Tag: bands

Curb Your Appetite with the New Feed

Heads up!

We’ve just introduced the newest member of the Immitter family, the FEED!

Simply put, a Feed is a bunch of filtered preferences cobbled together to create a saved stream of only the type of music that you prefer.

When you create a feed you can easily monitor the Immitter for new tracks and new emerging artists to support.  Each feed that you create is dynamically updated as new songs, that match your preferences, are added to the Immitter.  Additionally, if you aren’t as active as you would like to be on the Immitter, no problemo, the top most tracks from your Feed are emailed to you periodically;  You set the time of delivery.

We hope you have fun monitoring the Immitter with this new feature.  Be sure to leave us feedback on ways to enhance the Feed to suit your needs even more.

Connect, Share, Discuss

Today we are launching a NEW forum for the Immitter community of artists, bands, and music enthusiasts. Our goal is to provide a platform to share and discuss new ideas, strategies and topics surrounding the independent music industry. Topics range from education to entertainment. We are excited to watch this community grow and evolve organically.

Forum features include, direct messaging, private group conversations, and the ability to create new public discussions around your favorite music topics. As the community grows we will definitely be adding more features.

The Immitter community will also serve as a place to directly reach the Immitter staff in regards to site issues, improvements or suggestions.

Active community members stand the chance of gaining recognition outside of releasing new music, becoming a thought leader in the independent music community by sharing helpful insights, tips, and how-to knowledge, and winning the respect of peers via staff promotion to moderator status. All moderators help protect the immitter community to make sure it stays a fun and safe place to network and meet new friends.

log-in / register to be a part of a growing community of emerging artists, bands and music enthusiasts.  The first 20 artists that introduce themselves in our New Members discussion will get a lifetime Immitter Pro membership for FREE.

We’re looking forward to meeting you, learning more about you and, most importantly, watching you GROW.

Download counts are now available in Albums

Albums got a new upgrade over the weekend!

Now all albums display the download counts for each unique song.

In the near future, Pro Artists can look forward to being able to

  • Make download counts private
  • See who’s downloading your music
  • See download demographics by location

In the mean-time, in addition to streams and purchases all artists can enjoy another layer of analytics to mess around with.

 

IMTR0 – </transmission>

 

New IP Location Detection

New location filters have just been added to Immitter.  This will further help us refine our targeting, ensuring your music goes directly to your target audience.

Situations where this feature can come in handy.

  • A radio station in Indiana is searching for local music for their newest emerging artist program
  • A local artist /fan is interested in learning about and supporting the local artists around him / her
  • A local coffee shop is searching for performers after hours on a Monday to help bring in more customers
  • A record label is evaluating the potential of a geographical market
  • An international fan is interested in discovering new music from different areas of the world

No need to beat a dead horse on this one.  Including your location not only improves the efficiency in your music delivery, it also helps with discovery.  We encourage all Immitter’s to update their profile with their location.

Your conversion rate depends on it!

IMTR0 – </transmission>

The Origin of Spam

For those of you that don’t know, the word SPAM on the Internet evolved from the 1970 sketch comedy routine by Monty Python titled…Spam.  It shows a diner where anything and everything ordered came with SPAM, Much to the chagrin of Hormel Foods, maker of the canned “Shoulder Pork and hAM”/”SPiced hAM” luncheon meat.

Immitter recently went live with a new distribution feature that delivers our TOP artists on a weekly basis to our entire mailing list of 1K plus subscribers.  But of course, this is not without one glaring hitch, we’ve noticed our email ending up in the Junk mail, we are now SPAM!

Seth Godin, talks a lot about the idea of Permission marketing and only delivering relevant timely messages to those few that actually are looking forward to receiving them.  If this is you, we urge you to dig through your junk mail and set us free.  Let your email provider know that THIS IS NOT SPAM!

We only deliver our weekly email to those of you who have subscribed to Immitter in one form or another and by no means do we champion or relish in spam.

If you’re not interested in receiving our weekly update, we’ve provided a link in the email to allow you to easily unsubscribe.

That being said.

We implore you to please take some time to make sure that you are receiving our weekly update in your inbox, the thousand + artists that we represent would really appreciate it – And so would we.

As for SPAM, lets take a look at where it alllll started.  I hope you enjoy the history lesson.

 

IMTR0 – </transmission>

Strategy: Coding Your Way To The Top

WE’LL ANSWER

  • Why is having my own website beneficial as a new artist?
  • What are the basic building blocks of a website?
  • How can I use html to build my very own website?

LETS GET STARTED

Social media has really saved your butt.  You should be very grateful. Social media allows you to have a presence on the internet without needing to know how the internet aaactually works.

Long before social media the only way to have a home on the web was to buy a domain from a domain service provider and erect a website on top of that domain.

