These are some of my favourite sites I use to promote my musical endeavours along with a brief explanation of how I utilise them. Some are pretty obvious but there are a few lesser know ones that are also worth knowing about.
Facebook
www.Facebook.com
Pretty obvious, I think most people the planet are aware of this site. I’ve set up my own artist page at www.Facebook.com/AidyMusic I use the site to talk random nonsense, interact with fans, post pictures, gig dates, links to songs and videos etc. I’ve also created a fairly inexpensive banner to advertise the page too; they’re cheap and easy to set up as the cost works on a sliding scale. I experimented with various pictures and text until I came up with one which seems to ensure a steady stream of random people clicking on my face and becoming a fan.
Another useful tip is to utilise the @ symbol for maximum exposure, e.g. if I’m playing with another band I’ll make sure to ‘Like’ them and then use the @ symbol to reference them in my status update, which means my status update will also appear on their page. Try it out! ‘Like’ me on Facebook and then type “I love @Aidy he is great!!” when you type the @ and begin typing in my name you’ll see a list of all your chums and pages being whittled down in front of your very eyes until see my face, which you’ll be able to select and have me referenced in your status update.
Twitter
www.Twitter.com
Another common one, again I use this to broadcast my random thoughts and musical antics it’s a great one to set up on your phone too, there are tons of free mobile apps that allow you to Tweet on the go, and even if you don’t have a smart phone you can setup your account to be updated via text messages.
Twitter is great for searching for people that might be talking about stuff that could be of interest to you e.g. if you had a gig coming up at The Bunny Boiler in Smallville, you could search for Tweets containing the word ‘Smallville’. If you see an update like “I am in Smallville! Bored! Wish there was a cool band on tonight!” you could follow them and Tweet back with “Come watch my band! We are playing at The Bunny Boiler!”
To save yourself a bit of leg work, connect your Twitter account to your Facebook fan page, that’s what I’ve done. There are lots of guides on how to do it so just have a Google. Mine is setup so that every time I end a Tweet with #FB it appears on my Facebook fan page.
Fanbridge
www.Fanbridge.com
This is for mailing lists, if you have a mailing list or you’re thinking of starting one, check it out! I’ve tried various alternatives but this is my favourite. You can start using it for free and you only need to pay when you’ve got over 500 people on your mailing list or if you want access to advanced statistics about the people reading your emails.
I normally collect emails at gigs and then spend the following morning adding them to my Fanbridge account. I’ve also setup a little widget on my home page at www.Aidy.com that allows people to join my mailing list from my site, it’s even set it up so that upon signing up they’re sent a free song, this is incredibly easy to do and a great little incentive. Have a go if you want, sign up to my mailing list and check out the email you get.
Reverbnation
www.Reverbnation.com
I mainly use this site for the widgets, they have some lovely little music players, video players and gig listing widgets. If you have a flick through www.Aidy.com you can see where I’ve used them. They’re a great little time saver, you simply add the relevant widgets to your various sites and you can update them all from one place. This is especially useful for sites that you can’t be bothered with anymore but that other people may occasionally check like MySpace. I’ve put Reverbnation player on my old MySpace page so it’s always up to date with my latest music rather than just having a rough demo from 3 years ago when I last logged in.
Music Submit
www.MusicSubmit.com
Now and again if I have a new song to promote I’ll treat myself to a MusicSubmit campaign, they’re pretty cheap yet fairly effective. You simply register, upload a song, photos and some blurb, choose a campaign and away you go. They submit your song to lots of blogs, radio stations and podcasts etc. and then periodically you get an email from some random contact saying something like “I just got your music from MusicSubmit, I like it! Can you send me a CD so I can play it on my podcast?”
I’ve been played on a few college radio stations in the USA and some random podcasts via MusicSubmit; however you still need to exercise caution when dealing with the people that contact you. There’s always a couple of scam artists that’ll tell you they love your music and would love to help you for a fee. Just ignore these emails and notify MusicSubmit.
