Top Websites For Promoting Your Music

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.

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!

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.

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.

Life In Monochrome

Seattle's Filled With Stars (8Bit)

Braintree

Smoke Rings

Destination SOA

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!

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!

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/

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.

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!

Music Success In Nine Weeks #5

It's been a little while since my last "Music Success" blog entry, but it's been a busy month, with a couple of festival appearances, my Song A Week project and my day job, but I haven't been neglecting my online marketing, and I've still been going through Ariel's various tips and tactics!

I actually sent out my first ever email newsletter today, I've been very slowly building up a mailing list by asking friends and people at gigs to join and I've even had a few people join from the from my site since I've started offering an exclusive MP3 as an incentive, still not in triple figures, but I'm getting there.

Web 2.0

With regards to Week 4, I'm fairly IT literate so I already have a Twitter account and I know how to use it, I also have a Blog, which you're currently reading and I am aware of what an RSS feed is, I have several on my site. The idea of using FlickR as a way of gaining more on-line exposure is pretty cool though, and I've now created myself a profile and I've uploaded some of my better music related pics to get the ball rolling. I've also joined Podsafe, which is a great site and I've already had airplay on one podcast as a result!

I'm now also an avid user of Google Reader and Technorati, which I've been using in conjunction with one another. I'm searching out blogs that interest me and blogs that write about similar artists to myself and I normally spend half an hour or so before going to work, just scanning the latest articles, and leaving the odd comments. It's actually quite addictive, like a magazine that caters just to me and my personal interests! But hopefully after a while, when I start to contact a few of them they may have some idea of who I am and be slightly more willing to deal with me. I actually no this kind of relationship should work fine, as I do write the odd review for a couple of smaller music blogs.

Right, I'm tired and I need sleep, it's been a long day! I'll post another entry soon, and hopefully I'll be a little bit closer to a triple figured mailing list and a couple of honourable mentions somewhere out there in the blogosphere!

Oh yeah, I also started using SoundCloud recently, it's a great site, and I've used it to create playlist to go with my Song A Week project.

BBC Introducing

I've tried on numerous occasions over the past decade or so to get a song played on Radio 1, but unfortunately without success. I've sent stuff to most of the DJs there, including John Peel a few months before his untimely death and the closest I got was when Steve Lamacq put me on the BBC site along with a short review, which I can now recite off by heart due to the amount of bios and press releases I've copy and pasted it in to.

Anyway, I'm now in my early thirties and still hammering away at the doors of the BBC, pleading and begging for one of their DJs play me on one of the national stations, and as a result I've also been using the BBC Introducing site to do this. The concept of this site is pretty cool, it gives you the ability to upload up to 3 tracks every 30 days, these tracks are listened to by your local BBC radio station (Cambridge in my case) and if they like any of them, they play them, and if they play them there's also a chance they'll get forwarded to the big boys at Radio 1. This is a great idea in theory as it probably filters the workload for the likes of Huw Stephens and his chums, and it's good for the environment and my wallet, since I don't need to knock up any CDs or purchase any padded envelopes etc...

However, after using BBC Introducing for about a year, I've only managed to get a total of 3 tracks to them, as doesn't actually appear to work the vast majority of the time. The first time I ever used it I received three emails, one for each uploaded track, telling me that they had uploaded with success, then I got three more emails telling, one per track, as each one of my carefully selected songs was listened to by my local BBC Producer. Cool! I was quite happy with this, the tracks didn't get played but that's cool, I waited for a while and then uploaded another three carefully selected songs. This time I didn't get the emails to say they'd been received, so I emailed support. Support told me the BBC Introducing emails had been problematic but everything was working okay so not to worry if I hadn't received anything.

I continued to upload within the given time scales and nothing ever seemed to get anywhere, and I never got any notification emails, even months later, so I emailed once again just to check that my tracks were uploading okay, they assured me they were and even emailed me a list of the last 3 tracks I'd uploaded. The list they emailed me contained the first three tracks I'd uploaded nearly a year ago! I emailed them once again and got no reply, so I'm now back to browsing through the BBC site for postal addresses, buying padded envelopes and burning CDs.

