Building Your Band's Fanbase Outside Myspace
Social networks like MySpace and Facebook are great ways to build your fanbase. But, you don't own and can't save your "friend lists". What if your account got cancelled or hacked? Or, your fans stopped logging in regularly? You wouldn't have any way to contact the fans that you worked so hard to get!
How about every time a friend request is exchanged between yourself and another {MySpace, Facebook, etc.} user, you send them a note back thanking them and also including this message... "I'd like to include you in my group of friends outside of {social network}, please reply with your email address if you are ok with that". The majority of those people are all about keeping in contact, so they don't mind replying with their personal email address. This simple habit will help you build your mailing list which you own and control.
Make sure you always have access to your peeps, no matter what!
POSTED BY ALLISON, January 23, 2009 | 47 comments
"Pay-What-You-Want" and "Members-Only" music downloads added
We just added some new ways to distribute your music in the Album Download feature.
First off, you can now let fans set their own price for individual tracks and albums. This approach has worked for both indies and majors like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.
Next, you can set tracks to be "Free for Members Only". Giving tracks away like this is great incentive for fans to join as site members.
Finally, we made it easier to update the track without having to delete and re-upload it. You'll find a "change" link on the track edit page, take lets you swap a new file. Handy if you have a new mix of a track but don't want to lose any stats that you have accumulated.
Let us know what you think of these new features!
POSTED BY CHRIS, January 21, 2009 | 50 comments
Major internal changes coming soon
Over the next few weeks, we'll be changing the way that the system creates your pages. These changes may not be noticeable, but the code in the back end powering your page will be completely different.
The goal is to make the internals of Bandzoogle more flexible so that we can add cool new features in the coming months. At the top of our list are customizable templates, the ability to upload your own designs, and flash-based headers.
This project has been a long time coming -- almost a full year in planning and development. Even though we are excited to add new stuff for you to play with, we wanted to be sure that any changes would not adversely affect your sites.
We'll keep you posted on the progress. For the next few weeks, we won't be posting a "template of the week" so that we can focus on getting this update complete. Thanks for your patience, neat stuff is coming soon!
POSTED BY CHRIS, January 18, 2009 | 51 comments
