About
ArtistData is a social networking and event administration tool. At it’s core ArtistData essentially helps you:
-Post your shows to your social networks, a variety of concert databases, and alert local press
-Write Blogs and News updates and post them to your sites
-Update your status on most social networks
What they say about themselves:
“ArtistData tirelessly works to give musicians more time to be creative. We’re building solutions to automate the monotonous updating of artist websites, social network profiles, concert databases, Twitter, official news feeds, iCal, local press, fan newsletters, and even tour books. When an artist updates our site, we update all their sites. Our current users save hundreds of hours, giving them more time to do what they love: create music.”
My 2 cents
We recently started testing out the ArtistData system and have been pretty happy with it so far. I have to say that I think it is much more valuable for managers, labels, and marketing companies then for the individual artist. I found that the setup process is a bit involved and when you add in the additional tools (a ton of widgets and exporting functions- many useful, some not as much) you tend to glaze over for a bit. As an event posting tool this thing ROCKS! I love it. We regularly handle posting our clients events to social networks and being able to do it once is a big stress reliever. They have a simple event widget which can be used on your website which again makes for one less thing to update.
The biggest problem with ArtistData at the moment is that you can not status update to Facebook. For some reason you can post to a personal profile, but not fan pages. This makes the status update tool pretty much useless in my opinion. Another issue is that Myspace (don’t even get me started with this doe doe bird) has changed how apps can access there events which makes ArtistData unable to post your events on that social network. As I mentioned before it does have a bit of a learning curve and setup takes some time, but if you have a manager, label, or marketing company helping you with the setup or even have them doing all of your admin, this isn’t a big deal.
Price
Sonic Bids recently acquired ArtistData and they are offering it free until September 1st. After that apparently the pricing will be integrated into a Sonic Bids package. I will take another look at this product once that all happens and let you know my thoughts.
Find It Here
About
Fan Bridge is an Email Marketing system designed for musicians. They provide tools for your fan relationships through email, mobile, and social networking lists. Still confused? Your fans enter there email info, Fan Bridge stores the email addresses and sends helps you send out updates and newsletters to those email addresses.
What They Say About Themselves
“FanBridge makes it really easy for musicians to build their fan list, manage their fans, and then communicate with their fans across multiple channels.”
Tools for Managing Fans:
- Free import help to get your list from any format into your FanBridge account
- Sort and target campaigns by custom groups or postal code and radius
- Automatic handling of bounces, subscribes, unsubscribes, and other email technicalities
- Store nearly 20 fields of data per fan (ie: name, location, MySpace/Twitter, and notes field)
- Hosted, secure platform accessible from any internet enabled computer
- Weekly account summary reports
Tools for Getting New Fans:
- Flash or html based fan signup forms (for your MySpace/Facebook/website)
- Downloadable fan signup form for use at the merch table at shows
- Free custom subdomain (http://yourname.FanBridge.com) with signup form
Tools for Effectively Communicating with Fans:
- Send plain text and html emails, or text messages to mobile phones
- Analytics tracking for your campaigns (track clicks, opens, bounces, forwards)
- Professional looking templates for great looking campaigns (or provide your own html)
- Relationships with ISPs to make sure your messages get to inboxes, not spam folders
- Custom branded web browser toolbars (keeping your site/buy/tour links in front of fans 24/7)
- Automatic Subject Optimizer to A/B test subject lines and make your campaigns more effective
- Scheduled sending (perfect for setting up emails before going on tour)“
My 2 cents
I was really impressed on the simplicity of getting up and running with Fan Bridge. Everything is simple and straight forward, each regular task is laid out in separate tabs on the screen and it is super easy to build sign-up forms and install them into your website or social network. They give you the ability to trade emails for media (as in ‘give us your email address and we will send you a free song’) which is really the future of music marketing. Building an email campaign is pretty straight forward as they have easy to use, bug-free templates that I would feel confident having one of our clients do on their own. They also give you the option to build your own HTML emails so your graphic designer can make you a slick template to wow your fans with. They also have a tool that lets you update your Myspace, Facebook Fan Page, and Twitter all at once which seems to work better then ArtistData. So far so good on trying it out with our clients, we are even considering moving our email marketing system over to this!
My only real gripes with this system is that if you want detailed analytics you have to upgrade to a paid account. I am not a big fan of the sign up form layouts. I totally get that they need to be easy to build for the majority of users, but when we are building marketing systems for our clients, we think the forms are pretty boring.
Price
Free for the bare-bones version, pro plans start at $9 month
Find It Here
About
Simply put, Root Music makes your Facebook Fan Page sparkly. It takes an otherwise white and blue, hard to customize social network into a totally engaging, fun to look at barrel of monkeys. You can connect your Sound Cloud account to stream audio and link your ArtistData account to post your gigs right on the page.
What They Say About Themselves
“So here’s the deal. There are many musicians and bands out there that need a little help. Everything from finding a place to sleep while on tour, selling their own tickets, remembering when they should be touring and keeping in touch with their fans. It’s hard to get all this stuff done and keep it organized, and that’s why managers and labels will take a big cut: because they do a lot of hard work to keep the wheels running for the band.
We are now in an age where technology will take a task that would normally take two days and make it two clicks. And that’s what at the heart of what RootMusic is. RootMusic is a professional technologically advanced bag of tools that gives -you- the control to reach your goals.
Whether you are a local band in Harrisonburg, Virginia or a big time manager, RootMusic can help give guidance and support to your end goal. So now it’s not a matter of if you can, but a matter of if you want to. You’ve got the power now, so what would you like to do? That is our mission and we believe strongly in our statement.“
My 2 cents
Can you tell from the intro that I like this thing? What’s not to like? This Facebook app is really easy to setup and if you pay for the pro version, it allows you to make a lot of cool customizations including the ability to upload your own background. The application was written really solid, so it seems to be pretty bulletproof (no Myspace like template disasters). Root Music lets you customize pretty much every detail of the page down to the color of the text. Facebook seems to be holding pretty solid as the social network of choice and having a tool like this is going to be really important to gain more fans. I highly suggest getting the pro version and updating your background often to keep your fans excited to come look at your page and see what’s new.
The only thing I would change is the ability to embed a FanBridge (or other) email sign up form on the application. At the moment, they have to go to a separate tab to signup and I don’t think that is going to be too effective.
Price
Free or $1.99 a month for the pro version
Find It Here
Next Time…
In my next post on this topic I will take a look at tools to gain more fans on your social network called Headliner, tell you more about a cool way to accept credit cards for your merch at shows or on the go, and examine the pro’s and con’s of some direct-to-fan sales tools.
