Members Opus Antics Posted September 11, 2013 Members Share Posted September 11, 2013 Thought I'd throw a fresh thread out there. I'm looking to next-level my marketing efforts for my band looking ahead to 2014. The band is a top-40 cover band. Currently playing bars. 2013 was a good stepping stone for my band, but I would really like to start seeing next-level results over the next year. Obviously that starts first and foremost with performance. But for purposes of this thread I was hoping for some input on the business side of promotion - namely use of Facebook, a website and a press kit. Currently I use Facebook extensively. I try to interact with people who follow the band, provide gig information, general band information, and I have links to reverbnation for our gig schedule and audio demos. I think I'm doing a pretty good job with that, but I'm always open to suggestions for improvement. How many of you use Reverbnation links? Do you use a different service or method? Any thoughts, comments, suggestions or critiques are appreciated: www.facebook.com/panicbuttonband For a website, I've been going around in circles. I currently don't have one for the band. I rely on Facebook. How necessary/helpful is it to have? I've had a few starts and stops with different band website providers, but never really followed up. If I do go with one, are there any cost effective (i.e., cheap or free, but good) options out there that people have had success with? Press kit. Mine currently consists of a cd with demos on it. On the cd I used lightscribe to print a picture of the band, FB page and contact information. And that's pretty much it. I'm stuck when it comes to figuring out what to do to create a more robust press kit, and whether it is necessary. I'm convinced most of that stuff gets thrown in the trash anyway, and it's the constant harrassment of the booking manager to get him to finally look at the FB page and book you for a first trial night that actually gets the booking. Am I off on that? What do you guys do, and if I want to get into the better paying clubs is it more necessary to have a more robust press kit? Content. Most of the time when I try to record a demo I end up with either lousy video or lousy audio or both. What I hear when I go out in front and listen never seems to match up with what I hear the next day when I download the recordings. What do you guys do to create demos that don't sound lousy and amature? Thoughts, suggestions, critiques are all welcome. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RoadRanger Posted September 11, 2013 Members Share Posted September 11, 2013 I notice that your "live demos" are super quiet compared to the "non-live" ones. I'd fix that, pretty simple to do. Were the "non-live" ones done at a studio or ?Do you have any videos up that we can have a look at to critique?Most of your "live" photos look like they were taken with a flash, I'd not do that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Opus Antics Posted September 11, 2013 Author Members Share Posted September 11, 2013 Non live demos were in a studio. Live were recorded with a Tascam. I didn't think to master them to the same levels. (leave it to a sound guy to pick up on that... ) If I had a really good sound guy would there be a way to get good live recordings off the board? I don't have any videos. I keep asking for someone to bring a video camera but it doesn't happen. And the live photos were taken with a flash. I agree that's not optimal, but it's all I have at the moment. Live photos are all from FOBs who are not professionals. I did just have a professional photo studio shoot done (see the cover photo), so I'll be rolling those out as needed. And I will probably have a professional take some live shots of our November gig. That will give me one set of professional studio pics, and one set of professional live pics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Howie22 Posted September 13, 2013 Members Share Posted September 13, 2013 I use bandzoogle for a website. It's between $10 and $20 per month and custom designed for musicians. They take care of the web domain registration, renewal, etc, but you keep the rights to the domain if you quit their service.also, it's very easy to set up and manage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RoadRanger Posted September 13, 2013 Members Share Posted September 13, 2013 Hey, anybody using GoDaddy's hosting and website builder? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members SaintJames Posted September 13, 2013 Members Share Posted September 13, 2013 RoadRanger wrote: Hey, anybody using GoDaddy's hosting and website builder? I use their hosting, though I wasn't aware they had a website builder other than the craptastic "Website Tonight" site builder. I use Wordpress as the CMS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members sventvkg Posted September 14, 2013 Members Share Posted September 14, 2013 You don't need multitrack recording for your video. Just a really good pro stereo mix set up through a board. Just make sure your sound is dialed in like live. You do not need an audience either, if you want to shoot it at a rehearsal space bit do have full lights an production. That said, spend a few hundred and get someone like my partner and I to come out with multiple cameras and mics and shoot a love show with a great audience. Don't be cheap. This is your career here. We would probably come out shoot your show, edit the promo and make ya a nice EpK for $5-600. A bit more than one nights gig pay. A pretty good investment I'd say for something that can get you many times that amount in work. Don't try to do something put of your expertise. Pay someone to do it once, do it right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RoadRanger Posted September 14, 2013 Members Share Posted September 14, 2013 I'd be interested to see some full-band "pro promo" live videos - anyone willing to post yours for critique? I've sure seen plenty of crappy ones . OTOH I've seen a few posted here that were pretty good . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted September 16, 2013 Members Share Posted September 16, 2013 You're not saying anything I'm not, Lee. If the band aims too high, it's going to be pretty obvious and the market is going to weed those bands out. You aren't going to last long by selling steak and then showing up and delivering hamburger. Puffed up resumes, retouched photos, etc? Yeah that all exists to a certain degree in every business. Thats just Marketing 101 stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wesg Posted September 23, 2013 Members Share Posted September 23, 2013 And from the other end of the spectrum -- My rock cover band hit the first rung of that ladder, then fell off when we lost our singer/bassist earlier this year. So, we're back to shooting for the bottom rung, we've now hired a new bassist and a new singer and have one rehearsal as the full lineup with about 30% new tunes. Best of all, I think we have actually found five guys on the same page. The first thing I did when we finalized the lineup was to order nice business cards..colour, extra thick card stock, with blank backs upon which to write. I think it's important that any band member can put a business card into the hands of anyone they're speaking to about the band. That was basically free. Next we need to get our stuff together and book a small venue so we can take some pictures and video to update the website. I've used Jeff's trick before to fake multiple camera angles from a single video source. It really brings a performance to life, although a second camera angle from a hand-held would be awesome. Can I splice together multiple camera feeds in iMovie, or will I need to speed money on software? I also bought oval stickers with the band logo on them. I have no idea what to do with them, except that I wanted some. LOL. Damn marketing folks are good at selling me stuff! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wheresgrant3 Posted September 27, 2013 Members Share Posted September 27, 2013 Opus Antics wrote: Thought I'd throw a fresh thread out there. I'm looking to next-level my marketing efforts for my band looking ahead to 2014. The band is a top-40 cover band. Currently playing bars. 2013 was a good stepping stone for my band, but I would really like to start seeing next-level results over the next year. Obviously that starts first and foremost with performance. But for purposes of this thread I was hoping for some input on the business side of promotion - namely use of Facebook, a website and a press kit. Currently I use Facebook extensively. I try to interact with people who follow the band, provide gig information, general band information, and I have links to reverbnation for our gig schedule and audio demos. I think I'm doing a pretty good job with that, but I'm always open to suggestions for improvement. How many of you use Reverbnation links? Do you use a different service or method? Any thoughts, comments, suggestions or critiques are appreciated: www.facebook.com/panicbuttonband For a website, I've been going around in circles. I currently don't have one for the band. I rely on Facebook. How necessary/helpful is it to have? I've had a few starts and stops with different band website providers, but never really followed up. If I do go with one, are there any cost effective (i.e., cheap or free, but good) options out there that people have had success with? Press kit. Mine currently consists of a cd with demos on it. On the cd I used lightscribe to print a picture of the band, FB page and contact information. And that's pretty much it. I'm stuck when it comes to figuring out what to do to create a more robust press kit, and whether it is necessary. I'm convinced most of that stuff gets thrown in the trash anyway, and it's the constant harrassment of the booking manager to get him to finally look at the FB page and book you for a first trial night that actually gets the booking. Am I off on that? What do you guys do, and if I want to get into the better paying clubs is it more necessary to have a more robust press kit? Content. Most of the time when I try to record a demo I end up with either lousy video or lousy audio or both. What I hear when I go out in front and listen never seems to match up with what I hear the next day when I download the recordings. What do you guys do to create demos that don't sound lousy and amature? Thoughts, suggestions, critiques are all welcome. Thanks. Well... for the four of the eleven years of our existence we tackled alot of your questions... and none were solved in a simple day month of year. When we started NUTS I was 32 (our youngest was 28 and oldest 37) . It took almost two years just to get the lineup stable and then another two years to gain some traction with clubs. And almost all of that involved time, money and sacrifice. When we decided that we wanted to grow beyond door covers and $500 gaurantees we had a meeting and all sat down with a yellow note pad and wrote out all of the things that we believed we needed to accomplish to advance the band further. Then we took that list and sorted it by what we were able to accomplish immediately versus what was something we could address long term. Immediate concerns were a presss kit and demo. We committed toward something professional which meant money out of pocket... or in our case money straight from the gig. This was before FaceBook or MySpace. We had a website at the time which was a pretty good representation of the band and the show we were putting on at the time. As you can see we still maintain a site today http://nutsinablender.com/ Even though it gets a third of the traffic our FB pages get it's still our EPK essentially. Photos were a big thing. I remember we spent $500 for a decent photo shoot at the time and that was big money at the time. Having to gather on a Sat morning to have individuals and some band shots. We spent another $500 on professional looking Folder sleeves to insert prss kit material. These days you can send an EPK.... that $1000 may be better spent in getting some decent video.Along the way we constantly chipped away at the list. In 2006 we bought a brand new PA as a band... and invested in a trailer to haul it. We had six members (5 band and one manager) and had a 7th payment to a band fund. $100 from the top of every gig went into the fund. Play 7 gigs and guess what, you have $700 to spend on marketing, t-shirts, rehearsal space, etc. Those funds help to finance the business. We used it to buy equipment, pay down debt. If we didn't have the funds to do something like buy lights ($3500) we would wait until we had the funds. Almost every step and improvement we took resulted in some advancement for the band. As I said it didn't happen overnight. It took years of progression. As we built our name and rep (which came really from developing an enormous local following) we needed things like a press kit less and less. We worked hard on branding ourselves and our name. So much so that we're in the current delemma of converting from a party band to Top 40 and as much as we need the name to continue the level of bookings and draw we wonder whether people will accept the new material that was so synomonus with variety and having a good time. We will see. But I think it's essential for every band to create their own standard and brand themselves off