Tech consultant for Olympia, Lacey, And Tumwater

Now some bands may not get this one, but Skype is a tool that can help both the unsigned local band and the worldwide rockstar. Skype is a VOIP service like Vonage or Oovoo. The difference is the Skype is free. Skype is also well known for it’s high quality. Ask anyone that knows me and they will tell you that I am one very picky customer. I hate all cell phones and media players because I think they all suck. Not one on the market is worth a crap in my opinion. So when I say that Skype has amazing quality and is shockingly dependable, it means something.

Now if you are in a signed band, please do all your interviews over Skype with a good quality headset like the one you probably play World Of Warcraft with. Nothing is more annoying than trying to listen to an interview with a band that has a crappy cell phone connection. There is no way your cell phone, land line, or any other traditional phone type device is going to come anywhere close to the quality of Skype. If the person doing the interview doesn’t have Skype, they can call you on your Skype number. They don’t have to know why you sound so crystal clear. They just need to be shocked at how easy it is to understand you and how clear you sound to their audience. Now to get a Skype number you will have to pay a VERY small amount. You pay $60 for a full year of an online number or $18 for the 3-month online number. Your band will stick out like a sore thumb with all your interviews sounding more clear than any other interview they have done before. This is a good thing.

So what if you are an unsigned band? Ever get a sore ear from holding a phone to your phone all day? Sucks don’t it? What about when your ear gets all itchy from the cell phone headset? What about the phone bill you get when calling around trying to set up that do it yourself mini tour every summer? You can call real phones with Skype while using a soft Plantronics GameCom type headset. Not only will this be way more comfortable, efficient, and cheaper, but it will also be more productive since you will sound more professional with your crystal clear sound quality.

Now of course once bands and labels wake up to the concept of Skype it will be a great method of networking and communication. Skype not only does voice, but it also does text. So one service for sending instant messages to other contacts online as well as making tons of phone calls. Of course you can also try and set up a bunch of press using the voice service. So no matter what level your band is at, Skype can help you save money and help you become a self promotion machine!

Now most of my music industry contacts will hate me for even mentioning this site, but screw them and their dying industry I say! Seriously, I think those labels could get some major traction out of TPB if they played it smart. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has a profile page on the site for a reason. Imagine if some unknown band out of nowhere put up their great new cd on TPB. Then promoted the hell out of the free download with a $2,000 ad campaign from Fixion Media (or even more at IndieClick if you have the extra cash). Sure you wouldn’t make any money from the cd directly, but imagine how many new fans you would gain? Then you would have a draw in cities you have never been to before.

The costs of recording a cd are getting cheaper, so forget about going to a full scale studio unless some big label is footing the bill. For the price you would pay a studio you could record it at home. Instead spend that money on promoting to people that you are offering a free download of your new cd at The Pirate Bay. The tech savvy music fans love this kind of thing, so you could end up getting some free promotion from tech blogs as well.

So do you just release one cd every few years and call it good? Why not have a friend record the band playing shows, slap the footage together using Windows Movie Maker (it comes free with any windows system), and release the “DVD” as a free download through TPB as well. What about recording some live shows in audio format and release a new live cd every few weeks. With a good digital recorder it will not cost you a cent, but it will get you some free promotion.

How to make money by giving the music away for free is the question I am sure you are asking though. You will want something for all your hard work I am sure. Well first off you will be able to have more of a draw when you do the “get in the van” style DIY tour next summer. You can also make money off of shirts, hats, beer mugs, and physical copies of the things you have offered as a download. Think outside the box a little with this stuff. Combine the physical cd with a shirt maybe? Put the live DVD of you playing the new cd in it’s entirety together as one package. Once people are hooked they will pay! Trent Reznor made $1.6 million in one week doing this. Now of course your band is probably not even in the same ballpark as NIN is, but if done right I think you will make more in the long run.

Doing things this way is more about expanding your fanbase than anything else. There is a legendary band I work with. They had a really good fanbase when the leader of the band dug the band name out of the grave a few years ago and put together a new line up. But I saw them playing 500 seat clubs. Then Ozzfest announced that they were taking fan ideas for what band’s should be on the next tour. So I thought I would use that fanbase to do my best to get the band on Ozzfest playing in front of 5,000 people a day on the second stage. When I posted the idea on the forum the fans were offended and would not vote for the band to be on the tour. Most decent bands that play this tour end up playing thousand seat clubs at least right after the tour. This could have been a major part of this band coming back in a huge way, but the fans thought it was an insult for them to be playing the second stage. So instead they get the insult of playing to the smallest clubs in the land. I tell this story to make a point. Making it big takes major sacrifices. If you don’t make those sacrifices you will stagnate and eventually die. Does it suck to spend thousands to give stuff away for free? Yes! But does it suck more to go nowhere? How much would it suck it you used TPB to gain your band a really good draw at clubs all around the country? I have a feeling it wouldn’t suck as much as playing to a small handful of drunks on a Tuesday. Right?

