It should have been easy for me to get the blog done this week as band wise the only thing we've done is to have the first of our monthly directors meetings (as we are just in the process of establishing ourselves as a company and one of the things you have to do is have regular minuted meetings. I can't say that our meetings conform at the moment to what you might think a board meeting looks like:) What came out of that business meeting was a long long long list of company actions that we need to sort out. They include ticket management, sponsorship, website development, business cards, campaign decisions on the album release, new gigs, branding and a lot more.
So although I should have had lots of time to get the blog done this is the first time I've had to sit down and write.
This week it's all about building your mailing list and as I've said before this is something we only really began to get to grips with in January this year.
It's very true that your mailing list is just as important as selling stuff at shows because every person that you collect an e-mail address from at a show is an opportunity to get them to come and see you again, buy something from you, or tell somebody else about you.
I can't say that we've added friends and family to our mailing list, I can't say that we are using our mailing list as well as we ought to. I can say it's growing through signing people up as we gig, but I can't say that we've put a lot of time into building that mailing list up online.
We do give away a track to people who sign up to the mailing list and funnily enough a lot of people have heard of that track and have shared it with friends (the downside of that being we don't get hold of peoples mailing addresses and if it's been shared friend to friend.
It had never occurred to me to trade a mailing list with a band and though I can see the sense in doing that it's really important to make sure that people really want to be on your mailing list. Certainly, in the UK with my business hat on you need to make sure that you stick to and stay within the law around the data protection act. I would also recommend that you get registered because it is only about £35 and what you end up doing is using the data that you have on your fans not only legal way but also an way that is safe for them and you.
To date we've never collected phone numbers although quite a few people have given us their phone numbers (our drummer is particularly popular) and I'd never thought about sending a text message out to those people - though properly people are more likely to read a text message than an e-mail.
I like the idea of sharing mailing lists where possible and going through our MySpace friends to see if people would like to join our mailing list.
Another thing that we've seen other bands do that seems to draw people in is the onstage photograph. What I mean by this is that you take a photo of the audience and tell the audience you will put that photo on Facebook/ MySpace and get people in the audience to come and find themselves in that picture and say hello.
The people that do come and find themselves in that picture will often join your Facebook page, send you an e-mail and join your mailing list. and, get your free tracks and slowly become a fan for a along long time.
Cheers
Zak
Sunday, 29 August 2010
Saturday, 21 August 2010
It's all about performance
Second mobile blog whilst at vfestival in Chelmsford. Watching other band is a real insight into what works and what doesn't work on different stages. The thing you have to remember at all times is you must respect and engage with your live audience as much as you would your Cyber audience. Whether it's the intimacy of a small stage or the wide expanse of the main stage treat everyone in the audience as a fan, entertain them, give a great show and some love and they will love you back.
Cheers
Zak
Isaac's Aircraft
Cheers
Zak
Isaac's Aircraft
Quick blog
I know that it's only yesterday evening since I last blogged, however since then I've just discovered an iPhone app for blogging that allows me to blog on the move. For a musician what could be better as I'm more likely to be near my iPhone than my lap top! So here's to mobile blogging:)
Cheers
Zak
Isaac's Aircraft
Cheers
Zak
Isaac's Aircraft
Friday, 20 August 2010
Learning about the music industry: Learning about the music industry - week six
Learning about the music industry: Learning about the music industry - week six: "I had two chapters to read this week as I have the original version of the book and the new version. The main change being that in version t..."
Learning about the music industry - week six
I had two chapters to read this week as I have the original version of the book and the new version. The main change being that in version two blogging has become a chapter in it's own right.
So news from the band before I talk about the learning from this week. We are on a sort of pre-recording holiday time at the moment with Martin in Italy, Calum just back, Ant visiting his family and me off to V Festival this weekend. Earlier in the week Ant and I spent some time working on a new song, sorting out some of the press and PR stuff that goes with releasing an album - like what should it be called, what should the artwork look like, should we have promo copies and fan copies, how can we get the best out of our very very small marketing budget. Which is why this course is so useful as I hadn't quite realised how much of a cyber impact we can have if we make the internet work for us in a meaningful way. I nearly forgot! The most exciting thing that happened this week was the release of our first sinc deal! My forgetfulness was because we did the work for this a while ago. We just weren't allowed to talk about it until the launch. The story behind the promotion is that a few weeks ago we were approached by the artist manager for focusrite (focusrite make lots of very good professional recording stuff). Anyway we were asked if we would like to feature on a promo video for a new piece of focusrite gear - the saffire pro 14 - and of course we said, yes. The whole process involved organising a date to shoot in London, choosing and re-writing one of songs to fit the time the guys at focusrite wanted the video to last, heading off to London to spend a whole day recording and filming. The result you can view here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1hh1aXifx0
The most amazing thing about it so far is that is been up 8 days, already had over 1200 hits and has also pushed people to come and find out more about us. Plus we were given some very nice gear for doing it. So thanks all round.
