Please everyone. I know you think summer is all full of fun, but please watch out for invisible ice. It may not be safe.

Credit for the original image goes to Adam from the band Mongrel. I stole it from his Facebook wall. He said I could. I said you could go check out their tunes because they are one kick ass band. Go to http://www.myspace.com/mongrel to do that.

Stop The Noise

I am still amazed when I run into websites that start blasting music at me the second the page loads. Are we stuck in the 90′s? Even MySpace has made it so the default for a band page is to not do this. They now make a band dig into their settings to make this happen. Why? Because it is just bad form. It’s rude and it turns people off. They also got tired of paying for the bandwidth for people that didn’t want to hear the music in the first place. It is why “Band Spam” on MySpace was getting such a bad reputation! For the most part it is looked down on, but people still do it. I recently made a post on several social networks ranting about this practice. Most of the people of course agreed that it drove them nuts when bands do this. A few wondered why it is frowned on.

It is very frowned on for several reasons. Listening to the band’s music is only one of many reasons to go to a band’s website. You could be going there to check tour dates. You could be reading up on a new release. Maybe you are a music journalist just looking for a band photo. I could go on and on. The point is that blasting away at someone without giving them the choice is rather presumptuous and a little rude.

So why is it rude? What if I am in bed doing one of the many things that can be done on a band website other than listening to music. I forgot to turn my speakers off and the site blasts away before I can click the mute button. That band just woke my wife up because they assumed I could only be at their site to listen to music. Or what if I am trying to review a cd of THAT VERY BAND? I already have a cd playing. Now I can’t surf around their site without songs stopping and starting with each page load. Most people listen to music on their computers and your browser doesn’t have it’s own specific volume control.

I have lost count on how many times I have had to stop listening to a cd I was trying to review because I was trying to surf around a band’s website to check some facts on my article. I had to stop listening to the cd I was writing about so I could mute my volume while I surfed around the site! Now of course if browsers had their own volume control this would solve the problem, but the best solution is to leave it up to the person visiting your site.

Now it is not just bands that do this. I have even seen charity sites that have little to do with music inflict this on people. Bandwidth is expensive, so why pay for bandwidth just to annoy people and turn them off to your band? Not only is making people click the play button first create a better experience but it saves the band money. How hard is it to click a play button? Not too hard if the website design is done well.

So please everyone, do your part to convince bands, record labels, and everyone else to stop auto play websites. It’s just bad business.

Sexual Chocolate

Ok, so as a follow up to my “Top Ten Worst band names Ever!” post, here is my top 10 tips to a good band name. I figured it was only fair since there might be a few of you second guessing calling yourselves “I went To The Store To Buy A Grape For Lunch”. Please notice that I am calling these tips and not rules. Why? Because rules are made to be broken. Tips are something to consider. So sure there will be exceptions. I know there are great bands that defy these tips. That is why they are just tips. Not rules. For the most part however, they hold true and should be strongly considered.

1. Keep it short.
Although a one word band name will most likely end up with you in court with ten million other unimaginative losers who thought of the same band name, you don’t want anything too long. Two words is a little more safe, but three words is the limit! Anymore than three words and your band name is very likely a inside joke that will get old very fast and most won’t even get. This will cause most people to just dismiss your band before they even hear the first note. You say the band isn’t serious anyways? Most of the greatest bands around were started off as just something to pass the time. So make sure the band name isn’t something you will think of as a curse when things shockingly get serious.

2. Can You Chant It?
Try chanting the name Slayer. Pretty easy eh? Now try chanting any of the bands from my worst band names list. Sucks, don’t it? Even if you are playing to 100 friends at the local tavern, you will want a name that will remain fun to chant for years to come.

3. Is it taken already?
Check every source you can. Check Amazon to make sure there isn’t a cd from a band with that name. Then check Wikipedia. Then check MySpace music section. If you are a Metal band check Metal-Archives. They have a database of Metal bands that is so big it is ridiculous. Check Cd Baby too. Then check to see if you can get the dot com domain. If you can’t get the dot com website don’t bother. Once you check all of those, grab those spaces as soon as you can before someone else does!

