As a band who wants to spread the word about your music, promoting yourself is a great investment of your time and money.  Just please think twice before you spend your money on promotion, and also make sure you’re being smart about how you promote yourself.  A simple way to check and see if you’re being both ethical and effective, is to imagine yourself on the receiving end of your own marketing.  Imagine that someone …

Okay, so this post is a little bit overdue, but life happens, right?  And it’s Wednesday now, so time to get back on track.
When I wrote about building your community online by thinking like a fan, I mentioned that a similar philosophy can be applied to the offline world as well.  The same type of actions, getting involved in existing communities, asking questions, getting involved in discussions, frequenting sites, supporting other artists… it all works …

Okay, so on Saturday I said today I would talk about how you can build your community in the offline world, by thinking like a music fan.  I apologize, but something else came to mind and so I decided to save that post for Saturday.
In the meantime, I felt like this was what I wanted to say today.
Be who you are.
It sounds redundant, but it’s not.  These days I see a lot of bands who …

There’s a lot of talk these days about community-building, and many look to that as a modern strategy for spreading a band’s music.  While I do believe that it is a great strategy, many bands tend to overthink or underthink this strategy – some are too selfish, and for some reason it seems all natural behaviour of interaction and human nature can go out the window when it comes to promoting a band.
To build a …

Interactivity for bands and musicians definitely takes place online a lot.  But what about those times when  you’re not on Myspace, Twitter, updating your website, sending e-newsletters, reading blogs (hopefully this one) or otherwise engaging the online community… what if you’ve taken one giant leap for band-kind, and gotten yourselves out of the basement and onto a stage somewhere?  Interactivity is just as important in the live setting as it is on the computer, more …

So you’ve signed up for Twitter.  Congratulations!  It seems to be all the rage right now in the music industry.  Bands and industry people are registering for the site like crazy.  So how do you make this Twitter thing work for you?  How can you use it to help promote your band?
The key is to make sure that’s not your only goal.  What you should be trying to do is become part of a community …

In the dark ages before the internet, people used to share music physically.  They’d do things like make mixtapes for eachother, or trade albums back and forth, telling all their friends about what bands they’ve discovered.  At house-partys, invariably one person would end up “DJ” for the night… hanging out by the CD player and picking songs to play for the room.
Then, as it always does, technology comes in and makes things more efficient, faster, …