Musician’s Notebook

Before you start your band blog, there are a few items you’ll need to prepare in advance to make sure the blog is an interesting and valuable place to go.

1. Have at least one song recorded and ready to go, even if it’s not great sound quality. This is important. People want to hear the music. If you’ve got more than one song ready, do not ever release them all at once. Put them up one at a time, and have a release schedule ready. In the meantime, promote your blog and build an audience like crazy. Then you can trickle the songs, which will keep people interested and returning.
2. Band information. You need band biographies, a bit of band history and information, and some photos ready to put up as permanent fixtures. If people can’t find out fairly easily what the band is about and something about the people who are in it, you’re doomed to hemorrhage visitors who could have been potential listeners!
3. If you’ve been reading Musician’s Notebook for long, you should know that to be successful as an independent artist (or truly successful for any good length of time, independent or not) you have to be about something and write music with purpose. Even Motley Crue had purpose. They sung about sex. So you’ll want to get some good, meaty, in-depth content up there that is strong and clear on your views (in an attractive and appealing way) so that listeners can quickly establish the ideological boundaries of your music. They’ll then either stick around with even more loyalty, or leave anyway.

A blog is all about ideas, and not just musical ideas; you have to express them with words, too.

On that last point, I once heard a musician say “But I don’t have enough ideas!” in response - I told him to find a new career. A musician without enough ideas? You certainly shouldn’t be starting a blog if you fall in this category, but nor should you be playing music.

Go get all that stuff together - next time, we’ll be talking about setting up the blog.