No. 1 Giveaway of an amateur band

I talked about this before, and I will end up talking about this again in the future, I am sure of that. From time to time bands and musicians ask me directly for advice. The advice they seek can be anything from how to they get to the next level, how do they go about booking a tour abroad, how do they promote their next album / single release or just generally generate awareness of their band.

Independent music business is a hard game, no doubt about it. Promoting my own music and churning out a new song a week, takes a lot of my time, but within my limited time I try to help as much as I can. So whenever a band gets in contact with me, I would expect the message to include a link to music, and website. Unfortunately more often that website link is replaced by a Facebook link. When this happens, I already start to doubt if I can help them. The next thing I do, is a quick search of the band name on google. If I can’t find a website, more than likely my first impression is that the band is not ready for my help.

This is a hard cold fact I repeat weekly. The lack of your own website is the first giveaway that you are not a professional band. Any advice I would give about promoting your new release or booking tours would come after you have set up our own website. Once you have a website, of course I would advice how to improve it. But the fact that you have one (and please make it a WordPress based! You can download everything you need for free from wordpress.org) already give’s me an impression you are taking your career in music more seriously.

There is no point even trying to approach a booking agent, promoter or a PR company without having your own website. It can even be a one page website to start off with. When it comes to websites, anything is always better than nothing. The website shows all these professional people you are taking your band seriously. It shows them they are not wasting time with an amateur band that might just breakup tomorrow.

Also If you do get any bigger shows, google is the first place the people who were at the show will try to find you after the show. With a very little SEO effort you can have your band name (provided it is original) on the top page of the search. I have done this with every website I have built.

So if you don’t have a website for you, or your band, get on it right now. If you do, share the link in the comments 🙂

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE