BY YOUR COMMAND! ON DEMAND! INTERNETS!

BY YOUR COMMAND! ON DEMAND! INTERNETS!

Here at The Skyline we know a thing or two about life on the internet. I mean, we love the crap out of this series of tubes and all the joy, myrth, information and cat pictures it sends our way (or even better, when it summons it based entirely on the force of our will/fingers on keyboards). We’d even like to say we know a thing or two about nesting together the myriad of whipassedness out there into a relatively cohesive online experience. NOT SO for everyone! Not for lack of trying, mind you, but for lack of getting together and sharing their ideas with others (although we guess there are folks out there that don’t much care).

And so, this month’s topic for Bandcamp over at the Caroline Collective is ‘ONLINE PRESENCE’, which we are told will discuss the following bullet points:

  • Improved tools beyond Myspace for online presence
  • the Wheel and spoke concept of web presence including a home base and digital outposts
  • designing a strategy for employing these digital outposts and selecting the ones that work for your band
  • Learn how to set up your own website in 15 minutes
  • Learn how to measure metrics for your site to determine your audience and what content is the most interesting to your visitors
  • An overview of other digital outposts other than Myspace that are just as effective for artist promotion
  • How to integrate your digital outposts to your website
  • Free email accounts for your band
  • Places to seed your music, video
  • Where to sell online: amazon, itunes, cdbaby, napster
  • Locations to post your photos online (flickr, photobucket, etc.)
  • Ideas for driving traffic to your site

Killer. Of course, we have some suggestions for bands too when it comes to dodgy music reviewing websites such as our own and things we would be really stoked if your band would do. They would be:

  • Make it easy for people to get your record by adopting such innovations as having it available in a store for them to buy.
  • Don’t make people get pissy and shelf their review of your record because you feel you are too punk rock or something to make the album artwork easy to find on the internet and so the reviewers have to go to the copy shop in the middle of the fucking night to scan your shitty artwork for fucks sake when we really just want to goto the damn bar and have a beer.
  • Make a sample MP3 available online somehow so that websites can link to it, which not only means that people who read the site will hear it, but it will get picked up by aggregate sites like elbo.ws and the Hype Machine
  • Put out good records

February’s Bandcamp will have two sessions, one this Sunday and another on the 22nd for folks who can’t make it the first time around. Complete details are available on the Caroline Collective website.