In conclusion it seems fairly hit and miss as to what's actually going on with this site, and I imagine it's not really top of BBCs priority to get it fixed by the sounds of it, I still use it now and again, just in case it's started working again, but I never receive any confirmation emails that would lead me to believe that it's working again. If you have music that you'd like to get into the hands of a BBC Radio DJ, by all means have a punt at BBC Introducing, but send out physical CDs too as it seems fairly unreliable, which is a shame as it's a great idea in theory.

Music Success In Nine Weeks #4

Optimizing Your Website

If you've been reading my blog you'll know that before going through the book sequentially I read the whole thing and did a few bits and pieces before starting. One of which was to optimize my site, the site now definitely loads quicker than it did! And I'm pretty sure that if you've got a modern broadband connection you should be seeing it fully loaded in under 3.5 seconds! So that's that bit out of the way. Now on to the other more tangible marketing ploys, that you can go and see for yourself at Aidy.com.

PITCH

My pitch is now displayed on my home page in nice big writing, and in a slightly different colour so it stands out from the rest of the text on there.

NO FLASH INTROS

Never had them, never would. Winds me right up when I have to click that Click here to skip intro link on sites that do.

CONSISTENT LOOK THROUGHOUT THE NET

Already there, if you check out any of my various internet incarnations, you will find a tasteful black and white look and a charming picture of my face, much like the one on this blog. If you don't believe me go to my site and click the links section, and have a look! Go on! Do it!!

GIVE AWAY EXCLUSIVE MP3

Hmmm, all my stuff was actually available for free anyway, so I took down one of my songs from the site, and it's now available as an exclusive free download if you join my mailing list. I did this with FanBridge they make the whole thing very simple and they have a nice fast loading html fan collector, rather that a slow loading flash one like Reverbnation, which occaisionally seems to struggle with the @ key when using a UK keyboard and Google Chrome. Anyway, if you join my mailing list you'll now get an 'exclusive' mp3, and you'll also find out what a sterling job the folks at FanBridge do!

MAKE IT CLEAR, SET THEM AT EASE

I have made a lovely little banner, with a picture of my good friend Gimpy on it, which now sits above the fan collecting box thing to make it nice and clear that you are indeed joining my mailing list in return for an exclusive track! Just look at it! It doesn't get much clearer!!

PS. Just a quick note on Reverbnation, I love their site and their widgets and they are very helpful when you email them, but you have to use a horrible email template if you use their services to email fans without paying, and the email widget is slow loading and a bit buggy at the moment. If they sorted these problems and let you send plane text emails without paying $9.99/month, I may actually use their email widget, and I may even pay them the £9.99/month if my email list grows to a more than the 20 odd people I currenlty have on it(only just started it since reading this book). I'm still using there widget on a couple of other sites though, just not the main one. You can quite easily export your emails from them in the form of a spreadsheet and import them into something else.

Music Success In Nine Weeks #3

The Perfect Pitch
So here we are in Week 2 of Ariel's magical world of Cyber PR, which is all about "The Perfect Pitch". Luckily for me I actually hired a PR man last year who wrote me a couple of bios and I now freely borrow random sentences from those whenever I need to summarize myself within one sentence, however I still went through this section and filled out the three lists which consisted of:

• Artists people think I sound like.
• Artists that influenced me.
• Feelings and vibes that I want my music to convey.

After a couple of attempts at using these lists to create my "perfect pitch" I decided that the one's I'd already been using from the pre-written bios were actually better, so I just used one of those instead, it reads:

"Taking the ramshackle charm of Guided By Voices at their most melodic and adding a boyish enthusiasm that tips its hat to both Weezer and Matthew Sweet."

I said it out loud a few times, and it sounded cool and made me think "I I hadn't heard my music, I'd probably really want to based on that sentence!! I am great!! Grrrrr!!

I then promptly went round the Internet and began plastering it about, if you'd care to check out Aidy.com for example you'll see it proudly displayed on the front page, and next time I make some postcards or flyers, I'll stick it on those too.

