Dear bands, if you aren’t online, just go ahead and give up.
This may sound overly harsh, but if you are a fan of live music, you know how frustrating it is to try to find out more about artists who haven’t yet joined the 21st century.
Ultimately, it all boils down to motivation. Playing for the love of music is great and all, but a group without an audience is just engaged in endless practice.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2009 population survey, 76.7 percent of households have some degree of access to the Internet. That’s almost 250 million people. If your mind isn’t spinning at the prospect of such a vast potential fan base, you’re the wildebeest that won’t make it past the lions this time.
As a band, if you hope to survive in the Internet age, you desperately need to connect with fans on a deeper level than is possible simply by sending out a street team to throw up some posters. Ideally, you need to tweet at them and speak to them through a video blog; the more interactive the communication, the better.
At a bare minimum, you need a website.
Let me forestall your handwritten, mailed counter-argument about how you don’t understand technology — to which I’ll respond by email — because being online is no longer a question of one’s tech savvy.
Marketing your band online isn’t about a flashy intro page or a bunch of pointless, animated icons. In fact, those elements often get in the way.
All you really need is somewhere to throw up a band biography, a show listing, a contact page and maybe some pictures.
Obviously, you’ll need a computer, or access to one, but three-quarters of the world can claim that feat of technological advancement. And if you’re concerned about needing to know how to program HTML, you’ve missed out on some tremendous advancements in ease of use over the years.
The simplest way to get started, and the one more and more bands are using, is through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. The former is more streamlined and has a larger user base, while the latter is more customizable.
Let’s stick with Facebook, since it reaches more than 525 million daily users.
I created a page for myself as an example (facebook.com/caseyonthebanjo), and the process was staggeringly easy.
After clicking “create a page” at the bottom of any Facebook profile, the site holds your hand through each step of making a band profile, from choosing a picture to inviting your friends to become fans. From there, there are even more options, either built in to Facebook or via approved add-on applications such as BandPage, for uploading music and accessing other advanced features. The whole process took me 13 minutes.
If you don’t have that kind of time to devote to being more visible to millions of people — including my 86-year-old grandfather, by the way — go ahead and disregard my opening salvo. You don’t need to give up; you already have.
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @Phillips CTFP.