Tough love time kids – here’s the reality of what you’re dealing with – this is not to discourage you, but to set your expectations and prepare you for the long haul. These are all based on mis perceptions and attitudes from real-life clients.
The internet has long been hailed as ‘leveling the playing field’, ‘giving indies the same capabilities as majors’ and other grandiose statements. These are partly true and partly misleading. Yes, as an indie you now have access to a lot of the same tools as majors, and as an indie you can go out there and directly connect with your audience, putting a lot of potential power in your hands BUT that does not mean your success will happen overnight. Online marketing strategies still need thought and time to implement, execute and come to fruition, and internet marketing should be an ongoing part of your overall marketing plan – that’s the main point I’m trying to demonstrate here.

“If I get x number of friends on Myspace, I’ll be a hit”
Most likely not. You’ll have an unmanageable and un-useful myspace account though. To my knowledge the number of friends you have has never been concretely linked to your sales figures. Usually artists are wondering why they have so many friends and so few sales. It’s not about quantity necessarily, it’s about quality. Learn from Tila Tequila – 1 000 000 friends still couldn’t make her music a hit. Myspace “friends” are disposable and pretty much irrelevant. You need Fans, not Friends. Fans are people that give you their email address to make sure they always get your latest news. They buy your music and attend your shows. They pay attention to your bulletins and blogs. You communicate and interact with them in some way on a regular basis. Myspace can be a great resource through which to connect with tons of people but you have to take that relationship to the next level otherwise it means very little.

Adding someone as a friend on MySpace requires such little effort on the part of the request recipient, that it doesn’t necessarily indicate a real interest in your music – that person may barely have checked out your page. But if you can get them to visit your official artist website, give up their email address etc then you have a more genuine sign of interest and a starting point to cultivate the relationship.

“It’s all about the internet, so if I do a 2 month online marketing campaign, my album will be a hit”
While the online world is very important for indies, there is no replacement for a well-rounded marketing campaign that contains both on and offline strategies and whose elements complement each other. Has there really truly been a band that has succeeded purely online with nothing else working in their favor? You should be playing shows, doing some kind of real world marketing, and being generally pro-active about your own career. If your music is really as good as you probably think it is, you will have found a way to accomplish some of these things and you won’t just be relying on myth #1 (having a lot of Myspace friends)

“Putting a video on YouTube = viral marketing”
Majors and indies alike are guilty of this one. YouTube and sites like it are platforms for viral content but just because you put your video on YouTube does not mean it will “go viral” and be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. You still have to drive traffic to it and create interest in order to hit that tipping point. And if the content is just not good, funny, stimulating, interesting or relevant, it won’t go viral no matter what. While it would always be nice to receive staggering numbers of views, that doesn’t mean that anything less is a failure. Focus on getting the right people to watch your video content – your fans, subscribers, people in the industry whose attention you may be trying to catch, etc.

“If we let people embed and distribute our content it will dilute our brand”
No, actually, it will make your brand more pervasive and more relevant.
I know of several large corporations who do web 2.0 completely half-assed. They want to be down, so they create, for example, video content and destination sites, but they are so afraid of losing control over their content and brands that they do not allow embedding of their content. In other words they want to work exponentially harder just to get people to go to their site and “interact with their brand”, when they could have thousands of people working for them and spreading their brand to every nook and cranny of the internet by simply enabling users to copy and paste videos into their blogs, profiles and emails.

Here’s a couple of culprits:
Def Jam blocked embedding of their video content

Universal prevented their artists from uploading full length streams of songs to MySpace

“If I have a page at every social networking site, I’ll be a hit”
Not exactly, but you will have a lot of pages to maintain. While it’s good to have a presence at most sites so that fans can potentially find you, it still takes time and effort to update and maintain those pages and drive people to them. And sometimes it’s ok to be choosy – some sites will be more appropriate for your brand or style of music than others, so you should pick and choose where you focus your energies. And be aware that just because you create a page, doesn’t mean you will instantly get a lot of friends on that site. Each page requires maintenance and attention in order to payoff. And don’t forget that each profile page should ultimately lead back to your own website where you have more control over the content. You should look at all your profiles as signposts rather than destinations – places where people might stumble upon you and then follow the trail back to homebase – your site.

“30 seconds or a minute is long enough for people to sample my music”
If this is what you think you are selling yourself, and the intelligence of your fans short. In this day and age there is no reason not to allow full length streaming for sampling purposes. Again, you can’t be rigid and controlling – go with the flow and give the people what they want otherwise you will frustrate and turn people off with your stinginess. And for some songs that are perhaps more musically complex than an average 3 minute pop song, 30 seconds probably isn’t enough to demonstrate all that your music has to offer.

“If I get on one of the top music blogs, I’ll be a hit”
Well first of all you probably won’t even get written about by any of the top blogs if you don’t already have buzz.
While music blogs are often hailed as the next generation of tastemakers, this is a bit of a myth in itself. Hate to say it but the Pitchforks, Stereogums and the like don’t bother that much with music that’s not already buzzing in some way. The more popular a blog becomes, the more people want to get on it, the more music they get sent, the more they have to pick and choose what gets listened to, never mind covered.
They are inundated with music and you have to make it through their filters to even be considered. Go take a look at their homepages and you’ll see that while the music they cover might be independent, there are a few other factors:
a) A lot of the music is signed to a label…
b) …a fairly well established one at that – such as Beggars, Def Jux etc
c) A lot of the blogs are talking about the same bands, with some exceptions. So the number of brand new or unheard of bands being exposed is relatively low compared to the number of blogs that there are.

And once you do get posted about – it probably won’t be career changing – you might garner a few more fans which is great but you should not rest on your laurels at that point. If you do get a favorable write-up, you should use a good quote in your promotional arsenal going forward – “Hailed by Pitchfork as the best white trash rap ever” etc

So one good blog post won’t be career-changing but if you can develop relationships with many bloggers and get posted about frequently across a range of sites, then you can perhaps develop some visibility that will work for you. The effectiveness of advertising is, after all, based on frequency – the number of times that someone is exposed to the same message/brand/music. You need to get on as many blogs as you can from the ones that are just starting out, to the ones with huge readerships. But don’t expect to get there in one shot and don’t be discouraged by non-response on the part of a blogger. It takes friendly persistence, but if you have great music, you’ll be able to catch someone’s attention.

“Flash is so awesome – make everything flash!”
Please no, no, no flash. It sucks for SEO (search engine optimization) and is often the web design version of hip-hop album skits – a self-indulgent waste of time that is not very entertaining – once you’ve seen that Flash intro once, no matter how fancy it is, you just want to skip past it next time. Flash can be good for navigation, or cool design touches, but please don’t create your entire site in flash.

“My music is so awesome I don’t get why people aren’t writing about it”
Your music might indeed be awesome. But that doesn’t mean other people care about it as much as you do. It might be your baby, but just like in the real world, most people will not love your baby in the same way or think it’s as cute as you do yourself. As mentioned earlier – you need to make it through many filters before people write about it or even listen to your music. You are a small fish in an ocean of other bands/artists trying to get attention. This is not intended to discourage you, but to let you know that if you expect everyone else to care as much about your music as you do right off the bat, you will be disappointed. Even if your music is great, you have to give people reasons to pay attention to you. And you have to understand that everyone you are trying to get through to has many other bands vying for their attention. So get creative about your approach and how to present and package yourself. See Derek Sivers’ guide for some ideas on how to try and stand out from the crowd.