Archive for the ‘Social Media and Music’ Category

As you will have undoubtedly of heard by now, Google has launched its new social network ‘Google+’ and as Ariel pointed out in her post the other week, musicians need to be signing up and using it. Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting a lot with Google+ and keeping on top of things from within the social media and search industry, and I can safely say now that Google+ is going to become important – not for the amount of...

This guest blog post was written by Helen Reid. Being in the music industry is like having any other type of creative job, there are hundreds of different things you can do, but in the end everyone wants to be in the music business (who blames them!). Whatever type of job you want to do in the industry there is no clear path to the shining lights of show business and it is a dog eat dog world out there. There are, however, a few things...

So with all the hype around the iPad dying down I thought I would do a bit of a round up on some of the coolest apps built for musicians, most creative uses of the iPad by musicians and talk about some of the future plans for the iPad that might benefit musicians. The Seven Coolest Ways Musicians Can Use the iPad 1. Mixing songs on the iPad using it as a Midi Controller There are several apps available, such as MidiPad that allow you to...

Ok so over the past few years the strategy for building music industry contacts has kind of changed in favour of musical artists, because it's now easier than ever to build a relationship with whoever you want to - because chances are they're online and on social networks. You're now in charge Unlike five years ago when the influential A&R executives or radio music directors in your niche only had to turn their phone off and not check...

For those of you who follow me on Twitter you'll know that I've recently been working on my first video training course called 'Advanced Online Music Marketing', which contains an episode called 'How to Speak Bloggernese' - an explanation of how to contact bloggers and get online promotion and new fans built through music blogs. (more...)...

After first hearing about Splitgigs from my friends at Top of the Ox, and then again over lunch with the guys at Ditto Music I decided to check out Splitgigs to see what all the fuss was about. I assumed it would be just another mediocre start-up with no real value to musicians, but thankfully I was proved wrong - their service is frickin' awesome! (more...)...

If I told you that you could have an advert promoting your music to 100,000's of people who listen to your genre of music, live in towns you're performing in or work in the music industry for less than the cost of a portion of chips you'd probably think I was joking, but this is exactly what Facebook advertising can do for musicians. (more...)...

There has been a great deal of noise over podcasting in the past few years but it still doesn’t seem to have caught on as a general practice for musicians, at least not to the same extent that blogging has. Perhaps it’s due to the initial hassle of setting a podcast up, or just a lack of faith in the benefits that it has, my personal opinion is that it’s an excellent medium to communicate with fans and is largely unexploited by...

Search Engine Optimisation is loosely defined as increasing the quantity of quality traffic to a website through organic (non paid) search results.  But how can that help you to build your fan base? SEO allows musicians to manipulate search results to improve the chances of fans finding them from search engines. Let me put it into perspective - there are 450,000 searches a month for the term 'acoustic music'.. now if you were an acoustic...

Following on from my video blog on how musicians should be using Twitter, I thought it would be interesting to compare the four big boys - who you might expect would be pretty damn good at using Twitter, wouldn't you? Well one of them is that's for sure. (more...)...