about the music industry–week seven

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

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

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