Customized Web Sites for Bands And Musicians

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There are two main ways you can sell your music online.

1. You can use your website and some simple software to provide the downloads your your various music tracks simply and cost effectively.  We can set this up for you for a one time cost. See more here.

You can also use this same system to sell your DVD or CD.

2. You can use a service like iTunes

As an independent artist, you’ll probably be very familiar with the fact that digital downloading is huge — and you’re probably wondering how to get your cut of the action! And it’s not just illegal downloading taking a huge bite out of traditional sales — legal downloading services such as iTunes, eMusic, Napster, and Rhapsody have created a huge opportunity for major and independent labels alike: the ability to sell your music to a large, diverse market, with little to no overhead costs.

At around $1 per song, $10 per album, these services represent a great way to get your music distributed to the masses. However, as an independent artist, getting your music digitally distributed on the big services may seem like an impossible task — until now!

Digital or Traditional?

While it may be tempting to go the all-digital route and avoid the printing costs of a CD, it’s also important to understand that the market is still there for CD sales, especially independent musicians. Despite the numbers looking great, there’s only an estimated 10% of the music-buying public taking advantage of paid digital downloads.

You’ll still want to consider retaining the option to sell CDs — especially at your shows! Most artists see CD sales at their merch tables, even if they’re not doing so great in local CD stores. Before making a decision on which way to go exclusively, consider the benefits of doing both, especially if you have a budget to do so.

Getting Your Release Ready – Mastering & Artwork

As an independent artist, you’ll need to make sure your release is up to commercial standards before releasing it digitally. By now, I’m sure you’re familiar with the process of mastering — evening out the dynamics and maximizing the volume of your recording. Make sure that, whether you’re doing the mastering yourself or hiring an engineer to do it for you, that your final product sounds it’s best. Remember, you’ll be on an even playing field (well, almost) to the big, major-label acts when you’re being digitally distributed, so make your release stand out as best you can.

You’ll also need to make sure you have complete artwork to submit, along with the complete track credits. The major players won’t post your music without artwork — it doesn’t have to be the best, but something catchy certainly helps!

Obtain a UPC Code

In order to sell your music in any online store, not just iTunes, you’ll need a UPC code assigned to your release. There’s a few options, and they’re all about the same price if you know where to look (and contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to pay the $750 fee that’s standard if you’re getting your own UPC, unless you want to register a UPC as your own company). One option is going through your CD duplication company. For a small fee (between $20 and $50), you’ll be assigned a unique UPC code for your product, which you can use on both your regular CD and your digitally distributed version. Just ask them, if they haven’t offered it already. Another option is the great service CD Baby. They’re an online store that’s a major player in the digital distribution market, as well (more about that later). They’ll assign you a unique UPC for $20. You can also do a Google search for “UPC Code”, and you’ll get some great results — don’t pay more than $50, though!

Find a Distributor

Unless your independent label (or you) are a major player, then you won’t be able to deal directly with Apple. Unfortunately, but understandably due to the volume of interest, iTunes requires that you as an artist partner with an established distributor. This works to your benefit when you compare the selling and bargaining power you as one of the many independent artists would have! This offers them the ability to work only with high-volume sellers, who’ll be committed to the level of content quality they strive for. Of course, the downside here is that is that it’ll cost you a little more in sales revenue, due to the fact you’ll have to help pay a minimal overhead for the other companies involved.

The number one thing to look out for in a digital distributing partner is a non-exclusive licensing agreement. Make sure that you will continue to own all rights to your own music. Don’t sign anything — and if in doubt, take it up with an experienced entertainment lawyer — if you feel you may sign your rights away to your material, which goes without saying. You’ll also want to make sure that the pay cut is fair — the average payout is around 60 cents per song download, and most digital distribution services will take a 9-10% cut of that. Still, when compared to the overhead of printing and distributing an actual CD copy, you’re coming out ahead!

One of the best distributors, as mentioned above, is CD Baby. They’ve partnered with not only iTunes, but many of the other major players in the digital market. They’ll set up to sell your CD — digital only, or, if you have real copies, on their online store, as well — for $35 per album. There’s some setup work, but it’s all easily done. They handle the digital encoding of your material for you, to make sure that your music stays in the proper format at the highest quality.

