Band Site Check List for Marketing Musicians

Here’s a Band Site Check List for Marketing Musicians and their music.

In 1998 I picked up a book called HTML for Dummies so that I could make a web site for a band I was playing in. Since then, I’ve made a dozen sites for my bands, my friends’ bands and clients. That’s right. Artists now call me up whom I’ve never met and want me to make a site for them. Amazing. One thing I’ve noticed is the struggle between what the artist wants and what the artist needs in terms of business goals. Artists want sites that look cool, are animated and seep with artistic flavors. Users on the other hand are looking for information like show dates, discography, biography, and pictures. The main purpose behind this piece is to create a third party, objective checklist for bands/managers and web designers to agree upon and work off of.

The types of bands and artists I’m specifically targeted in this piece starts at new, local talent who are unsigned and applies all the way to touring national acts who haven’t broken into superstar levels. At that point, they become simply a product and their web site’s needs change over. The sites I design are for the working class.

I’d also like to point out that many bands cater their sites toward getting that elusive record deal. The record deal is many steps away and no matter how cool you’re site is, you won’t get signed because of it. What’s important is the fans and early contacts like media, promoters, venue bookers and events planners who need information first and foremost. Your cool factor is second.

Basic features are the core elements that are do or die. I’ll list in order of importance but a good site will have them all. Advanced features is what bands want to start off with but aren’t ready for. Reasons of course given. Neutral features are run of the mill ideas people like but don’t drive business. Bad Ideas are general things that bands and artists want or have seen and think they need but shouldn’t use. I’ll talk about flash, its good points and bad.

Basic Features:

Contact Info
All sites need a way for people to get in touch with the artist or its management. A good, working email address is preferred. Avoid using hotmail, AOL, and yahoo accounts. A message form is good too but sometimes a person can’t always get to the web site to fill it out and send it. Sometimes web servers go down and become unavailable. It’s easier if they have a contact email they can write down. People are often hesitant to include a phone number on the web. If you were a venue or media agency and needed to contact a band on the road, having someone’s personal line isn’t such a bad thing. Chances of some weirdo finding a band’s site and abusing a number are probably pretty slim in the group’s early days. However, use your own judgment based on the band and its fans.

Biography
Every band should have a bio that let’s the reader in on key concepts surrounding an act: how long it’s been together; who is in it; where have they played; what recordings do they have out. How you write the bio is very, very subjective. I’m sure everyone has an opinion on what will “sell” the act to the public. Here’s my only real guideline: write the bio with the intent of taking up space. People who publish, whether it’s a featured artist section on a web page or a write up in a local paper, need copy to fill up space. They know nothing about your band and could never write something up on their own about you. They only have so much room. So they will cut and paste you bio then trim it down until it fits in the space. Don’t believe me? I do it for about 4 web sites: two clubs and 2 online zines. I copy and paste band bios all the time. I’ve seen other sites who have used bios off web sites. The same is true of print. Write your bio big. Organize it into sections.

If you have a web site built entirely in Flash, web surfers will not be able to cut and paste your bio. Why? The technology doesn’t work in flash to allow you to highlight, copy and paste. Just isn’t there. Don’t know what to say. Make an html version and link to. Make sure to send publishing people to it.

Show Listings
Apart from the bio, everyone goes to a band’s site to find out when they are playing. That’s the reason for the site in many people’s opinions. It’s a good source of info and is easy to update if show dates change. I feel this is so important that I create a special section on the home page that is easy to see that lists the band’s next gig. The number one question I get from fans about my own band is “When are you playing next?”

You would think that I’m some sort of information updater Nazi who gets upset by bands listing old shows. Not so. I am the ultimate pragmatist. Many people do searches by venue and date as well as other band’s names. Some people would like to know when a show happened and look to the web as an archive. There is nothing wrong with leaving older show dates up. It’s a good idea to have some older dates, current ones and future ones posted but balanced out. Users sense the treadmill effect of a list of shows that present where the band has been, where it is now and where it’s going.

Hostbaby offers auto updating calendar software along that allows artists to post their gigs without having to know html. However, the way it displays is non-customizable and can look garish in a site.