YouTube
www.YouTube.com
I do all kinds of crazy things on here like uploading music videos and video blogs! Recently I went on tour and downloaded a little video editing app for my iPhone, so I could edit and upload video blogs from the road.
Make friends, comment on other people’s videos that you enjoy and don’t forget to share your video links on Twitter and Facebook!
Music Alley
www.MusicAlley.com
There are loads of people making podcasts! Loads! Sometimes podcasters are worried about getting sued for using copyrighted content though, and that’s where Music Alley comes in. You create an account, upload some songs and click a check box saying you won’t sue podcasters for playing the songs you’ve uploaded. Then the podcasters listen to your songs and say “That’s pretty cool! I’m going to play it on the next episode of my podcast!” Next thing you know you’ve got an email notifying you that your music has been played on a podcast!
I generally like to listen to the podcasts I’ve been played on and then send a little thank you email to the people that played it, I’m nice like that.
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Song A Week Retrospective Part2 - Creativity & Focus
In the last blog entry I talked a little bit about the conception of the Song A Week project and in this second part I'll be talking a about the day to day stuff, creativity, experimentation, my attention span and Geek Pop!
After hearing about the Geek Pop podcast from a friend of mine, I decided that 3 Monkeys sounded fairly geeky and sent them a link to it, they got back to me the same day and were kind enough to feature it on their “virtual festival” which in turn led to me getting the opportunity to play at a real festival, The Green Man Festival to be more specific, due to their involvement with Einstein’s Garden. So during a rather wet but pleasant weekend in Wales I got to take the stage on two consecutive days for a solo acoustic set, which made me extremely happy. So if you’ve never heard of Geek Pop, go check it out, it’s a great listen and I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank its wonderful creators Hayley and Jim.
Cutting Back
So things started well, and I got a little bit of publicity with Geek Pop, and couple of other blogs, podcasts and even some college radio in the US but at some point I realised I’d bitten off slightly more than I could chew, not with the actual songs funnily enough but with everything else that I’d decided to do alongside them. I was recording a weekly video blog, which I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog entry, a podcast, and I was now also playing live again which I wasn’t planning on doing until the project was complete, but it’s hard to say no sometimes . I pretty much maxed out all of my free time and every second counted with this endeavour so I was staying up late, not eating particularly well and I’d stopped going down the gym so something had to give.
I cut back on two things, the videos and the podcast intros, which gave me back a nice chunk of time. I still did both things but instead of putting a spoken word introduction at the beginning of each podcast I just put out the song itself, and on YouTube I’d just put a still image along with the song title and my web address. Like so:
Geek Pop
Once the project began I found it pretty easy to begin with, I had tons of ideas and enthusiasm and so I was rattling through the project effortlessly. I was also really pleased with the quality of the output. Songs like 3 Years and 3 Monkeys came pretty early on and still get downloaded a fair bit even now, and I frequently send them off to industry types in a vain attempt to get reviews and airplay, and I occasionally get lucky, which leads me nicely to my first little success with the project.
Once the project began I found it pretty easy to begin with, I had tons of ideas and enthusiasm and so I was rattling through the project effortlessly. I was also really pleased with the quality of the output. Songs like 3 Years and 3 Monkeys came pretty early on and still get downloaded a fair bit even now, and I frequently send them off to industry types in a vain attempt to get reviews and airplay, and I occasionally get lucky, which leads me nicely to my first little success with the project.
After hearing about the Geek Pop podcast from a friend of mine, I decided that 3 Monkeys sounded fairly geeky and sent them a link to it, they got back to me the same day and were kind enough to feature it on their “virtual festival” which in turn led to me getting the opportunity to play at a real festival, The Green Man Festival to be more specific, due to their involvement with Einstein’s Garden. So during a rather wet but pleasant weekend in Wales I got to take the stage on two consecutive days for a solo acoustic set, which made me extremely happy. So if you’ve never heard of Geek Pop, go check it out, it’s a great listen and I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank its wonderful creators Hayley and Jim.
