Posted on September 16, 2009 - by Marilyn Roxie

Independent Musicians’ Tips: #2 – Get it Out There

Welcome to the latest installment in this on-going series: Independent Musicians’ Tips!

Tip #2 – Get it Out There: Upload and Tag Everything on Last.fm

Tip #1 – Establish Yourself Online had to do with setting up a website and social-networking profiles for your material. This is an area that you, and/or who’s in charge of managing your sites, will want to continue to improve (adding widgets, adding contacts, occasionally changing up the layout, adding songs, keeping news updated, and so on).

The next important bit to work at is the promotional side – you want to make sure your music is where the greatest number of people, and especially the audience most likely to be receptive to your stuff, can hear it! Apart from your own website and any profiles that you have (at least a MySpace Music page), Last.fm is, in my opinion, the greatest tool available for testing how successful your promotional efforts can be.

Let’s take a look at why having a Last.fm page is useful. For starters, it’s a first-destination for many when they initially want to check out a band. Why? Because visiting any fleshed-out artists’ page gives you lots of goodies to read, look at, and listen to! Check out this artist page, as an example: Radiohead. You’ve got listener and play-count numbers, a biography, pictures, videos, similar artists (calculated based on listening habits), upcoming gig dates and locations, top albums (in Radiohead’s case, nearly everything is available for full-stream), top tracks for the past week/past 6 months, news feed piped in from their MySpace Music and official sites, recent listeners, recent activity (such as when a user adds the band to their library or adds a song to their ‘Loved’ tracks), journal entries linking to the band, groups connected to the artist, related links, and a shoutbox for people to leave comments in (Radiohead have 46,000+ shouts on theirs!).

Of course, Radiohead is a major artist, so all of the above seems like a given because of that, right…? Well, on Last.fm, you can get that same kind of data and material for any band anyone’s ever listened to on the site, since it tracks user listening (“scrobbles”) and automatically creates an artist page for anyone that’s being listened to! Fans can update the bio, add pictures, gig dates, tag tracks (whether they’re streamable or not – just as long as one or more users have listened to them) with genres and other descriptors, tag the artist in a journal entry, and connect the artist to related groups. After, or before an artist has been listened to, a label or the artist themselves can claim the artist (or a label) page as their own, adding adding actual tracks for listening and the like, by setting up a regular user profile, and then visiting this link: http://www.last.fm/uploadmusic
After the Music Manager account set-up, you’ll be able to upload tracks (while keeping all the previous stats for anyone who’s listened to them beforehand entact), add album art, edit pre-existing albums uploaded, add music videos, set featured tracks, allow for full-stream and/or free download (I don’t recommend 30-second samples; anyone I’ve talked to about this finds them quite irritating!), examine a load of stats about waves of listeners and plays scrobbled over time, set up RSS feeds to integrate on the artist page, and a whole lot more…

A Music Manager FAQ is available here for anyone wanting assistance with this process: http://musicmanager.last.fm/help/faq

I’ve been a member of Last.fm since November 2007 – it wasn’t long before I got in touch with like-minded music listeners and musicians, since Last.fm is very much like a music-based social network. Take a look at my user page there and you’ll see what I mean: http://www.last.fm/user/MoogleFan

While it’s not necessary for an artist/label to have such an action-packed user page (ha!), communicating with others has certainly upped my listener numbers as well. I link to my Last.fm artist page, MySpace Music page, and home page right on my profile, and embedded the music video for “Indigo” in my About Me section, amongst other things. Scrobbles (which are tracked from installing the Last.fm client on your computer, and then using the streaming radio service or Windows Media Player, iTunes, or other compatible players to listen to music on your computer) appear on your most-recently-listened-to tracks, and make up your user stats overall. Visiting my profile page, you can see what I’ve been listening to the most overall, or smaller time-frames: see also here: http://www.last.fm/user/MoogleFan/charts?rangetype=overall&subtype=artists

Now that I’ve covered artist and user pages to a reasonable extent, I’ll demonstrate how to put this all into practice, using how I set up and promoted my own material as an example. This is my artist page: http://www.last.fm/music/Marilyn+Roxie

I first uploaded my music to Last.fm in March of 2008. I started with a compilation, Selected Recordings 2005-2007 (I’ve continued to upload a new album of some sort-EP, compilation, and most recently, an LP- every few months). After claiming ‘Marilyn Roxie’ as my own artist page, I uploaded the album, and made it available for full-stream and free download. I’ve continued to upload everything I have for free download since I haven’t been selling my music otherwise – if you are an artist that has physical copies for sale, I would recommend just going with full-stream instead, though it wouldn’t hurt (and fans like it!) if you had at least one track available for free mp3 download. After all the tracks and cover art were up, I went about tagging each track with descriptors that I felt were appropriate (“electronic”, “experimental”, “instrumental”). When tagging your own music, look at the tags for artists that you feel inspired by and think are similar (or have been told you’re simialr to) to decide what other tags to use. In my case, I checked out Brian Eno’s tags, and, later on, Delia Derbyshire’s, since some people had made comparisons between my music and hers. Once enough listener data is gathered, a list of similar artists will appear on your artist page based on listener data and common tags, which will help you better understand your audience (you can always browse the profiles of your recent listeners to get a hold on demographics and their other musical interests as well) – here’s my similar artists page:

http://www.last.fm/music/Marilyn+Roxie/+similar
Tagging, while not compulsory, allows people to better find your music when browsing tags and, most importantly, through Last.fm streaming radio. If you haven’t tried this for yourself, I recommend giving it a go here – just enter the name of an artist or genre descriptor, and watch the magic begin!: http://www.last.fm/listen

Does it work for independent artists? In my case – yes! Between 500 and 1,000 of my listeners have heard my music because of typing in a tag I’d used in Last.fm streaming radio. Likewise, I have heard many an artist I may not have discovered elsewhere because of Last.fm streaming radio (as well as communicating with other users, checking out my recommendations based on what I’ve been listening to, and simply browsing around the site). This is a premiere method that people use to find music that is new to them – utilize it!

For an earlier article I wrote on this topic, see also Dorq.co.uk – Independent Musicians Should Utilize Last.fm. If you have any questions or comments about artists and labels using Last.fm, please feel free to leave them in a comment below!

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