Musical Musings and Meanderings

I first read about a site called GigIn through HM magazine.  It is an interesting concept.  From what I read, you can join with up to six other people and jam together online:

GigIn is the ultimate online music hub – a virtual space, social network and creative laboratory, that gives everyone a means to connect, compose and make music together, in real time, at any distance, and totally free of charge. Whether you are an amateur or a professional, GigIn taps into every individual’s inner musician allowing you to explore, create and share your own music, broadcast your live shows, attend online festivals, and participate in exclusive contests.

So, the deal is that you can form a band (or re-unite a band) with members from around the world and practice as much as you need.  Then you can even put on live shows together no matter where you live.  Could be an interesting tool for many of the bands that we cover on Down The Line.  They could get together for practice no matter where the members now live. They could work out new material even.  Then they can put on regular concerts for their fans online.

I still need to check it out to see what it is like.  It certainly won’t take the place of a true live concert, but it could also be an interesting idea to help those that can’t get out and tour.

I never was in a band, but I thought I would start looking at what resources bands can use to reconnect with fans. This might actually prove useful for new bands, also – just remember that it is coming from a fan perspective. There are many free or low cost solutions out there for the non-techie bands to utilize. So, here is part of one of So You Were In a Band, and Now You Want to Re-Connect With Fans: Getting a website.

There are probably thousands of different ways to get a website going. If you have html programming skills or access to a web designer, you probably don’t need to know any of this. But if you have neither and still want a site… there is hope.

First of all, I would get familiar with some free tool for publishing content. Google has a few of these (Blogger, Google Sites, etc). The tool I would recommend is a WordPress.com blog. Why WordPress? Well, most blog programs work about the same. The difference with WordPress is that you can actually create pages and not just blog posts. You can run an entire site through WordPress (like we do) – setting up discography pages, lyrics pages, everything. Your blog doesn’t even have to be the front page of your site. Some programs also do that, but WordPress is probably the most popular.

The most important thing is to pick a tool that works best for you and what you want to do.

But why would you want to blog if your band doesn’t even exist and you have no news to report? Your fans would love to hear all the stories surrounding your band. Why not just add a new story every Monday? Or just go through every song and blog about each one – how it came to be, etc. You might even come across new stuff on YouTube or other places that might be of interest and want to post them.

Finally, a word about domain names. Your free account at WordPress.com will still reside at WordPress.com. If you want to have a domain name that matches your band name, you can still have that domain name point to your WordPress.com blog. Or, if you want to go a step further into DIY land, you can download the source code for WordPress and install it on your own website. Bluehost is one such site hosting option that will let you install WordPress as well as let you have your own domain and email, all for about $6-7 a month. The source code for WordPress can be found at WordPress.org (notice the .org part). Or, if you are interested in the less DIY option, some instructions on having domain names point to a WordPress.com blog can be found on this page.

What about MySpace? That is a different topics, but I wouldn’t recommend running MySpace as your main web page. Many do and it works fine, but it is more geared for active bands. I will cover MySpace in the future – I would recommend having that in conjunction with your main website. Next, however, I want to cover how to share copies of your music that you want to give away.

Any other ideas or suggestions? Feel free to drop a comment.