Bands

When doing promotion some band’s can get very pushy. It’s to the point where it hurts them more than helps them. Take a look at the social profiles of some unsigned bands. It will be “Check out our MySpace at _____” Followed by “Check out our MySpace at _______”, etc. After they do that 5 or 6 times they give up because they are not getting anything out of it. Well DUH! You keep sending out the same message. So no one is paying attention!

Try being more strategic about it. Try posting a link to a download a day for a week. Get people in the habit of going to your website once a day. Also, don’t make the mistake of saying it’s a download when it’s just a stream on MySpace. People hate that. They expected to be able to download it and if they can only listen to it at home in front of their computer you will only piss them off and they might not come back.

You don’t have to release a song every day. What about having a friend record one of your concerts. Then post a song a day from that show. What about just news? You can announce that you have new merch, new graphics done, a new band member, describe a new song you finished writing that day at practice, etc. Just make sure and not be too pushy with one message. People will get bored and start to ignore you. The less strategic you are the less impact your messages will have. If you wonder why people are ignoring you, this could be why.

Think of it as a show. What would happen if you played the same song over and over again at every show. Please get pretty bored with that one song. They want to hear an entire set. Same thing goes for your online profile. Give them a show!  There are two bands that do an amazing job at this. One is a band called Mongrel. Adam is a social media master. He is constantly giving fans and friends new information on the band and almost never posts the same thing twice.  Go to http://www.myspace.com/mongrel to check them out.

The other band that really does this well is the band Pure Hatred. No they are not some racist band. But they are far from being “Politically correct” either. In fact one of the ways they engage their fans is to post truly tasteless (but really funny) jokes on their social networking pages. Actually this is one specific band member, but it works to promote the band because people keep watching his profile to find out what the next joke is. Then when he needs to push his band people are actually paying attention. Keep them entertained and they will keep watching. Go to http://www.purehatred.com/about.htm to find out more about Pure Hatred.

Name This Band?

I read way too many band bio’s doing what I do for RockMyMonkey. After a few decades of doing so I have ended up with a few pet peeves about bad bios. If you read enough of these posts you will learn quickly what those are. The one I want o talk about this time though is name dropping bigger bands. No one cares, so stop that!

The most popular version of useless name dropping is where a band drops all the big bands they have played with. This means nothing. It means you paid a big bag of cash to get on a bigger stage. Yes this will get you in front of a bigger crowd and I am one of the very few people who supports this kind of “Pay To Play” model. It gets a band in front of more people and that is a good thing. Especially if that bigger band might have some crossover with their fanbase. But it means nothing about how good you are or what you sound like. It tells the person nothing as far as if your band will fit their publication or if that music fan will like your band. So just stop it!

There is also the band that name drops every popular band at the time under their influences. Which pretty much makes listing influences totally worthless. I have seen bands name drop the band Trouble when they sound more like Korn. Listing your influences is a great thing, but only if you are honest about it and only list those bands that would have a crossover of fans. Would fans of Slayer enjoy your Limp Bizkit style band? Probably not, but they might give you the beating you deserve. So maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all?

The third style of name dropping in a bio that needs to stop is listing a quote from a member of an established band. “Dave Mustaine said o the band, “Awesome. I love it!” when really what happened was that a friend of the band got backstage, that friend played 10 seconds of the band from their phone, Dave placated them to be nice and said what he needed to so the person would go away without hurt feelings. When I read these quotes it means nothing.

Stop name dropping. Just explain what the band sounds like. Be honest about your influences. Stick to the facts. Unless you suck that is enough. If you can’t find enough to say without the B.S. maybe your band is more interested in what is popular of cool than what kind of music is truly in your heart. There is a local band in Seattle that played full on mall-metal for well over a decade. It was horridly painful rap-core garbage. They went nowhere! Then about a year ago they switched to this doom/stoner style and their fanbase is growing at an insane pace. The band is exploding very fast and all they did was start being honest about what music was in their souls. Try that instead of name dropping.

