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After a Brief Hiatus, Griffin Anthony to Release New Album, Refuge

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Griffin Anthony, after taking a brief break from touring, is releasing his first full-length album since 2015’s, “Making of A Man”.

The album is set to be released this summer on Big Eye Records. During Anthony’s hiatus he has composed film scores for the Woodstock Film Festival selected documentary, Catskill Park and HBO’s I Wanna See You and Call to Action, amongst others.

 

“Scoring was invaluable to my evolution as a songwriter”

“Scoring was invaluable to my evolution as a songwriter”,says Anthony, “but I grew to miss writing the stories that I wanted to tell.”

Since scoring music for various films, Anthony became anxious to get in the studio and return to his first love, writing songs connecting to people emotionally. His new album, Refuge, was recorded at the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville with producer Jon Estes (Kesha, John Paul White, Steelism), in collaboration with Andirja Tokic (Alabama Shakes, Margo Price, Langehorn Slim).

Truly returning to his musical roots, Anthony recorded Refuge live to two–inch tape. He completed the recording of the album over 6 days in October 2017. Given the opportunity to listen to Anthony’s new album prior to his release and sitting down with him at his home in Ridgefield, CT, Anthony went into depth over his thoughts on his new music and how it is different from his previous works.

“I just aimed to write songs you can trust,” Anthony said. “I took a bigger swing on this record. The tunes have some heavier themes.” Never preachy or fussy, Anthony’s unwavering vocals and pointed lyrics deliver on the nine-song LP. Starkly more nuanced than his previous work, Refuge, offers character-driven narratives ripe with perspective and humility that sneak up and grab you by the throat. This album is a return home for Anthony and provides a hopeful feel through risk.

“From time to time, we all have to take great risks in order to find safety. These songs explore the risks, failures, and steps towards finding our safe-haven.”

Refuge is set to be released later this summer.

 

Author’s bio: Gabe Crawford has been a music and vinyl enthusiasts for over 20 years. Although originally from Oklahoma, he currently resides in New York with his 1200 vinyl albums.

5 Tips To Optimise Your Musician’s Website Using SEO

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As a musician, you might have spent the majority of your time making and perfecting your talent, recording an album, sourcing the artwork and trying to get your name out there into the big wide world.

Of course, one of the best ways to do this is by creating your own website, a task that’s now easier than ever. However, getting your website up to the top of the search engine results page is a whole other ball game.

Today, SEO plays such an important role in all kinds of website of all industries and businesses, organisations and artists needs to pay attention to their SEO ranking to ensure their music gets in front of their fans.

To give you a helping hand when it comes to SEO for your musician’s website, here are three tips to remember when designing or updating your website ensuring that your music is discovered by the masses

Conduct Research

Before you start designing or updating your website, carry out research, so you know what you’re competing with. You’ll also be able to see what kind of websites your competition has as well as information on what works best when trying to reach out to your fans.

Of course, you’ll have your own style and ‘brand’, but if you don’t fit into a certain niche, you won’t be able to appeal to it. You can also conduct research on how to boost your SEO ranking using tried and tested techniques. Some of the best places to look include Moz, a leading SEO organisation and Portent, an SEO-related blog.

Communicate Properly

Every single page on your website matters. Whether it’s your blog page where you share info on what you’re up to, your ‘about us’ page which gives your fans a bit of history and tells them your story up till now, all the way through to your album descriptions on your online store.

Whenever your site has written text, read through it and make sure it’s perfect. This is called editing. Of course, writing may not be your main strength so you can always enlist help from professional writers from services such as Boom Essays, or brush up your knowledge using blogs like State of Writing.

Use Perfect Content

Google will judge your website based on the quality of your content. It’s all about giving your fans the best experience possible when they visit your site.

This means you’ll need to go through and check all your existing content as well as checking any content you ever upload in the future to ensure that it’s perfect.

This means looking out for spelling, punctuation and your grammar. If you don’t trust your own editing and proofreading skills, you can always use a professional writing tool that can do it on your behalf, such as Academadvisor or UK Writings.

Use SEO Tools

One of the best ways to boost your website’s SEO ranking is by using tools that were designed to save you the time and effort. These tools are perfect if you’re not an SEO genius and will automatically tell you what you can be improving on.

For example, tools like SEM Rush is a website where you can simply input your website address, and it will start to list out all the errors and things you can fix with your website.

Furthermore, tools like Ahrefs are ideal for seeing where all your user traffic is coming from as well as your competitor bands or artists to see what techniques they are using on their website.

Content, Content, Content

I can’t stress enough how important the content of your website is. There’s a special knack for writing search engine optimised content and it can take years to master the techniques as well as continuous effort to stay up to date with the latest trends.