Don’t get it twisted though, just because a website is the traditional home of the internet doesn’t mean that a website isn’t just as valuable to you now as it was back then.

A domain is your own unique home on the internet complete with an address, similar to the address of the house or apartment that you live in now.  A website is all of the furniture that you move into your house.  Some people pay a moving service to move in all of their shiny new furniture, while some of us, well lets just say, we’ve all strapped furniture to the back of our cars at one point in our lives. That’s the difference between paying a developer to create a website for you and dedicating time to develop one yourself, either way, having your own home on the internet is key to establishing your music brand online.

Lets take a look at an example.

A new rap group called FreeStyle recently dropped their new full length album.  FreeStyle decides to market their new album digitally for the first time.

Let’s explore the best strategy for FreeStyles new release.

A.  FreeStyle creates a Facebook fan page to get the word out about their new album

B.  FreeStyle uses some digital distributors to get their newest full length album on Spotify and Apple Music

C.  FreeStyle releases a new website called FreeStyleMusic.com and then uses calls of action (a fancy way of saying commands) to direct users to learn more about their brand on Facebook while also providing links to their new album on Spotify and Apple Music

If you chose C, then the answer was either really obvious, you’re really good at multiple choice or you just know your stuff!

Social media and streaming websites are both great strategies for creating awareness about your music brand but aren’t very good substitutes for being homeless online.  Think about it, a website allows for you to store links to your various digital marketing initiatives, preside over similar brands online that don’t have a website URL and allow other brands online to link directly to you.  As your music brand receives more and more relevant searches and inbound links your websites ranking position in the search engine results will begin to skyrocket.

Increasing your ranking in search engines is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO, meaning, the search engine is now more optimized to recognize your brand.

Now that’s how you get…above the competition.

A website is also a mutable object; unlike feed based websites, a webpage always contains your most important and most relevant information.

Similar to how a car consists of an engine, a staring wheel and tires. A website is founded on a series of building blocks, the most basic being:

  1. A Domain – that you can get for a fair price from services such as  www.hostgator.com or www.godaddy.com
  2. HTML – to add copy and formatting to your page
  3. CSS – to style your page with colors and pretty fonts

Hiring a developer to build your website is a good idea if you’re a beginner, you can look to resources like https://www.upwork.com that employ thousands of freelance web developers just waiting for projects to work on.

As a new digital artist, doing a little coding yourself could save you precious time and cash that you could use to reinvest into your marketing budget.  At the bare minimum, knowing how to read code, embed code snippets or make small changes to the HTML on your website could set you light years ahead of your competitors.

A website consists of a head and a body, sound familiar?  The head contains all of the instructions that the body needs to survive.

HTML is written using a “markup language” and is delineated by tags written using angle brackets.  Any copy you add to your webpage is basically surrounded by an opening tag “<>” and a closing tag “</>.  Tags tell the webpage exactly what type of content is in between the opening and closing tags so that the webpage knows exactly how you would like that content displayed to visitors.

The 5 most important tags to familiarize yourself with are:

  1. <h>The header tag</h>
  2. <p> The paragraph tag </p>
  3. <br> The line break tag</br>
  4. <a href=”link URL”>The link tag</a>
  5. <!–This is a comment tag, and is a great way to track your steps –>

Now that we know a little HTML, let’s use this time to build our very first website.  

Open your favorite text editor and type or copy and paste the following.

<!–DOCTYPE declares the type of document we are creating is an HTML document–>

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<title>Immitter presents [ARTIST/BAND NAME]</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Hello New Music World</h1>

<p1>[My/Our] name is [Artist Name/Band], thank you for visiting [my/our] first website</p1>

<br></br>

<p1>Learn more about our music here <a href=”[http://www.linktosocialmediasite.com]”>mysocialmediapage.com</a></p1>

<br></br>

<br></br>

<p3>brought to you by <a href=”https://www.immitter.com”>www.Immitter.com</a></p3>

<!–Now save your newly created text document to your desktop using the “Save As…”option and be sure to change the extension of your document to “.html”–>

</body>

</html>

Be sure to update the information within the [brackets] with your own information and then navigate over to http://htmledit.squarefree.com and simply copy and paste your newly written code into the top text box and watch your code magically appear on the bottom half of the screen.

You should now be looking at your very first website.

There are many resources online to help you learn more about coding your very own website, http://www.W3Schools.com is one of these resources, and a good starting point.

Now that you know a little more about how a webpage works, how using your webpage as a digital home can have a positive impact on your digital marketing and most importantly HOW TO CODE, you can now have a hand in building your very own home on the internet.

LESSON COMPLETE

Reply to this post right now and let us know ways that you’ve used code in your digital music marketing.  Even if it’s something small, we want to hear about it.

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