Cutting Back
So things started well, and I got a little bit of publicity with Geek Pop, and couple of other blogs, podcasts and even some college radio in the US but at some point I realised I’d bitten off slightly more than I could chew, not with the actual songs funnily enough but with everything else that I’d decided to do alongside them. I was recording a weekly video blog, which I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog entry, a podcast, and I was now also playing live again which I wasn’t planning on doing until the project was complete, but it’s hard to say no sometimes . I pretty much maxed out all of my free time and every second counted with this endeavour so I was staying up late, not eating particularly well and I’d stopped going down the gym so something had to give.
I cut back on two things, the videos and the podcast intros, which gave me back a nice chunk of time. I still did both things but instead of putting a spoken word introduction at the beginning of each podcast I just put out the song itself, and on YouTube I’d just put a still image along with the song title and my web address. Like so:
So if you’re reading this and thinking of embarking on a ‘Song A Week’ challenge your own then my main tip for you would be, just do a song, forget podcasts and videos, they were fun to begin with but started to become a major drag after a while and I didn’t really see that they were benefitting me or my music in any sufficient way. It’s important to put your stuff out on a few different sites but make things as easy as possible, so you’re not struggling to generate new content for each.
Creativity
They say genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration, now I’d like to state that I’m not claiming to be a genius in any way shape or form, I’ve just found myself beginning to identify with this phrase. A completed song, a novel, a short story or a painting, all kinds of creative projects can probably fall within this idea. It’s sometimes easy to have an initial idea and to begin something, but it takes a whole lot more to take that idea all the way through to completion, even a three minute song.
I don’t actually find creativity difficult, my mind’s constantly churning out random ideas; I have shed loads of notebooks, scraps of paper, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and tapes full of musical odds and ends that I’ve created over the years. So even if I’d been genuinely stuck one week, I’d have had a load of ideas to fall back on.
I find it way more difficult to edit what comes out of my brain into something that could possibly sound pleasing to the ear, and it’s this process that sometimes leads me to believe that I might suffer from some mild form of attention deficit. Before the project began I’d often find myself halfway through recording a song and another song would pop into my brain and then I’d start recording the new one instead, then the previous one would then get tossed into a darkened corner of the vaults never to seen or heard again. You could argue that this mind-set may be an editing process in its own right and that my subliminal mind is using my attention span as a way of filtering out the weak and inferior.
This quickly changed in 2010, if I was half way through a song and my brain started to go off on a tangent I’d still persevere with the original idea and see it through to completion. I knew I wouldn’t always have enough time to bin it and start again, which in turn led me to look at song-writing in a more pragmatic manner; I started reading about structure and arrangement and listening more intently to other people’s music, in order to work out how to complete the songs I was having difficulty with.
I found that attempting to clone an existing song I enjoyed was a really useful learning exercise; I’m not talking about completely ripping something off note for note, but analysing it and attempting to produce something with a similar vibe. For example I did ‘I Used To Be Cool’ which was based on Blur’s There’s No Other Way and Life In Monochrome which was based around Pink Floyd’s Breathe. These methods just opened up my mind to new methods of completing songs and varying the overall sound of the songs in order to keep it interesting for myself, and hopefully for the listener.
Below are some of my more experimental moments, where I’ve either borrowed ideas from existing songs or just gone off on a musical tangent.
Creativity
They say genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration, now I’d like to state that I’m not claiming to be a genius in any way shape or form, I’ve just found myself beginning to identify with this phrase. A completed song, a novel, a short story or a painting, all kinds of creative projects can probably fall within this idea. It’s sometimes easy to have an initial idea and to begin something, but it takes a whole lot more to take that idea all the way through to completion, even a three minute song.
I don’t actually find creativity difficult, my mind’s constantly churning out random ideas; I have shed loads of notebooks, scraps of paper, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and tapes full of musical odds and ends that I’ve created over the years. So even if I’d been genuinely stuck one week, I’d have had a load of ideas to fall back on.
I find it way more difficult to edit what comes out of my brain into something that could possibly sound pleasing to the ear, and it’s this process that sometimes leads me to believe that I might suffer from some mild form of attention deficit. Before the project began I’d often find myself halfway through recording a song and another song would pop into my brain and then I’d start recording the new one instead, then the previous one would then get tossed into a darkened corner of the vaults never to seen or heard again. You could argue that this mind-set may be an editing process in its own right and that my subliminal mind is using my attention span as a way of filtering out the weak and inferior.
