Perfect Porridge Indy Band Marketing Tips: Web Domains

October 28th, 2008 · 2 Comments

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.

Tags: Music Marketing Tips

2 responses so far ↓

1 I spoke at MCAD and launched Perfect Porridge Indy Band Marketing Tips « Greg Swan // Oct 28, 2008 at 2:10 pm

[…] Read the first post here. […]
2 Culture Bully // Oct 29, 2008 at 12:09 am

I’m interested in seeing where you go with this Greg - because I’m always looking at things from a marketing perspective… that being said, it’s a strange balance when it comes to art in general, let alone branding art.

The band name thing, for instance.

From a perspective of word-association, you’re dead on - Tool wold have been a ridiculous choice for a band name had the group been focusing only on branding itself.

Fortunately they were focusing on making amazing music and the branding kind of took care of itself.

That’s one thing that needs to be addressed as well… it doesn’t matter what your name is if you’re trying to peddle crap. To focus entirely on branding, image and marketability is all important, but no where near as important as making sure you have a base for your representation. Greg, you and I both know that the vast majority of PR materials out there are BS… in a lot of cases its a matter of a company being paid to try to shine up a turd. That new Apple commercial comes to mind, where the “I’m a PC” guy is putting 9/10 money into “advertising how Vista is better” and 1/10 into making Vista better. Marketing is great when there’s some substance to it.

The other thing I wanted to note was the album title/url thing… I agree, the ease of this is remarkably simple and it’s amazingly effective.

http://www.modernguilt.com/

For bands this is a unique opportunity to stay ahead of the curve, so to speak. Everyone changes from day-to-day, but in the world of releasing an album, the album is viewed as the change - whether or not it took a day to write and record or five years. Branding yourself behind that tells the world “hey, I’m new - that was the old me on that other website, but this is me now” (which would probably forward to your new site anyways). And that’s what the internet is, this is me, right now - no matter if you’re a blogger or a band. That’s a pretty simplistic way of discussing it, leaving out the SEO effects and googleability of everything, but you get the idea.