release. They had our data and called us and thanked us.
Musician Coaching:
Do you have any general advice for artists?
LP:
Have your own website. I know a lot of bands don’t, and a lot of bands can’t afford it. But if you’re using a social network as your own website you have no control over it. They can tell you what store to use, what you can be doing. And they’re not giving you all the data you need to understand your fans. None of them allow you to really e-mail your fans. And I think e-mail is still really important. Everything leads to an e-mail. People still go to their inboxes, even with Twitter and everything else. Use the technology that companies like us offer and use it to understand your fans, because it makes it easier to market to your fans if you understand them.
———
If you aren’t already familiar with the site, check out Reverbnation.
