The Underground Artist

How I Embed Music Videos On My Facebook Page Posts

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Sat, 5 Feb 2022 17:41:00 -0600

Photo via Flickr by HS You

Embed a playable music video on a Facebook post.

Facebook used automatically embed a video player from a YouTube link because Facebook didn't host videos itself.

Well, that's all changed in the past few years.

Now if I want a video that plays directly from an embedded player on Facebook? I have to upload the video to the post itself. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Here is how to do that.

1) Embed A Video on Facebook Page Post

Let's say I want to post my latest music video on a Facebook page post.

I actually talk to a lot of people that think they can only post a video if it's recorded on the Facebook app.

So now, not only can I upload a video, it allows us to upload large files -- so high-quality videos can be used!

In the Facebook post box, click on the "photos/video" link under the posting prompt.

Click the “Add photos/video” and upload the video.

Search for the video to use

Upload that video to Facebook

Then I can add a title and description and upload a custom thumbnail for the video if I want.

I hit the post button and it is an embedded player right in my post.

And that’s it!

Also the benefit of doing this?

People who view videos uploaded to Facebook can be added to a promo campaign for future videos I post.

2) Can I embed a YouTube video in a Facebook post?

No not anymore. Facebook will post a video thumbnail image but not the video player.

Here is how to get the YouTube video thumbnail to show up.

Click the "share" section under the YouTube video and copy the link.

Copy the YouTube link

Paste that link into the Facebook post.

When it finds the video image from the link used it will appear in your post as an image link to the YouTube video.

When people click that it will take them to the video on YouTube.

If you have any other tips for uploading videos feel free to post them in the comments below.

I wanted to know: What's the best distro service for my music?

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 18:08:00 -0500

I've been using the same music distribution service for years. I figured it was time to see what the others were like.

I don't even remember why I chose the one I use? But I've been distributing music from a service called OneRPM to all the streaming platforms for years.

It's been fine. They take a percentage instead of an upfront cost for singles and albums.

BUT recently they made the distribution to YouTube mandatory. And that's a problem for me because I sell my own music to YouTube Gamers and Vloggers so they can use it.

So I'm looking into switching and I thought I would see what other people are saying about the distro services they like.

Here are some responses from Twitter about what is the best music distro service:

As an artist releasing music, if you get any sort of record / pub deal or signup for a distro service, at least read that contract. Don’t be so naive to think everybody had your best interests in mind.
— sumdays (@sumdaysdotco) June 29, 2020

Distrokid for me. or amuse for free
— Lucy, Racquel and me (@LucyRacquelandM) August 31, 2020

Amuse (for people just starting out)
— HUNT$MAN🪓 (@prodbyhunty) May 11, 2020

@DistroKid DistroKid is honestly the best music distribution service of all time 100%
— Jackson D. McGrath (@JacksonMcGrat13) April 19, 2019

Although I would say this feature from Distrokid is pretty interesting

I'm excited to announce... 🚀🚀 Starting today, DistroKid members can upload looping videos to Spotify, that play when someone listens to your song. Info here: https://t.co/CaBQ8LnSmq 🙌 Enjoy
— DistroKid (@DistroKid) November 19, 2020

Preparing my new song for release - using Google Drive to organize this

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Sun, 24 Jul 2016 17:57:00 -0500

Photo Credit - “Flipping through files” - CC-BY-SA

There’s a lot of info I need re-use for submitting my song to different places online. I’m going to use Google Drive so I can access it easily.

I'm getting ready to post my song in different places on the web. Before I do I'm going to create a Google Drive folder for all my song release information.

The reason I'm doing this? Because in the past when posting songs I've learned:

While creating accounts for my songs I'm going to need to enter the same information over and over
Later on, I may want to remember the links of where I put all this stuff without having to go to each site to find it next time.
If I ever need to send someone information about the song for promotion down the road I can just look there.

Main reason I'm using Google Drive is it's connected to my Gmail account and Google gives you 15 gb free space with documents and spreadsheets as well as file storage.

Folder setup

I created a folder in Drive with the band name as the title. Then inside that -- another folder for the song files I'm going to use.

Links Spreadsheet

I add a new spreadsheet to track where I'm going to put this stuff. Each row I title with the websites I'm going to submit to:

Archive.org
SoundCloud
Bandcamp
Jamendo
Bittorrent Now
And so on….

I then add columns for information about each task to enter as I go along

Date (when I created it)
Song link
Artist page

Save this spreadsheet for later.

I'm going to (try to remember to) enter the information here as I create each song page and account.

Information Documents

Next, I make some new documents for:

Lyrics
Band bio
Song description

I know from experience I'm going to have to enter these things a lot. So if I write the information in these docs now I can just copy and paste this stuff as I upload the song to each account.

Add files to Google Drive folder

Then I uploaded my files to the song folder on Google Drive.

This includes:

mp3 audio
wav audio
album artwork image
band Image
header image (for artist pages)
logo

Maybe even create separate folders for the audio and image files to keep it organized.

I'm doing all this for safe keeping in case something ever happens to my computer files, or if months later I need to find them. It's happened to me before.

Now I should have everything I need to start creating my accounts online for this song.

Enter id3 information and artwork to my mp3 file

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 12:00:00 -0500

Photo credit - Tagging Music - CC-BY-SA by tmray02

I want to add information to my mp3 file so when people download it they'll see things like the correct title, band name and artwork in whatever player they use.

I know iTunes or Windows Media player can add these basic things. But I also want to add as much detailed information as possible. Including things like lyrics, licensing, and attribution information.

I downloaded an id3 tagging program called Kid3 - Audio Tagger.

I opened a copy of my mp3 song (made a copy in case I screw it up) in kid3.

In the program I was able to add song title, band name, release year by default.

I also was able to drag the artwork I made for the single into the artwork box to embed it in the mp3 file.

(RELATED: I don't need expensive software to make artwork for my song single)

After that I clicked the add button to see what other options i could add.

I was able to also set:

BPM
Label name
Songwriting credits
Website address
Lyrics

That last part is nice because in some mobile players people can look at the lyrics while the song is playing.

So all I did was go to the Google document I saved my lyrics in, opened the lyrics window in kid3 tagger pasted them in and saved it. Boom.

Now my lyrics are in the audio file.

Last thing I wanted to do was add my creative commons license to the file so people knew how to attribute my work if they decided to use this song for something.

All I had to do was go to the creativecommons.org website, choose the license I wanted. I usually go with the cc-by-sa (attribution share alike). Basically people can use my song or remix it however they want as long as they give me credit and release it under the same license.

I copied the license description and link generated on the creative commons site and added that to my tagger. Then saved the file and it overwrites all this info to my mp3 file.

Now whoever downloads this or shares the mp3 will have all my information. No mislabeled info.

I don't need expensive software to make artwork for my song single

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 23:30:00 -0500

Artwork for the song "Astronaut" by Rom-Com

How I created my album art using creative commons images and online software. No expensive programs needed.

I needed to make some cover artwork for my single.

Normally I would just:
Take a picture using my phone, re-purpose an Instagram photo or something like that.

I didn't have an idea for the artwork this time, so I turned to the Internet for inspiration.

Searching for images to use

First I wanted to find some images to work with. I decided to look for art under creative commons license, meaning I would be able to use and build on the artwork as long as I attributed the work to the original creator.

My song is called "Astronaut" so I'm going to be looking for images with a space theme.

First place I looked was a site called deviantart.com. I searched "astronaut creative commons", since they don't have a filter to just search for CC images.

(RELATED: Looking for ways to improve artwork and video for songs)

Found a few there that I liked and bookmarked them to look at later. Wanted to check one more place before deciding.

Next site I went to was Flickr, which actually does have a filter to search only CC-BY images. Was also able to filter my results by image size.

Searched for "Astronaut" there, which turned out pretty good since NASA actually shares all its images openly there.

Found a picture of the moon on the horizon in the evening sky and downloaded that to use.

Photo credit - Hovering on the Horizon - NASA's Earth Observatory - CC-BY

Edit using canva.com

Now I wanted to add the song title and band name to the photo.

I did this using a website called canva.com. It lets you even pick a template specifically meant for album covers.

