Building a community of fans to rally around you and support you and interacting with them in a meaningful and connected way is both labor intensive and time consuming. In fan building and social media (much like in the music business) you cannot jump to the front of the line. To make it today as a musician (I don’t care if you are independent and totally DIY or signed to a major label) you must focus on building your fan base.

The #1 most effective way I know for building a fanbase which is the first step towards making more money: Building Your Email List And Sending Effective Newsletters.

Click here to read Ariel's entire post.

I asked myself this crucial question when writing my latest e-book, "What are the important skills and practices required to create a winning and profitable music business apart from good music?"

The answer rests in being a good leader of your ship, having a well-designed and communicated strategy and a good marketing plan that can be executed to promote your music in a structured way.

If you re-read that last paragraph, you'll see how much I emphasize the idea of strategy and structure. It is with this careful planning and well-understood principles that your music business will become profitable.

STRATEGY
A strategy comes to life through its ability to influence hundreds and thousands of decisions, both big and small, made by anyone from the director level to the street team level. It is, at its core, a guide to how you behave and provides an external reflection of your music business.

A good strategy fuels and ignites your fire to more compelling actions and results. It leads you to a destination that is clear in your mind. A bad strategy on the other hand leads you to a less competitive, less differentiated position. It is simply a waste of time and energy as it does not move you forward; instead, it keeps you where you're already at.

The word "winning" is important in this context. An average strategy plan, when executed, gets you mediocre results and may not be a fair reflection of your true talent. A winning strategy plan on the other hand transforms your current situation into monster success through developing the right tools, people, techniques and street teams to share your art with the wider world.

As musicians, we are explorers. As explorers, our job is to explore the depths of our hearts and souls to share the music that feels most at home to us. Our job is to experiment, and experimentation takes time before it is successful.

Your music business needs a framework for achieving results that can be built upon to achieve your specific goals in your specific music genre. When you start to put together a puzzle, you would start by finding the corners and the edge pieces before building and assembling the inner pieces. It is the same with putting together the framework for your music business.

Constructing a music business plan is the first step in gaining clarity and direction in what you'll do, how often you'll release an album, how you'll market your music and how you'll make money. The framework of your music business is what holds it all together - the operations, the marketing, the management and the finances. Let's look at each one separately.

OPERATIONS PLAN
Your business operations is the activities your music business will do in order to share your music. These are usually gigs (what type of gigs?), recording (how often? when?), distribution (whom? how?), sponsorship, and other avenues of generating revenue.

MARKETING PLAN
The activities and tactics you will undertake to promote your music through your music business. These may include PR, social networking on Facebook, Myspace, etc, blogging, podcasting, video blogging, flyer and poster marketing, etc.

MANAGEMENT PLAN
Who will form your core team for your music business and what will they do? Regardless of whether you have the capacity to get these people involved, knowing what you want is core to getting a framework to build your music business.

FINANCE PLAN
Knowing what money goes out and what comes in is crucial to understanding how your music business can be successful. My accountant often tells me that the success of my business is equal to how well I can understand the numbers on my cash flow sheet. He is right and I pass this advice on to you

This article you just read is an excerpt from Kavit's new e-book called "How to Design a Winning & Profitable Music Business." Released 9th Sept. Available for free download from: www.innerrhythm.org/ebook

On Nov 17th, 2007, here is what Facebook says on its official blog:

 “We launched Facebook Pages, which are distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook.

We noticed people wanted to connect with their favorite music, restaurants, and brands; but there was no good place for these types of affiliations to exist. Now, there is a place for them and you can become a fan of whatever pages you choose in order to interact with your passions in new ways. You can post reviews for a local restaurant, buy tickets to a new movie, or be the first to get a heads up about new promotions.”

Here are some examples of musicians with Facebook pages:  

- Jay Sean: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jay-Sean/9266370870

- Herbie Hancock: http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Herbie-Hancock-Of%EF%AC%81cial-Artist-Page/%207211826782#/pages/Herbie-Hancock-Official-Artist-Page/7211826782?ref=s&refurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.new.facebook.com%2Fs.php%3Fref%3Dsearch%26init%3Dq%26q%3Dherbie%2Bhancock

The simple fact is that there are still not many Facebook pages and so if you create one, start sharing it with friends and use the appropriate words, you could grow it to a big, big traffic puller. 

Follow these steps:

1.If you haven't yet got a Facebook account, go and open one at www.facebook.com as it's free.

