Your #1 sales reps

You’re heading out to a gig. On go the AC/DC socks and pants set (in case you pull, you’ll shake them all night long), Iron Maiden trainers with Eddie’s face on them, that cool Baroness t-shirt, denim jacket with Municipal Waste and Motorhead patches, and your beloved Megadeth cap – do you ever get the feeling like you’re one of those multi band fliers that get handed out at gigs?

All these bands are exceptional at branding (or perhaps their record label is) and although that Slayer air freshener may have represented a step too far for you, it’s big business – in fact, it’s fast becoming bigger business than the sale of the music itself. The music industry, traditionally centred around selling only music, are clambering to get into the merchandising game offering bands 360 record deals that include selling merch (and live shows, plus distribution, publishing etc.) in an attempt to bolster their languishing profits. Traditionally the bastion of mega b[r]ands like Kiss and Iron Maiden, it’s now becoming normal for even the most marginal of bands to view themselves as a brand – the era of bands as brands is upon us.

It’s worth clarifying what I mean by ‘branding’. The retail world decades ago cottoned on to the fact that a consistent approach to advertising their products led to more sales. It’s a simple psychological reality that, when someone who is given a choice of similar items, they will choose one that they are more familiar with or is more recognisable. It didn’t take advertisers long to work out that, with the right product image, you could build up feelings affinity, identification, even devotion to otherwise completely mundane or functional products. This then expands out to product ranges, then to merchandising related to product ranges. In this day and age, it’s got abstracted to the point where, in some cases, the brand is as important (if not more so) than the product (take Apple as an example of this).

The music industry was slow to get to grips with this, but fast to capitalise – and it’s getting better all the time. The heavy metal world is spectacular at this. Most metal bands have an identifiable logo, a sub-genre, an identifiable band image, and fans that will wear their t-shirts, hoodies, caps etc. This stuff all pulls together to form a band’s brand. It’s what makes you instantly recognisable to folks who know your music, but your brand image is a viral mechanism in itself – a badge of honour, sign of allegiance, a deriver of coolness (or uncoolness) – and when wielded correctly can be the single most important factor in the success of a band.

Bands like Black Sabbath or more recently Mastodon and icons like Kurt Cobain this exude coolness and create culture and identity effortlessly that people immediately attach to. Other bands have record companies pay millions of quid on creating this identity (eg. Linkin Park). But either way, it’s a powerful mechanism for spreading affinity with a band.

Now, on to the economics. Traditional musical marketing, broadly speaking, considers 4 elements (and seemingly in this order of importance):

1. The format containing the music (record, tape, CD, MP3) – the Cornflakes box if you will
2. The music itself – the Cornflakes
3. The band and their image – the Kellogg’s brand
4. Sales of other related stuff like merchandise – like, umm, those branded Kellogg’s bowls you used to get I guess

The purpose here is clear – sell more music, just as it is for Kellogg’s to sell more packs of Cronflakes. Given the dwindling sales of music (you know the reasons, I’ll not patronise you by repeating them) it’s starting to become necessary for this paradigm to shift. To maximise revenue generated by a band, all potential product lines must be considered, and their relative commercial merits should be judged within the context of that particular band – to give a facile example, metal fans are more likely to buy t-shirts and CD’s whereas Dance music fans are more likely to buy records and record bags. So if your core motivator with regards to generating cash is no longer the music, but a diverse and malleable collection of product lines, where is your focus? The band of course! The band, their music, their image and that of the label are vehicles to shift more stuff, be it CD’s, bandanas or bog roll. In fact, it’s conceivable for a band to exist and be very successful without ever officially releasing any music at all (more thoughts on this at a later date)

And let’s be perfectly clear here – a fan that buys a t-shirt is potentially more important to you than one that buys the music. Why? Well, they like you enough to wear your band’s name on their body, and walk around like a big advert. They hang around with their buddies who want to know who the hell that wondrous looking band on that t-shirt is. People are now talking about your band – the importance of this should not be underestimated. And because kids tend to like to fit in with the crowd, they’ll probably all go off and buy one for themselves, thus propagating the same mechanism. Did all these kids ‘steal’ your album from the interwebs? Probably, yeah, but what have you really lost? You’ve shifted some t-shirts that you probably wouldn’t have, which are generally more profitable anyway, and whether they bought the music or not, they’re still fans.