Signed in with my Google account, and chose the template I wanted to use. Then all I had to do was upload my picture and add my song title and band name text to the artwork.

When I was done I downloaded the picture. Now I have my song art ready to use. And if I ever need another copy it's available in my canva.com account.

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How I created a simple band website in just a few minutes

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 11:19:00 -0500

making a blogger website

I'm starting my new band side-project, and the first thing I'm going to do is create a website.

There are a lot of free options out there to make a website. But I’m going to use Google's blogger platform.

I've used for different websites over the years and I'm comfortable with it.

Another thing is, it also integrates nicely with all of the Google services I already use, including my Gmail account, Google Drive and Google Photos.

The domain is even free if I keep the default blogspot.com address. I can change it to a regular domain at anytime for like 12 bucks a year if I want. Google even lets you do this right in blogger using Google's own domain service.

Main thing is, I want to have:

somewhere to post my most recent songs for an email download
Be able to add upcoming information and/or reviews
Create an about us page.

All I need to do is go to blogger.com, log in with my Gmail address and name the site.

Name website

The band name I've chosen to use for this project is Rom-Com. When I first entered that blogspot domain name it was taken, which happens. Probably by some site about romantic comedies? Who knows.

So I added “band” after the name for the URL which was open. Kind of like the band spoon does with their URL - spoontheband.com.

(RELATED: Where to start? I'm pitch music promotion ideas for my band, to myself.)

Makes sense amongst the relevant sites that would show up if people just searched for that name Rom-Com alone. I think adding that will make it more clear anyway.

Choose Template

I chose the “simple” template to start. It defaults to this orange gradient template, which doesn't seem like a simple design at all to me.

I go to the template editor in blogger to change this. I switch it to the plain white design grouped with the other “simple template” design options.

Then I changed some of the font colors, sizes and font styles in the “customize” template section, and save it.

Design

I'm not gonna do anything too fancy with this site. As a mater of fact, I think I'm just going to take an approach similar to sites like medium.com (ironically run by the guy that created blogger and sold it to Google).

So I'm not going to add any images to the design. I’ve decided that I'm going to let the images I add to posts dictate the look. These will mostly be artwork from the single song releases.

Pages

Then I created an “About us” page on the site. This is different than a post, it’s just a standalone page with some information about the band and how to get in touch with us. Save that.

Layout

I arrange the objects for the site in the layout section. I tuned off the blogger “navigation gadget”. It's a blogger branded bar at the top of the website. Don't really want that.

And I also removed the “profile gadget” in the sidebar. It's of my personal profile, nothing to do with the band, so I don't want that either.

Added the “pages gadget” to the cross-col section of the layout and activated the “about us” page I had made. This is going to be my website navigation. Saved that, and the site was up and running. Almost.

After I clicked the view blog button and looked at the site, I didn't like the way the navigation looked. It had a border around it.

So I went back to the customize section in blogger’s template editor like before, and changed the border color to transparent.

Note: In the advanced section of the template designer they call these “tabs” even though in the layout section it's called the pages gadget. And even more confusing, the borders I wanted to change in the tabs are in a different section called “Accents” in the template designer. Don't know what that is all about.

Publish Website

I applied those changes and went back to my new site. Liked that a lot more.

I haven't posted anything on the site yet. I'm going to wait until I have the first single all prepped with a player and some artwork to do that.

If you want to follow along and see how I'm going to do that and all of the other things I'm going to try out as I create this band project from scratch?

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TO-DO: A list of tasks I need to finish before I can promote my new band project

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 23:31:00 -0500

New band To-do list in Google Keep

First thing I need to do to start my band project

I recorded a song using on of the old ideas I had kicking around with my current band that we never used.

I did the whole recording using the open source recording software Ardour which is free to use.

I've written about my setup for Ardour before. Maybe I'll go more into how I record using it later.

For now, I just need to get these things ready to release and publish my new song.

So I made a short list of what I need to do next in Google Keep.

New band tasks

Look for band name
Make mp3
Find artwork
Make art in canva
ID3 tags on song files
Make simple website

Basically I can't do anything until I finish these next couple of steps.

In the next couple of posts - I'll walk through what I did on this list.

(RELATED: How I created a simple band website.)

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Where to start? I'm going to pitch music marketing and promotion ideas for my band, to myself

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 11:59:00 -0500

Photo credit - Some rights reserved by tmray02

I decided to ask myself, what would I like to accomplish by promoting my own music?

By the end of this article I convinced myself that it could be possible to get:

144,000 streaming listens over the period of a year
Make around $4000
With a budget of only $365 to spend

Let me explain.

I started this website theundergroundartist.com a while ago. The concept was to share things I've done to promote my own band online and help others.

Problem is, I didn't really know where to begin?

I've already been promoting my band Lorenzo’s Music for several years. Anything I talk about is something I've already done a while ago. I had no context of what to talk about first.

I got an idea to create a new band from scratch and promote it.

I'm going to start a new band as an experiment and try to build it up. A sort of guinea pig. It has no existing audience, no online presence.

As I create and promote this band, I’ll share what I do and how I do it.

So now I’m a new band. What do I do?

To get started I asked myself, "What do I want to accomplish, and more importantly how?"

I was listening to this episode of the Foundr Podcast. The host, Nathan Chan was interviewing a guy named Ben Chaib who is a marketing consultant. Ben was explaining how he gets his clients to tell him how he should promote them… He has them answer some basic questions.

I know?! As I say this it sounds silly right?
Of course you ask them questions to know what they want!

But as I listened to the types of questions he was asking -- I started thinking of my own answers. What I would want to do with my own musical and creative projects.

That's when it occurred to me… I've never really done this. I've never just asked myself what do I what to accomplish, and more importantly how?

I pitched my own music promotion concept to myself.

After listening to that podcast, I sat down and wrote out the questions Ben asks. Then I asked them to myself.

Truthfully, I even got a little inspired and excited as I was answering them. Thinking about what I might be able to do.

Here are the questions I asked, and what I came up with.

What do I currently do for promoting my music?

I post songs on the website.
Share songs on our Facebook page and Twitter
Post songs on YouTube
Sometimes look for people using our songs in videos and share that on Facebook and our website
I also have a playlist I created of fan videos on our YouTube channel I save them to
Take photos while practicing and post to Instagram
Have email for download on our site to build mailing list
Put songs on music services and stores
Email our mailing list when we have a new release
Did a live internet performance
Made single videos for YouTube channel of each song from that performance
Did some ad promotion, but not much
Created landing pages for recent singles to send people to
Covered another artist's song and shot a video
Re-purposed a creative commons video for one of ours

What things do I think would be different if I move forward, trying to find a solution for more exposure?

If I create a larger fan base I can get more plays on streaming services to collect more ad revenue
People may use our song more in videos - (one of my most popular songs was because it was used in a gaming video).
More downloads = bigger mailing list
An engaged list of new users - current list has become kind of stale
Possibility for mechanical sales
More remix or collaboration possibilities
A larger fan base makes it easier to promote events in the future
Be able to have a more regular income
Licensing opportunities
Become more active and recognizable in online communities

How much do I think each new person would bring in if I were to start building this exposure?

Ok, possibly $1 to $5?

What's kept me from moving forward on this?

Not knowing what to promote
No constant song releases
Not knowing how to really engage with a fan base
Feel like I'm bothering them if I post sometimes
Making the money back that I spend
Don't want to just promote a song over and over
Feel I would have to spend all my time doing this to get somewhere and don't have time

How does that make me feel?

Makes me feel like I could be doing more.
I thought I was doing a lot but my fan base hasn't grown in a while

What would it be like if I learned how to get more listens on streaming services or more downloads or have more of a fan base?

I would be able to fund what I do creatively
Share more music for people to enjoy
Meet more musicians and open collaboration ventures with them
Be able to get involved with more creative ventures with other creators that may have heard my music and work with them on their projects

Why is that important?

It's what I care about doing
To meet people and do creative work

Let's say, if I plan to make music for the next 10 years…

The value of that could be:

If I tried to average 100 listens a day for a song from each of the 4 big services

YouTube
Spotify
Google play
iTunes

That adds up to 400 listens a song per day
Which would be 12,000 listens a month
Times that by 12 months for a year = 144,000 listens
144,000 a year for 10 years = 1,440,000

Ha! That's ridiculous right?

But what if I tried to do that?

And that's just thinking about one song. That doesn't include the other songs I have or the new ones I plan to release along the way.

How long have I been trying to think about a solution?

Always of course
But in the past couple of years I really wanted to up my game
Since the internet has become more involved in people's day to day lives

What's kept me from pursuing or completing this?

Not having a plan I stick to
Not knowing where to start
Finding the best way to make it part of my day to day

What If I had $1 a day to increase my exposure to start with?

That's $365 a year to spend.

Here is where it gets interesting.

So, for example:

If I were to think about trying to get the 144,000 listens a year I had mentioned earlier
And let's say, for that one song I made like, 3¢ a day for streaming?
I could possibly make back $4,320 in a year?

I could at least make my money back and more if I kept at it. And that's not including if people download the song for the standard 99¢.

It's nothing to make me wealthy in this scenario. But as I said, wanted to start expanding and building my audience for right now.

I’m not going to stop making music?

I'm making music already
I'm going to continue making music regardless
It's just silly that I don't want to try something more

The way it is now, I made maybe a little more than the $365 with my music already I could spend. So I don't personally have a problem putting that back into promotion.

I spent more than that on random crap I needed this weekend I think?

It's kinda like this. Someone is telling me; "If you give me $365, I'll try and pay you back around $4000".

It's not for certain, but what if it happened?

Why would I try? Maybe I'm an idiot?

But I'd feel like more of an idiot if it worked and I didn't try?

I think?

But I'm gonna try it!

(Next: TO-DO: A list of tasks I need to finish before I can promote my new band project.)

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Looking for ways to improve artwork and video for songs

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Sun, 19 Jun 2016 22:34:00 -0500

Photo credit: Collaboration across the pond by suzi54241 - CC-BY-ND

I think artwork makes a difference in people's perception of a song.

Years ago there was a music website called garageband.com. They had two options you could choose to upload your music.

One - pay a $19.99 submission fee.

Or

Two - you could listen and review four bands and upload your song free.

When you chose option two, you only heard the songs, nothing else.

You would rate the song and move on to the next one, knowing nothing about the song other than what you heard.

When you were done, it showed you the name and album art of the songs you had listened to. This part really opened my eyes.

Looking at the list, I saw the album art and thought “Oh! that is not the type of music I would have listened to.” But I had! And some I even rated favorably.

The album art I saw for some of them were really just poor quality. One I think, was a shot of the group that made them look like a boy band.

This is when I noticed I was judging them after the fact. I realized that presentation really would have made a difference if I had seen this first. The music in some cases, didn't match the way I felt it sounded when I heard it.

This is something I always try to think about when I'm making a single or an album cover. Find something during the writing process that influences me, and try to use it in the artwork.

I talked to a few musicians whose artwork I felt really made a difference in this area.

I asked them -- how they came up with it, who they worked with and how it was made.

Ryan Little

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheR4C2010

How did you improve your song artwork?

When I first put videos out I was still in college and I had no clue how to – create a decent audio/visual experience. I just put my picture usually as the background. I thought people just liked pictures of the artist themselves, right?

I think there’s one in particular I have, that’s just me [with] an Xbox and I’m even standing in the bathroom! But I [shot it] close up so you can’t tell that’s where I’m standing?

I just did random things like that! I thought it would look cool?

And then I realized, I started looking at other audio/visual channels, just bigger name audio/visual channels. And I thought that looks way better than what I’m putting out!

I realized in order to market my music better, for the YouTube audience and YouTube being very visual, I have to have a better visual experience.

What did you do?

First and foremost none of the photos [recently] are shot by me. I am a terrible photographer.

When I first started there was a website called alpha.wallhaven.cc (I want to say it’s a creative commons site?) And it’s just like a ton of pictures, to be used by whoever.

There is a website called Canva.com I [went there] looked around at some of the stock images. And using one of those images I was able to formulate my own logo [with text].

I also met up with this guy named, Martin Moore out of Milwaukee. He found my music on freemusicarchive.org.

He himself is a photographer. And I asked him – If we [could] collaborate on my videos. if you provide some pictures for me, I can feature you in the videos, put your information in the description. And we was more than willing to do so!

How was your most recent Logo made?

I created that logo.

There is a website called Canva.com I [went there] looked around at some of the stock images. And using one of those images I was able to formulate my own logo [with text].

Dr. Mindflip

http://www.drmindflip.com/

An artist based out of Ireland, who makes music in the realm of Hallucinogenic piano cabaret.

He has a multi-media/collage sort of vibe he uses for his album art and two stunning animated music videos.

When I asked him about how he had made the artwork and videos, he told me he reaches out to other creative communities and collaborates with them. Networking with them, where they work online.

How did your album artwork come about?

The collage art on the covers came from a few different artists who are really, really cool with their material. And really generous with it.

I spent a lot of time just looking at people that were putting out their artwork. I was looking at people who were doing interesting collage art and psychedelic art. Looking for something to help me bring the image [and music] together.

I do remember getting a reply from one or two people, saying things like “I’m a professional graphic designer! Don’t go wasting my time talking to me about this stuff.”

That was kinda funny! Because really all I was asking was, would you want to make something cool together and throw it out there and see what happens?

I [was] totally respectful to people's time and energy. If there is an opportunity for me to give something back to someone who’s provided their work [online] for free or under creative commons license, I do.

Most people were super cool about it and really encouraging. They liked to contribute artwork.

...someone who’s provided their work [online] for free or under creative commons license... Sites like deviantArt.com

Where were you finding them?

Sites like deviantArt.com. I was casting the net really wide and looking for something that fit.

I was looking for something that would represent the collage, weird mesh of things [in my music].

What about your videos? You have two animated videos, how did you make those?

I loved both of those video artists that I came across [online].

They had put their work up under creative commons license. They were happy to let me use it and manipulate the video to fit the song a little bit better.

There's been a few occasions where people have taken my own stuff and remixed it back in their own videos.

I saw somebody make a short film, it was like a school project. The guy had used a lot of creative commons music and one of my songs was in it, in this scary scene in the heart of it. And it was just brilliant!

It's really rewarding to see that and it gives me a different angle and maybe an insight into what somebody else sees in my work.

And hopefully it [works] the other way around. They get to see a slightly different interpretation of their [video] work with somebody else's sound or music.

It just makes a more interesting story. It turns it into a more creative conversation between people.

Want more ideas like this?

List: 11 Podcasts That Help Me Promote Music

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Sun, 12 Jun 2016 17:01:00 -0500

Photo credit: A blast from the past! John Haslam - CC-BY

A surprising list of podcasts that have helped me think differently about how to promote my own music.

To be honest, I don’t find a lot of “music how-to” podcasts to be that useful. Don’t get me wrong they talk about useful industry info, but these other podcasts listed below have given me real insight to self promotion. Listening to them have made me think about what I can do online in different ways.

The reason? These podcasts are about startups and entrepreneurship.

It's still people that create things. They spend all their time trying to get people interested in it, through trial and error, promotion, and whatever else they can think of.

I realized when I listen to them I find them very relate-able. I think about the startup they discuss on these shows, as if it were my own music or creative venture.

And for all the questions I've ever had about how to use Facebook advertising or web promotion in general, these cover more than any music promotion podcast out there.

This is my list in no particular order.

1 - The Top

Website: http://nathanlatka.com/podcast-thetop/

Description:

The world's TOP entrepreneurs on how much they sold last month, how they are selling it, and what they are selling - 7 days a week in 20 minute interviews!

Takeaway: Since the show is around 20 min he very quickly tries to get the person he is interviewing to tell us how they promote themselves.

2 - The Ask Gary Vee Show

Website: https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/the-askgaryvee-show-podcast/

Description:

Gary Vaynerchuk answers your questions about marketing, social media, and entrepreneurship.

Takeaway: He’s very opinionated, and actually tries all these ways out there to promote himself. He will tell you what he thinks works and what doesn’t. Or even more useful, what used to work and what you should do now.