The Hard Rock Social News site I am part of called HeavyAsHell.com has an account at TPB and will be releasing stuff like crazy there soon. Check it out at http://thepiratebay.org/user/HeavyAsHell

FriendFeed is a service that let’s you combine all your social network profiles into one place and discuss them with people. It’s all about networking and Friend Feed is like networking on a big bag of crack. So if you are on Twitter & Plurk, why be on Friend Feed as well? Well FriendFeed has a ton of automation to it. You can be active on FriendFeed without even going to the site!

Now of course you have to go through the annoying process of setting everything up, but once you do you can be done with it. Yes it is a “Set it and forget it” situation if you want. You can have it post the RSS feeds from your band’s news site, your Twitter messages, and tons more. It puts all of them in one place, then streams it in a live real time feed, then let’s people comment on the link. So it’s like Plurk, but the threads are started by the stuff you do elsewhere on other websites.

So although you can just let it do it’s automated thing, you will get more out of it if you are active.  You can follow those who offer content you care about, comment on things that interest you, press the “like” link if you want to share others links into your feed, and basically network with others with interests in the type of music your band provides.

There are also “rooms” you can join to help find people that might be interested in your band. Music isn’t currently a major subject on Friend Feed, but it is growing fast. So don’t dismiss a room just because it only has one or two members. You may start the ball rolling for the room and will have established yourself when it does take off. Plus it doesn’t take any of your time if the room goes dead. Rooms only take up your time if they are active.

So Friend Feed is a way to just funnel all your social media activity in one place, but could also be another place to find and interact with potential fans. It is real easy to dismiss FriendFeed at first. In fact I wasn’t active at all for the first several months after signing up. I set everything and never really looked back. I’m not sure what happened, but I think one of my tech friends Robert Scoble is to blame. He talks to everyone and anyone who isn’t a retard. Because he has an insane amount of followers I ended up with tons of new connections just from following him on the site. Now Scoble is not a music industry person. He is a tech industry person, so he may not help bands or music industry types directly. He is just my example of how your account can suddenly take off and take you by surprise if you put a little time into it.

Now FriendFeed has become my favorite new social website lately. With it being so live, it can almost become like a chat room. I can ignore 75% of the stuff that flows by because I either have nothing to say or just don’t care. You don’t have to reply to everything. Be your own filter. Only pay attention to the things you think will help your band. So set it up to be just an automated archive or dive in with both feet and go nuts. But by all means follow me so I can help you through it all.

Follow me on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/markcarras

What the hell is RSS? It is a way for you to get your band news out to more people. It will make your band’s website ten times more powerful. Trust me on this. There are some major label bands that have RSS feeds but are making some horrid mistakes.

Many people are starting to use RSS readers to put all of their online content on one page they can check in the morning. No one has time to check a few hundred websites before they go to that job they hate so much. RSS readers solve that problem by routing all the content into one place. Do you really care if they visit your site? Or is it more important that you get the information out? Make sure to use an RSS feed so people can get information about your band with as little hassle as possible. Now RSS is something that most bands do not understand at all. They always make one of three mistakes.

The first mistake is not giving up all the content in the RSS feed. Remember that it is more important for a band to get out the info than it is to get a website visit. Whatever software you use to run your site should have a section in the admin panel for RSS that will ask you if you want to give the RSS feed the entire article or just a sample. Give the entire article if you are a band that wants to get their information out to as many as possible.

The second mistake is not giving each article it’s own unique website address in the RSS feed. When going down the RSS feed, people will open up a tab of the articles they want to read later. If it just opens up to the main “News” section then people will not be able to find the information they want and will get frustrated. What if someone wants to email the article to a friend? Link to it on another website? Does your RSS feed give them a direct website address to the specific article? It really needs to!

The third mistake is that the RSS is not formated the same as the actual article. This will take a good content management system. The easiest one to work with is Word Press. It is the most common and so you will be able to get help with it pretty easy.