File sharing aside, squeezing profit, or even return on investment on physical and even digital music sales is nigh on impossible for most bands. The overheads are big, distribution and promotion hard and costly. Merchandise tends to be more profitable as the margins on each item are higher and the overheads lower. Also, when you concentrate on selling the music, you can really only sell a couple of items to any 1 individual (CD’s, collector’s packs, record), but clever branding and merchandising opens the door to sell a whole range of other items to peddle to all the adoring fanatics.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that unsigned bands stop releasing albums/EPs. The artistic merits of the album format aside, they provide a vital marketing mechanism, and a way to manage your marketing over time in discrete chunks (analogous to campaigns in marketing speak). Spending out on decent recording and some nice artwork is essential, but when looking to recoup that cost, you should place your emphasis on selling merchandise rather than CDs, and even consider giving the music away in digital form, either in part or in its entirety, to help shift more merchandise and spread awareness of your band. This depends on the band, but you should generally only consider a physical release if there is CLEAR demand for it, and always consider getting up on iTunes as the priority.

The best approach to branding and merchandising will be different for every band, and the key to success is agility – the ability to roll with what the fans are demanding – something which the bigger record companies are terrible at.

If you’re in a band, you’re agile and creative, so this stuff should come naturally to you, so get on with it!

Techniqes for getting inbound links #1: Immortal politely request that you link to their myspace

So you’re in a band. You’re probably young, internet savvy and have a profile on every social networking site going. You have mates that run various websites and your housemate knows a bloke that runs a porn site. Getting links to your site is easy right? Not as easy as you make think. Let’s examine.

In my last article I talked about the mythical, mystical term pagerank. Broadly speaking, this increases as you get links to your site, and will improve how high up in search listings your pages appear. Getting links is good. However, from a search perspective, not all links are created equal.

Now, I preface this by saying that links are generally a good thing regardless of the effect they have on search. Links increase traffic on your site, and if their source is a page that is created by someone people respect the opinion of, then the link is like gold dust – imaging if Lee Dorian posted a link to your Doom band, or Terroriser magazine linked to you from an article about Emperor. This is precisely the real world situation that the search engines use to try and decide whether your page is important or not. The logic is, if PageA is important, and it links to PageB, then PageB must have some level of importance too. Also, if PageA is about Industrial Acoustic Punk, then there’s a fair bet that PageB is too.

So your mates all have Myspace pages, just get them to link to your site and hey presto pagerank! Right? Wrong. Some sites, most notably social networking sites, apply properties to links on their pages that explicitly prevent those links from carry through pagerank. This is so that people don’t use their pages for the sole purpose of driving up pagerank. Those links may well be valuable in the real world, indeed they may be the most valuable links you get, but they will not help you at all from a pagerank perspective. Some sites that apply this restriction are:

• Myspace
• Facebook
• Bebo
• Twitter (notice this is a link? FOLLOW ME!)

This also often goes for links placed in comments on blogs or posts in forums. Another thing to note is, that if a link is too easy to get (for example comments on blogs) then the search engines are likely to view them as lower value, and carry less importance to them – so spamming every metal blog you know with links probably won’t help much (this, however, not a bad way to drive general awareness of your band, but more on that later).

One more gotcha, before I start to get to things that actually will help. That mate with a porn site? Steer well clear of any links that he offers. If the search engines start to associate you with the, shall we say, less wholesome areas of the web, then you could end up getting excluded from the mainstream search results and only appear in searches like “hard metal insertion” along with some less healthy websites.

This sucks, you’re thinking, why bother? Well, a few good quality links can go a long way.

