Facebook is just one way musicians can communicate with their fans.

From LRG: This is a condensed version of a post that first appeared in AllAboutJazz.com. Chuck Anderson interviewed Eric Hebert, CEO of Evolvor Media, about marketing music through – what else – the internet! Chuck hired Eric to re-design his website, and to add various social media tools that Chuck had not previously used. Take a look below at what Eric Hebert advises for Chuck, and for you, too…

Chuck Anderson: Is having a well-designed website enough for a jazz musician?

Eric Hebert: Well, that depends on what you mean by well designed. One of the first missteps that I find musicians taking is worrying about their site’s design —most are only thinking in terms of graphic design. They think their site should be “flashy” and stand out. While having nice graphics is a part of a well designed site, it’s just a portion. A well-designed site should focus on giving the visitor access to as much content as they want to read or check out. It needs to be easy to navigate. It must be search engine friendly. It must provide calls-to-action to entice the casual visitor to sign up to your email list to download a track.

A well-designed site these days is also more than just a billboard for your music. It should be built with WordPress (a content management system) so the artist can easily add content like blog posts and allow the visitor to comment, etc.I wouldn’t say that’s it’s enough for the musician to just have a well designed site, but if used properly, it sure can play a major role in how you market yourself as well as how you plan on generating revenue.

CA: How has the internet changed how music is marketed?

EH: I think in the past, musicians mostly relied on record labels to do their marketing for them. While this still works, it requires a ton of money. The thing the web has done is enabled all of us to build our own communities through things like Facebook, Twitter, and blogging about the experiences of being a musician. This interaction is actually the marketing for your music.

CA: What do musicians not understand about the internet?

EH: I don’t think musicians, or anyone for that matter, really understands marketing or branding—that’s the problem. Building a brand these days is all about building communities or “tribes” and connecting with them by providing them with information. This can easily be done via the web because it’s so easy to set up blogs and social networking tools.

Think about how you found out about me and your perception of my brand. Most find me via Google search about music marketing information. They then learn something by reading my blog content. This content backs up the brand and the services I offer. Then the visitor can connect with me via email or Twitter or what have you, and I then get a new “fan” and possible client.

The same approach can be had for a band or musician. Build your tribe, constantly interact with them in a way that makes them fall in love with your music, and learn how to sell products to them over the web. I think that last point needs to be addressed as well about musicians “not understanding the Internet.” There is a market for selling digital memberships to fans if you can create compelling content that they just need to have.

CA: Explain search optimization.

EH: That’s a tough one to answer quickly without putting you to sleep. Many people think they understand SEO, few actually do. SEO is two things—how your website is constructed and how much attention you get from other websites (and that’s the most important part). You have to make sure that Google can read all the content on your website, and you then have to make sure you get other websites to hyperlink to that content.

CA: What is the role of digital content in today’s music industry?

EH: I think it’s the main format if you’re looking to really interact with your fans. This is of course all outside of making a living as a touring musician, which really should be the number one revenue generator for musicians. However, if you can create really compelling digital content, whether that’s recorded music, behind the scenes videos, training materials, films—all these things can be sold in different formats via the web, and offers you a different business model than the traditional music industry is used to.

CA: Should your website be the hub of all your activities and content?

EH: I think so. If done properly, you can maximize your efforts by making your website the center of everything, and use tools like RSS to syndicate your content to things like MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook, and try to convert those fans into email fans. The email list is your most important asset and you need to create a fan funnel where you bring them in and get them to sign up to that list.

CA: How do you organize your work on behalf of the client?

EH: Another big part of working on the web is just knowing how to organize yourself and use tools to make communicating easier, especially when the client is 1,000 miles away in a different country. I think using project management tools like Basecamp is really important—I get to have all my project files and correspondence with the client stored in a nice location on the web that I can access at any time.

The other really useful tool is Gmail. I love it when a client I have uses Gmail, can access Gchat, and share documents using Google docs. All this is so much easier for collaboration then the old “send me the file” routine. And the new Google Wave product is sure to make this process that much better for real-time collaboration on documents.

Visit Chuck Anderson’s website to join his mailing list and learn about upcoming concerts. Take a look at his CDs and educational materials. And of course, become a Facebook fan!

Jeanette Lundgren aka "Mom Hen" heads up Mother Hen Promotions.

I have a job that didn’t exist five years ago. I’m a social media manager for independent musicians. In the old days, promoting a musician meant putting together a press kit with a CD, paper press release, photocopies of reviews and interviews from magazines, and any number of other promotional items that might interest the receiver. It meant sending out postcards to fans to remind them of upcoming shows. It was slow, clunky, and hit-or-miss.

