This is the 3rd and final post in a series on Trent Reznor’s advice to unknown artists. Read the first post here, and the second post here.
Trent wraps up his forum post with this paragraph:
“Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace – it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay). Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any – Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc. 
If you don’t know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don’t get it – find someone who does to do this for you. If you are waiting around for the phone to ring or that A & R guy to show up at your gig – good luck, you’re going to be waiting a while.”
Well let’s start with MySpace. It does seem that MySpace is dying thanks to the rise of Facebook. But for an artist and musician MySpace still has use and value. For one MySpace allows you to really control the look of your page, which is a great way to show off your artistic style. For musicians it is still the place to showcase your music on the web easily and for free. MySpace does have a cheap feel to it though thanks to all the ads and the type of ads that tend to be found on MySpace. Use it for some of its functions but don’t use it for your online headquarters.
Mr. Reznor’s next bit advice is solid advice for any creative people. “Remove all Flash from your website.” I know many artists will not like or agree with that bit of advice because many artists use Flash for their whole website. This is so it looks fancy and can have all sorts of animation, sounds, and fancy menus. A website heavy in Flash can be very slow to load and very hard for search engines to find. If search engines have trouble finding you then so will your fans. And if your fans do find you and your site loads painfully slow or automatically plays music they may just leave to avoid the hassle. If you must have a fancy Flash site then think about having your landing page (the page people first land on when they visit your site) offer the option of Flash or HTML. Find a great example here.
“Constantly update your site with content…” Probably the single best piece of advice in all of Trent’s post. As an artist if your patient and you continue to perserver with your online efforts by constantly updating your site people will find you and you will gain fans. It is almost guaranteed. It is for this reason that I am a big believer in artists using a blog as their online headquarters. Blogs are easy to update and easy to make search engine friendly.
And if you don’t know anything about this “new media” don’t worry. I am moving Art Palaver in the direction to focus on helping you learn and effectively use all the tools that are out there for the independent artist. Because like he says your role these days is to be a master of these tools, your art career depends on it.
Use this link to read the complete forum post along with all the replies. There is a good palaver happening there and any artist in any medium can learn from it.
Thank you Mr. Trent Reznor for sharing you thoughts and ideas with the us.
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