Why Your Band Needs an App
It’s no secret that the world of music has changed over the past decade. In fact, there’s no aspect of writing, recording, distributing and marketing music that hasn’t changed. While some bands may be actively seeking major label success, the truly inventive bands are working hard on every aspect of their music, including promotion. This is largely because today’s independent musician is truly independent. They often produce, record and promote their music without the help of a record producer or PR company.
Your Band is a Brand
The truth is that whether you like it or not, your band is also a brand that people need to connect with. The other truth is that music is more accessible than ever, and that means that we’re constantly barraged with new music via cloud-based music streaming services and music blogs. In fact, standing out from the masses of musicians and bands trying to strike it big is among the most difficult challenges of playing music these days. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better way to stay ahead of the back than with a well-designed iOS or Android app, though.
Three Reasons Your Band Needs an App
1. Promotion – If you’re like most band managers, promoters, frontmen/women you have probably spent countless hours promoting shows, new singles and upcoming tours or radio appearances. A mobile app would serve as a simplified portal for promoting upcoming band-related events.
2. Band Updates – If your band is actively touring and recording, you may find yourself incessantly posting updates to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, sometimes getting posts crisscrossed in the process. A quality mobile app will allow you to pre-schedule tweets and status updates from the road without having to scour unknown cities and towns for Internet cafes when you should be focusing on touring, which is a stressful process in and of itself.
3. Music/Merchandise Sales – A big debate in today’s music making culture is whether or not bands make money from touring. Whether or not bands make money from touring is irrelevant. The bottom line is that bands don’t make money from selling records anymore - royalties are a mere pittance of what they used to be - so they have to make money somehow. This is an unfortunate reality for many bands, but you can make this work in your favor with a mobile app. An app will let you alert fans and users when you come to their town. You can even offer discounts and specials for people who present a ticket stub for your show at the merch table. However you approach it, make sure you make it easy for concertgoers to buy your band’s merchandise.
Getting Down to Business: Developing the App
Unless you’ve lucked out by recruiting a mobile developer as a drummer, odds are you may find yourself on the clueless end of the app development spectrum. There are a number mobile app development services that work with you to build a high quality app to fit your band’s image. Some are open source or allow you to build your app in a drag & drop format, while others will work with you directly and custom design the app for you.
Facing the Music: The Old Industry Model is Dead
From the moment music lovers knew they could enjoy music digitally without spending $15 to $20 on an entire album, music industry bigwigs have been trying to thwart the power of the Internet. While this battle is far from over, the accessibility of promotional tools, like mobile apps and digital distribution, puts more power into the hands of musicians, and less power into the hands of executives and music publishers.