Hey everyone, I am trying to promote a friend's music online. I created a myspace and added his music to rhapsody, and soon it will be on itunes. How can i get more people to his myspace and promote his music online? Thanks! http://www.rhapsody.com/jamespolana/expresessionsoflove http://www.myspace.com/jamespolana
For Myspace get a bot to send out friend requests www.adderrobot.com I know from experience that this works very well for promoting music.
Don't promote music via bots. It doesn't work as well as you'd think. A big part of the work I do through my firm is music publicity. I also run an indie music webzine, so I deal with artists from both sides, so to speak. Myspace can be effective in promoting music, but only if you do it right. Getting 10,000 "friends" for your band doesn't mean anything if those people don't honestly care about your music. If you want to promote it, you need to reach the right people. Join groups on myspace related to indie music. Look for zines, radio stations, etc. and add them to your friends lists first. Also look for people who do cd reviews right on myspace. If you can get any of them to become actual fans, they often work to promote you a little on their own by mentioning you, adding you to their top 8, or whatnot. When it comes to more general fans, I've noticed the bands doing the best, of the hundreds I deal with at least weekly on there, are the ones making an honest effort to find real fans, getting their offline fans to sign up, finding online fans who actually express an interest in the genre (like approaching fans from pages of friends' bands' profiles - especially the active ones), and who actually take time to comment people and write to them. Something else you need to be doing is contacting any webzines or review sites you can get to and asking them for a review (follow their submission guidelines though, or you'll get ignored more often than not). I'm not a big fan of The Indie Bible, but for this particular thing, I'd suggest actually having a copy around. Not all "online", but still good to know... Generally the media doesn't have any reason to care about your band... there are too many. So something I push with any of the artists that want to work with me is that they absolutely have to be committed to making themselves more newsworthy. You can do that in a lot of ways (and I won't share most of my tips on that, simply b/c it's a large part of what I do), but here's what I've seen work the absolute best: Charity shows While you can participate in them, it's always better to organize your own. If you have access to a venue that might be willing to participate (can be anything from a church to a club), it would really help obviously. If you're taking the initiative to pick the charity, get the venue, find the bands, and plan the event, it's not hard to get people to take notice. You just need to prepare a press release and manually send it to every area newspaper, radio station in your genre, and even college papers and stations (if it's during the school year). So far, it's never failed to get coverage, whether I've organized one time events for them, or for bands who have organized whole series on their own. They've gotten not only hometown newspaper interviews, but also bigger interviews in larger city papers nearby (like the Philadelphia Inquirer just b/c of the general location of bands I've worked with), and even on-air radio interviews with commercial stations. If you do it, and you promote that well, it's a great way to promote your band.
Sort through the many music blogs online, and see if there are any that match the genre of music you wish to promote, then send them CD's. The Tofu Hut has a pretty comprehensive list of music blogs in its right sidebar.