Today, it means shouting out from the internet rooftops about shows, reviews, blogs, videos, new songs, radio-play – practically anything that a fan or a friend will want to know about a musician. I am able to do this in up-to-the-minute reports via MySpace, Twitter, ReverbNation, Facebook, Sonicbids, YouTube, AirPlay Direct, Yahoo and Google groups, and e-mail mailing lists. Phew!

A musician hires me because they simply don’t have time to keep up with all of these tools and update them regularly. In upcoming posts, I will talk about each tool separately, and the best way to use each if you’re an aspiring, semi-professional, or professional musician.

Another way to use the internet for your music, besides promotion, is to locate venues. Say you will be touring through Colorado, but you have 200 miles in between stops. You can simply do a search for “Colorado music venues” or “Colorado music coffeeshops” or become a member of House Concerts In Your Home or Indie Venue Bible to find locations you may not have known about.

In the old days, you’d send your CD (or LP…) out to a radio station – and wait. Now, you can simply point the station to a location where your MP3 or .wav files live so they can instantly download and play your music to their radio audiences – whether they are terrestrial (tower-based), satellite, internet, or podcasting radio stations. 

Another way to use the internet is to approach websites and blogs and ask if someone will review your album or interview you about your music. If something is published, you can then run the link on your site, or copy the interview and clearly display the source, copyright, and permissions.

Social media operates largely as a barter system. The website or radio station writes about you or plays your music as a way to increase readers or listeners, and you, in turn, help promote the website or radio station when you post a link from the site or station to your own sites.

The internet is basically a civil place. Just make sure that you are not consistently asking for favors, but offering them as well. And check out Mashable to stay up to date on Web 2.0 and social media trends.

Jeanette Lundgren aka “Mom Hen” heads up Mother Hen Promotions, a social media management company that represents the social media needs of independent musicians that are not signed by major labels. Her clients include Tracy Newman and John Batdorf, both of whom were interviewed by Music After 50, a good example of Mom Hen’s efforts paying off!

Let us know what you would like to see on the Music After 50 site.

This week, the Music After 50 site turns five months old. It is still in its infancy, but, like any parent, I have great hopes for this baby!
 
I started the site because adult amateur musicians need a place to locate each other, encourage each other, and learn from each other.
 
Like all of you, I lead a double life. I have a profession – writing and editing, and a passion – music. Dr. Stephen L. Cash, who I interviewed recently, personifies this double life. By day, he’s a prominent Philadelphia-area hand surgeon and on some weekends, he’s George Harrison in the Beatles tribute band Liverpool Beat!
 
When I tell people who my audience is, I tell them it’s the people who want to play music instead of golf when they retire. Not that you can’t do both, of course, but there is a huge population of adults, approaching 50 and well over 50, that see lifelong learning and increased creativity on the horizon.
 
I’ve been particularly struck by people who have shared stories about wanting to play music full-time when they retire. Chuck Anderson, our Master Music Teacher blogger, has many students who have become professional musicians after retirement. And some of these people didn’t learn an instrument until later in life.
 
Take a look at Chuck’s recent post on getting paid to make music; learn about Biana Kovic, who taught an 89-year-old woman to play the cello; read about Elli Fordyce, who released her first album at age 70; take a look at our interview with Tracy Newman, who started a career as a singer-songwriter in her 60s; and learn about reader Bergen Woods, who put down the guitar for 38 years and now plays in two working bands. And of course the Music After 50 Community Forum is a great place to connect with other adult musicians in your area and around the country.
 
My goal is to serve YOU! Take a look around the site and the Forum, and tell me what is useful to you, and what would be even more useful. I am currently looking at ways to connect music teachers and students in certain U.S. cities. Please write to us via the contact us form if you have suggestions for the site or its offerings or just write a comment in the comment field below. I want to hear your thoughts, and what you would like to see here in the coming months and years.

Smokey Robinson follows his followers on Twitter.

If you do a Google search of  “Twitter is for old people” it returns about 146,000 results. Facebook certainly has its share of “old people” (generally defined as the over-35 set), but Twitter leads the category.  There are nearly 300 million active users of Facebook and nearly 18 million active users of Twitter. More than 60% of  both Facebook and Twitter users are over 35, but there is a slightly larger percentage of 45- to 64-year-old users on Twitter.

