Welcome to the second episode of The Music Biz Weekly, a weekly podcast co-hosted by Michael Brandvold and Brian Thompson. The first podcast was received with great comments and over 200 listens in the first week.
Each week Michael and Brian will discuss the latest events in the music business and music marketing events and techniques.
This week’s episode, March 25, 2011 – A band’s website and how a band should blog.
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Please leave feedback and comments, we want to hear what you think.
Tune in every week for the latest discussions and comments on the music business
Be sure to follow both Michael and Brian on Twitter for updates on each week’s podcast.
- Michael Brandvold – @michaelsb
- Brian Thompson – @thornybleeder
About Michael Brandvold:
Michael Brandvold is a freelance music industry consultant based in Northern California. Having launched Michael Brandvold Marketing to leverage his years of experience to provide direction to large and small clients in the areas of online & social marketing as well as e-commerce and customer acquisition and retention.
Gene Simmons of KISS first tapped Michael’s skills as a pioneering online marketing strategist to launch and manage all aspects of Kissonline.com’s multi-million dollar enterprise, including their ground-breaking VIP ticket program.
Michael has also managed the online efforts for Motley Crüe, Rod Stewart, Madonna, Ozzy Osbourne, Madonna and Britney Spears to name only a few.
About Brian Thompson:
Brian Thompson, Managing Partner for Thorny Bleeder Records, is a Vancouver based music industry entrepreneur, record label owner, artist manager, marketing consultant, radio promoter, publicist, web designer, blogger, and industry speaker.
Formerly the corporate head of music buying and marketing for a large national music retail chain, Brian has since moved on to become a well respected voice on the convergence of artist development, music marketing, social media, and technology.
Another good episode. Totally agree with you guys about keeping a band site updated and interactive with fans.
I loved this podcast! (Listened to it on Thorny Bleeder’s SoundCloud post.)
The only thing I think is missing is YouTube! The biggest social marketing resource for a musician! I have a nifty WordPress plug-in that automatically posts my YouTube posts directly to my band’s blog. Seeing how YouTube is bigger than Facebook or Pandora for music discovery, it seems worthwhile to invest here and build an audience to your site.
A side note about YouTube is to really invest in the text description of the Vlog. This text description will show up as the blog post on your site. So one post to YouTube can fill multiple needs on your blog.
And YouTube also allows posting automatically to FB and Twitter to generate more hits to multiple social sites. All which point back to the main site.
Other than that, this is a wonderful podcast! I love the tips.
The pre-gig checklist is priceless.
Chris do you prefer listening with Soundcloud, mp3, iTunes?
Honestly, I haven’t found a convenient Podcast listening solution. I saw Brian’s post on Twitter which led me to the SoundCloud post. However, I’ve usually click on the podcast player embedded in the RSS feed (which I just did for CDBaby’s podcast with Godin).
I was actually about to do some research on a convenient podcast aggregate that lets me listen to multiple podcasts that I subscribe to regardless of source. My mobile talk radio station that I don’t have to put much thought into.
Sorry, I’m not a good resource for this! 🙂
For a weekly podcast, I think one hour is fine. At this point, I don’t think you could guys could keep it to 30 minutes, and I don’t think you should. If you decide to start doing multiple episodes a week, then you might want to keep it shorter.
I love WordPress, and I think it’s great for band websites. Once you get past the initial setup, it’s easy to update, and most people can learn to do some basic modifications to the site design/structure if needed. It seems like most bands either just skip over having an “official” site or they have one designed for them that’s terrible, with things like Flash-based splash pages. Or even worse, they’ll end up with something that looks like it was unearthed from the Internet of 1997. Not good.
Thanks for the feedback Shawn. This episode felt better talking about one topic, but I could see a single topic going longer if needed.
Once again, I want to reiterate my enjoyment of this podcast! Tons of great information from two highly knowledgeable people.
And of course, thank you so much for mentioning MicControl as a resource for advice content. 🙂
Looking forward to next week’s episode!
Jon Ostrow
MicControl.com
@miccontrol
Thanks so much Jon!
Great podcast. I believe if you have the content and want to make it longer, then by all means go for it!
I think what would be great is a Q&A. If you are doing a weekly podcast, allow your listeners to send in questions and allow 10 minutes or so to answer the top 5 for the following week.
With both of you doing the podcast together, I think it would be best for you to each have the same brand of mic. Not sure if it was the mics or levels, but Brian was louder in the mix. And not sure if this is how you want to have it set up or not. Overall, the audio did sound great. I have the podcast running through my HS8OM’s! But I think having you at the same level would be better.
Great Job!
Cory
Adult Contemporary Pianist
Thank you for the feedback Cory.
I like the Q&A idea.
Also good point about the mic. We are using Skype at this point, just recording a Skype call. Bandwidth is a issue on the quality of the call for sure. Did you also listen to the first podcast? Did one have better audio quality?