November 2, 2013 
MTT, MTT Open tagged Independent, promotion February 14, 2013 In the increasingly difficult world of getting your music heard, indie artists are being supplied with unparalleled tools in the form of social media, web sites specializing in “helping” musicians with marketing, and audio platforms which promise unlimited access to the public.
January 29, 2013 Everyone says that flyering is dead and a useless waste of money. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t. It’s not that the people still hanging up flyers are mindless drones simply repeating the “promotion” techniques they’ve seen on TV that they think might work, it’s that they DO WORK. Flyering has to be done strategically though. There’s no use hanging up flyers without a plan in place. Over the next 12 weeks, you’ll be playing 4 shows (one show every 3 weeks) and flyering the hell out of every single one of them. By the end of the 12 week challenge, you’ll see an increase in your fan base, a huge increase in awareness, a clearer market segment that you can play to in the future, and hopefully some money rolling in as well.
May 21, 2012 The first piece in this 3 part series discussed steps you should take before you start promoting a new album, such as having your online presence all in order. In Part 2, I will go over some basic elements for, yep you guessed it, promoting a new album.
May 10, 2012 Artists tend to be creative people. We write music, create dazzling visions of art, and express sentiments in the most unique ways. However, when it comes to promoting our art, something else happens. For one reason or the other, most artists fail to express any creativity in their business endeavors.
Here are five easy (non-internet) ways that you could promote your band. I hope that more than anything else, they get your brain going and inspire you to create ideas that work specifically for your art.
March 3, 2012
Where
The Music Industry
Thinks Out Loud
February 28, 2012 Dave Cool is the Community Manager for musician website and marketing platform Bandzoogle. Twitter: @Bandzoogle | @dave_cool
The “Four P’s” is a term used to describe the traditional Marketing Mix: Product, Price, Placement, and Promotion. Well, I’m going to borrow from that expression and talk about the Four P’s of Playing Live Shows: Preparation, Promotion, Performance, and Post-Show. This series of blog posts will cover the things that you can be doing as a live performer to maximize each show. Part 1 was all about preparing for your show, and in now in Part 2 we focus on promotion.
Live Music, Promotion tagged Live Shows, Marketing, promotion November 16, 2011 Album finished? Check. Tour dates? Check. Press photos? Check. Press release? Check. Biography? Urgh! If you’re not a spectacular storyteller or wondrous wordsmith, then the task of writing or updating your biography can seem like an arduous task. However, a biography is an essential item in any musicians marketing tool kit. It positions your brand identity, communicates your key achievements and provides background info to fans and media alike. Here are a few pointers to help you on your way…..
Branding tagged Artist Advice, Marketing, promotion, writing October 5, 2011 Running a Facebook ad campaign is confusing. You bid for ad placement, but the price you pay bears little relation to your bid. What’s the difference between reach and social reach, connections and clicks, CPC and CPM? More importantly, is there any way to tell how many people played, downloaded, and shared your song, or signed up for your mailing list? (answer: no, there’s not)
ReverbNation’s new Promote It tool addresses those shortcomings, and then some. You pick a song, photo, and budget, and it automatically generates dozens of optimized Facebook ads based on past Promote It campaigns, and continually optimizes your campaign based on the performance of those ads. New fans click through to customized landing pages that track not just clicks and likes, but plays, downloads, shares, wall posts, and mailing list signups. As I’m quoted as saying in the press release, “It’s the ultimate ‘set it and forget it’ fan-making machine!” I was invited to try it out and provide feedback during the beta period, and I’m flattered that some of my suggestions made it into the final product. So far I’ve run six campaigns. Let’s walk through the creation and performance of my latest and most successful one.Developing a Strategy, Effective Publicity and Promotion, Expanding Your Fan Base, Facebook, Internet Strategies, Resources, & Websites, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Music Sites, Music Social Media, Selling Your Music, Social Media, Understanding Your Market, music sales tagged Facebook, Marketing, ReverbNation, passive promotion, promotion | 1 Reference September 22, 2011 I’m continuing the Music Marketing Experts FAQs where my favorite gods and goddesses of online marketing and Social Media promotion share with me the questions they get asked the most by musicians.
What’s most important as a promotional tool; Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube?
August 8, 2011 When you think of DIY bands, chances are the acts that come to your mind are not on the billboard charts. At least not yet. When we first reached out to 3OH!3 for an interview, we had our doubts as well. However, as you will see below, 3OH!3 was born and raised in DIY ethos and continue to move forward with the same mentality even today.
July 29, 2011 Part of being a DIY artist is marketing yourself like an entrepreneur or small business owner: You’re presenting the brand of “You, Inc.,” comprised of all the unique things about your music and you as an artist. And while putting some tracks up on social media platforms like Facebook and Myspace or on your own website is an important part of your larger portfolio of marketing tactics, you can’t just leave it at that and hope that someone will eventually stumble across you. A very important part of your PR campaign as a DIY artist is presenting yourself well to blogs, podcasts, online music communities, music websites and magazines. It’s a given that if you’re at the stage where you’re ready to approach the press about your music, you should have at least two things: a professional-sounding collection of your songs – whether that is in the form of an LP or a full-length album – that represents you at your best; tangible proof that you are playing whenever and wherever possible, working hard at providing an engaging experience for your fan base – who essentially act as your paying “clients,” buying albums and coming to your shows – and to turn new people onto your music. Assuming you have both those things going for you, what comes next?
July 7, 2011 Odds are if an artist has to calculate their potential for success based on statistics – regardless of veracity – they are doomed from the start. Really. Think about it – the only formula known thus far to work with any predictability is BEING an act REMARKABLE enough (thanks, Bruce, a favorite word the past year or so), to spread by word of mouth. A formula NEVER out of date.
January 25, 2011 Viinyl is a fairly new service that popped up in late 2010 that allows you to create “song-based websites.” They ended up being one of my top picks for 2010’s most interesting and innovative music start-ups, and I’d like to dive a bit deeper into the free service with this post.
If you ever find yourself wanting to promote a single, using Viinyl is an excellent way to provide your fans with a rich media experience surrounding a single song. In this post, I want to show you how you create a one-song web page with Viinyl, and how you can link to it via a subdomain on your official website (e.g. “singleimpromoting.mywebsite.com”).
Selling Your Music tagged Business, promotion, single, website