Ask A Sound Guy

You’ve got tracks. You’ve got beats.  You’ve got skills.  But who’s listening? After going through the intellectual and emotional gauntlet that is making music, you’d like to think the worst is over.  But getting that music heard can be a huge task on it’s own.

Let me share some tips to make things a bit easier.

1) Clean Edits: When you put your music up on the web there are a couple of things you can do to make sure you keep a person’s attention.  If you get someone to actually play one of your tracks, you don’t want a bunch of silence at the beginning and ends of your tracks.  The longer the gap between hitting play and actually hearing music, the more likely your potential audience is to click “back.”

2) Consider getting your work mastered.  Obviously the matter of making everything hugenormously loud is a heated topic in the music world (more for engineers than musicians I think).  But getting your music mastered will help it compete psychologically with the other music out there, which is generally blazing loud.  Unfortunately, mastering isn’t done well at home, or even in semi-pro situations.  It often leads to all sorts of morphing of your mix, a mono-ing of stereo elements, and funky distortions.  So my advice is be aware of the loudness of your competition, and whenever you can, pay to get your work mastered.

On that same note, if you’re just putting samples online and selling cds, or allowing different files for download, you might consider smashing the heck out of the samples to keep em loud, but be a little more gentle with the ACTUAL product.

3) Social Networks Work.  You’ve probably noticed that the AskASoundGuy crew is pretty deep into the facebook/twitter/blip.fm/etc scene.  We’ve even got a myspace.  But as distasteful as this might seem to some of you, just realize that 70% of our traffic comes regularly through these sites.

So if you make a facebook profile, a twitter account, a myspace page, and profiles on blip.fm and last.fm you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with updating them all pretty quickly.  Not to mention, those are just a FEW of the sites that offer networking functions.

Part of the beauty of these sites, is they often offer tools to link them all together.  setup your twitter account and then add the twitter app to your facebook profile.  Now your status in facebook gets updated by twitter.  Next add something like twitter tools to a wordpress blog, and ever blog post sends a message to twitter…and facebook. And to make it reciprocal, add the twitter widget to your blog’s sidebar and somewhere on a myspace page.   Then setup your blip.fm account to update twitter/last.fm and a host of others.  So basically now when you throw updates on anything – your blog, twitter, blip, facebook, myspace – you’ve got easy utilities to automatically update other pages.

Then if you combine the potential traffic all those sites – it’s pretty huge.  Every little link (yes, use tinyurl and tiny.cc for your links) you send out reaches a TON more people than you’d expect.

How to build that traffic up?  Update one profile at least once a day, and go on a friend-adding frenzy on one site every day.  In no time you’ll be connected to thousands.

4) DONT SPAM – You might have noticed that askasounduy.com isn’t connected to a million people.  That’s partly to do with the fact that I’d rather send updates just to people who want them.  So try not to add a bunch of people on twitter who clearly have no interest in you. It takes a fair amount of thinking to focus on the people on the networks that are interested.  But you get a lot more for your efforts in the end.  Also, if people do you the favor of a connecting to you, return it by commenting, messaging, etc.  Build up their traffic a bit and they’re much more willing to see what you’re about.

5) Search Engine Junk – If you’re working in wordpress, get yourself some SEO (Searh Engine Optimization) tools, and tool your site to show up a bit higher in the google searches.  Don’t abuse the heck out of it, with weird keyword mispellings etc.  That isn’t super useful.  But just adding these tools help you natural go up in rankings by accurately tagging your own site.

6) Make some business cards.  Just simple ones with an name, email, and url can really make a big difference.  It’s a lot easier to get a relatively new acquaintance to take a card than it is to convince them to put your number in their phone.

Anyway, hope things like that help.  I ommitted a lot of the more common things like tunecore and itunes, etc.  But Explore out there.  There’s lots of free utilities that let you find an audience.  All it takes is a little time and a little tooling around.