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
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