3 - Mixergy

Website: https://mixergy.com/interviews/

Description:

Andrew Warner asks uncomfortable questions to dig deep into the success and failures of the most successful business founders and thought leaders.

Takeaway: Talks to people that, in theory, created something that no one knew they needed. And asks them how they turned it into a money making business.

4 - Tim Ferriss Show

Website: http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast/

Description:

In this show, he deconstructs world-class performers from eclectic areas (investing, chess, pro sports, etc.), digging deep to find the tools, tactics, and tricks that listeners can use.

Takeaways: Some inspiring talks with influential people and stories of how they got there.

5 - Unemployable

Website: http://rainmaker.fm/series/unemployable/

Description:

Drawing upon his own 18-year evolution from solo to CEO, Brian provides actionable strategies for ambitious freelancers and creative entrepreneurs

Takeaway: Interviews with people that have decided they are going to work for themselves and make a living at it. Useful tips and how they made mistakes along the way.

6 - Perpetual traffic

Website: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/podcast/

Description:

Cutting edge strategies on acquiring leads and sales for your business through paid traffic.

Takeaway: Want to know how to promote your site? Use Facebook ads properly? Network with other people to grow a fan base? This is pretty much where you will learn to do that.

7 - Foundr

Website: https://foundrmag.com/podcast-with-nathan-chan/

Description:

The biz version of Marc Maron, Dave Ramsey, Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla, & Planet Money. We interview hard to reach entrepreneurs. Unlike most podcast interview series I literally started from knowing nothing.

Takeaway: The person running the show went from nothing to interviewing industry leaders. How he did it makes the show worth it.

8 - Call To Action

Website: http://unbounce.com/call-to-action-podcast/

Description:

A show about remarkable online marketing success stories and how you can apply the lessons to your own marketing campaigns.

Takeaway: Learn about growing your fan base and using landing pages and email lists to expand.

9 - The Digital Entrepreneur

Website: http://rainmaker.fm/series/rainmaker/

Description:

For people who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services.

Takeaway: Interviews with people that sell digital goods (downloads) online. And how they reach people to do it.

10 - Problogger

Website: http://problogger.com/podcast/

Description:

A mix of teaching, case studies and actionable challenges Darren Rowse will teach you to create compelling content.

Takeaway: Ideas for using your website more as a promotion tool.

11 - Song Exploder

Website: http://songexploder.net/

Description:

Musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

Takeaway: This is just a great show. Learn about songwriting process from some of the world’s best musicians, one song at a time.

Want more ideas like this?

SEO for an artist or musician is not the same as other websites

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 23:00:00 -0500

Photo credit - look by Ρanayotis - cc-by-sa

At some point I started to wonder about search engine optimization for my band's website. I've come to realize it's a bit different for artists.

In the last few years I've messed around with trying to setup my band’s website to rank higher in search engines.

Most articles tell me I need to find keywords or index terms relevant to my category and use them in my post titles, articles and stuff like that.

priority is given to words that occur in the title, words that recur numerous times, and words that are explicitly assigned as keywords within the coding.

Wikipedia - index_term

Made sense to me as I read these explanations.

In my head it was like this:
People would search for words like "music" or "new music" or whatever other similar categories I could think of to use. And If I set up my keywords correctly, our music could show up in that search.

Seemed smart. So I wrote a list, thinking about what search do I want to try and rank better in?

But guess what? It didn't work

After a while, having tried a bunch of different search possibilities with no real results, I realized there is a flaw in this method when it comes to a creative genre.

It was this: I don't think that people fire up the search engine to just randomly find music.

Here's why it's different for an artist in my opinion.
I thought about it and when was the last time I just typed "music" in a search engine to find a band? Never.

For one thing, the results would be nothing I was looking for in most cases. It's a broad category and just silly to search for info on this as a general term.

Moz.com, a site dedicated to things like search engine optimization, even says this about it:

For bands and musicians, the discovery path is flipped around. The search engine is more about reducing friction on the path to becoming a die-hard fan.

Via MOZ - Music SEO - 7 Lessons in Brand Optimization for 2015 - Moz

Here's a scenario that may sound a bit more familiar.
Someone tells me about a band they like, I type that name into the search engine and see what shows up.

Sound about right? Does to me too.

Another example: I hear about music or artists on a blog, or their name is mentioned in a podcast or I see their name in the credits of a video. Again, I’ll type that name in the search engine to learn more about them, because now I’m interested in them.

I decided to optimize for our name instead.

After figuring this out, here is what I wanted to do. I wanted the right information to show up when people searched for us.

When I first started

I searched for our name to see what showed up and the results were confusing and inconsistent. The Facebook page was third or fifth on the list and the rest of the results were for an actor’s obituary whose name is similar to ours.

I didn't like that result.

Here is what I wanted to happen if I searched for our band name.

Top three results would be us
The first result should be our website
One of those artist showcase cards by Google should appear next to the search results
Video suggestions
Lyrics

Here are a couple of things I did that seemed to improve this.

Get albums listed in MusicBrainz.org

MusicBrainz.org is a wiki site dedicated to musician album release information.

MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and the length of each track.

Via Wikipedia - musicbrainz

MusicBrainz has been around for quite some time and is viewed as an authority site by google. So it would probably help to have my band information there. It was really easy to sign up for an account and add our album releases.

Just make sure you follow the instructions when adding your music. The site is maintained by a community and album information could be denied if you don't follow the rules. But mostly I've found that they will help you correct mistakes if it needs it.

Discogs

Another site I found is discogs.com. I was able to submit album information there too. It’s a database for people to showcase their music collections both digital and physical. So I figured having our releases in their database couldn't hurt.

Proper YouTube channel titles

The analytics from our site showed that sometimes searches included the title for one of our songs. Which makes sense if they did hear a particular song of ours somewhere else.

Knowing this, I want to make sure they find whatever song they are looking for when they search.

Video Titles
YouTube searches are more likely to show up for these. And since all of our songs are already available on our YouTube channel, I decided I was going to change the video titles to match these searches. Originally each video just had the song title, so I added our name next to them all. To help relate the song title to the band name.

Video Descriptions
In the description section for the video, I added a link to that particular song on our site and not the website home page. I figured, they're watching the video and were interested enough in the song to click. So why risk losing their interest by making them have to find the song they wanted.

On that that page, I can put the download links for iTunes, Spotify, Amazon etc…

The reason for that?

I wanted them to visit the site first, get to know us, then choose how they want to get the song. If I put those links in the YouTube video description, they won't visit the site.

Include Lyrics With The Video
In the same train of thought, people may search for our song lyrics too. So I figured, why not put those in the description for the video?

After doing this to our videos for a while, I noticed, our lyrics started showing up on lyrics database sites. People were actually submitting our lyrics to these sites! Gotta love the internet.

Showcasing Song Use

I do searches on YouTube for our name all the time to see what shows up. We release our music under a creative commons license, and because of that, our music gets used in all kinds of videos because that license tells them they can.

If I find a video using a song of ours that has a large number of views? I'll post about it on our site.

In theory this helps create more backlinks. Also, I like showcasing these examples, I feel it encourages others to use our songs in videos they’re making.

These are just some of the things that I think have helped for my SEO when searching for our name. As of today we are the first 6 results on google for our name. Now it's pretty clear who we are if people type in our name, which is what I wanted.

What are some things that you have tried that helped you with this? I'd love to hear about them. Let me know in the comments below.

Want to shoot a multi camera music video with your phone? How I did it, and what I learned.

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Tue, 8 Mar 2016 23:04:00 -0600

video shoot. via - Lorenzo's Music - cc-by-sa

It’s possible to direct a video using several smartphones at once. What I learned from doing it may hopefully make things easier for you.

I decided to set up a video shoot for a new single my band has been working on. For this I entertained the idea of doing it solely on our phones.

My reasoning was - we all have a smartphone and the resolution and quality of them these days are extremely high. So why not try and wrangle these phones to do the job?

Here is a list of what we did to set it up.

The concept

The video would be multiple performance takes of the song. Nothing earth shattering just a performance video. The phones would be set up in different areas in the room and these would be edited together.

