First came the cheap recording equipment, which turned everybody into a bedroom recording artist. Then, the web arrived, turning all these bedroom recording artists into bedroom recording labels, able to sell records (in theory at least) to a massive global audience.

Now, many artists are great at making music in their bedrooms, but not so savvy when it comes to selling it from them, so in this post I’m going to outline how to create a good online store that makes it easy for people to purchase your wares.

There are three main approaches you can take, with various pros and cons – so let’s look at each in turn.

1. Use links that point to existing retailers

The first method of creating an online store, and possibly the easiest, is to simply create a page on your website called ‘store’ and place a few links on it to online retailers that are selling your music. That could be Amazon, Apple Music or another high profile site that sells music.

There are three main advantages to this approach.

First, you don’t need to fulfil anything yourself — there’s no weekly walking down to the post office and sending stuff off to your customers.

Second, depending on the site you refer people to, your music may be chart eligible if you sell it this way.

And finally, many people shop regularly with these companies and will be very comfortable with buying your products from them.

You can also use this approach for selling merchandise — there’s quite a few ‘print on demand’ sites like Printful and Printify that allow you to upload JPGs which can then be added to t-shirts, mugs, wall art etc. When somebody buys your merch from one of these sites, the item is made to order.

2 Use PayPal or Stripe

Although selling music via established music sites is very easy, and has several advantages to it, you may find that selling your music ‘direct to fan’ is more profitable. By managing the whole sales process yourself, you get to keep most of the proceeds.

If you only have one or two products to sell, then selling them through PayPal is a really easy way to do this — you simply create a couple of ‘buy now’ PayPal buttons and add them to your site. This means you can accept payments easily and fulfil any items yourself.

PayPal charges a small transaction fee per sale: around 3%. But this is much less than the 30%-50% fee you can expect to pay if people are buying your music from a retailer.

Stripe also works in a similar way, and may be a more obvious option if you regularly sell merchandise at gigs (thanks to its dedicated point of sale features that let you accept payments via a card reader at events).

3 Use an online store builder

If you have lots of products to sell – i.e., a big back catalogue and a wide range of already-manufactured merchandise items – and you are fulfilling orders yourself, you may find it easier to go with a more comprehensive ‘online store builder’ solution. These are basically paid-for web apps that let users without coding skills build a store by themselves (using templates as a starting point) and sell products easily.

There are now lots of options available on this front, but Shopify is probably the best-known of the bunch. This is because it provides a really easy way for bands to create an online store from scratch.

You can also use Shopify to sell a large catalogue of products on an existing site (although you might find competing platforms Ecwid or WooCommerce slightly better for this, particularly if you’re a WordPress user).

Like Stripe, it’s also a very good option for selling at gigs via a card reader and other selling hardware.

The other advantage of using Shopify is that it integrates neatly with Spotify.

Squarespace and Wix are also good options for building an online store (but they are not quite as feature-rich on the e-commerce side as Shopify, WooCommerce or Ecwid).

If you’re in the fortunate position of selling music in quantities that might see you charting, then you might want to consider Music Glue. Sales through this platform are chart eligible — however, you will have to apply to use the platform and you can expect the company to take a large commission on your sales if your application is successful.

On the plus side, however, Music Glue has a lot of music-specific features that you won’t find on other e-commerce platforms, like merch manufacture. You can also avail of fulfilment services using Music Glue where — for a fee — the company will post all your CDs and other merch out on your behalf.

Remember: give your fans some options

Even if selling direct to fan is the most profitable option for you, you should keep in mind that many people prefer to buy music from the big retailers.

Accordingly, even if you are using PayPal or an online store builder to sell your music, it's still worth offering people the option of buying your music using Amazon or Apple.

By all means encourage fans to buy direct from you, and explain that this is the best way they can support your band...but give people the option to buy elsewhere – or you could lose sales.

An Amazon sale, even if less profitable than a direct-to-fan sale, is better than no sale at all!

The first few weeks of a new year are generally the time when you start to think about how to do things differently (and more effectively) — so in this post I thought I’d share some resolutions that may help you improve your music career in 2023.

1. Put the music first

Being a musician these days seems to involve dividing your time between making music and nattering about it with your fan(s) on Facebook and other social networks.

This year, maybe consider putting TikTok, Facebook and Twitter aside, and putting the music first. By all means keep your social media profiles relatively up to date – but not at the expense of producing great music.

Lock yourself in a room with a musical instrument (but not your smartphone) until you are 100% satisfied that you have some great songs really worth talking about.

Then, and only then, go out and talk about them. 

2. Improve your website

Yes, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on are all helpful in spreading the word about your music, but nothing beats a good website.

By having a strong site, you’ll ensure that

• you get a truly professional and distinct online presence

• your act is easier to find when people search for your act (a website gives you much more control over search engine optimisation than a social media profile)

• you obtain ultimate flexibility and control over how you present your band to the world.

To really understand why a band website is so important, I recommend reading this great article by Make it in Music on why music sites matter, as well as Prescription’s key tips for building a great band website.

3. Capture more email addresses

Capturing email addresses — using dedicated tools like Getresponse, Mailchimp or similar — is absolutely essential for any artist (regardless of the level of their success), because

• it allows you to communicate direct to fans

• you, not a social networking company, own the data.

Having this direct link to your fans allows you to maximise music sales and gig attendance.

Whilst it’s nice to have large Facebook fan / Twitter follower counts, don’t forget that people will only see your messages if an algorithm lets them and, crucially, if the social network continues to be successful.

You only have to think of how much effort bands put into adding Myspace friends in the mid-naughties, and how useless that effort all seems now, to understand why having a large database of email addresses is important.

Get clued up about the importance of building an email database here.

4. improve your online reputation

The internet is rightly seen as the key place where artists forge relationships with fans – but it’s also a place where it’s easy to come across as a highly annoying individual or act.

It’s just too tempting to regularly spout inanities or post ‘buy me’ links every five minutes on Facebook and Twitter.

This year, make a resolution to stop bludgeoning your friends, family members and fans with too many messages about your music (or what the band had for lunch) and only post content about your music that matters.

5. Take your image seriously

Too many artists obsess over whether their album sounds like it was recorded on a big reel of tape in the 1970s and mixed on a consule packed full of valves – only to forget that sadly, in addition to sounding cool, you’ve got to look cool too…

So don’t forget to spend some time getting your image right, and ensuring your band photography is up to scratch.

6. Blog (And not just about your band)

One of the best ways to generate traffic to a website is to ensure it is packed full of content that people want to read.

And the easiest way to arrive at that happy situation is by blogging about interesting stuff – according to research by inbound marketing agency Hubspot, site owners that blog regularly receive around 55% more hits to their site than those that don't.

Every hit to your site is a chance for you to expose somebody to your music, or capture their email address. The key thing is this: don’t make your blog all about you – write about stuff that people are already searching about. For a band website, you might consider writing about acts that influenced you; recording equipment; a particular gig and so on.

You can find out more about blogging and how to increase blog traffic here.

7. Manage your time wisely

If you’re anything like me, you’re juggling a job, a music career, a baby and a cat.

And it’s tough, with music-making and music promo often taking a back seat. But there are strategies that can help you make the most of your time to make the most of your music – find out about time-saving tips for musicians here.

8. Think creatively about music promotion

There are many ways to skin a cat, as a record store owner I once worked for said about a very unfortunate cat.

So instead of taking the bog-standard approach of putting your album up on Spotify and hoping against hope that somebody actually streams it, why not take some time to dream up some interesting ways to fund and release it?

Sometimes creative ideas regarding both can actually land you a great PR angle too. You might find our ideas on funding the making of your album and interesting formats to release it on helpful. 

9. Manage that project!

You have a home studio. You have 10 songs. You are making an album. You are going to upload it somewhere. People will stream it in droves. Simple, yes?

Well actually, no. Despite a plethora of self-promotion and self-distribution options now being available, releasing an album is actually a deceptively difficult business, and if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

As such, we suggest that you make this the year that you take a bit of notice of project planning. Recently we put a guide together on how to create a really great project plan for an album release using post-it notes — it’s well worth a read.

We’d also suggest that if you’re going to self-release an album this year that you check out our checklist of the key things you must do when releasing an album independently.

10. Don’t forget the professionals…

In a music industry where DIY production and promotion is increasingly the norm, it’s easy to think that you can do everything yourself, from music photography, to band website design to music PR. But sometimes it really helps to get somebody experienced on board. An outside eye can deliver objectivity, free up time and ultimately deliver more professional results.

So if you’re planning on releasing something this year, do get in touch for a conversation about how we can help.

For most artists, getting into the charts is a key measure of success; the ultimate ambition.

And in some ways, it’s easier to achieve this goal than ever before. This is because the streaming revolution (for all its downsides) has given musicians something very valuable: the ability to cheaply and easily distribute music to a global audience.

Before the likes of Shopify, Apple Music and so on came along, distribution — a key pre-requisite for charting — was one of the hardest things for musicians to access.

Sure, you could print up your own singles and albums, but getting them into shops, and thus making your music chart eligible, was next to impossible without a serious record deal.

The situation has now changed radically, with musicians not only having access to global digital distribution, but online advertising platforms and social networks that can be used to promote their music too.

Used in smart ways these tools have the power to propel independently-released tracks into the UK charts.

But what do you need to do to make sure that your releases stand the best chances of charting?

Well read on, because in this post I’m going to explain all that.

1. Register your release the right way

To have any chance of getting into the official UK charts, you need to ensure that you have registered your releases with the relevant organisations.

For digital formats, you’ll need to embed an ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) on each track. The Official Charts Company, which compiles the UK charts, can only track streams of songs if they have one.

To create ISRCs, you’ll need to join and then contact PPL (Phonographic Performance Ltd, the UK’s music licensing company), who issue these codes.

For physical formats (CD, vinyl, cassette), you’ll need to obtain a catalogue number and barcode. Your CD / vinyl manufacturer will often be able to advise on how to get both of these; and you can also find more information about barcodes on the GS1 website too (GS1 is an industry body that issues them).

