The post The End of The World? appeared first on The Indie Band Alliance.

A lot of people have slammed Google Plus saying things like "only Google employees use it". Others have pointed out the track record of other Google properties like Google Wave that have all crashed and burned in a relatively short type after much initial hype.
Then there's the all too true statement that nobody needs -yet another social media network to manage!
However, what is your actual experience of Google Plus? I'll share you mine.
Out of the box, I find it extremely easy to use. I love the circles and how you can easily assign your status updates for whatever audience you want. this is so cumbersome in Facebook, but is effortless with Google Plus.
Next up – Google Hangouts are incredibly cool. I've only been on two so far and am amazed at how easy they are to setup and run. In comparison – I found using Skype to be more of a challenge; especially when trying to engage with others who aren't all that 'tech savvy'. There's also a 'studio' version of Google Hangouts that is aimed directly at musicians…thanks Google!
Having said that, I do find that Google Plus is a bit of a ghost town. That could be because I don't have many active Google Plus people in my circles at the moment – I hope it picks up. But this is another reason why I like Google Plus – I'm not here to hang out and kill time, I'm here to share relevant ideas and information with the people who are most interested in hearing them. I'm also here to help Google find my content and the content of other people that I find to be particularly helpful.
How is Google Plus Good For Bands?
Perhaps it's the marketer in me, but I see a lot of opportunity here. Not only can you create a special circle for just your fans, you can also create a circle for only those who pay to be part of your membership. You can then offer those members things like private Google Hangout sessions (a free way to have a video chat with up to 10 people at once), where you can do anything from write a song for them or teach them how to play one of your songs or host a private listening party.
This is just scratching the surface… I'm sure there are far more ideas on how to get Google Plus working for musicians. How are you using Google Plus? Is Google Plus a part of your social strategy? I'd love to hear what you think – leave a comment below.
#iba

The post Google Plus For Musicians appeared first on The Indie Band Alliance.

A lot of people have slammed Google Plus saying things like "only Google employees use it". Others have pointed out the track record of other Google properties like Google Wave that have all crashed and burned in a relatively short type after much initial hype.
Then there's the all too true statement that nobody needs -yet another social media network to manage!
However, what is your actual experience of Google Plus? I'll share you mine.
Out of the box, I find it extremely easy to use. I love the circles and how you can easily assign your status updates for whatever audience you want. this is so cumbersome in Facebook, but is effortless with Google Plus.
Next up – Google Hangouts are incredibly cool. I've only been on two so far and am amazed at how easy they are to setup and run. In comparison – I found using Skype to be more of a challenge; especially when trying to engage with others who aren't all that 'tech savvy'. There's also a 'studio' version of Google Hangouts that is aimed directly at musicians…thanks Google!
Having said that, I do find that Google Plus is a bit of a ghost town. That could be because I don't have many active Google Plus people in my circles at the moment – I hope it picks up. But this is another reason why I like Google Plus – I'm not here to hang out and kill time, I'm here to share relevant ideas and information with the people who are most interested in hearing them. I'm also here to help Google find my content and the content of other people that I find to be particularly helpful.
How is Google Plus Good For Bands?
Perhaps it's the marketer in me, but I see a lot of opportunity here. Not only can you create a special circle for just your fans, you can also create a circle for only those who pay to be part of your membership. You can then offer those members things like private Google Hangout sessions (a free way to have a video chat with up to 10 people at once), where you can do anything from write a song for them or teach them how to play one of your songs or host a private listening party.
This is just scratching the surface… I'm sure there are far more ideas on how to get Google Plus working for musicians. How are you using Google Plus? Is Google Plus a part of your social strategy? I'd love to hear what you think – leave a comment below.
#iba

from MyGPlusFeed https://plus.google.com/112647218605132634370/posts/S8HYjYkPLSv

The post Google Plus For Musicians appeared first on The Indie Band Alliance.

A lot of people have slammed Google Plus saying things like “only Google employees use it”.