Setting up cameras/smartphones

We needed to be able to stand the phones in different areas. We did have to make some minimal purchases to do this.

Tripod stands.
We got both GorillaPods and standard tripods, to vary our shooting angle options.

Gorillapods are small and can be placed anywhere. They even have the ability to wrap the legs around things, so you don't need to find a place on the floor for them. http://amzn.to/1QFa10O

Traditional tripods the gorillapods are very short so regular tripods are still a good way to go. Just thought I'd mention it. http://amzn.to/1M5p12s

Phone mounts.
To set the phones on the tripods. I was able to find some that were relatively cheap and got enough for everyone in the group to use. http://amzn.to/1M5ov4w

Filming the video

Let's move on to recording the video. If you go the live route, like we did, using the audio from the phone wouldn’t be the best choice. It's nice for demoing but not for a good quality version of a song.

The Sound

The sound itself would not be from the phones. There are 2 ways to get sound for the video outside of the phone mics.

We could lip sync to an existing recording
Record audio live into a DAW (digital audio workstation, like ProTools or Audacity).

We decided to do the second choice, record the audio live.

For this method, what you want to do is mic up the room and record it the way you would track a song. Record audio while the cameras are rolling.

Don't worry about starting everything at the same time, you can run a visual/sound cue to sync it up later.

How? You know on movie sets, that stripped box they clap in front of the camera right before they say action? We're going to do something like that.

Turn on the audio recording
Start all the phones to record video.
Stand in front of the cameras and clap your hands together one time.

Later you look for the spike in the audio file where you clapped and line up with where you did that visually in the videos.

This will get your video and audio all synced up.

Record to a click track.
If you do more than one take you will want to use a click track. If you don’t, you may not play the same tempo for each take and the video will not match. A click track will keep these consistent with the other videos.

Transferring the videos.

While all this sounds easy so far, the one thing that is difficult when recording video on your phone is - the files are huge!

You can't just email them when you’re finished, and downloading them from each person's phone would be annoying. I thought about it for a bit, wanting to come up with a method seamless for everyone involved.

Here is what I came up with.

Install the Google Photos app.
Have everyone involved install this app on their phone and sign in to, or create their own google account. It will automatically backup the videos on the phone to each person's Google Photo account.

When all the videos have finished uploading to Google Photos you can delete them from your phone. They are backed up online.

Share the videos with your video editor.
You can easily share these with the account of person that is going to edit the video. The editor can then select and download them to their computer from Google Photos on their computer at photos.google.com.

Why not Dropbox? The Dropbox free account only gives you 2GB of storage. Your Google account gives you 15GB. Also everyone involved had a Gmail account already, so it just made more sense to me.

Trial and error.

This was all pretty painless for the most part. But we did hit a few snags along the way, and maybe you can learn from our experience.

Make sure the app is set to backup on WiFi only
In the Google photos app settings on your phone, set it to only sync over WiFi. We didn't check this and a few people used up the data plan on their phone for the month. That’s pretty important for obvious reasons.

Backing up videos takes time
You’ll have to be patient, like I said before, the video files are huge! The backup process will take several hours so you probably won't be able to use them until the next day.

Set the app to run in the background
One person found that the backup would stop when his phone screen would lock. He had to keep an eye on his phone to make sure the screen stayed open otherwise the uploading would stop. Not an ideal experience.

Setting it to run in the background should fix this.

Overall

For the most part, I think we will use this process again. As we do this more I think we will work out the kinks.

If you have a better way that you have done it, or can think of some steps that could improve the process that I may not have thought of, please let us know in the comments below.

Some Quick YouTube Optimization Tips

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Mon, 8 Feb 2016 23:15:00 -0600

Photo credit - I Love YouTube by Álvaro Ibáñez

Here are just a few things you can do to improve your YouTube channel that may not have occurred to you.

These aren't huge changes, but they do make things better for your band's YouTube channel. It's just making a few changes to how you post to your video channel.

Optimize the video title.

The actual length of your video’s title can help your click through rate.

What most people don't know is, on YouTube you get 100 characters you can use for your video title. But you don't want to necessarily use all of them.

Here's what happens when people search for videos on YouTube. YouTube's best practice guidelines even tell you that, you should try and keep it less than 70 characters, anything over 70 will get cut off in the search results.

Seems the best title is to hit somewhere between 40-70 characters.

The video description box.

Lots of people only use the description box to give a brief outline on what the video is about. Maybe a link to your website. If even that sometimes.

There are many missed opportunities if that's all you do. Think of it this way. People may have landed on your video from a link or a suggestion. They know nothing about you but what's in the video they are watching. If you send them to a link that isn't directly related to the video they may lose interest.

If it's a music video, link to all the places they can get it or listen to it in the description. Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, Bandcamp, your albums page on your site… all of these if you have them.

You don't know what this new person's listening preferences are, so have all of these choices in the description for them.

Another thing to think about, the content of the description box is indexed by Google, so whatever you put there can help with getting a jump up the rankings.

Add lyrics at the end of the video description too. People search for lyrics to songs all the time. This will help the lyrics and the video show up in the search for whatever song it is for.

More information can help keep people on your video page. Many people will start watching a video, then after a while they’ll start looking at the other areas of the screen while still listening to the video.

If your description box is just a single line description, then they’ll naturally look elsewhere on the page, which is a problem - because on the page are other videos for them to click on, which takes them away from your video.

So, having some decent content in the description box keeps them on your page, as the video plays in the background.

Download this YouTube checklist pdf free!
>>Click to get the pdf

Get A Custom YouTube Channel URL

OK, here is the one, more technically advanced, thing you can do. It will involve having some access to your web page information.

This will make it easy for people to find you and your YouTube channel.

You've got your domain name, your Facebook page name, you should also have your YouTube channel name.

By default when you make a YouTube channel for your band, you are automatically given a random URL with various letters and numbers like this:

example: youtube.com/channel/DGRpNCeoay5Q

This isn’t really easy to show or tell people about.

But you can create one that has your band name in the URL like:

example: https://youtube.com/c/lorenzosmusic

It's fairly easy to set up. If you have Google analytics on your site, that is.

Starting with the technical part.

You just need to verify your site in the Google Search Console (formerly called Google Webmaster Tools).

If you already have Google Analytics on your website it’s just one click inside of the Google Search Console to verify your site.

Here’s the instructions from Google help docs to get your site verified on the Google Search Console: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179?hl=en

Changing the channel URL

After you verified your site, you can get your url set up on your YouTube channel.

Here are the steps.

1) On YouTube, click on your logo/icon in the top right, then click on the ‘Creator Studio’ button.

2) In the ‘Creator Studio’ on the left sidebar select the ‘Advanced’ option under the ‘Channel’ menu.

3) In the main window enter in the URL of your website and click on the ‘Add’ button.

Since you already verified your account with Google you should get an instant ‘Success’ green light!

4) Click on your icon at the top right again and select the ‘Settings’ icon, which is a little cog image.

5) In the settings ‘Overview’ screen click on the link to the right of your profle picture that says ‘Advanced’.

6) In the advanced settings screen you’ll see that you now have a custom URL for your channel.

And that’s it!

Bonus

Now here's a trick that no one tells you.

That /c/ that is in your URL, you can skip that!

It will redirect to the channel if you just put your channel name after the YouTube URL.

So the link example I gave before it also works if you just use this:

example: https://youtube.com/lorenzosmusic

Which is even nicer.

Hope this helped and feel free to leave a comment below!

Download this YouTube checklist pdf free!
>>Click to get the pdf

via - Dan Raine Report (pdf link)

Biggest Question: I recorded an album, how do I promote it?

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 17:59:00 -0600

Photo by K.G.23 - Fliers

Want to get your new album out there? First ask yourself these questions.

Here is a question I get asked all the time.

I released an album how do I promote it?

Before you think about how to promote it, make sure you have these basic things set up.

Without them, you may lose people from the very beginning.

Do you have a website?

Start with this, a website. One place to send people. It makes it easier to find you.

Even if you have a Facebook page, twitter account, soundcloud page, a YouTube channel, hell even a pinterest board. You should be using those places to promote your website, where your albums are.

Why you ask?
Because it's the internet. There is no timeline on the internet.

Think of it this way. Months later people hear about you from someone, they hop online to look for your album, and if you only promoted it on a social channel, they will have a harder time finding it.

Create a post for your album on your website.
That means more than just showing it on your homepage or albums page. Create a post on your site that has it's own URL you can link to.

This will be your "landing page", a place that you will send everyone to get the album from anywhere you post about it.

Why? You don't want to make people look for it. If they see it posted somewhere all they want to do is -- Listen to it and get the album. So make this post accomplish just that.

It should have a embedded player or a video, a description and download links. Remember, you want this link to be there for people to get it even months later.

If they want to hear more, then they can search your site for more music after that. All you want do is to get this album to them right now.

Do you have, at the very least, one song available for an email download?

I know a lot of people are against free email downloads but, once you build a loyal fan base in your email list, you can continue telling them about your music releases in the future by sending them an email about it.

That way you don't have to start from the beginning next time.

It may take a little while, but when growing your email list you can use it find your fans on facebook.

Is it available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon etc...?

This is a really simple thing to do these days on your own. There are a number of sites you can use that are relatively cheap to put your album on music streaming apps and stores.

I know there is an argument about streaming services too, not paying enough, blah blah blah...

But you know what? It's where people listen to music, and if yours isn't there are they gonna forget about you? Maybe? So it's silly not to have it there.

OK. So, how do I promote it?

There's no one size fits all thing you can do to promote your music from the ground up. You just try everything, see what people respond to then focus on that. Learn from it.

Start Locally

Easiest method is not to worry about getting it to the world. Play a show, sell your CD. Duh.

Another thing you can do at the show, just hand out a printed card with a website link to where they can download it. The URL you posted, or a short URL to make it easier.

Sure you can tell everyone to go to your website at the show. But the next day, they might not remember. Then they clean out their pockets and there's your card to remind them.

Seems stupid but makes sense right?

Fan pages everywhere

If you haven't already, make a Facebook page, YouTube account, Twitter account & instagram specifically for your music. Keep those updated & keep posting/creating content.

Just like the distribution channels above, create all of these because you don't know where people might be hanging out.

Should I advertise?

Short answer - Yes

Long answer - Not right now. Concentrate on getting in touch with people on a natural level.

Figure out what is working and what isn't based on the things we talked about here, before throwing money at it.

Advertising can open up a whole new audience but if you don't know what works first it's a waste of your time and theirs.

Plus, like I said before, this is the internet. You can promote your album at anytime. Advertising it to new people later is OK. It's just as new to them later on as it is if you started today.

Does this seem overwhelming?

Does this seem like a lot of work? Well yeah, sorry but it is.

Another thing you can do is, pay someone who understands how to market things. Not a promoter. Someone who has ideas on how to alternatively market your stuff.

We all know someone like that from my experience. Someone that seems to know more about this stuff, ask them to help.

Or if you want to go big scale find a promotion company. Like us! :)

A musician's greatest enemy is anonymity. It is ridiculously hard to get people to just listen to your music. But with the internet it's a lot easier to try.

If you don't have the time, you'll spend more money not being able to understand the way to promote your music than someone who does.

Things people think they should try, but really shouldn't

Here is a list of things people also ask they should do. I usually answer no.

Shopping a record deal? Not yet.

The internet works for record labels too.

If you don't have anything I mentioned set up. You shouldn't be wondering how to shop your albums to labels. First thing they will do is look at your online influence. If you don't have one, then they won't be interested.

Have a contest? Nah.

Aside from the fact I personally think they are corny. They are a pain to set up and manage.

And consider this, if no one participates it's embarrassing and makes it look like you have no fans. And on the other end no one wants to be the first to participate for fear of being the only one, which is embarrassing for them.

But that's just my opinion. Tell me if I'm wrong. I'm willing to listen.

Contact music blogs? I guess if you wanna.

You can try, but again, unless people already know who you are, why would they take the time? Think of all the bands and promotional people that contact them. It's pretty hard to compete.

Focus on your audience first, they are far more likely to share it with people.

Put your music on a USB? Ok grampa.

People still mention this one, like they think this is a good idea?

One question. Have you bought one from a band? No? I rest my case.

People have phones that play music now. Make it available there, like we talked about earlier.

If you want to sell physical items, it's hard enough trying to move CD's these days. For the price get shirts printed instead, it's cooler than USB drives.

This is all just stuff off the top of my head. I cover more about subjects like these as they come up.

Follow this site or sign up for the newsletter to be kept up to date.

Based on a conversation from - r/marketing

How To Embed Video In A Facebook Post

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 10:30:00 -0600

Two ways to embed videos in a post like you always see.

This is one of those things that I get asked a lot. It seems simple, but it’s really not clear to everyone right away how to do it.

1) Embed YouTube Video in Facebook Post

This first method is for embedding your YouTube video.

Some people think if you paste the embed html from YouTube it will post the video. But all that does is... post the embed html.

So here’s how you do it.

Click the "share" section under the YouTube video and copy the link.

Get YouTube link

Paste that link into the facebook post and wait for it to search for the video.

When it finds it, the video will appear in your post.

Past YouTube link into post

Also, now that the video is embedded in the post you can even delete the link to the YouTube video when you're done. The video itself will stay in the post!

If you have another link you want to put in the post to a download, or something like that, people won't get confused about what they should click.

2) Upload video to Facebook

Did you know you could do this? You might, but I actually talk to a lot of people that aren’t aware that you can. So thought I would cover it here.

It’s really simple actually.

In the Facebook post box click on the “photos/video” link next to “status”.

Then choose “upload photos/video” and upload the video.

Upload video to Facebook

You can add a title and description and upload a custom thumbnail for the video.

When you hit the post button it will be displayed in the post.

And that’s it!

If you have any other tips for uploading videos feel free to post them in the comments below.

How to Invite Fans On Your Mailing List To Like Your Page On Facebook

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Tue, 5 Jan 2016 11:30:00 -0600

Get more of your fans to like your page without having to pay to "boost" it.

Here’s another good reason to have a mailing list. And it’s something free you can do to get more fans on your Facebook page.

For this example I’m going to use MailChimp. The free version lets you have up to 2,000 subscribers. So it’s a good way to start out and get used doing email promotion.

If you have more than 2,000 emails on your list, first of all, nicely done. Second, it’s still a great email tool if you do need to use the paid version. I highly recommend it.

Alright, so here is the pretty quick and painless way to build a larger fanbase on facebook.

1) Export your email list from mailchimp (or whatever one you use)

Make sure your list is up to date before doing this. It will export as a .csv file (comma separated value) and save it somewhere.

Log in to Facebook as your page

You will need to be logged in as your page to add this list. Makes sense, but I just thought I’d make it clear.

Go to the notifications section in Facebook

The method we need to use is in the notifications section. Not sure why it was put there.

2) Click on “Suggest Page” link

Once you’re in the notifications section, on the left sidebar scroll down and click the “Suggest Page” link.

It’s located right under the “Get More Likes/Boost Your Page” section. Which is pretty sneaky.

3) Upload your mailing list

After clicking the “Suggest Page” link, a window will open. That will show you all the different methods you can use to upload your email list.
For this example, as I said, I will be using the Mailchimp method. But any of the others should work too.

Click “Upload Contacts” and upload your email list from where you saved it on your computer.

When you’ve done that, a new window will open that will show you your imported list, asking you to “Select Contacts to Show Your Suggestion to”.

Above that list click the “Select All/None” check box to select them all. Make sure the boxes are all checked now.

Then click the “Preview Suggestion” button to complete this step.

4) Send suggestions to email list

Another window will open, asking you to confirm you want to send this page like suggestion to your list.

Click the “Finish” button and you’re done!

Overview

What this does now is, Facebook will look for people that have accounts using these emails and suggest your page to those that aren’t already fans.

Of course, your contacts who aren't on Facebook or use a different email won't be able to see this suggestion.

So there you go! This is a free method to build your Facebook fans without having to pay anything to boost your page.

Is There a Way To Track My Sales on iTunes etc..?

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Mon, 4 Jan 2016 11:30:00 -0600

Your download stats on iTunes aren't as fast as you think.

