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Today I review Bandsintown, an incredibly useful free website for musicians to publish their upcoming live events and why you should be using it even during the pandemic. I also talk about why Musician’s Friend is my favorite place to get music gear.

You’ll Learn

• Why Bandsintown is useful… even if you’re not playing out
• Why I love Musician’s Friend

Resources

• My Bandsintown event page – don’t forget to click “track” please, help me get to 100! Here’s what the widget looks like on Facebook and on my website.
• Bandsintown tutorial videos – short and a great place to start.
• Bandsintown app – on Google Play
• The Basics of Bandsintown for Artists – CD Baby blog
• Musician’s Friend – don’t forget to sign up for their free rewards program to get your 8% cash back! Note: Affiliate link. Support the podcast at no cost to you!

Transcript

What’s up Heroes, welcome to episode 40 of the Producer Life Podcast.  In this episode I want to talk about a really useful free website for musicians interested in gigging, Bandsintown.  I’ll also talk about a unique phone call I received this week… but first I wanna say thank you.

Since this is episode 40 I thought I’d look at the podcast’s metrics.  Since we started January 2020, the Producer Life Podcast has been downloaded over 1,400 times from 43 different countries, including the US, Spain, France, Canada, Peru, UK, New Zealand, Switzerland, Germany,and more.  Thank you, each and every one of you, who has taken your time to listen to the podcast.

And now, cue the intro music.

Bandsintown was founded in 2007 in New York.  It’s currently a website and app that helps music fans track and discover musicians while also providing a set of tools that allow musicians to publish upcoming events as well as engage with their fans. Additionally, fans can RSVP or even purchase tickets for upcoming shows. 

Bandsintown has a huge reach.  They have over 38 million registered users in 210 countries, and over 530,000 registered artists.   They built this massive user base around live music events, but even though few people are playing live now, it’s still a great time to start using Bandsintown…. Because they’ve adapted their platform for livestreaming, which is what brought me to them. 

I started using Bandsintown earlier this year as I was looking for a good solution for advertising my weekly livestream, the Heroic Hump Day House Party. I’m all about streamlined workflows, and I didn’t want to have to update my Facebook page and website separately.  Enter Bandsintown, who offer an easy-to-update widget that you can then embed in multiple locations.

So, when I realized I could update Bandsintown once and then embed their events widget into both my Facebook business page and my website, one update now provides visibility in three different locations.    Bandsintown has an event widget for WordPress, Facebook, Squarespace, Wix, and Twitch.  The widget allows you to customize it’s look, and they’ve even got a full API if you really want to dig into the coding.  Another benefit of their widget is that it is very SEO friendly (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization), which means it is designed to help Google find your tour dates more easily for your fans.

Here’s how I’m using it: I embedded the widget on my Facebook business page and my website. Since my livestreams are every Wednesday at 9pm eastern, I use their “bulk upload” option which allows me to fill out an excel spreadsheet once and just change the dates each month. I then upload this, tweak a few settings, and have a month of events published across three different locations plus Google.   You can, of course,  also publish events one-at-a-time if you prefer.

Each week on Wednesday when I’m promoting my  livestream on social media, I also reach out out directly to my trackers. Bandsintown allows you to post up to a 1,000 character message along with a photo, targeted by either event or location, which then goes directly to your tracker’s app and email.   Annoyingly, they will only let you reach a portion of your trackers (about half) at any given time, which rubs me the wrong way because it reminds me of Facebook’s limited reach unless you’re willing to pay to boost posts.  It’s just another reminder that your #1 priority is to build your personal email list which you will always control…but still, Bandsintown has a huge reach and it has its place in your advertising toolkit if you think of it as a supplement to your email list. 

It seems to be working for me.   My “trackers” on Bandsintown have grown to 43 over the last several months.   100 is a particularly important number: that unlocks their metrics which give you valuable insights into where your trackers are located…I’ll link my profile in the show notes so you can see what this all looks like…. And maybe give me a boost towards that 100 goal 🙂  My hope is that by the time the pandemic is over, I’ll have hundreds of trackers on Bandsintown, some of whom will then show up for live performance. 

Being such a well established platform also means they’ve got some unique partnerships. For example, they’re an approved vendor with YouTube so you can post links from YouTube cards at the end of your videos directly to your Bandsintown events page where fans can track your events or purchase tickets. 

So, how do you get started?  Claim your artist name on the website, fill out your profile, and add events. I’ll have links in the shownotes, 

I’d like to talk about a unique phone call I received this week.

Musician’s Friend is one of my favorite places to get musical gear, and their customer service is a big part of it. I had a call last year from them just to tell me my Rewards Points were expiring and asking if I needed any gear. They could have just as easily allowed those points to expire and pocketed the extra money as profit… But they didn’t. 

The rewards points are the second big reason I love them. Their prices are generally very competitive to begin with, but you get 8% back in points to spend on your next purchase with their free loyalty club often making it much cheaper.  You can get an especially good deal if you search their site for some of their “open box” gear which still has a full warranty, qualifies for the 8% back, and like-new.    I am an affiliate with Musician’s Friend; I’ll have my link in the shownotes so if you need some new gear, using that link would be an awesome way to support the podcast while not costing you anything. 

That’s all I’ve got for this week, I’d love to hear from you over on the shownotes page at ProducerLifePodcast.com episode 40, or on our private Facebook group at https://www.Facebook.com/groups/ProducerLifePodcast. Let me know if you’re using Bandsintown and what your experience has been.

Until next week, this is the House Ninja reminding you to be someone’s Hero today.