Tag Archive - interactive

Eventbrite

January 13, 2009 in Use with 0 Comments

eventbrite

Eventbrite - Online ticketing for everyone

Chances are, if you’re in a band, you’ve put on your own shows before. Eventbrite is a great tool for offering online ticketing to your events, and the best part is that it’s free unless you want to charge money for the tickets. They’ve partnered with Paypal for the accounting part, so your fans can pay by credit card or directly from their Paypal accounts. Their fees for paid-tickets are reasonable too. (2.5% per ticket, plus credit-card purchase fees for applicable tickets of an additional 2-3%).

Just another barrier that is being torn down, allowing bands to function as effectively, if not MORE effectively than “the old ways” of doing business in this industry.

All in all, a great service, for reasonable rates. And I love that they only make money when you do.

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.

Sing It Loud

November 16, 2008 in Emulate with 0 Comments

singitloudThis is a great example of a band doing a lot of things right.

On their Myspace page, the band call themselves a “proud pop band with an arena-rock musical background and a punk-rock pedigree.” Interesting enough.  But what’s more interesting, is the amount of interaction this band has opened itself to. A quick peruse of their Myspace page shows these boys have embraced the interactive opportunities like few others have.  They have a Fan2Band.com street-team, a Mozes.com “send Sing It Loud a text” widget, a Kyte widget, a Youtube channel, a Buzznet account, a Purevolume page, their music is available for purchase on iTunes, a “meet the band” video plus individual “meet” each member videos, an online merch store, embeddable banners, and they have very obvious listings of ways to contact the various members of the band and their business team. They also have at least two different photo blogs set up, a tour diary and to top it all off, each band member have their own twitter accounts, plus a band Twitter and they actually use all of them regularly, and they use them well.

I haven’t even listened to their music yet, and I’m already impressed.  The best thing about what they’re doing is that lot of it doesn’t cost any money.  But it does require an investment of time.  However, it’s investing time in cultivating a fanbase, helping fans get to know you.  Outside of songwriting and rehearsing, I can’t think of a more important thing for a band to be investing their time in.

There’s just no excuse not to do this.

Making Friends Not Fans

November 12, 2008 in Interact with 0 Comments

twowaytrafficIn days gone by, it was much more difficult for a musician to get to know their fans, and even more difficult for the fans to get to know their musicians. I mean really get to know them. Like the way you know your friends. Sure, fan magazines would tell you little tidbits of info, like birthdays, or favorite colours… little tiny shreds of truth, the slightest little glimpses behind the curtain, to reveal some small bit of true humanity about your favorite stars. And fans clamoured to get that info, to know what their heroes and idols were like. Because fans inherently feel the need to connect on a more meaningful level with the people who create the music they already have that intense connection to.

Fans would send birthday cards to fan club addresses, make banners to display at live concerts, scream, case out the back doors of concert halls, wait outside tour buses, anything to make a deeper connection with their musical heroes.

Now think about your friends… those with whom you already have that deeper connection. You know their birthdays because you’ve probably celebrated with them. You know their favorite colours, even their hopes and dreams. You would do anything for your friends, and your friends would do anything for you.

How did that happen? Simple. Your friends know things about you too. That’s how you became such good friends… you shared information back and forth. It wasn’t a one-way street, where you knew things about your friend yet they knew very little about you. You spent time with your friends, had conversations with them, shared experiences with them… you created a deep meaningful connection where one didn’t exist before, simply by the fact both of you chose to interact with each other.

Tools now exist for you musicians to create friends, not just fans. To have a two-way dialog, learn meaningful things about your fans and share meaningful experiences with your fans. Conversely, the fans have the incredible opportunity to develop meaningful connections with you too. Share information with your fans, have conversations with them. Use Twitter, Facebook, Myspace even, but don’t just use these powerful interactive tools as a means to quantify your fanbase, or to spew endless streams of outward announcements. Listen to your fans, respond to them, have conversations.

You’ll start to turn fans into friends… and your friends will do anything for you.

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