Category Archives: music marketing

A YEAR OF WEIRD EXPERIMENTS IN BAND MARKETING: The Best Articles On Band Marketing And Software Reviews From The Past Year

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A lot of bad shit has happened to The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad in the past year. For starters, our biggest fan got locked up for attempted murder and will probably never see the light of day again. Then Captain Mediocrity, our hype-man and co-founding member, took an indefinite hiatus from the band to follow his dream of becoming a lead maple-syrup producer in Canada. Finally, we were heckled by some crazy-ass dude at a children’s museum on New Years Eve! Seriously?! That one still burns my ass…

But one thing we can be happy about is the growth of Weird Experiments In Band Marketing. Over the past 12 months we’ve seen our readership increase and comments become more humane and thoughtful. We even received some love from top recording-software companies who were willing to give us their ‘warez in exchange for a FluteSquad.com full-on double-rainbow review.

It’s been an unpredictable ride, but we like the results so far. We feel like we’ve come into our own and are going to continue churning out thought-provoking posts on band marketing and super-technical software reviews.

If you have been lurking around this site for a while do us a favor and subscribe to this blog. I can promise you that it will stay updated at least once a week. If you are a new reader of FluteSquad.com, here’s a half-dozen great posts that were published over the past year:

Why Are Bands So Broke ALL THE TIME? – A quick primer on what to do with your band’s money. Sounds lame, I know. But I give out this advice so often that I had to write a post just to point people to it when they ask me.

Your Big Amp is Annoying: THERE IS NO FUCKING ‘I’ IN ‘BAND’!! YARRRRRRRG! - How you can perform better by turning down your stupid over-sized amp and working with your band. The post is good, but the comments are priceless!

The Mild Facebook Stalking Technique For Bands At Conferences - How to use video and Facebook to gain leads and new fans at conferences. This post features a video that was shown during Derek Sivers keynote at SxSW 2010.

The Hottest Ass Contest: Creating A Mini-Event At A Music Conference - The Mild Facebook Stalking Technique® in action! How we created lasting impresssions by creating a contest on the fly. We actually found our new agent this way.

Your Big Amp is Annoying: Why Our Live Setup is 75% Less Girthy Than Most Bands – Comprehensive post on how to sound great live while keeping your setup small and easy to manage.

Software Review: Steven Slate FG-X Virtual Mastering Processor – Possibly our most popular post. A comprehensive review of Steven Slate’s amazing FG-X Mastering Processor. This program made us eat our words on the loudness wars debate.

MUSIC MARKETING: I’m Not Making This Stuff Up (Ebook Download)

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It pisses me off when I write a thoughtful post about a marketing idea, or some practical advice on how to sound great live only to find a comment that sounds like this:

“Hey you guys shut up, if you shitty bands weren’t so any good you wouldn’t half to worry about it!!! You guys suck!”

Although the chronic spelling errors hurt my feelings, the comments make me laugh. I can’t help but feel that the reader is missing the point of “Weird Experiments in Band Marketing.”

We started this blog a year ago to start defining “success” as it applies to being in a band. In my opinion there’s a severe lack of useful material out there related to music marketing or running a band. If it is good, it’s usually written by someone who has crossed the chasm to find success somewhere other than playing music.  In fact, look at what happens when you type in “Music Marketing” in Google. Besides a few top-ranked blogs, the results are truly retarded: a bunch of half-assed articles trying to sell bands a duplication service.  A lot of times they’ll add “101” to the end of the title to make it sound educational like “Music Marketing 101”, or “How To Start Marketing Your Band 101”.

Ooh, or maybe you’ll find a video of some dude pontificating on the magic of posting fliers to promote your show (this video cracks me up):

No wonder bands don’t really look to the web for advice on how to promote their band, good content on music marketing is a relatively new concept! 

Do you know what musicians actually search for? Despite all the evidence that a record deal may be the worst kind of strategic partnership, bands are mostly looking for info on how to get signed.

According to Google:

  • “Promote Band” – 8,100 Global Monthly Searches
  • “Get A Record Deal” – 18,100 Global Monthly Searches (!)

Holy shit that’s frustrating! What about the DIY spirit? What happened to that?!?!

If you want skip past record deal pipe dreams, and all the trash marketing advice, read this free ebook by Derek Sivers:

This book has been out for a while, but concisely states everything that you would ever need to know about music marketing. See, I don’t make this stuff up!

Coming up with original marketing ideas is not the focus of this blog. But if you want to read about a band that’s putting these ideas to work, then this is where you want to be.