I wanted to urge all independent musicians looking to take their career into their own hands to check out Ariel Publicity. In the world of the crashing record labels there have been some people making a living and a name for themselves by helping the DIY musician. One is Derek Sivers, who Esquire Magazine calls "One of the last music-business folk heroes." Derek is the owner and creator of the massively successful CDbaby.com and has made digital and physical distribution painfully simple for the independent musician. Another is Ariel Hyatt who is teaching her brand of Social Media marketing and the DIY ethos through an abundant amount of resources in her books and website.
I am taking part in the music success in 9 weeks blog challenge, based on the book of the same name, in effort to be selected to win a free marketing campaign. Basically I read a chapter, write a blog and spread my music further while making fans in the process. I hope through these posts I can share what I have been learning and hopefully inspire to do the same and take on DIY in the new social age.
I followed all of Ariel's suggestion in this chapter and as usual everything is spot on. One thing I wanted to talk about a little further in detail is the use of "Intro Pages" and Flash. These 2 things are super annoying. Anytime I come across an Intro page on the web this little voice in my head says, "no shit i reached boringsite.com, that's what I typed into the address bar". Back in the day intro pages were on so many websites and I could not be happier to see them disappearing. With so much web surfing being done on Iphones these days, intro pages even make less sense. They typically do not offer any information and they slow down the loading of the site.
Flash...ugh. So annoying. GET ME THE INFORMATION!!!! We, the collective WE.... the Royal WE, have no patience. "We" should be able to view your website on the lowest common denominator P.O.S. computer, on the slowest dial up line, in the seediest Internet cafe from a third world town. I don't want to download any software to be able to get simple information on anything. Flash not only takes long to load, but it seems way outdated to me and cuts off access from anyone checking your page on an IPhone.
Other things discussed in this chapter had to do with maintaining the consistency of your brand through online and offline media and an important suggestion to make your website load within 3.5 seconds or be dammed to loose the majority of your audience. I also learned about the need to satisfy the Whats in it for me factor of the Internet. I decided to give away a MP3 a week for awhile until i release at least 20 and make them available only to my mailing list members. After I have released enough, I will let the mailing list vote on what songs should be re-produced and then included on my follow up album. I thought this sounded like a cool idea and a way for fans to take part in the record.
Since I have started this blogging challenge I have come across a lot of Blogs that deal with DIY promotion and wanted to share some of that information as well. Tight Mix is a great site that I found that that also offers some great advice and interesting blogs including an inspiring video of Young Guru discussing the state of the music industry.
Tommy
Of Course you thought Tight Mix is cool! My awesome intern started it :)
ReplyDeletex Ariel!