It’s all about the music…. it’s what you love, what you live for – but it’s no good if no one else knows what you’re writing, recording and performing. The web offers you so many different platforms through which to promote your band or yourself as a musician. I’ll cover a few select sites that you can use to better chat with your groupies and share your latest videos, songs, events and news.

Every band or musician has fans…. if you don’t, chances are you’re possibly not very good in which case you should consider another career or you can spend years busking in tube stations in miserable London.

The web offers you a great opportunity to find out who your fans are, this is important because fans spread your name and recruit new fans. Also, usually within a group of fans there are people who have certain skills who are usually keen to help you market – photographers, videographers, writers …. Just ask, put it ‘out there’ to your fan base and you’ll find help pretty quickly.

When you’re promoting yourself online:

• Get actively involved; make sure your stuff is current and up to date.

• Give your online fan base something extra, don’t just duplicate what you do at your gigs or tell them what they already know. They want behind the scenes footage, pictures and personal band diaries or news.

• Use a few key online sites and then make sure they all work well together. Alternatively just pick one platform you think suits your needs and make sure you use that to its maximum benefit.

Ok, cool – got that, now what? Where?

Gone are the days of shelling out huge amounts of cash to get on the web – yes, the further you develop online and the more you market and see results then the more you’ll invest. But for the moment if you’re starting out and have no clue you can create hype and activity around you or your band quickly, easily and for free.

There are a few options – I would suggest you start with something simple and manageable (like Facebook and Twitter for example) and then depending on the interaction and success you can create more online spaces.

Facebook
This is the most obvious place to start in SA. Create a Fan page, I prefer fan pages to groups; with a page you can add cool applications and create quite a solid online space. Once you’ve created and named your page then browse through other applications available for pages and add extras like video, audio, photo albums and events so that using Facebook you’ll end up creating a solid online base space.

A page also means that you can update fans by writing on the wall or by sending them updates via a single email to all. The events and music player applications are must-haves to update fans on gigs. Check out the Goldfish Facebook page as a cool example of how much you can interact with fans and keep them interested.


Twitter
Twitter is a micro-blogging service – it’s like lots of sms conversations going on in one place. Read our WTF is Twitter post if you have no idea what I’m on about.

For musos Twitter is great as updates can be sent quickly and easily while you’re on the move. It takes a bit of effort to boost the 2 way conversation you can have with fans but it’s well worth it. The Rudimentals, Jax Panik, GoldFish and The Parlotones all maintain active twitter accounts.


Webpage
Register a domain name and get your site hosted so you can have personalised emails. Hetzner have an easy and simple domain hosting and registration services. Depending on the domain name you want it may be difficult to get a .com. I think that .co.za is better for local businesses anyway but if you can get the .com do it anyway and just get the hosting company to divert the .com to the .co.za. You can get away with around R80 per month for basic hosting and domain registrations are anywhere between R100 and R150 per year.

Designing a site isn’t as difficult as it used to be - check out Tank and Yola – two very easy to use and flexible systems that you can use to create a website. They also offer hosting solutions.

Blog
You may prefer having a blog to a website, don’t know what a blog is? Read this first.
Blogs should be updated and are a great way of interacting with fans and sharing your latest photos, videos, gig dates or road stories. You can start a free blog at Wordpress or Blogger.

Speakerbox
Speakerbox.co.za a collab between BlueWorld Communities and 24.com. Bands can create their own profile, upload music, share photos and videos of their gigs, publish their upcoming gigs and interact with fans. You can see a good example of a band profile here.

last.fm
Probably the widest used online music listening service. You can upload tracks and create a profile. Check out the FAQ on how to do that here and this is a list of SA bands and musicians on Last.fm