If you have been looking at the statistics for your new release, you may think your album is not selling. That's possibly not true, the sales reports are not in real time.

The dashboard for most online distributors will show you a list of your sales next to the current date. Here is where this can get confusing. Those dates are for the day that they were sent to you.

If you click into the "view details" of these sales (like you would in say CDbaby) you will then see the date the sale actually happened.

Via - grassrootsy: "Monthly sales reports are accurate accounts of which songs/albums have sold through all digital services your music is being carried by – iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, eMusic, etc.

Sales reports are available roughly 1 month after a sales period is over.

In other words, you will get reports for March sometime in May."

How to manage personal and band twitter accounts with one email

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 11:30:00 -0600

Use the same gmail address to manage multiple twitter accounts

Every band needs it's own twitter account. A separate one from the personal account that you may already have.

Problem is you can't create a band page under the same email-- like you can with Facebook.

I found this simple trick on labnol.org that will work with your gmail account, if you already have one.

"In Gmail, you can add a dot (.) anywhere in the username and all emails address to that new alias will still reach your mailbox.

For instance, if your original email address is hello@gmail.com, any emails sent to he.llo@gmail.com or he.ll.o@gmail.com will land in your mailbox because Gmail ignores periods in the email username.

And that’s what you can use to trick Twitter.

Twitter will consider hello@gmail and he.llo@gmail as two separate and valid email addresses even though they point to the same Gmail Inbox."

via - labnol.org

Simple as that. Now you can get alerts for both accounts delivered to the same inbox!

Tips to promote your band day to day

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 13:00:00 -0600

Want just a few simple things to help you promote yourself?

Here is a short list of a few ideas that can help you grow your audience in a way you may not have thought of.

Ask for a comment or review

It can be as simple as that.

You hear podcasters do it all the time -- "Please leave a comment on our website or iTunes".

They just ask. That’s it.

Think about it, it only takes a second of their time. People who hear you don’t always think to do that.

Put it at the end of anything you post, facebook, web post, video, email, etc…

I’m not talking a full blown review just a comment about how they like it.

When people hear your stuff for the first time it’s intriguing to see a slew of comments. May even make them want to get involved themselves.

Don’t go too far
But that’s as far as I would take asking fans to do something. Some people like to suggest things like, asking fans to create photos and artwork for you.

On paper, this sounds like a fantastic idea. I hear it all the time. But you’re asking your fans to do work for you.

Here’s a good test. Ask yourself whenever you have an idea that involves your fans:

"Would I do it if a band I liked asked me?"

Most cases the answer would be-- probably not.

Offer a free download for email.

Do you have an email list? You should.

You can do this on bandcamp with a whole album or just one song.

Why?... Because when someone buys your music, you have no way to tell them specifically when you release another. If you give something to them for an email... Well, now you can.

The point is that this is still more effective than posting a message on facebook, or twitter etc…

Think about it, we all miss tons of posts on these sites each day. Yours probably get missed more than you think.

If you have their email, you can announce important things you want them to see right to them.

I know from experience that more people check out an announcement when we both send it to our email list & a social post. It’s good to have both.

Of course email should be used more for larger announcements, new song/album, upcoming show, things like that.

It’s not an extension of your social pages. Would you want to receive emails that way? Of course not.

Repeat popular links

Given what I just said about people missing out on most of your posts on facebook or twitter, re-posting popular links is a good idea.

Look at your analytics on your site and your social feeds. Find 5 posts with the most clicks or shares. Then schedule them to re-post again though-out the week.

The idea is that people were obviously interested in what was shared, but others may have missed it. So why not share this again for those that may have missed out?

Make sure you don’t over do it. Spread it out. People are online at different times of day remember.

“Don't drown your followers in content they really don't need in their news-feeds. On the other hand, don't fall silent!”

ideas via - 5-non-annoying-ways-to-promote-your-music

Why You Should Have A Spotify Follow Button On Your Band Website

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 11:30:00 -0600

If you have your music available to stream on Spotify you should have a Spotify follow button on your site instead of just a link.

Here's why: If you get up to 250 followers on Spotify you will then be eligible to become a "Verified Account". When you achieve verified status, you can change images and information that people see in the mobile and web app.

Here is information about getting the button, click the link below to generate your own

Spotify Follow Button - Spotify Developer:
"Spotify Follow buttons are free to use (although we do have a few Terms of Use we’d like you to comply with.) Simply generate the code below and paste it into the appropriate place in the body of your HTML page."

Music Publishing on YouTube with contentID

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 13:00:00 -0600

The way things work today, you can upload your music to any number of services and distribute them without having a label or record deal.

It's one of the beautiful things about the internet.

Even music publishing for advertising and rights, when owned by companies could go very wrong. Like this example from artist John Fogerty.

“I was sued for sounding like myself” — ReadThink — Medium:
In 1988, Fantasy Records, the company that owned the rights to Fogerty’s CCR classics, sued Fogerty for releasing a song that — get this — sounded too similar to one of Fogerty’s earlier CCR songs. Or as Fogerty put it while recalling the episode, “I was sued for sounding like myself.”

This is the world of music publishing — a world where you can write a song, sell the rights to that song, then have to pay royalties to perform that song (which you wrote), and then potentially get sued if you write another song that sounds too similar to that first song you wrote."

You still have to use approved services to control what is being used. On sites like YouTube for example they have a contentID system that will even let people use your music and pay you for it in ad revenue.

As a begining musician in todays world I think that is a fantastic option

A New, Free, Way to Ask for Facebook Likes

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 11:00:00 -0600

Facebook has a new way to ask for likes on your pages most popular posts. You know when you have a post that says "+ 12 more people like this"?

Click on that link and in the window that pops up it will show you the people who liked the post and which ones aren't a fan of you page.

Powerful New Way to Ask for Facebook Likes -via actionsprout: "Facebook quietly released a powerful new feature you should be aware of: a new to ask for Facebook likes.

You now have the ability to invite people who have liked your Page post(s) to like your actual Facebook Page.

To access this feature, first find a post that has more than two or three likes on it. Click on the number of likes on this post. (This is the x number of others who have liked the post.)"

This is a simple way to invite people to like your page. Give it a try!

Google streamlined it's search results for bands

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Sun, 6 Dec 2015 21:34:00 -0600

If you are on an android device searching for a band now shows a card that has links to videos, songs and reviews for bands.

This is how Google streamlined its entertainment search results | AndroidAuthority:
"Search queries will now result in a more streamlined interface that focuses on content related to whatever musician, movie or show you search. This will include images, an overview, songs, albums, cast and more."

I assume it will start to work across all devices and computers to help people learn even more about a band in the near future.

Almost everything you need to manage your band

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 16:04:00 -0500

And it's with your Google account...

I've been using Google to manage almost everything I need to do for my band.

Over the years I've tried many different services that say they are specifically for bands. One thing I found they have had in common? They ask you to enter your email to sign up.

If you're like me you sign up with your gmail address.

I figured I would just find a way to take care of it all with the tools I already have available to me in my Google account.

Here is a quick example of things that you can do. You may already know some, but maybe there are a few you didn’t know.

Email

Let's start with the obvious-- email.

Create a gmail address for your band. No one in this day and age is going to scoff at an email like yourbandname@gmail.com, it's perfectly acceptable.

Plus this is the connection for everything you need for these examples from here on out.

You can still keep your original email, even if its gmail, and just switch between the two.

Storage

Google drive gives you 15gb free as opposed to Dropbox that gives you 2gb.

You can upload things like audio files, pdfs & zip files to it. Even embed them or link to them to share privately or public. You can organize these with folders for songs, albums or anything else.

Documents & Spreadsheets

Included with Google drive are Google Docs and Google Sheets.

Manage contracts and budgets. Keep practice notes, lyric sheets and set lists. Or create a press kit that can also be shared publicly or privately.

The key thing here is that you can collaborate with others on these documents. You can't really do that with an Word doc on your computer. It also saves each change automatically, so you can revert back to older versions if anything gets screwed up.

If you already have documents that you keep on your computer, you can also upload them to Google docs and continue to update.

