Tag Archive - community

Band Interactivity In “The Real World”

February 11, 2009 in Interact with 0 Comments

It's not all about selling something... except for selling yourself.

Build your community at the live-shows too...not just online.

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 even.

It can be so easy to get caught up in all the work… slogging gear, tuning guitars, getting your stuff up on stage, getting your stuff off-stage, drinking, hiding backstage like a rockstar so people don’t see your new ironic t-shirt before you storm the stage… and so forth.  But you can’t let that happen.  Look at it this way – you’re there networking, so network your butt off!

Start off with your arrival time -  get there early, in plenty of time to load in, and watch the other bands do soundcheck.  Talk to them.  If they’re anything like you, they’ll probably really like talking about their band.  If you have time after soundcheck, and you’re going to grab food, why not ask the other bands if they want to join you?  Make a friend.  Build your network.

Then during the show, be accessible, watch the other bands perform as much as you can, until you need to go backstage just before the show to get ready.  Hang out in the crowd, talk to the person next to you about the band performing… maybe you mention that you’re playing later.  Talk to people though.  And try not to stick to just your friends either.  This is work, it’s not party-time, you know?  Go make new friends.

When you’re on-stage, play the hell out of your songs.  Don’t half-ass anything, ever.  And even though it’s not “cool” to be too self-promotional, its imperative that you say your band name after several of the songs.  Plug your website, and make sure you let the crowd know you’re on Myspace.  At the end of your set, make sure you tell the crowd to come say hello to you right after the set at your merch table.  This is not negotiable.  You must try to drive people over there, and telling them to “come say hi to you” is about the softest sell that’s acceptable.

Then, as soon as you walk off stage, get over there.  Not five minutes later, not twenty minutes later… get off stage and walk right over to your merch table.  (and trust me, you’re not too cool to do this either.)  I’m sure you have a friend who can help your band by taking some of the gear off-stage for you.  Possibly the person who was watching your merch for you while you played?  At any rate, figure it out, and make sure you get right over to the merch table, before people start to forget about you.  (That can happen very quickly…usually as soon as the drink they’re currently sipping runs dry and they have to go to the bar to replenish.)

So you’re at your merch table right after the show, (or at least your main spokesperson is there… ie the one who does all the talking into the mic between songs when you play)… again, don’t just hang with friends and ignore people you don’t recognize… now is not the time for self-congratulatory post-show festivities… now is the time for making lasting connections with new fans!  Don’t wait for someone to interrupt your current conversation so they can purchase something from you… be aware, greet them yourself, first!  As soon as you spot them lingering… they’ll be there, about two feet back from the merch table, watching, debating what to do.  Deciding whether to approach the table or not.  Make the decision for them, spot them, smile and say hello!  Engage them in conversation, talk to the strangers about the show if they bring it up (they will), invite them to give you their email address so you can email them bi-weekly about news relating to the band.  Tell them how often you would email them, I use bi-weekly as an example.  It’s also good to offer an incentive right away too… for example, “Hey, if you want to sign up to our bi-weekly e-newsletter, you’ll get a download card with two of our songs on it for free, plus we do a draw every month for a free album/t-shirt prizepack.”

Then, if they buy something, say Thank You!  Wish them a good night, and tell them you hope you see them again.  Make their experience everything you would want from your favorite band.  And maybe you just might actually see them again after all – rocking out in the front row of your next show, with the three friends they dragged out to see you.  Repeat.

Building Fan-Band Relationships In 420 Characters Per Day

February 7, 2009 in Build with 10 Comments

twitter

It's easy to use, but its easy to misuse too.

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 of people who most likely will enjoy your music, and want to hear what you have to say.  And build your numbers up slowly and organically.  Don’t just sign up, start following a bunch of random people, and make your only tweets promotional in nature, like saying “check out my band on our myspace” over and over again.  In fact, a really good idea is to upload a profile picture, customize your profile page, fill out the BIO line, display the link to your website/myspace, and post at least five to ten tweets (see below for more on that) all before you start following people you don’t know.

On Twitter, it IS okay to follow people you don’t know in real life, so that’s a plus.  People are far less protective of their Twitter followers/followings than they are of their Facebook friends.  So go ahead and search Twitter for key words of conversations that might indicate that a person may like your music, and follow them.  For example, if you are in a band that sounds like MGMT, try searching for things like “Hipster Runoff” and definitely “MGMT”.  Find people who are already talking about the genre, follow them, and start talking about them too.  Be honest… “hey, I love MGMT as well.  I play in a band and they are a major influence on our sound.” is a good start.  It’s honest, to the point, and conversationally promotional.  Then, if the person @replies, and asks you for the link to your Myspace, go ahead and give it to them.  @replying is a public conversation, so then anyone reading that conversation will see your site as well.  And the people who are actually reading the conversation, are the people you want to reach!  Jump in, and start talking to people.  Just don’t come on too strong… you wouldn’t walk into a house-party full of strangers and just start shouting “HEY, I’M IN A BAND… CHECK US OUT!”, so don’t do it online either.