2.Set up a Facebook page from here: http://www.facebook.com/business/?pages
and follow the step-by-step instructions to adding all the images, text, web links, videos, etc and other information you have to make it an informative page.

3.Share the page with your friends by sending them an email and placing your page link in it. And ask them to forward it on.

There is also an Insights dashboard where you can see how many people visit the page and how many become fans. More than anything, it is an advertising mechanism to be used with Facebook's Social Ads which are pay per click advertising. If you dont have the money to pay for ads yet, still go ahead and set up a Facebook page to build up a fan base.

(This is an excerpt from my e-book called "The Strategy Guide To Succeeding As A Musician in 2008". It's available free at http://www.innerrhythm.org/strategyguide.html) 

This is a website of which you might think is similar to Myspace. BUT, there is a huge difference.

You can upload your music under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA license. This means people can use your song for many different purposes. In this way could be that your song will be used for a commercial, jingle, remix, etc. This is all free exposure for your act and might get you in the spotlight you want to get in. People that use your song need to state your name (or your artist name) and need to share their work with the world as well.

Check it out! http://www.tribeofnoise.com 

For more details on the license: http://www.creativecommons.org

More questions? Contact me! 

HypeBot published a list of 100 music promotions tips and ideas that's definitely worth a read if you are an artists trying to get your music heard. Several of the tips are common sense but focusing on the basics often times yields the best results. 

Click here to read the List of 100 Free & Affordable Hight & Low Tech Music Promotion Tips from HypeBot.

While expanding your brand i.e. your music across Cyberspace it is good to keep up with what is already built. What this means is leaving at least 1 comment on a fans profile or web presence each week. I actually think you could leave 1 each day to a different person and still have plenty of time for what matters Your Music.

Though if you are only doing the minimum of 1 comment each week you may want to set up a google alert for your bands name. The reason to do this is so that if someone is talking about you, you can participate in the conversation. By participating with a comment you show interest in your fans or potential fans. This will bring more people to check you out and enjoy the greatest music ever created. You do believe that you have the best or close to the best music ever created don't you?

If you don't find anyone talking about you then move on to whatever social network site you use. Leave a comment that will be seen by others, for the potential increase of new fans. If you are adding new friends regularly and some of them are commenting to you these would be the best ones to leave comments for as they already are active fans.

Run fan participation contests and list the winners on your web-site. Your fans will not only love the attention. But they will tell all their friends about being mentioned on your site. Don't get too lost in doing this and remember to keep making the best music in 22 galaxies.

FATdrop webhead Alex was on the panel at the Independent Label Showcase in Brighton (UK) last week, giving advice to bands and independent labels on how best to utilise the internet for marketing and promoting music.

We summarised the tips from the event on our blog , hoped they might be useful. And below...

build a mailing list: having a list of people who are likely to want to pay to come to gigs and buy albums later down the line is essential

give music away for free: but make sure you’re getting something in return, like an email address to add to your mailing list. And be careful what you give away – you won’t be able to sell it to any other groups afterwards. Consider giving away remixes instead of actual album tracks

don’t spam the fans: when you’ve got your mailing list, make sure what you’re sending out has value and is entertaining – treat the email as a product and remember that it’s competing against emails from the receiver’s friends and family, who aren’t trying to sell something

facebook v myspace: the panel thought that facebook is better for engaging with fans; but myspace is better for discovering music, so make sure you keep both/all communities up to date

you must be on these sites: discogs and last.fm

get your music on to mp3 blogs: bloggers are generally happy to receive music from bands so just email anyone that might be interested. To find out who you should be approaching use hype machine and imeem to see who’s most popular

• If 40 or more blog posts were made before an album's release sales ended up being three to four times the average for both independent and major label releases.
  
  
• If blog posts crossed 250, album sales rose to six times the average regardless of label."
  
  

Last.fm is a great site for music listeners, but it also has great potential for bands to promote their music. In this article I'll show how you can promote your music using Last.fm. In this article I assume you're in a band, and you have recorded your songs.

Click here to read to full article. 

8 Steps to Social Networking / Web 2.0 Mastery by Ariel Hyatt - A great summary on how artists can use social networking and web 2.0 technology for generating publicity from the Music Meets Media panel discussion and Q & A at the 2007 Future of Music Policy Summit.

http://www.arielpublicity.com/sound_advice/web-2-mastery.html