Another great option is a company called TuneCore. TuneCore offers similar features to CD Baby, although they only deal in digital distribution, not traditional sales as well. Their pricing model is quite different, and allows you to choose which services you’d like to distribute to. For every release, they charge a 99 cent fee per store you choose to release to, including iTunes Japan, eMusic, and many others, aside from traditional United States iTunes distribution. They also charge a yearly maintenance fee of $19.98 per album, and 99 cents per song. For a 12-song album, that means roughly $25 in fees to distribute to the major players. They also don’t make any claim to your material, just distribute it. They offer free UPC code generation, and can hook you up with a good artwork person if you don’t have cover art already made.

And remember, promote your digital downloads!

One of the things we do for musicians is create power-point slides that can then be used to promote them and can be sent to promoters, advertise the release of new music, be posted onto fans site and sydicated giving massive exposure.

You can add interviews, band member profiles and much more.

The other beauty of using these video powerpoint programs is they can drive extra traffic to your site.

Contact us now to get your own website and let us promote your site for you.

Our job id to make sure your site reaches the wides audience and the way we do this is with some great plugins to automate the process. You don’t want long urls but ones that represent your band.

And those long blog post URLs, ugh! Yeah, we got rid of those using URL shortening services like TinyURL and tr.im but what about the name and/or brand? Your blog posts might be fab – very interesting to read and three thousand comments on each.

But are you getting people to remember your website address in Twitter? No.

Do you get backlinks from Twitter using TinyURL? No.

Can you measure site statistics from TinyURL links on Twitter? No.

Sweet huh? Here’s a features list:

• Easy to install
• Customizable shortened URL style
• Switch between 302 and 301 redirects
• You can have a list of all your posts/pages/attachments together with their Twitter Friendly URLs on one page (AJAX pagination)
• Shows the short link in the edit post/page form together with the text you can tweet out (trimmed to 140 characters) and a link to Twitter with the predefined text
• You can output the twitter friendly link in your themes using the twitter_link() function
• Compatible with Sociable, Twitter Tools, Tweet This and AskApache Google 404 plugins
• Configurable linking relations (HTML and HTTP) for rel=shortlink, rel=canonical and rev=canonical
• Compatible with WordPress MU
• Super easy tracking with Google Analytics! Destination links are Taggable!
• Loads more yet to come

This is just a small sample of the type of intergration we do for you. Contact us now for a quote.

A question from Dan.

I am trying to help a band out with their web development and marketing.

I got some of the below ideas from the jonasbrothers.com website, however the band that I am doing this for is a completely different genre of music (it is an alternative rock band).

The members are completely into talking to fans via their website.

My gut says the major decision I am going to have is which CMS to use (I am leaning towards wordpress).

I am very interested in knowing what your suggestion would be for me.

I know they have a small budget to work with so maybe any custom programming could be done by some freelances.

The main thing is to make it easy to add content so we can manage a lot of it ourselves. If you could tell me about the format and how you would do it I would appreciate it.

I think the site should contain:

blog

built in music player

picture section (maybe linked to a flickr account)

video section (linked to youtube maybe)

sometype of twitter integration

sometype of myspace and facebook integration

a way to purchase merchandise

a subscriber/fan database for email newsletters communications

Hey Dan

Yes Wordpress is absolutely all that you want and can easily have all the features you want  incorporated into the site with plugins. If you provide most of the text and some photos I am sure we can get you started for $350 up front. I will also show you how you can add content, streaming audio and video easily.

Just use the contact form and lets get going.

In this post we want to look at the power of having your own website.

Unfortunately most people in the music industry do not understand the Internet and so end up spending huge amounts on a website that in the end simply is not effective.

You see search engines and the like only see text and yet what a lot of people do is add a lot of graphics. It is the text that gets you seen and not the graphics or media. The graphics are simply a way to enhance the text.

This site is going to be the calling card, it is going to be the place where people can look and listen to you whenever and wherever they are. This site has to hit them straight in the face and make people think WOW!! I strongly advise putting your music on this site for people to listen to – what sort of message are you sending out if you don’t? “Um – Yeah we are a great band, but we aren’t going to give a sample of any of our music!”, just don’t do it!

This is why we suggest most people let us install Wordpress so they can have great targeted text in pages and posts and also add media and graphics easily. We can then use this to get your site recognized in all sorts of places all over the net. Some question we need to ask:

1. How are people going to find our site once it is online?

By writing targeted text and telling people about your project with relevant headlines you can then leverage this to not only search engines but social bookmarking sites, RSS directories and many other online places where people hang out.

2. Who is going to design, create and maintain our site?

We can design your site and also have some great software that will allow you to partake in the process if you want. This means you get a fully customized website for a fraction of the cost.

