Five Music Promotion Shortcuts
Nothing’s a better time sucker than making music, except perhaps trying to pimp your music online through social media and your website. Digital media have given indie artists at least a fighting chance at building a fan base and making a living, but if you’re a DIY type with a day job, maintaining your online presence can easily sap the free time that’s supposed to be dedicated to your art.
The following services are designed to help you get the most out of digital promotion in the time it takes you to skip out to the deli on your lunch hour.
Update all your social networking profiles, event calendars, and news from one location. ArtistData supports info syncing to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, PureVolume, ReverbNation, SonicBids, FanBridge, and more — a total of 27 sites so far.
ArtistData Base – free
Among the features included in the free version are unlimited data synchronization to profile sites, unlimited shows submitted to the top concert databases, customizable show widget for your website, automated day-of-show reminder status updates, and your own RSS Headlines feed for all your news, shows, and blog entries.
ArtistData Gold – $9.99/month
Adds multiple users to an account; a calendar tool for Google Cal, Outlook, iCal, etc.; posts concert posters and images to profile sites; direct links to your blog, website or Facebook RSVP page; and more.
Band Metrics (beta) tracks and organizes data for your band
ArtistData Platinum – $24.99/month
Local media alert tool for your shows, accelerated sync for your sites, priority access to support team, and more.
This services tracks and organizes data for your band, including national maps that show you where you’re getting radio play or where your Twitter buzz is coming from.
Another feature ranks your fans into groups from casual listeners to fanatics. Band Metrics is still in beta, so many new features are coming. Anyone can join up now for free.
Make yourself an iPhone and Android mobile app that you can use for selling music and merch, as well as updating fans with news and show information. Mobile Roadie helps you out with a template for choosing a theme, customizing the graphics, videos and music; and then managing the app’s distribution to the App Store and Android Market.
Make yourself an iPhone and Android mobile app with Mobile Roadie
Users of the apps can get push notification for your tickets sales and news, forward your news to Facebook and Twitter, chat directly with you and earn point rankings for using the app.
Mobile Roadie is definitely a pro-level service. If you need something for a lower budget, also check out AppOmeter.
Mobile Roadie Core – $499 set up and $29/month or $1,200/year
Mobile Roadie Plus – $999 set up and $49/month or $2,500/year
Mobile Roadie Pro – $1,999 set up and $99/month or $5,000/year
Maybe you’re not sure if you’re ready to build an app yet, or if there’s even a demand among your fans for one. If so, you could use Mozes to create a mobile phone text messaging list. The Mozes web-based platform lets you, for example, send and receive voice messages, send targeted messages to certain segments of your audience, do a text voting campaign, run mobile contests, stream fans’ camerphone photos, send trackable links and see metrics of the results, and much more.
Mozes Standard – $10/month
This plan gives you one project and one active campaign, with up to 250 messages a month. You can distribute ringtones and wallpapers, target segments of your list, collect fan comments and build a mobile list to send text alerts, links, and polls.
Mozes Group – contact for price
With this bigger plan, you get up to five active campaigns and extra features such as mobile sweepstakes, mobile coupon codes, and trackable links to online storefrounts. Mozes also has higher-level plans that would probably only apply to artist who have a manager, publicist and/or label supporting them. Check out their plan page if that applies to you.
Instant Band Site is a WordPress plug-in that uses a template based format to create a music website for you with a minimal amount of labor to get started and to post updates. Hundreds of templates are available, and you just need a free (or paid) WordPress site to get started.
Nimbit Instant Band Site is a template-based WordPress plug-in
The whole thing is set-up to save time, and if you’ve really embraced the time-is-money ethos, you can pay $199 or $299 to have all the set-up work done for you.
NimbitFree – free
Instant Band Site with NimbitFree gives you a store to sell music directly from your site, an email list sign-up, a streaming music player, connections to your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, integration with photo libraries and other WordPress add-ons, and an artist bio, blog, and event calendar.
NimbitIndie – $12.95/month or $129/year
This adds a complete store for selling physical merchandise with credit card processing and order fulfillment, distributes to digital stores such as iTunes and Amazon, HTML email blasts, fan analytics and more.
NimbitPro – $24.95/month or $249/year
You’re top-shelf all the way, and you get many more sales and content management tools with this premium plan.
— Markkus Rovito
Markkus Rovito plays drums, DJs and hacks away on the QWERTY in San Francisco. He has written for Gearwire, DJ Tech Tools, Remix, EM, and Mac Life, among others.
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Matt Verzola
October 14, 2010 at 5:12 pm (14 years ago)Similar to Nimbit – I’ve always been a fan of Bandcamp.com