The easiest and best technique for gather good quality links is link swaps. When you meet new bands of a similar ilk, then offer to put a link to their band’s site on your website of they do the same. The more of these, the better. You’ll only build up a little bit of link juice that way, but it all adds up.

Secondly, if you can get a mention (even if it’s a bad one!) on a metal site or blog (Metalsucks, Invisible Oranges, Metal Injection and, of course, The Inevitable Nose are all good metal sites that feature small and unsigned bands) then this will help a LOT. It’s a good idea to read these sites regularly and make decent contextual comments (eg. “I love this video, but really, Mastodon are not of their best form at the moment” rather than “Mastodn suxxx LOLLLLLFAIL”) to build a bit of rapport with the writers. Then, send across your music, once you have decent recording, as they usually have email addresses listed. If you know they’re local to you, then invite them to your gig. Don’t spam though – use considered and informative correspondence and be personable!

Finally, be linkable. If your page looks good, contains useful information, then people will want to link to it.

2 more points to make and then we’ll move on, because this is getting pretty long! Links all have at least 2 properties: the link itself and the anchor text. I’m going to talk about both these.

The anchor text is the text that actually displays in the browser to be clicked on (“click here”, “visit the band’s myspace here”). Google uses this text as a strong indicator as to the content of the page to which it’s linking, so if you have any influence over what this text is then you can use this. Most links will simple be your band’s name – this is a good thing, this will allow you to build up a pagerank against your band name as a search term. But if you can get a few links that also mention your band’s genre (eg. “listen to this amazing acoustic death metal band”) then this will also really help you get a foothold against that genre for search.

With regards to the link, remember that I made a point of saying that pagerank is generated against single pages? This is important. If some sites are using your Myspace, and others your band’s website, then your link juice for each page is less overall, making it harder for any one of your pages to rank. It’s a good idea to decide which page best represents your band and will best convert folks stumbling across your band into fans (more on this later) then promote that link alone. That way, sites are most likely to link there.

OK, that’s it for this lesson kiddies. I’ve really only scratched the surface, but don’t get daunted; if you only apply the rules I’ve thus far mentioned, it will help you a lot.

SEO for Metal Bands #3

SEO for Metal Bands #2

SEO for Metal Bands #1

This billboard speaks the truth

Here’s a thought for unsigned bands who a) are feeling a little squeamish about giving away tracks for free or b) still think filesharing is bad for them.

So when you go to your shitty day job every day, and you’re sitting in the same traffic or on the same train (running late for the 3rd day in a row) do you notice the billboards gliding past you? It’s the same ad every day for weeks on end. You probably forgot about it, but still it’s there day after day, same place. Whether you like it or not, the name of that washing powder if tattooed on you memory despite the fact that you’ll never use the stuff (beer is the ultimate substance for cleaning clothes right?)

Companies pay hundreds, if not thousands of quid for that sort of ad placement. Whether you’re paying attention or not, that advert is making an impression on you. This is an age old and well understood advertising technique, and is used widely in web advertising.

Now let’s imagine another scenario. You’re an unsigned band struggling to get noticed. You give away a free MP3 of one of your tracks and advertise it on your Myspace. People like free stuff, and 50 people download it. Think about what you have there now, before going off half cocked about how those freeloaders should be paying you for that track that cost you 200 quid to record. Your band name is Metatron (Industrial Acoustic Grindcore since you’re asking), and because you were diligent enough to get your ID3 tags set properly on that file it now sits comfortably under Metallica in the “Artists” menu on most people’s iPod. Think about that for a second. You gave up 1 track, and now, every time those 50 people go to listen to Master of Puppets they will see your band’s name (the same logic applies to iTunes, Media Player etc.).

The brain is wired to attribute value to this sort of connection. This is why companies will pay so much money to sponsor music venues. From now on, those folks are going to remember your band’s name, even if they never listen to that track again. It’s like you’ve got a mini billboard sitting in a bunch of folks’ pockets. Now, I’m not going to start banging on about your band as a brand (although I fully intend to very soon), but the more folk’s iPod you can get that track on, the less time, money and effort you’re going to need to spend on raising awareness of your band later on.

