Over the years, I’ve had plenty of arguments with musicians and with music management professionals about the importance of maintaining a website under your own domain. Their responses often included: * 1996: I don’t need my own domain. AOL gives…
Category
Web/Tech
My @SproutSocial Experiment: Setting Boundaries on Social Media
I’ve been teaching some workshops on social media lately, and one of the questions that comes up very often involves how to keep Twitter and Facebook status updates from taking over your life. In the new edition of Grow Your…
Why You Should Own Your Band’s Website
Delicious is dying. And if you’re not a hardcore web citizen, you might not know the reason why so many folks have become so upset about it. In short: a beloved, free service that thousands of people used to automate…
Make Space to Leave MySpace
The alarm clock woke me up with the news that a senior News Corporation executive hinted about the possible closure of MySpace within “quarters, not years.” Even if MySpace manages to avoid a total shutdown, independent musicians should worry whenever…
Can Spotify Satisfy American Copyright Laws?
Lots of friends and colleagues from abroad have hyped up Spotify to me, and I don’t doubt that it’s an awesome service. As we hear more about Spotify, especially involving mobile apps and in-car services, I fear we might be…
LazyWeb: Gig To-Do Macros + Gig Matcher
Scott Andrew and Bill Wilson are riffing on some tools that we could use in the independent music community to get more meaningful artist promotion work done. I like Scott’s idea of automating gig swaps — the kinds of things…
Make Make a Pancake
Are you having this much fun making videos? If not, you should: I think I’m gonna have some pancakes for breakfast today. Also, make sure you watch past the credits. [ via Natalie Dee ]
Just press play? (How the marketplace is forcing the music business to consider on-demand music.)
Mark Cuban notes in an e-mail to Nancy Baym that if YouTube had sprouted up two or three years earlier, the RIAA would have toasted them for s’mores in a heartbeat. (Those are my words, not his, because it’s getting…
How to use unconventional musical instruments to make a classic sound, or vice versa.
While technology lets you do some amazing things on stage, the power of your songs can sometimes be muted when your audience focuses too much on the gimmick. It doesn’t sound like this is the case for Pamela Z and…
How to Change Your MySpace URL
Basically, once you pick that username, it’s yours to keep. If you want a different one, you’ll have to sign up again However, you don’t have to be stuck with giving out a MySpace URL you don’t like. Get your…
Stay safe on the Web!
Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself that, for a lot of musicians, the Web is a brand-new place. And with more and more indie musicians trying out services like eBay and Paypal to sell CDs and merch, a…
Preparing your Flash website for IE7
(This post contains more web-geekery; if you’re unfamiliar with things like HTML and JavaScript, you’ll want to get your webmaster or a web-savvy friend to help you out.) I was messing around with my website a few days ago when…