I did attempt to test it out on the "fabulous website" 15SecondPitch.com that Ariel suggested, unfortunately after churning away for a couple of minutes it finally came back with:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e31'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired

/new/createuser.asp, line 276

I tried a couple more times and got the same thing. Annoying, but hey ho, at least I've got my little daily notebook of achievements to get me through ;-)

Music Success In Nine Weeks #2

First Things First
Well I've now gone through the entire book and I've started a few of the later tasks already as I was slightly concerned after reading the fact that potential fans could have the attention span of gnats and may not be prepared to wait for longer than 3.5 seconds for my website to load. So I did a bit of tweaking to Aidy.com. I've enabled caching, enabled gzip and I've also gone through the images on the front page and re-formatted a few of the larger ones. The only thing that's slightly bugging me now is that even though my site loads fairly quickly the Reverbnation widgets that I've got on there don't, and yet these come highly recommended by Ariel. The whole page seems to load in under 3.5 seconds but after it's loaded you can still see these widgets loading up. I've emailed Reverbnation and asked if anything can be done to speed them up a bit. Another thing I've noticed with the Fan Collector widget is that the @ comes out as a “ when viewed using Google Chrome, which seems like a major flaw in an email entry field, though it does work fine in IE.

The other main thing that got my attention upon my first read was the value placed on an email list, which I don't currently have, so I've now started one. I got the ball rolling by asking a few friends if they'd like to be the first of many to join this prestigious contact list and also asked a couple of people that randomly emailed me about my music recently, and I now have an email list in double figures! But I obviously don't want to stop there so I shall continue to ask others and I've also added the previously mentioned Fan Collector widget to my blog, MySpace and Aidy.com. Let's just hope that none of my potential new fans are using Google Chrome ;-)

Week 1 – Getting Mentally Prepared
So after kicking off my email list and streamlining the website I it was time to start going through the book from the beginning, in a more formal manner, so where better to start than Week 1! This chapter actually made me cringe slightly as it reads like a self-help book, encouraging me to write down my dreams and aspirations on paper and then decorate them with coloured crayons and hang them where I (and possibly others that might start to question my manliness) can see them. Never the less, I sat down at my dining room table with a cup of Early Grey and some art supplies and began to scribble.

I found this activity rather challenging, as I have a rough idea in my head of my ambitions and goals, the main one being to actually make enough money from music to be-able to do it full time, but to articulate these ideas into fully formed sentences on paper along with deadlines was slightly more tricky. After a couple of hours I came up with the following:

1. To be-able to quit day job and make a comfortable living from music alone.
2. Complete my Song A Week project at Aidy.com.
3. Increase traffic to Aidy.com to around 1000/day.
4. Get paid TV/Film placement.
5. Increase fan base to at least 1000 solid fans.
6. Sell enough merchandise and music to make at least £2000/month.

After creating this initial list I started going through the other suggested lists and then I decorated my ultimate list of goals as suggested by Ariel and and I hung them up in my kitchen.

On top of all of this I have also purchased myself a little notebook, as per Ariel's advice and each day I'm scribbling down 5 small successes that I've made. Yesterdays list consisted of:

1. Mailed out some CDs to a college radio station that requested them.
2. Added some more people to my mailing list.
3. Purchased and assembled a fan for my housemate who was complaining about the temperature of his room at night time.
4. Added email capturing widget to my MySpace.
5. Did weekly food shop.

Even though this activity felt like a waste of time to someone like myself, I've actually enjoyed doing it and it does leave me thinking “God I'm great! I've done loads today!” So hopefully I'll stick to it, and it'll help keep me motivated throughout the darker hours of my musical endeavours. Once I've finished this blog entry, I'll be-able to put that on todays list!! God I'm great ;-)

Music Success In Nine Weeks #1

Well along with all my other music marketing shenanigans I've decided to purchase myself a copy of 'Music Success In Nine Weeks' work my way through the book and also to take the blogging challenge whilst doing it. If you've got no idea what I'm talking about go here.

I first came across Ariel Publicity a few years ago, I can't remember how exactly, but it was probably through my usage of CDBaby and somehow I've found myself on founder Ariel Hyatt's mailing list, and I also now follow her antics on Twitter and YouTube. Though I've never paid for the service of Ariel or her company, I'm eager to try out some of the techniques in this book and blog about them to see if I can get anything out of it.

As her site suggests I'm also able to enter her contest for some free Cyber PR by blogging, which is quite cool as I would have probably blogged my experience anyway. If you're interested in my current state of affairs, at the time of writing my stats are roughly:

YouTube VLOG: 40-100 views per week
Twitter Followers: 49
Aidy.com unique hits: 1000/month
Most downloaded track: Hodge Plays Mario Kart, approx 250 downloads
Facebook Fans: 181

As a wise man once said "Let's go, let's get cracking!!"