Pictures
Everybody who clicks on a band site wants to see what the band looks like. We can tell a lot about the music just by looking at the artists making it. Set up a clean photo gallery. It doesn’t need to be huge. 10-30 pictures is usually enough. There’s many creative ways to display photos. I usually make a thumbnail gallery and create a second page if I go over 20 thumbs on a page.

Media people also need pictures for feature artist pages, print ads, write ups and reviews. For print they need photos that are 300 dpi (resolution). The web displays at 72 dpi. This means they can’t use your web pictures. It will appear stretched and blown up. You need to make a special 300 dpi image for publishers and label it as such. Such files are huge.

Audio Files
Users want to hear what a band sounds like. This means putting a song or a snippet of a song on the web site for them to download or stream. Download means they click the link, it transfers the file to their computer and when finally downloaded, begins to play. Usually these are stored in a temp file and are eventually deleted during normal maintenance. Users do have the option to save the file to their hard drive. With streaming it plays as they are receiving it. I’m probably wrong about this but they can’t rewind or fast forward streams. Nor can they save the file. They can only hear the file when they connect to the site and press the link.

Which should you use? Streaming is good because users don’t get to save the file (can’t own it), which is a hot topic today considering the RIAA suing people owning computer files and sharing them. Also, streaming is usually faster. On the Internet fast is king. The types of files themselves are varied as there are a lot of different formats competing. The two really big ones are mp3 and real audio. Mp3 is an open format and the one of choice for most people. Lots of software is available that will rip a CD, turning the tracks into mp3s. CD Baby puts out sample CDs with Mp3s on it. Mp3 is a download technology.

Real Audio is heavily licensed to use and so you rarely see anyone making Real Audio files except the web sites which serve up a lot of artists samples where they don’t want you to keep the file. Garageband.com and Cdbaby are a couple that come to mind.

Some web servers have been set up to stream mp3 files. A dummy link is used, ending in .u3 which points to the mp3 file. This does require set up on the server but is the best of both worlds for people making mp3s who want them streamed. Hostbaby is one of the servers out there which supports this.

Other formats are Wav, Ogg Vorbis, Flac, WindowsMediaFile and mpeg4. None have had the lasting power of mp3s.

Email Harvester
People who will volunteer their email address to you is one of the most powerful forces out there. Good bands with good sites can scoop up address for their regular newsletter.

I’ve done harvesting two ways. One works really well. One doesn’t work at all. When you say “join our mailing list” and the link fires up a new email where they expect you to email them your address, no one contributes. Why? I don’t know.

The other way is to have a form where users type in their email and hit a submit button. The results are staggering. The difference is next to nothing, because when they hit submit the server generates an email that notifies the recipeint of the new user signing up. However, from a psychological point of view, the open form with submit trigger is miles ahead.

To create a form with submit trigger requires software running on a server, like formmail. This is usually not a hard request to put in with a host and is a regular feature of most hosting companies.

There are third party email list manager web sites who let you manage your list. They give you a line of code which is dropped into your site and generates the form. Anyone who submits has their email stored on the list manager’s site. A login allows the admin to manage the list. This includes deleting and adding users and of course sending the newsletter.

Caution: don’t add people to your list who don’t volunteer their email. While I don’t think its an evil act, in many states it is illegal. I realize you have to fight for every single fan and anything that pushes your “product” out there helps. Having said that, I hate receiving non-personal emails from bands or artists who don’t know me. I can tell they have gotten my email from some list or off another undisclosed email. These are capitalistic wannabes with no true art other than to “make it.” Spam your newsletter at generic addresses but the more personal ones (bill@microsoft.com) leave off unless they signed up. 3 people who are genuinely interested in you are worth more than 150 people you don’t know that you just pissed off with your spam.

A regularly updated news section
Lets face it, bands come and go. Web surfers who stumble upon sites need to know when’s the last time the site has been updated, is this band still together, what are they doing now. Those three factors contribute to the overall psychological effect.

As long as you answer those questions it doesn’t matter what you use for news. If you only change the month at the top of the page heading, you answer the first question. By posting an event that happened or will happen you answer questions two and three. There are lots of things a band could do to create updates and news. Even if no one reads them (and quite frankly after seeing about 40 band sites in a row who would) you still are contributing to the psychological effect of surfers who dont really care about the answers to those 3 questions but want to know that they are being addressed.

