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Independent Artists: Build An Online Community Of Fans

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Times are tough, and it’s all easier said than done but hey, who said it can’t be done! The biggest blessing today is access to the internet: a free-for-all platform to express and showcase our talent. That spectacular Instagram page you’ve created for your band is a gold mine that can foster an online community around your music. All you need to do is share your social media handles with as many people around you as possible, and encourage them to share your socials with their friends and like-minded people around them. Gradually, you’ll begin to see the snowball effect doing its trick. Read on to know how to spruce up your pages.

 

Make a playlist of all your best songs

Music fans LOVE to discover their next musical obsession. Here’s your chance to capitalize on that. After all, you deserve to be discovered! Create that awesome playlist of all your best songs. Spotify it, YouTube it and share it on the social media handles you’ve been developing. Feed your online community with the power of your music, because they need to hear you. Remember, fans take great pride in discovering cool new music every day.

Go live with your rehearsal today 

Rehearsing at home today?  Pull out of your phone, hit live on Facebook and play the songs you want your online community to see. Give them a real-time experience to know what you sound and look like! Believe in the music you’re making, and make your community experience that euphoria in you. Chances are that there’s an agent or a host somewhere in your local scene looking to book the next best talent. You ARE that talent.

 A DIY photoshoot is all you need: hello Instagram!

Here’s the fun part: ALL you need is a smartphone, literally, just that. This is especially easy nowadays where most smartphones come with great cameras. Find a great location in your house ( backyard maybe?), do your shoot and post those pictures on your Instagram. Don’t forget to use the stories feature for behind the scenes footage and bloopers. It’s your time to shine!

Get in touch with bookers online for future shows: Facebook has you covered!

Every venue has a designated booking agent, and every venue has a Facebook page. The easiest way to reach out to local venues is to look through their bio and find their contact information. Shoot them an email with your social media pages. The reach you have gained over time will now pay off, bookers love acts with a good online following.  Go out there and chase it.

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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.

Why Live Music Changes Lives

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Picture this..

It’s a beautiful, sunny day in your local city – except you are unaware of this as you stand, shoulder to shoulder with strangers from all degrees of life. Packed like farm animals inside a dark auditorium awaiting the blinding of strobe lights and deafening of speakers with enough SPL per watt to uproot a forest. And yet, you leave this loud, crammed, seemingly undesirable experience as an inspired, satisfied and overall happier individual; and the question is: why? Why humans not only love, but crave the live music atmosphere, dates back to practically the dawn of mankind.

Even in prehistoric times, the art of live music was believed to play part in the lives of cavemen and women.  Artifacts found revealing cave drawings of people dancing—and let’s be honest, who dances without music? Jump forward a few hundred-millennia to Ancient Greece where live performances of theater and music became not only a source of entrainment but also a means of projecting societal norms.

1700s: Opera emerges as a new type of live music performance; initiating a need for large showcase venues such as La Scala in Milan.

1850: Jenny Linda makes her debut in America, exceeding the crowd size brought out by any preceding artist.

1950s: Rock and Roll broke down the race barrier by showcasing black and white artists side-by-side on a shared stage.

Maybe it’s just in our nature or maybe there truly is something different, something unexplainable about live music. On that note (pun intended), the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center conducted a study which analyzed the compared human reaction to live and recorded music. According to the data retrieved through this study, live music resulted in greater relief of stress among patients than recorded tracks. The setting, the physical vigor and connection between fan and artist has the power to pull audience-members out of their busy lives for a moment, where nothing else matters but the art in front of them.

And that’s not even the best part. Concerts not only have illustrated a unique ability to reach people in a way no other means of art can, they are also -dare I say- saving the music industry. Mind you, this is a debated topic amongst music connoisseurs. Many argue, that as the profit from purchased music decreases with the incline in streaming, the touring and live music industry will pick-up the income slack.