This quickly changed in 2010, if I was half way through a song and my brain started to go off on a tangent I’d still persevere with the original idea and see it through to completion. I knew I wouldn’t always have enough time to bin it and start again, which in turn led me to look at song-writing in a more pragmatic manner; I started reading about structure and arrangement and listening more intently to other people’s music, in order to work out how to complete the songs I was having difficulty with.
I found that attempting to clone an existing song I enjoyed was a really useful learning exercise; I’m not talking about completely ripping something off note for note, but analysing it and attempting to produce something with a similar vibe. For example I did ‘I Used To Be Cool’ which was based on Blur’s There’s No Other Way and Life In Monochrome which was based around Pink Floyd’s Breathe. These methods just opened up my mind to new methods of completing songs and varying the overall sound of the songs in order to keep it interesting for myself, and hopefully for the listener.
Below are some of my more experimental moments, where I’ve either borrowed ideas from existing songs or just gone off on a musical tangent.
Monday, 24 January 2011
Song A Week Retrospective Part1 - Conception
Well it’s been nearly a month since I released the final song from my Song A Week project, so I thought it was time to have a retrospective, to see what I’ve learnt and what (if any) success I’ve had from it. I orginally tried to sum up the entire project into a single blog post but failed to cram a years worth of musical antics into a few paragraphs elequently, so instead I'm going to blog about it in two or three seperate chapters, over the next few weeks and so it gives me great pleasure to present to you, my first chapter explaining the conception of the project!
Code Monkeys
At some point in 2009 I became addicted to a cartoon called Code Monkeys, an original comedy set in the 1980s, which documents the humorous events that take place at a fictitious video games company. If you’re into old video games and you’ve got a sense of humour then I’d highly recommend it. Anyway, after falling in love with this pixelated work of genius I began reading about the show online and discovered that the incredibly catchy theme song was by Jonathan Coulton, and so I went off to his website to download it. The song in question had been released as part of a yearlong project entitled ‘Thing a Week’ for which Coulton wrote and released one new song every week for one year, as soon as I read this my brain started churning, I was thinking stuff like “I probably write a song every week already! Probably more!” and “I could do that standing on my head, and I wouldn’t need to quit my job like he did!” and “I’m having a go at that!” And so my own ‘Song A Week’ project was born.
Preparation
First things first, even though I write and record a lot of songs, I don’t actually release them, they normally sit on my hard drive and then occasionally I round up a selection that sound good together and put them up on my site as an album like I did with ’10 Trafalgar Rd’ and ‘Low Fidelity’. This isn’t that demanding a task and since it didn’t used to happen that often I could get away with a pretty basic website using static html, and no kind of blog or content management system. This had to change if I was going to be releasing new content on a weekly basis and so I redesigned the whole site with Joomla, which meant I had a back end to log into and add new content instantly without having to edit raw code each time.
Secondly I thought it’d be fun to have a podcast, in which I could speak a little about the song each week and then play that week’s song, I did this using Podcast Generator, a simple app that installs to your site and creates the necessary xml that iTunes requires in order to stream your podcast.
Thirdly, I also thought it’d be cool to do a YouTube video for each song as well, I’d maybe talk a bit about the week’s events and creativity and then I’d play the song at the end of the video.
Going Live
I announced my idea to the world via Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace etc. I recorded my first song Hurt Me Bitch, made a little video of me talking about the recording, created a podcast and uploaded the song itself to the site. I set the publishing date so that it wouldn’t show up for download until Friday, 1st January 2010 at 12am.
Sometime after midnight on my mediocre New Years Eve bender in Cambridge I checked my site on my phone, and there it was! My first song in the upcoming series was live!