So to this weeks learning - connecting with fans and blogging (a sort of two for one read offer :)
It's certainly true that to be a successful artist you also have to be a successful business person. For us that’s about making sure that as we develop our music, our shows, our style and our fan base we also work on our business - managing our money properly, having goals and objectives and sticking with them until we achieve them or need to adapt them. It's also true that you have to think about your band business as much more than the music. Certainly without the music we wouldn't be a band and music is what brought us into being a band plus putting on a great show is what we want to do more than anything else. However, as a band we also know that to make living from being in a band means we have to look at all the ways in which we can support our fans to want to support us and bring new fans along too. Making an income is something we have to do from all the different things (T shirts Mugs, shows music, branding) that we can offer in a why that people can identify with, and, want to buy into again and again. So what is our identity, what are we selling to our fans - great music, honesty, high quality, having a good time, integrity are just some of the things that come into my mind to start out with. How we communicate that is where we need to do some more work. Yes we are using Twitter, facebook and Myspace and yes we have a mailing list. The trap we have fallen into though is not making our mailing list work properly as we have only ever sent messages to people when we wanted them to come to a show or buy something we have never done a proper news letter!!! Whilst we have a good idea who are fans are, their gender, how old they are and what the like I can't say that we have really thought through how make best use of that information meaningfully. So here's job number 203445 - Write a newsletter that tells people what we've being doing, shows how we are progressing, tell them what they've missed, included a fan opinion, and generally pit out a regular newsletter that brings the band to life. We know that we have an emerging following abroad and what better way to communicate with them until (and even when) we get out to them to play shows. So time to get writing it using the format - make it personal, guts, putting people into action.
And the extra blogging stuff. The new chapter on blogging certainly expands on the stuff I read earlier. I guess the main message that still hits me on the head about blogging is that if your are to be a successful blogger you have to engage with eh blogging community, It's one thing to blog it's another thing to get involved.
I can't say I’ve done much of this yet but I’m adding it to my list and as always will use my business head as well as my artistic head to get it done.
Cheers
Zak
So news from the band before I talk about the learning from this week. We are on a sort of pre-recording holiday time at the moment with Martin in Italy, Calum just back, Ant visiting his family and me off to V Festival this weekend. Earlier in the week Ant and I spent some time working on a new song, sorting out some of the press and PR stuff that goes with releasing an album - like what should it be called, what should the artwork look like, should we have promo copies and fan copies, how can we get the best out of our very very small marketing budget. Which is why this course is so useful as I hadn't quite realised how much of a cyber impact we can have if we make the internet work for us in a meaningful way. I nearly forgot! The most exciting thing that happened this week was the release of our first sinc deal! My forgetfulness was because we did the work for this a while ago. We just weren't allowed to talk about it until the launch. The story behind the promotion is that a few weeks ago we were approached by the artist manager for focusrite (focusrite make lots of very good professional recording stuff). Anyway we were asked if we would like to feature on a promo video for a new piece of focusrite gear - the saffire pro 14 - and of course we said, yes. The whole process involved organising a date to shoot in London, choosing and re-writing one of songs to fit the time the guys at focusrite wanted the video to last, heading off to London to spend a whole day recording and filming. The result you can view here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1hh1aXifx0
The most amazing thing about it so far is that is been up 8 days, already had over 1200 hits and has also pushed people to come and find out more about us. Plus we were given some very nice gear for doing it. So thanks all round.
So to this weeks learning - connecting with fans and blogging (a sort of two for one read offer :)
It's certainly true that to be a successful artist you also have to be a successful business person. For us that’s about making sure that as we develop our music, our shows, our style and our fan base we also work on our business - managing our money properly, having goals and objectives and sticking with them until we achieve them or need to adapt them. It's also true that you have to think about your band business as much more than the music. Certainly without the music we wouldn't be a band and music is what brought us into being a band plus putting on a great show is what we want to do more than anything else. However, as a band we also know that to make living from being in a band means we have to look at all the ways in which we can support our fans to want to support us and bring new fans along too. Making an income is something we have to do from all the different things (T shirts Mugs, shows music, branding) that we can offer in a why that people can identify with, and, want to buy into again and again. So what is our identity, what are we selling to our fans - great music, honesty, high quality, having a good time, integrity are just some of the things that come into my mind to start out with. How we communicate that is where we need to do some more work. Yes we are using Twitter, facebook and Myspace and yes we have a mailing list. The trap we have fallen into though is not making our mailing list work properly as we have only ever sent messages to people when we wanted them to come to a show or buy something we have never done a proper news letter!!! Whilst we have a good idea who are fans are, their gender, how old they are and what the like I can't say that we have really thought through how make best use of that information meaningfully. So here's job number 203445 - Write a newsletter that tells people what we've being doing, shows how we are progressing, tell them what they've missed, included a fan opinion, and generally pit out a regular newsletter that brings the band to life. We know that we have an emerging following abroad and what better way to communicate with them until (and even when) we get out to them to play shows. So time to get writing it using the format - make it personal, guts, putting people into action.
