Tips For Being A Musician Online
Here you will find some useful tips if you’re performing any Online activities as a Musician. If you have a tip that could help other musicians, don’t hesitate to share it with us – just use the form below! Thanks!
Last updated: 17. January 2021
(The newest entry on top!)
A lot of – mostly fresh – musicians and artists think that after they have posted a couple of posts people will just start liking their page and music and joining their mailing list and/or fan club. Unfortunately in most cases that’s just not how it works. In today’s music world you have to build your audience one by one. You post your music, videos and/or blogs and posts online and wait to get noticed by people. Oftentimes you’ll need some help from your friends and family that are on social media to help you spread the word a little. When other people start showing up, listening and liking your music, maybe even commenting, don’t be shy and connect with them! That’s one of the few advantages of being at the start of your journey. You don’t have a lot of fans (yet) but you have time and opportunity to interact directly with them. Talk to them, ask them what they like and what they don’t like about your music, what you could do better, etc. If you’re nice to them they will spread the word how cool you are and other people will start dropping by. Try to maintain this one-on-one interaction as long as possible. Even later when you’ll (hopefully) have too much fans to talk to them directly try to pick one or two every now and then and connect with them directly if possible or maybe through a comment – people love it and – trust me – you’ll be rewarded for that…
Social media platforms are great to get to know your audience. You could never do that before with this kind of precision. Now you know their age, where do they come from, what they like, when and how often do they visit your website or your social media profiles, etc. It’s just crazy! You can even connect directly with them if you want!
Why is that good? If you know your audience then you can find out what they love about you so you can give more of that to them. Without those infos maybe you’d be posting and sharing stuff your audience wasn’t into that much and not posting something they’d really like to see or hear. You can also see where people are from, so for instance you can connect with those who live near your next gig to let them know that you’re going to be in town or in the area so they can come and see you play.
There are countless benefits to that so get to know your audience as good as you can.
Don’t put every piece of information on every platform – you don’t need to do that!
Use your website as your main source of information about you and/or the band: your info/biography, hobbies, favourite stuff, what kind of music do you make, the music and merchandise that you sell, tour schedules, tickets info etc. You should always put the link to your website on every other platform that you’re on so people can visit it and find out more about you and your music.
Use other platforms for specific things. For example: use Twitter for short messages like “rehearsing for the show, already sounding pretty cool” or “5 minutes before the show, getting excited…”. Then put the link in if maybe you’re broadcasting live via Facebook or YouTube or you posted some photos or videos. Maybe only use YouTube to post videos from rehearsals and shows and use Facebook to chat live with fans or just to keep them up to date through your posts. It’s up to you how you do that just don’t do everything everywhere!
The main goal is to connect and interact with your audience on social media and then get them to visit your website where they can read all about you, buy your music, merch and tickets to your shows.
There are tons of platforms out there and oftentimes it’s hard to decide which ones to choose. I suggest you pick the combination of the ones that you’re good at and the ones where your potential audience is. I would say pick 2 or maybe 3 max. If you have a band and you can split the work on social media among the bandmates then you can take 3 or even more. If you are a single artist maybe it’s the best you take only one. At the moment there are 3 or 4 interesting platforms for music, artists and bands, depending on what do you want to do. Facebook is still the big dog where most of the people are so it’s interesting (not only) because of that, Instagram is getting more and more popular among musicians and as a musician YouTube is almost a must-be-on platform. I’m not a Twitter fan for music but if that’s your choice it’s ok to do that, too. Twitter is good for short infos about what you’re doing at the moment and for short promotions with links. To me it’s similar to what I can do on Facebook just with less characters to write. But that’s just me…
In a nut shell – “less is more”: better pick less platforms, choose the right ones for you and be more present on those.
As a musician you can’t just put stuff on every platform that you know and think that everybody will immediately jump on it. Well, you can try but it’s not such a good idea. Why? Platforms change, they come and go and with every single one that it’s gone your content is gone, too! Remember that! You should pick your online centerpiece, your prime focus, your center of attention. And it should be something and somewhere where everything is in your hands, where you are in charge. The best and only way to do that is: to make your own website! And if you make your regular website backups (and you should by all means do that!) then even if your webspace provider goes out of business you just move to a different one, restore your website from the backup and you’re good to go! It only takes a couple of hours tops! But if you rely on Facebook and Co. then you should remember (or find and read about that online if you’re too young to remember) what happened to MySpace years ago. I rest my case…