According to eMarketer.com (via www.briansolis.com), those between 45 and 54 years of age make up 20 percent of Facebook users;  that demographic makes up 24 percent of Twitter users. On Facebook, the 55- to 64-year-old demographic makes up 11 percent of users; on Twitter it’s 12 percent. The over-65 crowd represents 4 percent of Facebook and 3 percent of Twitter users.

If you have no idea what Twitter is, here’s the best way I can describe it after nearly three months of using it: It is a tool that enables an ordinary person to instant-message the world – and, in many cases, the world listens and responds.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, instant messaging was the way to quickly communicate with colleagues if you didn’t feel like getting up or picking up the phone. Even before we all had PCs on our desks, many companies had instant message capabilities on its multi-user platforms.

Tweeting and reading tweets is not so much about staying connected with friends and family, as is done with Facebook, but talking to those with whom you’d like to connect. For example, some of the people and things I follow on Twitter are: musicians; record labels; radio stations; music stores; news sites; newspapers; music venues; software producers; music critics; and bloggers around the world.

If you’ve looked at Twitter and concluded that it’s mostly useless chatter, you’re largely correct. But probably 20 percent of the time, you’ll learn something.

A recent study described 80 percent of all Twitter users are “meformers” - people who write all about themselves. The other 20 percent are “informers,” who relay information and/or comment on it. Even if the information supplied by the informers is ultimately promotional in nature, it can often be quite valuable.

Here’s an interesting observation from a recent New York Times article on why adults tend to like and use Twitter more than teens:

Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)

“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”

Mashable, the social media site, has a list of 100+ musicians who tweet. I have no idea who 80 percent of them are, probably because most of the people at Mashable are in their 20s and 30s – as they should be.

I recently started following Smokey Robinson (who is not on the Mashable list). He tends to follow everyone back. He likely has a software application that does an auto-follow when you place him on your “follow” list. Nothing wrong with that; it enables the artists to reach out and talk to the fans. Like nearly all public figures and celebrities on Twitter, Robinson is a “meformer,” but that’s why he’s there and why people follow him.

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is valued at $1 billion. It doesn’t seem surprising, particularly because the tool is fast becoming an essential part of the way the world communicates.

And for anyone “old” who is reading this (and who doesn’t have their reading glasses available), this is the text in the image at the top of the post:

To all the people thanking me for following them… thank you too! Really, its so nice talking to you all everyday.
3:11 PM Aug 6th from web
smokey_robinson

Litchfield Jazz Camp student performance. Photo by Antonio Monteiro.

The music critic and blogger Terry Teachout wrote a curious article entitled “Can Jazz Be Saved” for the Wall Street Journal on August 9.

He says of jazz: “Nobody’s listening.”

“No, it’s not quite that bad — but it’s no longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than bleak,” he proclaims.

He comes to this conclusion based on a recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Not only is the audience for jazz shrinking, but it’s growing older—fast. The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29,” says Teachout.

The best response I’ve seen to Teachout’s piece was from a 24-year-old blogger named Patrick Jarenwattananon
who wrote his own piece entitled: Can Jazz Be Saved? (Is That A Useful Question?)

“I try to monitor the state of affairs in jazz, and I know there are at very least still a lot of young people making improvised music. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that youthful interest may not be far behind,” says Jarenwattananon.

Teachout gets close to the heart of the matter, but misses:

“…the average American now sees jazz as a form of high art. Nor should this come as a surprise to anyone, since most of the jazz musicians I know feel pretty much the same way. They regard themselves as artists, not entertainers.”

Jarenwattananon’s response:

“Wait, what? Really? First of all, the heart of the problem isn’t that people see jazz as high art: it’s that people see it as boring or unapproachable art. We would do well to treat this problem, and not the imagined, increasingly meaningless distinction of low vs. high.”

Chuck Anderson, Music After 50′s Master Music Teacher Blogger, has been talking about this for years.

“I think the biggest problem lies squarely on the shoulders of jazz musicians and the jazz community. This community has never promoted or marketed their art and craft at the level or with the same intensity as other musical idioms,” says Anderson.

“As an example, country music has an enormously popular and important tradition called Fan Fair (now known as the CMA Music Festival). This is basically a big convention for the fans to meet, up close and personal, their country music idols. Autographs are given, merchandise is sold, pictures are taken. I have never seen a country artist resist this tradition or complain about it. They recognize that without the fans, they would have no career.”

Chuck once told me he started using the tagline: “Audience friendly, progressive jazz guitar” on his website and promotional materials after people would come up to him after concerts to tell him they had no idea how much they liked jazz!

