Networking is the best way to get ahead in “the biz.” It isn’t all about sending your music to Pitchfork and blogs to hope it gets some airplay in the corners of the internet. It’s about talking to the people who matter most in your town to help each other out and to build a core fan base you can build from in the coming months.

Mutual Benefit

The whole purpose of networking is to establish relationships with people who can mutually benefit by helping you out. Or, you helping them out. When you start talking to bands, bloggers, press, or super-fans in your town, the goal is to build a positive relationship with all of them so that you can help them get things like stories for the blogs/papers, more fans out to their shows, or free swag (for the fans). The only way to help your local scene grow is by being a part of it, not just expecting people to drop what they’re doing and flock to your new creative endeavor.

Go To Shows

The first, and probably best, way to get more exposure locally is to talk to people at other bands’ shows.

Bands

Talk to the bands who are playing and congratulate them on the great job they did. Introduce yourself and ask if you can buy them a beer after the show. Just hang out. This isn’t about pushing your own shit, it’s about talking to other HUMAN BEINGS about the thing you love so much: music. Talk local music, albums, new artists, and life in general.

The goal here is to make your presence known and get to know other local bands on a personal level, not just from a distance. Knowing bands personally will open up many doors down the road.

Press

There’s never a huge press presence at local shows unless there’s a festival going on. Nashville (the city I live in) has local music festivals a few times a year and all of the newspapers and local music magazines make a point to show up to take some photos and see who’s big at the moment.

Try to go to these festivals to at least say hey to the guys/gals that write for the magazines you’d like to get a spot in. Again, don’t pressure them when you first meet them. This stage is all about just saying hello and letting your presence be known.

Networking – General

The internet has done wonders for reaching out to people in a virtual world, but face-to-face communication is still the strongest way to get to know people. Make it a point to meet new people every time you’re at an event. The more people you know, the bigger your network becomes. As mentioned before, this isn’t about advertising yourself to everyone you meet. The goal is to simply meet people and as time goes on with your relationships, your own life will eventually come up.

Networking positively means talking to other people about THEMSELVES. People love to talk about their own lives, so help facilitate it and learn to be a good listener. You never know who you’ll meet!

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Today Google officially launched the long anticipated Google+ Pages, which finally gives bands, brands and businesses an equal footing on the social network.  There’s a slightly confusing two button system:  fans can  recommend you with a +1 or add you to a circle to have your updates appear in their stream. Google has also integrated search with  two ways to add pages to circles from Google search.

The first way to add pages via search is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect. For example, maybe you just heard that your favorite band is coming to town. with Direct Connect search for [+], followed by the page you’re interested in (i.e. +AllAmericanRejects). Google will take you straight to their  Google+ page, and if you want, we’ll add them to your circles.

In fact, Oklahoma rockers All American Rejects are Google’s example of a band using Pages.

Google+ Pages is rolling out over the next few days, and you’d be smart to grab you band or brand name asap. 

Do I really need a website for my music? With Facebook, Twitter, and all the musician-specific social networks out there, you might think that your own .COM is obsolete. But there are 3 very important reasons to drive fans to your website instead:

 

1) You own the address -

First and foremost, you own your .COM address. As long as you maintain it, it will always point to your website. This is powerful — you are guaranteed to own that little slice of the Internet. Even if you switch companies that host your website, your .COM can be transferred, so your fans will always be able to find you.

This is not the case with your social networking profile. They can get bought out, lose out to competition, or simply become un-cool. Thousands of bands relied on their MySpace page as their home base, then switched over to Facebook (after printing their Myspace URL on their merch… ouch!).

This isn’t limited to MySpace. Those of you who’ve been online since 2000 will remember sites like Garageband and MP3.com. Who knows what will happen in 5 years? Will Facebook still be around? Twitter? Google+? It might be an entirely new social networking site that will be “THE” place to have a profile. Your best bet is to make sure that you always have a place where fans can go to find out about your career.

One last point about social networks: if you’re really unlucky, you may wake up to find your social network page repossessed. There have been many examples of MySpace doing this. Time will tell if this also happens at Facebook or Twitter. And although his page was not repossessed, one Montreal artist had his Facebook page (with 80,000 fans) hijacked by someone, who then spammed his fans. It can take a while for Facebook to sort out situations like that, and it’s a great example of how you can lose control of your social networking page.

2) You Own the Experience -

With your website you also own the experience. You can control what your fans see, when they see it, and the messaging that you send to them. This means:

• No Distractions - Unlike with social networking sites, on your website there are no ads to distract your fans, and there also aren’t dozens of other links vying for their attention. You’re able to really focus on your music and your brand. And since you have your fan’s full attention, you can then direct them to your call to action to deepen their connection.
• No Design Limits - With your own website, you don’t have any design limits or restrictions. If you want to add a blog, or put a hi-res press kit for download, or even a special “fan-only” page, you can. Your website gives you the opportunity to make a deeper connection with your fans, without the limits of the one-size-fits-all social networks.
• A Better Buying Experience - If you sell music or merch, your own website is even more critical. Social networking sales tools force fans to interact within a tiny widget, or redirect them to another website altogether to complete the transaction. Having your own store on your own site allows you to give your fans a seamless buying experience, and full control over what that experience is.

3) You Own your Data -

On your .COM site, you can get far more detail on your fans than what you can get on a social networking site. Stuff like:

• How many people previewed my track last week?
• Which ones downloaded it?
• Did they skip ahead to a specific track?
• Where do those fans live?
• What site brought them here?

