Digital Training Day in Derby
As some of you may be aware, we run a digital training day on behalf of AIM (Association of Independent Music) in London about once every three months. Well, for those of you who live a bit too far north to make it to London, we will now be running a condensed version of this course in Derby, in association with AIM and CIN (Creative Industries Network). So if you’re in the area you should definitely check it out. Here’s a flyer with the details:
Twitter Profile Design
If you are an artist, or you represent an artist, you are probably using Twitter to communicate with fans. If you’re not, give yourself a slap and then go and register. Go on, we’ll wait… Done it? Ok.
While Twitter does not allow as much flexibility design-wise as, say, MySpace, you do have the option to upload your own background image. You should be making the most of this by creating a background that mirrors the design of your website, MySpace profile, YouTube channel, etc, to ensure that you have a consistent design across all platforms through which people might discover your music.
So to get you started, here’s an article featuring some basic guidelines as well as plenty of inspiration in the form of examples of what other people have done with their Twitter backgrounds – http://bit.ly/dzCe4h
Also, here’s an article listing 10 great tools for creating Twitter backgrounds that you may find useful – http://bit.ly/a5fvqx
So now you have no excuse for sticking with that plain old standard Twitter background!
Digital Music Marketing Is Boring
Over the last few years digital campaigns for new albums and releases have had increased budgets, more time and a much bigger place in the overall marketing mix.
The work done by a digital department or independent company has come to be seen as crucial to driving sales and creating engagement. In fact the digital presence of an artist is now more sought-after than the actual quality of the music itself. A&R people will ask how many email addresses on the mailing list and if there has been a video that has ‘gone viral’. These are the stand-out indicators of the likely success of an album now.
Despite digital having this increased importance and there being a greater understanding of how to use it, campaigns are mostly dull and boring carbon-copies of the same idea.
If you walk into any marketing meeting at any mid to large record label you can guarantee to hear that the plan for ‘digital’ involves a free download, a remix competition and a stream of the album. The record will be pre-ordered with some sort of exclusive content and iTunes will have two bonus tracks that the artist didn’t deem good enough for the album itself.
It’s all perfectly well and good, but boy is it dull. With the opportunity to reach an unlimited audience, a starting point of great artwork, songs and lyrics to spark the creative juices and with pre-existing fans, why the heck is it like this?
Why do artists put up with having spent months in a studio tweaking every sound and laying down hours of different takes to get their musical expression correct and then have their marketing be a remix competition and giving away a free track.
I’m not saying that we have all the answers and can do this on every campaign, but it is up to us and the marketing departments at all labels to use digital creatively and not just go through the same motions on every record.
How To Change your Myspace URL
Changing a myspace url used to be impossible, but thanks to the addition of Myspace email, there is (as of writing) one opportunity to do so. This only works if your account was opened before August 2009.
If you’ve changed artist name, or want to bring your myspace url into line with your new website url etc than here is how you do it:
Login in to your Myspace account
When logged in click on ‘Mail’ on the top navigation
Once the mail page loads you should see a line of red text in the top right-hand corner which says, “set-up your own Myspace email address” (or similar text). Click this.
This will take you to the first page of setting up your new email account. You will be able to input what you want to be your email @myspace.com. By changing what comes before @myspace.com for your new email address this also changes your url to that text too.
So if I input my new myspace email as davidriley@myspace.com, assuming its available, my Myspace url would also become www.myspace.com/davidriley
This can only be done once so make sure you double check that you’ve written in the right text.
Simply go through the rest of the set-up of the email and your url will have been changed for good.
From there remember to update the links on your other websites etc to point to this new url.
Examples of artist websites built on WordPress
WordPress is one of the more common Content Management Systems that is used to build artist websites. It has become synonymous with blogging and is known for the ease of access and use.
Here is a quick list of some artist and label websites that are built using wordpress to give you an idea of what can be made:
Beck
www.beck.com
Dizzee Rascal
www.dizzeerascal.co.uk
Drift Records
www.driftrecords.co.uk
Gallows
www.gallows.co.uk
Gilles Peterson / Brownswood Recordings
www.gillespetersonworldwide.com
Hot Chip
hotchip.co.uk
Jaguar Love
takebacktheradworld.com
Maximo Park (artist)
www.maximopark.com
Patrick Wolf (artist)
www.patrickwolf.com
Party Dark (artist)
www.partydark.co.uk
Röyksopp
http://royksopp.com
Tinie Tempah (artist)
www.tinietempah.com
Please share other WordPress artist/label websites that you like or dislike in the comments below.
Stephen Fry on Twitter, music piracy and the web in 2010
Stephen Fry talks to .NET magazine about Twitter, offers his thoughts on music piracy and reveals what he thinks the web has in store for 2010. As always with Mr Fry, an interesting watch: http://www.netmag.co.uk/fry/ (requires the Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin)
