If you are looking at doing music for the long term then don’t get too attached to these sites that are out now. It was only 6 years ago everyone was on Friendstar & Hi5. 3 Years ago MySpace was killing it and now its all about Facebook & Twitter. Will these sites be the main “hang out” for your fans in 3 years time? Honestly, I dont know but history shows that your fans will be on the next “cool” site by then.

Will people still want to engage with artists? Yep. I can’t see that changing. Therefore, don’t get too attached to what’s hot now but instead master engaging and providing content for your fans regardless where you deliver it. If people want to go to the next cool site and you have the skills in delivering your message, then you will be able to survive regardless of the new playing field. I will show you some amazing tactics from people who have mastered this in future tips.

If you want a long career then you need to think Long-term success and start evaluating why you are using social media in the first place and how you will measure its success. Remember to handle your business because your music is your business.

If you want to find out more about music and social media, please download a copy of my ebook/ecourse.

Do you ever look at some popular websites and think I wish I had the money to get my video on the home page or in highly trafficed places? Well I will let you into a little secret if you didn’t know…..A lot of those places are not paid for. Some sites may have a deal in place between the label but a LOT are the preference of 1 person or a team of people.  These are usually the Content Producers aka the new DJ you need to target.

A very basic description of a content producers job is to upload content to webpages, including the homepage. If they have influence then they even decide what goes up and these are the people you need to build relationships with. The reason why I can talk about this with such conviction is because that was a critical part of my job for 2 years while working as a content producer at MySpace. MySpace promotes hundreds of artists a year for free on pages that get a lot of traffic (millions of views a day). Same as Youtube, Bebo and other popular sites.

So how do I find them? Loads of ways and I will share some within the 101 tips but 1 quick way is to use our best friend Google, type content producer for X (website you want), find out who they are and follow them on twitter. Once you have them on Twitter (and most are), you can look at influencing the influencer (Chapter 6 of my free downloadble book).Again, this is just 1 way.

Please continue getting your music to the hottest and most relevant DJs on the radio but don’t forget the content producers. These new DJS have as much, and in a lot of cases, more reach over who can hear your music. Also a lot of Djs are starting to figure this out and are creating their own blog sites where they are becoming content producers.

Chapter 6 in my downloadable book talks more about the influencers and how to get hold of them. Feel free to download it here

Until tip number 2, Good luck.

We at The Worst Kept Secret are always looking at new ways and ideas of helping musicians improve their chances of turning their dreams into reality. Its no secret that without a strong online presence you will struggle so we are going to offer 101 ways/tips/secrets on how you can help improve your internet game. We are going to try (lol) and offer new tips every other day and will be using our experience and network within the music industry to help you.

Also if you haven’t already please read our downloadable free ebook and course as some of the jargon, references and examples will be connected.

Tip 1 is coming tomorrow.

Follow us on Twitter, RSS or Facebook to be notified when the next tip is out.

Good luck and please let as many musicians know about this.

Today, Spotify announces a major evolution of its service. We caught up with our friend and head of Spotify Legal, James Duffet-Smith, who gave us the exclusive:

“In what marks our most significant upgrade since Spotify’s launch in late 2008, we’re introducing a wide range of exclusive new features that will not only allow our users to discover, share and manage music more effectively, but make the overall Spotify experience more enjoyable and expansive.

We’ve all been working very hard on this. It’s a major release for us and integrating social features into Spotify is a big step forward. We hope that our users love it as much as we do”

The major innovation is that of the fully-customisable ‘Spotify Music Profile’. Allowing users to better share music with friends, it works in three distinct ways:

BUILD

Build your Spotify Music Profile by adding friends and other Spotify users to your ‘People’ sidebar, to the right of the screen.

Connect to Facebook: You can now connect to Facebook through Spotify, allowing you to add friends (who have done the same) into your Spotify profile.

Add Spotify users: You can also add other Spotify users by simply searching for them by username. For example, searching under ‘spotify:user:username’ will bring up their profile (if published).

PUBLISH

Publish a link to your Spotify Music Profile anywhere on the web.

Publish your Profile: This allows your friends to follow your musical tastes, top artists and favourite tracks and albums by publishing your profile to your Facebook page, blog, personal website or indeed, anywhere on the web you choose. Your weekly top six tracks and artists can also be published.

DISCOVER & SHARE

A number of new and exciting social functions will allow you to discover and share music like never before.

Inbox: A great way to share. Simply drag and drop a track or album over a friend’s name and it will appear in their ‘Inbox’.

Facebook ‘Feed’: Music your friends have posted on Facebook will be visible in the unique ‘Feed’ section.

Popularity Count: Playlists you’ve posted will display how many times they’ve been added by your friends. Clicking on the number brings up their names. In another significant innovation, the ‘Library’ function will transform Spotify into a total music management platform, enabling you to combine your personal music library with ours and browse it with ease via the ‘Filter’ bar. The three key features of the ‘Library’ are:

LOCAL FILES

Missing any music in Spotify? Now you can import a link to all the music files stored on your computer with a simple click of a button. Local files shared as part of a playlist will also be playable if matched with tracks in the Spotify catalogue.

WIRELESS SYNC

Tracks that you add to Spotify locally can be saved to playlists and transferred to your mobile phone without connecting a USB cable.