Knowing that, if I were an unsigned band, I’d be actively encouraging people to share my tracks.

We want email!

Whether you like it or not, if you’re in a band (unsigned or otherwise), you are a business. You have ‘customers’ (the fans), you generate revenue (the 10 quid you made from that gig down your local) and have overheads (booze, guitar strings). It doesn’t matter how big or small you are. Not very rock n’ roll I know, but an unavoidable reality. I’ve spoken before about bands viewing themselves as small business; indeed in the changing music landscape, this is going to become more and more of a necessity. I’m aware that at some point you may be one of the lucky few to be offered a record deal, but in the meantime you still want to be packing out those gigs, selling merch and getting your music heard right?

So I’m going to spend a little time talking about your fans and how you engage them at the times you’re not screaming at them and jumping on their heads. The corporate world has this concept called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which relates to the management of customers or contacts and how you engage with them. It’s big business. Massive. The music industry uniformly sucks at it. It’s because they assume that they have the fans in a strangle hold – the fans want the music, they proved that by buying the last record, so all we have to do is make the new one and tell them about it. Well times are a changing folks. When a band’s new album is on the internet before most of the folks at the label heard it, then you need to look at engaging your ‘customers’ in the different way.

This aside, as an unsigned band, communicating well with your fanbase could make or brake you as a band. You’re reliant on them to buy your stuff, spread the word about your band and turn up to gigs. You probably can’t afford much advertising or PR, so you need to rely on your fanbase to help you stay afloat. If this is done well, not only will you create a base of well informed devotees (known as advocates in the business world) but you may even make a bit of money.

So what exactly am I on about? Well, those adoring faces in the front row getting kicks out of your mad skillz on your Les Paul have names, likes and dislikes, personalities. They also have emails addresses, Myspace/Facebook/Twitter accounts, money and a propensity to bang on about your band to anyone who will listen. The row back from there have all of the above but may be yet to be convinced about your band. The row behind them didn’t get your EP yet and only turned up because one of the kids in the front row keeps banging on about how good your band is.

These people have information, all of which can be used to help connect with them, to get them to help you, to sell more stuff to them. If you can get the email addresses of a quarter of the folks at that gig – say 25 people – you now have 25 direct lines into people’s lives to tell them about your next gig, your ace new t-shirt, your new record.

This all probably seems blindingly obvious, and you may already by doing this, or perhaps you’ve got a bunch of friends on Facebook. Let me tell you about that little collection of gold dust. Some big corporates will pay literally hundreds of pounds for a single email address. It’s depressingly common practise for companies to spend out £10 per contact!

You can get it free. Perhaps you need to give a little out (maybe a free mp3 download) but it’s worth it. If you collect 100 email addresses across 3 gigs, and send out emails to these folks, and get 3 t-shirt sales as a result, is it worth it? Hell yeah! Here’s what you have now:

1. A few quid
2. 3 walking adverts for your band
3. The email addresses of 3 people who like your band enough to want to wear your shitty t-shirt!

Which is the more important of these outcomes? Number 3 of course! Next time you send out a bunch of email, you don’t spam these 3 about merch, you send them a link to download one of your new tracks and a free ticket to your next gig. Now what you have is someone who’s going to make damn sure they turn up at your next gig, proudly sporting your t-shirt, and bring all their mates.

This is a fairly facile example, but it illustrates how CRM works. I know a company that would personally deliver free laptop to their key advocates loaded with all the stuff they needed to do more of what they were doing.

There’s plenty of ways of doing this, but getting the basics right is important. If you get a bunch of contacts and proceed to spam them, then not only will they start to hate you, they’ll bitch about you to all their mates. If you treat all your fans as equal, then you’re missing a trick. If you do nothing at all, who’s to say they’ll ever give you a second thought?