And the extra blogging stuff. The new chapter on blogging certainly expands on the stuff I read earlier. I guess the main message that still hits me on the head about blogging is that if your are to be a successful blogger you have to engage with eh blogging community, It's one thing to blog it's another thing to get involved.
I can't say I’ve done much of this yet but I’m adding it to my list and as always will use my business head as well as my artistic head to get it done.
Cheers
Zak
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Learning about the music industry - week five
My 'to do' list from Ariel's course is getting longer! My 'completed' list isn't quite as long. However, the good news this week is that we've had some new profile shots done, redesigned the main website (made it much simpler and more of a portal to facebook, twitter, you tube and myspace) plus have started to build relationships with other people out their in cyberspace. What still needs to get done is a review and re-jig of all the other websites that we have a page on that we have some control over to make sure that they are up-to-date, remain relevant and where possible are linked together to make managing them easier.
Anyway, news from the band before I talk about learning from week five. As I've said before we are not doing many shows at the moment as we are busy getting our acoustic album ready for recording in the last week of August. This has meant six nights of hard rehearsal, lots of heated debates, and lots of fun. Luckily we only annoyed the neighbours once! At the moment the album list of songs looks (in no particular order) like this - Boogie in Boots, She is Moscow, Wake Up, Too Many Kiss, Dry, Friends and Foes, Good Man, Final State (with a special guest singer), My Baby Did Me Wrong, Mathematics. When holidays are done we've got a week of fan testing by inviting local fans into our rehearsal space to listen to the acoustic versions of the songs before we record them so that we can be sure that our fans will love them and also be able to see how (even where we've reworked them) each song links comfortably to it's sister electric track. We want this acoustic album to be different from the electric one we plan to record in the spring yet not so different that people buying it after having seen our electric set are put off (it's a very hard balance to get right).
So the learning from week five - is it really week five of this nine week course already! Oh and thanks to Carla for letting us know that Ariel and team got our pitch for them to review and will get back to us as soon as they can.
Right! This weeks reading has focused on newsletters, emails and surveys. There are a number of very useful learning things here for the band. Firstly knowing that if we as a band are going to get to the point where we are going to make a living as a band the business side of what we do has to be addressed. In some ways I think that we have begun to consider this in that as well as our music we have worked hard to present ourselves on photo's video and radio, found a distinctive name for the band and produced a very strong logo (we get people come up to the stage and take photos of the logo on the bass drum) so as well as our music we hope to bring resources in through our identity too. We are also in the process of becoming a limited company.
On the subject of email lists we only started actively collecting emails in January this year (sign up to our mailing list at info@isaacsaircraft.com and we'll send you a free track). To date we've got about 400 people on our email list, which is a pretty good start. The bit i don't think we have done very well is the newsletter bit and here i think we need to do a number of things.
Construct a proper newsletter that's not just text.
Make sure it's a story rather than just saying - buy this, come to that.
Decide on a sensible frequency and encourage people to link to other stuff too.
Say something about us as people in it.
Only have one 'ask' per newsletter.
The other area of learning is the survey bit. I've used surveys before and found them very useful though I've never used them in the context of the band, so over the next few weeks I'm going to work out what we ought to put in a survey about the band and give it a go!
Cheers
Zak x
Anyway, news from the band before I talk about learning from week five. As I've said before we are not doing many shows at the moment as we are busy getting our acoustic album ready for recording in the last week of August. This has meant six nights of hard rehearsal, lots of heated debates, and lots of fun. Luckily we only annoyed the neighbours once! At the moment the album list of songs looks (in no particular order) like this - Boogie in Boots, She is Moscow, Wake Up, Too Many Kiss, Dry, Friends and Foes, Good Man, Final State (with a special guest singer), My Baby Did Me Wrong, Mathematics. When holidays are done we've got a week of fan testing by inviting local fans into our rehearsal space to listen to the acoustic versions of the songs before we record them so that we can be sure that our fans will love them and also be able to see how (even where we've reworked them) each song links comfortably to it's sister electric track. We want this acoustic album to be different from the electric one we plan to record in the spring yet not so different that people buying it after having seen our electric set are put off (it's a very hard balance to get right).
So the learning from week five - is it really week five of this nine week course already! Oh and thanks to Carla for letting us know that Ariel and team got our pitch for them to review and will get back to us as soon as they can.
