Make sure you get the word out by reading and commenting on other sites or related pages and link back to your own. Myspace/Facebook (pages)/Blogger/Wordpress are all great places to get started offering fully customizable templates that make it simple for anyone to get started with a simple page, RSS and in some cases email.

Spend quality time finding local event blogs (ex: blogTO - for Toronto events) and get news and buzz created this way for your site/band/company etc…

Last piece of advice - Be open to comments, both good (appreciate these) and bad (learn from these). Interact with people that read and review your site, build a community around yourself.

I think David nailed it - it’s all about going to where people are instead of waiting for people to find you. Didn’t always used to be that way but as an artist you have to eveolve with the times and technology.

And I agree Matt, you have to let go of the need to control and that means reading the good and the bad. There is definitely something to be learned through that process and as David said, it has actually enabled him to be more creative.

I have been hubbing from my myspace. I tried a blog but it seems very strange. I have no idea who’s coming. I started blogging a lot more on my myspace lately. It’s largely to keep me on track. To keep me accountable to someone else. So I can come back to my blog and say “This is what I’ve been doing the last week”. I tried to do something where every day I would say what I had done, but it got super annoying so I stopped.

I think it takes time to understand the ins and the outs of the different platforms. For example I am a youtube expert, i have 300,000 views but only 20 on my last FM. I don’t get last fm, because I’m not a last FM. I mean, right now it seems that I should really focus my promotion efforts just on youtube. What’s the point of putting time into imeem, figuring out how it works, making 3 fans, as opposed to spending the same amount of time making cooler youtube videos and getting 30.

Just my thoughts, obviously i’m still learning at all this stuff.

Rafe
Trick of Disaster

As a fan, I would say that you way of using the web, David, is very efficient and very clever.

What should they do? And what should they do always first, in the age of free or anytime? Be creative! To show the content, they need first to have/create it.
Will you update everyday or twice a year you should load something valuable and tempting.
Blog is good if you have what to say. But I’m wondering how much universal this way for different people?
And what with new unfamous artists? Who and how will follow them? How they should promote themselves? And more, to stay creative, you have to be very self-confident and independent (of the majority view) person (just like you, probably
Other words, an artist should be a literate captain of its ship in a free web-space.

Great info Dave! I’ll be sure to pass it along to some local artists. You are doing a fine job and it has definitely made you more creative. X

Now, anything happening in Montreal in July? I’d love to see a show. I couldn’t make any of the Alberta ones. Come to Saskatoon in August!

Is what you are doing working? Is it working better then you thought? What types of changes have you seen already in your fan base? (Steady growth?)
You certainly go where the people are. Is there a noticeable difference in the kind of people showing interest in your music?
Having such a big tool to get your music out there and known to people has there been a great amount of “international” interest in comparison to before the social networking?

@Rafe

Funny seeing you here! haha

imho, hubbing from MySpace isn’t a great idea, because, as you note, you have no idea who’s coming to your blog. If you have your own blog on your own domain, you can use tools like FeedBurner to get a much better idea of your readership, for example. I haven’t begun using FeedBurner myself, but even on my own site, I can see which posts are getting viewed how often, but how many different people, and where links and search terms are leading people to my site, etc… all from basic web hosting stats.

Second, I wouldn’t focus on the artist side of Last.fm so much first. The user profile is a lot easier to get the hang of and then you get to understand how the service works better if you’re actually using it. I scrobble all my tracks from Amarok (my desktop music client) and from my iPod to my Last.fm profile, and then use my charts on my MySpace profile, Facebook profile, and personal website.

How have you been able to capitalize on YouTube views? Is there that much more information available that on MySpace? How can you tell the difference between passerbys and long-term fans?

With Youtube you actually get some pretty serious demographics. You can see exactly when each of your videos are popular, like you can track the number of views per day, going back for a year. You can also see how everyone found your video (youtube search, related search, youtube video) and you can see where they live, their gender and age.

Also, you can see who has subscribed to you, who wants to be your youtube friend and who left a positive or negative comment. Then later on you can go back and reach out to those people. All in all, it seems a lot more organic then myspace.

In my opinion, Julia Nunes does it better than annyone. I aspire to make my videos more professional, and more like hers in the future.

Here is her link.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Mbiql_-H4KU

@Rafe

Sweet, never realized YouTube provided all those stats. They’ve a much better system than MySpace though… well, anything is better than MySpace from a technical perspective imho, lol, MySpace just has the music community going, that’s all.

Wow. That video is really good.