The other key to twittering effectively, is to tweet often, but not too often, and to balance your tweets between promotional tweets, personal tweets, and conversation tweets (either asking a question, or @replying to one of your followers posts).  Working Twitter into your daily routine takes a bit of getting used to, but you need to make sure you do it.  Here’s an easy way to get into it.

Start by tweeting three times in a day.

Make one tweet your “promotional tweet”… things like “in the studio, laying down vocal melodies,” “just posted a new song on our myspace, hope you like it!” and “new tour dates announced!  check them out here.” are all basic examples of promotional tweets.  Give a bit of information that people who follow you would care about.

Another of your tweets should be the “personal tweet.” These are designed so your followers feel connected to you, the way your friends in real-life are.  Say things like “Deciding between Pizza and Chinese Food for dinner.” or “going snowboarding tomorrow, stoked!”  Basically whatever is really going on in your life outside of the band.  Even though they seem mundane, when you’re a fan of a band reading these tweets, they can seem really exciting because they are the window into the band members personalities… and that deeper fan-band connection is what they are looking for.

Finally, the third tweet should be your “conversational tweet.” These are designed to further embed you in the community, and stimulate interesting discussion.  These don’t have to be about music, or your band, because they are to show that you’re interested in what your followers have to say, and that you’re paying attention to them too.  Things like “@follower, nice new tattoo you got there!” or “Question – what do you think of the new U2 single?”  And if someone asks you a question, make sure you @reply back to them too.  These tweets all show that you care about what the people who follow you have to say.  And again, just think about this from a fan’s perspective… imagine if your favorite band was actually listening to what you had to say, responding to you personally, and asking you questions… you would immediately recognize that as a sign they cared about you too… and think how that would make you feel!

This is the power of Twitter for musicians.  Promotion, fan-connection, community-building, relationship-developing.  Use it to truly endear your audience to you. In three simple tweets per day.  (a measly 420 characters of daily effort.)

PS – Fan relationships are precious…don’t abuse them.  Don’t do any of what I’ve mentioned above if you don’t actually care.  A one-sided relationship is really easy to sniff out, and it’s more detrimental to you than if you didn’t do anything at all.

Blip.fm – An Introduction For Musicians

February 3, 2009 in Use with 1 Comment

The 21st Century version of being the DJ at a house-party.

The 21st Century version of being the DJ at a house-party.

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, and better, though that last one can be debatable at times.

So along came Napster, mp3 players, P2P, etc.  We all know that story.  And now there’s an influx of different web startups that allow people to share their music and their musical tastes with the online world in all sorts of different ways.

Enter Blip.fm.  It’s the new incarnation of being the DJ at the houseparty.  You get to be the one to tell all your friends what songs to check out, and provide a soundtrack to an everchanging mood, timeline, day, whatever.

Similar to Twitter, Blip allows people to create their own profile, then send small messages (like tweets) out to their “listeners” which are the other people on the network who have decided they want to follow you.  The addition that Blip adds to the Twitter/micro-blogging concept is that they have a streaming audio player built in, so you can attach a URL to your message that will trigger a song to start playing.  And as long as the song has an mp3 posted somewhere online, and that location has been input into the Blip.fm database, you can stream it to all your listeners. Its very easy to add a song to the Blip database, all you need to do is post the mp3 online somewhere, and input the URL on the Blip site.

So for bands, it’s another great way to be active in the online space.  Musicians, you should start blipping songs by your influences, and by bands whos fans might like your music.  Start listening to other blip DJs who are blipping songs by similar artists too.  What will happen is, you’ll build up a listener-base of avid music-fans who happen to like bands similar to yours.  Then, when you occasionally blip one of your own songs, and you’re open and honest about it, you’ll have a receptive community of listeners paying attention to you, and maybe they’ll like what they hear.

EarnItYourself.com

January 27, 2009 in Use with 5 Comments

logo

Earn It Yourself - an online band community.

I recently came across this site, which is a community site for bands to network with each other, trade shows, read articles to get some tips on touring, radio, etc. plus bands can sell their music through the site as well.   They’re also affiliated with BYOFL (Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life) and you can search that entire database via this site.  Another thing that’s interesting is the fact they host a weekly online radio show that deals with the realities of being in an indie band in this day and age.  The episode I tuned into was talking about licensing songs for use in film, commercials, etc, and music publishing.  Listeners can also call in to ask questions and get answers live.  The site also has an arrangement with Warped Tour, that will allow EarnItYourself bands to win the chance to play on the Kevin Says stage this upcoming year.

