Are the days of promoting your band on the Facebook gone?

Part 95

  Why is it that every time you come across some great promotional tool, service, company etc. Eventually there comes a time at the end of the story when they ask for your credit card details? I am not saying you can buy your self a career, but you most certainly can buy your self a small bit of fame, if you wish to do so. Then we have the great promotional tools like the Facebook. But hold on, once again they changed something... If you have a band profile on Facebook, you have under every post a number that represents how many people your post has reached and a percentage of how many that is from your total fans. On average on posts that posted in the past month or so, the reach is around 19%. Once the post is up for longer time, I am happy if it reaches 40% in a month. So not so good news for the next show you are putting on. Seems like you got to go back to the good old fashioned posters... Unless people not only like your band page, but also subscribe to your news feed, most of them wont see your posts... Why is this? Well it comes down to the same thing, they are hoping to get your credit card details. Beside the reach figure there is a promote drop down menu, that promises to reach about 1500 of your fans for €5. That is if you have 1500 fans and I am still wondering what happens to your money if you don't... So yeah, here is the bad news, Facebook as it is right now, does not work as a free promotional tool. What bugs me even more is the fact that once again they decided to do this without letting us know and in the shadow of the company entering the stock market. Seven months ago it was very easy for me to reach about two to three hundred people a day with this blog, but just due to a small change in the Facebook, those days are gone. And I can only imagine how many bands put on shows, posted it on Facebook, and their fans actually never heard about it until long after the show.

  So here we go, if you are reading this blog, you have been warned! And once again we go back to the old truth, you need your website and your mailing list. No social media site is going to ever replace these tools.

     J.P.

What does it take to be a musician?

  What does it take to be a musician today? I think fifteen years a go if you asked me that question, you would got completely different answer than today. Back then of course in my young naivety I thought I knew everything... No I know heck of a lot more, but still I would openly admit that I have so much more to learn. Back in the day it was all about the music, nothing else than the music mattered, and of course i knew how to best play it... Now I know that the music matters, and I need to practice every day more, but that is not enough at all. I have had to learn how to manage my own career. I have had to learn how to run an cottage industry. I have had to learn how to record albums, as the studio time was out of our budgets. I have had to learn how to design CD covers and how to prep them for printers, as graphic designers were well out of our budget. We had to learn how to organize tours, budgets, travel arrangements, advertising, design websites, social media, video editing, Poster design. We had to learn how to get by with only few hours sleep, several hours drive in a crammed car and at the end of it set up a sound system and do a show with a big smile on your face. And this is only scratching the surface. You need to have an attitude, where nothing is impossible, just sometimes something that no one has done before. I have also learned the hard way, that if you want something done your way, learn to do it your self. And always build a good team. What I have got to do with Sliotar in the past six years is not far from a miracle, but a miracle that took us lot of hard work. And by this hard work I mean the kind of hard work where you spend every waking minute on something for weeks. Something that every one told you could not be done, but you just kept going. I know there are those old stereo types of sex, drugs and rock and roll, where musicians all just party all the time. But maybe next time you see something like this, you might consider the possibility that the musician might just had weeks worth of work culminate in to one night, and I think it would be only fare to let them blow off some steam. There was a time in my young days, when I wanted to concentrate only on music...Ahh those were the days... Little did I know about the learning curve I had a head of me:-D. So as you can see, if you just want to play music, I would recommend you do it as a hobby, but if you are willing to spend most of your waking hours thinking about every little detail and aspect of your career and you are not shy to work extremely hard year after year, being an independent musician can be one of the most rewarding jobs out there:-)
 So today Sliotars hard work once gain is bearing fruit in form of Sliotars fifth album Fine Friends:-) Here is a sneak preview for you: Tinkering on the bridge by Sliotar
 For more info go check out www.sliotarmusic.com
It is miles apart from what I do with JPKALLIO.COM, but that's what makes both bands so interesting for me.
   Talk to you next week:-) J.P.

Make your own band website part 2

  As some of you know, we had to hold back a little bit in the past few months due to some health issues. But now it looks like it’s going to be a full steam a head :-) We are trying to put a bit of a dent in to our 100 concert challenge before the years end, so few more gigs booked. JPKALLIO.COM will be taking part in the Battle of the bands organized by the Fibber Magees on 7th of October, again another Friday night gig for those of you working 9 to 5. And then we'll be doing the Juke box slot in the Sweeney's basement on 19th of October, I’m still working on some extra dates before the end of the year.