Of course, the chances are that you haven’t got time to do all this which is why it’s highly recommended to use a professional copywriting service, such as Essay Roo or Academized to create it on your behalf. They’ll be able to create all your album descriptions, your about us page, your contact page and any other pages you may have.

If you’re writing your content yourself, one of the main things to remember is the length of your content has a direct impact on your SEO ranking. You can’t just write 300 words here and there. You need to provide real valuable information to your readers. To start with, aim for 1,000 words or above. You can track this using tools such as Easy Word Count.

If you’re looking for ways to get your music and presence in front of a larger audience and to the top of the search engine results pages, considering your SEO should be your first point of call. Obviously, a lot goes into fully-optimising a website, but by following these tips and tricks, you’ll be able to get yourself off to the best start.

Author’s bio:

Gloria Kopp is a content writer and an online marketing specialist Big Assignments writing service. She regularly contributes columns to Engadget and Australian Help. Gloria is a paper writer at Revieweal blog where she shares her reviews with students and educators.

Best Options For Marketing Your Band To A Wider Audience

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If you’re in a band and you want to be popular in the music scene, you have to face countless
others who want to be just as famous as their stars. Your best bet is to have a good marketing
strategy.

Marketing for any type of product continues to evolve with the market, which makes services
step up their game every so often and make marketing a daunting term to those new in the field.
Here are some tips that can get you started on a full-blown marketing campaign for your band:

1. Awareness: Who Is Aware of Your
Music?
Music isn’t your only tool to be known by
your fans. You can also invite people to
attend your gigs and review you as a band, so
they can spread the word.

● You can reach out to local bloggers
and influencers with free tickets to
your gig, or a free EP to give access
to your music. This lets them know
that you really want to engage your fans.
● Snapchat is also a growing tool you could use to post live updates of your gigs to your
fans. It’s becoming a widely used service even by popular news sites, which means a lot
of users are going to look for you here as well if they are your fans.
● Facebook is your friend, but you shouldn’t stick to groups and pages. You can use the
power of live streaming, sharing commentary, and creating the atmosphere of being
engaging by always staying up to date with Facebook’s latest trends and using them to
engage your fans.

2. Responsiveness: Are You Communicating With Fans?
Of course, you can’t exactly form a fan base if you’re not appealing to your prospective fans. It’s
not always about your music, but how you convey it. You should be a group that people want to
follow and check out. You should convey a personality of sorts when you interact with your
fans, even in social media.

● Artists and bands may want to consider how large is their fan base first before releasing
their tracks. If you want to make a partnership with labels, your social media numbers
may be your version of cred for partners and sponsors.
● One way to do this is by making design contests. You can challenge artists to create
posters or shirt designs for your band, and print the winner.

3. Exposure: Where Do You Bring Your Music?
So you have a band, and you want to be known. You have tracks ready, and you may have been
doing gigs of your own as well. However, this shouldn’t count as your overall exposure, as you
may need to do something more to fully expose your fans to your music.

● For instance, you can do unique song covers such as acoustic versions of your favorite
non-acoustic songs, or slow versions of fast music.
● Spotify is growing to be the best alternative option to the radio, and it’s popular on a global
level. It is a good option to share stream links to your fans inside and outside Spotify to
constantly engage with your fans.
● You can team up with popular podcasters to have your music featured in their episodes,
or you and your band can make a podcast as well. This is a handy way to have something
to engage your audiences with that is not always your music.

4. Online Is Not Always the Best
This may seem counterintuitive, but this
is something everyone should always
remember, your offline presence should
be just as strong as your online presence.
Help your fans know that you are
available in the real world to be interacted
with.

● You should try establishing a
home base where you’re always
expected to appear, so fans can go and see you.
● Discmaker suggests you can go to local fests, events, venues, and bars to do gigs so
people can discover your music. This is of course in venues outside your “home base.”
● You can also try out geo-targeting your audience in emails, newsletters, and Facebook
events. This means, with the right guidance, you can attract and focus on potential fans in
areas closer to the place you will have events in. This boosts the chances of people going
to see your events.

Conclusion

You may come up with the best marketing strategy that is fit for your band, but the most
important thing is to come up with something you can do consistently. All efforts you’ve done
for your marketing campaign will fail if you don’t follow through with your plans.
As Undercover.net.au says, always remember to put love and effort to your marketing campaign,
and your love for your band and the craft will come to life. Do you have other tips for marketing
strategies for bands? Comment down below and share it with us!

 

About the writer

SARA HARRISON
Sara is a music enthusiast who loves to play guitar and the piano. She has a
large selection of music CDs with Rock and Blues being her favourite. In her
spare time, she’s studying to be a music teacher and enjoys visiting music
festivals. She currently writes for Undercover.net.au and enjoys life.

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