Online Promotion?

[casonwood]

So my band just finished our first album with a fantastic engineer/producer. We've finished all the mixing and mastering, and we're about to send the album off for printing.

Now we were going to spend our money (well we actually have a budget given to us by a company who sponsors us) on printing 2000 copies, but someone pointed out that most people will buy our tunes online and that we're only going to be getting rid of physical copies two ways.
1. By selling copies at our shows, and
2. By giving them out as promotional material to those in positions to help the band out.

The person then suggested that we print a fraction of our original count (say 1000 instead of 2000) and spend the rest of our budget on promoting ourselves online.

My lead singer/guitarist asked all the band members to research whether this is indeed the right route, how much quality online promotion costs, and if online promotion is effective.

So I thought I'd ask the wonderful resource of TB what your thoughts are. If it matters we're prog-rock group and you can hear our music at Link Removed by following the links to our reverbnation page. Note that the two songs on the site are our least progressive tunes, but should give you all a taste of our music.

 

[Ubersheist]

So my band just finished our first album with a fantastic engineer/producer. We've finished all the mixing and mastering, and we're about to send the album off for printing.

Now we were going to spend our money (well we actually have a budget given to us by a company who sponsors us) on printing 2000 copies, but someone pointed out that most people will buy our tunes online and that we're only going to be getting rid of physical copies two ways.
1. By selling copies at our shows, and
2. By giving them out as promotional material to those in positions to help the band out.

The person then suggested that we print a fraction of our original count (say 1000 instead of 2000) and spend the rest of our budget on promoting ourselves online.

My lead singer/guitarist asked all the band members to research whether this is indeed the right route, how much quality online promotion costs, and if online promotion is effective.

So I thought I'd ask the wonderful resource of TB what your thoughts are. If it matters we're prog-rock group and you can hear our music at Link Removed by following the links to our reverbnation page. Note that the two songs on the site are our least progressive tunes, but should give you all a taste of our music.

Online promotion is often just a ton of work. These days, if you're really looking to make a career of music off of your own music, you should work on promoting almost as much as you should work on the music/show/recordings. Unfortunately, the onus of this has been transfered from the now non-existant PR wings of record companies to the indivuals in the band.

You can place ads and such on line, but getting that ad to a target audience is often very difficult. As such, your money could be totally wasted on online ads or such. However, if you have something about your audience or music that's really specific, like you have a big following in WoW players because of a silly WOW-themed song you had, then ads on a WoW forum may pay off in spades. If you have a national/regional following, then targeted ads may really work for you. If you can think creatively and outside the box, then maybe some other targeted ads might work really well for you.

More effort and time should be spent connecting to your audience through Twitter, Facebook and email. These are free, but can take alot of time.

To get a sense for this, start really reading some music marketing industry blogs or websites. My favorite is hypebot. Some of the articles are totally cheeseball and obviously paid advertisement "news articles" about a specific potentially useless new website. However, really pay attention to the stories by current working musicians that explain how they made The Internets work for them.

Honestly, if you're an independent band without some gimmick (like the WoW example), then you're best off finding a creative way to connect to fans. I remember one of them was about a singer songwriter who started up a Kickstarter.com thing where if she gathered enough money in a specific city, she'd play a show there with everyone who chipped in getting in for free, or something like that. It totally worked for her.

These days, CDs really don't sell like they used to. It's now more of one of three things: 1) a method of getting gas money at shows that you're playing by selling some CDs, 2) it's also become a really, really expensive business card, and 3) a resume builder that shows you're actually serious.

I suggest sitting down and realistically trying to come up with some numbers, and break out a calculator. Are you guys touring, or just playing locally for now? How many shows do you play, and how many CDs do you realistically think you could sell at your best and worst shows? If you really aren't known with much following, then 1000 CDs will be with you for a long time unless you can really break out on a more regional level or bigger.

Probably one on this forum really knows about your band's capability to sell your CDs. As such, the choice is ultimately going to be back on you. Also, the Internet is still the "Wild West" for the music industry right now. It's starting to get more defined and see where it's strengths (potential for laser-precision marketing of your music, new and creative ways to make money and promote in ways very different from traditional methods, and personal connections through Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and weaknesses (cheap digital media, little money made through actual sales of digital or physical copies of music) are. If you really are looking to make money through music, then don't look to do it through CDs. It's now more of a cost of doing business, and old-school attitudes of having a physical product need to fall by the wayside in lieu of more practical, modern thinking.