2. Meet the chart rules

Your music can’t chart unless it meets the rules set by the industry body that compiles the charts — The Official Charts Company.

These specify what formats and lengths tracks should be in to be eligible to chart, and prohibit things like buying multiple copies of your own record, offering cash or other sweeteners to chart reporting retailers or interfering with equipment that is used to track sales.

You can download the singles chart rules and the album charts rules below:

• Single chart rules

• Album chart rules

(Other sets of rules exist for video charts and classical music charts — you can view the complete sets on the Official Charts Company’s website).

3. Ensure you are selling your music via chart reporting retailers

You can’t get into the charts unless the people selling it are letting The Official Charts company know about your sales.

Accordingly, you need to make sure that wherever possible, your music is being sold by ‘chart reporting retailers.’

When it comes to digital releases, this is usually not terribly hard to sort out — The Official Charts company uses data from the major streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer etc.) to compile its charts, and so long as you’ve got an ISRC code on your track and are using an established digital distribution platform (TuneCore, DistroKit etc.), your tracks should be chart eligible once uploaded.

As for ensuring that physical copies of your albums are chart eligible, the trick is to get them into record shops that report their sales to the Official Charts Company.

Now, this is usually a tricky endeavour for independent artists — getting distribution for physical releases is still very difficult (more difficult than ever, in fact, now that there is less shelf space available for CDs and records).

However, if you can’t get physical copies of your music into record shops, all is not lost: there are still ways to report sales of them to the Official Charts Company. 

If you’re selling your CDs and records online, you can use a store building tool that send sales data to the Official Charts Company.

Music Glue is probably the best-known example of a platform that does this: it lets you build an online store for selling records and CDS, with all sales being reported to the Official Charts Company.

Using Music Glue can work out more expensive than using more commonly-used online store builders like Wix or Shopify, but if you are selling very large quantities of physical releases, doing so can make sense.

If you’re selling a lot of CDs and records at gigs, you may be able to make use of a system called ‘Lightning Live’ that reports sales of your CDs and vinyl to the Official Charts Company. You’ll need to contact the company to discuss this.

4. Sell enough music!

The final step in all this involves generating enough sales or streams of your music to actually chart!

This is obviously the hardest part of the process, but there are enough examples out there of independent artists charting successfully to give you some hope on that front.

What’s rather difficult to work out however is precisely how many streams or sales you need for a track to get it into the charts. The Official Charts Company doesn’t make this data publicly available — to get it, you’ll need to pay the Official Charts Company for access to its ‘B2B music data service.’

The company does occasionally publicise particularly impressive sales and streaming data, however. For example, in 2021, it posted a blog post highlighting that in securing a UK number one chart position for her ‘Easy on Me’ single, Adele sold 217,300 copies of the song and generated 24 million streams of it in one week.

While Adele is obviously more of an ‘outlier’ artist than most (!), these figures might help you get a very rough idea of the number of sales / streams you might need to get to the top of the pops.

The bottom line: a lot.

It’s also worth pointing out that track formats are not treated equally when the charts are being compiled. While a purchase of a song in vinyl, CD or MP3 format simply counts as one sale in the eyes of the chart, you’ll need to get 150 streams of the same track on a premium streaming service  — i.e. from listeners who pay a monthly subscription — to get that same ‘sale.’ 

(And if the track is not a new release, 300 streams equates to one sale.)

Wrapping up

To sum up, charting in the UK isn’t easy (but never was!). However, in this digital world we now live in, a good tune, a good strategy, a good music PR company plus some good luck can lead to nice charting surprises. 

The key thing to remember is to tick all the organisational boxes before releasing music, so that if you are in the fortunate position of one of your tracks getting a lot of attention and plays, the UK Charts Company know all about it.

Good luck!

Headlining a gig sounds much sexier than being a support act, and bands often get excited at the prospect of being at the top of the bill.

But for most unsigned or new bands it’s often better to play on a bill supporting somebody else.

There are a few reasons why: the most obvious being that to headline a show you need enough fans to fill the venue. Many new bands – by virtue of the fact that they are new – don’t have a sizeable enough following to make a headline show work. We’ve all been to gigs where an enthusiastic but unknown headlining band comes on only to find that the venue has emptied out.

(In some cases, we’ve been that band).

Playing support to another band by contrast gives you a chance to play to full venues and expose your band to another act’s following. It also allows you to play earlier, which can be important if you’d like to invite some industry contacts to see your show.

However, playing further down the bill is not without its challenges.

First, most of the people at the gig are there to see somebody else and are less likely to be paying attention to what you’re doing.

Second, even if you grab these folks’ attention with the quality of your music, it’s easy – human nature being what it is – for those potential new fans to walk away from the venue without catching the name of your band or signing up to your mailing list. When this happens, it means that your support slot arguably becomes little more than a rehearsal in front of a crowd.

However, there are things you can do however to maximise the chances of converting a listener's casual interest into something more useful. I’d suggest two main areas to focus on: increasing the visibility of your band’s name and forging a relationship with members of the headline band’s audience.

Increasing the visibility of your band’s name

Use bass drum heads

Make sure your band’s name is (pardon the pun) drummed into audience’s head. To make a bad pun even worse, a good place to start with this actually involves drums. By using a graphic bass drum head featuring your band’s name (and website URL, if there’s room), you are instantly making it easier for an audience to leave your show with an act name to Google or a website address to enter into a browser.

Use projections

Similarly, you can use projections to ensure an audience can't miss your band name or logo. Not all venues will cater for this, but if they do, it's worth hauling a (cheap) laptop and a VGA cable along to your shows.

Ensure you mention your band’s name on stage

In your head you may need no introduction, but in reality you probably do. You should ensure that your witty stage repartee includes occasional references to your band’s name and website – particularly as you wrap up your set and prepare to leave the stage.

Don’t forget pre-show publicity

Just because you’re not headlining the show doesn’t mean that you should neglect pre-show publicity. Ensure that the venue or promoter you are dealing with lists your band’s name on all promotional materials – posters, websites, flyers etc. This means that the audience of the show may already know your band’s name before you start playing.

Forging a relationship with the main act’s audience

Although there’s scope for quite a few slightly naughty jokes here, by ‘starting a relationship with the audience’ I technically mean capturing as many of the crowd’s email addresses as possible. We have a whole article on how to go about this here, but here’s some quick pointers:

• Try to have a mailing list signup form at the door of the venue and on your merch stand.

• Leave sign up flyers or cards on every table (these should include details of your Facebook page, website etc.).

• Where possible, use smartphones and tablets to capture email addresses directly onto your mailing list.

• Be pro-active: if you have somebody who can go into the crowd with a clipboard or tablet and encourage sign-ups to your mailing list, this can drastically improve the number of email addresses captured.

• Incentivise: offer a free track in exchange for an email address.

Another thing you should do to maximise sign-up rates is ensure that your website is 100% geared up to capture data effectively: if a member of the crowd looks you up online after the show, it should be blindingly obvious to them how they can sign up.

This can be done using 'welcome mats', pop-up forms (occasionally controversial but usually quite effective) or prominent sign-up boxes embedded onto your site.

Similarly, all your social media links should be to the fore – and where possible use ‘like’ and ‘follow’ buttons rather than icons which have an immediate action.

One final thought on converting fans from headline acts into your own: if you’re in a position to do so, choose your support slots wisely! If you are a soft rock band there’s arguably not much point in supporting a bunch of punk bands all the time. Try to identify your niche, and make sure that you’re supporting acts that are making a similar noise to you.

So now you know how to make the most out of a support slot. The next challenge is how to get one – and we’ll have more to say on that soon…

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a hot topic for any business; appearing in the top 3 results for a particular search query can mean the difference between loads of clients and none.

But is it any use to bands and musicians?

Well, yes. For two reasons:

• First, you need people who like your music to be able to find your website when they search for you (and quite possibly, you want it to appear ahead of any Facebook or Soundcloud pages.)

• Second, you want people who might like the specific type of music you make to come across you when they search for that genre.

So, in this week’s article we’re going to take you through some of the basics of optimising your band website for search engines.

Site title

The first thing you need to look at is the title of your site.

The site title is the text you see at the top of your browser window; but it’s also the text that search engines consider as crucial in determining what your site is about (and will display first in search results).

It simply has to include your band name.

If you use generic page titles such as ‘Home’ or ‘News’ that contain no reference to the band name, then chances are that you are going to struggle to be seen in search results. So always, always put your band name in the title.

Now, this is not necessarily going to win you any new fans or visits from people who haven't heard from you. But it does mean that anyone who HAS heard of you will now be able to find you much more easily.

Meta description

Next, you need to move onto your meta description. Your meta description is text that is not visible on your site, but rather stored within the HTML code. 

You need to ask your web designer (or yourself, if you’re the web designer in the band!) to edit the description so that it contains a couple of lines of text about you and your music.

The text you enter here is not indexed by search engines, but it is displayed in search results — and if it is relevant or appealing enough to the people searching for your music, it will be more likely to generate clickthroughs to your site.

The more clickthroughs you get, the more search engines will consider it a quality result, and accordingly will tend to display your site more often in search results. 

You can view a more detailed overview of how meta descriptions are used by search engines here.

Headings and body copy

A lot of people who design music sites like to forgo text for big impressive visuals and video content.

Although strong visuals are indisputably important for bands, it's extremely important to include quality text-based content on your site too.

This is because search engines love words: they help them understand what a site is about, and give them something to index.

Within your site there are two main types of text that you need to worry about: headings and body copy.

Headings are important because search engines effectively treat them as 'tags' for categorising site content. So, wherever possible, ensure that they accurately describe what people might be searching for: instead of a heading of ‘Gigs’, try ‘Gigs by [Your Band Name]’.

There are various types of heading tags – H1, H2, H3 and so on. The H1 is the most important tag - it indicates what the page is chiefly about, and as such should only really be used once on the page. A H2 is a sub-header, and a H3 is a sub-sub header. You can go all the way down to H6s if you like...but focus most attention on H1s and H2s when structuring your page headings.