@rafe
the only thing about hubbing out of myspace is that its a walled garden. you really dont control any of the data on your site and you can be locked out at anytime for no reason. (ive had it happen a few times) I think its better to hub out of your own url and RSS your content to myspace and facebook:)

Here’s a take from another band….appeared in Marketing Mag… http://www.marketingmag.ca/english/news/agency/article.jsp?content=20080620_163715_17796

CRUSH CREATES R.E.M.’S LATEST VIDEO ]
June 23, 2008 | By Associated Press
Michael Stipe thinks the music video is a “dead medium”—but the R.E.M. singer still wants the band’s songs to be accompanied by some kind of visuals.
So instead of hiring a top video director to create a clip for their new song “Man-Sized Wreath,” they hired a Toronto-based advertising agency, Crush Inc.
And rather than debut the finished clip on a music network, they took it directly to their fans last Thursday night and previewed snippets for a sold-out crowd at their concert at Madison Square Garden.
Stipe said it’s just the latest way the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band is trying to create new ways to connect to its audience.
To promote the release of their latest album Accelerate, the group has stepped up their Internet presence, starting websites that allowed their audience to see the band as it created their songs and others that gave fans a chance to take R.E.M. footage and use it in their own video creations.
“It’s what I call invisibility of process. Basically we’re allowing everyone who cares to kind of peek in on all of the process of creating something, rather than just being handed the finished product at the end, or the finished piece at the end,” Stipe said.
Though R.E.M. has made some award-winning videos in the past, including “Losing My Religion” in the early 90s, Stipe said the time of the traditional video has passed.
“It is what it is, and I think anyone who refutes that is an idiot in 2008,” he said. “We can all agree as a medium music videos really found their place in pop culture in the 1990s, [and have been] replaced by the Internet in the 21st century.”
It’s one reason the trio hired the Canadian ad agency to create the visuals for “Man-Sized Wreath.”
“The music video is a dead medium so I didn’t want to go to that industry to create a piece,” he said.
But while Stipe is adamant about videos being over, he’s not quite sure about what will eventually take their place to promote new songs.
“That’s the itch that we’re trying to scratch, or the question we’re trying to answer,” he said.
Originally published in Marketing Magazine, June 2008

@dave and blaise

ya, I know that’s definitely a problem about potentially being locked out, but the problem is, what do I do. Start a blog and stop blogging on my myspace? Copy the blog to both places? What I like about the myspace blog is people can find my blog, and then immediately hear my music.

Check out this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LzgYWCgkZk

That kid is charting number 49 on the Canadian Itunes Charts. He’s not even Canadian. No label, no tour, no radio. Number 49.

No kidding on the video Rafe … 1.65M views, over 4 thousand comments. Good tip. The guy is now selling a 6 song CD on iTunes. How cool is that … some 17 year old kid getting famous by filming himself rapping. There is now more music available than ever and that is a good thing but the game has definitely changed.

Hey Blaise … cool running into you here. Look forward to catching one of your gigs in Toronto … keep us up to date.

thats great rafe, whats interesting about it is what will happen to him next. will the web star be able to translate it into anything else. its that bridge between hobby and career thats hard to jump these days. what do you guys think. are we still going to have really mass stars?

@isfan

Looks like I’m not the only follower David picked up from Mesh!

@David

I tend to subscribe to the Long Tail philosophy of things. There will still be stars, though a little less so, but the niche markets are and will continue to gain relevance so that non-hits continue to become increasingly economically viable.

I’m a huge Dispatch fan. They’re a band that rose during the days of Napster, never had a major label or any major distribution or radio play or anything. They broke up in 2002, but when they reunited in Boston for a free concert, 110,000 people showed up from 20 different countries. Then, last summer, they sold out Madison Square Gardens THREE nights in a row for a string of charity benefit reunion concerts for Zimbabwe. Absolutely unheard of for an independent act, nevermind one that hasn’t really released any new music in seven years. They still aren’t stars in the same sense as most people use the word, but… Madison Square Gardens? That’s big. The fan base they built up through grass roots means is so much more dedicated and continues to grow even long after the band broke up.

@Rafe

Yeah, another reason I… strongly dislike MySpace. It has even crappier import features than it has export features. With Facebook, you can easily import your RSS feed from another blog with the Notes application (on a page or profile). And full text feeds, for that matter (which I don’t think MySpace offers).

My approach to my MySpace profile right now is to use it mostly as a gateway to my other web properties, and to cross-post significant things. If I have a significant post that’s music related, I’ll most likely cross-post it to my personal blog and MySpace. (I already do this with a few other blogs, but my own blog on my own domain that I have full control over always has priority.)

Hmm… a quick Google search reveals there may be some ways to simplify this a bit. There’s a WordPress MySpace Crossposter Plugin, for example, lol.

Someone recently has felt a strong connection with one of my less popular songs. I would never play this song live, or put it on an album, but I did put it on Youtube. This guy from the UK felt a connection to it.

So much so that he did his own cover.

I wouldn’t say it’s the best cover ever of it, but the fact that at least some people are responding to my music helps me sleep easier at night.

http://downloads.unbrokenpictures.com/Half%20A%20Boy.mp3

@blaise
have you been following the Harvard Business blog on the long tail, interesting.

@allan
sorry allan some of your posts have been getting stuck in my spam filter for some reason. i need to check it more often!

@David: No, thanks for the heads up!

This is a great site to learn. Life is all about learning a little bit everyday