The story so far. 18 months ago my songs were skinny weaklings. Girl songs didn’t want to hang out with them, the Internet used to kick pixels in their faces. Today they’re rippling hunks of mp3s loved by multitudes. Let me tell you how they did it – for free!
Step 1 was Get your mp3 web ready. Step 2 was Get hosting for your files. Now let’s pump some blog!
Step 3. Get a blog
Your mp3 is prepped and set. Your Box.net account is humming like a well-oiled Panther. All you need is a shop window for your songs, where people can come in and browse and see what you’ve got on offer.
Something like a website. But…
Not a website
Websites are great, but if you’re looking to me for advice you’re probably not ready for a website. And here’s a funny thing. Many major artists aren’t ready for a website either. Any time you go to an artists website and it’s two years out of date, takes forever to load, has broken links, needs you to download software to make it work properly and even then you can’t find anything, they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. (Usually it’s the label that’s failing to chew on their behalf).
You want something simple for you to set up and maintain and simple for the visitor to find their way around.
That’s it. So for me it’s a blog and definitely…
Not MySpace
In case you haven’t noticed Myspace is a digital swamp. There are a million reasons to delete your account, but here’s two - your fans can’t download music and you can’t send anyone a link to your song.
Back to blog
Sign up for a free Blogger account. Lots of people swear by Wordpress (which has a free and a paid version) and one day I may swear just like ‘em, but I opted for simple and free and it’s working so far. You can set up more than one blog so if you’re not sure what to do just set up one for practice first.
Once you’re comfortable with your blog, set up…
A post for each song
Write a little about the song including some of the following,
what it sounds like/influences
the story behind you writing the song
the lyrics
Then the important part. At the beginning, the end (or both) put “download this song for free!” And paste in the secure code you’ll find on your box.net page.
Click publish and hey presto – now people can find, and download your song for free!
More songs
When you’ve got four or five songs start including a link to an older song at the end of each post. “Here’s another free song!”
You could also create a sidebar using a 'link list' (Design>Page Elements>Add A Gadget>Link List) with links back to each individual song page, so people can see all your songs at a glance.
Later on you can even create a master page/post with links to every song post. Here’s mine.
Making the Net work
So your song’s there on the net. But how are people going to hear about it?
If every song has a page then it’s easy to email a link to a friend “hey check out my new song” or put it on Twitter, Facebook whatever.
It’s also easy to paste it into a comment on other blogs and forums. “hey you were saying there aren’t enough Christian songs about assassination and poop. I wrote one. Check it out” and include the link.
The beauty of this is it allows you to be relevant to other web users. You’re not saying “love me and my entire recorded back catalogue” but rather “here’s a song that’s relevant to the discussion” (Just make sure it is relevant). Practice on me – leave me a comment and a link to one of your songs.
That’s all for now. Leave me a comment if it’s been helpful, if you have questions or if you violently disagree.
What do you mean you haven't read parts one and two yet? double sheesh!!
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Other popular posts: First Black President
Other popular posts: First Black President
Matt,
ReplyDeleteA great blogging trilogy, but I think I'm in need of a part 0 - how to develop some song writing talent...
I think the only think I would add is to post regularly to your blog. Too many times people go months/decades between posts and in the meantime they've managed to lose half of whatever readership they had. It doesn't need to be hourly (one twitter is more than enough!) but a couple of times each month.
Anyway that's my 2 cents.
Phil
I would also like to throw in a very important part of setting up a blog:
ReplyDeletePick a template that doesn't burn peoples eyes.
Seriously, I have seen so many blogs (not just music-promoting ones) where the blogger has just picked a default template at random and it is unbearably ugly. People will not read your blog if it is aesthetically offensive.
P.S. Brown is a nice colour, I like it :)
@Phil - great comment, I was going to add something about using the 'in between songs' time (which can be decades in my case) to promote other people's music, but the post was getting a bit long.
ReplyDeleteRe developing songwriting talent, can you say a bit more? Anything in particular you struggle with - music? lyrics? Ideas for starting or finishing off?
@Peter - good point I totally agree about painful looking blogs (he says on his plain old default template) though for real pain you have to visit myspace!
Do you think the problem is default templates though or people customizing them? Most of the standard ones seem pretty tame (though some can be slow loading). The crazy results seem to come out when people are 'trying' to be clever. Just like music in fact!
What do you think?
Great series, Matt!
ReplyDeleteThis is going to save me some serious time... I'll never have to explain this process to anybody again.
Hilarious writing also, as always.
Cheers!
Thanks buddy
ReplyDeletetotally love the podcast you did. (And you could always get some extra work reading audio books!)
Planning to link to it soon.
(see what I did there?)