In the following articles we’ll talk about ways to gather data, what we do with it, and how we manage different profiles of fan. These techniques and considerations should be built into the daily running of your band along with turning up for rehearsals, booking gigs and screwing groupies.

Pagerank diagram or Death Metal band logo?

I’ve mentioned this mystical term ‘pagerank’ in my previous articles and probably made it seem like manna from heaven. It’s not that important in the grand scheme of things, but it is helpful to understand what it is, as the main contributor to achieving a decent pagerank IS the most important thing for search optimisation: getting links. I’ve split this piece into 2 parts. The first is an explanation of pagerank and the second covers the real world practicalities, strategies and gotchas of link building. So here’s my dummies guide to pagerank.

So go download Google’s toolbar. There’s some vaguely useful tools on there, mostly it just takes up screen space in your browser window, however, for the purposes of this article, there’s a very handy tool on there: the pagerank indicator (it’s somewhere near the middle). This shows a little green bar, and if you hover your mouse over it a number out of 10. This indicates the public page rank of the page which you are on. Now, note what I said there – this number refers to the page, not the whole site. This is a numeric value, between 0 and 10 (0 bad, 10 good), that represents how important your page is in Google’s index (the index being the total list of pages Google knows about). Spend a little time surfing around the pages associated with your band, some other favourite sites, then some big sites (BBC, Amazon, Google, Apple etc.) and check the pagerank for those sites, as well as various pages within those sites. This will give you an idea of how pagerank is distributed. Now, this is only the public pagerank, which gets updated a couple of times a year, and is purely meant as an indicator of how your site’s performing for in Google’s search index. Real ‘pagerank’ is somewhat more complex and probably doesn’t exist in any form that we’d understand in Google’s (and indeed other search engines’) search algorithm. However, it can be broadly described like this:

Pagerank is a property that search engines apply to a page when other pages link to it and is used to derive a sense of importance and authority of that page. This influences how high in the search listings your pages appear when people search for terms relating you your site – generally speaking, pages with higher pagerank should appear higher up in search listings than those with less. It’s that simple, at least for the purposes of this article and understanding the basics.

However, due to the complexities of the internet and the propensity for people to try and abuse this mechanism (using link farming for example), the best practise to apply when attempting to improve your pagerank are important to understand.

Now, pagerank for any given page is inherited from the pages that link to it. However, the amount of pagerank that those pages yield depends on how many other pages they link to – so a page with a pagerank of 5, that has links to 5 other pages, would pass on a pagerank of 1 to each of those pages. Now I don’t want you to worry too much about this as it can get VERY confusing, but suffice to say, the higher the pagerank of the pages linking to your page, the more pagerank your page will acquire.

Now, don’t go get all excited now because your dad runs a dental supplies website with a pagerank of 6 that you can con him into linking to your site from. You will remember that I spent a while in my previous article going on about how it’s important to classify and define your band, and that the search engines classify your pages by the company they keep? This is important. Yes, you will derive pagerank to your band’s page regardless of what type of pages link to it, but if these pages are all about different, non-related stuff (eg. dental supplies, badger baiting, S&M, earwax) and your site is about your progressive hair metal band, then Google’s going to get mighty confused about that page and either a) not have a clue how or when to list it or worse b) de-list it entirely as spam.

So as you can see, public pagerank is only an indicator of how important Google perceives your search in the grand scheme of things, and is not particularly helpful in understand how your site is actually performing.

Remember this: the ONLY thing that matters at the end of the day with SEO is that you’re getting traffic of the right kind to your site. Don’t get caught up in pagerank as it’s one of literally thousands of indicators that Google uses to calculate when, against what terms, to whom and in what order to present the pages in its index. However, it is something that you can influence, and has is probably the single most important way to optimise your pages for search.

So how do you go about getting links and driving up your pagerank? Well you’ll just have to wait until my next instalment to find out…

SEO for Metal Bands #2

SEO for Metal Bands #1

Matanza - Countrycore?