4. What Does It Say About The Band?
I hate to reference Slayer so often, but what does that name say about the band? They are going to slay! You know right off the bat they they are not some wimpy acoustic folk band. There was a local band around the Seattle area in the 90′s called Forced Entry. What does that say about the band? What does Trans-Siberian Orchestra say about that band? With that you know it is going to be some epic music with some really well thought out arrangements. You know that there is going to be some really great orchestral instrumentation. Pick a name that sends the right message for the band.

5. Make sure it doesn’t sound like that other band
So if you have a band name that confuses people into thinking you are another band, you will get some pretty ticked off people showing up at your concerts. Imagine if a band was called something like “Epic Nirvana”? Or how about “Anthrax Exodus”? That last name might be good for a Thrash Metal tribute band, but otherwise it would suck the taint of a dead pigeon (if a pigeon has a taint)!

6. Don’t use any brand names
It might be funny to name yourselves “Microsoft Blue Screen” for awhile, but the joke will get old when the lawyers come knocking at your door.

7. Enough with the name dropping!
I have seen a trend where bands will use a famous actress or actor in their band name. Stop it! It makes it hard for your fans and friends to find you on the internet because all they will find is that actress. It also might land you in court. Plus, joke names get old really quick.

8. No swear words
Notice how many of these rules could be reduced down to a rule of “No joke names”? They get old real quick and create more problems than they are worth. You will have a hard time putting up flyers, coming up in search engines, getting on even the local band radio shows, or even sometimes getting shows.

9. Think about search engines
In this day and age you need to think about search engines. Do you have at least one word that will help your band own that “phrase” in search? I have to say that I thought the band name Arkaea was stupid at first. Then I started putting it into search engines to research for an interview with the band. They always came up first because it isn’t a real word. They made the word up so they wouldn’t have to compete with anyone in any way. Smart guys I have to say.

10. Can fans spell it?
Yes, I know I just gave the band Arkaea points for coming up with a name that gets great Google juice, but I have to look up Fear Factory every time to remember how to spell the damn thing! Your band won’t have that reference, so make sure people can spell it!

Now I know that if you try to think of a band name that fits all these tips you will drive yourself crazy. That’s ok. A little insanity has done Ozzy well, right? Seriously, if you have the imagination to write great songs this should not be a problem. I remember a few years ago people started complaining that all the good website domain names were taken. Since then my wife and myself have grabbed RockMyMonkey.com, HeavyAsHell.com, QueenOfCheese.com and many others. If you have the imagination it will happen. If you can’t pull off a good name, you don’t have what it takes to write great music anyways. This is the first test. Will you pass?

A couple days ago I was asked why I became part of the team behind the “Tweet #metal Chart“. Well to be honest my entire purpose was selfish. I wanted a way to find my target audience. I have found that the best way to find a ton of people that are in a very small niche group is to provide a free service for that group of people. Give them something that they will really want and they will come in droves. It always works and almost always works well. So I continue to provide tools for the hard rock and metal community. Why? Because it is the best way to find the highest quality people within that category. Now of course they are using me as well. That’s the whole point. If I always do my best to make sure they get the most out of what I do, I get what I want. The Tweet #metal chart can of course be used by anyone who wants to find these high quality people just as well as it can be used by me, but it would not have been as useful of a tool if I kept it all to myself. Helping others helps me more than being totally selfish.

Now there are some that are always trying for the quick and easy. The local bands that are happy to play the same clubs, screw the same local groupies, get paid the same crap door money, drink the same crap beer, and somehow expect a record company to somehow find out about them and hand them the world. There are the promoters that will book bands, put up a couple flyers in a few windows, draw the same crowd, and pretty much go no where. Everywhere in every part of life you will find the status quo. You will find that the majority of people will either just be really lazy or they will go for the quick scam. All it takes is one out of every few million to gain from this line of thinking to keep people buying into it. Look at the lottery. My wife and I call it “The idiot tax” because you are being an idiot if you think you are going to win. We still play, but we at least joke about it being the “Idiot Tax”. So even we are guilty of this small minded way of thinking at times. Almost everyone is, but what can we learn from that and when should we go the extra mile to get out of this rut? How do we get out of this rut?