Taxi Rejection #3

Here we go again, obviously not third time lucky ;-) Got some actual textual information this time though, making this rejection more useful that the previous two.

Submitted Songs

Christian Kelly

Amsterdam

Listing

CONTEMPORARY COUNTRY SONGS for a Male Artist a la BLAKE SHELTON are wanted by the Dir. of A&R at a Major Nashville Label. Great, conversational lyrics are a must. Familiar Country themes are welcome but must be told in a new and fresh, contemporary way. Uptempos are preferred but they are open to hearing mids and ballads, if they are amazing. Vocal and instrumental demo presentation must be top-notch! Please submit one to three songs online or per CD, include lyrics. All submissions will be screened and critiqued by TAXI and must be received no later than Tuesday, May 18, 2010. TAXI #S100518CO

Feedback

Taxi.com Rejection #2

Well here we are once again, with my second lot of feedback from Taxi.com for a couple of songs I recently submitted. As before I've posted the feedback and the songs themselves. The listing wanted songs about smiling, so I hastily knocked one up after seeing the ultra specific description and I also stuck in an old song of mine entitled Polly, which was a bit of a long shot but it's fairly poppy and makes a brief reference to smiles in the third verse with the lyric "look for your smile".

Submitted Songs

Polly

Smile

Listing

CONTEMPORARY SINGER-SONGWRITER-type SONGS about "SMILE/SMILING" needed by a successful Music Publisher based in L.A. who's gotten tons of great Film/TV placements for many TAXI members. Open to all tempos. Male or Female vocals are okay. No instrumentals please! Universal lyrics are necessary. Vocal and instrumental presentations must be top-notch! Recordings need to be Broadcast Quality (great home recordings should be fine). They offer a non-exclusive, 50/50 split deal - you keep your original copyrights. Please submit one to three songs online or per CD, include lyrics. All submissions will be screened on a YES/NO BASIS - NO CRITIQUES FROM TAXI - and must be received no later than Friday, May 21, 2010. TAXI #Y100521SS

Feedback

CD Baby

Apologies if this entry seems a slightly biased but I love CDBaby and I’ve used them since around 2003 when I released my first album, I’d actually had plans to release it via MP3.com which used to be an awesome site back in the day but unfortunately they got bought out and things changed so I had to find an alternative. After hunting around I came across CDBaby and a lot of people seemed to have a lot of positive things to say about them, so I decided to try it out.

The concept was fairly simple, I paid a one of set-up fee which I think was around $30 and I mailed them 10 CDs. They then set the product up on their site everytime someone purchased my album they’d take a small percentage and then deposit the rest into my PayPal account. Then when the CDs all sold, I just mailed them some more, simple!! So all I’ve had to do is put a link on my site to CDBaby, where people can purchase my music.

The site itself was setup by a guy called Derek Sivers, whom I actually met once at an informal CDBaby meet up in London last year. He was a professional musician and in the late 90s he wanted to create a way of selling his own CDs online and the whole thing grew from that.

As time’s gone on they’ve added other features and built up a number of partnerships with various digital download and streaming companies like Napster and iTunes, this additional distribution hasn’t cost me anything extra and unlike other companies like TuneCore it doesn’t expire, it just seems to sit there forever or until I want to delete it. It’s easy to set up too, you just log into your account, click on your album and select any digital distribution service you want you’re album to be available on and CDBaby do the rest. Once again they just take a small amount from each sale. They also now offer a digital distribution only service, so you don’t even have to have a physical CD, and they recently branched into singles too, which they’ll set-up for the low cost of $9.

I’m still using CDBaby today, and I still think they’re the best distribution company out there for an indie artist, although recently I’ve also started using BigCartel.com as I’m selling some slightly unusual items that CDBaby don’t cater for such as a limited edition single on 3.5” floppy, which I did for fun and as a cheeky marketing ploy!

