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 Any time you go to an artists website and it’s two years out of date, takes forever to load, has broken links, needs you to download software to make it work properly and even then you can’t find anything, they’ve bitten off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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