Facebook Events

Are You Training People To Reject Your Invite?
I follow a ton of people from all over the world on most social networks. So I get invites to things all over the world. The problem is that I loose money on my music industry related activities already. So there is no way I am taking a private jet to your local club show. I know, what’s the harm when all I have to do is take a few seconds to click ignore on the event that was mass blasted to everyone on that persons list? Well, it’s kind of like when the “Are you sure you want to delete that” pop ups that our computers give us before hitting delete. Does anyone even pay any attention to them at all? I am so used to hitting that ok button that even if a part of my brain is questioning the deletion, my hand has already deleted the item before I can even save it. The same thing happens with your events. When I see that question of “Will you attend this event”, I hit no before I even stop to check the location. I click that no button before I even look to see what that event is.

Why Did You Promote The Event On Facebook?
Because everyone just blasts everything to everyone, everyone is jaded to the event invites. So no one really pays any attention to them at all. Sure your best friend will click yes. Your girlfriend will click yes. Your bandmates will mostly click yes (sorry but your drummer is dumber than a rock and doesn’t get it), but will this improve attendance? Not one bit. You will be lucky to get one person to attend that would not have attended otherwise. Wasn’t that the point? To get more people to show up than who would have otherwise? Then stop blasting it to everyone because you are training people to reject your events without even thinking about it. It is a knee jerk reaction because of the constant blasts we all get from every band from all over the world.

Have You Ever Even Mentioned The State Or City?
Most band’s don’t even mention the state or city. So I have rejected events and found out later it was a local show at a club I had never heard of before. At least list the state and city or your event post failed right out of the gate.

It’s Not All Bad News
So is this nothing but bad news? No. You can stop it. We all need to do our part to stop people from blasting everyone for an event that only 10% of their followers are even capable of attending. Most of the social networks have a way of selecting only the people from your area. Can we start a campaign to not just click no, but to say why in the comments. When an online friend invites you to an event in another state or country, link to this article. Or you can just type “Stop inviting people from out of state, it hurts us non-spamming bands jerkface!” Ok, make up your own line if you want. I just think it would be funny if EVERYONE started using that one. If they don’t list the city and state post that you have no idea what part of the world the event is at and that is why you will not attend. It will take more of an effort than most will be able to muster, but if enough of us do this we can change the pattern and maybe a few habits. Or maybe this is just a way for your band to rise above the rest?

How will I pick which ones to RT? Well I have a few rules. To keep track of people playing this new game of sorts I ask that you use one hash tag #RTtuesday. I also ask that you put @MarkCarras in there so I can just go to that section of my profile. Third, I only care about tweets about music. Guitar based music to be exact. This can be bands wanting their websites promoted, news stories about a band you love, a music video on YouTube (or some other known video hosting location), an article on your website about a band, or whatever else. Just as long as it is about music. No websites whose main purpose is to sell though. That’s not an article or helping a band. It’s spam and I don’t care about that crap.

I know I haven’t been doing #musicmonday or #followfriday much, but to be honest I notice almost nothing from those days. People have become jaded about them. They will pimp out a friends profile, but how many follow someone because of that? Because #RTtuesday is about compelling content I think people will care much more. So who’s in?

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!

Ok, I talked about this once before, but I didn’t go into direct detail about why the 360 deal is so bad and anti artist. Last time was more about opinion. So here I will try to not only explain it all, but maybe show a more clear picture of why this is so bad for artists. First let me explain how things used to be done.

