Indie Music Marketing

http://www.risongwriters.com/RISA_Other_Links.html

A page with useful links. mmmmm... delicious links. A couple on that page about music promotion. I'll check it out next weekend, when I put my indie music marketing hat back on.

www.ifanz.com (mailing list maintenance)

www.weedshare.com (interesting music sharing concept)

www.futureofmusic.org (great organization to know about)

www.bryanfarrish.com or www.radio-media.com (great stuff on radio promotion)

www.taxi.com (great organization for songwriters)

www.lefsetz.com (great music business rants)

WOO HOO! These are some great links! The descriptive text is from her site too.

And to thank Diane here's a link to her site with some link text I hope will help her out some:
music business articles
here's her music business and music marketing site.

there is one thread I found after a teensy bit of poking around:
http://www.justplainfolks.org/ubb/Forum11/HTML/000463.html

It deals with marketing music online.

another about what should be in a press kit:
http://www.justplainfolks.org/ubb/Forum11/HTML/000425.html

here's one about selling your songs to tv shows:
http://www.justplainfolks.org/ubb/Forum11/HTML/000442.html

article by music marketer Diane Rapaport (why is her name familiar?)
http://www.justplainfolks.org/ubb/Forum11/HTML/000369.html

I just got started with marketing Gretel tonight. Gretel is Reva's band. They don't even have site yet. I would publish their band bio but I haven't ok'd that with Reva yet.

Well, here's a little bit. Sorry Reva:
"Sonically diverse and lyrically intimate, Gretel’s sounds and stories have the kind of space and pathos usually confined to confessionals and bathroom stalls."

This blog is going to be a record of what I've done to help them market themselves online. They plan to go on tour beginning in April.

I started out looking at backlinks for the be good tanyas. There were only 3. That's cause Reva sent me the link as www.thebegoodtanyas.com. The majority of links go to www.begoodtanyas.com, without "the." Which was fortuitous because there are 112 links to no-the be good tanyas site.

Anyways, while looking at backlinks I found this blog post that mentioned Whole Wheat Radio. I had never heard of them before. I talked with my housemate Amanda about marketing indie music and she mentioned Whole Wheat Radio right away. I'm not so slick with capturing a band's sound with words, but it looks like Whole Wheat Radio plays the kind of stuff that Reva's doing. (I'm listening to the 5 tracks she sent me while typing this).

So. Thus far I've found the following places I'm going to be investigating as potentially useful sites to our online marketing campaign. They are from the Whole Wheat Radio site:

CD Baby
Purchase CDs from independent artists
Kulak's Woodshed
Live music and video, from North Hollywood, California (archives available)
Testing Testing
Live broadcasts from Whidbey Island, Washington (archives available)
Cotolo Chronicles
Live broadcast from icecap to icecap (archives available)

and here's a live radio broadcast site I found through back link analysis of the Kulak's Woodshed site:

http://www.new-sounds.com/contact.php

I started looking at backlinks in MSN now because they typically show more than Google does. Google is more stingey about what they consider links I guess. For those not into search engine optimization a back link is simply a link to a given site. You can perform a back link check in any of the search engines by typing "link:http://www.thetargetsite.com."

You'll have to remove the quotation marks and the period at the end of course. And put the actual url of the site you're investigating in where it says www.thetargetsite.com. But you knew that.

This back link analysis gives you an idea of who thinks a certain site is worth mentioning. I analyzed backlinks of the be good tanyas based on the assumption that people linking to their site probably liked their music. Finding these people is what my job is right now, because I want them to hear Reva's music.

Here's a site that appears to be a fantastic resource. I haven't dug into into it yet, but I'm in the process of joining their forum. I wanted to start this blog first though so I'd have a site to link to. here's Just Plain Folks:
http://www.jpfolks.com/home.html

I'm joining their forum to look for marketing advice. I'll post any advice I get here.

Send me ideas/resources to gfrench@gmail.com.