Win+Win

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The more I think about it the more it makes sense to me…
And I sincerely hope it will also make sense to you too!

The old vs the new

In too many cases, bands/artists have kept the old “battle of the bands” mindset and ported it on the internet and the world of social media. But what ‘could’ make sense on a local scene when there’s little venues to play for and a lot of great bands to ‘compete’ with, doesn’t make any sense on the internet where the virtual ‘scene’ is worth hundreds of millions of potential listeners and fans…

The challenge of social media

Actually, the challenge there is entirely different: It’s not about competing to get a coveted place on stage any more (the stage is yours already!) it’s about finding your crowd, moreover it’s about captivating that crowd with ever renewed content and keep them entertained 24/7 with quality stuff.

So how does one do that? By sharing the same songs every day? The same videos? By posting random pseudo philosophical quotes? Or posting cats and boobs? Put yourself in the shoes of potential fans (and music lovers are truly out there, and in huge numbers even!) and try to think of what they are looking for… They want new songs, new bands, new videos, cool blog posts, radios to listen to, hear about concert/events to go to… Are you capable of posting that kind of renewed content every day, all the time? Can you do it alone??
Of course you can’t!

A change of mindset

Now what if you were forgetting about the old “battle of the bands” idea and shared content coming from many fellow artists that you like instead? If you think about it, there’s tons of great content posted every day on social medias… Each fellow band/artist is going to post their own stuff regularly of course, so then what about appropriating that cool content and make it yours to share? The more you would do that, the more you would keep your own followers interested, right? But then, what if they follow these other artists? Well sure, but so what? What are you afraid of? Remember that the music lovers out there are forever hungry for more, meaning that if they follow other bands, that doesn’t mean they will stop following you! Even better: what if other bands were actually all doing the same thing, and were also sharing your content, along with theirs and many others? Win+Win

I truly believe that it is the way to go. I even think that it’s the only way to go online if you’re an indie artist and you want to keep growing your following the right way and ultimately find your own crowd… Forget the competitiveness and adopt a sharing attitude! We, unsigned artists, don’t have a big label to do our promotion, we don’t have much money to put on ads that won’t do us any good anyway, we don’t have much money to put into expensive PR… So why not enroll fellow artist to do that for us, the only thing we have to do is to do it for them too…

What we can ALL do

To put that into practice, I have created a “friends” page on my website to showcase indie artists that I like and want to support. What I truly have in mind is to create the same kind of network that you can see on some blogs with their “blog rolls” links. Each blog links to other blogs and a visitor could follow any of these links and find new content that would fit their taste, if they end up on a site where that same kind of sharing exist they could follow more links… I propose we all do that and create our own indie network of bands and fellow artists friends.

I also propose to feature an artist on my monthly newsletter, and if we all do that, we could all extend our reach… It’s not about stealing others’ fans, it’s about sharing a crowd of people who would like music of the same kind/same quality.

And of course online, on Twitter, Facebook, whatever your social media platform of choice, when you don’t know what to post any more to keep your hungry followers happy, instead of posting the same old link, or cats and boobs, why not share other bands quality content? You get happy followers plus happy fellow artists who will be happy to share your content when the time comes. 

Win+Win

So now, are you in with a sharing mindset or are you out doing it alone with an old and inadequate 'battle of the bands’ mentality? 
It’s an easy pick, really!

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