   But now let's bet back to our Build your own band website project. This will be the second part, and if you missed the first part, check out Make your own band website part 1. This week we'll get to the actual design part of your site. Another advantage of the Wordpress site is that you can use almost endless amount of templates available online. You might say here, why would I want to use a ready made template, it will only make our site look like so many other sites. But the thing is that you can customise most templates to certain level, and some you almost have complete freedom. I would look for a simple and functional template. These tend to be easier to customize. So now after last weeks set up you will be able to log on to your dashboard www.yourdomainname.com/yourwordpressfolder/wp-admin/ This is where you can do pretty much all the set up work and manage your website. This is something you do not have with normal websites. With them you need web design software and html knowledge. So let’s get started with something simple.

  On the left hand side you have a navigation bar, and there you can find at the very bottom Settings. This is the basic info of your website. For now all you need to worry about are the first two, Title and Tagline. The title should be your bands / websites name. On the tag line put a short description of the site. At the bottom of the page you have Change Settings button, click on it to save the changes. Next click on Appearance in the Navigation bar and a subfolder opens underneath it, select Themes. Wordpress comes with theme called Twenty ten. This is basic but very useful theme. So we are going to work with this. It allows you to do some customizing on it with in the basic tools. And with a little bit of CSS code you can make very nice and individual web page with it. On the Themes page you have two sub pages, the Manage themes and Install themes. On the Install themes you can search online for different themes and install them to your page (Just google wordpress themes and you will find thousands!), and on the Manage themes page you can actually activate the desired theme from the ones you have installed. So under every theme you will have three options: Activate Preview and Delete. Let's just click on the Activate. Now you have the very basics set up, and we will do small bit of customizing. Click on theme options on the Navigation bar. Here you can choose Light or Dark colour scheme, choose the link colour, and the basic layout of your page. The layout options basically puts the main body of your site on one side and small column on the other side, or you can just have the main body. I find the small columns handy as you can put your Soundcloud player, twitter feed or other more permanent stuff here. We'll go through this in a bit. Once you have selected the settings that best suit your site, press Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

  Click on the Header on the navigation bar here you can select a custom image for your header. This could be a photo of the band or a logo. There is also option to put some text on here, like your band name for example, but I find I have more control if I actually put the text in the header image. To do this you need some sort of image editing software. There is shareware software called Gimp 2 that I use all the time. For a shareware it is very powerful and even just compressing or re-sizing photos for Facebook, Emails etc. it is priceless tool. It will also let you re-size your header image to the required 1000x288 pixels. If you don't know how to do this, don't worry, Wordpress will chop it for you. But if you want the photo to be exactly to your dimensions, then head over to Gimp for some simple photo editing. Again once you have selected the photo you want to use by clicking choose file, select the image from your computer and then click upload, go to bottom of the page and Save Changes. There are other options on this page that are pretty self explanatory, but I think choosing the photo and if your band name/ web site name is on your picture just choose No in Display text.

  So now what you have is a very basic page with a header. Let's put some interactive stuff on your site :-) How about some music? Surely you want to put some music to your band website. We will use an external player. I have used several over the years, Reverbnation makes very nice looking players that have quite lot of customizing options, but Soundcloud is becoming the industry standard and the sound quality is very good. So if you don't have a Soundcloud account head over to www.soundcloud.com and register account, the basic pack is free and you do get up to 2hours of storage page at any quality. I personally like the fact that you can upload WAVs and even let other people download them in full quality. Once you have registered with Soundcloud uploaded some music, you can grab the Embed code from the sound cloud and copy it. Then click on the widgets on the Navigation bar on your Wordpress dashboard. Here lot of stuff pops up, but don't panic. What you have here is Available widgets, Inactive widgets and a Main sidebar on right hand side. In the Inactive widgets you have box called Text. Click and drag this to your Main sidebar. Once it appears here, just click on the downward arrow in the text box to open it. What you have then is a text box. Click on the text area and paste your embed code and save.

  Now I think it is time to have looked at the work you have done so far :-) At the top of the dashboard page you have small circular WordPress logo and beside it the name of your WordPress page (band/site name). I find it very useful to have two tabs open at the same time, one for the dashboard and one for your site. So right click on the name and choose open in new tab. Now click on the tab and you should see your basic site :-). There is a basic WordPress message on the main body of your site; we'll change this in minute. But check that the Header looks ok, and your Soundcloud player is in place. If it spills over from the side bar, which it should not do, but different browsers can be funny. So if this is the case, go back to Appearance and widgets. Here again click on the downward arrow in the Text box in the Main side bar. What you see is the HTML code for your Soundcloud player, and the first line looks like this: < object height="81" width="100 %" >. What we want to do here is change the 100% to a set width like 250 so you would have: < object height="81" width="250" >. Now the 100% repeats in the code again in the Embed tag, so towards the end of the code you will have width=”100%” again change the 100% to 250. And again save (what you have done here is go from % to fixed pixel size, this allows you bit more control). Now go back to the tab with your WordPress website and reload, any changes you make only appear on the site after you reload the page. Now the player should be the right size. Also on another note, you can use these text boxes for YouTube embed code as well, or for your twitter feed, pretty much any site that has embed widgets can be placed here.