STARRED

Every track or album on Spotify can now be ‘starred’, allowing you to tag/bookmark your favourites into a special sub-folder.

Daniel Ek, CEO and founder of Spotify, comments:

“Today Spotify has moved a step closer to making music more connected, and realizing our dream of becoming THE music platform. We want to empower users to share and discover music in a way that hasn’t been possible up until now. It’s never been easier to enjoy music together.” The update will start to be rolled out to both our Free and Premium users from today.

If you have read our Free E-Book ‘The 10 Commandments of Music and Social Media’, you will be aware that the first chapter is entitled; Get Your MTV Crib.

Your MTV Crib is your website, your blog, your home; it is the place that you send your core audience to and the place that if you understand how to influence your audience; it is where you can entertain them to buy into your brand.

The first step to becoming an online brand, is giving your website a vanity url name, also known as a domain name. By vanity, we mean, the title that you will be proud to say to people for example; go to www.mydomain.com for more information.

It has to be catchy, it has to be easy to remember and most importantly, it has to be relevant to your brand. So where can you get yourself a domain name from? Well at The Worst kept Secret, we have done the research, so you don’t have to. Our trusty Resource page has the low down on all the tips, tricks and advice for building your online brand and below we have outlined the Top 3 Domain Name Registration sites, taking into consideration; price, special offers, reliability of the company and customer service.

1). Go Daddy

Like Hostgator in the Hosting world, Go Daddy is at the forefront of domain name registration. They specialize in simplicity and from the moment you decide on your domain name to the moment you own it, Go Daddy will guide you through a hassle free process. Go Daddy Domain Prices start at $1.99 depending on what kind of url you want, and if you have any questions their customer service is top notch.

2). 123-Reg

Ask anyone about domain name registration and they will generally point you here. Does what is says on the tin, and with a very user-friendly control management page. 123-reg is one of, if not the best in the business. If it were not for 123-reg taking weeks to reply to our email queries, we would have gone with them; so we chose Go Daddy.

3). 1&1 Instant Domain

Not much separates these from the other two above apart from the fact that we don’t like the look of their website. Makes us go dizzy just by looking at it. In terms of value for money and customer service though, we can’t knock their packages. 1&1 domains start as low as £5.99 for a .com and £2.99 for .co.uk – That’s cheap!! Like the budgie.

The News of the Week

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New indie music TV station ‘LAVA’ is set to launch on SKY channel 378 from March 29th Music News

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New figures show that the impact of piracy on the British music business is uncovered in new figures that show nearly 10,000 jobs could be lost in the industry by 2015 iStockAnalyst

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A newly created “trust mark” is going to be utilised for Music services such as iTunes, MySpace Music, Tesco, Spotify, HMV and Rough Trade which will highlight licensed music download and streaming sites Arstechnica

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The top news stories of the week

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It is estimated that Net Piracy has caused the media industries to lose £10 billion pounds in 2008. Not only money will be a losing factor, as in the future a quarter of a million British jobs could be at risk. Guardian

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The music labels love the idea of bringing people’s music collections into the cloud, meaning in web spaced storage, particularly because it might make consumers excited about buying music again NY Times

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Apple is estimated to have sold 120,000 iPads when it opened pre-orders on Friday Music Week

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It’s being reported that service-based companies, as opposed to streaming or download music services, are rapidly becoming the hottest music start-ups. Billboard

I just watched a very interesting Panorama special on the BBC about Internet music sharing.

It talked about a proposed new law that is threatening to disconnect the millions of internet users who unlawfully download free music, films and TV. Jo Whiley looked at how broadband use at home may never be the same, and could even be cut off. It left me thinking is Illegal downloading the Gift or the Curse for the music industry?

Some interesting facts on why it is a curse:

- Record Industry claims to be losing £200m a year
- 7 million people illegally file share
- A staggering 61% of 16 to 24 year olds illegally download

Some interesting facts on why it is a gift:

- People who illegally download spend more on music
- 42% of people who illegally download do it with a view to buy
- People who illegally download spend an average of £77 per year on music vs £44 per year on music for legal downloaders

It created some very interesting points and questions:

- Is the music industry suffering or is it really the record labels that are suffering? (1.4billion spent on live music in 2008)
- Is it a new music industry or is it not too late to turn back to the traditional method?
- Will slowing internet connections down or off to prevent illegal downloading going to prevent people from filesharing?
- Is music albums now just great promo for live events? Is it a new model now?
- Do you find the people that complain about downloading music are happy to download films and TV shows?

Personally I dont think this bill will work and it will only hurt the industry more. People still love music and will spend money on music, its just seems that the traditional ways are changing.

What do you think? Please let me know your views.

PS, if you are in the music industry and what to know more about Marketing yourself in a new way, please download the free ebook on how to make social media benefit you.

The Top News of the Week:

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BBC digital chief Erik Huggers announces plans, in an interview, to scrap 200 of the BBC’s websites, with the promise of more quality and less quantity. Guardian

And you can find the Original Guardian announcement here Huggers promises BBC cuts will leave ‘greater space for others’

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Pink Floyd have won a legal battle against EMI, meaning that their album tracks will no longer be sold individually online. BBC

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