Others have pointed out the track record of other Google properties like Google Wave that have all crashed and burned in a relatively short time after much initial hype.
Then there’s the all too true statement that nobody needs -yet another social media network to manage!
However, what is your actual experience of Google Plus? I’ll share you mine.
Out of the box, I find it extremely easy to use. I love the circles and how you can easily assign your status updates for whatever audience you want. this is so cumbersome in Facebook, but is effortless with Google Plus.
Next up – Google Hangouts are incredibly cool. I’ve only been on two so far and am amazed at how easy they are to setup and run. In comparison – I found using Skype to be more of a challenge; especially when trying to engage with others who aren’t all that ‘tech savvy’. There’s also a ‘studio’ version of Google Hangouts that is aimed directly at musicians…thanks Google!
Having said that, I do find that Google Plus is a bit of a ghost town. That could be because I don’t have many active Google Plus people in my circles at the moment – I hope it picks up. But this is another reason why I like Google Plus – I’m not here to hang out and kill time, I’m here to share relevant ideas and information with the people who are most interested in hearing them. I’m also here to help Google find my content and the content of other people that I find to be particularly helpful.
How is Google Plus Good For Bands?
Perhaps it’s the marketer in me, but I see a lot of opportunity here. Not only can you create a special circle for just your fans, you can also create a circle for only those who pay to be part of your membership. You can then offer those members things like private Google Hangout sessions (a free way to have a video chat with up to 10 people at once), where you can do anything from write a song for them or teach them how to play one of your songs or host a private listening party.
This is just scratching the surface… I’m sure there are far more ideas on how to get Google Plus working for musicians. How are you using Google Plus? Is Google Plus a part of your social strategy? I’d love to hear what you think – leave a comment below.
#iba

The post Google Plus For Musicians appeared first on The Indie Band Alliance.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve probably heard by now that you need to be collecting emails and creating a list where you can interact with your audience. This has been true for many years and will continue to be that way – especially if you subscribe to the 1,000 True Fan concept.

However, building that list is itself a problem. You need to have a squeeze page and an auto-responder to be able to automate the sign up process…and things start to get complicated from there.

Building your own squeeze page for WordPress can be a major pain in the butt, but not only that – many musicians haven’t made peace with the concept of the squeeze page yet. They don’t want to force people to sign up or leave – they want something that’s not quite as ‘in your face’ about collecting emails.

Sure, there are other ways to collect email addresses like the pop-up and the sidebar opt-in, but these are not only far less effective and almost invisible (sidebar optin) or they can risk annoying your fans (pop-ups).

However, there’s a new option available to musicians who use WordPress and it’s 100% free (for now).

It’s called Welcome Gate – and it’s made by a company called Leadbrite.

This plugin can work like a hybrid squeeze page and like a pop-up without being anywhere near as annoying. Here’s how it works.

You install the Welcome Gate plugin on your WordPress site and you set it up the way you  like. There are a bunch of tweakable design options that require zero knowledge of code at all. I whipped this together in just a few minutes, it almost took me longer to find my header graphic than it did to setup the design options!

So what makes Welcome Gate different? First of all, you may have noticed the words “skip this step” at the very bottom of my screen capture. That’s where your visitors can choose to bypass what otherwise appears to be a typical squeeze page. You can disable this if you like and force people to have to sign in to get access to your site.

The other thing different about Welcome Gate different is that it only shows up when people go to the home page of your website, and it will only appear to them once. This is why it’s much less likely to annoy people – it won’t ask for their email every time they come to your site and read an update, it will only appear if they go to your home page and only for their first visit. So Welcome Gate gives first time visitors the chance to sign up immediately before they view your site for themselves.

The guys at Leadbrite claim that their Welcome Gate plugin is 10 times better than a pop up, in fact they designed the plugin because they found that using pop up optins were no longer converting for them at all. I only just set up my first Welcome Gate, so I’ll update this post once I can verify or disprove these claims.

The biggest weakness for me with Welcome Gate is that it only collects email addresses; this is by design as Leadbrite has done the testing to show that asking for a first name with the email address reduces conversions. While that may be true, one of the most powerful aspects of having an auto-responder is being able to personalize your communications by addressing your list members by their first name; so it’s a trade off. I’d love to see the option to include first name down the road (they already added this feature to their Leadplayer product…so maybe Welcome Gate is next?).To get the benefits of using Welcome Gate, I needed to create a second list that only requires the email address, which is an extra hoop that many others might not want to jump through…

Pros:

• Welcome Gate is easy to use and fast to setup.
• It’s free (for now)
• It does what it claims to do.

