bandGeek

One of the coolest music sites I’ve come across in a long time is Last.fm. This site takes advantage of a tool called an audio scrobbler (cool word…) to track what people are listening to. You sign up for an account, install a scrobbler plugin into your music player (iTunes, Winamp, ect.) or install the Last.fm Tool and then the meta data about the music you listen to will be sent to your personal page. Check out my page for an example. It’s a lot of fun to be able to see what your friends are listening to (I caught my bassist listening to Kelly Clarkson) and to find recommendations based on what you’ve been listening to. They also have a nice online radio station that you can customize based on genre, similar artists, or any number of other tags.

What can this site do for you band? The site has a page for every band that gets listened to. On this page you can edit a wiki-like description of your band, upload pictures, and see how many people are listening to your music. Here’s the page for Davenport, because of the potential issue of multiple bands having the same name (which is a problem for my band), this page represents two bands, as is stated in the artist description. Another nice feature is that you can upload your mp3s to the site by calling yourself a label (this is what they tell independent artists to do) and then whatever music you choose to upload will be available for preview on the site. Also your songs go into rotation on their online radio station. According to the stats I have, Davenport gets between 40 and 60 plays a week.

Last.fm is a fun site for musicians and music fans alike. There seems to be a pretty good community on the site and it’s defiantly worth playing with a bit. Enjoy!

Let me start by saying this, I hate MySpace. It is an absolute abomination of web design and full of snotty little teenage scenesters and attention whores. The majority of people’s (and band’s) MySpace pages are hideous. Do people not know when they are making things ugly?

With that initial rage expressed, I have to concede that MySpace has become a valuable tool for musicians today. When people want a quick and easy way to hear a few of your songs and look for some show dates, they often turn to MySpace. It is easy to get in contact with a lot of people very easily, though the downside of this ease is that people become desensitized to your show announcements and friend requests, as they have already received hundreds, if not thousands, from other bands (and porn sites). Given the painfully undeniable usefulness of this social networking site to musicians today, I aim to help make your MySpace page suck as little as possible.

When customizing your layout the best route you could take is to actually learn CSS and understand how to put your layout together yourself. I understand that this is not for everybody, so when using and tweaking templates try to avoid setting things up that make it harder for your future fans to learn to love you

Avoid tiled background images – these look tacky and it’s hard to read text over them

Make your text contrast with your background – dark text on a light background, light text on light background, readability is key!

NEVER make anything trail behind the mouse – you’re a band, not a 13 year old girl (unless of course you’re a 13 year old girl in a band… and even then, you still shouldn’t do it)

Don’t make a video load with your page – if you want to include a video on your page, don’t make it auto play, let your fans press play or else it will just be an ugly mix of noise from your music an your video.

Don’t make mouse rollovers on links make the text larger – this shifts around the content of the page as people browse it and just looks bad

Be careful with opacity – I’ve seen several pages where people abused the ability to make things semi-transparent and made EVERYTHING semi-transparent. Very hard to read.

Upload music that sounds good – I understand the desire to get your new music out to your fans, but putting up music that’s recorded to roughly to be enjoyable can be detrimental.

Have a good variety of pictures – It’s good to have a mixture of live and press photos on your page. Seeing live pictures of a band gives your fans an idea of the type of show you put on and press pictures make better content when your groupies want to make a shrine in your honor.

Keep your shows up to date - This seems like no brainer, but make sure to put in as much info as you can about the show; address, price, other bands, etc.

Well, this should get you started in making your fan’s MySpace experience as painless as possible. Something tells me, this won’t be the last article I write about MySpace though.