A common misconception, when people first become conscious of their presence to the search engines, is that just be getting inbound links and acquiring page rank (of the type found on the Google toolbar) you will magically be found by people looking for you. These things certainly help, but you’re not going to get found by the people that you want to find you without thinking a little first about how you want to be found.

Assuming you have reasonably distinctive name, then you’ll probably rank well against people typing that term into a search engine (if it’s at an early stage, then this is most likely with your Myspace page). This covers getting found by people looking for you (more on this in later articles) but doesn’t really help getting eyeballs on your pages from people not looking for you specifically, but stuff like you. Many people look to track down new music by looking for bands in the genre occupied by other bands they like. It’s worth giving some thought to what genre and sub-genre(s) you belong to.

Now this may outrage some bands who consider themselves ‘outside’ any genre. This may be the case, but it’s worth considering that a) other folks will not see it that way and, if you don’t begin ‘branding’ your band in a specific genre, will do so for you and b) you are shooting yourself in the foot in the short to medium term. Bands like Opeth and The Dillinger Escape Plan may be able to eschew the genre constraint these days but they started out as progressive death and hardcore (or any number of over *cores subsequently) respectively.

So if you’re Funeral Doom, Glam Rock, Blackened Thrash, Deathlike Thrashy Dronecore with Crunk tendencies then call it – loud and proud! For a while at least, this forms a vital part of your band’s identity.

So what’s the aim here? When someone types in “blackened countrycore” into Google, you turn up in the first page of results. Depending on the prevalence of the genre to which you belong, then it may be advisable to niche down to the closest sub-genre. If you are just ‘rock’ you’re unlikely to rank well against that term unless you sell a few million CD’s – better to be ‘hard rock’ or ‘melodic rock’ or whatever. It’s possible to go too far here. If you are the only ‘vikingpiratecore’ band out there, then people aren’t so likely to searching for that term, and you loose the benefit of genre proximity.

Once you’ve decided what this is, then start advertising it. Myspace is good place to start. Resist the urge to state ‘other/other/other’ as your genre. Find the one that closest suits your band, and if it still doesn’t fit, the state your true genre everywhere else on that page. Search Engines have a concept called keyword density – basically they use the frequency of a particular word or term to divine what a page is about. So you shouldn’t be afraid to mention it a few times. Be careful with this though, as Google expects to see human readable text, so cramming your blurb with your chosen term will likely cause your page to be delisted as spam.

Secondly, the search engines will give precedence to words and terms in prominent place on the page. So, assuming it doesn’t screw up the design or flow of the page, it’s worth stating your genre in any or all of these:

• Page title
• URL
• <H1> and <H2> tags
• Description tag

Next, search engines try to divine what your pages are about by the company they keep. So if you link to, and are linked from other Depressive Drone Hair Metal pages then that will have an influence on what terms you rank for (more on link building in later articles).

Finally, get people talking about you in the context of your chosen genre. Search engines pay attention to the words used to link to your site, and those surrounding these links (also pictures and video of your band), and if you leave it to other people to decide which genres you belong to then when they do they may use different terms. This means that you’ll struggle to gain pagerank against any specific term and end up spreading your search engine love too thinly.

As ever with SEO, there’s mountain of ambiguity, differing permutations and exceptions. What’s certain is that it’s different for everyone. If you find something that works, then do more of it. The key to SEO is consistency. If you’re clear about who you are and what you represent then this will come naturally. If you prefer to appear obscure, then from a search perspective that’s the way you’ll probably remain.

SEO for Metal Bands #1: Name your band wisely

<unfindable>

I’m going to start at the beginning, with one of the first things that a band does: Choose a name. Now, this may be redundant in most cases, as you probably already have a band name that you’re happy with, but if it’s not too late to change (your band is, like, Metallica or something) then heed these words, as you could really benefit further down the line.