Oh and I’d strongly recommend subscribing to the CDBaby DIY Musician’s Podcast, it’s a great resource if you’re looking for new ways to try and promote your music yourself.

www.CDBaby.com

Taxi.com Rejection #1

Okay, I'm gonna document my Taxi.com experiences via this blog, just as a useful guide to anyone else that might be thinking of using their services, I'm going to try and remain un-biased and actually link to the songs that I've submitted so you can make your own mind up about the feedback I receive from my submissions to them.

Since joining Taxi I've gone through all their listings, submitted a few songs that I thought were relevant and every couple of weeks I've gone through the new listings and done the same thing. I've just now had my first response, and it was a negative one, I submitted 3 songs for the following advert:

"ELECTRONICA SONGS - with vocals - of the 1990s - in the wide range of The Prodigy, Chemical Bros., Moby, etc., needed by a Music Publisher who has signed and placed tons of TAXI songs in various Film/TV projects. Original songs only that have a 1990s style and feel of the artists referenced are what's needed. Universal lyrics that can fit a number of film and TV scenes are what is being looked for here. Excellent vocal and instrumental performances are a must. Please submit one to three songs online or per CD, include lyrics. All submissions will be screened on a YES/NO BASIS - NO CRITIQUES FROM TAXI - and must be received no later than Monday, May 17 2010. TAXI #Y100517EL"

These were the songs:
Normal
Something You Forgot
Quiet Dreaming





They were all rejected on the basis of "Recording", I haven't had anymore feedback than that, as your feedback from Taxi just seems to be a form with some check boxes, which looks like this:



So, I went on the Taxi forum to get some more info and received some really good advice from other Taxi users and some suggestions on improving the recordings. I'll follow this advice and in the meantime, I'm gonna keep plugging away!

Hodge Plays Mario Kart

Okay, so a couple of weeks ago I watched the incredibly entertaining King of Kong documentary for the first time, after being recommended it by a friend. If you’ve never seen it, I’d highly recommend checking it out. It basically charts the progress of a Steve Wiebe who’s desperately trying to become the world greatest Donkey Kong player.

The whole thing got me thinking about my good friend Andrew Hodge and the fact that he often claims to be the world’s second greatest player of Super Mario Kart on the SNES, apparently he did an online search for the fastest lap times on Rainbow Road (The most difficult Mario Kart track) and he was about a second slower than the fastest lap time ever recorded.

Now, King of Kong heavily featured the website Twin Galaxies, who are the official score keepers for all things video game related are even recognised by The Guinness Book of World Records, so I logged on and looked up the fastest lap time for Rainbow Road, and told Hodge. Turns out that Hodge is quicker! Several seconds quicker in fact!

You can check out the video of Hodge smashing the world record here, and in dedication of this momentous achievement I’ve written a song in his honour simply titled Hodge Plays Mario Kart, which you can download here.

Joining Taxi.com

This year I've been pretty much flat out on the whole music thing, with an ultimate goal of turning my passion into something that can support me financially. So along with the constant song writing, recording, video blogging, podcasting, twittering and sending out CDs etc.. I've now decided to bite the bullet and join Taxi.com

I've had a few tunes used in independent productions in the past, its something I'd like to do more of, and Taxi claim to be-able to help with that. I've toyed with the idea of joining for a while now, I've spoken to a few members and received some fairly positive feedback overall, although there are a few negative forum posts out there too.

So, I've shelled out $300 (USA) for a years worth of their service, introduced myself in the Taxi forum and begun the process of submitting songs! It'll be interesting to see how it progresses. In the meantime I've actually learnt a fair bit about tv/film music placement from their online resources and I'm attempting to write some slightly more tv friendly tunes, and cutting back on the "naughty words" lyrically ;-)

Aidy.com

8 Bit Antics

I'm a bit of a geek and a retro gaming enthusiast, and whilst recently visiting Bletchley Park I came accross a CD in the gift shop called The Boy With The Digital Heart by Pixelh8. I've been listening to it a fair bit since, if you're not aware of what he does, he reverse engineers electronic toys and random computer game sound effects to make instrumentals. Any how, this has inspired me to do something similar myself, and after reading a few tutorials I've discovered I can get the old 8-bit Mario, Double Dragon type sound out of Reason by tweaking the SubTractor so I'm in the process of re-recording one of my old tracks Seattle's Filled With Stars, which I'm gonna release next Friday at Aidy.com.