If the band is no longer performing or working together but the site remains for fans, this is a perfect place to announce that.

I highly recommend monthly updates as this requires only 12 updates. Weekly would generate 52. If you are a busy band with a lot of things going on, say touring the midwest, then weekly might be on target. Seasons work too, i.e.: fall, summer, winter, spring. It leaves users hanging on longer and less people will check back as often but it is change and a sign of updating.

Advanced Features:

Press Kit
Bands need a place where all the previously mentioned media types: promoters, agents, managers, writers, event planners, newspapers, zines and similar trades can go to get a bio, 300 dpi photos and archived articles. Having this all in one spot is a nicety and shows you are a player and professional. Press Kits might also contain things like a stage plot with a cell phone number, an input list, and a rider.

It is highly recommended to have your bio, photos and most important documents available as a PDF document. PDF is an Adobe format, which is nearly open. Anyone can read it. Lots of software (but not all) can write it. It auto formats to a letter-sized page that is very easy to print. You can take a PDF on a disc to Kinko’s and have them print it on the spot in b/w for 8 cents.

Merchandise
Being able to sell merchandise over the web is one of the greatest empowerments for artist. But alas, it’s not cheap and it’s not easy. There are different aspects of selling goods online and I will talk through the basic elements.

The crudest way to sell online is to list your goods on a site and request that people send you a money order for your product. This method does not require the use of a credit card. Not a bad start. Especially if you are an underground or cult classic type artist where dealing in individual mail transactions is about the right speed. The major set back to this is losing the impulse buy. Along these same lines, customers have become used to doing transactions over the web. By “used to” I mean, customers have come to expect you to have your goods ready to ship and a credit card order gets it out that day.

The next step then is to accept take credit cards. This is a large jump though. For one, it requires something called an SSL certificate. I am not an expert on SSL by any means and can only address it in terms of cost not the technological side. Essentially it means that the page where someone enters a credit card number is an encrypted page that no one can heist your CC number from. You know when you are viewing an SSL page when the little yellow lock icon at the lower right window of your browser shows up. Https (as apposed to http) also means it’s a secure page but you still need the certificate for the icon which gives customers peace of mind.

How much does an SSL certificate cost? Price varies as several companies sell them. I’ve seen prices between $35 and $1400. More info on the topic can be found on the which SSL site. There is also the matter of implementation. Throw in the idea of a database driven catalog (not necessary but professional and preferred). Then include a bank that will process your credit cards. Take into account their fees plus the integrating of their web site and yours. And finally, someone needs to ship the goods. If you’re not prepared to have a small part of someone’s basement set aside for shipping and receiving, then you shouldn’t be doing this. The big market-speak term is fulfillment. Its one of the basic business principles which Internet-Start-Up companies didn’t study. Take Kozmo for example. You could get a $1 candy bar delivered to your house for $1 with shipping. Or Pets.com where they shipped out dog food bags for next to nothing. Amazon.com, by contrast, has one of the most sophisticated warehouses ever. They studied fulfillment so as to minimize their overhead.

I hate to fall back on the marketing jumbo of my dotcom days in the technology sector but one cliché has become an altruism for me: hire someone else to do look after your needs if they can do it better and cheaper than you can. This means, if you can’t afford to sell your goods, have someone else do it for you. You need to use a third party or middleman. But aren’t middlemen bad? On paper yes. They represent an overhead cost that you are always working to remove based on: they’re not a part of your creative vision and they’re not your customers. So who are they? But look back at the cliché on outsourcing. If they can sell your goods with less expense than you could do it yourself, by all means use them.

There are multiple middleman vendors out there who will shepherd your products. Choose them based on your own criteria. Both Amazon and CD Baby will sell your CDs. CafePress will sell your none-CD merchandise.

There are also companies that will handle credit card transactions on your behalf, providing the SSL on their site, doing the processing and generating receipts. Companies like Paypal and CC Bill come to mind. There are a few more if one researched the field a bit more than my broad statements. With Paypal, they provide developer kits that allow you to easily create buttons to add to an html page, giving your customers a gateway to complete the transaction on their site. While this may appear down and dirty, it can provide a low cost way to sell a handful of items every month.

