Last night I spoke to Matt Wilson’s MCAD class about music/band marketing. They were a super smart group of students working on projects for STOOK!, The Invincible Kids, Dance Band, Military Special and Kristoff Krane.
My approach to marketing a band is akin to consumer product roll-out and positioning strategies, and I spent a lot of time listening and responding to their specific local band challenges and opportunities using insight from both my day job and this here music blog.
In honor of the class, I’m going to start a series of indy band tips here at PerfectPorridge.com.
Some of this is common sense, some is stuff I’ve learned and some is stuff I’ve gleaned from indy band marketing experts Bob Baker and David Hooper, whom you should check out. We’re going to start with…
Web Domains and Band Names
When giving priority to a band’s marketing mix, I recommend adding Web presence to the talent, chemistry and branding mix.
An up and coming band cannot make it big — let alone break even — without a robust online persona, engaged digital fan base and integrated social media marketing mix.
With that said, I absolutely hate it when bands have to put the word “band” in their domain name (http://toolband.com), or music (http://www.cakemusic.com), or even worse (http://www.spoontheband.com). These bands opted for cool, everyday objects when naming their band, and I can respect that. However, from a marketing standpoint, Tool, Cake and Spoon were horrible decisions.
Considering that 70 percent of all internet searches begin at Google, it’s critically important to Google your band name and see what comes up. When naming your band (or thinking about renaming your band), you may want to consider making up your own words. Read Seth Godin’s perspective at naming companies based on domain and memorability — lots of parallels here. Seth named his company Squidoo so he could “own” all search results for the topic.
Also think about name length and difficulty. Average people can’t remember complex URLs and sure as hell can’t spell “Porridge” (believe me, they can’t). You also will want to fit the name/URL onto stickers, punk pins and other merch, so keep it short, sweet and measurable.
Some other tips:
- Buy your band’s domain name – It’s $8/year on Hostway.com.
- Even if you don’t have the money or expertise to launch a site, redirect the URL to your MySpace page.
- Don’t just buy the .com. Buy the .net, .org, .us, .biz for your domain to be sure other bands (or even companies) can’t edge into your territory.
- Then take it a step further, secure your MySpace, ReverbNation, iMeem, etc. profile URLs.
- Think of this step as proactive inoculation angle — you may never use it, but at least it’s yours.
- URLs are so cheap, consider buying your new album name, tour name and other one-off Web domains and either build microsites or redirect to pages on your site.
- Again, it’s only $8/year/URL, so get creative.
- If another band has your band name, owns your .com URL or MySpace URL, change your band name. I’m not kidding.
- Why do you think Linkin Park is spelled so stupidly? Because they couldn’t get lincolnpark.com.
Frankly, having a flashy, interactive site with compelling content linked via a memorable URL won’t make up a band who sucks, but it sure can’t hurt.