Clean URLs and internal links

Clean URLs

So that search engines can categorise your site properly, it's important to use 'clean' URLs which have a simple structure and are easily understood by search engines.

This means that instead of using a fairly impenetrable URLs like ‘www.myband.com/1252/content/sdjgasd.php’, you should create a URL such as ‘www.myband.com/online-store’.

(The dash is important, because search engines usually treat dashes as spaces.)

Using clean URLs which include keywords helps search engines index content more easily.

Internal links

When creating links within your site to other pages, avoid using vague phrases like ‘click here’ or 'read more' as your anchor text.

Instead, insert keywords into the link title, i.e., ‘Read about our gigs’.  Again, Google picks up on the keywords and this helps your pages appear in relevant search results.

External links

A crucial part of how your site performs in search hasn’t got much to do with how you optimise it; it’s about how many other sites link to it.

Search engines count external links (or 'backlinks') to your sites as ‘votes’ – the more the merrier, therefore, when it comes to ensuring your site appears at the top of the results.

Accordingly, it’s really important to get links to your site on as many other sites as possible.

However – and to misquote Morrissey – like some girls’ mothers, some links are better than others. Sites that have a lot of external links pointing to them effectively cast a greater vote for any links from them.

For example, if your band is featured on The Guardian website (which has a lot of links pointing to it), Google will take note and is likely to bump you up its search results far more enthusiastically than if you are featured on a small-time blog.

Also, it's important not to create or buy spammy backlinks to your site; this can actually result in your site being penalised by search engines.

Casting the net wider

Most of the tips above are focussed on making your site appear in search results when people type your band’s name into a search engine.

If you want to cast the net wider, and use SEO as a way to attract new listeners, then you’re probably going to have to start referencing other artists (in a similar genre) within them on your site. This is because more people are likely to be searching for established artists than you.

So think about creating content about your influences, writing blog posts about your favourite artists’ best albums and so on.

But blogging is a very time-consuming activity, so it’s important not to just dive in straight into it. You need to do keyword research first: identify phrases that people are actually searching for (using keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush), and then craft content around topics that you know people are interested in.

Once you’ve done that, it’s a case of reaching out to other bloggers and site owners, asking them to link to your posts (as discussed above, having more external links helps your content climb up the search rankings).

Ultimately, search engine optimisation is a pretty simple process; it’s about choosing the right keywords, putting them in the right places, and ensuring your site is well linked to.

Good luck!

See also

You may find some of these other SEO resources helpful:

• Simple ways to make your site visible on Google

• Squarespace SEO tips.

• Shopify SEO tips.

• Bigcommerce SEO advice

• Semrush review

You’ve spent years slaving over a mixing desk to make your album. You’ve spent thousands on CD manufacture. You’ve hired a PR company, radio pluggers and even a stylist to ensure your meisterwerk gets the best shot at rising up the charts.

And then what happens? Your record gets an absolute stinker of a review in a newspaper or blog read by thousands, accompanied by the 1 out of 5 stars kiss of music career death. Ouch! So how do you deal with this? 

1. Keep calm and don’t write letters to the publication

A bad review hurts, there’s no question about that. Yes, it took you years to make your record and a critic 5 minutes to dismiss it (45, actually, if you include listening time), and the instant reaction is to run over to your computer / iPad / typewriter and furiously type a letter to the critic’s publication decrying the ears and/or writing abilities of the critic.

DO NOT do this. It is incredibly tempting to put your feelings down in rant form and mail them to the editor, but it will not help your cause.

First, it makes you look like you can’t take criticism (never a good trait); second, if the publication actually print your rant it will only draw further attention to the fact that you got a bad review; and finally, it may reduce your chances of getting more coverage (and perhaps more positive coverage next time) for future releases from the publication in question.

2. Remember that you can’t please all of the people all of the time

Whatever kind of music you make, and however good it is, it simply will not be everybody’s cup of tea. Critics are no exception to this type-of-tea business; some will recoil in horror at a glam rock-influenced album whilst others will positively devour it.

Better-informed critics, or those who listen to a broad range of musical output, should in theory be able to cast prejudice about genres to one side and judge a record on its merits within that genre…but hey, sometimes, you just encounter a critic who doesn’t like glam rock and will use your record to vent their frustration at the whole genre.

The best way of dealing with this is to 1) take a note of that particular reviewer’s music tastes and never ever send them a glam-rock record again and 2) accept that some people just don’t like glam rock.

3. Accept that the critic might have a point

As difficult as this is for you to do, try to think the unthinkable for a moment: maybe the critic who roasted your album alive had a point? Maybe your record, despite everything your mum said, wasn’t very good after all?

Particularly after an awful review, it is tempting for bands to dismiss the whole idea of rock criticism completely (and yes, some of it can be terrible) but it's not entirely fair to do this, and it isn't helpful either.

Remember that reviewers probably listen to a hell of a lot more music than you (it’s their job after all) and as such are able to compare your efforts to what else is out there and put its quality in some sort of context.

You may not initially agree with what they have to say about your album, but step back from your precious baby for a minute, listen to it with more objective ears and see if you can see the reviewer’s point for a moment.

Maybe the critic was not just being mean when s/he said your record was a bit derivative; maybe his/her observation about its poor production was correct; maybe the drummer’s playing does hint at the fact that he was just in from the pub when he did his takes.

As hard as it may be to admit, there can be learning points in a bad review – the trick is to spot justified criticism and learn from it rather than dismiss everything the critic has said simply because it hurts to hear it.

4. Put your stinking review in context

As mentioned above, you can’t please everybody all of the time. This means that even if you’ve just released the 21st century equivalent of Dark Side of The Moon, at least one reviewer is going to think it’s absolute pants.

But before you get all despondent about one stinking review, put it in context.

What were your other reviews like? Was the general reception to the record good? If so, calm down: it’s probably just a rogue review from a journalist who doesn’t like whatever genre you’re operating in.

However, if a particularly bad review is consistent with all your other reviews (i.e., if reaction to your record has been, shall we politely say, generally muted), it may be time to look at how to improve your musical output. If all the critics you’ve sent your music to don’t like your stuff, it’s probably not just a taste thing and there is clearly stuff for you to address.

5. Remember that even a bad review can have some benefits

Even a bad review can help you a little bit. For starters, if it’s published on a heavily-visited site (for example, a newspaper site that attracts hundreds of thousands of visits a day) and there is a link to your band website at the bottom of the review, it can boost your site’s search ranking.

Also, you can post a link to your bad review on your various fan pages, allowing fans to get all outraged on your behalf, massage your ego by telling you how great you are really and post angry tweets to the reviewer who had the barefaced cheek to slag your band off.

All while you hover gracefully and impassively above the fray.

6. Don’t forget the other channels of music promo

Good reviews are helpful, but reviewers are not the only arbiters of musical quality. Even if you are not getting good reviews (or any reviews at all), remember that if your music is inherently appealing, it still stands a good chance of doing well.

This is because well-written music, irrespective of how hip it is, or people’s opinions on it – has an uncanny knack of travelling. Good reviews are important and certainly help music on its journey, but so can radio play, word of mouth and gigs.

In other words, you should not view press coverage as the only tool in your armoury but as an important part of the mix, because if it all goes Pete Tong with reviews, there are still other avenues you can explore.

7. Prove your critic wrong

Ultimately, the best way of dealing with a bad review is to use it as an opportunity to prove your critic wrong. Put your head down and make a follow-up record that is so fantastic that the guy or gal who wrote that awful review of your album ends up wishing they’d actually fawned over it and were backstage in the VIP area of your sold-out and much-talked-about gig chatting to Niles Rodgers with you.

If there are genuinely lessons to learn from your critics, learn them and improve so significantly that your critic will have no choice but to give your album 5 stars next time; if not, just move on, screw everybody's opinions and be bold in pursuit of delivering that perfect glam rock record.

Either way, make an album so fabulous that nobody will dare criticise you ever again (well, until the underwhelming follow-up to that one comes out).

by Chris Singleton

by Chris Singleton

The music industry is in a constant state of flux. Streaming has taken over from downloads. Vinyl is making a comeback. Hi-res audio is increasingly a thing. Live promoters are becoming record labels. Record companies want to sell you a tote bag.

And yet despite all this change, one thing seems to stay the same: the notion that the album is the be all and end all. 

Despite the fact that people are consuming music in all manner of ways, on all manner of devices, and often in some sort of shuffle mode, the idea that at some point a band should get 12 songs together and stick them on a shiny piece of plastic remains a dominant one.

In some ways, this obsession with and emphasis on the long-player is perfectly understandable. The album has proven itself to be a great format; and wonderful things can happen when you place twelve songs by a great band in a row.

And the LP has a proud history (though not as long as some imagine – it’s really only since the mid to late sixties that the LP really became the art form that it is considered today).

The main problem I see with the album doesn’t really concern the format though: rather, it’s the way that the album seems to be often the only thing that musicians think is worth promoting.

For new bands, unless there has been a lot of groundwork laid, there’s generally no fanbase at all there to buy an album — even if it’s great — and shouting about the fact that there’s a record with 12 songs on it out on Date X is not really going to do you much good.

(There are an awful lot of other people doing that.)

The thing to remember about music promotion is that if you leave it until the point at which your album comes out, you have possibly left things too late.

By all means release a full album, but try to create a promotion schedule that starts well in advance of its release date – maybe up to a year in advance.

Here are a few things that you could consider doing as part of this:

• Rather than putting an embargo on your album tracks, try releasing them (ideally with accompanying videos) online regularly – and approach blogs and music sites about your band every time you do.

• Use Facebook ads and other social media tactics to build up your following and email mailing list so that both are as large as possible well before the record comes out.

• Don’t leave it until the album comes out to start gigging – get out there now and start developing a live following (well, when the state of the global pandemic allows, of course).

• Approach managers, publishers, agents and labels with individual songs that might pique their interest; don’t necessarily wait until your album is 100% written, mixed and mastered to do so (you never know – an individual song might convince them to put some budget into an album project).

The other thing to remember is that you might be a singles band, not an albums band. Your album might be an incoherent mess but it might have 3 killer singles on it.