As Chuck’s experiences attest, there’s a disconnect between what people perceive jazz to be, and what jazz actually is.

From what I have seen at jazz summer camps for young teens (listen to the kids at Litchfield Jazz Camp); high school jazz bands (watch the Roosevelt High School Jazz Band in Seattle and students at Camden Creative Arts High School in Camden N.J.); college jazz bands (watch the Temple University Jazz Band); and community bands for kids (watch the Little Jazz Giants’ self-made video) – jazz is alive and well.

If the disconnect between potential listeners and players lies solely in the marketing of jazz, the situation is far from dire. The young people coming up may turn out to be far better marketers of their music than older players. Unless they give up Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, texting, and IMs, jazz will survive.

The Little Jazz Giants of Camden, N.J.

In order to post, you will need to register, which takes a few seconds. Go to the forum homepage and click “Register” directly under the photo strip on the left.

Let the posting begin…!

Today I got an email from a drummer asking if this site would have a place to connect with other adult musicians who are looking for band members.

The Music After 50 Forum will be a perfect place to connect both with performing and practice groups; the goal of the latter being to meet up with others – simply to get experience playing in a group.

The writer said he posted on Craigslist, and had not had much luck. He’s looking to put together a dance band that plays songs from the ’50s to the ’70s.

“It would be great to find musicians within my age group,” he says. “It’s more fun to play songs when you have an emotional attachment to them, when they bring you back to a time and place.”

This line of his gave me a chuckle:

“I’ve had a few people tell me that the crowd I’m looking to play for is dying out. My response to that is then I’ll play for them until they are all gone and by that time I’ll be too old to play.”

If the audience is dying out, then I’m confident this guy can just go ahead and create a new audience with his music!

Jazz – which is often referred to as a dying art form – is continously creating new audiences as artists reach out to young people both as players and listeners.

I just saw the Little Jazz Giants, a jazz band made up of 8- to- 18-year-olds, at the Cliveden of the National Trust’s annual jazz festival on Sat. The audience – a mature group – loved them.

Take a look at the latest reader story on this site and click on some of the links. If young people were exposed to the O’Jay’s singing Backstabbers, this music could never die!

I was really disappointed that Joey Calderazzo, Brandford’s spectacular pianist, wasn’t on Twitter, which is somewhat ludicrous given the fact that yesterday:

1. I had only a vague idea about what Twitter was.
2. I hadn’t thought of Joey Calderazzo since April 5, 2009.

That was the day I saw him play with the Branford Marsalis Quartet at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

I was mesmerized by his playing, and took note of his name. I thought I might check out a solo album of his. And then the next day, I re-entered my life, and the name “Joey Calderazzo” was wiped from my memory.

Fast-forward to today when I signed up for Twitter and saw Branford Marsalis there…I was really excited! I clicked the “follow” button. He’s playing a show in Lisbon at 8 pm tonight…just fyi.

But when I put Joey Calderazzo into the “Who are you looking for?” box…he was nowhere to be found. I was deeply disappointed.

Stephen Saber, CEO of the CrossTech Group, has some interesting insights about Twitter’s impact on how we communicate:

“Many people have asked in the past six months, is Twitter real and permanent. Does it have staying power? Can it really change how people communicate?

I postulate that the problem that people have with Twitter is that they are looking at it as if it is the final product of the communications revolution that it has started. Instead, let me suggest that you think of it as the AOL of its era.

When AOL launched, it was very much a tool for social purposes that had a lot of features and functionality that could be repurposed for successful business uses. These days, AOL is all but non-existent in the realm of internet powerhouses, yet much of what was embedded in that application lives on today in many of the tools that we all rely on every day.

To that end, Twitter is the same as AOL. It is, for all intents and purposes, version 0.2 of a new set of tools that will change a communications paradigm. What it represents is a great, simple tool, for people to send out quick, short ideas and messages to people who care to hear what they are saying. For instance, think about a group of people that have all of chosen to belong to a certain group because they care what the others are saying.

Imagine this being a twitter group where, instead of emails, these were small twitter broadcasts – “tweets” – that hit this group and were responded to within this group. In fact, it would be quicker than email, more efficient, and easier to browse and read. Now extend that to other groups of people that you are affiliated with where you feel the same sense of interest in sharing ideas. All of a sudden, the “Twitter model” could have profound impact on the way that these groups share ideas.

I know that this is not truly what twitter is today. But the underlying technology, concept, and communications platform and vehicle are that. This is the future and Twitter is showing us how that might look at feel. Will it be called Twitter? Maybe… Maybe not…”