Cons:

• Only supports 3 auto-responder companies at the moment
• Doesn’t allow you to collect first name data, just the email address

Overall – I think Welcome Gate is worth testing out on your blog. I’ve installed it on 3 of my sites and am curious to see how it performs over the next while. I will update this post with my findings!

The post The Welcome Gate Squeeze Page Solution for Musicians appeared first on The Indie Band Alliance.

I somehow missed hearing about this new feature at Youtube where you can now create Youtube playlist introductions and outros. This allows you to plug your email list to those who are checking out your videos on Youtube – pretty cool!

You can add either a slide with 2 lines of text, or you can shoot a brief video of you speaking to your viewers or thanking them for watching.

This allows you to leverage your video content and get more people over to your mailing list (you do have one don’t you?); it would be fantastically short-sighted for anyone not to get more people onto their mailing list.

Youtube can be a significant source of traffic – especially for musicians, so get on this right away! All you need is an autoresponder and a half decent squeeze page or landing page and some videos to get this working for you.

For more about this check out this post from FanBridge
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/08/grow-your-email-list-with-youtube-playlist-introductions.html

Note – I’m not endorsing FanBridge or their landing pages – I think you should own/control as much of that side of your business as possible. However, they are providing great content in this post that I think can help you grow your audience and get that one step closer to making a full time income as a musician – so check it out and make it happen!

The post Grow Your Email List With Youtube appeared first on The Indie Band Alliance.

This is a good article that gives solid advice on some of the ways to develop a hardcore fan base. Of course, this is easier said than done, and reading a single article isn’t going to magically get you there all on it’s own.

The one tip that the author recommends that could actually bite you in the butt is the one about over delivering. I’m not suggesting that you be ‘half ass’ in the music you do or the way you interact with people – but there is a risk in trying to be too much to too many people and failing miserably. It’s okay to over-deliver, but only in the context that it can be measured in some way to prove that it is actually adding value to your audience and also benefits your bottomline.

Otherwise, over delivering merely for the sake of over delivering can leave you overwhelmed and underpaid; and isn’t that what most musicians are already grappling with in the music business today?

What’s your take on this article?
How To Develop A Hardcore Fan Base

The post How To Develop A Hardcore Fan Base appeared first on The Indie Band Alliance.

I can across an interesting article that touches on how a new program called “Tell My Friends” is pitching using it’s affiliate sales feature as a way to combat piracy. At first glance it sounds like it could be a good idea – what better way to get people who don’t want to pay for your music than to actually give them money to promote your music?

But the more I think about it – the more I think the logic is severely flawed.

First of all, the mindset of people who want free music is that they want it now, they want it free and they don’t want to have to work for it. I’m guessing there would be additional hoops to jump through to sign up for the affiliate program; there usually is. The type of person who is gladly pirating music might not be bothered without a considerable bribe for their time.

Number two – there’s not a lot of money to be made selling music. What’s the affiliate payout on a 99 cent download anyway? Fifty cents? Seventy-five? How many downloads would you have to sell before you could buy a beer or even a cup of coffee? Also – when does the payout happen? In two weeks? 30 days or six weeks? I find it hard to believe that someone with the pirating mindset would put in this much effort for this little reward.

Number-three – affiliate marketing isn’t easy. It’s not like you just share a link and everyone in the world is going to purchase from you. If that was the case, wouldn’t you rather be selling high-end expensive gadgets like ipads, musical instruments and computers that could payout hundreds of dollars per sale instead of 50 cents?

There’s no way that offering an affiliate program (for those who bother to sign up) is going to reduce piracy at all. I think there is a place to use affiliate tools to promote your music, but you’d have to target an altogether different audience – your biggest fans and even better – other awesome bands in your genre who have a lot of followers that they can promote your music to. Affiliate marketing makes a lot more sense as a “one t0 many” approach versus a “one to one” approach – meaning if another band promoted your music to their list of 10,000 fans there would be a much higher possibility of a reward for a slight degree of effort (maybe an email or two.).