More than stats, you also own your fan list. You probably noticed that you can’t move your old MySpace fans to Facebook. That’s because you don’t own that fan list, MySpace does. Same thing could happen whenever the next hot social network appears. There is no easy “export from Facebook” option!

Remember, your list of fan emails is gold. It allows you to always maintain contact with your fans, regardless which social networks they might be on.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t be present on social networks — they clearly have a place to interact with and find new fans. But what’s even more important is to have a home base to bring your fans back to that you own, where they can always find you regardless which social networks are popular at the time.

In an upcoming post I’ll talk about the “hub and spokes” method of driving fans from your social networks (“spokes”) back to your website (“hub”), and list some of the best ways you can do that.

A general rule of commerce is this: You cannot demand money until you have generated demand, or at the very least, the perception of demand. And a sure way to generate demand is by using a loss leader. 

Your music is your business. And in business, in order to spike sales and increase the bottom line, you have to pick and put into play a loss leader. A loss leader is a part of your whole product offering that you will lose money on (or not make money on) in order to get potential customers through the door. Once they are in, their experience with your “brand” should cause them to buy other products you also offer as well as become repeat customers. This adds to your bottom line. This is what a loss leader does. 

In our industry, there’s been a great deal of debate regarding the giving away of music for free. Many emerging acts have opted to give away their entire body of work for free through services like Bandcamp (with some using the pay-what-you-want or donate option). Most of us do this in hopes that it will generate more demand for our music and that, eventually, we’d get paid somehow. Whatever we decide to do, I think it’s important that we understand how a loss leader works and how to rightly choose one. We should make decisions with a clear understanding of a matter and not because it’s trending or something everyone is doing. Think for yourself. Think objectively. Because if we don’t, we wont have a sustainable career in music. Here are some thoughts for your consideration. Please eat the fish and spit out the bones. 

The loss leader should only be a part of your entire offering. This is common sense. There’s an old adage: Business is common sense. If you give everything away for free or if you lose money on everything, you wont have a business. You cannot build a business nor can you sustain a business that way. You risk devaluing yourself when you give everything away. It’s a serious risk. Also consider that the only way that you can succeed these days is by standing out. People share things they’re excited about. And their perception of you is what drives that excitement. It’s not just your music. It’s an idea about you that they have to buy into. And when you give everything away, you set up for yourself two public perceptions that will hurt you:

1. You look like you’re not worth anything and desperate for attention. This is not romantic for the music lover/buyer. This doesn’t make you stand out. They want to buy into something cool, not something perceived as worthless and desperate. Giving away everything for free says on a subconscious level that no one wants you. 

2. You look like you don’t have much demand at all. Hence, you’re giving everything away. This doesn’t help generate demand because it doesn’t excite people. People are excited about things they think others are excited about (or even the possibility that others are excited about it). You need to look like you have some demand while generating demand. Giving away everything for free doesn’t help that at all. 

Making your entire product offering a loss leader can only lead to one thing - devaluation. And devaluation leads to demise. However, when your loss leader is only a part of your entire offering, it simply says to potential customers that you want them to give you a try without creating the perception that you are worthless, unwanted, and desperate. You can build a business on that.  Remember that the point of a loss leader isn’t to lose money, but to gain money through controlled loss.  Try offering a song or two in exchange for an email address. I recommend using ONErpm, who recently added a storefront application on Facebook with a download-for-email component (which actually boost sign-ups and get you more useful data of those who sign up).  You may not sell your other songs at first, but that’s not the point. The point is to maintain a certain positive perception while you’re working to generate demand. Be patient and keep working. 

The loss leader has to be worth it to potential customers. This goes without saying. Give away something good and valuable. Don’t pull a fast one on potential customers. It may seem counter-intuitive to let go of what you think is your best song. But, it’ll challenge you to create other amazing songs they’ll want to get. Plus, in my experience, they usually find something else as their favorite that you have. 

The loss leader always exists, but is never constant. In retail, there is always a special sale. There are discounts throughout the year, but under different names/campaigns. Consider this effective approach. What it does is maintain excitement, which is key to generating demand. They also rotate products as the loss leader. I used to work for a large jewelry store chain. The sales ran into each other and each one would offer a different inexpensive piece of jewelry as the center of that sales campaign. They didn’t really make money on these pieces, but they almost always sell more things to the client. If nothing, they’ll have repeat customers for their stores and deepened market share. Try having a special name for the duration of time you are offering a certain song for free download, like a campaign. Or, try offering the old album for free right before you offer the new album for sale. This is done in retail all the time and it works. 

Lastly, the loss leader needs to bring potential customers into a brand experience. For stores, the point of a loss leader is to get customers through the door, where they’ll end up buying more products and come back because they enjoyed their experience. For music, the point of a loss leader is to get people to experience you personally so you can build a connection with them, after which they’ll begin to buy your music and actually pay to see you play. This is debatable. But, aside from giving a song or two for free in exchange for an email online, I think that doing free shows is the most effective loss leader for emerging artists. The reason being is that people are brought into a real world experience with you. And nothing generates demand for music better than real world engagement. Everyone’s online! So, to stand out, do something special in the real world. It seems to me that in this new music era, we’ll be forced to revert back to the old days when acts have to work hard and build a real-world following in order to have a sustainable and influential career. 

It goes without saying that you need to open for other acts for free as you are starting out. Play everywhere you can, but only in a specific market (city/region). But not too much as to become common. Remember, you must maintain excitement for your music. Once you’ve built a following and generated enough demand for your music, you’ll find more people willing to pay for your music and to see you perform. 

Article originally appeared on Music Think Tank (http://www.musicthinktank.com/) and was written by Minh Chau.