The great music industry and business blog Hit Singularity has a great article 10 Fast and Free Strategies To Market Your Band Without Resorting To Spamming People On Myspace about promoting your music online. It’s got some great comments and great ideas but it serves to illustrate one of the main problem facing a lot of bands these days. These days to be a successful independent artist also means that you also have to be a resourceful self promoter and marketer. The many opportunities the web offers doesn’t necessarily cost much money but they do take up huge amounts of your time. For example writing and maintaining a blog can be a huge undertaking if you do it properly, conventional wisdom is that to hold an audience a blog needs to be updated at least 3 times a week preferably with original material (eg. not just links). By the time you’ve done this, kept up with all your Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and Flickr communications AND done the day shift at work to pay the bills it’s a miracle that there’s any time to do music at all. 

This is what management is for, to do the boring admin stuff whilst you are being creative but if even if you haven’t got any then there is still hope. Derek Silvers who setup CDBaby has a new idea that he is trying to get support for. It’s called Muck Work and is basically a pool of assistants that you can hire for a small fee to do all that boring promotional work for you. If the business takes off it could be an awesome little resource for bands who need all the promo stuff to be taken care of without the commitment or long term cost of signing a management deal.