The Hot Toddies

Hi,

Quick shout-out to a fabulous band we just discovered. Ladies and gentlemen, The Hot Toddies! The most apt description we can think of is a cross-over between The Beach Girls and The Breeders 2.0. Check out their catchy, tongue-in-cheek song "HTML" below, and make sure to visit their site for more.

Beware, their songs will haunt you for the rest of the week ;-)

Bad Maxton

How to get exposure as an Internet/virtual band? (2)

[This is part 2 in a series of blog posts. Part 1 can be found here.]

2. Free Internet Radio

The clever interface of thesixtyone, featuring one of our songs (apparently, we're pretty unique ;-)).

There you are, having just uploaded your masterpieces to your 10 social network sites and spammed hundreds of fans with blatant self-publicity. While frantically refreshing the song play and fan visit stats across your sites, you can't help but wonder why your stats remain near zero. This must be a bug, right? Or, err, is no one taking the effort to listen to your songs, or even visit your site?

Well, considering that there are millions of bands and artists out there, each having, say, on average five songs, nobody's really waiting for you. Traditionally, bands would go out and play concerts to make a name (a process that might take ages), but, remember, we're talking here about Internet bands in particular, who don't necessarily have that opportunity. So, what to do?

Think about it for a minute, how do people usually learn about new songs? Right, they turn on the radio! You could try sending a demo to your local or national radio station, hoping to be discovered and being hailed as the new Lady Gaga. There's an easier way, though, called "Internet radio". Basically, artists upload their music. The Internet radio then streams your songs to its listeners, in a channel specific to your style of music, or maybe even randomly. Granted, Internet radio is still not as main-stream as traditional radio, but you'll get at least a couple of dozen song plays, or, who knows, even more.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of Internet radios, in all sizes, shapes and prices. We selected some of the better-known, free stations:

• www.last.fm
• soundcloud.com
• alonetone.com
• www.thesixtyone.com
• www.bandsoup.com
• www.betarecords.com
• www.purevolume.com

Some radios have really nifty interfaces, such as alonetone, thesixtyone and bandsoup. The latter, for example, centers around a bowl of (yes) soup. New songs start off in the centre of the bowl, before gradually straddling off to the border of the bowl, and disappearing. At random moments in time, your song can be beamed back to the centre of the soup, briefly returning you in the spotlights.

From our experience, Internet radio stations are an ideal way to get your songs heard, yet they are not magic. Similar to the social networking sites, your music gets duplicated across multiple places. Also, while people listen to your songs and might even add them to their favourites, they typically won't comment on your songs, still leaving you without feedback. Time for even heavier weapons (stay tuned ;-)).

How to get exposure as an Internet/virtual band? (1)

Well, good question ;-) If we'd known the answer, we probably wouldn't be writing this blog post :-) That said, we thought it might be interesting to explain how we've tried to get some exposure as a band, hoping to get some input from fellow artists, so here goes ...

First off, what are "Internet/virtual bands"? According to wikipedia:

An Internet band (also sometimes called a virtual band) is a musical group whose members collaborate online through broadband by utilizing a content management system and local digital audio workstations.

So, Internet bands are a relatively recent breed of artists who never (or rarely) meet each other in real-life, for different reasons. Maybe nobody in their area likes their music or wants to collaborate, or maybe a band member moves abroad to study or work. Since playing concerts is less trivial, and the band not really has a home base, it becomes challenging to be heard as a band, and hence to get feedback or start up new collaborations.

This series of blog posts considers concrete ideas that bands, and in particular Internet bands, could follow to get exposure and realize their musical dreams. Since our band's promotion strategies are very much work-in-progress, your input is highly welcome!


1. Social Networking Sites

reverbnation site of one of our favourite bands ;-)

The first thing any band should do, is to get a spot on one or a combination of social networking sites geared towards artists. There are gazillions of such sites. Some of the best-known are:

• www.myspace.com
• www.facebook.com
• www.reverbnation.com
• www.ilike.com
• www.unsigned.com
• uplaya.com
• www.hypedsound.com

Which one to pick? Frankly, we tried all of the above. Since each site has a different audience, putting your music in multiple places helps to spread your music to different groups of people. The downside of such a practice is that you need to upload your songs and photos time and time again, making synchronization of your content tedious. Fortunately, sites like reverbnation help you consolidate your content in one place by automatically forwarding messages to twitter, facebook and myspace, or by providing clever music player widgets that you can post on different sites, for example myspace.

Another risk is that social networking sites only work if you're behaving, err, social. So, the more visibility you desire, the more social interaction is required on each site. Otherwise, people won't notice you, which brings us to the point of our next blog post.

Website moved to reverbnation!

Hi,

After ample consideration and experiments, we decided to move our main site and blog from myspace to the excellent reverbnation and blogger respectively. We hope you will enjoy this move.

Rock on!