Code Monkeys
At some point in 2009 I became addicted to a cartoon called Code Monkeys, an original comedy set in the 1980s, which documents the humorous events that take place at a fictitious video games company. If you’re into old video games and you’ve got a sense of humour then I’d highly recommend it. Anyway, after falling in love with this pixelated work of genius I began reading about the show online and discovered that the incredibly catchy theme song was by Jonathan Coulton, and so I went off to his website to download it. The song in question had been released as part of a yearlong project entitled ‘Thing a Week’ for which Coulton wrote and released one new song every week for one year, as soon as I read this my brain started churning, I was thinking stuff like “I probably write a song every week already! Probably more!” and “I could do that standing on my head, and I wouldn’t need to quit my job like he did!” and “I’m having a go at that!” And so my own ‘Song A Week’ project was born.
Preparation
First things first, even though I write and record a lot of songs, I don’t actually release them, they normally sit on my hard drive and then occasionally I round up a selection that sound good together and put them up on my site as an album like I did with ’10 Trafalgar Rd’ and ‘Low Fidelity’. This isn’t that demanding a task and since it didn’t used to happen that often I could get away with a pretty basic website using static html, and no kind of blog or content management system. This had to change if I was going to be releasing new content on a weekly basis and so I redesigned the whole site with Joomla, which meant I had a back end to log into and add new content instantly without having to edit raw code each time.
Secondly I thought it’d be fun to have a podcast, in which I could speak a little about the song each week and then play that week’s song, I did this using Podcast Generator, a simple app that installs to your site and creates the necessary xml that iTunes requires in order to stream your podcast.
Thirdly, I also thought it’d be cool to do a YouTube video for each song as well, I’d maybe talk a bit about the week’s events and creativity and then I’d play the song at the end of the video.
Going Live
I announced my idea to the world via Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace etc. I recorded my first song Hurt Me Bitch, made a little video of me talking about the recording, created a podcast and uploaded the song itself to the site. I set the publishing date so that it wouldn’t show up for download until Friday, 1st January 2010 at 12am.
Sometime after midnight on my mediocre New Years Eve bender in Cambridge I checked my site on my phone, and there it was! My first song in the upcoming series was live!
Friday, 5 November 2010
How to get over a thousand views on YouTube
As an independent musician try to do absolutely everything I can to promote my music online and in the real word, I’m on all the major social networking sites, I blog, Tweet, podcast, post in forums, put out flyers and posters, hassle journalists and bloggers on a weekly basis and also inevitably, I YouTube!
YouTube’s becoming increasingly more important as a tool to promote yourself, a lot of people actually use it to find and listen to music and it’s now the second most widely used search engine in the world. Many people would rather watch a video explaining the answer to their various internet queries; I mean why just read a lasagne recipe when you can actually watch a semi-professional knock one up on YouTube?
So two years ago I created my very own YouTube account and uploaded my first ever video, which was an animation I was quite proud of at the time, having spent five days solid staring at a computer screen drawing it, and in the background was my song Prettyish, which I’m also fairly proud of. Two years later and that video has just under seven hundred views! Seven hundred! That’s at least eight days of hard graft gone into that! When I total up the recording and animation time! Part of me thinks that it was kind of still worth doing, as it’s a bit of extra content for my site and I still think it looks cool, plus it may have exposed me to a few extra people. However, another part of me thinks “For f*cks sake! Someone just filmed an infant biting his brother’s finger and they’ve got over two hundred and fifty million views! At least let me get past the thousand mark!! For the love of God! That’s something like fifty times more views that the first Moon landing! More people would actually watch this than the….” And then I go and have a nice cup of coffee and chill out for five minutes.
The outcome of this is that it’s long been an ambition of mine to try and get a YouTube video with over a thousand views, and not just because it’s been online for four years and has accidentally turned up in the search results of someone who’s searching for a lasagne recipe or Chocolate Rain. So far I’ve tried making music videos, tutorials and even comedy sketches that in my opinion should appeal to the lowest common denominators that chose to watch Thomas’s finger biting frenzy several million times. At the peak of all this I was actually making a low budget ten minute show, which was rammed with my friends who kindly made themselves look like idiots in front of a camera to help me out, competitions with cash prizes, theme music, title screens, live music and all sorts!