As with any middleman contract, if you start selling a lot of goods through them and think you are now losing money based on the volume you are moving, then its time to reconsider a new service or distribution.

Online Journal
An online journal is a nice touch for acts that write and post quite a bit. It helps if they are on tour otherwise its kind of just another ‘blog on the Internet, except they are in a band that sometimes plays. If the journal isn’t updated, then it looks disastrously bad. The site will appear to be abandoned, which it is. For fans in love with the artist, an online journal keeps them coming back.

Online journals require software and a database. You can do static html posts but then the ease of posting to an online journal diminishes and it becomes work. To get a server to install journal software and give you a database will cost extra from who you host from. Hostbaby does offer a journal and database connection with each account, whether you use it or not.

Online forums
Really big bands have forums that allow their fans to post and discuss things that are of interest to them. Words of caution: it takes a really, really popular band to attract enough people to make forums work. Once a forum has enough critical mass, they usually tend to pick up more and more users and become crowded.

Forums also require special software and a database connection. I don’t know of any hosts that have forum software up and running with the keys in it, but I do know several that will let you install and run the apps yourself if you know how. Forum software means a lot of traffic and heavy toll on the database as it is being pounded constantly. The repeat traffic on forums is immense.

Video
You would think that since audio is a basic feature, then video would be as well. Wrong. The web isn’t ready for video the way they are for mp3s. Videos are huge files. The average 3 minute mp3 song is 3-4 mb. A video that’s 3-4 mb is about 14 seconds long.

Transferring video is not as easy as ripping mp3s from a CD. It requires special hardware and software, both of which are spendy.

And, most video shot of garage bands with grainy looking hand held digital cameras are going to look even worse when squished into the computer and compressed. Add that if the act isn’t doing flips and jumps like Flying Karamozov Brothers, then the home video quality of it is going to look, well lame.

Video needs to be transferred correctly, edited and produced like anything else. And then you get 14 seconds. Don’t sweat video.

Discography
Many bands out there with sites don’t even have an album out. They probably don’t even have a home 4 track demo. Maybe they do. Bands with no albums or one album will look silly having a discography. Discographies are useful for bands that have released multiple albums (minimum of three). Otherwise leave them off. Be sure to include catalog numbers and artwork.

Neutral features:

Links
A page of links does nothing to further the business of an artist. It is a legacy from the early Internet. In modern terms it’s a form of thank you and a shout out. Artists can exchange links with other sites. I like looking at band’s links pages but it doesn’t drive me to the site. Nor does it keep my attention. Links are in fact a diversion but many people maintain them as a form of recognition amongst peers.

Lyrics
Fans do enjoy reading lyrics. Web sites should be about information and the fans. I appreciate being able to go to an artist’s site and read their lyrics. This is the least needed feature and can be dealt with last.

Bad Ideas

Flash
Don’t make a site all in Flash. By this I mean, the web site is one huge .swf file of about 1 meg which requires the user to click enter on a start page to download the file which is the whole site.

Instead…

Use html pages and add Flash in doses. Users can’t highlight, copy/paste text done in Flash. Media people can’t grab photos used in Flash. Other sites can’t link to specific pages (like an audio page) because it’s all one big file.

Spam
Don’t spam people who didn’t sign up for your list. Email address like “events” and “calendar” are all right but don’t add anything that looks personal. I say this because it will save you from making enemies of the people you’re trying to befriend.

Splash Pages/Intros
Don’t have an intro page. When people clicked on the link to your site they thought they were going in the door not walking up to it. Splash pages are redundant and create an unnecessary barrier that will prevent user from becoming repeat visitors. The same applies to Flash intros. Skip skip skip.

Music
Don’t have music looping on your site or pages. This sounds totally counter to what the site’s for right? “People came here because they wanted to hear a 10 second loop of our music right? They’ve never heard us so now that we got their attention we’re going to cram our music down their throats.” Music that loops in the background is one of the highest rated complaints in surveys of web experience. It also takes it toll on the user who has to download a huge file that could be in the form of a wav. If they’re at work, the sound now playing is invasive while they scramble to turn their speakers down. If they’re already listening to music, they now have this other sound that their sound card is fighting to play.

My advice: back off the music cramming and give users show dates and news updates

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