Right! This weeks reading has focused on newsletters, emails and surveys. There are a number of very useful learning things here for the band. Firstly knowing that if we as a band are going to get to the point where we are going to make a living as a band the business side of what we do has to be addressed. In some ways I think that we have begun to consider this in that as well as our music we have worked hard to present ourselves on photo's video and radio, found a distinctive name for the band and produced a very strong logo (we get people come up to the stage and take photos of the logo on the bass drum) so as well as our music we hope to bring resources in through our identity too. We are also in the process of becoming a limited company.
On the subject of email lists we only started actively collecting emails in January this year (sign up to our mailing list at info@isaacsaircraft.com and we'll send you a free track). To date we've got about 400 people on our email list, which is a pretty good start. The bit i don't think we have done very well is the newsletter bit and here i think we need to do a number of things.
Construct a proper newsletter that's not just text.
Make sure it's a story rather than just saying - buy this, come to that.
Decide on a sensible frequency and encourage people to link to other stuff too.
Say something about us as people in it.
Only have one 'ask' per newsletter.
The other area of learning is the survey bit. I've used surveys before and found them very useful though I've never used them in the context of the band, so over the next few weeks I'm going to work out what we ought to put in a survey about the band and give it a go!
Cheers
Zak x
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
New Music Tuesday: Black Crowes, Arcade Fire, Guster, QOTSA, Los Lobos, Buckcherry, Lady Gaga - Music - Blogcritics
New Music Tuesday: Black Crowes, Arcade Fire, Guster, QOTSA, Los Lobos, Buckcherry, Lady Gaga - Music - Blogcritics
The new Arcade Fire Album is a must buy. It's there most accomplished album yet.
The new Arcade Fire Album is a must buy. It's there most accomplished album yet.
Learning about the music industry - week four
This blog is a day late!! I meant to write it yesterday, however, we are the middle of a week of very intensive rehearsals prior to heading into the studio to record an acoustic album which will... be slightly different to the way in which we play our songs normally. Partly the reason for doing this is that we are still capital raising to do the full electric album and partly because we do have an alternative acoustic version of each of our current songs and people keep asking where they can buy both versions. So.. if you like the hard pop-rock version of 'Steady On' that we give away as a free download when you sign up to our mailing list i know you will also like the folk version that will be on the album. Fingers cross the plan is to have it recorded and mixed by the beginning of September, mastered by the middle, and out in October! It will also feature a team up with the lovely Christina Novella on a song we wrote four years ago called Final State.
Anyway in between, redesigning each song and getting a load of new photos done I'm still reading Ariel's book and this week its all been about web 2.0. Now to be honest I'd never really got this before i read this and in some ways this week was a bit of a eureka moment. I almost cant say exactly what I've learnt because i really think that you should GO AND READ THE BOOK yourself.
So what will the band and I be doing having read this chapter.
Well, firstly - the website www.isaacsaircraft.com comes down tonight to be replaced by a new much simpler and easy to maintain website. (learning have a presence in as many paces as you can - make them as fast and simple to maintain as you can).
Blog lots more and talk to lots of people about the blogs that they are posting.
Network with bloggers where we can.
Set up a podsafe profile (not heard of this one before).
Keep tweeting.
Start using Flicker (again) This might take a bit of time to sort.
Most of the stuff in this chapter we were already doing, however it is not just about the doing it. It's the way in which you do it - otherwise you can put an awful lot of effort into not getting very much done. Sometimes i look back what the band so done online to date and i now know we have been very guilty of that. You have to have great music, a great show and a great vibrant online presence too.
Cheers
Zak
Anyway in between, redesigning each song and getting a load of new photos done I'm still reading Ariel's book and this week its all been about web 2.0. Now to be honest I'd never really got this before i read this and in some ways this week was a bit of a eureka moment. I almost cant say exactly what I've learnt because i really think that you should GO AND READ THE BOOK yourself.
So what will the band and I be doing having read this chapter.
Well, firstly - the website www.isaacsaircraft.com comes down tonight to be replaced by a new much simpler and easy to maintain website. (learning have a presence in as many paces as you can - make them as fast and simple to maintain as you can).
Blog lots more and talk to lots of people about the blogs that they are posting.
Network with bloggers where we can.
Set up a podsafe profile (not heard of this one before).
Keep tweeting.
Start using Flicker (again) This might take a bit of time to sort.
Most of the stuff in this chapter we were already doing, however it is not just about the doing it. It's the way in which you do it - otherwise you can put an awful lot of effort into not getting very much done. Sometimes i look back what the band so done online to date and i now know we have been very guilty of that. You have to have great music, a great show and a great vibrant online presence too.
Cheers
Zak
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