As a digital DJ or electronic music producer, a well-curated internet
presence can seal the deal when booking gigs, getting fans and friends
out to your events, or putting your original tracks into headphones
around the world. Today, we focus on some of the best tools and
practices out there for maximizing your time online in 2012.
WHAT’S YOUR OBJECTIVE?
Most active performing DJs and producers already have a web presence
somewhere online. However, before dedicating loads of time and energy
into whatever network or site (or combination of multiple) you’ve
decided on, take a minute to think what’s really important to you as an
artist. Knowing what you want to accomplish with your internet presence
will help you determine what tools will best fit your needs.
As we see it, these are the most common objectives for DJs and producers:
- Reach out to current fans and followers
- Get discovered by potential new fans
- Get people to listen to your music
- Present a unique identity or associate your identity with a larger, important group
MYSPACE: FORMERLY THE GOLDEN IDOL
Seven to ten years ago, the complete package existed, and everyone in
the industry knew it was the number one resource for bands and artists
to create an online presence. MySpace has been falling out of the
limelight since 2007, but when it stood tall in the world of artist
communication it accomplished (to a significant degree) every single one
of the goals above. Sure, profiles were often buggy and ugly, but users
saw it as a place to find and follow new artists. I couldn’t write a
better obituary for MySpace than DMC DJ Champion A-Trak did in the
Huffington Post last month,
so check his out instead.
MySpace Music still exists, but the NewsCorp-owned site has dropped in reputation and traffic steadily for the last two years.
(Sources: Alexa, eConsultancy). It is worth noting that for a number of DJs and producers who you search online, their MySpace
still show up in the top Google results, but if current trends continue, don’t bother. Instead, you’ve probably made a….
FACEBOOK PAGE
With the slow agonizing death of MySpace came the rise of Facebook as a
social network, including “Like Pages”. I’m pretty confident that
everyone reading knows what Like Pages are – but if not, feel free to
visit the DJ SCHOOL LEBANON page now
Facebook Pages have been a great platform for artists to connect with
their fans, and musicians and DJs have the ability to easily flesh out
their pages with photo, audio and video content. Soundcloud and Mixcloud
(more on them below) both integrate easily into Facebook pages, posting
updates when new tracks/mixes are added. Producers and artists will
appreciate that Spotify and Rdio plays show up on Pages, meaning that
fans who get to your site have a chance to very quickly play your
tracks.
MAKING FACEBOOK PAGES MORE EFFECTIVE
A lot of readers have asked us how they can use Facebook as a better
promotion tool for their DJ career, and we recommend immediately taking
two actions to make your Facebook DJ pages more effective:
First, check out
Bandpage by RootMusic and
FanRX. We’ve written about Bandpage
in the past,
but in a nutshell, it makes the default view for new visitors to your
page a display that shows a picture, your next upcoming show, and your
most recent tracks. This ensures that new visitors will immediately get
access to the most relavant information about you as an artist. FanRX
does the same – but the free version has a bit more customizability in
terms of offering features such as advanced sharing behaviors, and
additional modules for contests, email list signups, and more. They’re
both powerful customizers that are worth exploring.
Our second Facebook Page tip for DJs is to upload and tag photos to
increase the reach of your page. I learned this from a friend who threw
an awesome weekly DJ night at a bar. He would bring a camera to every
night, take loads of pictures of people having an awesome time, and then
would upload the photos to his page and tag the people in the photos.
These photos showed up in the news feeds of friends of the tagged fan,
and linked directly back to his artist page when anyone clicked into the
photo or album.
Facebook also seems to often assign a higher value to posts with
content beyond text (like photos or videos), as they’re more likely to
attract a click and increase pageviews. Use this to your advantage and
post links, photos, and videos that have relevance to yourself as a DJ
or to your fans!
THE CASE AGAINST FACEBOOK PAGES
Despite its awesome potential, we need to point out a recent
development with Facebook Pages that could be devastating for
smaller artists and pages. It’s been known for a while that Facebook
filters a user’s homepage newsfeed based on who they actually engage and
interact with, including the Pages that they interact with. This
potentially means that even though a follower might want to know about a
post you just made, if they rarely or never interact with your page,
it’s unlikely it will show on their newsfeed. Instead, Facebook now has
monetized that reach – charging page owners cash money to engage with
those individuals. It’s not realistic for many smaller DJs to be posting
up $5.00 – $20.00 everytime they want to remind their entire fanbase
about a show. Read some more commentary about this change here, on Always Upward.
Additionally, as a DJ looking to get noticed and easily found, you
should consider a few other factors in your web presence – don’t limit
yourself to just one outlet, but instead connect multiple outlets. This
is especially important when building links and getting great natural
search results on Google – more on that later.