That’s all I have to say about ending piracy by rewarding music buyers – not gonna happen!

You can check out the original article here:

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/07/tell-my-friends-e-junkie.html

The post Can You End Piracy By Rewarding Music Buyers? Nope. appeared first on The Indie Band Alliance.

I wrote about Fandalism in a previous post where I likened it to Myspace because it’s geared to solving a problem for musicians (networking and finding cool musicians to form bands/create music with) in much the way that Myspace solved the problem of getting a web presence and music online for free back in the mid 2000′s. I decided to take a closer look at the site and see how it worked for me personally to see if it was a fair comparison.

The video is a little bit long, but shows me doing a custom search for other bass players in my immediate area within a certain age bracket with similar influences.

• You get to see the results of my search as well as the profiles of the musicians that I take a closer look at.
• I also fill out a profile myself so that I can experience the site on an even deeper level.

My Fandalism Takeaways

I think Fandalism is very helpful if you want to narrow down and find musicians based on location, instrument type and age. It really lives up to the hype in this regard. I like how it asks questions that are geared to get others to understand you better as a musician to hopefully find better working relationships with other musicians that are in line with the same influences and outlooks on making music.

However, I was surprised that there wasn’t the option of promoting a URL – either for yourself or your band. I think it was left out intentionally since the entire site appears to be geared entirely to the individual, but I still would love to see this option added.

Also, I didn’t like how it returned 50% of my results for people who weren’t actual bass players – in the sense that it wasn’t their primary instrument. It should filter the primary bass players to the top at the very least. Lastly, most of the information is optional (except for the data that Fandalism grabs from your Facebook profile – there’s no avoiding that), so if musicians don’t take the time to actually fill out their profile, you’re not going to get the full benefit of what Fandalism has to offer.

With all that said, it is still ‘early days’ for this platform and I’m sure that as growth continues it will also continue to mature. Being able to narrow down musicians in a closely targeted range and reach out to them with a direct message will be handy for many of us that need to reach out to new musicians; Fandalism should only get better at this as more people discover it for themselves!

The post Is Fandalism Worthy of the Hype? appeared first on The Indie Band Alliance.

Hunting for other musicians to collaborate with is one of the hardest challenges, but that might be a thing of the past if Philip Kaplan has his way.

The new site called Fandalism is one part social network and one part database that allows musicians to sign up and enter basic information such as preferred genres of music, influences and their location. They can also share their original photos, lyrics and embeddable Youtube videos and SoundCloud players.

Does the world really need another social network?Do musicians really need this service? Well, Fandalism started out as an invite-only platform in January and has already had 85,000 musicians sign up mostly by word of mouth. Also, when Myspace first came out it was heavily populated by musicians in a way that hasn’t quite been matched by any other social network since.

I think Fandalism shows a lot of potential for two reasons. First – because it does address a real problem that musicians have which is being able to easily find other musicians. The promise of Fandalism is to be able to find other musicians to work with based on how good of a match they are to your influences and preferences. Craigslist, Google and Facebook weren’t making it as easy as Fandalism claims to be.

Secondly – the site is not trying to be the next Facebook; it’s by musicians for musicians. When musicians get together and support each other, they can create a grassroots movement that can eventually bring in real fans. This is something that I learned from playing in a band; when you’re just starting out and haven’t built a large following – you’re often performing for the other musicians performing on the same bill as you (and the bar staff).

Should Fandalism keep a narrow focus on helping musicians, they should do well. If they change gears and focus on getting the audience to show up, things could potentially degrade into the spam-fest that Myspace became filled with bogus ‘friends’.

I think Fandalism could be a great way to network with other musicians and allow ‘orphaned’ musicians to be able to sync up with other musicians to potentially start a band or to collaborate on a music project together. The potential here is to find a higher quality musician to work with instead of putting up with the guy down the street how attends ‘alcohol practice’ each week and brings his guitar with him.

Find out more about Fandalism below and let me know if you think this site is all hype – or a great way to network and raise your profile in the music circles that you are most interested in.
Fandalism: Finally A Social Network That Works For Musicians [EXCLUSIVE]

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