Music + Twitter = Awesome

It’s now easier than it ever has been to take on DIY marketing for your band.

By easier, I mean the vehicle to do it in is more easily accessible and reaches around the world. In addition, it’s bloody cheap. The problem is that it is easier and cheap for everyone else also. So you have the same problem you did as an artist before the Digital Age. I remember back in 1993 making fliers for my band. I would sit and cut up magazine pictures and paste them into an ironic primitively crafted advert to announce to everyone that walked by a certain telephone pole that we were playing at the community center on Friday night. Of course the telephone pole by the Bohemian coffeehouse was a collage of fliers that fell victim to rain, wind and another band putting their flier right over some others band’s flier. The dream back then was to be able to go to Kinko’s with enough money to make color copies of your flier and get a lot of addresses for your mailing list (addresses as in where you live, to receive mail hand-delivered by a member of the USPS). Times have changed.

One thing that has always remained a constant is the unfortunate reality that the bands that make it turn out to be great business owners. The art matters because a successful business has at their core a great product that meets an authentic need. So for a band to be successful, it needs to have an original sound that emotionally connects with a large number of people.  A lot of the most talented artists suck at business.  Our society used to glorify excessively talented self-destructive, ego-centric, maniacal artists–we tolerated and/or condoned their selfishness and immaturity and perpetuated their careers because of their great talent. Basquiat, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Hunter S. Thompson are some prime examples. With such saturation in the music scene nowadays there is not much room for that. You actually have to work hard and continually put yourself out there. Major labels no longer scout the clubs for great talent and sign them at the end of their set; that’s a fairy-tale. Even independent labels want to see that you have developed a following and have sold albums and merchandise before they will consider you. So the question is, “How do you find success as an independent musician in the Digital Age?

Amanda Palmer used twitter to sell $19,000 worth of music–more than she made in traditional distribution and marketing channels. But as she says, “First the music has to be good. Seems obvious but if it’s not good no amount of social networking is going to work.”  You have to create a sound that is unique and people can connect with it.

Originality in Music Gets Retweeted

C.S. Lewis wrote the best advice for you on making an original artistic product, “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” However, a great product or ’sound’ alone is not worth anything without the drive and discipline to relentlessly exhaust all channels to deliver your band to a mass audience. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Youtube, Flickr, Vimeo, SoundCloud, iLike, and it goes on and on. It takes an enormous amount of time and energy to manage all of these areas of fan engagement (psst. keyword here is fan engagement).

It doesn’t matter what the platform is (Facebook, Twitter) those tools will more than likely come and go. What matters is how tactful you are at engaging and interacting with your fans. Unfortunately, there is no formula for this. You have to maintain integrity, not look like you are marketing yourself all while having a mystique. What C.S. Lewis said about being truthful in your art is transferable to your online reputation. Be honest and authentic always. Tweeting that you have a new album available on iTunes with a link is not going to help you sell your music. The online reputation you build up around that tweet just might though.

People follow you on Twitter because you are either entertaining, funny, informative, or they know you (you have something useful to give them). In order to sell your music through online fan engagement, build up your stock as a great Twitterer, Facebook user and MySpacist–be those things first then plug your band every once in a while. Don’t be misled though, you’re not going to make any money selling mp3s; its just the way things are now. You want people to come to your shows and buy your merchandise; it’s the first and last way to make money and it can never be substituted. Also, you want the press to like your music AND you. When they get your album, they check out what kind of online presence you have; the better job you can do managing that, the better chance you have at getting good press. As Dave Allen from Gang of Four says, “Either you manage your message or the message manages you.”

The main idea is to develop a conversation with fans, not to broadcast yourself. Social media is about talking AND listening–listening is key. You can’t just go on there everyday and “update your band’s status.” The best approach on Twitter is to be yourself–meaning, for example, tweet as “Matt from Rectangles Aglow” not as Rectangles Aglow. Again be a good user, friend, follower, followee and respond to replies and comments. Keep a conversation going about your band because when the conversation doesn’t exist, neither does your band.

Here are some related links to help:

What The F**k Is Social Media

End of The Music Album

Musicians Surviving The Link Economy

Qualities of An Artist Entrepreneur

Tagged as: facebook, internet marketing, Musicians, myspace, social media, twitter