   I think this is quite lot for this week, but I will just add one more thing. At the moment your website works like a blog. The Header and your side bar stays the same and you can use the main body area as news feed, or posting other stuff, so how you edit this is go to the Posts on the navigation bar. You'll have the WordPress message still here. Under the message you have options of edit, Quick edit, Trash and View. Just click on the Trash and the old message is gone. Now on top of the page there is Add new button, click this and add new post page opens up. You can edit the post in visual (Just write and add photos, links, videos, what ever you want by clicking a button) or in HTML (For the more detailed editing with HTML code). The visual is fine and you can just type some sort of welcome message for your website :-). On the right side you have blue publish button, once you press this your post is live on your website. You can make more posts, and the older ones will move down the page. Or you can trash them the same way we did trash the old WordPress message.

   That’s all for this week. Next week we are going to take a break from the web build, as we have another interesting industry interview coming up :-) But in two weeks time I'll show you how to build more pages for your website :-) Again if you have any trouble with any of the above, don't hesitate to contact me at jpkallio@hotmail.com and I'll do my best to help you out.

   Have a good week and we'll be back for more next week :-)
     J.P.

On a shoestring project part 31

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I've had a good look around in the past six months of the music scene in Dublin. I looked in to venues and promoters who put up shows for independent and up and coming bands, I looked in to local bands, what they do, how they promote them selves, where they play, how often they play... And I have found out few things that might need attention, and I will try to do my best to help this situation.
  First of all, we all know there are few cool venues around the town, where you can get a gig with an indie band. But I would like to see a list of venues and band nights online where any band could go and try their luck. But of course this is not as simple as just set it up and every one is happy. First of all, if I would post every venues promoters contact details, I think they would be ready to lynch me after a month of mail boxes full of not so great music... Second thing is that this list should be informative as well, there is no point trying to push your reggae band in to a heavy metal club. And if you just want a venue list, that’s what the Hot Press yearbook, is for. So what I will try to do is going to take me a long time and probably lots of help from musicians and music fans. As you know jpkallio.com started a 100 concert challenge, where to build up following, mailing list and social network lists. With in this challenge we will perform in quite few venues. So as we go along, I started a page on the blog where I will post the venues we played, and with the venue promoters permission I will share their contact information and some details of the venue and what kind of music they are looking for. I will work out the details of this page in the next few weeks, but the start up is already up. One-way or another it will be a free list, but again I do worry that the list will be abused by musicians who just waist promoters time... So be nice people:-) I also want to get a bit of a conversation going, where other bands and artists can share their experience of the venues and submit other venues. So first of all, let me know what you think of this idea, and also if you have any venue suggestions for the list you can send them to jpkallio@hotmail.com, or the comment section on the Indie Venue List page, that way they are there for every one to see.
  Second, I was very surprised how few up and coming bands have website! For the love of all good in the world, this is not that hard to do! There are loads of services on the net where you can get a template for a website, and I would be very surprised if you did not know any one in your friends who knows a bit of HTML. I started from the bottom... I think it was an Web design for Dummies, or something like that, about 12 years ago. But being a musician, I know it is sometimes hard to manage your time, and it feels like another over whelming task. I would like to make a web design guide for musicians, but to me right now that just seems more than I can take on. But maybe in the near future. Do you think this would be useful? And would you use it? For now, try it your self, there are endless amount resources online. If this fails, try to find some one who is willing to do it for you just for fun. Remember, it does not need to be the best website in the world. I believe that just an ok website is still million times better than no website. If you can't find any one, then try contacting some colleges and see if they can put you in contact with some students who might want to do this just to build their portfolio. The next step up from here would be getting a professional to do this, but be careful with your hard earned cash, shop around wisely. If all else fails, contact me. I am a musician, not a web designer, but I have done quite few sites so far and for a small fee I can get your website up and running.
On top of the website you need to have presence on as may social media sites and music sites as possible. I talked about compiling a list on them way back in one of the earlier blogs. But for now on our websites link list there is a links to our social media sites. Not all, but the ones that seem to be working for us. So just click on the link and sign up your own band up, and when you do, make us your friends :-) I will be tweaking this list almost weekly so keep an eye on www.jpkallio.com/links.html
  And hey, don't forget about our next concert! 31st of March in the Captain Americas on Grafton Street. The show starts at 10 with a support band and we'll be on right after them. This will be number two in our 100 concert challenge. I will leave you this week with a new video from our first concert :-) This is a song called “News” Back for more next week.