While it’s great exposure for bands to get their live music heard by thousands, on free music torrent sites like DimeADozen.org (with their 100,000+ users (wow- I really downloaded nearly 2 terabytes of live audio & video?)) and TheTradersDen.com and etree’s live music archive (with over 3,300 bands), what if your band benefited from an open taping policy with one caveat?

Here’s the scenario;

You’re on stage in front of 600 screaming fans. You are 25 minutes into your set, in between songs, and the lead singer leans into the mic and announces, “Just so you know, we’re recording tonights show.  (Cheers)  If you want us to send you a link to download it free, put your address on the sheet by the t-shirt booth.”  That’s it.

The result? Depending on your performance, you’re likely to find a nice crowd of people surrounding your booth after the show.  Just drawing them to your booth is bound to help merch sales, because while waiting to put their name, email and zip code (ALWAYS get the zip/postal code!) down on your free concert recording list, they can’t help but stare at your cool t-shirts, CDs, 8-tracks, lunchboxes and what-have-you.  And how hard is it to create a printed form with a column for name, email and zip code?  Not hard, I just created one in 10 minutes (a PDF example is attached, but sign-up for my free SMMuG Email list off to the right and I’ll email you the Excel version so you can put in your own band logo). —> Make a dozen copies of your form, invest in a clipboard or two, and you are in business!

Now, the show is over, you dump your recording to the laptop, edit the tracks and compress to MP3.  Post the tracks up to your website using a unique path for each show; something like yourbandname.com/2009/pittsbrgmp3s/.  Email everyone on your new list, thank them for coming out, apologize for the exploding drummer and include the link to the mp3s.  You, my friend, have  just made a bunch of your people VERY happy!   And what do you have, beyond some great karma?  Well lookie there; you now have a list of fans/friends and followers who you can reach out to next time you’re coming to town! Or next time you’re releasing a new CD.  Or next time you’ve got a new t-shirt.  Or next time… You get the idea. Put that list in Excel, a database or better yet your favorite email campaign system, like MyEmma.  A few years from now you can send me a thank you card when you have 5,000 people in your system and can go just about anywhere and draw a crowd.

Now, how does this play with your taping recording policy that you’ve posted on your website? If you actually do tape all of your shows as my friend does, I would encourage the audio recording and free trading of your shows, but request a 30 day grace period before audience recorded live shows hit the trading networks.  This will increase the value for the people receiving the links to the bands mp3s since they will be the first recordings of that show available.  Not to mention that the band recordings will be from the soundboard and the other recordings are mostly audience mics. Keep in mind that tapers take their passion very seriously and it is not usual for them to get recordings from a live show up and available via bit torrents in the same day, which is why the 30 day grace period in critical to this process.    The other thing that this new process addresses are some venues who have strict policies against the audience carrying in mics, booms, laptops and harddrives to capture your show.

One last thing to consider, a lesson learned from prior Pearl Jam tours. Some of your audience members haven’t figured out how to download Mp3’s or use Torrents.  A few of your audience members haven’t figured out how to get music to their iPod. And some of your audience members would rather BUY a CD of the live show they attended, because of the convenience, or as a gift or because of the lossless quality of the music.  How easy would it be to offer that low price live CD option up to all of those who attended within the email notification to show goers? Easy. Easy money baby.

Let me now how it goes!

-pjc

I get emails from bands every week thanking me for the website and asking how they can contribute.  The best thing to do is post your comments, concerns, questions below and create a dialog with other bands and musicians.  Who knows, you might find a new collaboration amongst this little community!  Make sure your comment below has a link to your website or social media page (Myspace/Facebook/Twitter, etc.) otherwise it will not be approved.

Since late 2002, Frank Yang, the owner/operator/writer for the music review weblog called ChromeWaves has turned his passion for music into a “second full-time job”. Beyond writing really informative music reviews, Frank shares news and links to MP3’s for most of the bands featured.

His own stats link indicates that he receives about 1,600 visitor each day, which puts him the top 25 music blog websites, according to Hype Machine.  ChromeWaves is a part of the BlogAds advertising networks, so if you have the cash to spare, be sure and include this website in your a la carte order.  According to Alexa, half the traffic for this Canadian blogger is coming from outside the US.  QuantCast seems to put the volume of US readers at only about a quarter of total traffic (~10k U.S. Visitors per month).  While some might see this as a disadvantage, I think this global diversity is an amazing way for ANY band, regardless of geography, to be seen by the world at large.  Technorati gives this music blog an Authority Rank of 281, which would likely put Frank in the Top 40 of all music review blogs that Technorati monitors. The Alexa traffic ranking for the site, over the past three months has it at 184k, an impressive score for ANY website. And according to Google, there are over 28,000 websites linking to ChromeWaves.net.

What’s unquestionable is Mr. Yang’s amazing dedication to bringing great music to light for so many years, and making ChromeWaves (a name taken from a song from one of his favorite bands, Ride) an important consideration for bands of many kinds.  Recent reviews this month included; Land of Talk, Zeroes, Friendly Fires, Cut Off Your Hands, Woodpigeon, Jealous Girlfriends, Sky Larkin, Emmy The Great, Ida Maria and more.  What I love about this blog is that Frank infuses news, tour dates, video links and mp3 files within his almost daily postings.  Really great stuff.

If this sounds like a man you want to make contact with, please do NOT send him MP3 attachments.  A simple email with a link to your MySpace/Facebook or website URL will suffice.  Email your message with link to submissions at chrome waves dot net.  I’m not including a direct email link, because he didn’t and I don’t want to be responsible for spamming this already very busy man.

-pjc

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Your comments below are HIGHLY appreciated, but please be sure to include a URL to your website or social network page.  Any Comments submitted without a connection to a legitimate website or page will not be approved.  And spammers and sploggers can suck my cancerous nut – wherever in hell that might be.

-pjc