this thread is a product of something mentioned in the Prizes! Weee! thread in the Announcements section.

We're trying to get Bandamp's name known.

quote, Puske
I think all the prizes mentioned are a great idea.  Maybe at the end of the year you can give out CD's with all of the winners of the battes on it. I know if I won a battle the Professional CD cover and case with my name on it would be something I would frame.....haha. Thanks for the website...It kicks ass.

quote, Iszil
Great idea!
So then the CD is a present for the winners of the battle and the other just can buy it.
You can put in the little book of the case ( don't know how you call it) a picture of the winners and an their biography and... well if you have a some idea put it in.

      > Iszil

There may be a good idea floating around in this.  we've been trying to spark up the annual BandAmp Cd again (refer to the project posts: 2005 and 2006)  Perhaps we can adapt the idea to the above quoted ideas.

at first, i'll admit, i thought that the cd being for sale was a silly idea, since the members could just download the songs for free if they wanted, but the novelty of having a more professional cd (something like what we've been trying to do for 2005 and 2006) might be enough to drive soemthing like that on a small scale.  to be honest, a lot of the members of BandAmp aren't terribly pro-active, so it may be hard to make decent sale on a cd like this, but..

Alittlepaperdoll and I were talking, and it might be worth it to produce these cds and then sell them off locally to friends and family, loved ones and enemies, for the sake of spreading bandamp's name.  you may be able to select "agents" to handle the local distribution: a few people around the world to run the scene in their own areas.  they could recieve printed professional cds from some lead coordinator (perhaps an admin, or alittlepaperdoll, since she's heading the project this time) and then they could sell them off for like, $5 to friends.  if they need more, they can put a request into the LeadCoordator ("the Lead" for short ).  it might be an interesting way to try to get the Cd to help produce itself.  last year, i shelled out the money to produce it and print it, and so i think it might be nice to make the cd produce money to help cover such costs. 

the only kink to work out is how to get the money to the Lead again.  we don't want a bunch of local banadampers running around with pocketed money

perhaps bandamp could make some sort of online interface to purchase the cds?  that would eliminate the need for local agents to handle the cds themselves.  in this case, the agents would only be responsible for talking to people about the cds and giving them the site address.  maybe the agents could burn their own little sampler cds out of old battle winner songs.

any ideas?

XO, TLS

Wow, this went unanswered for so long? I remember PuppetXeno had a blog one time mentioning that he puts his music onto iTunes through tunecore, with a $20 fee to sign up for distributing music on iTunes and such, and  $7 something or rather per album, I think, I dunno exactly. That'd save forfreight and handling to willing ampers, with no guaranteed way of getting the stuff back. So, I think, just a bit of advertising for the bandamp album, or start a bandamp myspace to spread the word, and direct people to iTunes etc. What do you think? You've probably forgotten this post...

That's right....

As I mentioned in another thread I think we should put some thought into putting some kind of promotion/marketing traject together. For BandAMP as a community, but also for individual members who might benifit from it.

Here's a couple of interesting links:

www.tunecore.com : gets your music published to digital download sites such as itunes, emusic etc also providing UPC and ISRC taking care of any copyright questions you might have. You get full royalties for any song sold on any of the download sites. Maintenance per album is indeed $7 something per year, setup fee for an album to ALL available download sites is one time $20 something. A small investment IMO. 

www.sellaband.com : believers can buy "parts" in your band, when you hit $50000 (5000 sold parts) you get the whole recording and marketing deal - very interesting if you actually have a band to show for and creating a profile is free. Ofcourse you only get believers if you know how to promote yourself, which I don't have a clue at I sold $40 so far since... umm August I believe. If you create a profile there it might be an idea to mention you're part of the BandAMP community... Maybe the name BandAMP will start having more meaning in time.

www.xampy.com : music upload site, which is being auditioned by professional producers and promoters etc. So if you have music on there, you might have a chance at being "discovered". I made a profile and within a few hours some "Music Agent & Producer called "21st Media Productions" " reviewed my work (gave me a good grade on one of my songs, and 6/10's for two others. dunno if that will ever mean anything, but it seemed interesting at the time. They claim "By publishing your work on Xampy.com, you are greatly increasing your chances of having your work heard by registered record companies, music agents, and distributors. The higher the rating your tracks receive on the website, the more your work will be promoted to our agents, which could result in a recording contract."