Now of course the most common mistake is to not have any RSS feed at all, but I won’t count that because any band smart enough to be reading this article  would not be making that mistake.  Of course if all you have is a MySpace page none of my articles will help you. So I’ll assume you didn’t make that mistake either. Some signed bands are even making that mistake. So very sad. Get a real site and get a good RSS feed.

So Plurk is a strange beast, but once you get hooked it is like a big bag of crack. I have only known of one person who gave it a real honest chance before giving up on it. That would be the hardest rockin’ programmer in the world…Mr DarkNemesis himself (RockMyMonkey.com & HeavyAsHell.com).Most people who give it a chance are hooked.

Now at first Plurk was looked at as a Twitter clone. I think once you have used both services enough, you will find they have many things that separate them. As far as bands and other music industry types are concerned I will keep it simple. Twitter is for getting a message out instantly to a ton of people at once. Plurk is for conversation. Imagine a band forum, but way more fluid and interactive. Plus a band forum keeps outsiders away. Plurk is part of a very large network, so if a band is conversing with all their fans through Plurk instead they will end up conversing with tons of potential new fans as well. It is about bringing in new people.

Now many people talk back and forth through Twitter, but there is a very large problem with doing that. it annoys the hell out of anyone who follows you that is not part of that specific conversation. Plurk totally separates new topics and threaded conversations. Now we host several official band forums at RockMyMonkey.com, but I honestly wish they would all leave us for something that would serve them better. Plurk would be so much better for a band if all the band members jumped in and got all their fans excited about it.

So Plurk should be a replacement for official band forums, but how else can it serve a band? Well, what if you only have one tech savy band member that wants to be social with the fans while on the road? There is a great mobile version of Plurk that works well on almost any mobile phone browser. Bored on the bus? Talk to the fans.

Now the important thing to remember for both Twitter and Plurk is to embed your profile into the sidebar of the official website, MySpace, and Facebook. This not only gets the message out to all your fans that you are on this exciting new social network, but it also kind of shows them what it’s all about.

So what about the smaller more unknown bands? Well interaction with fans is even more important for the unsigned and unknown. So it’s even more important you spread the widget mentioned above around. Not just to keep fans posted, but with Plurk casual conversation is more accepted. This helps you be more intimate with your fans while probably ending up with new fans at the same time (being part of a large network). I also notice that more traffic comes from links I post on Plurk than any other social network. Because of the more social aspect of Plurk, people are more likely to check out your stuff. So make sure and post links to news on your official site along with the casual conversation with your fans.

So Twitter is for getting a message out, but Plurk is for true interaction and conversation. Being more social with fans will help your band’s fanbase grow.

Most important of course is to follow me on Plurk.

http://www.plurk.com/MarkCarras

So you are in a band, a press agent, work for a label, or have some part in the music industry and want to know why the hell you should care about this thing called Twitter eh? Well, the first thing you must know is that the power of Twitter is in it’s simplicity. It is a messaging service, but from a perspective that most do not have.

Who’s already on Twitter? Musicians like Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion, MC Hammer, Patrick Wilson of Weezer, and many more. Legendary actors like Levar Burton (Actor – Kunta Kinte, Geordi La Forge, Host of Reading Rainbow), Janina Gavankar (plays Papi on The L Word, Ms. Dewey the search engine), Brea Grant (plays Daphne Millbrook on Heroes, Season 3, and was on Friday Night Lights), Greg Grunberg (plays Matt Parkman on Heroes and previously Eric Weiss on Alias), David Hewlett (plays Rodney on Stargate Atlantis, goofs off online), Kate Hewlett (sister of David Hewlett, co-starred in the movie A Dog’s Breakfast, guest appearances on Stargate Atlantis), David H. Lawrence XVII (Plays Eric Doyle on Heroes), Michael Pennie (Earl TV show writer), Richard Roeper (columnist and film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and former co-host of “At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper”, William Shatner, Wil Wheaton, Stephen Fry of BlackAdder, and many more I don’t care to write out. Even President-elect Barack Obama used Twitter as one of the ways to get the vote out for his campaign! It helped lead our country to it’s first black president. If that’s not enough to convince you I don’t know what will. CNN & the BBC are even starting to integrate Twitter into their broadcasts so get with the program already!

