OCCUPY YOUR MUSIC - Part 8: REVERBNATION

Reverbnation has been a bit of a different story. The PR company I was involved with at the beginning of my CD promotion effort had created my profile on there. It still took some work on my part to add the images, logos, and customize the profile. For the basic service free of charge one gets what appears to be more than from any other online service in terms of exposure, connections, gig opportunities, song submission opportunities of various kinds, promotion tools, distribution etc. 

This is the only website that keeps working for you even if you are not making direct presence. As long as your site, Facebook profile, blog, and Twitter profile you are working on even somewhat regularly are synced to your Reverbnation profile, you will see the number of visitors, fans, song listens slowly and steadily growing. But don’t get your hopes too high: this will not make you famous. And Reverbnation will still make way more money off of your free music than yourself. However, your odds are a bit better with this service.

The Reverbnation team appears to work pretty hard on creating opportunities for every musician. You get regular opportunity emails and you can apply to them right from your phone, most of them for free. The odds are very slim something will actually work, but it’s better than nothing right? From their free app you can keep your profile up to date and do the most of what the service offers where ever you are. Check and reply to emails, fan back your new fans, listen to other artist’s music, add shows, add songs, photos, videos, check the stats, and much more. 

From your home computer you can use their free gadgets like player, mailing list signup, video player, shows, free download etc. and place them on your main website, blog, Facebook profile etc. It’s quite smooth and slick and worth a try. Be careful what songs you are posting though. My suggestion is to post experiments, demos, songs that are not too important to you, especially not songs that you published on CDs! It’s proven that giving your published music for free will reduce the number of sales – if you at all have them already! Don’t get the U2 full you. They can give away a whole album through Apple – for a limited time, but be sure that they will make up for it in concert sales and later in CD sales because of the enormity of their popularity. The concert prices are now getting ridiculously high. In Vancouver, the biggest names in the music industry are selling regular tickets from $300 and up! Gone are the days of $40, $50, or even $90. Of course people don’t want to buy CDs anymore when they can stream the same music for almost nothing if they are doing it legally. The only way the music industry figures it can still make money is through inflating the ticket prices.

For us mortals, the only way we can retain some respect for our music is if we are not giving it away. At least we need to make a real careful selection of what we are going to give away.