Three killer tips to get your music heard

< Reminiscence - a milestone : The Long Cold Night >

I've been experimenting with various ways of getting my music heard, and I've come up with a few that seem to work better than others.

1.  Give it away for free.

Let's face facts; if you're a relative unknown (not the same as an unknown relative, such as a long-lost cousin) you don't need artificial barriers preventing new listeners from hearing your tracks.  Charging from the start might work if you're phenomenally good at composing and promoting yourself, but chances are you'll do a lot better if you give your music away for free.

If you disagree, consider that a recent poll showed that most fans did not pay anything for a "voluntary contribution" album from Radiohead.  More about the Radiohead release at BBC News.  Radiohead are huge.  If "most people" don't want to pay for Radiohead's music, what hope is there for someone who isn't known to the masses?

I'm not famous yet - far from it.  But I've had a lot more listens since I put all of my music online for free.

2.  Join last.fm.

last.fm is an excellent site.  These guys know what they're doing.  Once you're there, you should aim to do the following:

• Before you do anything else, get the last.fm plugin for your media player and start listening to music.  Do this for at least a week or two and make sure you play a good mix of the other artists you like.  If you can, always use the media player on your computer when playing music.  That will help to match you to others who like the same music as you.
• Listen to your own music.  As with listening to other people's music, it'll help you to build a good listener profile.
  
• Upload your albums to last.fm and make them free.  They don't have to be downloadable, just allow people to hear the full-length track in the last.fm player.
• Tag all of your tracks.  This is a surprisingly effective way to get unexpected new listeners.  Just tag all of your tracks with decent keywords and wait a week or two.

They even have a blog over at last.fm that you should check out: Now Form A Band.

There are some other ways too, but these are the main ones you should focus on first (at least these are the ones that work for me).  They help to push your music to people who are most likely to enjoy it, without doing so forcefully.  When push comes to shove, people get turned off and you don't want to be seen as a spammer.  A lot of musicians want their tracks to be heard - it takes time.

3.  Build a decent website.

The whole point of this tip is to encourage more people to do a proper website, instead of their MySpace profile being their only presence on the Internet.  If you don't have a site yet - set one up.  My main blog has plenty of tips to help you with this.  Don't just think that updating your MySpace profile is a substitute for a decent website.  It's not.

It takes time and effort to do this, but it pays off.  Don't just throw a few pages onto the web and leave it at that.  Get a decent site together with a bit of info about you, a blog that you update regularly (at least weekly), and of course a downloads area.  Allow guest comments on your tracks and your blog.

Of course, your music must be the most important thing, but don't neglect your site. Make an effort to keep it current and make it worth visiting.  Again, I may not be anywhere close to a household name just yet, but keeping my blog updated has kept people checking back much more often than they would if I never bothered to update more than once every few months.

This applies to websites too - your blog should be an integral part of your website.  Don't just do a blog, do a proper site.

And if you want a decent system to run your site, look no further than my home-grown system: Majestic.  I use it for benbarden.com, lyricless.com, injader.com and several other sites that we'll be showcasing at some point in the future.


Good luck - and be patient!

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