Despite the outlandishness of this claim, it is valid considering the immense growth in live music profit over the past decade. Concerts and live tours, which were once mere means of promoting a new album, have evolved into a multibillion dollar industry. Millennials have undeniably taken part in the live music fad; however according to Ticketmaster’s 2014 Live Attendee Study, their presence was solely thirty-five percent of overall attendees. Therefore insinuating that older generations too have increased in concert attendance, and today take up sixty-five percent of the documented audience.

So picture this…

It’s sixty degrees in Dublin, You’re in an outside venue in close quarters with the stranger on your left. You take a moment to appreciate that one festival brought all of these people together. The lights of the stage dim, and outsteps the artist you came to see. And thus, you leave this loud, crammed, seemingly undesirable experience as an inspired, satisfied and overall happier individual; and the answer is: music.

Josey is a content writer for youbloom as well as a member of the marketing team. She is music obsessed and a diehard Tom Petty fan. Josey currently lives outside of Los Angeles where she enjoys excessively sunny days, train adventures and organic chai (yes, Josey is high-maintenance about her chai).

Spotify and Music As We Know It

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So, you may not have heard of them….but a long time ago music listeners used to pay for their music by

purchasing magical little devices called CDs. Now, I’m not saying we need to base modern life off

prehistoric tendencies, BUT suspend your disbelief enough to imagine a world where music hypothetically has more value than $0.006. $0.006. As in: you can’t even shop at McDonalds for 100 times the deemed value of modern music.. thanks, streaming!

History:

This whole evolutionary change (you know, the one where we demoted the value of art) can arguably be tied back to the October 7th of 2008 in Stockholm Sweden. On this fateful day was born Spotify, a digital audio streaming device, developed and released by partners Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. Contrary to popular opinion, Spotify’s foreign roots and sleek color scheme were not its sole motivators for success; rather, this was a result of excessive planning and a brilliant business model. Come summer of 2009 (less than a year following its official release) Spotify raised $50M in their second round of funding which was essential in the paying off of major record labels.

Reaction:

Not surprisingly, Spotify faced mixed reactions upon its release to the public. Its initial business plan massively underpaid artists and exercised the objectively suspicious need to pay off record labels who otherwise were unwilling to hand over their precious songs to be distributed to the public for practically nothing.

Artists were the first to catch on to the consumer-heavy focus of Spotify’s business model: essentially underpaying musicians only to cut the literal value of music by 99.4% (which was revealed when Spotify later released a statement illustrating the payout per new streamer to be less than a cent).

Underpaying artists may be in the best interest of consumers (and happy consumers means a happy Spotify bank-account) however, is discounted music really worth the scamming of artists and overall wear and tear streaming has on the entire music industry? Many don’t think so.

Artists and producers such as Thom Yorke, Taylor Swift, Nigel Godrich, and David Byrne spoke out against Spotify not only as business men and women fighting for economic equality, but also as concerned lovers of the art itself with fear for streaming’s influence on its future.

“If Spotify reaches its goal of gaining a definitive hold on the new delivery system then another precedent will be set and the idea that recorded music is practically worthless will become normal.” – Nigel Godrich

Influence:

As it was so beautifully stated by Mr. Godrich (likely in a British accent), Spotify and streaming as a whole will continue to demote the worth of music so long as

the literal marketed value of a song continues to drop so drastically.

As profit brought in by music alone declines, labels must find other means of making money off of artists and the easiest way to do this is by “branding” a musician. AKA owning the artists’ names not merely their music; naturally leading to creative restrictions from labels.

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At the end of the day, music is music. It evolved into what it was 10 years ago and it continues to reshape into what it is today just as it will tomorrow and forever. There’s no way to stop a changing industry from growing but there is a way to help it. To aid it rather from becoming something you don’t want it to be. At the end of the day- you, the fan- have the most influence of all. What you choose to buy sells and what you don’t will likely conform into something you will. So make the change you want to hear, music as we know it is ours to protect.

 

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Josey is a content writer for youbloom as well as a member of the marketing team. She is music obsessed and a diehard Tom Petty fan. Josey currently lives outside of Los Angeles where she enjoys excessively sunny days, train adventures and organic chai (yes, Josey is high-maintenance about her chai).

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.

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