Bonus
Get the Google drive browser plugin and you can take a picture of webpages. For example- use it for online reviews from pages and it saves them directly in your drive.

YouTube

Again, you probably already know about this one too. You've uploaded your videos or CD image video singles I assume.

But there is more you can do with this. Set a video as unlisted and you can send an exclusive link to fans on your email list that only the they can see.

Record your practices on your phone and upload them as private so you can view them later.

Website

I host a podcast called Music Manumit and we interview independent bands every week. When I research a band that we're going to talk to it still amazes me how many of them still don't have a website.

Google has it's own web platform, blogger.com.

It's easy to set up and you don't have to know how to code to make a pretty simple one to start. And you can get advanced with it if you know how.

For free you can get a yourband.blogspot.com address. You also have the option to buy a domain at any time right in the blogger settings for as little as $12 a year if you want.

Plus it's a Google owned service so it's already optimized for search engines. And no server to maintain, pay for or set up.

Photos

Google photos isn't just a place to post your pictures. It's also a place to host them.

Upload a picture there or take one with your phone and you can link to it anywhere.

Blogger even connects with it. Set your Google photo app to backup pictures on your phone and when you choose to add an image to your site, your phone is one of the choices!

The app even has Instagram-like filters you can apply to the pictures.

And remember how I said you could shoot video of your practices? It backs those up to your photos too!

Link shortener

Go to goo.gl and sign in with your gmail and you can create short URLs to your web pages or albums on iTunes and things like that.

It also has analytics to track how many clicks you received and more.

Notes

Google Keep is kind of like post-it notes. You can use it to write lyric ideas, keep to-do lists and even add photos to them for reference.

It's no Evernote, but the mobile app is pretty handy and you can organize & search things by note color, text or labels.

I save all my lyrics to sort by one color and like to pull them all up at once when I'm trying to write.

They can also be shared with others. And you can also move them to Google docs when you're finished.

Wiki

What? Wiki? Why should I need that? I'm sure you're asking.

Well when my band works on songs, we record every session. Either with a digital recorder or tracking a song on Protools for release.

And you know how the next time everyone gets together, at least one person doesn't remember how it goes or maybe even how they played it?

To keep notes of all these things we created a wiki at sites.google.com. This has saved us more than once in situations like these.

Some examples of ways you can keep track of things in the wiki are:

Create a new page in the wiki for a song you’re working on.
Record video from your phone, upload it to YouTube as an unlisted video and embed it.
Save audio you record to Google drive and embed it.
Write notes about key signatures, song structure or recordings.
Take pictures of lyrics, song notes people right down to remember their parts (if they forget to bring them its in the wiki).

All of your Google services are connected to the wiki in the editing menus.

Keep them updated and you can refer back to these at anytime.

Chat

Google Hangouts is good for IMing each other. But you can also use the mobile app as the default text messaging client on your phone.

So any conversation you have can be found on your computer or your phone.

Video chat

You can also video chat with multiple people in the Google Hangouts on your computer or the mobile app if you need to talk face to face or want to work on an idea remotely.

Live hangouts

You can broadcast a live show from google hangouts too (You will need to set up a Google+ page for your band to do this).

Connect your YouTube account to your bands Google+ page and you can schedule a live broadcast.

When you're done, it gets saved to your YouTube account and added to your videos.

Calendar

You get your own calendar with your account to keep personal schedules. But can also create different calendars within it and everyone can add or edit things to just those they have access to.

I mean you know what a calendar does, just wanted to mention it comes with the account.

Contacts

Contacts have been given their own section inside of gmail these days. And you can create groups for different people you need to keep track of like media, press, reviewers or night clubs.

Searchable

All of these items, email, chats, docs, files even photos with text are searchable. This is Google after all. And that's a handy thing right there.

I can't tell you how many times I wasted effort looking for things I didn't file properly on my computer. Trying to find them months later. If you just know some part of a name or date of something in this setup it will help you find it. Sometimes it even brings up things that you forgot all about.

Best of all it's free

That's the obvious thing.

As I said, I've tried a bunch of different things over the years. Some of them have been very useful. Some were short lived and no longer available which always sucks.

But the main problem was always getting the other band members to also use these new things and teach them how.

I've found that they all had gmail, and all this was already available to them so why not just use it.

There is way more that you can do with what I've mentioned here. And I plan to go over them section by section in future posts.

So if you liked this share it with others and sign up for the mailing list and I'll send you more that you can do to organize your band with just you Google account.

Tumblr Gets Tough on Music

tmray1@gmail.com (Tom Ray) — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 11:00:00 -0600

Considering one of the features of Tumblr is to upload audio I find this ironic.

Should musicians who host their blogs on Tumblr be worried?

Another good reason for bands to have their own dedicated website.

"Tumblr will terminate, under appropriate circumstances, the Accounts of Subscribers who are repeat copyright infringers, and reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to terminate any Subscriber for actual or apparent copyright infringement."

Via: Tumblr Panics as Site Gets Tough on Music Piracy | TorrentFreak

The Underground Artist

How I Embed Music Videos On My Facebook Page Posts

Embed a playable music video on a Facebook post.

1) Embed A Video on Facebook Page Post

Also the benefit of doing this?

2) Can I embed a YouTube video in a Facebook post?

I wanted to know: What's the best distro service for my music?

I've been using the same music distribution service for years. I figured it was time to see what the others were like.

Here are some responses from Twitter about what is the best music distro service:

Although I would say this feature from Distrokid is pretty interesting

Preparing my new song for release - using Google Drive to organize this

There’s a lot of info I need re-use for submitting my song to different places online. I’m going to use Google Drive so I can access it easily.

Folder setup

Links Spreadsheet

Information Documents

Add files to Google Drive folder

Related articles

Enter id3 information and artwork to my mp3 file

I want to add information to my mp3 file so when people download it they'll see things like the correct title, band name and artwork in whatever player they use.

I don't need expensive software to make artwork for my song single

How I created my album art using creative commons images and online software. No expensive programs needed.

Searching for images to use

Edit using canva.com

How I created a simple band website in just a few minutes

I'm starting my new band side-project, and the first thing I'm going to do is create a website.

Name website

Choose Template

Design

Pages

Layout

Publish Website

TO-DO: A list of tasks I need to finish before I can promote my new band project

First thing I need to do to start my band project

New band tasks

Where to start? I'm going to pitch music marketing and promotion ideas for my band, to myself

I decided to ask myself, what would I like to accomplish by promoting my own music?

Let me explain.

I got an idea to create a new band from scratch and promote it.

To get started I asked myself, "What do I want to accomplish, and more importantly how?"

I pitched my own music promotion concept to myself.

What do I currently do for promoting my music?

What things do I think would be different if I move forward, trying to find a solution for more exposure?

How much do I think each new person would bring in if I were to start building this exposure?

What's kept me from moving forward on this?

How does that make me feel?

What would it be like if I learned how to get more listens on streaming services or more downloads or have more of a fan base?

Why is that important?

Let's say, if I plan to make music for the next 10 years…

How long have I been trying to think about a solution?

What's kept me from pursuing or completing this?

What If I had $1 a day to increase my exposure to start with?

Here is where it gets interesting.

I’m not going to stop making music?

It's kinda like this. Someone is telling me; "If you give me $365, I'll try and pay you back around $4000".

Get Updates for this project emailed to you

Looking for ways to improve artwork and video for songs

I think artwork makes a difference in people's perception of a song.

I talked to a few musicians whose artwork I felt really made a difference in this area.

Ryan Little

Dr. Mindflip

Want more ideas like this?

List: 11 Podcasts That Help Me Promote Music

A surprising list of podcasts that have helped me think differently about how to promote my own music.

1 - The Top

2 - The Ask Gary Vee Show

3 - Mixergy

4 - Tim Ferriss Show

5 - Unemployable

6 - Perpetual traffic

7 - Foundr

8 - Call To Action

9 - The Digital Entrepreneur

10 - Problogger

11 - Song Exploder

Want more ideas like this?

Related articles

SEO for an artist or musician is not the same as other websites

At some point I started to wonder about search engine optimization for my band's website. I've come to realize it's a bit different for artists.

But guess what? It didn't work

I decided to optimize for our name instead.