May 6, 2003

I was reading the comments to the poll question we have up, "How much do you spend to promote your band each month?" and the responses went exactly as I knew they would. The majority of the responses would be that they don't pay to have their band promoted. When I was at MP3.com, it was always something that we struggled with, until one day I put myself in an artist's position.

What does promoting get you online? More traffic to your page/website? If you are hosting your own page, then that isn't making you any money, but rather costing you in bandwidth costs. What do you do with that traffic once you get it? How do you make money off of your cyber-fans when they are used to getting any and all music for free online? It's these types of questions that keep most artists (those with finished work that can be promoted) from pursuing marketing online. The answer is this, we are now in a day online where there are more tools available to artists to help them make money.

Think about online promotion and marketing like this, if you were in front of the largest crowd of your life, how would you get them to remember your name? Through marketing and promotion, whether it be stickers, flyers to your show or maybe a merch table.

There are many artists that are being played all over the radio that lack talent, but have great marketing departments working for them. So how can an independent artist benefit from the marketing that they do? There are a couple of ways but before we get into that, let's talk about the bare necessity. Your website, your home. One comment on the poll said to put up a free page at the places that still allow that. That is a great idea, you should put up your music everywhere that you can for free, but you should have all of the pages on the other sites (MP3, DMusic...) directing traffic back to your own website. (www.yourband.com) The reasoning is simple, you remain in control of your bands site, if a site closes down, your information isn't lost. Also remember that the independent artist sites that are free today, may not be so tomorrow. Stay in control of your artist site. From your website you can stream music, sell merch, collect email addresses to send out newsletters, and much, much more.

As some of you may have known, we at DMusic had a hosting service available. We took the service offline for a few months to improve it and move it to more reliable servers that offer:
- a 99.9% uptime gaurantee
- COGENT free network (which means more reliable delivery of your music)
- Unlimited email addresses (bob@yourband.com)
- Unlimited ftp accounts
and more...

I invite you to check out the packages at www.DMusichost.com . We have kept it simple and we think it is such a great service that we are willing to offer a 30-day free trial.

Michelle