The old way record companies would do business was to sign a new band to a record deal where they would a huge advance and give the band a percentage of the profits for their cd sales. Sounds good right? Well, it does until you really look at what that means. Say for example you are given a loan of 500,000.00 for your business. Now let’s say that instead of you taking that money from the bank and spending it on the things you think your business needs to become profitable, the bank spends the money. They spend your loan and you pay it back. Pretty weak eh? It gets worse. The band’s not only have to pay back money the label spent, but while the label keeps 90% of the profits the band pays back the loan with their 10% cut. So out of that $20 a fan pays for a cd, the band gets nothing until they pay back every penny the label spent to promote them. Because the loan is being paid back with only ten percent of the profits, it takes decades for even well established bands. In the old days a great majority of bands would never see a single penny from any cd sales. It just didn’t happen. Unless a band went multi-platinum they never got a slice of that pie. Sometimes even bands with hit videos being run into the ground every day on MTV ended up in debt to their label.

So how did the band’s survive if they never made money from cd sales? For decades band’s survived strictly from touring and merchandise. Without those two sources of money most of your favorite bands would have never made it past album one. We are talking about less than one percent of the band’s that get that ever elusive record deal would have never made it without touring and merchandise money being all theirs. If a band made it over that hill to where they did make money from the cd, it was called “artist development”.

The 360 deal changes that! The 360 deal says that the poor record company isn’t making enough by taking every penny of 99.99% of every cd sale. Now they get a good chunk of the merchandise and touring as well. Artist development is now thrown out the window. If a band doesn’t become a major break out success right away they just disappear. The label own their ass until they pay off that “advance” (that’s really a loan), so they can’t do anything until that happens. It used to be that a band could at least tour like crazy if they wanted out of their unfair contract. Just keep touring until the label is willing to negotiate. Now even playing a show is under the contract. So the only thing they can do is break up.

So please encourage your favorite band to never sign a 360 deal. I hear Fat Wreck Chords like to talk smack about the 360 deal, so I love them for that. If you know of a label that is willing to stand against the 360 deal please let me know so I can love them too.

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.

This weeks question is when do you follow people back. Myself I follow back anyone who makes it clear they enjoy heavy music. This can be made clear from the bio, user name, avatar, profile background, looking at your Twitter messages, or by sending me a Twitter message telling me your favorite three bands. I’m not too picky about how you get the message out. If you at least make the effort to lie to me, I will follow you back. You would be amazed at how few even try to trick me into following them back. This works very well for me. Here are what some others have said…

metalross i follow back everyone unless they post hundreds of tweets in a row, then i unfollow them

Pubrockercom I follow everyone back. when they post too much stupid crap or too many links (just advertising w/o personality) I delete them.

deathisgain713 Like mindedness. Metal, design, etc. I don’t need to follow 500 people to tell me how to make money at twitter.

10. #followFriday
Follow Friday is where you pick someone you are following and “pimp” their profile to everyone else following you. “#followfriday @rockmymonkey because it posts some great music news” is fine. Keep it simple. Now some do the lazy Follow Friday where they say something like “#followfriday @markcarras @isewdollies @rockmymonkey @HeavyAsHell” with no explanation of why you should follow that person. Details are very important and people will be more thankful you cared enough to pimp them exclusively on that one message. Make it about quality and not quantity.

9. RT’s can gain you fans
Now this only works for bands trying to gain attention. Unsigned or mostly unknown bands need to do the Re-tweet! What is a Re-tweet? When you see someone sending a message you like, agree with, or is talking about your band, re-send it to the people you follow. If nothing else this can be used to encourage people to talk about your band.

8. Not being on “We Follow”
This is how you can find new fans. Or even fans you have had for decades but they don’t know the band is on Twitter.

7. Not doing updates
Ok, depending on how big your band is you may want to post different stuff. Once a day is fine for most. “Playing Chicago tonight. Who’s gonna be there?” can work for pro level bands. If you are unsigned, let people know how the new cd is going, what clubs you are going to play, what merch you are working on, or even some contest where you need your fans to show their support.

6. Not filling out a bio!
Sure everyone knows who Queensryche is, but most bands can have Gold albums and still not be known to most people. Keep it simple though. “We are the band Blah and we play old school thrash!” is all you need. The band name and what style you play is all you really need. Don’t try and be cute or funny. Just tell people who you are and what you play. If you are some wussy indie pop band I need to know that so I don’t follow your yawn inducing crap of a band.

5. Not uploading an image
It makes your profile look fake and spammy. A band photo or logo is fine. It takes just a few seconds and makes everything look way better.

4. Paying someone to run the account
This makes your band look like they don’t care about their fans. Call me if you need to know how to make this so easy even a drummer can do it. (just joking, we love drummers too)

3. Not responding to fans
Ok, your main focus is creating great music. So don’t try to respond to every message. Try to be strategical about it. But please try and respond to a about ten percent. 1% if you currently pack 10 thousand seat arenas.

2. Not Following Back!
Twitter is about being able to interact with your fans. @reply every once in awhile. Even Shaq does it, so what’s your excuse? You think you’re bigger than him? If your lazy you can at least use @socialtoo to auto-follow people back.

1. Not being on Twitter
Seriously! I am shocked that many bands are not using this great tool. This leaves it open to someone creating fake accounts and screwing with your fanbase. Very bad!

Yes, I know that last link doesn’t work. That’s the point. Nevermore needs to get their collective butts in gear! All my other links however do go to real places. Each point is made with a link to an account that SHOULD be doing something on Twitter they were not doing at the time I posted this article. Most of them fit several of my points though.

I like to think of myself as the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Tech Consultant” so please feel free to contact me if anyone needs advice or consulting. I work dirt cheap and even free for most things. So contact me on Twitter if you have a quick question. Call 360-789-0703 for paid phone tech support if you need that little extra.

http://twitter.com/MarkCarras

Find lists of metalheads
I have talked before about how you shouldn’t just blind follow people on Twitter. The reasons are many and you will have to go back to that article to check that out. So how do you get a ton of followers without blind following? Well, if you are a metal band, fan, record company, online radio station, journalist, or whatever else, you want to find other people that care about metal. The first thing you do is find a list of metal fans. There are several ways to find these lists of the metal community on Twitter.

Other metalheads are “following” more metalheads
The first way is to find some people passionate about metal on Twitter. If you have at least 5 followers or are following at least 5 people you should have at least one. I’m talking about the nut jobs that live, eat, breathe, and crap metal 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. There is a good chance that the people they are following are at least metalheads on some level. So just pull up their “following” list from their profile. Then start opening up tabs of each one of the profiles of the people they are following. Look at the bio they have, their user name, who they are following, and what types of messages they are sending. Most of them are going to be metalheads and you should follow them.

We Follow does have it uses
The second is to go to the metal chart on “We Follow”. Now just like with the trick above, you shouldn’t just follow every profile on the We Follow metal chart. I saw one profile of a company that made stair cases. Wanna guess what those stair cases were made of? Metal! There is also a gem and jewelry blogger. They put themselves on the metal chart with zero thought to the style of music under the same keyword. There are also some people who hate metal and put themselves into the metal category to be funny. They do it in mockery and will not help your metal band in any way. In fact they could cause problems for you. So only follow the ones who look like real metal fans.

We need more metal bloggers to rank metal Twitter users!
The third way to gain a ton of metal loving Twitter users is to find a blogger that ranks metal related profiles. To be honest I have not run into any other than myself, but if anyone knows of any let me know. Very soon I hope to post a new chart of metal and hard rock Twitter users. It could be the ones who follow the most, are followed the most, have the best ratio, bands, fans, record companies, online radio stations, journalists, or who knows what else. I suck at programing, so this will be “static” lists and will not update automatically like some of them. However, unlike the charts at places like We Follow, I won’t have a company that makes metal stair cases on the list.

Using these methods I have gained almost a thousand people. Now after a week of adding all these people though, you might want to use SocialToo to mass unfollow anyone who isn’t following you back. It costs a tiny one time fee, but it is well worth it. You don’t want your following/follower ratio to make you look like some lame spammer. People hate that. That could cause quality people to unfollow you. Good luck and by all means follow me!

http://twitter.com/MarkCarras