Jesse Cannon

CD Baby’s DIY Musicians blog has up an interesting showing of their service from 2011. Check it out to get some great insight on how most groups are making money on their service.

YouTube’s viewership keeps growing and growing and you have to know that it is one of the most powerful music discovery and marketing channels out there. While it is obvious you should be using YouTube, but what type of video should you have on your channel?

1. Lyric Videos – The lyric video is one of the best tools for marketing out there today. They can help increase sing-alongs at shows and give fans something to watch that takes very little effort for you to make. Adding behind the scenes photos and other rare videos can give your fans even more reason to watch them.
2. Music Videos – Just like you used to see on MTV! Obviously a great video can go viral or just give your fans something to watch, while they listen. When done right these are still the ultimate marketing tool.
3. Live Video – If you want people to come see you live, having an impressive taste of how good the experience will be can lead to more people coming out. The better quality, the more likely you are to have it shared and have a good turnout. This also means you better be playing well!
4. Interview – Having a way for fans to watch and get to know your history, personality and little personality quirks can go a long way with your fans feeling like you are someone they want to tell the world about. Filming an interview, even if you don’t see the interviewer and just answer some frequently answered questions, this can be a great way for fans to get you to know.
5. Single Frames – If you can’t make a music video, live video or lyric for your song, you should at least have a single frame video for every song you have released to the public. YouTube is the biggest music discovery medium out there. You should put up every song you have since it is another chance to get discovered and earn revenue if it becomes successful through YouTube’s revenue sharing system.

Vimeo has always been the choice of those who want their videos to really look fantastic on the net. Their video service has always been better looking than YouTube and served as more of a community for those looking for good looking videos instead of more videos of cats yawning. If you are making great looking videos, you should always be using Vimeo to connect with those who appreciate them. If this is the case, the great news is they have many cool features. The most notable for music marketing is there is now a Tumblr like interface that delivers a feed so that you can take in the newest videos from your favorite video makers. Check out all the new features here.

Cash Music, makers of cool web tools to make your website and sharing work better have finally made it official! They have launched a platform filled with great tools for marketing and showing off your music on the web. They have free tools to trade tweets and emails for downloads as well as ways to make pictures and music play well on the web. They pride themselves on the fact that you will not need to know how to program much of anything to use their service as well, so those looking for a complex but awesome web page, can look to their platform to make it happen. Check out more here.

Doing graphic design for your music is a rough duty, but one you are going to have to do at some point. Whether it is making things look nice on your website or making a flyer, at some point you are probably going to have to do some graphic design and font work. Odds are you also come across websites with great fonts you would love to use every day. Thankfully the What Font? web extension (Chrome, Safari and Firefox compatible) will tell you exactly what font is being used on a website. This can help you take your design skills to the next level with some quick answers.

It is easy to start to not believe the hype of how much Tweeting and Facebook sharing can do for your music. TopSpin who make some of the finest sharing widgets out there, has just announced a Sharealytics feature that allows users to see the number of shares, the amount of traffic created by those shares and the number of new fans acquired from the shares. This means you will be able to hone in and focus your marketing on te channels it is working best. Check out more details on their blog here.

Lately I have felt a critical mass of friends talking about using ReverbNation’s Promote It in order to get new fans and concert attendees. The service has the ability to take the thinking out of Facebook promotions and ads for those who find their interface complicated and annoying. They offer pre-designed plans for you to either promote a song, an upcoming show or just get more Likes for your page. Get more info on this service here.

Mastering – a step by step guide to good sound by monolake

Our first post of 2012 was on that it is way past the time when you should delete your MySpace Music profile. Since we wrote that we have deleted the MySpace for all of the artists we work with. What we have seen since than was a pleasant surprise. All of our sites whether they are websites designed on WordPress or OneSheet have all seen at least 25% more traffic. This means more people are discovering music and information on our music in a much better way and e are making a much better impression on new fans. This is news that tells us you should get rid of that MySpace as soon as possible.