ok, this post is concerning probably the most useful site i've discovered since i started playing music. reverbnation.com is an incredible band management site and is completely free. they will host your songs (no space limit), they host pictures, they provide a blog, they give you a tool to manage an e-mailing list and widgets for your website so that people can sign up to join it, they have a great show management system with a calendar and automatic maps, the list goes on. they offer so many services that i only take advantage of probably half of them, and it's still so much more than worth the time. not to mention free. did i mention it's free? 'cuz it is. it's free.
anywho, you head over to the site and hit "sign up" right? you're given the option to sign up as an artist, a fan, management, a label, or a venue. now i haven't signed up as anything but an artist, so that's what i'll talk to you about.
when you first login, you'll see a rather unremarkable profile page. the simple interface belies the power behind this site however, as you'll soon find. on the left side are "upload pic" and "edit profile" links, which are pretty self explanatory. to the right of where your picture will go is the music section, where songs you upload will show up. the top right corner of this section has the "upload song" link, and as i said before, there's no limit on how many songs you can upload, as long as each song is below 8 megabytes in size.
below this you'll find a row of tabs that control just about everything else about your profile, the blog section, photos section, the shows section (where you can add shows with directions, dates, and it'll automatically add them to a map!). i just think that's about the coolest thing ever.
the last part i wanna talk to you about is the little orange button directly above your music player. this buttons says "admin toolbox" on it and it's extremely powerful.
click it.
in here you'll have access to a suite of web based applications that will make your life a whole lot easier. at the top of the list is the one i use most, called "fanreach". this application allows you to add e-mail addresses to a list and enter information about each individual person such as age, gender, location, and when they joined the e-mailing list. it also has a rich text editor that has tools for hyperlinking and embedding images in case you're not too html savv. you can edit the look of the e-mail before you send it out, and you can choose whether to send it to your whole list or just to people in a certain location or of a certain age or who joined after a certain date. it's really really great, and in conjunction with the NEXT tool it's even better.
the other tools i use most in this toolbox are the widgets. these are handy little html based applications that you can add to your myspace, your website, your facebook, pretty much anywhere that lets you add html to a page and they'll do cool things! ok, so as an example, there's a "fan collector" widget that you can put on your website that's basically just a form to add their e-mail address to your mailing list. they have a widget that will display your upcoming shows, they even have a music player that you can embed on your website! the most versatile of all the widgets however combines all these options and adds a photo viewer and video player (did i mention you can link up videos on youtube with your songs on reverbnation?) all in one compact widget you can add to any page you desire!
since i joined this site i've gotten more use out of it than is believable for how easy to use and cheap (see:free) it is. i highly recommend it. this is especially useful if you don't have your own website, you can put just about everything you need on reverbnation.
thanks for reading, see you next time!
-loren
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