So you want to name your band ‘Apple’. Let’s think about this one for a minute. Isn’t there a company named Apple too? Well, they’re not a band so no problem, right? Well, when naming your band, it’s probably a good idea to go type your shortlist into Google. The term ‘apple’ is not only dominated by the ubiquitous technology company, but it’s also one of THE most fiercely contended terms by every man and his dog on the internet. Unless you become VERY popular VERY quickly by other means (basically you are Arctic Monkeys, which is, incidentally a great band name for SEO) then you’re always going to have trouble ranking for search terms relating to your band name.

Another gotcha is using non-standard characters in your band name. Avant garde black metalers <code> may have a cool name, and make fabulous noises, but they’re a bitch to find in search engines and ecommerce sites using the correct spelling of their name. They’re also making life harder for bloggers like me who have to use special characters in subject lines if we want to use the correct spelling. What’s worse is that the angle brackets “<>” are widely used in internet markup languages like HTML, and this will confuse the hell out of many web applications and in some cases could actually cause the site to malfunction on less well built sites. This is not the end of the world, and I’m sure <code> are doing quite well for themselves (they at least have a record deal) but you’re just making life hard for yourself at a time when you least need it.

The best choice for a band name from an SEO perspective is probably a made up word (eg. Skronkgornak – I couldn’t think of any real bands off the top of my head, so I just made on up) or a mis-spelling (eg. Def Leppard). Assuming someone else didn’t beat you to it, it’s really easy to ‘own’ these sorts of terms with very little effort and get almost immediate results. This is one of the reasons I chose the phrase “the inevitable nose” as the title for this blog. There were a few medical related pages ranking for this term, so it only took me a week to rank #1 for that term in Google, and only a couple more weeks to get 2, 3 and 4.

So stick your preferred name into Google before commuting to it and make sure you’re not going to be buried from day 1.

This is the first of a series of articles on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for metal bands.

In my experience most new bands don’t know or care about SEO or perhaps assume that the record labels will deal with when they get signed (which they probably won’t). I think this is a mistake. SEO isn’t hard, and following a few simple principles will pay off in dividends.

Why should you, as a band, care about SEO? Well, the one thing that bands need most when their starting out is exposure. Getting found or noticed isn’t easy. In our internet saturated age the first place people go when looking for something is the search engines. If you want to be found then you need to pay attention to how the search engines perceive you.

It’s important to acknowledge that just because you are on the web, doesn’t mean that you can be found. Depending on how you present yourself, you may be very hard to find, which would be bad for you no matter which way you look at it.

Also, this is not aimed at improving your band’s website, although this is part of it. The aim here is to make your band findable and discoverable, and for this Myspace, last.fm, Wikipedia and countless other sites are equally (and in some cases more) important.

There are three key aims to this exercise:

1) Get found by people who are looking for you

2) Get found by people who are looking for stuff like you

3) Get found by people randomly (perhaps while they’re looking for, or doing, something else)

By making sure you have your bases covered here you will make getting your band found a whole lot easier. The key thing to understand about SEO is that nothing happens quickly. Search engines take time to react to changes, and there’s no silver bullet that will boost your rankings over night. By applying best practice you will see improvements over time that will add up to impressive results over time.

I’m eating my own dog food with regards to sticking to niches, hence the metal slant, but the same principles should work for any genre of music.

If you have any questions, or need advice on your band specifically, then feel free to leave comments and I’ll endeavor to help out.

It’s not coincidence that the vast majority of the bands and musicians we see most frequently are also pretty well off financially. This privileged clique has billion pound corporations behind them, huge record deals, they get money for just turning up places. They are conspicuous because they have a load of money to promote themselves (and experienced professionals to help them do it) and from this they make more money. They also represent a tiny fraction of all recording artists, the vast majority of whom make little or no money from their art.

Perhaps it’s the lure of big bucks that leads unsigned bands to assume that they should make money from their efforts from day one. It’s just as likely that they’ve shelled a bunch of money for demo recordings and they need to cover costs. This is fair enough, but it’s also a very short sighted view. Let me explain.

