May 15, 2014 How To Effectively Promote Your Music Video on Facebook
Being an up and coming musician can be both a delightful and dreadful gig. You’re always writing music, recording, performing in bars and/or clubs, and trying to sell yourself on social media platforms. Selling yourself also means shooting a music video for your best song. You can always just upload the video to YouTube and engage with trolls, or upload to Vimeo and engage with trolls. But you want to, not only sell your music video, you want to engage with your growing audience and earn more fans. Facebook is the answer for that.
Create a Page
It seems like a no brainer to create a page for your music video but most musicians seem to overthink it. You’ve encountered pages on Facebook before but they’re usually for products, films, or some cause to have you donate money to. You can create a page for yourself (or your band) to garner an online following and inform people of events, concerts, and more. Creating a page for a music video seems kind of redundant but it’s a great step forward for you.
May 14, 2014 Why The Hardest Workers Win And The Complainers Lose…And I’m Totally Fine With It
In and around Ontario, the war on internships rages on. It’s been a hot topic in the press as of late since 2 Canadian magazines (Toronto Life and The Walrus) dismissed their interns after the provincial government questioned the ethics behind unpaid youth employment. This isn’t the first time internship drama has made an impact in the media – there was the Fox ‘Black Swan’ lawsuit that created quite a swell of excitement in September 2013 and it’s got me thinking.
As an intern you have an opportunity to prove to a company why you deserve to be hired over anyone else. In J.J. McCullough’s article for the National Post titled ‘Why Internships Should be Illegal‘, he likens unpaid internships to “something [that] can be very good for business yet still ugly and immoral.” He even goes as far as to educate young internship victims (eyeroll) on “9 tips for ending your internship on a positive note”. As a business owner who employs unpaid interns, I regularly come into contact with many people who agree with McCullough’s point of view on a practice that is a personal career choice many young professionals make. A wise career choice, if you ask me.
May 12, 2014 3 Creative Ways DIY Musicians Use Online Session Talent On AirGigs.com
Musical Direction
If you’re preparing for an upcoming showcase, or a live gig with new players, you need to be skilled at giving musical direction. There’s nothing more frustrating than going into a big gig hoping to capture a certain energy, sound or vibe, only to have it completely miss the mark.
May 10, 2014 
May 8, 2014 4 Ways For Artists To Get The Most Out Of Bandsintown
You’ve booked your tour, you’ve practiced your songs, you’ve packed the van, but you’re feeling like something’s missing. How can you get more people to come out to your shows? With gross ticket revenue up nearly 30% worldwide and touring having eclipsed record sales as the main source of artist income, Bandsintown’s Artist Platform has become an indispensable promotional tool for alerting fans when you’re on tour.
Over 10 million concert-goers use Bandsintown to discover shows, buy tickets and share tour dates with their friends. It automatically generates alerts for your fans through email, mobile notifications and Facebook notifications, and if you use Auto Promote or Twitter Sync, Bandsintown delivers alerts to your fans there too. Today Bandsintown powers the tour dates for over 215,000 touring artists, ensuring their fans never miss another live show.
May 6, 2014 Bands: How to Properly Use a Landing Page on Your Website
This post originally appeared on the Bandzoogle blog. Dave Cool is the Director of Artist Relations for musician website & marketing platform Bandzoogle. Twitter: @Bandzoogle | @dave_cool
Bandzoogle makes it easy to add an intro or “splash” page to your website. When used properly as a landing page for your visitors, they can be an effective marketing tool for your music.
However, intro pages can easily be misused, which can hurt your site traffic, fan engagement, and your sales.
4 Common Mistakes To Avoid with Intro Pages
Here are four common mistakes that we see with intro pages that you should avoid:
1. Permanent intro page: Intro pages should only be used for short periods of time and for specific calls-to-action. It becomes annoying for repeat visitors to keep having to click through to your main site.
Also, Google picks up text content on your page, and if the first page of your website is an Intro page, there isn’t much to tell Google how your site is relevant to search queries, which can hurt your rank.
May 5, 2014 5 Steps to an Amazing Band Website
By now I’m sure you understand the importance of having a website for your music. However, a sloppy, hastily thrown together website may actually be hurting your brand more than not having one at all. I’m sure you’ve all visited a website that was unorganized, out of date, or unprofessional looking and clicked off without even giving the content a chance. You don’t want that happening to your website!
The fact of the matter is that with all the tools and services out there to help you build a clean, professional website, you don’t really have an excuse. There’s also a ton of people with basic web design skills these days. There’s probably someone in your extended group of friends and acquaintances who knows all about Wordpress or can write HTML. Even with all that, building a new site or refurbishing an old one can seem a daunting task, so I’ve broken it down into 5 things you should keep in mind through the design process.
Advice from the Experts, Marketing tagged Indie Musician, website May 3, 2014 
May 1, 2014 Top Five Must-Have Music Apps for 2014
In this age, nothing brings more music to our ears than a mobile music app. We apps can listen to our favorite songs and find new tunes whether at home or on the go. Stephanie Falvo of Echno Nest says that, “We as consumers are beginning to expect more from our music services. Not only do we want a place to catalog our music, but we want to use platforms that cater to our music tastes.” However, no two mobile music apps are the same, and the vast number of music apps available for can be overwhelming. This list of the top five mobile music apps will ensure that you have the best listening experience to keep you jamming to your ears’ content!
1. Spotify (FREE for Android, Apple, Blackberry, and Windows Phones/$9.99 a month for ad- free listening):
Spotify is essentially the app of Playlists. This popular music streaming program available on desktops enables you to access the playlists from your computer on your mobile device. Not only will the app shuffle these songs, but new tracks similar to the original playlist content are also included in your original playlist.
April 29, 2014 5 Money Management Tips for Indie Musicians
There are many articles out there telling indie musicians about all the cool ways they can make money in today’s music industry. However, all that money that you could potentially make probably won’t equate to very much if you don’t have an understanding of personal finance and budgeting. Without a sense of finance you could see your hard-earned cash going down the drain as a result of impulse buys, unstructured saving, and over-spending for your projects and tours.
If you’re far enough along in your career, your manager or accountant may take care of budgeting and finance, but, especially in today’s industry, most musicians starting out may only have a friend or classmate acting as their manager. With all the stuff you need to get done, something as mind numbing as finance tends to get pushed under the rug in favor of more glamorous activities like recording, writing, and talking with fans on social media. But the fact of the matter is, it’s not glamorous to throw money away. And that’s exactly what you could be doing with poor budgeting and finance.
So how can you get a better handle on your finances and get the most money out of your music? It’s actually a lot easier than you would think - no boring accounting lecture necessary! With just 5 quick fixes, you can be more organized and make more money.
April 26, 2014 
April 24, 2014 5 Things They Don't Tell You About Being A Booking Agent
You can read all the articles you want (even from us), and talk to every agent under the sun, but you will not really understand what it is like to be a booking agent until you actually do it. It’s a completely different
1. Being a booking agent requires a lot of time.
I’m not talking 2 hours a day. I’m talking about your entire day spent at the computer working and sending out emails. Facebook, email, phone calls. Rinse, repeat. For hours and hours a day.
I have spent days just researching local promoters in certain areas just to get turned down in the end. Booking a tour can take 3 months of 8 – 12 hour days of just researching, e-mailing, messaging and networking.
April 23, 2014 How To Get Gigs That Make You Money!
As many will agree, getting and performing gigs are an important part of most musician’s music careers. Aside from giving fans the opportunity to meet you in person, live shows can be a good source of additional revenue from your music.
That said, not all gigs have the same earning potential as each other. Some gig types have a few revenue sources you can tap into, while others tend to be hard to make money from. So today I’ll give examples of which gigs you should and shouldn’t get booked for if your main aim is to make money from them.
P.S. This guide doesn’t look specifically at how to get gigs, but more at which ones you should be aiming for if you want to make money. I’ve written a guide detailing the steps to get gigs, so if you’re after the actual process, you’ll want to check that out as well.
Some gigs are better for making money than others, so choose wisely - Tweet This