If so, focus on your strong point – and place the emphasis on (and plough your budget into) promoting singles over and above an album.

But to answer the main question posed by this post - should bands bother promoting their albums? - the answer is actually a resounding yes.

It’s just a case of starting way earlier than you might think is necessary. A promo strategy which kicks in long before an LP comes out is crucial to giving you the fanbase (and media support) that you need in order to sell some copies of that LP (or see bums on seats at the accompanying tour).

It’s simple: if your album is your big musical statement, make sure you have a big following to hear it — BEFORE it comes out.

by Chris Singleton

You’re probably a bit too young to remember ‘home taping is killing music’ labels that started to adorn LPs in the late seventies (I can just about remember them, along with Sealink ferries and blue and grey trains).

Well, despite the scary warnings, music did actually survive the rise of the cassette (not to mention CDs, MP3s and streams).

But there is a very important part of the music industry that is in the process of being killed – and no, I’m not talking about the quaint idea that people should get paid for making music. I’m talking about the professional recording studio.

Every week seems to bring news of a well-known studio being forced to shut its doors for good; this is a real pity, because in general, there is nowhere nearly as good as a recording studio for making albums.

The death of the professional recording studio may be partly down to the fact that over the past 15 years or so, we all seem to have got it into our heads that the home is the de facto place to record music (or at least a good place to record music).

Now, I am totally guilty of being a home-recording-believer myself over the years.

And it is easy to see why people want to record at home: cheap tech means everybody’s got a 128 track recorder and thousands of plugins in their toilet (or on their iPhone). Why spend £300 a day in a professional studio when you can record all your music for next to nothing at home?

Well, there are several important reasons why it might be worth thinking about leaving the confines of your bedroom when it comes to making your next record.

1. You are missing out on a truckload of amazing equipment

In most cases, comparing a good recording studio to a home setup is like comparing a Porsche to a Fiat Punto: there is barely a comparison to be made at all.

Recording studios come with an armoury of mics, instruments and outboard gear that will easily outclass whatever you have at home – and generate much better recordings.

You simply will not have a U87 mic, a Hammond organ or a Steinway grand piano lying about at home; but you’ll find all these (and much more) in many professional studios.

2. The acoustics in studios are much better than in your garage

Even if you dismiss the gap in the quality of equipment between a home setup and a professional studio, you will find it difficult to ignore the fact that the rooms in proper recording studios have been designed to simply ‘sound’ better than a garage.

Not entirely surprisingly, you will therefore end up with a much better sound from a professional studio, particularly where recordings of acoustic instruments are concerned.

Now to be fair, you may want your music to sound like it was recorded in a garage — which is fair enough; use a garage. But if you’re after a more polished result, you’ll usually get it much more easily in a studio.

3. Recording engineers are good at recording

Just because you have an audio interface and a copy of Logic at home does not mean you are a recording engineer.

(It means you have an audio interface and a copy of Logic).

A house engineer in a professional studio will have been trained to capture sounds (through use of good mic selection and placement, or correct use of outboard equipment) in a way that you will struggle to.

Not only that, but they’ve been trained to process recordings in a way that the home recordist might not understand terribly well. Advanced use of EQ, compression, gating and effects can transform recordings; the professional recording engineer will have an arsenal of tricks up their sleeve that the bedroom musician is very unlikely to be able to match.

At this point I’ll draw an analogy with medical care: sure, thanks to the internet you can google your symptoms, find a potential diagnosis, and sort of be your own doctor…but how confident would you ultimately feel about the results?

4. Producers bring all their previous work to the table

If you are lucky enough to work with a really good producer, you are in a sense working with every other artist they’ve ever worked with, because that producer will have taken some interesting ideas away from every previous studio session which he or she may then be able to add to yours.

That could be anything from a simple-but-effective string arrangement to a very out-there backward drum part. Something, in effect, that you would possibly never have thought of – because you’ve only ever produced your own music.

Because professional producers work day-in, day-out with a multitude of different types of bands, they can apply much more creative ideas to your music than you are ever likely to.

OK, so a professional producer could in theory come and hang out in your house and produce your music there…but they’ll tend to push you to go into a studio every time (because they know that that’s where they’ll get the best results for you).

5. Recording studios save you time

So long as you are well-prepared when entering the studio, you should find that recording studios help you get your music down faster.

There are a few reasons for this: firstly, because the rooms are designed with recording in mind, you’ll spend less time trying to iron out a sound (because you won’t be dealing with the sonic challenges and compromises that invariably come with recording at home).

Secondly, because you’re likely to be working with a professional engineer who really ‘knows’ the studio, he or she will be able to get things sounding good quicker. And finally, the fact that you are paying for studio time means you are more likely to want to use it productively.

6. Recording studios inspire creativity

There is something about studios which just makes you feel more inspired. It may be that the simple act of leaving the house gets you into a more creative zone, or it might be that working in a room where Dark Side of The Moon was recorded helps you to aim for similar artistic heights, but either way being in a studio can press creative buttons that a boring old bedroom can’t. Meaning your music gets more interesting (read better).

So what has all this got to do with music promo?

Yes, this is a music promo blog – and surely waxing lyrical about how great recording studios are has nothing to do with music promotion?

Well, actually, I’ve always found that the whole music promotion process begins not with a Facebook ad campaign or a well written press release, but the music itself.

It is infinitely easier to promote – on every level – a well-recorded and produced album than a record which, even if it contains a lot of good ideas, sounds a bit half-baked because it was recorded in a shed.

Recording studios, when used well, offer you the best opportunity to do your music justice and create albums that have the potential to sell themselves (even before you approach a music PR company).

There will of course be exceptions to the rule and fantastic records produced at home, but next time you are tempted to be your own engineer and producer, or are trying to record a complicated drum part in a shed, remember where most of the great albums you’ve heard were made: in a recording studio.

There are LOTS of music genres around these days: a bewildering number in fact, with sometimes pretty complicated names.

It’s easy to be cynical about some genre descriptions…but genres ARE actually very important.

Here’s why.

We find ourselves in a post-post-modern era where there are an increasing number of independent bands who:

• combine ideas from an ever-lengthening music history

• inject and combine them into songs using an ever-increasing amount of audio equipment (new and old)

• present the results to an online sea of music listeners who, thanks to the the above, plus the disruptive nature of the internet, no longer really have particularly homogenous tastes in music.

In other words…

…What you end up with is niches.

And with niches comes opportunity.

Now, your niche might not be huge: maybe there are 500 people worldwide who understand the particular genre you’re operating in.

But if you as an artist know how to find this audience, and how to speak to it, then you open up the possibility to do two things:

• Generate an income from this niche: in my experience, people with minority interests tend to have less opportunity to indulge them — and so splash out more willingly when the opportunity to indulge arises. So even if the audience you are targeting is really small, it may be more financially valuable to you than say, trying to convince a multitude of Coldplay fans to buy some music.

• Develop a fanbase that will be far more passionate advocates of your act than the average joe (thus, hopefully, helping you to eventually gain popularity outside it).

But how do you find and speak to your niche audience? Here’s some tips.

1. Find out what your niche actually is

Now, you may think you’re a breakbeat hardcore act.

But actually, you sound more like a darkcore act.

And If that’s the micro-genre you fit into, it’s the darkcore crowd you’re looking for.

In other words, before you start promoting your music, gauge opinion on it – not in terms of quality, but in terms of who people think it sounds like and what genre it belongs to.

This will help you identify the precise audience you need to speak to.

2. Find out where your niche lives

Once you’ve actually decided you are a darkcore act, it’s time to find the darkcore fans.

The internet offers you two main ways to do this: push and pull.

You could push darkcore on the world in a couple of ways: first, through social advertising tactics that allow you to display ads to fans of a very specific list of artists - i.e., fans of artists that you sound a bit like. So with darkcore, you might end up paying Facebook to show your videos to 4 Horsemen Of The Apocalypse fans.

Second, you can try to identify fan groups and forums dedicated to your micro-genre and SENSITIVELY present your work.

Time to politely introduce yourself to the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse fan club, in other words.

In terms of pull, we’re generally talking about SEO and blogging here. If you make the effort to ensure your site is optimised to appear in searches for darkcore, and regularly blog about key darkcore artists, you may well find that your audience, seemingly by magic – but actually because of algorithms – starts coming to you.

(If blogging’s not for you, podcasts and Youtube videos are other options for generating search-friendly content).

3. Find advocates of the niche

You will find that every niche genre comes with passionate advocates of that niche genre: bloggers, journalists, rock critics and DJs who simply love it.

Particularly if you are dealing with something rather niche like darkcore, you may find that there are less artists operating in the genre to pester these poor souls for coverage and airplay, meaning YOU get more opportunities to get publicised (to a smaller — but as mentioned above — more dedicated audience).

Being aware of your niche also comes in very handy when it comes to hiring music PR agencies, radio pluggers and so on — if you hire an agency or a plugger that is really into your niche genre, they are more likely to be experts in it and more keen to work hard for you as a representative of that genre.

Crucially, they'll know what your niche audience reads or listens to and will pitch you for those papers / shows.

Conversely, if you hire an agency or plugger that says 'yes' to every project irrespective of niche or genre, you may find yourself without publicity quite quickly, or with a feature in Take a Break when really you should be being plugged on Noisey (or vice versa). 

4. Talk to your niche in the right way

Once you’ve realised that you are a darkcore band and found the online audience for and the media champions of this type of music music, it’s time to ‘talk’ to them in the right way.

Obviously, the most basic way of doing this is to present them with music that they like.

But it’s also important to meet their expectations in other ways. Do you look like a darkcore artist? Do you talk like one? Do you dress like one? Do you dance like one?

People have very specific expectations when it comes to micro-micro-genres, and are extremely particular about how they should operate and who should operate in them.

So it’s important to enthuse your niche audience as much as possible and you won’t do this by confusing them. You don’t necessarily have to conform completely to your audience’s expectations, but – initially at least – you do need to meet them to some degree or you won’t be recognised and loved as the darkcore act that you know you really are.

Basically, all this seems cynical and formulaic and frankly, it is.

But on another level, it’s just how record labels have made bands popular since time immemorial: find out who likes a certain sort of music and sell that sort of music to them.

And it actually kind of makes sense.

It’s just that these days, it’s not just big record labels that have the opportunity to be cynical and formulaic. Thanks to cheap recording gear, access to every other band in history's music for free online, iTunes and Mark Zuckerberg, you do as well.

If you fully understand the power of all of these tools and crucially, you’re actually making some really great music, who knows how you might fare.

And, if you do find that niche audience, they might get a kick out of being found too.

It’s hard to get by in the music industry at the best of times, but especially so during the COVID-19 crisis. The emergency has led to tours being cancelled; album releases shelved; media appearances curtailed. All this has significant economic implications for musicians.

However, any crisis brings with it many new ways of looking at the world, and despite the multitude of negatives inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic, there are nonetheless some positives to be unearthed, and innovative ways of working to be explored.

In the music industry, the recent rise in the popularity of the online gig is probably the biggest example of a positive, useful new way of working brought about by the current situation.

So, in this post, I’m going to discuss the various ways you can run an online concert — either as a gift to your fans or as a way to generate income for your band or project.

Running online free gigs

If you simply want to broadcast a free show to your following, then it’s hard to argue with using Facebook Live as a means of doing so. 

You can use a phone or your computer to broadcast — it’s simply a case of choosing the ‘live video’ option when posting a status update.

The main advantage of using Facebook Live is that you can get quite a wide reach for your online gig — it’s easy for people watching your show to share it easily with others. Your more engaged followers will usually get an automatic notification that you’re broadcasting too, which also helps from a promo point of view.

Another option when it comes to playing a free online gig is to use YouTube Live. As with Facebook Live, you can broadcast straight from your phone or computer, and some of your YouTube following will get notifications of your event.

There’s also the option of Instagram Live, which also allows you to stream a gig for free, and works in a similar way to Facebook Live and YouTube Live.

Finally, there’s also the now-ubiquitous free Zoom option (but remember that this caps your audience to 100 viewers…and watch out for Zoom bombers!).

Which of the above options is best for you probably boils down to where your following lives: if it’s mainly on Facebook, use Facebook live; if most of your followers are YouTube subscribers, use YouTube etc.

Zoom’s a good option if you don’t really have a following on either, and rely on a mailing list to engage your listeners.

Running paid gigs

Free gigs are a great way to keep your audience engaged during the lockdown — but many musicians depend on touring income to make a living, and free gigs are for obvious reasons not going to replace that.

But the good news is that it’s very possible to generate income from streamed gigs — and because anyone can tune in, regardless of their geographical location, the income generation possibilities in question can be quite significant.  

There are a few different ways to go about this.

Paypal + a streaming link

A lo-fi — but often quite effective — way to host a paid-for online gig is just to charge people a fee via Paypal and then email a link to a live stream of the show to everybody who has paid it.

This could be, for example, a Zoom link — but note that the number of people who can watch your show on Zoom will be limited by the plan you’re on.

For example, the free Zoom plan caps the participant number to 100 and the length of the stream to 40 minutes. Fine for small-scale events, but a bit limiting for any act with a large following.

If you’re a G Suite user, using Google Hangouts is another option — in the light of the COVID-19 crisis, they’ve upped their participant limit to 250.

But if you are serious about online streaming, and have a large following, you’re probably going to need to look at a more professional setup — and one which facilitates larger audiences. This brings us on to…

Dedicated online gig streaming platforms

If you have a large fanbase, online gigs are potentially very lucrative.

If, say, you can convince 1000 people to pay £10 each to watch your show, then an hour’s performance could net you...well, you do the maths :)

However, in this context, free or low-cost options like Zoom or Google Hangouts are not necessarily going to cut the mustard, and you’re going to have to look at products that let you live stream on a larger scale.

One of the better-known choices here is StageIt — a platform that lets you host online shows to large audiences and charge people to view them. On the plus side, this is an established platform that well-known acts use to host shows.

On the down side, Stageit takes quite a large percentage of ticket sales and its ‘notes’ system for buying and selling access to your shows is unnecessarily confusing.

Another option is Crowdcast — this involves a sizeable monthly fee ($20 per month to $139 depending on plan) plus a small cut of your sales (2%-5%, again depending on plan) — but its higher tier plans allow you to broadcast your show to a large number of people (1000) and its integration with Stripe makes accepting payments for shows really straightforward. It also works with Patreon, which may be helpful for some musicians.

The ‘tip jar’ approach

If you want to monetize your live online performances, but aren’t 100% comfortable with charging people upfront to view your shows, you could consider the ‘tip jar’ approach.

This means hosting your show for free, but encouraging people to donate to an online tip jar or honesty box if they enjoy the performance. 

So, for example, if you were hosting your show on Facebook Live, you could periodically encourage people to donate to the tip jar — this could simply be a link to Paypal or to a ‘donate’ page on your website.

Charging for recorded performances

All the approaches discussed above assume your online gig is going to be live — but remember that you could consider making a recorded gig available online too.

You could either package up a previous live performance (or performances) into a show that you then make available online, or you could record new versions of your songs. 

Either of these recorded options might make your online show a bit more interesting because they open up the possibility of a performance involving multiple musicians. Live acoustic streams are all well and good, but full-band performances are usually a bit more exciting for listeners.

In the current social distancing context however, if you want to make a ‘new’ show featuring all the members of your band, this is likely to mean everyone in your band filming themselves recording their parts on their own, and stitching it together using some editing software. But done right, it can make for some really valuable new content.

Once you’ve got your pre-recorded online show ready to go, you can distribute it for free by uploading it to Facebook or YouTube; or alternatively, make it available to buy in a variety of ways. Online store builders like Wix or Squarespace make it pretty easy to sell digital files / videos online; you could also consider going down the ‘Paypal + link to content’ route (for example, take payment via Paypal and then provide buyers with a link to a downloadable video on Dropbox etc.).

Getting the production values right

No matter whether you host your show for free or on a paid-for basis, it’s vital that you get the production values as high as possible.

So, rather than using a built-in microphone to capture audio, use a decent microphone plugged into an audio interface if you can.

Similarly, when it comes to video, consider using an external camera rather than a built-in webcam; and if you do end up broadcasting via a phone, think about using a tripod to get a nicely composed shot rather than just plonking your device on a table at an angle which picks up a double chin or two.

If you really want to take things up a notch, you could also think about incorporating some lights; you can pick these up surprisingly cheaply and they can really improve the quality of your broadcast. (Even a well positioned anglepoise table lamp can help quite a bit here).

And, depending on how seriously you’re taking online gigging, you might want to think about using dedicated encoder hardware or software to stream your shows. These are, respectively, boxes or applications that help you incorporate and encode multiple sources of audio and video together more effectively and professionally. (To be honest, they’re more suited to larger-scale events requiring lots of camera angles than the sort of ‘bedroom shows’ that are being carried out by musicians during the COVID-19 lockdown — so maybe one to consider down the line).

Finally, one thing that can make a HUGE difference to the sound quality of your show is the equipment that your viewers are listening to it on. At the start of your online gig, always encourage them to make use of headphones or decent speakers during the show, rather than listening through tinny smartphone or laptop speakers.

Marketing your online gigs

“Build it and they will come” only takes you so far in the music business, and online gigs are no exception to that. Without proper promotion, you can end up with the best sounding, fantastically-lit online show — but only a few viewers for it.

So, make sure that you promote your show well in advance of it taking place, sending an e-newsletter to your mailing list and posting news on your social media profiles to flag it up to your following. You may wish to consider some boosted Facebook posts or Twitter ads to promote the show to make sure your social following is fully aware of it — by default, their algorithms won’t show news of it to all your followers.

(Tip: make sure you read our article on why mailing lists matter so much to bands — a lot of the info it contains is very relevant to doing online gigs).

Good luck with your online show, and if you have any tips of your own on how to run an online gig, we’d love you to share them below.

On a final note, all of us at Prescription PR would like to send you our best wishes during this strange time. Stay well and safe.

Whether you’re a wildly successful musician or a complete unknown, you are probably ‘time poor’ — you are either very busy with a successful music career, or subsidising an unsuccessful one by working round the clock in an unloved day job.

Either way, you won’t necessarily have a huge amount of time on your hands to promote your music. This is where automation can come in really handy – and in this post, I’m going to look at ways you can automate your band’s marketing efforts and save a truckload of time.

1. Consider online advertising

Using online advertising isn’t a free way to automate your marketing – but it can, when done well, be very effective in driving traffic to your site while you are working in a call centre.

If you have some budget to put into Facebook, Twitter or Google ads, then it’s definitely worth experimenting with them to get more visitors to your band’s site or social media profiles (the aim, of course, being to convert these visitors into social media fans or subscribers to your mailing list).

Usually it’s best to target fans of bands that you think your act would appeal to and offer some free content in exchange for a like, follow or email address.

Our view is that typically, Facebook ads work best for bands, and email addresses are the best thing to try to obtain from a ad campaign, as they let you fully ‘own’ the relationship between you and your fans — you are not beholden to a social network’s algorithm when it comes to getting messages about your band out there. (You simply send everybody an email, which in many cases results in a hard-to-miss ‘push notification’ across devices.)

For more tips on how to use online ads, check out our ‘Facebook ads for musicians’ post.

2. Automate your e-newsletters

I’ve written about this regularly on this blog, so I’m not going to wax too lyrical about it again…but basically,  if you use a tool like Aweber or Getresponse to send out e-newsletters, then you have the ability to program in a sequence of automated ‘follow up’ emails to your fans.

Everybody who signs up your mailing list can therefore automatically receive encouragements to follow you on social media; buy your merch; come to a gig and so on – without you having to worry about scheduling e-newsletters in automatically. You’ll find some more in-depth information on autoresponders here.

3. Use RSS to disseminate content

If you have a website worth its salt, it will contain a blog with an RSS feed. This RSS feed can be used to power all sort of stuff automatically – if you set things up correctly, your RSS feed can:

• convert your blog post into an e-newsletter which goes out to your mailing list every time you add a new entry

• share your new posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media feeds

• allow others to display links to your articles on their websites which are automatically updated every time you post new content

• ‘ping’ news services and blog directories with new content

• display your new posts to anyone using an RSS reader.

