 Alt-folkies Andrew and Noah VanNorstrand use ReverbNation for their mailing list.
The independent musician’s online to-do list, 2010: add friends and songs on MySpace, recruit Facebook fans, post gigs on numerous calendars, send out event invitations, update the home page, upload YouTube clips, blast the e-mail list, fine-tune profiles on Sonicbids and CD Baby and Last.fm et al., blog and tweet, and do status reports on every detail of your life—all these things can be worthwhile for promoting your music. And yet, with so many music sites and services online, and more popping up all the time, there’s a risk that you’ll spend so much time typing and clicking about your music that you never get around to actually playing it.
Sync Your Sites
Fortunately there are emerging ways to streamline all your online activity. One increasingly popular resource for indie musicians is ReverbNation, which allows you to sync your profiles and status on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, so you only have to update one site. Beyond these syncing capabilities, ReverbNation offers many other handy marketing tools. Even if you’ve never been to reverbnation.com, you may have encountered its widgets elsewhere on the Web: those little boxes “powered by ReverbNation” that allow fans to join the e-mail list, listen to and share songs, watch videos, check the tour schedule, and more. According to ReverbNation cofounder Jed Carlson, more than 400,000 artists actively use the site, and its MyBand application, which adds a complete musician profile to a Facebook page, is used on more than one million pages.
For the artist, the idea is that you keep your ReverbNation profile up to date with songs, gigs, and news; you copy and paste code to place the widgets wherever you want online, and encourage friends and fans to do the same; and ReverbNation then automatically spreads current info around the Web. In Carlson’s words, “It’s a ‘set it and forget it’ kind of model.”
The headache of inputting tour dates on multiple sites is what got Andrew VanNorstrand started using ReverbNation. Andrew and his brother, Noah, are acoustic instrumental aces from central New York who’ve been playing contradances with the Great Bear Trio (alongside their mom, Kim, on piano) since they were young teenagers, and they now also lead their own alt-folk group the Andrew and Noah VanNorstrand Band (andrewandnoah.com). “I first noticed the Punch Brothers using it,” Andrew says of ReverbNation. “The gig listing is really handy. I just wasn’t getting around to updating the calendars everywhere.” The brothers’ expanding tour schedule brought them to 23 states in 2009, and one of ReverbNation’s show-schedule widgets not only lists gig details but shows their itinerary in moving lines on a map.
Manage E-Mail Lists
ReverbNation has also helped the VanNorstrands with their e-mail list, which Andrew used to manage manually from his personal address book. “Playing music is the hobby,” he says. “Writing e-mails is what I get paid to do.” ReverbNation’s free FanReach system allows you to automatically build a contact list and a street team via “fan collector” widgets, and then e-mail fans using predesigned templates that include tour dates, retailer links, etc. The VanNorstrands now use the paid FanReach, which offers additional features and flexibility (such as customizable templates), because they’ve surpassed the 500-contact limit on free accounts. This is the “freemium” model that ReverbNation follows: the basic tools (which are more than adequate for many grassroots musicians) are free, and then you can pay for more advanced features—the paid FanReach, for instance, currently starts at $9.99 a month for up to 999 contacts.
Electronic Press Kits
Tori Sparks, a dynamic young folk-rock songwriter based in Nashville, is something of a power user of online promotional tools—from MySpace and Facebook to iLike and Twitter and her own site at torisparks.com. Like the VanNorstrands, Sparks uses ReverbNation’s paid FanReach to manage her e-mail list, and she also likes the ReverbNation press kits (RPKs, currently $5.95 a month), which are similar to Sonicbids EPKs. Sparks says, “Sonicbids [EPKs] and a few other online press kits are useful for communicating with people within the industry but aren’t geared towards laypeople and fans. ReverbNation is great because it has the press kit component as well as the fan and fellow musician component.”
ReverbNation’s press kits, she says, “offer more statistics than other similar services out there. It saves me about $20 if I can just send out a link instead of a physical press kit. Also, I’m able to upload more content than is possible on a site like Sonicbids or MySpace.” She also uses ReverbNation’s TunePaks, which allow her to deliver specific songs to people without actually e-mailing the MP3s. “Anything that saves me time,” she says, “is worth its figurative weight in gold.”
Decent Exposure
 Songwriter Tori Sparks has landed gigs through ReverbNation�s electronic press kits.
The essential question about all this online activity, of course, is not just whether it saves time but whether it actually accomplishes anything. ReverbNation can certainly help with the problem of having too many sites and too little time, but there are limitations to using automated widgets. ReverbNation’s widgets are generally designed for tight spaces with tiny type, and though you have more sizing/format options by paying for “pro” widgets, you still can’t customize the formats so that they work well and are easy to read on an uncluttered Web page, for instance. And in the schedule widgets, there’s no way to link directly to a specific URL (like a venue) for a show except by creating a “Buy Tickets” link. Yet these are quibbles considering how useful even the free tools are—and ReverbNation seems to be continually working on improving and adding to them. The site recently rolled out a Reverb Store that allows you to create and sell products (CDs, downloads, ringtones, T-shirts, posters) that are made on demand and delivered directly to fans, as with sites like Zazzle. Since these products are only made if someone orders them, you don’t have any up-front manufacturing costs—ReverbNation just takes a cut of any income from actual orders.
For Sparks, using the site has done more than help with the drudge work: following up on a tip from ReverbNation’s Lou Plaia, she submitted her music for a promotional program with Microsoft. Her song “Tall Towers” wound up being featured on the Windows Media Player/Zune home page alongside tracks by a few other indie artists. “That was a chance at significant exposure, and it did cause a spike in sales and Web traffic,” Sparks says. “It’s fantastic that Microsoft and ReverbNation teamed up to shine the spotlight on independent artists. I think ReverbNation could become popular without going the extra mile to try and help out indie musicians, but they do it anyway. That’s what sets them apart, in terms of the way they approach their business. They and a few other forward-thinking companies make it possible for people like me to essentially be our own labels.”
Contributing editor Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers (jeffreypepperrodgers.com), a grand prize winner in The John Lennon Songwriting Contest, was the founding editor of Acoustic Guitar.
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