If anyone has more sites or ways that may be interesting please post them here. I think we should compile a list of all of those sites just as a reference for members who are looking for these things.

And promotion, people. The CD thing is nice but without ISRC no radio station is going to play it (except for the very small ones) - I love the idea of a BandAMP collective promotion/marketing but this has to be conducted in a very solid, professional manner.

Also I do believe mud mentioned that on of his plans for BandAMP was that members could sell their music via the site one day. Seems like a good one to me. Xampy.com provides this possibility aswell. Gonna check this out some more.

So anyone has anything to add? Please do so! I know there is no "holy grail" when it comes to marketing one's stuff on- or offline but it's all about increasing chances, so let's increase our chances.

Great Ideas, sure....

  But I think this should go through Mud first, and I think we need these bugs fixed first...

           Then we can concentrate on promotion...

                        JimK

Umm, alrightee, but most of us have really very little to do with fixing bugs. You're right about promotion of the site itself (this should go through mud first) but I am more aiming at promotion of the individual members. Bugs or no bugs there is a community on this site, and what I mean is getting a list of actions one can take to increase one's chances to earn money through one's creative efforts. I don't see why we should wait with compiling a list like that...

hm, i agree with the new projected idea.  the iTunes / otheronlinedistributors would be an excellent idea in my opinion.  i'm sure that there's some good progress to be made here if we can get some real creativity flowing here in bandamp!  (there's lots of creativity already, but i mean pushing for more collaboration between members, yada yada)

if we could get this idea rolling through the community of Bandamp, i'm sure that certain users who are really looking to promote their music (rather than simply looking for advice or pointers) would love to do something like this.


yeah... I think bandamp would get much more out of this idea if we were to find a way to post into iTunes as "BandAMP - Artist" rather than individually.  perhaps we could even find a way to promote the Battle winners to have their songs put in as a collection.  and i agree--this needs to be conducted in a professinal manner, as quoted.

i suppose the true issue is the money behind it.  even if it does promote themselves and bandamp, people are lazy when it comes to giving up their money

Also known as 'the Amp' ! 

What an amazingly obvious quite obviously amazing idea!

A 'web-site' that makes music! And after all the comments and criticisms the site members have given each others songs over the years they should know how to make some very good music!
There are such a lot of very good ideas going on in his thread !
I have a feeling there's more of this to come so I'll leave my comments till I have more time!

its a very good idea. i am totally for it. 

wonder if i can be of any help ha ha

Well for starters BandAMP is significant enough to have it's own Wikipedia entry... Just need someone to write it.. And yes mud has to agree to this.

oo.. Wikipedia....  i hadn't thought of that to be honest.  I'd love to do it, but i simply don't have the time to do such a thing.

any journalists in the house?

Ummm. I dunno about Wikipedia, they really work hard to keep advertising and such out of their site.
Are we really that significant? How big are we on the internet scene? I have no clue.

And the CD idea sounds great, really. But, I don't mean to be pessimistic or anything, but, well, couldn't they just download it for free? Maybe we should stop that, and only let music be listened to through the site, and then provide a way for listeners to pay an artist to download.

And WB- yes, we need a myspace. We should get started on that right away. I think I will, actually. Myspace does seem to be really good advertisement.

wikipedia.........cool that's a great idea. and with the confirmation form mud these ideas should move fast

Oldies has set up a myspace account for bandamp, under my email, I have no idea how to work myspace, so I'll leave it up to him to take up the ideas, or pass it on to someone else. Also, I think, after we've sorted out who's going to be controlling it in the end, it should be a good promo.

Well, we're talking about "upsizing" BandAMP, are we not? A lot of bands in general have their own wiki pages with lots of references to other bands and genres, even bands from the past (20+ years ago) that were never that big at all. I agree that pages such as CrystalCherrie's had no place on wiki, but we are a growing community and if wikipedia moderators would research our site, I am sure they would agree it to be worthy of having an entry.


Uhm shouldn't you ask mud first? Anyway true, myspace seems to be a big thing... It'll only work if you're REALLY going to shove this account down everyone's throat - spend no less than 5 hours per day working on this! I hope we won't draw in too many idiots though... There are a lot of idiots on myspace

Anyway seems this is going somewhere. Any more ideas anyone?

hummmm........"upsizing".......banners are a good idea......there is already a thread here