4. Be a slave to the algorithm: optimise your site for search

Every second of every day, algorithms are trawling the internet, sifting through sites and picking the best ones to plonk at the top of search results.

Setting up your website in a way that gives it the best chance of being automatically discovered by one of these algorithms means that you may end up on the receiving end of a lot of web traffic without much effort.

For some tips on how to go about this, you can read our article about SEO for musicians (I’d also recommend that you check out our inbound marketing tips).

5. Split test to find out what content works best

You can use split testing algorithms — also known as A/B tests — to test what content works best for your band.

Whether you want to find out which version of your website works best, what subject header for an email generates the most opens, or even which mix of a song appeals most to your fanbase, A/B tests can automatically ask the question and give you the answers.

A/B testing tools work by

1. showing two different versions of a web page or email to a sample of your visitors / subscribers

2. evaluating which generates the most engagement (be that in terms of how long people stay on a website or how many people open an email)

3. automatically rolling out the best performing version of your content to the majority of your web visitors or subscribers.

Most e-newsletter tools allow you to split test out of the box; for running A/B tests on websites, check out Unbounce or Instapage.

6. Promote your gigs with Songkick

By using Songkick,you can automate your gig publicity efforts to a degree.

First, Songkick allows you to make use of a widget that you can embed on any number of online presences (i.e., your website, Facebook, Bandcamp etc.) – meaning that once you’ve added a gig to the system it will automatically appear anywhere your widget is displayed.  

Second, Songkick have a partnership with Spotify, Youtube and Soundcloud, so your gigs will automatically appear on those sites when people are listening to your music on them.

7. Use Hootsuite to schedule social media posts automatically

If you know that you’re going to be too busy to post on social media during a certain period, you can use tools like Hootsuite to schedule posts in advance – on multiple networks – so that the posts still magically appear even whilst you’re doing something else.

Not convinced by the power of automation yet? Well, you’re probably reading this post because one of three things happened:

1. A search engine or social media algorithm automatically decided that you should.

2. Our e-newsletter system automatically sent you an email about it.

3. Our RSS feed and an automated tweet sent news of the article’s existence to the Twittersphere.

Automation rules...

The arrival of a new decade tends to bring with it a desire amongst musicians to ‘make the new one count’ and increase their profile (both online and offline).

So, as we’re not long into the 2020s, I thought I’d share 6 simple things you can do to just that.

Read on…

1. Build a website

Regular readers will notice that I encourage bands to build their own websites a lot (instead of just setting up a Bandcamp or Facebook page). I’m a bit like a broken record on that.

That’s because there are some distinct advantages to using a website to promote your band over relying on third-party platforms.

First, it looks more professional and will lead to your industry contacts taking you more seriously.

Second, it will usually make your band easier to find in search results.

Third, a dedicated site allows you — not Mark Zuckerberg — to have complete control over your band’s brand.

And finally, a proper band website allows you add important functionality to proceedings — for example sophisticated email address capture, blogging and website analytics — that isn’t always available on social networks.

By all means have a presence on social media or music sites like Bandcamp — but make sure that your band website is the first port of call for your fans and industry contacts.

2. Make sure your band name goes on stage with you

It’s easy to perform a gig in front of a bunch of strangers who end up really enjoying it — but who also end up leaving the venue without any idea of who they’ve been listening to!

Fans are hard to come by, and this sort of scenario feels like an awful waste of energy, time and probably money.

A simple fix for this is to print up a banner with your band’s name onstage — or use a drum head with your band’s logo and website on it.

Now everyone knows who you are.

3. Put data capture at the heart of everything you do

Facebook and Twitter followings are all very well and good (and yes, important) but I’d argue that a big mailing list is possibly the most important thing a band can have.

With your mailing list, you’re much more in control of who gets to see your content, and when — not a Facebook algorithm.

Additionally, studies have shown that the ‘return on investment’ associated with email addresses is very high — emailing your fans is one of the ways that you are most likely to generate sales of merchandise and gig tickets.

For tips on how to grow a mailing list and run an email marketing campaign, check out my article on how to create email newsletters and marketing campaigns.

4. Use simple SEO tactics to ensure people can find your band

If you are in the fortunate position where you’re getting some airplay, or some good support slots, then the chances are that you’ll get people who want to find out more about your act, or listen to you in the comfort of their own home. And they’re going to try to do this using the internet.

As such, you need to ensure that your band is easily discoverable in search results - a few simple tweaks to your site can mean the difference between being found really easily or not at all.

I’ve put together some SEO tips for bands here.

5. Use Facebook advertising — but be smart about it

Facebook ads can be used by bands to reach thousands of people — but it’s important to reach the right people (i.e., folk who are most likely to enjoy your music) and convert them to followers or mailing list subscribers.

It’s dead easy to make mistakes and burn through budget when using Facebook advertising - so check out our tips on Facebook ads for musicians here before you start boosting any posts…

6. Make great music

Content is king, they say - and in this instant 'they' are right for once. Whilst it pains me somewhat to refer to music as 'content', the fact of the matter is that - particularly given today’s ultra competitive music industry - your music is only going to travel and reach ears if it is absolutely brilliant.

Before you get too worried about how to promote your music, make sure it’s wonderful - that’s half the battle.

So stop reading how-to guides and get in the studio! :)

So you’ve been making an album for what feels like a decade. You’ve gone through several difficult stages to get there: the writing, the recording, the mixing, the mastering, the sleeve design…and then some bright spark pipes up to tell you that on top of all that, you’ve got to make a pop video.

Now, in days of music yore, pop videos were the preserve of the megastars. Flying Simon Le Bon to a tropical island and sorting him out with a pair of designer leather pants for a 70mm film shoot was not a cheap business. Fortunately, times have changed and making pop videos is more affordable than ever; so here a few tips on how to create a good one on a budget.

1. Come up with a good concept

A good concept will nearly always trump high production values. 

Take Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’ video as an example. Shot, guerrilla style, for only $800 on the streets of Westwood, California – rather than in an expensive studio – it was one of the funniest and most popular videos of the late 90s and contributed in no small part to the success of the track.

Even if you are not able to get your hands on any professional video equipment to make a pop video with, if you can come up with a strong idea and shoot it on your phone…well, you may be onto something.

And speaking of phones…

2. Go deliberately lo-fi

There’s nothing quite as bad (in my mind anyway) as a video that tries to look professional but falls short (I’ve made a few of them in my time).

If you know that you’re not going to have a film crew and loads of lights handy, think about going to the other extreme: make a deliberately lo-fi music video. Shoot on phones, camcorders or old super 8 cameras and be wear your graininess proudly on your sleeves.

(Again, how good this will all work out for you will depend on your video concept.)

3. Consider making a lyric video

Half the point of having a music video these days is so that people can find your music easily on what remains the biggest music streaming site in existence: Youtube.

If you can't afford to make and upload a beautiful cinematic masterpiece to Youtube, it's still important to put something up, and many punters will be happy with a ‘lyric video’ – particularly if your band writes good lyrics.

Lyric videos are easily made with basic packages like iMovie, and are ideal if you are really short on time and cash, because they do away with the need for pesky things like band members, lights, cameras, locations and extras.

If you don’t want to make a lyric video yourself, you’ll find lots of freelancers offering this service on Fiverr.

4. Record a live performance

Another way of making a cheap music video is to record a live performance.

Admittedly, this can be tricky or expensive if you’re hoping to shoot a full band in full swing – but acoustic versions of songs involving one or two musicians are easily performed, shot and edited.

As with lyric videos, this gives you an opportunity to put your music on Youtube and in a relatively straightforward, cheap manner.

5. Blag favours

If you want to be a bit more ambitious with your music video, then blagging favours is the best bet – ideally from a mate who makes music videos for a living.

But don’t just stop there: you can ask friends to get involved with your video as extras, ask a local venue to lend you their establishment as a shoot location, borrow a DSLR from your dad…and so on.

And speaking of DSLRs…

6. For God’s sake, use a DSLR

If you’re shooting something yourself, the DSLR – or ‘Digital Single Lens Reflex’ camera – is your friend. Unless you’re taking the deliberately lo-fi path described above, then these cameras, which are easily borrowable or rentable, are capable of providing stunning, cinema-quality results.

If you’ve got a clever idea for a video and want to up the production values a notch, then it’s definitely worth trying to get your hands on one instead of resorting to your iPhone (as good as iPhone cameras are these days).

7. Invest in some cheap lighting

One thing that bands always seem to forget about when making pop music videos on a shoestring is lighting. And, 9 times out of 10, it’s the lights that make the difference between something looking professional - and not.

The funny thing is that lights are not actually that expensive to hire. You can hire a lighting kit for as little as £50 a day – and using one will make all the difference.

It is worth, however, swotting up on how to light a shoot before plonking lights all over the place and shouting 'the camera, action' bit – ask the internet for some basic pointers before plugging anything in.

8. Limit the number of locations you use...

Rather than getting bogged down moving between several locations – which can eat up time, goodwill (if blagging favours) and cash – consider using one really cool, quirky location and making the most of it.

9. ...Or don’t use a location at all

You can save time and money by not going anywhere.

Putting the band against a blank wall and getting them to pull silly faces, or plonking them in front of a cheap green screen which is later replaced by wacky visuals in a video editing program, can — if done right — actually yield better (and cheaper) results than filming on location.

Alternatively, consider putting your video together using animations, archive/stock footage or photos.

10. Put a bit of dosh aside for post-production

Finally, spending a little bit of money on post-production, particularly colour grading, can go a long way. ‘Grading’ a video is a bit like mastering a song – and can have equally transformative effects.

Whether it’s a simple case of tweaking the brightness and contrast levels on each shot, or applying a particular colour effect to the whole video, grading can help lift the visuals no end — as can the addition of subtle effects like film grain (or indeed more radical effects like colour inversion or vignettes). 

