Here are a few bits of advice we pulled together a while ago as a general guide for bands just starting out locally - it’s in no way meant to be prescriptive or the ‘right’ way of doing things, but lots of local bands have been in touch to say they appreciated reading it. We hope that some or all of the material in here is useful, but if you have any comments or additions, please do leave them, or get in touch with your ideas.

1. Promoting your band

The best, most effective way of promoting your band is to write good songs, play great gigs and have brilliant recordings for people to buy. If you get this most difficult part, good things will happen, but there are a few things you can do to kick start the process. Getting your band’s name out there is another thing that almost everyone will have different ideas about. However, there are a few basics that might help you get started.

1.1. Mailing list

This is invaluable for getting news about your band out quickly to interested people. You should have a form using which people can join your mailing list at every gig you play, and on your website too, if you have one. You might only get two or three names at a time, but the numbers soon mount up, and you can quickly find dozens of people on your mailing list – extremely useful for getting people actually to turn up at your gigs.

Mailing lists are a very good way of keeping people up to date on your information and releases, and also help people to keep your band’s name in mind. Try not to e-mail to your mailing list more than once a month without a very good reason (particularly once your list extends past your immediate family and friends) – people will soon become annoyed if they feel that they’re being spammed. Remember to BCC (blind copy) the addresses, so the e-mail addresses aren’t available for everyone on the list to see.

You should never:

• Hijack anyone else’s mailing list, even if it is almost the same as yours, or has more people on it, or you think that people on another band’s mailing list would like your band.
• Add anyone to your mailing list without their permission – for a start, this is illegal. There’s nothing more annoying than receiving regular e-mail updates from a band who sent you a demo two years ago, based 100 miles away from you, and who aren’t even any good.

1.2. E-mail

Choose a band e-mail address early on, and stick to it. Obviously, if you’ve got something like info@yourbandname.com, that’s ideal, but even a Hotmail address is fine. This provides a central and useful point of contact for the band, so make sure it’s on all your demos, on your website etc. Make sure you check it regularly, and respond to relevant messages quickly and coherently.

1.3. Website

Obviously the easiest thing to do is to get yourself a MySpace and set yourself up quickly and easily that way, but what if you also want a ‘proper’ website? It’s nice to have a decent website, but the golden rule is: don’t spend a huge amount of time constructing a flashy website, when you could be spending that time writing good songs. Basically, all your website needs to be able to do is:

• Give people easy access to samples of your music
• Offer the latest news about your band, including where and when they can see you live
• Make it easy for people to contact your band.

Obviously, something like www.yourbandname.co.uk is very useful, but depending on your band name, this can be impractical or impossible. Anything memorable like www.yourbandsmusic.co.uk, or whatever’s available, is fine. Complicated URLs like www.geocities.com/1034/myband/band/myband/band.html are to be avoided if possible. Once you have a domain name, stick to it, and make sure your website name is on your demo, mailouts, and in your e-mails. A link to an informative website is much better than sending pages of guff off with a CD – the principle being that if a promoter wants this information, then they’ll know where to find it.

You could try some of the following for registering your band name as a URL:

• Easily.co.uk
• Nominet
• 1 and 1.co.uk
• UK2Net
• Freeparking
• UKReg

Don’t waste time with fancy Flash intros or anything that eats up bandwidth or takes ages to load. All-Flash sites also prevent people from creating deep links into your gigs or news pages, or to individual song MP3s. Splash pages of any kind are fairly pointless. Just a simple menu, where’s it obvious where to find what you’re looking for, is perfect.

Test all our your code on several browsers and several different resolution sizes – although most people will be looking at your site the same way, there’s an increasing diversity of browsers and you can’t guarantee that everyone will be using IE at 800 x 600. This is especially important if you’re using non-HTML scripts. You don’t want people who use Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Linux or Macs to be put off by a site that they can’t access properly.

1.3.1. Your website should include

• A simple main menu, from which it’s obvious where to find what you’re looking for. Don’t make people run an assault course or run through a maze to find your gigs page, unless you’re wilfully trying to annoy them. People looking at websites mostly have short attention spans.
• A news page, regularly updated whenever you have actual news to report. Don’t fill it with setlists or what you had for dinner last night.
• A gigs page, listing clearly what gigs you have coming up, where, when, with whom and so forth. A list of previous gigs can be useful for people to see what you’ve been up to in the past.
• An obvious contact section, contact form or e-mail link for people to contact you. Try to avoid putting a direct mailto link to your band address on the site, or you’ll start receiving bucketloads of spam. Use a contact form, or disguise your address (e.g. stuart at oxfordbands dot com) to avoid this problem.
• Some samples of your music, preferably as downloadable MP3 – not everyone will have streaming software. In addition, make sure you tag all MP3s, and make sure the filename has both song title and band name in it. People don’t want to download a song by you, find you’ve called it Song_4211.mp3 and then forget where they got the MP3 in the first place. Fill in the ID3 tags, at the very least, with band name, song title, and your website address.
• It can also be useful to have a couple of good quality pictures of your band as JPEGs – either a well-taken promo shot or decent live shot are good things to have.
• While a complicated PHP forum with only three posts in it can be pointless and look a bit embarrassing, a simple guestbook for comments can be a good thing, and there are plenty of places you can get these for free.

1.3.2. Your website shouldn’t include

• ‘Under construction’ pages. If a page on your site isn’t finished yet, don’t upload it until it is.
• Badly taken photos of your and your friends arsing about. Or any in-jokes.
• Lyrics pages. You are not, and never will be, U2.
• Animated GIFs of little postboxes next to your e-mail address, or moving guitars. Or kittens.
• Profiles of individual band members with amusing answers to amusing questions.
• Comedy links. Yes, we’ve all seen b3ta, and yes, we all think Bill Hicks is funny, too.
• A lovely great PHP forum, with no posts in it.
• Expansive sections copied from websites of bands on major labels, offering desktop wallpaper, a merchandise section, video interviews, phone ringtones. Save these for when you’re signed by EMI, and stick to the basics for now.

1.3.3. Technical tips

• Make sure your site isn’t overloaded with images – these will slow down people’s access to your site, particularly if they’re on a dialup connection. If you do have images, don’t make them too big – modestly-sized GIFs or JPEGs will be fine most of the time.
• Don’t use audio effects or have your music streaming when visitors first access a site. If they want to hear it, they’ll download it themselves, and if they’re looking at your site anywhere public, they won’t thank you for it.
• Avoid using ‘click here’ for links: be descriptive.
• Don’t use pop-ups in new windows - this causes problems with visitors using the back button on their browser.
• Don’t use frames - search engines can’t get in and pages can’t be bookmarked.
• Don’t use spaces in filenames, and try to keep them all in lower case.
• Don’t use pages counters - if you need them, keep them hidden.
• Try to use CSS or stylesheets – for a bit of extra work at the beginning, you’ll find the site much easier to maintain in the long run.
• Only use two or three common fonts on the site. Overloading the site with lots of different typefaces looks messy. Don’t use typefaces like Comic Sans, or any ‘comedy’ typefaces. Keep it looking professional.
• Design for 800 x 600 (or 770 pixels wide) - this is currently the most popular size/resolution.
• Be sure to check and validate your HTML throughout.