 

[bassbully]

Good Luck! My band is in the same boat and it's sinking We released our first full length album this past summer pressed about 1200 copies to sell at show's, CD baby and giveout for promotion. Sales are slow but they are well received.
I would split the budget and use it for tours or promotion, but on the promotion part ..where? I'm interested in any idea's others have as well. We have had a few reviews and others promised that were never done. There are outside companies that will help you get airplay or send them out to stations with a release but it's costly. I'm getting to the point that for my band sit's just what it is. The album was a labor of love to share our music with other's and that's it.

 

[casonwood]

You can place ads and such on line, but getting that ad to a target audience is often very difficult. As such, your money could be totally wasted on online ads or such.

I should probably be more specific. My guitarist asked that we research two specific ways of online marketing (if we found others that might be successful he's also all ears). He wanted us to research mass messages on social network sites, which personally I'm wary of doing as I don't thinks it's very effective or professional. He also wanted us to look into services online that raise your website to the top of the list when people use specific key words when using search engines. Searching 'Advent Horzion' brings up our website as the first hit, but he was thinking about raising our website's hit response when searching things like 'progressive rock'.

To get a sense for this, start really reading some music marketing industry blogs or websites. My favorite is hypebot. Some of the articles are totally cheeseball and obviously paid advertisement "news articles" about a specific potentially useless new website. However, really pay attention to the stories by current working musicians that explain how they made The Internets work for them.

Thank you, looks like I have some reading to do.

These days, CDs really don't sell like they used to. It's now more of one of three things: 1) a method of getting gas money at shows that you're playing by selling some CDs, 2) it's also become a really, really expensive business card, and 3) a resume builder that shows you're actually serious.

Good Luck! My band is in the same boat and it's sinking We released our first full length album this past summer pressed about 1200 copies to sell at show's, CD baby and giveout for promotion. Sales are slow but they are well received.

This confirms what we've been worrying about, and why we're looking into other means of spending our budget.

I suggest sitting down and realistically trying to come up with some numbers, and break out a calculator. Are you guys touring, or just playing locally for now? How many shows do you play, and how many CDs do you realistically think you could sell at your best and worst shows? If you really aren't known with much following, then 1000 CDs will be with you for a long time unless you can really break out on a more regional level or bigger.

I would split the budget and use it for tours or promotion, but on the promotion part ..where? I'm interested in any idea's others have as well. We have had a few reviews and others promised that were never done. There are outside companies that will help you get airplay or send them out to stations with a release but it's costly. I'm getting to the point that for my band sit's just what it is. The album was a labor of love to share our music with other's and that's it.

With the fact that we're sponsored by a company that essentially pays all of our expenses, until we can show that we will make a profit from a tour we're stuck playing locally. We have a good following around here - all the local bands know us well and we have plenty of fans who show up to every other show - but we're looking to break out of the isolated bubble that is Utah. We're hoping to unload a large portion of our CDs at our next show where we'll have most of our fans in one location, and are planning on handing out some copies at NAMM (on our sponsor's pocket book) to those who are interested, which I'm super stoked for.

. . . Also, the Internet is still the "Wild West" for the music industry right now. It's starting to get more defined and see where it's strengths . . . and weaknesses . . . are. If you really are looking to make money through music, then don't look to do it through CDs. It's now more of a cost of doing business, and old-school attitudes of having a physical product need to fall by the wayside in lieu of more practical, modern thinking.

I don't think we're planning on making much money from these CDs; right now it's all about getting our name and music out there to those who would enjoy it. I completely agree with you on physical products diminishing in importance for an original group. I'm just trying to figure out what exactly the next innovation to sell music today in our modern age actually is I know there isn't ONE solution to it, so I guess I'll do some research on the sites listed above and see what I can come up with.

 

[bassbully]

It is really hard today to sell a band when nobody is buying..sad. I was talking to a guy who had to great local bands that toured nationally for 10 years. Today he is solo and doing a day job ..gave up the dream. He said a national artist he toured with that was struggling with him for years finally made it and is doing well today after finding an agent that got him radio play all for $5000.00 a month.