Ever since serial smug twat Trent Reznor had his say on the matter of unsigned bands giving their stuff away for free I’ve been pondering the problem of new bands being able to support their art. This week journalist and industry observer Cosmo Lee had his say on his blog Invisible Oranges. Both these guys make very compelling points, but still I see dissent among unsigned bands who see it as only fair that they can recoup their investment.

Now, I’m not in a band, I don’t even work in the music industry. I do however work in the business arena, and from that perspective this attitude seems absurd. I’ll start out by saying that bands are NOT businessmen (for the most part) and should not be expected to be. Their job is to make music. To be able to continue doing this, and not end up in crippling debt, they need to have some income to support this. Having a job on the side is not usually enough – a lot of these kids want to make a career out of making music. This is a noble cause, and they should be commended for it, but it’s not easy to do so.

So, despite the fact that the primary motivator is, and should be, music, some consideration should, in most cases, be given to making money.

Now, for the sake of comparison let’s look at small businesses. I’ll use an (imaginary) example – Jenny is a hobby jewellery maker (really evil looking gothic stuff with pentagrams and shit). She’s been making stuff in her spare time and selling it on at cost to her mates, mainly for the love of it. One day she realises that she’s selling so much that she could make a career out of this. So she decides to quit her job and start her jewellery making business. Now, with her kit in the garage, she’ll never be able to pump out enough merchandise to support her doing this full time. So she’ll need to invest in some new kit and probably rent some a bigger space to house it. Also, although she’s selling a good amount of stuff now, she’ll need to sell a lot more to make the venture even break even. So she’ll need to promote herself – to advertise in trade and music magazines costs more money. So she borrows some cash from her parents and the rest from the bank. The understanding is that she’ll pay back the bank in monthly instalments immediately, and will start paying her parents back when she starts making a profit – her projections say in 3 years time (taking into account overheads, tax etc.), although depending on sales this could be more or less. In the meantime, she will take a salary of a bit above minimum wage to cover her living expenses.

This is a very common scenario. MUCH more common than instances of bands starting out. Jenny does not expect to recoup her initial investment as soon as she makes it, it will take time.

Now, back to the bands. Music is NOT a commodity any more for the most part – it’s freely available and easily exchanged. Jewellery is tangible and, assuming that the materials are worth something and workmanship is good, is a commodity. Jenny will more than likely receive money for her wares, but her business will not make money (ie. Profit), for a long time. The business will remain in negative equity and she personally will be living on the breadline.

Unsigned bands may expect (and be able) to sell CD’s or even MP3’s, but is this a sensible idea? Without a significant fan base, and their music being easy to exchange, it’s unlikely that they’ll recoup any investment at all. All that they are doing is making it harder for folks to hear their music.

Jenny had to shell out cash to promote herself. For bands, this is traditionally a role that record labels perform. For record labels this is a difficult task, for unsigned bands it’s nigh on impossible. One way of promoting yourself is to make your music freely available and encourage folks to share it. Get people to record your shows, and put them on Youtube. Take any opportunity you can to get your music heard, it is, after all, your wares, not the CD on which it’s recorded.

Once you’ve got a few people at your shows you can start really capitalising on this by selling merchandise, and maybe you can afford to make a really nice digipack version of your demo – something that people will really want to own (they probably already own the music contained therein).

Will you get return on your investment at this point? Hell no! You won’t even get it if/when a record label signs you. You may not even see it after scoring your first Gold record. This stuff takes time, effort, talent (sometimes) and a lot of luck (always).

If you don’t like to think of this outlay as an initial investment, call it a loss leader, a well understood retail tactic of offloading stuff at a loss, under the understanding that this will get poeple hooked in and coming back for more.

I’m not saying that bands should run themselves like a business, but business is in the business of making money, and you would be wise to pay heed of this. Unless you’re the next Artic Monkeys, it’s unlikely that you’ll see that cash rolling in from just being a band, so if you want to survive, be smart and forward thinking.

Join the debate over at UKMU.