Particularly if you are a novice to the area of video-making, or using less than ideal equipment to shoot a video, you can enhance results no end by investing a little bit of time or money on post-production.

Reminder: Prescription PR now offers music photography and music video production services.

As is often remarked upon in this blog, a technological revolution has brought about a massive drop in the cost of access to professional recording equipment whilst at the same time furnishing musicians with an easy way to distribute music globally.

This means that the number of bands in a position to make and release albums has never been higher. However, the same technological revolution has brought with it streaming, illegal downloading and the gradual death of the physical album, meaning that the rise in the number of records being released has not been accompanied by a plethora of new labels with the finances to release and promote all of them.

This has led a huge number of bands ‘going it alone’ and self-releasing their records, either with a view to getting enough of a reaction to entice one of the dwindling number of ‘proper’ labels to get involved, or generate enough of a buzz to actually turn their music-making into a viable business.

Both goals are extremely difficult to achieve, but they are doable. However, generally speaking, to have any chance of meeting either, bands usually need to work with a music promotion team.

What do we mean by promo team, though? Well, as a bare minimum, a music promo team tends to consist of a music PR company, who will handle print, online press and possibly some radio / TV.

However, depending on budget, bands may hire a broader range of professionals, ending up with a team that consists of:

• A music PR company

• A national radio plugger

• A regional radio plugger

• A TV plugger

• An online marketing company

(Typically, the most common scenario tends to involve bands hiring a music PR firm and a national radio plugger.)

Regardless of the size or make-up of your team, however, it’s vital to have really good people on board; music promo services cost money and the music industry is intensely competitive — pick the wrong team and you will end up 1) throwing cash down the loo and 2) not getting anywhere.

So how do you pick the right people?

1. Identify your niche, and look for people who work in that area

There are a lot of PR companies and radio pluggers out there – but some will be a better or more natural ‘match’ for your project.

If you make easy-listening jazz, it stands to reason that hiring somebody who works chiefly in the area of death metal PR is not the smartest move (and vice-versa). So, before you hire anyone to do anything with your music, try to define what kind of genre you are operating in and do some research into companies and individuals who specialise in that genre.

2. Be cautious of companies that say ‘yes’ to every project

Delivering a serious PR or radio campaign involves a LOT of work: identifying press angles, writing press releases, selecting the correct targets, pitching, repeated chasing and reporting on progress.

There is only so much time in the day and only so many people in the office (or in the case of freelancers, only one person in the office…), so if the company you are approaching seems to be one that says ‘yes’ to every project, or has a huge client roster without the team to adequately service it, tread cautiously.

Always ask a few probing questions about

• why the company particularly want to work on your project

• what else they’ve got on at the moment

• if they can genuinely fit your project in.

3. Beware of outlandish claims

Musicians are probably the biggest dreamers out there. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as ambition is a prerequisite to success, but unfortunately there are a bunch of snake oil salesmen about, all too ready to guarantee fame and fortune to these dreaming musicians…for a price, of course.

Success in music is attainable but it is very difficult to achieve, and you need to be working with people who understand that alongside talent, graft is the key to this success. It is far better to work with a PR or plugger who gives you a realistic set of targets and outcomes rather than one who promises stardom without giving any hint at how he or she will deliver it.

As the old saying goes, if something sounds too good to be true, that’s because it usually is.

4. Shop around

It’s a good idea to approach several companies / individuals with your project and ask them to pitch for your business – by averaging out the quotes you will get a sense of how much you should be expecting to pay, and by examining the quality of the pitches and the kind of media targets each company lists in their proposals, you’ll be able to get a sense of which company or freelancer is likely to do the best job.

5. Check for rapport…

As mentioned above, don’t be afraid to ask a lot of questions about how a company would potentially handle your project. This will allow you to get a sense of

• how professional an outfit is

• how good their relationships with media contacts are

• their understanding of how your music could fit into the media landscape.

But crucially, it will help you get a sense of the kind of personality / personalities you will be dealing with at the company, because it’s crucial to be working with people that you know you can trust and whom you will have a good rapport with throughout a campaign.

6. …and check for reports

Ensure that anyone you are thinking of working with commits to regular communication and written reports outlining who’s been approached, when, and what the reaction to date is.

Nail everybody down to a robust reporting schedule. If somebody seems reluctant to commit to serious reporting, that should ring alarm bells.

7. Work with people who actually like your music

Music promotion is a business; profits need to be made and bills need to be paid. This inevitably leads to people taking on music projects even though they don’t actually like the music in question. If you’re working with a professional outfit whom you are certain will do their utmost on a project regardless of their opinion on it, then that’s okay; but in an ideal world, you want to be working with people who love your project and want to work on it because of that love for it. Passion breeds good results.

8. Inspect the track record

Take a close look at what the agency you’re considering working with has done for other artists in your genre — this can give you an idea of what they’re going to be able to achieve for you.

However, it’s important to be aware that a lot of people in the music industry dine off past glories — so it’s a good idea to look at what a team has done for other artists in the recent past (for example, during the past 6 months).

If you’re self-releasing an album, pay particular attention to what an agency has done for independent acts in the recent past. Getting strong PR results for a new artist that isn’t signed to a major label is usually considerably tougher than doing so for a signed or established band, so make sure that anybody you commission to work on an independent release has a proven track record of results in that area.

Good luck with your quest to find decent people for your project – and of course, don’t forget to put us on your list of music PR companies to check out. We look forward to all the probing questions…you can contact us here.

Regular readers of The Prescription will have picked up on the fact that much of the advice it contains relates to digital aspects of music industry – whether that’s to do with recording, distribution, PR or marketing.

This week, I thought I’d devote a bit of time to looking at the more ‘physical’ side of things and how thinking beyond digital releases can really benefit musicians.

Whilst it’s true to say that the digital revolution has in general made physical formats like CDs and records seem rather obscure, and often available for next to nothing in charity shops, paradoxically it has also – in certain contexts — turned them into valuable source of revenue.

I’ll expand on that shortly, but let’s stay with the digital side of things for a moment.

Although digital recording gear and worldwide digital distribution have led to an explosion in the number of bands producing and distributing albums, what it hasn’t provided for these bands is the kind of fanbase-generating marketing budget that would have accompanied a traditional album release.

This is usually because today’s major music medium — streaming — doesn’t typically generate enough money to risk investing much in a band.

The upshot of universal access to recording equipment without a corresponding access to marketing budgets is that the industry has arguably changed from being one where there was a small number of bands with huge followings to one where there is a huge number of bands with small followings.

I’m guessing that if you are reading this post, you or your band fall into the latter category, and you’re struggling with how to generate revenue from that small following.

By ‘small’, I mean that perhaps a you have few hundred dedicated fans rather than a few hundred thousand. But the key word here is ‘dedicated’: if your few hundred fans are really into you, they may be prepared to pay a premium for your music, and make your music-making a financially viable activity.

But given how easy it is for for your fans to listen to you for free, this is only the case if you make it really worth their while.

And here’s where physical music products come in: if you can create a physical offering that is perceived as unique and of special value by your fans, you may find that instead of them steaming your album on Spotify for a few pence, they may be prepared to pay a lot more for the same music.

So, here are some simple ideas on how to get physical.

• Number your CDs by hand and sign them. Instead of charging £8.99 etc., charge £15.00. This is a really simple way to increase the income you generate from any stock you manufacture, and you'll always find at least some listeners prepared to pay a bit extra for a signed CD.

• Put together a little package comprising a bunch of limited-edition items. For example, charge £25 for a package that includes a signed CD, handwritten lyrics, a poster and two signed photos.

• Accompany a CD sale with merchandise – bundle a CD, t-shirt and mug together for £20.

• Do a limited run of cassettes / mix tapes and charge £15 per signed cassette album.

• Do a combined vinyl/CD release and charge £25 per copy sold.

• A bit of a physical/digital mash-up this, but you could issue your album on a designer USB memory stick. Include high-resolution versions of your tracks on the USB (WAVS rather than MP3s) and other exclusive content like videos, alternate takes and so on.

These are just some examples of limited-edition physical releases – I’m sure you can use your imagination to come up with more interesting examples of how to get physical. In fact, I’d be keen to hear some more ideas; do leave a comment if you have any suggestions on this front.

The point is to try to increase the value of your offering for your fans, and by extension to increase the financial value of each fan (if that doesn’t sound too mercenary!); for example, to get to a situation where you know there are 750 people who will pay £20 every year to consume your music; a £15k total. Ok, it might not be millions, but it will happily finance the recording and release of another project, or help support a tour.

Whatever you eventually decide upon for a physical release, the key thing really is to think like a business and work out:

1. how many of your fans will realistically buy a physical product

2. how much they will be prepared to pay for it

3. how much it will cost you – not just in terms of money, but time too – to make your physical offering.

Ultimately, if you are smart about things, do the right sums and manage to keep costs down, you may find that oddly, in this digital era there is still considerably more to be made from an innovative physical release than a bog-standard digital one.

And the added value of this is that you have interesting physical products to send to journalists and bloggers too — this can make your press pack stick out from the crowd.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you’ll have noticed that selling records has become more and more difficult.

And you don't need a degree in rocket science to see why: ever since records became ‘files’ rather than physical items, it’s been getting easier and easier to obtain music for free – either through file-sharing or legal, ad-funded services like Spotify. So, in a world of free music, how do you actually make any cash out of your tunes?

One important answer to this tricky question is this: the money is in the list.

What list? The list of people who have given you an email address. Generating a decent database is one of the most important things that a band can do these days, but, perhaps understandably – as “data management” isn’t exactly the sexiest aspect of a rock career – it can get overlooked by bands.

So, in this article we’re going to spell out the benefits of having a good fan database, suggest ways to build one, show you how it can generate income and outline some pitfalls to avoid.

Why an email database matters

Having a good email database of your fans is a really important for a number of reasons:

• The people who are interested enough to give you an email address are probably the people who are most likely to buy your music and merch. They are amongst your warmest "leads".

• Communicating with your list is extremely cost-effective. If you’re on a budget, you can technically email everybody for free, or if you want to be a little more sophisticated about things, you can use an inexpensive but very useful email marketing tool (more on which anon).