TOOLS TO TRACK YOUR WEB PRESENCE
There are a few tools that are designed specifically so that you can
make a solid assessment of your own digital power, reach, and overall
importance. Klout, which
is attempting to create a standard metric for digital influence, allows
users to connect all of their social networks to the system and
provides a regular grade based on the reach of your activity. While I’m
not convinced that promoters are going to be booking DJs based on their
Klout scores (yet!), it’s a great way to directly see how your actions
correspond to gains and losses in influence and visibility. Best of all,
it’s free.
If you’re taking off and are building a larger fanbase, we recommend considering signing up for
Next Big Sound,
which for a significant ($79) monthly fee provides extremely detailed
analytics on Facebook likes, Wikipedia pageviews, Twitter fans,
Youtube/MySpace/Last.fm plays, and more. It’s a hefty fee, so we’d
mostly recommend it for DJs and producers who are actively touring and
devoting a full-time schedule towards their craft.
DJ-SPECIFIC SOCIAL NETWORKS AND LISTS
In addition to normal social networks, a lot of DJs find it important
to maintain their identity across places online where other DJs
maintain a profile – especially those who plan to or dream of becoming a
major artist. Doing so will also secure your identity and stop others
from taking your super clever DJ name, and it will make sure your Google
natural results are chock-full of hits that all are actually connected
to you. Here are the three sites we recommend ensuring that you start
with when spreading your name around the web.
- Beatport DJs: Beatport
has billed this as the ultimate DJ profile site on the internet, and
although it’s in beta, you can see why. Its clean design, simple feature
set, active current feature development cycle, and powerful simple URL
(ex: http://dj.beatport.com/bassnectar) means that it’s a no-brainer and will have longterm value.
- Resident Advisor: In
addition to being one of the most informative electronic music
communities on the web, RA is a great homebase for a number of DJs.
They’ve got a great event listing feature that’s especially active in
Europe, and maintaining a profile on here is highly recommended for DJs
who play a lot of club/underground gigs.
- DJ List:
This is an older, clunkier site in terms of functionality and design,
but Google still assigns a fairly high value to profiles coming off of
this site. Take two minutes and claim your name here, but don’t be too
concerned about making it look nice.
Editor’s note: In the comments, Rolfski notes that he finds that
the Facebook / Soundcloud / Twitter combination is the most important
trifecta of internet presences for DJs. We agree that Twitter is
powerful, but it’s an inherently temporary, fast-moving method of
communicating to your fans – so make sure that you have a fanbase who is
ready to listen and that you balance frequent posts with interesting
insights. Duplicating the same content across all of your communication
networks is not the best practice, as it doesn’t reward people for being
more engaged with you.
SOCIAL NETWORKS VERSUS INDEPENDENT WEBSITES
So far, we’ve been focusing purely on social networks – but what
about building your own webpage from a template or from scratch as your
primary web presence? This has been often perceived as the best way to
achieve one of the core goals of presenting a unique identity that will
attract promoters and listeners. That being said, a lot of promoters and
listeners
expect to interact with artists and DJs through a
familiar framework of a social network that allows them to quickly glean
information about you (I’d even argue that this
structural predictability was what made Facebook shine in comparison to
MySpace).
Another very important concept to understand in this debate is that
Facebook and other social networks are built around the concept of
sharing – for instance, that incredible photo of you DJing is very
easily commented on and shared in a potentially viral process on
Facebook. This wouldn’t ever happen on a photo gallery on a small DJ
website.
That being said, you have much more freedom on your own site, so
don’t let us stop you from building it. We’d recommend keeping any site
that you design simple and understandable – your identity shouldn’t ever
get in the way of communicating the most important information to the
people trying to find it.
A site that we’ve reviewed previously that quickly allows you to make
a professional artist website is Onesheet. The service is out of beta
now, and actually incorporated some great feedback from DJ TechTools
readers! Great job, all.
Also worth mentioning are two (very similar) services that have cropped up around the same time,
About.me and
Flavors.me - they’re all essentially the same, but personally I think
Onesheet has the best interface and results in terms of simple design and customization.
What About Just A Blog or Self-Designed Webpage?
The biggest thing to consider here is that you’ll then need to take
significant time to make sure the design of your site is clean,
professional, and functional – and that means time and/or money.
Remember that spending time developing or designing a site might
ultimately not be the best use of your resources, depending on where you
are in your DJ career.
CHOOSING A GREAT URL
If you can get your DJ name and then “.com”, do it now. Many of the
services we’ve mentioned can take your URL and forward it to the page
you’ve created. Additionally, we’ve all seen web startups in the last
five years come up with creative names that use a custom url ending,
which can be a great way to make a shorter url that looks clean.
Finally, just as a public service announcement, Djibouti does allow non-citizens to register .dj domain names –
go ahead and register “yourname.dj” today for 40 Euro/~$50 per year!
What awesome tools do you use to build, maintain, and track your
DJ web presence? We want to know how you accomplish your online DJ
goals, so let us know below. 