Two years on, and I’ve finally cracked it! I now have a YouTube clip with over one thousand views, and this is how I did it.
One Saturday afternoon I purchased some shoes, and they were slightly uncomfortable, they were quite stiff and they needed a little bit of wearing in, I knew that after a few months of wearing them they’d feel better but I’m impatient and I wanted them to be comfortable straight away. So I headed over to YouTube and searched for some videos about stretching shoes, and I came across a woman called Michelle who had a great idea about putting bags of water into your shoes and then putting them in the freezer. What a bloody good idea! Then I noticed her view stats, her video had over four million views, and then I remembered reading somewhere about making interesting video replies to other people’s videos in order to expose yourself to their viewers, light bulbs were going off all over my lethargic little brain, so I hurriedly got to work!
I filmed my shoe stretching antics, added some music and creative editing and then I uploaded the video, I then added it as a reply to Michelle’s video! Michelle never actually accepted it as a video reply, but due to the fact that I named it “RE: Stretch Shoes With Ice” it started to appear right under her video in the search results for this very specific topic and several months later I have nearly two thousand views and I’ve now added a little annotation to the video to let people know that I make music as well as stretch shoes, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some of that lovely shoe stretching traffic over to Aidy.com :-)
Well, there you have it, the feel good story of the year, I set myself a realistic and attainable goal and I kept plugging away and knocked this virtual curve ball out park! Stay tuned for more of my marketing expoits!
YouTube’s becoming increasingly more important as a tool to promote yourself, a lot of people actually use it to find and listen to music and it’s now the second most widely used search engine in the world. Many people would rather watch a video explaining the answer to their various internet queries; I mean why just read a lasagne recipe when you can actually watch a semi-professional knock one up on YouTube?
So two years ago I created my very own YouTube account and uploaded my first ever video, which was an animation I was quite proud of at the time, having spent five days solid staring at a computer screen drawing it, and in the background was my song Prettyish, which I’m also fairly proud of. Two years later and that video has just under seven hundred views! Seven hundred! That’s at least eight days of hard graft gone into that! When I total up the recording and animation time! Part of me thinks that it was kind of still worth doing, as it’s a bit of extra content for my site and I still think it looks cool, plus it may have exposed me to a few extra people. However, another part of me thinks “For f*cks sake! Someone just filmed an infant biting his brother’s finger and they’ve got over two hundred and fifty million views! At least let me get past the thousand mark!! For the love of God! That’s something like fifty times more views that the first Moon landing! More people would actually watch this than the….” And then I go and have a nice cup of coffee and chill out for five minutes.
The outcome of this is that it’s long been an ambition of mine to try and get a YouTube video with over a thousand views, and not just because it’s been online for four years and has accidentally turned up in the search results of someone who’s searching for a lasagne recipe or Chocolate Rain. So far I’ve tried making music videos, tutorials and even comedy sketches that in my opinion should appeal to the lowest common denominators that chose to watch Thomas’s finger biting frenzy several million times. At the peak of all this I was actually making a low budget ten minute show, which was rammed with my friends who kindly made themselves look like idiots in front of a camera to help me out, competitions with cash prizes, theme music, title screens, live music and all sorts!
Two years on, and I’ve finally cracked it! I now have a YouTube clip with over one thousand views, and this is how I did it.
One Saturday afternoon I purchased some shoes, and they were slightly uncomfortable, they were quite stiff and they needed a little bit of wearing in, I knew that after a few months of wearing them they’d feel better but I’m impatient and I wanted them to be comfortable straight away. So I headed over to YouTube and searched for some videos about stretching shoes, and I came across a woman called Michelle who had a great idea about putting bags of water into your shoes and then putting them in the freezer. What a bloody good idea! Then I noticed her view stats, her video had over four million views, and then I remembered reading somewhere about making interesting video replies to other people’s videos in order to expose yourself to their viewers, light bulbs were going off all over my lethargic little brain, so I hurriedly got to work!