The most impressive thing about this site, though, is their philosophy.  “Earn It Yourself” is their take on the classic Do It Yourself mentality, but adds to those ethics, the fact that it’s okay to earn money from your band or your music, providing you do it while preserving your integrity and sticking to your personal values.  And you know what?  They’re right.

Twitter

December 7, 2008 in Use with 0 Comments

twitter

The micro-blogging platform can be very useful for musicians.

Are you on Twitter yet?  It’s been around for a few years now, but has existed mainly in the tech world.  Only now is it really breaking into the mainstream and musicians are starting to discover it as well.

So what is it?  Basically, it’s a micro-blogging site, that provides a way to send quick updates to a large group of people.  In the US, these updates can be recieved via SMS (unfortunately Twitter recently cancelled SMS-receiving capabilities in Canada).  You can send your updates via web, SMS, or mobile-apps like Twitterberry from your smartphone.

How does this help musicians or bands?  Your fans can follow you on Twitter, and therefore sign up to receive updates from you, and the updating is instantaneous, and they can get their news from you right to their phones.

There are definitely ways to Twittering well though, which I’ll talk about in another post… in the meantime, check it out for yourself, search the twitterverse for folks you find interesting, and dive right in.  Sign up for an account and try it yourself.  It can be very useful, and it’s also borderline addictive, so twittering often isn’t difficult.

AFI – Respecting And Rewarding Your Fans

November 24, 2008 in Emulate with 1 Comment

Davey Havok, lead singer of AFI gets propped up by his fans in more ways than one. Photo credit: Kristina Loncar

Davey Havok, lead singer of AFI gets propped up by his fans in more ways than one. Photo credit: Kristina Loncar

Whether you like their music or not, dark / goth / pop / punk-rock heroes AFI are leaders in fanbase engagement, interaction, and reward.  Back in 2003-2005 they ran an Alternate Reality Game that invited fans to solve puzzles, find clues, and interact with each other. The game was rewarding lucky participants with laminate All-Access passes, meet-and-greets, soundcheck parties and secret concerts long before ARGs like this hit mainstream with Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero.  Plus, the band has been using the social and community-mobilizing aspects of online forums to great gain for years.

In fact, not once, but twice, the band have won awards on the MTV Video Music Awards.  Once in 2003, and again in 2006.  Not so uncommon, but the difference is, both awards recipients were decided by public votes.  In both cases, the band mobilized their fanbase to help them win, but they did so by truly creating a feeling within their online street team and their official fan club that if fans helped the band win the award, it would be a victory not just for the band, but for all the fans as well.

It worked.  Fans cried when this band won their awards.  Fans felt as though they themselves won the award.  How did they do it?  AFI are not shy when it comes to rallying their fans, and asking them to unite to help further their cause.  But, they are also not shy when it comes to rewarding their fans by acknowledging them, and sincerely thanking them.  This truly helps create the feeling that the band and their fans are one team, working together.  The key is the sincere acknowledgement.  You can’t just ask your fans to do things for you without some acknowledgement for their time spent on your behalf.  It doesn’t matter if that’s in the form of tangible goods like exclusive stickers, posters, t-shirts, what-have-you, or if you’ve got a point-system that keeps track of how much work a fan has done for a band, or if it’s just giving them a sincere and heartfelt thank you.  Whatever it is, make sure it’s meaningful.  And make sure you mean it.  Those two things may sound similar, but they are different.  The first one says to make sure your rewarding your fans with something substantial, that will make them feel their efforts have been worth their time.  The second one says that if you ask your fans to do something that will benefit you, and they actually do it, then you had better thank them and you better be sincere about it.  All this social community and networking can be undone if fans feel their being taken advantage of.

Check out these two videos, and you’ll see a perfect example of what happens when all this is done right.  The first one is the AFI’s acceptance speech, from the second time they won a moonman, in 2006.  Listen to the sincerity in the singer’s voice when he’s thanking the fans.  And the second video is of a fan, watching the band accept that award on TV. It’s also important to read the video description on the second one. This is what it says: “this is me freaking out about AFI winning Best rock video! I voted 600 times for them! I am SOOOOOOO happy they won! I helped Davey get his moonman!”

Watch these videos, learn from them, and then make sure you do everything you can to inspire this level of community between your band and your fans.  If you are one with your fans, amazing things can happen.

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