of that. What makes one burger place better than another... usually nothing more than the branding and what it represents to the customer. We were always interested in partnering with the right sponsors. This took immense work and effort on our part and the payout was again validation for the hard work and quality we put forth in our show. One key sponsor was a local radio station which we maintain to this day... the alt rock station with their target demo 18-40. Oddly enough when we first partnered with them about 80% of our setlist matched their programming. Now probably less than 20% The sole reason why we continue to work with them is because the publicity, on air mentions and advertising in trade keep us branded with listeners. The reason why they continue to work with us: we always deliver and we're easy to work with. This coming Halloween we're performing our 8th annual Halloween event with the station. Their costume ball at a local civic center arena. We provide the stage show and they provide everything else. It;s a free event for us and when you factor in costumes we're paying some cash to play this event. In return they will run a commercial (similar to this one: Commercial and various interviews like this: interview. Again it takes years to cultivate these relationships they don't come easy and it's up to you to prove value as a quality act that can meet the standards of the station. I think it's important to have a website. If for anything it makes you look more committed and less fly by night. But certainly short term you could keep plugging away at FB. It is currently our #1 source of pulling draw. Over the years we thought long and hard about how we were goin to seperate ourselves from the dozens of other bands that were selling the same thing. We made regular committments for posting pictures from shows. We were lucky to have a friend with a camera who took pics at every event. He was also a popular guy at our shows as a result. We never paid him but we did treat him like a member and ceratin, when given the opportunity gave him entry into events like a crew member. When his camera broke we gave him a $200 gift card to buy another. That's how important we felt pictures were to our overall representation as a band. Around 2009 when Facebook was blowing up I felt real pressure from some upstart bands that were selling alot of hype about themselves. Relentless reminders and proclamations of how they were the freshest thing on the market. That's when I stopped trying so hard to sell ourselves to audiences and started shooting video... to let that do the talking for us. It was an investment ($2000-3000 in equipment), it took time and it required me to learn something I had a passion for but was never trained in doing. So we started producing short clips and video recap from shows and doing regular video promos. During our hieght as a band 2009-2012 there was no better way of us getting the word across about our shows and the payoff was huge. We were drawing 200-300 people into small bars and breaking attendence records at destination clubs. Videos were validating our story and driving people back again and again to shows. There's alot more I can discuss and go more in detail with. I don't want to overwhelm you, you sound like you are just getting started. For every hour onstage we spent equal time either in rehearsal or marketing the band... and I mean all of us! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members jeff42 Posted September 27, 2013 Members Share Posted September 27, 2013 I want to mention IMO the importance of FB or website pics. I think its better for a band to have photo albums online of their gigs. Not just a couple pics here and there. I make sure I put up pics of every gig we do that's not a disaster. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted October 3, 2013 Members Share Posted October 3, 2013 So what's the difference between a fog machine, a hazer and a "fazer"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RoadRanger Posted October 3, 2013 Members Share Posted October 3, 2013 guido61 wrote: So what's the difference between a fog machine, a hazer and a "fazer"? Generally, a fog machine uses a heating element to vaporize a water and glycol (usual) or glycerin (old school and nasty) mixture. A hazer uses a high pressure pump and air compressor to spray mineral oil (usual, uses little fluid, and best results) or a water based fluid (not as long lasting and uses much more fluid) through a nozzle. As I think I already said a fazer is a fog machine the outputs into a fan that better disperses the "fog" to simulate a hazer. Generally a true hazer is much more even and less visible but still shows up the light beams as well as fog. True hazers are > $1000 I think but can pay for themselves through their lower fluid usage if used regularly. The typical twice a month bar band would probably be fine with a fazer . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members hans-jürgen Posted October 6, 2013 Members Share Posted October 6, 2013 Opus Antics wrote: Content. Most of the time when I try to record a demo I end up with either lousy video or lousy audio or both. What I hear when I go out in front and listen never seems to match up with what I hear the next day when I download the recordings. What do you guys do to create demos that don't sound lousy and amature? Sorry for being late on this discussion, but I would like to reply to this point, as I play in two cover bands as well, so making good or even professional recordings of us playing songs from other bands in the studio is not really worth it. Bookers of cover bands are mainly interested if the band can play live what they chose to cover, how they look and sound live, and most important how many potential visitors of the venue they might draw in.So I think it is not absolutely necessary to make a high-quality live video or studio recording, it's enough if the booker can see and hear that you can play your stuff which might even animate people to dance to it. Amateur videos and pictures can be edited by yourself nowadays in sound and image quality which is not that complicated to do if you have enough time to learn it.The question where to post and upload your material is no rocket science either, Facebook is still the site with the most visitors, but maybe not the best for music fans, that's why I rather prefer the new Myspace site. Any site that gives you free webspace and some efficient tools to present and promote your uploaded music is a good choice, as you would have to direct fans or bookers/promoters to that site anyhow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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