Kevin Daoust (dot) Com

I was thinking about some things after reading Andrew Dubber’s e-book (that I talked about in my post Free e-book on music and the Internet) the other day. Considering that people expect more from an artist and their Web sites than the online brochure, the artist has to continue coming up with content to feed their audience and allow them to interact with the artists (community is just as important, if not more, than content.) If anything, this is a good reason to document everything you do either through photos, video and/or audio.

One person that is notorious for his documentation of everything is Mike Portnoy, the drummer from Dream Theater. He takes his video camera with him everywhere and films practically everything that Dream Theater does. Most of that content finds its way to official Web sites, fan clubs and anywhere else the fans congregate. For the last few studio records, they have filmed studio tours during recording sessions (either as one general clip, behind-the-scenes clips for individual songs or a 90-minute documentary, such as the one included in the Special Edition of Systematic Chaos.) It is not often that the fans get to see their favourite bands at work; when it is available, they feel that they get to see something that no other band lets them see.

Today, it is very easy to do these sorts of things for very little cost, not to mention that it is not hard to do in the first place. Here are some points:

• Document, document, document: Get yourself a good digital camera and camcorder; throw a blog together on your site and talk about everything; take pictures and/or video of everything (rehearsals, recording sessions, gigs, rides in the van, you with the fans, the fans from the stage, etc.)
• Get yourself some audio/video editing software and learn how to use it as best as you can: iPhoto and iMovie are already free with a Mac, and there are free options out there for audio and video editing, such as Avid Free DV and Audacity. Get your media looking good; create intros and outros for videos and audio files and keep them consistent from file to file; make sure that audio files are as clean as possible.
• Get your content out there: Create a YouTube channel and throw your video up and embed it on your site (less bandwidth for you); throw the audio and video into an RSS feed and create audio and video podcasts; throw them in a blog and allow people to receive them, along with the text, in newsreaders and by e-mail (if you use Feedburner’s e-mail feature, and you should); put your pictures up on Flickr and give people the feed; create a kyte.tv channel; etc.
• Make it personal for yourself and the audience: Did some fans by you a round at the bar? Drop their names in the blog with a thank you (and maybe throw up a picture). Did you enjoy the food at the burger joint in Moose Jaw? Talk about it. Did you take some pictures with some fans? Throw them up and drop names. Giving the fans something that they can relate to makes it more special for them.
• Keep your online information consistent throughout your various online presences: This is something that will probably take a lot of time, but may be worth it. In this age of social networking, people congregate at different places (some prefer MySpace, some prefer Facebook.) If you are on all these places, it is important to have the same information up at all of these places at the same time. If you put up a blog post on your site, throw it up on the other sites as well (unless they allow for RSS content to be imported); keep your tour dates up-to-date on all these sites; post your photos and videos on these sites as well as your own (or maybe a few and encourage people to visit your site for more); create groups and fan clubs on these sites for people to come together (and if you find a fan club dedicated to your band, join in!)
• Make your RSS feeds available and upfront: A lot of blogs (such as yours) and sites (Flickr, Facebook) use RSS now, so make your feeds available and evident. This is also what drives podcasting, so make that feed evident as well. Don’t forget to run everything through Feedburner as well (it will make all your feeds compatible with different readers, allow your podcast to be fed properly and allow you to create e-mail subscriptions with no work on your end—just post on your blog and it will be e-mailed to subscribers automatically.) Doing all of this will allow people to access your content how they want (either through a newsreader or e-mail) and receive updated content once it’s available. (Andrew Dubber even has a chapter on it in his e-book.)
• Get the fans involved: This is probably one of the most important things that an artist can do today. As I said earlier, community is just as important, if not more, than content. Let them interact with you and get involved; encourage them to take pictures and video at performances and have them send it to you; post that content and give them a “thank you” for submitting content; encourage comments on your blog; run a message board and encourage fans to participate (and don’t forget to participate yourself); throw up the session tracks from one of your songs and allow fans to create and submit remixes (have a contest where the best remix goes on the next CD); let them have a track and encourage them to create a music video; etc. Andrew Dubber also has a few ideas in his chapter on cross-promotion.

Some of my favourite examples of documentation and interaction include Jacob Two Two’s Tour Diary from 2004; Some of the various “Behind the Scenes” videos that Dream Theater have done (such as these two videos—1 and 2—from their Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence sessions); Nine Inch Nail’s multi-track downloads (allowing fans to do remix selected tracks and submit them for various contests); Kevin Smith’s production diaries from Clerks II; and various blogs by several artists.

But, in presenting your content, avoid these two things (which are two major pet-peeves of mine and others in the business):

• Do not build your site with Flash: Remember that not everybody is on a high-speed connection (some people are still on dial-up, and it’s not always by choice. In many rural areas, it’s the only type of Internet connection available to them.) For that reason alone, you should not do your site in Flash (not to mention the fact that it’s slow loading, some computers have trouble running it and it can be an unwanted extra step for somebody to download a plug in.) A Flash component here or there is fine (Youtube’s player runs off of it, for example.) And, what probably irks me the most…
• Drop the crappy MySpace Layouts: Do not use layouts that clutter your page, have backgrounds that mask the text, use colours that are hard to see and send the various pieces of your layout (MP3 Player, comments, etc.) to weird places within your profile. I beg of you, don’t do it!! Go for as clean a look as possible, use colours that are easy to see, keep your background image as “reasonable” as possible and don’t pick something that will send things all over the screen. Remember, you are building a brand; don’t let something like this sour it.

All of this stuff is very easy to do; you only need to commit the time to do it. If you do, the rewards for your group could pay off in spades.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 8:28 am and is filed under Technology, Music, Internet, Blogging, Podcasting, MP3, RSS, Music Videos, New Media, Youtube, Other blogs, Performing Arts, Facebook, Marketing and promotion, Independent music, Social networking, Independent film, Distribution, Commentary, kyte.tv, Audience Interaction, Artists, Online Collaboration, Online Music, MySpace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.