8.3. Establishing an Online Presence

Distribution and promotion and promotion used to be the big hurdles for recording artists, and that was why they needed to make deals with record companies. Now distribution is easy, thanks to the Internet. An Internet distribution strategy has two parts: your own personal website and as many music distribution and broadcast sites as you can manage. Always have your own personal site with photos, contact information, and links to where fans can hear and purchase your music. This increases your search engine presence, and it makes it easy for fans to find you. Do please resist the urge to make this a typical overproduced site full of special effects and animations and dark, barely readable color schemes; this guarantees you will chase away your visitors. Make it clean, simple, readable, and easy to navigate, because nobody cares how self-indulgent your web designer is. They want to know about you and how to hear your music, and they don’t want to jump through hoops to get there.

You should have a consistent online identity. The first step to building your online identity is to register your own domain name. Don’t have an email address or domain name that promotes someone else’s business, like carlarockstar@gmail.com or guitarcarla@hotmail.com. Free email addresses are seriously uncool anyway. Domain names are cheap, about $15 per year. If you change web hosts and email service providers, your domain name will always travel with you. Suppose you have a band—let’s say you’re The Bandits—and your domain is http://thebandits.com/. Now you can do all kinds of creative things with the domain name. Everyone in your band can have their own email address, such as drummer@thebandits.com, diva@thebandits.com, or rockgod@thebandits.com. No matter what music distributors, hosting services, or social networking sites you try, http://thebandits.com/ will always be there for your fans to find you.