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.

Artists Must Master New Media is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

Related posts:

1. What Is The One Thing I Should Do Online As An Artist?
2. Blog Writing Tip For Artists | Write Offline First
3. Facebook For Artists | Free Art Marketing Webinar

Nine Inch Nails is pretty much the musical project of one man, Trent Reznor. Back then he had the image of an angry at the world skinny guy who at every show trashed most of the bands instruments. Even though I liked the music I never cared for Trent. In 1994 he released the album The Downward Spiral and then seemed to disappear. NIN resurfaced a bit in 1999 with the release of The Fragile but that album did not seem to have much traction and Reznor again faded off the pop culture landscape.

It was 2005 when Trent seemed to comeback onto the scene a new man, bigger, cleaner, and most of all smarter. It is when he started to change the music industry through leading by example. A video for the new album was premiered on the band’s website, not on MTV. Reznor released source files of songs so that fans could do their own remixing. Trent saw the new world that technology and the internet was bringing and was early to adapt to it.

Why am I giving you a Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor history lesson? Because I feel we have a lot to learn from those who are forging a path. Recently via the NIN Forums Trent offered some advice to musicians who are new or unknown. It is good advice and I wanted to share it with you as well as have a palaver on how it can be applied to other artistic mediums besides music.

It all started with this Tweet (via Twitter), “Beastie Boys / TopSpin get it right once again. This is how you sell music today. http://bit.ly/Aj9yw” And what he is referring to is the fact that the Beastie Boys offer up a bunch of options for fans to get their hands on Beastie music and Beastie merchandise directly from them through a service like TopSpin. Many people read that Tweet and replied with comments saying that only works for musicians who are already established. It is because of those replies Trent offered advice to those musicians still struggling to get known.

His first piece of advise is, “Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish?” (Where have I heard that before?) Thinking about what you want your art career to look like will help you in knowing what path it takes to reach your goals. If you don’t know your destination how can you know what roads to take? Some artists simple desire the ability and the resources to keep creating. Others dream of being rich and famous in their respective field. These two different paths could be the difference in seeking representation or taking care of your own business. If you have not already planned and written down your goals as an artist that should be first on the list. This advice holds true for any hat you want to wear in life.

Mr. Reznor’s next bullet point may sound a little discouraging at first but I believe he is onto something:

“Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.”

Remember this is for little or unknown artists. The idea here is to give away something in exchange for information. Most likely a name and an email address. Any artist working in any medium can apply this idea. Photographers can give away hi-res jpgs, writers can offer chapter samples or whole books, painters can offer simple contests for a print, a sculptor could have a similar drawing for a smaller piece, it can work with anything. Heck you can even get people to offer up their friend’s email addresses in exchange for your art, like I write about in this post. Nine Inch Nails gave away a whole album, The Slip, which you can download for free here.

The idea is to build a list. Your list will be the foundation to your creative career. And as you grow your list, nurture your list, and take good care of it, it will become the most valuable asset to making money with your art. Managing and taking care of your list are a topic for another post though. Take his advice and think outside the box a bit on how you can effectively offer something of your art in exchange for a little bit of information. Trust me you will see a return on this investment.

This palaver is continued in this post.

Trent Reznor Has Some Advice For You | Part One is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

No related posts.