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.

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!