I filmed my shoe stretching antics, added some music and creative editing and then I uploaded the video, I then added it as a reply to Michelle’s video! Michelle never actually accepted it as a video reply, but due to the fact that I named it “RE: Stretch Shoes With Ice” it started to appear right under her video in the search results for this very specific topic and several months later I have nearly two thousand views and I’ve now added a little annotation to the video to let people know that I make music as well as stretch shoes, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some of that lovely shoe stretching traffic over to Aidy.com :-)
Well, there you have it, the feel good story of the year, I set myself a realistic and attainable goal and I kept plugging away and knocked this virtual curve ball out park! Stay tuned for more of my marketing expoits!
Saturday, 2 October 2010
Finally On BBC Radio
Well, I finally got to play on a BBC radio station, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire to be more specific, and it wasn't due to sending CDs, or uploading MP3s, it was all down to a new DJ going by the name of Tom Simkins who found my music on the world wide internet, liked it and got in touch. Tom was great, he let us play three songs live in the studio and even played Not Your Day from a CD I bought along too, and then to top it all off he presented us with a trophy indicating that we were the last ever band to play on Thursday's Audio Files show, as it's now being re-vamped and moved to a Friday.
This was possibly one of the greatest days ever, and here's a picture of the trophy, which is now taking pride place on the left speaker in my little recording room.
You can listen to the show here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00b6rcj/BBC_Introducing_in_Cambridgeshire_30_09_2010/
Thursday, 16 September 2010
BBC Introducing (Sorted)
I emailed the BBC again today with regards to the uploader still not working on the BBC Introducing page and I actually got a decent reply with some nice simple instructions on how to get your account working if you're having problems. I carried these out myself and my account is once again up and running, so I can now get stuff to the BBC without the cost of material items and postage!
Just submitted the following 3 tracks:
Pain In My Heart
Garden Leave
Race Cars
I already have a lovely confirmation email saying that they've got Pain In My Heart, and these are the steps to carry out if you're having problems with your account:
1. Visit bbc.co.uk/music/introducing/uploader and make sure you are not already signed in - click "Sign Out" in the top right hand corner of the page.
2. Now click the blue Sign In button, and enter your username and your password.
3. You'll then be asked to update your BBC membership account to our new BBC iD system. This should only take a minute, and afterwards you'll be taken back to the BBC Introducing uploader page.
4. You should now see a link on the right hand side of the page which says "Your Artist Profile". Click this button or just copy this URL into your browser http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/introducing/artists/profile/edit
5. You should now be looking at your artist profile. You might find the info boxes on the page are blank - if so, please fill them back in. After making changes, click Update at the bottom of the page.
6. Once you've done that, it will take you to the Track Upload page. Here you can select an MP3 and upload it to us. You should then get a confirmation email within 15 mins or so.
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Music Success In Nine Weeks #6
Well, we're coming to a close now with the old MSI9W challenge thing but it's been interesting, and I've definitely learnt a few things about online marketing that I wasn't previously aware of such as the value of a mailing list, which I now have along with incentives for people to join. For the first time ever I actually went round the room after a gig this weekend and asked people if they'd like to join my mailing list in return for a CD, and low and behold people were only too happy to do so, and one's actually unsubscribed yet!
Another useful tip was the use of Google Reader, which I'm now getting pretty addicted too and it's how I now start my mornings before leaving for work, it's like the ultimate newspaper that caters just for me ;-) Here's a handy hint too, why not pop a little star next to the articles you comment on, that way if you filter by your starred articles you can see where you've been spending most of your time "interacting" within the blogosphere, and this should act as a fairly good indicator as to who may be more likely to write about your own musical antics.
Podsafe has also worked out to be a great little resource, and I've been played on a couple of shows already, I have the feeling that podcasters tend to mainly look at the new uploads on this site though, so if you have a multiple song you want to upload then don't put them all on there at once, ration them out slowly in order to make sure you have something on there that's amongst the new stuff for as long as possible.
Anyhow, I'm gonna sign out now as I'm pretty short on time as write this, it's Thursday, which means I'm gonna have get my latest Song A Week song out for tomorrow!
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