• Email addresses can be used not only for direct-to-fan communication but for building up fanbases on social networks. For example, Facebook and Twitter allow you to connect contact lists and identify profiles of people who are on them.

• When used in conjunction with a half-decent email marketing system, your database of email addresses can tell you a hell of a lot about your fans – where in the world they are based; how many of them open your emails; what sort of content they particularly like and so on. You can use all this data to decide what sort of merchandise to sell them and where to do gigs.

But how do you build an email database?

Ok, having spelt out the benefits of an email database, how do you actually create one? There are a few different ways you can go about it.

• At the very simplest level, you can just whack an email address on your site that people can send a message to if they want to join your list. You could then store these email addresses in Outlook, or an Excel spreadsheet. However, this is a very 1990s, less-than-ideal way of going about things – not only will ‘spambots’ find your publicly-listed email address and send you a load of junk mail, but the above method relies on you manually filing a bunch of email addresses. It is a quick way of getting a list on the go, but I’d personally avoid this method.

• Getting a little bit more sophisticated, you could use a free service like JotForm to build a form that captures email addresses; this lets you capture more details about your fans and will send an email to you every time somebody completes your form. However, it's all still a rather manual process requiring Outlook lists or Excel spreadsheets.

• Getting more sophisticated again, you can use a professional email marketing app such as Getresponse or Mailchimp. These are nifty tools that allow you to do a whole host of useful things, like create HTML emails (emails that involve graphics and photos); send pre-written, automated emails (autoresponders) to subscribers; see who’s opening your emails; find out where your fans live (!) and much more. Unsubscribes are handled automatically too.

Ok, so how do I actually use my list to make money?

First, you’ve got to be realistic about things: despite your list containing your ‘warmest leads’, only a very small proportion of them will actually part for cash for anything – as a rule of thumb, around 1% to 5%. So if you have 1,000 people on your mailing list, you can expect 10 to 50 sales of something.

So, the best way to generate income out of a mailing list is to grow it so that it is as large as possible.

And how do you do that?

• Incentivise things – spell out the benefits of joining your list (this usually involves giving away music).

• Consider using online adverts on Facebook or elsewhere to encourage people to sign up to your list. However, be aware that this can be an expensive activity which is full of pitfalls…see our article on Facebook advertising for more information on how to go about this.

• Make it easy for people to sign up. Keep things basic: capturing name and email address is usually enough (although if you’re planning on touring, a postcode field is a good idea).

• Mention the mailing list at every gig you play, and always capture email addresses at the door of events – ask every paying gig-goer you have to join your mailing list as soon as they walk in the door of the venue. Leave sign-up forms on any tables in the venue.

• Ensure that your website features data capture forms prominently in all areas - on the home page, in the side bar etc.. Pop-ups and welcome mats, when used wisely, can also increase the number of email addresses captured.

Once you’ve got a large number of subscribers on your mailing list, you can send them e-newsletters about about physical releases, downloads, merchandise and gigs.

You should try to do this in as personal a way as possible — don’t talk to your fans as though you’re an airline emailing its customers; rather, communicate in a genuine, heartfelt way that lets your listeners know that you value them.

And think out of the box when it comes to what you actually sell to your subscribers. Yes, you can try to encourage them to purchase CDs and downloads, but in the streaming era this is always a hard sell. So think out of the box — innovative merch, crowdfunding and unique live experiences can potentially raise more revenue than CDs. See our ‘Let’s get physical’ article for a few suggestions on this front.

Using your mailing list wisely

Remember that once you have a huge mailing list, don’t overdo things. Think long and hard before you hit the send button on every e-newsletter. Do you really need to email everybody once a week with inane news about your granny? 

Also, remember that with mailing lists, it's incredibly easy to break the law; there are quite a few data protection regulations that you really need to adhere to if you're capturing email addresses (especially in the GDPR era). The key things to remember from a legal viewpoint are as follows:

• Make it clear to users what they are signing up to

• Use a 'subscribe' button or 'Yes, sign me up to your updates' checkbox

• Give users an easy way to unsubscribe from you newsletters.

• Store your data securely

And finally, although the money may be in the list, it isn’t ALL going to come from flogging recordings.

You may find that even if you have a large mailing list packed with enthuastic supporters, they may still not be arsed buying a record which they can listen to on Spotify for nothing.

But they may very well pay to see you live, wear your t-shirt or drink from your mug. (Check out our article on Ryanair’s business model (yes, really) for some ideas on how to make money from fans who will happily listen to your music for free but won’t buy any albums from you.)

See also

If you’re investigating the world of email marketing, there are a few reviews on email marketing apps I’ve written which will help:

• Aweber versus Getresponse

• Aweber review

• Campaign Monitor review

• Getresponse review

• Mad Mimi review

• Mad Mimi versus Mailchimp

• Mailchimp vs Aweber

And finally, you may find my guide on how to create an e-newsletter helpful.

When trying to find the secret to musical success, you might as well start by looking at the career of the most successful band in history: The Beatles.

Even if you don’t like their music, they nonetheless wrote the textbook on how a band can overcome odds, succeed in the music biz and sustain a career; there is still much to be learnt, even in today’s internet driven music industry, from their story, and in this post, I’m going to zoom in on their early ‘Hamburg days’ in a bid to help you improve the quality of your live performances.

But before I do that, let’s take a look at what’s currently wrong with your live performances. Based on my own past failings as a musician, I can suggest a few issues that you might want to address:

• You don’t look like a ‘natural’ performer

• You look uninteresting on stage

• Your playing skills aren’t that great

All that sounds rather harsh doesn’t it? Now, of course, I’m not saying that all the above strictly applies to you, dear reader, but my hunch is that if you are reading an article about improving your live performances…well, some of it probably does. So what you can learn by looking at the Beatles’ Hamburg period?

Let’s start with a bit of history: the Beatles went to Hamburg in August 1960, booked to play a string of gigs in the notorious St Pauli area of the city.

Upon arriving there, band essentially lived in a toilet and played gigs seven days a week in seedy nightclubs. And when they started this stint, all the flaws discussed above – by the band’s own admission – were present in their performances.

The Beatles didn’t play like naturals; they didn’t have a ‘look’; and their music was very rough around the edges. But by the end of their Hamburg experience, The Beatles had been transformed into a live powerhouse with interesting haircuts that quickly went on to secure a record deal and…yes, you know the rest; you’ve watched The Rutles movie. 

And here’s why Hamburg transformed The Beatles: first, the band got loads of practice at live performance. Playing seven days a week for hours on end honed their performances to the point where they started to look like the real deal.

Second, they were under huge pressure to entertain: the clubs they played in initially were run by a rather forceful German entrepreneur called Bruno Koschmider, who, whilst the band were playing, would come to the front of the stage and scream ‘Mach schau! Mach schau!’ (‘Make show! Make show’) loudly at them. This led to Lennon to ‘dance around like a gorilla’ and the band ‘knock their heads together’ on stage: a far cry from just standing still and playing songs, which they’d previously done in Liverpool.

Third, the intense schedule of live performances meant that the band effectively spent a vast amount of time on band practice – albeit live on stage in front of an audience. (Additionally, because they had to play for so long each evening, they had to pad out their songs with long guitar solos – thus improving their improvisation, composition and general playing skills). 

One other thing worth considering about The Beatles’ Hamburg experience was that they were playing out of their ‘natural habitat’, Liverpool – they were in a strange city, playing to strange folk, meaning that there was 1) more room for them to make and learn from mistakes in front of a potentially less ‘local’ (read judgmental) crowd and 2) they were more likely to come into people who did things differently.

For example, that moptop haircut – which went on to be one of the things that made the band stand out in Britain – was, curiously enough, a very common sight on the head of young German men in 1960. And the band encountered the likes of artists Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann, who helped define the band’s style not just in their early years (via Kirchherr’s iconic photo shoots and her insistence on the group wearing leather outfits instead of sports jackets) but later in their career too, with Voormann designing the artwork for Revolver in 1966.

Anyway, let us move from the sixties back to the present, where you are no doubt waiting for me to stop waffling on about some band your dad likes and cut to the quick with those handy hints on how to be a pop star. Here they are:

1. Play as many gigs as you can, in as many venues as possible

Playing live frequently – even in awful venues – will help you to feel comfortable on stage and more able to deal with a variety of different (and even hostile) audiences. It will also do wonders for your playing, and – almost as importantly – your stage patter. 

2. Try to differentiate your band from other acts

Don’t just stand there and play songs like every other indie band: employ some theatricality. Whether that’s by dressing interestingly, getting your frontperson to do a gorilla dance, putting on a light show or using some arty video backdrops, follow Bruno Koschmider’s advice and ‘mach schau’.

Remember of course that there is a fine line between making your schau look ‘interesting’ or making it look daft – but generally speaking, even a daft show is infinitely better than a bland one. 

3. Invite feedback

In Germany, the Beatles didn’t so much invite feedback as receive it somewhat unwillingly via a venue owner yelling at them as they played; but either way it worked – the instruction to entertain led to them starting to do precisely that.

Particularly if you are relatively new to gigging, ask (ideally impartial) members of your audience to give you an honest post-mortem after the gig. Don’t be offended if the feedback ain’t so hot: try to learn from it.

Another thing you can do is video your performances and, much like a football team sitting round the TV watching a game they’ve just played, try to establish what worked and what didn’t, with a view to including the good stuff more in gigs and omitting the bad. 

4. Get out of your comfort zone 

Don’t just play in your local venue. Try to find gigs in places where you wouldn’t normally look for them. Whether that means busking on the tube or playing in a fan’s house, the more you can er, expose yourself to different situations and audiences, the more likely you are to come into contact with people who you may be able to learn from – whether that’s simply a hard crowd or a bohemian photographer who goes onto play a big part in your sexy new look. 

If none of the above work, I would suggest a brief stint in Germany and some leather pants: after all, there’s nothing like the real thing.

Chris Singleton wrote this post. He has never been seen in leather trousers, which perhaps explains his relative obscurity.