Well, I have found that just about anything you can do will put you above the majority. Take a look at how far everyone else is willing to go. Then go twice as far to win. If the standard local bands are putting up a few flyers and updating their MySpace page, then you should do that and then some. Buy radio and newspaper ads in the local area. A few thousand dollars investments will put you way above the pack. If your band members are all spending their hard earned vacation time from work to do a mini tour, advertise! You are on a national tour, so advertise as such. 3 grand at FixionMedia.com will kick things in high gear for an entire month. Two weeks before the tour starts and for the two weeks during you will be impressing local clubs around the country. Labels will start to wonder why they keep hearing your name. If you can afford a few thousand to toss at IndieClick.com as well you are getting close to pro level marketing for a tour.

In fact I will make a deal with any band out there. First UNSIGNED band to follow the following directions exactly wins a full year of advertising on all three of the sites I am connected to. These sites are MarkCarras.com, RockMyMonkey.com, and HeavyAsHell.com. I will give said band a banner at the bottom of all three sites (pretty much every page and at least the highest traffic pages) for the term of one year. They can change the graphic of the link connected to the graffic once per month.

Here is what you need to do to win:
1. Buy $3,000 of advertising from Fixion Media, $5,000 of advertising from IndieClick, and $2,000 from Blast Beat with all campaigns starting on the same day.
2. Have this all connected to a two week tour with two weeks of advertising before the tour starts.
3.Contact me before the ad campaign starts so I can track it.
4. Do this before June 1st of 2010 because after that this deal has to die.

Deal? Why am I doing this? Honestly it serves me if a band “makes it” because they followed things from this blog doesn’t it? What would happen to my traffic if some band makes it big and they go around telling people they made it because of advice from this blog? My traffic goes through the roof and my word is then respected. Now I could just go around ripping bands off, getting them to sign shady 360 deals, and probably make a quick buck and get out of town before anyone knew what hit them. This is how the music industry is done most of the time. But that is short term thinking and I would rather do what I love for a very long time. To do that I have to keep it honest. I have to actually help bands. That is the long tail vs the short tail. Call my bluff. I dare ya!

This weekend CNN posted one great article about the over blown hysteria over swine flu (along with probably 50 very irresponsible articles fueling the insanity). We have all seen people go nuts over this for very little reason. The World Health Organization said that as of the writing this article there have only been 20 deaths world wide! There are probably more people that die from a smack upside the head every day. This is proof that people have zero interest in facts. We have become so addicted to being controlled by fear that we will latch on to anything hyped at all. It’s as pathetic as a worst case heroin addict.

So how can bands use the knowledge on this to benefit their band? Well, like most lessons, it is something anyone paying attention would have learned many times before. It’s always about hype. When advertising something it is never really about just letting people know about the event. You can have millions of people know about your show and still have an empty nightclub. Why? Because if it doesn’t seem like an out of control hype of hysteria people just don’t care. People always want to be part of something big. On Twitter people are going nuts posting articles supporting the paranoia over the swine flu. Why? Because they want to be part of the big party of everyone over reacting to the swine flu hysteria. When you have a show you want to create as much hype about the event as you can. You want to make it look like it is the event of the year and the club will be packed.

I stopped reading press releases many years ago, because the press agents pile on the B.S. a mile high. It’s like the bands that keep talking about their livers going on strike because they are such wild party maniacs. The truth is that most of them barely drink at all. Not too mention that that line has been over used to pathetic level. The press agents for metal go on and on about how the cd they are promoting is the most brutal thing to be recorded since the dawn of time. They find several ways to repeat the same thing Ad Nauseam. They are trying to hype the band to the point of hysteria because they know what that is worth. So even the pros do it, so why don’t you?

