Marketing & Business

Turn your fans into walking billboards for your work by selling some good merchandise online and at your gigs. It’s all part of growing your brand awareness, so at the very least, you should have some T-shirts printed with your band logo. In fact, you can slap your logo on anything you want: badges, caps, sweatbands, beermats, iPhone cases – you name it.

Whether you’re a casual or a professional DJ, you no doubt know that the DJ-world can be harsh and unforgiving, especially since popularity has seemingly been taking precedence over performance and skill. If you’ve been wondering how to improve and promote yourself in order to get booked more often, then the tips and advice offered up by guest-blogger-and-DJ Brian van Bogaert aka DJ BRIVE might be useful. Read on and learn how to claim a bigger piece of the spotlight and market yourself.

If you want to make your bread and butter as a musician, besides investing in your skills, it’s also essential to invest in building your fanbase. If you don’t have people listening to what you’re making or coming to your gigs, it’s going to be pretty hard to make a living from your music. With that in mind, the question is: how do you gain new fans? Guestblogger Maaike van Steenis offers up her top tips!

For up-and-coming musicians, a music video is a great way to promote a new single. But how do you do it when your budget is limited? There are actually examples of great music videos that were shot using an iPhone or digital camera out there, but to pull it off, you need to know the basics of filming. Music video director Zeno Groenewegen is here to explain how you can achieve pro-grade results in twelve steps.

We don’t just buy records based on what we hear, but what we see. According to research, colours, images and even shapes influence our decision-making, so let’s take a closer look at how this works in the context of album artwork.

Play for free? Is it just something you have to do or can you refuse? Our resident DJ specialist Marc den Hurk is regularly asked if he can play for free and understands that it’s a bit of a dilemma. If you say no, you risk rejection and if you say yes, you’re essentially going to be paying out of your own pocket to play. If DJ-ing is just a hobby, giving your services for free can get very expensive very quickly. Here, Marc lends any conflicted DJs some friendly advice.

Having a certain identity is just as important for solo artists as putting out music. A good photoshoot can help define how people see you and think of you, but as always, there are various things you need to beware of before you start posing. Guest-blogger and wedding song writer Kevin Okkema is here to share his tips.

Getting booked to play a nice club night or party and playing a banging DJ set is great but is it enough to make a real impression on your clients? As a DJ, how do you make sure that you always come across as professional and make sure that you’ll be recommended by every booker you work for? Guestblogger, Amar Amlani (AKA DiceDJ) shares some of his hard-won experience.

As a band, whether it’s conscious or not, you develop your own unique character and image, which not only gives your music some colour and identity but your gigs as well. Some well styled photos can do wonders when it comes to putting your band in the spotlight and presenting the right image, but how do you go about making a good set of photos?

Know the deal? I’d be surprised if you didn’t: another rejection letter in your inbox in response to your latest gig-fishing email. It seems that the majority of the bands that are sending out their bio and demo to venues receive a ‘no’ – if they receive a reply at all.

Any paid-up superfan has gone on a journey from supporting an artist that no one’s ever heard of to seeing them flourish into the success they knew they always would be. Since it’s essential that artists build a relationship with their potential superfans, most of them stick to social media. But email is actually just as powerful a tool. Here, Guestblogger and musician Mirjam Sieben offers up some email marketing tips and reveals what something as simple as an email can do for your music.

Despite all the skill and musicianship involved, cover bands are often looked down on, which is a shame, since putting together a cover band is a big job and a lot of them are actually pretty awesome. So, what is it exactly that separates a great cover band from a mediocre wannabe? In this blog, we take a look at the essential ingredients that go into building a brilliant, successful cover band. We can already tell you that the first thing to be sure of is that you’re creating a band that has its own identity, rather than setting out to make a carbon copy of the original.