Tech consultant for Olympia, Lacey, And Tumwater

Don’t Be Too Pushy With Your Promotion

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.

Please give $1 to this project THEN you can wish me a happy birthday.

So my birthday is Oct 31st (seriously it is)
On Facebook when it is someones birthday the tradition is to flood their wall with a ridiculous amount of posts that all say the same thing. No, not one post with a bunch of replies. Each person makes a separate post. Then you all think I’m being unreasonable by blocking people from posting on my wall?! Really? I’m the unreasonable one? Of course on Twitter you will get a ton of @ messages and every social network does the same thing. This on the day after The Rally For Sanity?

Let’s Do Something Good
So instead of doing the normal meaningless mess online, I propose something that does a little good. I have always been a supporter of the arts, especially when it is actually original. So instead I want to support the most original production I have seen in a very long time. It is the Heavy Metal Opera put on by a local band called Arakus. I know what you are thinking. Probably the same thing I was thinking. “Oh crap this is going to be so painfully low budget that it will break records of how much failure a production can have.” But I have seen the first part of this production and it was amazing. GO HERE for some photos I took to see that this is no low budget hack work. GO HERE to check out some music from the production.

THE IMPORTANT PART OF THIS POST
All I ask is that before you wish me a happy birthday please just give this production one measly dollar. I follow thousands of you online between the many social networks. I am only asking for one little dollar so this production can happen. If they make their goal I will unlock my wall for 24 hours and let you all post away as much as you wish. Deal? One dollar. Can we do it?

You can also check out this video for a sample of what this Opera has to offer NOT just for metalheads, but fans of good art.

Why Name Dropping Will Never Help Your Band

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.

Events On Social Networks Are Useless

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?

So now that you have created tons of social networking accounts to promote your band, how do you use them? As with anything there are unspoken rules. Imagine all the horrid stuff noobs do when they come to see your band for the first time. There are so many noob mistakes you can do at a metal show, there are just as many in social networking. Mostly you have to keep in mind that it is about being social. Don’t just post stuff about your band. Reply to others about the things that are important to them as well.

1. Talk to people about stuff other than your band
2. DO NOT TYPE IN ALL CAPS EVER!
3. Don’t post a flood of stuff in a small amount of time.
4. Post at least a few times a day whenever possible
5. Keep it “work safe” because most are surfing from their job
6. Make sure you get as many fans & friends to join you on these social networks
7. Run tons of giveaways through just those social networks
8. Friend people back or you look like a snob.
9. Don’t use trickery to get attention. Always be honest!
10. Keep your followers & followed ratio close

These are pretty general things. This stuff works on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, MySpace bulletins, or any others. I hope they help.

Now there is tons more we could get into but I like to keep these updates nice and simple. This kind of thing can be a lot to swallow at times. Some people will come at you with tons of unwanted advice and will make you feel like a 13 year old kid being taught guitar by Yngwie Malmsteen. Yngwie only knows how to go full speed, so his lessons are pretty useless. So I hope I don’t go Yngwie on you people. If I do let me know.

Why Ping.fm can be the most powerful tool a band has

Ok, this is where things get very powerful. Imagine you are busy as hell, but have time to send a quick text message while in the bathroom. With this one text message you update your band’s profile pages at 32 of the hottest social networking sites. No joke! With this service you can update Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, LinkedIn, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Blogger, Identi.ca, Friendster, Delicious, BrightKite, Yahoo 360, Plaxo Pulse, Koornk, Live Journal, Diigo, Bebo, YouAre, Hi5, Multiply, Mashable, Yammer, Kwippy, Flickr, Xanga, Utterli, WordPress.com, Imeem, Rejaw, & Seesmic with nothing but a simple text message. Now it may be a pain to get it all set up, but after you do that you don’t even have to log in. Do I have your interest?

Now Ping does have a nice mobile version you can use, a simple full scale online version, and I think some freaky email version. I have never tried the email version though. Why bother when I can do it with a text message? Of course most will not want to sign up to all those networks, but if you are a band that wants to network with as many fans worldwide as possible I would. Imagine if each one of these sites got you a few sales of your cd a day? Not saying that will happen…you might suck. I’m just giving you something to think about.

Although you don’t have to sign in to Ping ever again, I would do that at least once a month just to make sure everything is working the way it should. I would also check a couple of these sites a day to make sure they are getting your updates. You might also want to log in to all these sites just to accept “friend” requests, answer messages, and make sure the account is doing what it should. Check 5 of them a week and you should be fine. I really wouldn’t do more than that. You have music to create after all.

Now I know that most of my articles are longer than this, but why say more? That is the beauty of Ping.fm is that it is simple. If you have any questions please feel free to ask me through Twitter, Plurk, or better yet the comments below.