Now of course the press agents do several press releases a day and get so bored with the project that it comes off with zero integrity. You have way more time and can put more passion into your campaign. This is also why you should not play a city more than once every three months. Part of making the event hyped as much as possible is to make it special. How is it special if you are playing the same clubs, in the same city, every weekend? In fact, I have seen bands do very well if they don’t play within an hours drive per season. Starve your local scene! The other thing you do is to save up as much money as you can so that you can advertise on radio, print, flyers, internet, and whatever else is available. Bands that spend their own money to promote a show end up with opening slots with the majors.

Like anything else, you will get out of it what you put into it. Expect things to just fall into your lap will get you no where. Work your royal ass off every second you can and you will see a difference. If you don’t see a difference you should have worked harder. Or maybe your band just sucks? That’s ok. I hear we will all die of swine flu within the week anyways if the media hype is to be believed.

No, I’m not talking about the bassist playing bass. Sure that is important, but your bass player needs to get up off his lazy butt and do a little more if he wants to play that bass for a job. There are many social networking tools I have featured in this blog. Way too many for one person to really use to there fullest extent. So if a band is really hungry they need to work together on this. You people are a small army and you need to look at this like a war. Don’t be the private that just sits back in the barracks eating up the rations. Have each band member can take on one or two social networking tasks. Then you can focus on it and push it to it’s limits. You can even make it an inner band competition. These social networks are ranked. Each user is ranked by either the site themselves or by an outside service that crawls the data. So which band member can climb the highest on the chart for the social networking site they took on. It will soon be very clear if the bassist is actually the laziest band member or if it’s that drummer.

Now most bands have that one band member that really knows their way around a computer and that band member always ends up being the one to take on all these promotional tools. Instead have that one band member be in charge of teaching all the other band members how to use these tools. This way the band as a whole can work together to take over the world. Each band member already has their specialty, so why not get the most out of that knowledge? These social networking tools like Twitter, Plurk, and FriendFeed are just waiting to be used to get your band’s music out to more people. So why not use them, abuse them, and suck them dry of their venture capitol while the money is still there. And of course make sure and add me to all of them. I tend to work really hard to give away cool stuff.

When you have been doing this as long as I have, you start to notice why bands stay local. It has less to do with talent and more to do with paranoia. Sure there are very talented bands that do everything right and still end up nobodies (Forced Entry), but this is very rare. Most of the time it seems to be a case of “Big fish in a little pond”. In their local town they are the heroes. The local bar has their new cd in a glass case like they it went multi-platinum. However, in the big bad scary world they are no more cool than the bum on the street begging for change. It’s a brave step to totally put your self out there. The world is a cruel harsh mistress and she will eat you up and spit you out (again, see Forced Entry). So what should you do? I say stop being such a wussy and grow a damn spine!

Many of these bands will dip just a toe in the water, not become world wide famous, and then give up and go back to becoming nothing more than local heroes. They say, “Well, we tried.” They really didn’t but they tell themselves that. You have to try everything and everything every chance you get or you might as well not try at all. You can’t keep playing the same gigs at the same local clubs and expect someone to walk in one day and hand you everything on a silver platter. Sure that happens to 2-3 bands a freakin’ decade, but the odds on that are worse than the state lottery. Walk outside in the sunshine this summer and see if you get hit by lightning. If not, then you don’t have that kind of luck. Do the old school “get in the van” style tours when all the band members save up a couple weeks vacation from their real jobs. However, promote the living hell out of it too.

A band will think nothing of it to spend thousands upon thousands on all their equipment, but when it comes to promoting the band they spend nothing at all. Maybe they might make up a few hundred flyers and pass them around if they happen to be going to another metal show a couple days before their own show. What about putting an ad on Blabbermouth for your little mini tour? What about assigning one band member to find out what the local music rags are for the town you will be playing. Then buy ads from them as well. Another band member should be in charge of finding out what the local college stations are and if they have a metal show. If so see if you can schedule a phone interview a week before hand. Don’t just email them links to mp3 files and call it good either. Send a full cd with a cover and everything. Toss in a XX-shirt as well. I know all this costs money, but is your music worth it? How much has your drummer invested in his set? How much are all your practice amps worth? Did your guitarist pay more than $100 for that Marshal amp? How much do you all spend on beer and Denny’s every month? You spend all this money on buying the right equipment to get the sound just right, but nothing on getting people to hear that sound? You blow the money you make on playing shows with piss beer and crap food.