So why is Twitter getting so big so quick? Well, it is a way to get a message out very quickly. Where as an email list only works if spam filters don’t block it, twitter is an opt in service so your message always gets out. Where as email has to wait until the person gets to it, Twitter users can accept their Twitter messages through SMS text messages, instant messenger, email, as well as their own Twitter profiles. So if the band is about to go on some live show they can send out a message to their fans and have an unannounced event suddenly have thousands of people flood in online, tv, radio, or whatever else. Got a “Secret Show” for a major band at a small club? Wait until 30 minutes before the show and send a Twitter message directly to the band’s fans.

Now for smaller more unknown bands things get a little more tricky. Where as some major rockstar might be able to get away with sending Twitter messages about eating breakfast at some cafe in the middle of nowhere, you might loose followers that way. Try to keep it to band related info only. Got a show to announce? Make sure and send a reminder on the day of show as well since many will forget. Going into the studio to record your next cd? Updates once a day at most might make for some great “content” fans will want to read. The second your cd is available you can send a Twitter message to let everyone know. Imagine some small unsigned band getting a few hundred sales in one day because they didn’t wait until each fan felt like going to their website or MySpace page. Twitter goes to their mobile phone too, so it’s instant!

One of the biggest mistakes band’s make is not following the fans back. If all you have is people who follow you, it looks bad. It is proper etiquette to follow people back. Especially your own fans!

Now for some words of caution.  There are many you should never follow back. Be aware of scammers, spammers, and lowlifes! They are very easy to detect. If they are following tons more people than are following them back there is probably a reason. 99% of the people who have the terms SEO, marketer, or blogger on their bio should be approached with loads of skepticism. If someone fits more than one of these, don’t bother following them back. They are not worth your time. If they have one of those potentially shady items in their bio, but their followers and following numbers are pretty close they might be able to help you.

Honestly I could probably write an entire book on ways band’s can use Twitter, things bands should do on Twitter, and things they should avoid on Twitter, but this is a blog post that has already gone on way longer than I prefer my updates to be. If anyone has any questions they can contact me on Twitter or make a comment below. I hope this helps some of you and make sure and follow me on Twitter. I am pretty active on there.

http://twitter.com/MarkCarras

Now this is an interesting topic. There are some that refuse to get the point because they know it makes their music collection look lame. At least that is what I am guessing. They try to split hairs on the subject to avoid the point. You ever hear of the saying “If the shoe fits, where it?” Well that is what I am trying to say here. It’s not my fault you like fake bands. It’s not my fault you are a shallow minded drone who gets their music info from places like Rolling Stones, Spin, Billboard, or MTV. It’s not my fault you shop at Hot Topics. I’m just the messenger.

They will try to debunk the concept of poser bands by giving weak examples. What about David Bowie? Was he a poser when he was acting like an alien? Well if you can’t tell the difference between David Bowie and someone who is a total fake then I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe you are a poser? What about The Monkees? Well they were not even a real band. They were the product of a tv show. The main focus was not the music. They were using music as a vessel to put on a comedy show.

No, what I am talking about are bands that put looking like a “rockstar” above writing good music. I am talking about the bands that put how they look in their press photo above how meaningful their lyrics are. I am talking about the bands that put celebrity above the art and craft of music. That is a poser. If you are in denial of that then you are a poser in denial. Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but it’s true. Rock n’ Roll ain’t supposed to be safe. It should never be pretty either. Real Rock N’ Roll (in it’s purest form) should be dirty, ugly, and mean. So enjoy your pretty boy rock and I will be listening to Motorhead!

Top Ten ways to tell if your favorite band are posers!

1. Have they ever consulted a fashion expert of any kind?

2. Would you picture them downing a shot of whiskey before a show or a good strong cup of tea?

3. If they saw a chipmunk in the middle of the road while cruising down the highway in their tour bus would they say…

a. Stop that matches my argyle sweater!
b. Floor it!

4. Do they have to steal from real musicians like Joe Satriani

5. Do they look clean cut?

6. Do they use more midi cables than guitars but yet are not in an industrial band

7. Have they ever been seen drunk, caught doing drugs, or done jail time?

8. Have they ever been arrested for fighting?

9. After a show do you think they eat meat and potatoes or a nice salad? Both?

10. Do they put style above substance?

Just for the record, I am NOT saying a band has to fit all of these. I am not saying that if the band fits any of these that they should be dismissed. My point is that if the more of these that fit, the better the chances that they are not down and dirty Rock N’ Roll.

I could name bands by name like Radiohead, Coldplay, Daft Punk, Oasis, or a few others, but I think I’ve pissed off enough people for today. Maybe for another top ten list some other time. Get your hate mail ready!

Follow me on Plurk at http://www.plurk.com/MarkCarras