Music Success in Nine Weeks

Week 3 began with a sunny Sunday. Sandra and I had just been for a pleasant autumnal Sunday walk and upon entering our Cotswold apartment remarked at how the sun was beaming in from the bathroom.

Photo opportunity

Standing in the bath, jacket still on, slinging on the Les Paul, Sandra started snapping. In awe of the flattering photos displayed by my fellow participants on their websites, I had been wondering about a photo shoot in anticipation of building a web presence as a musician. A gift from the sun god.

Week 3

In week one of our Music Success in Nine Weeks journey we looked at our grander vision and our goals. In week 2 we distilled who we are and what we are about, as much as one can in one week, creating a personal pitch to entice our audience.

With week 3 upon us, our guide begins by immersing us in the approach now referred to as Web 2.0: optimising an interactive and dedicated online presence.

Web 2.0

We are given six tips regarding website optimisation (not to be confused with SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.) I begin by taking a look at each guiding point in relation to each individual web component that I am responsible for.

MySpace

For the sake of my Music Success in Nine Weeks project I decide to start by re-vamping my old MySpace page (as an attempt to compile and consolidate some of my old material with various bands and projects.)

I’ve had a personal MySpace website for several years. The site usefully lists my musical interests and helps me to maintain many valuable connections with other friends and followers who use MySpace too. However, disappointingly, I am unable to modify or upgrade it to a musician template where I can add songs and video.

/rant:on

So; I decide to start from scratch and sign up for a fresh new account (despite being unclear about how to create a musician profile) and already it’s too late. I’m registered and whilst re-tracing my steps I recognise that, mistakenly, I did not spot the entirely separate, almost inconspicuous, link that one must follow to sign up as a musician.

I cancel my account, delete my profile and start all over again with a few days to let things settle.

Now unable to re-register, I am apparently registered. I cannot now login because MySpace tells me I do not have a valid account with my email address. I receive MySpace promotional emails suggesting how to improve my account.

I give up.

Once a cyber networking super-power it was once essential to have a MySpace website as musician. Having had moderate degrees of success using MySpace over the years to connect and communicate with venues, promotors, other musicians and followers, MySpace, by today’s standards, it now feels a bit clunky to me.

Despite attempts at researching the help it’s beyond me. I need an expert. MySpace will have to wait until I have fried my other interesting tuna.

/rant:off

Bandzoogle

By contrast Bandzoogle is much slicker. Bandzoogle offered the Music Success in Nine Weeks bloggers a promotional opportunity which I thought was a great opportunity to give it a go.

I learned this week the importance of having a single, dedicated website.

Bandzoogle made this objective easy. I kept aside a rare empty evening and it took me all of five minutes to create a basic design. I added some useful video and mailing list widgets and then spent a few moments uploading tracks to the site-wide streaming music player (running at 96kps for the music discerning amongst you.) I had one problem regarding the site layout yet was suitably impressed that their support emailed me back in only 20 minutes.

www.roblorenzo.com

I registered Rob Lorenzo as a dot COM address. Lorenzo is a nickname (I can thank my antipodean friends for) and made for a useful psuedonym given Rob Lawrence dot COM had gone.

Brian Hazard of Color Theory suggested changing your band name, in this article, if the dot COM name is taken. Whilst at face value this advice may seem a little extreme it is perhaps an insight in to the thinking, power and direction of the ‘new’ web in relation to music marketing and all that is Web 2.0.

Pointing it at Bandzoogle, this is now my main musician website and I will attempt to divert my other ‘teaser’ traffic this way over the coming weeks.

With the Bandzoogle registration being so quick I spent the rest of the evening worshiping my new photo working on new song material – something almost forgotten in the fog of online self-promotion.

Reverbnation

Reverbnation has lots of useful widgets that can be dropped in handy places such as Facebook. They also offer to manage your mailing list, a service Bandzoogle offers too.

I am relatively fond of the Reverbnation site and I like spending a lot of time on other artists pages there. I occasionally hit walls and sometimes find it frustratingly slow to change elements or upload items yet the patience pays off with the semi-useful stats Reverbnation provides. Since starting the course I’ve gone from 180+ to something like #44 for rock in Oxford. This boosts my ego.

With Agent, Red we used to get generally positive comments regarding Reverbnation from followers and fans despite load up times often being a little slow. I’ve attempted to minimise widgets and increase simplicity towards a quicker load-up speed on my new Reverbnation site.

Pitch and Bio

Other changes, whilst following the guide, included adding Week 2’s pitch to my new Reverbnation homepage and drafting up a new biography. The intention here is to keep this mirrored on the other sites.

Website Speed

Bandzoogle consistently loaded within the time recommended in the book. Now equipped with the knowledge of how important website speed is I have begun to use useful internet speed testing tools to gain insights in to how my web presence is performing from a technical perspective.

Facebook and Reverbnation I am keeping as ‘light’ as I can by disabling unrequired widgets.

Flash intros are out apparently, good job too as I would not know where to start.

Website Design

I’m working on trying to keep a consistent look and feel. I understand from the book how important it is for the fan or follower to have a consistent experience throughout. People feel uncomfortable when the consistency changes, a point I can relate to as a fan.

The challenge with this particular point is choosing the style and design that authentically reflects us in the first place.

There is font to consider, l a y o u t to consider, colour to consider.

Once design decisions have been made it will be a case of being ruthless ensuring that all sites reflect one another in terms of brand and design.

What’s in it for me

Ariel stresses the importance of enticing potential followers with an exclusive music track.

People generally aren’t programmed to give something for nothing so as a responsible musician (that’s a new Web 2.0 term) it makes logical sense to delight any followers with a great track in exchange for their contact details.

I selected an enticing MP3 that is exclusive if you sign up here (yep – that’s a plug,) pointing you at the new Reverbnation site and I add that I promise not to sell, rent or lend email addresses to assure folks they are safe here.

Week 4

Despite week 3 being a shorter chapter, it was full of action. Week 4 looks chunky with plenty more action to get stuck in to.

My key insights and lessons from week 3 were:

Have a dedicated web site
To think of other sites as a funnel or ‘teaser’ sites pointing to your one dedicated site
Make it fast
Make it safe
Make it consistent
Entice folks with an attractive proposition (MP3 for example)

Why not be the first to sign up to my mailing list and leave some design suggestions in the comments below.

Signed bathroom photos upon request.

Music Success in Nine Weeks – Week 3