So here is how a band can get the money needed to do all this stuff. What if instead of splitting the money you make from shows all the time you created a band fund. Then on top of that you all paid dues. Not a ton, but enough so that when you had a new cd you could actually promote it. If each band member put in $100 a month for two years, you would have enough for a very strong campaign with Blabbermouth, Brave Words, and all the websites in the FixionMedia ad network.

So be a brave little toaster and jump out of your small little pond. You can do it! Your strong enough, your good enough, and gosh darn it…people like you! Right?

So what bog should you use for your band updates? Well, this site is done with Word Press and it is very search engine friendly. Google owns Blogger, so you know that is going to be logged into their search engine. Those are the two best for what a band needs. Now I must mention some advice I currently do not follow yet myself. I was recently informed by Pamela Weir that I was not using “search engine friendly urls”. At first I didn’t get it to be honest. It seems that in the control panel of Word Press you have the option of having either nice short url’s or search engine friendly urls. I picked the wrong one when setting this thing up, so now when I switch I have to set up a bunch of re-directs so links back to these articles work. So I will be fixing that this weekend I hope. So make sure you have search engine friendly urls. This would mean that the headline is part of the web address.

Now how often to post? Well, this is all about new people finding your band. Post often. In fact post as often as you can. If you can get into the habit of posting at least once a day it would be a good habit. Why? Because Google loves blogs. The more pages, the more words for the Google bot to log in. The more words Google has loggged into their search engine that are connected to your site the better the chances a search result will link to your bands website.

So it can do amazing things for your search engine results to run a daily blog. I know you think most will not care that the band didn’t practice today but instead just hit the local Taco Bell, grabbed some brews, and hung out and watched the football game together. However, think of all the key words I had in that one sentence alone! If you can post 300-400 words a day it will get your band a ton more traffic. More trafic means more fans. More fans equals pure awesomeness…right? So get blogging already!

I'm a Google Poser!

Why is Google calling me a poser? Well actually what happened is more my fault. On this site you can search for articles with specific “tags”. Each tag basically is given it’s own page. I was lazy on one article and only gave it one tag. That tag was “poser“. Google works by sending a bot around the web to collect data to base it’s searches on. That bot found the page of results on the tag poser for this site. So a search engine found a results page for the internal search feature for MarkCarras.com. Yes, that makes it a search result of a search result.

So why is this important to your band? Well, if you use modern website software (known as CMS or content management system) you will be asked to give tags to each update your band does on your site. Don’t be lazy about your tags like I was for this article or Google might start calling you names. Worse yet, people might not find your band’s website when they are looking for something your band sings about, does, or cares about. New people finding your band is important right? Your tags should be just as important.

Now most bands have figured out how to offer their cd online in some way. I say use them all if possible! If one of your potential fans doesn’t feel comfortable with one method, they have several others to choose from. Plus it looks cool to say you have it available in 10 different online locations. PayPal will allow them to buy it direct from you, but with their own credit card. CafePress will let you sell it along with a ton of merch. But what about getting it in the more mainstream online locations? CD Baby does this for you. When you set up your account you can have them handle iTunes, Amazon, and a few others.

Why have CD Baby do this? Well, two main reasons. Frist off some of these places do not want to deal with what is called “micorpayments“. Meaning $25 here, $50 the next month, $100 another month, and maybe $10 another month. iTunes wants to deal with thousands of dollars at a time. So they deal directly with CD Baby and CD Baby deals with you. Same thing with Amazon and the rest of them. It just makes life more simple. The second reason is that you don’t have to deal with setting up a ton of accounts with a ton of places. Cd Baby does it all for you. Plus you don’t get a bunch of tiny checks from all of these separate online sellers. So it could be said that you should go through Cd Baby for one reason. Less hassle for everyone!

So go set your band up with an account at Cd Baby