It’s difficult days in the retail industry and musicians have to look for strategies to continue moving forward. I don’t think we use the web enough. The web in my opinion is a musicians storefront and too many musicians don’t bother to change the shop window. (Some may see the gig as the store front but for me the gig is more like the inside of the shop – no-one will come through the doors if they don’t feel enticed to come in.)
We need to spend more time marketing our product, our music and the web is the perfect place to do it. You can have your message out to a lot of people all over the world in just a few minutes. Marketing takes time and thought though and many people don’t seem to find the time… Everyone does seem to find time for FaceBook though! It’s not that FB is a bad thing – it can be very useful. I find when I write a blog and link it to FB this is where I get the most clicks through to the website.
I would like to see musicians / organisations spending more time on their websites creating content like blogs and videos and sharing them through FaceBook, YouTube (world’s 2nd biggest music search engine), Twitter, newsletters etc. We have a very strong product that is popular across the world. Imagine if we were all very active creating content, uploading videos, sharing the word over social networks how even more popular we could be. Everyone would be talking about Scotland and our culture.
Let’s work harder, spend less time on our FaceBook profile pages and more time on our FaceBook pages linking to content on our websites that everyone can access.