This is probably one of the most exciting areas of development for the independent artist. It gives you the tools to reach a huge worldwide audience of people who are specifically into your particular genre of music, an audience who you would never normally ever get to play to or even meet.
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Great article from The Independent about a guy who tried to launch his debut single soley through using a YouTube Video.
How to take advantage of these new tools is still being explored within the industry and interestingly different things seem to work well for different artists. Just because one idea or gimmick worked for one band doesn’t mean it’ll work for another. However in the following pages we’ve gone through some of the things to explore.
Email Mailing Lists
Email mailing lists are an essential tool when marketing and promoting your work online however don’t count on them for huge amounts of sales. It’s worth adding that sending out mass emails from a normal email account isn’t only a chore but also can result in a lot of emails just ending up in junk folders. Websites like Constant Contact allow you to not only manage lists online but also use HTML templates so they look cool and professional. They also send the emails out in such a way that avoids them being classed as junk and have powerful analytical tools that can produce stats about successful deliveries with information as detailed as telling you how many people actually opened the email as opposed to just deleting it.
Online Radio
There are simply thousands of online radio stations now ranging from the 15 year old in his bedroom to the huge multinationals. At the moment most users listen through their static computers but new technology like the iPhone with it’s 3G connection is now allowing people to listen to it on the move as well. One important thing to note is that few online radio stations currently report to or pay copyright royalties on the music they air but if all your after is promotional opportunities then this won’t matter to you.
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More and more radio is being listened to online as this Rajar survey shows.
As with all promotional work it’s essential to target where you’re sending your music to make sure it’s suitable. There is simply no point sending your beautifully crafted acoustic singer/songwriter piece to a Hip Hop station, you’re wasting your time and theirs! Research the stations and shows who play your genre of music and then try and target the DJs and producers of those shows.
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Pandora (based on the Music Genome Project) and last.fm are the most popular examples of a new type of internet radio station that doesn’t use a pre-programmed playlist of music but generates one in real time using information it’s gathered about the users tastes and habits. They’ve got a rapidly growning user base and there is information about how to get your music playlisted on Pandora here and last.fm here
It’s also worth really thinking about if the radio station has a bona fide audience or not. There are millions of radio stations available who literally no one listens to and so it’s again important to target your efforts to make sure they aren’t wasted. Websites like live365.com host hundreds of independent radio stations and rate them which can be a helpful guide to their audience size. You can send music to each station by a link on their page or live365 also offer a paid service where they make your music available to all their DJs.
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