3. What is going to be on this site? Gig updates, biography, photos, your music for example.

As part of our consulting package we can help you organize the appropriate content. We have been doing this for over 10 years and so know what works from a marketing point of view.

4. How much is all this going to cost?

Most Website developers create what we call brochure sites which are very graphically rich and hence cost a lot of money however with our system we concentrate a lot more on the text and still make it graphically appealing but only to provide eye candy. A typical start up site can start fro $350.00

5. How are we going to finance this?

You can finance this cost easily and then as you get more exposure add more. We also teach you how to do a lot of it yourself reducing the cost even futher. Because we use Wordpress many of the functionalities that Web Designers charge for are included free.

Make sure you do this correctly though, if you can’t do it correctly – then don’t do it at all. Make sure that the music is really good quality, you dont want some hissing music thats recorded poorly, ok it doesn’t have to be amazing studio quality but it has to sound good. We can organize this for you FREE.

Above anything a website is showing your audience that you have control and professionalism, if you want to be taken seriously – you need a website. Once you have a site, your music is now being played to the world!! Anyone can listen to it.

Dont get a profile page or a MySpace page confused with a website, while these are good and they have their uses, they have their limits. A website on the other hand – it has no limits to what you can do, it can be as big or as small as you want it to be. A well designed, well maintained website will give you an advantage over other bands that maybe only have a MySpace page.

As vital as a press pack is to send to radio stations, promoters and gig organisers – a website is an online press pack, it has everything! You can track the visitors to your website – I do.

Our  Analytics package is ideal for this, it shows you exactly how many visitors you have had in day, how many times each of those visitors have viewed your site. One of the great things you can use with it is that it shows you where those visitors are from, so if you have loads of hits from a particular city, you know you can use that information and set up a few gigs around that area.

Carefully plan what you are going to put on your site, of course you know that your are going to have brief biography of your band with a few sample songs and some cool photos. These are obvious things to include – and while they are good, you should think about a few other things too. Maybe not include these things straight away but definately in the future, always look at how you can improve your website. Lets be honest – your fans want you to have a website.

One of the things that I love most about a website is the potential it brings to earn you money. You can sell merchandise through it for starters. You can generate income through ads if needs be. All these things can go towards helping to finance your band, arranging tours, recording demo’s etc. How can you do this through a web page or your MySpace page? Answer is – you can’t!!

Don’t think this will be expensive to setup, it won’t be.

If you would like a quote and discuss with us your needs send us an email to start the ball rolling.

There are a lot of websites providing the ability for bands to set up a website however in most cases the provider gets most of the credit.

Bands who want their own domain and ability to sell their own music and add the things they want should look at developing their own site.

Streaming for musicians help bands and musicians do just this by using a program called Wordpress. First we register a domain of your choice and then load Wordpress for you. We can then customize the whole system so it can become a complete sales and promotions machine for you.

1.  Customized design - We can design the site with you or provide you with software to allow you to get the type and feel you want. Once finished we can compile for you and it can be changed at any time.

2. Free Streaming Audio – The beauty of Wodpress is that there are a number of plugins we can use to help show off your products and services for FREE. You can also have a download link for the file.

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3. Contact forms – Make it easy for fans and promoters to contact you without getting a whole lot of spam. We use an inline form to protect you but enable easy contact.

4. Free Public Streaming Video – We provide a system so you can add as many public videos as you like from over 10 public video sites and can even provide your own video hosting. Youtube is great but there are many more high quality sites you can stream from.

5. Blogging Platform – add unlimited blog posts to keep fans and media up to date with where you are and what your doing.

6. Unlimited Pages – add as many static pages as you like to show off your products, services, profiles and much more.

6. Search Engine Optimized – We help provide fully search optimized pages and posts and will add to social bookmarking sites to make sure you get maximum exposure. Add postings to your facebook, myspace and twitter acounts automatically.

7. New Ways to Promote You – There are a lot of new technologies that can help give you a better visibility and one of these is slideshare which can be easily added to your site and create a buzz.

So that’s just a small sample of what we can do for you. All this can be achieved and you can then manage the whole site yourself or we can do it all for you.

A basic site with all these features, we build 6 pages for you and help with your first few posts cost only $600 which also includes the training on how to write your own posts, add your own audio and videos and much more.

For a complete quote or if you are ready to get going use our contact form.

It doesn’t matter where you are in the world as we can use Skype or one of a number of communication tools to go through the process.