WordCast

WordCast Conversations 7: WordPress and Blogging for Musicians and Bands

By Dave Moyer, posted Mar 2 2010 at 6:00 am | View Comments

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Many of you might not know that WordCast’s own Kym Huynh is quite a prolific musician, not only by himself but in his band: sSalvia, a dance/electronica project. This week on WordCast Conversations, we turn the tables as Dave Moyer interviews Kym about how WordPress, blogging and social media can be used for musicians and bands.

Episode 7

Kym’s musical projects:

  • Kym’s older solo work can be found at kymhuynh.com
  • sSalvia is a dance/electronica project
  • sSalvia runs on WordPress, and compared to static HTML sites, Kym says there’s no reason to not be on WordPress

Essential elements of a band’s website:

  • About pages are needed!
  • Like our friend Roxanne Darling recommends, contact pages are essential.
  • Gigs calendar: When are you performing?
  • Samples of music
  • RSS feeds are important to market to return visitors

Gig Calendar Plugins:

What to write:

  • Don’t just post the extremely big news! Bring the audience into the process.
  • On the sSalvia website, the blog’s content is designed to bring fans into the music making process.

Social media for musicians:

  • Even if you have a website, you need to tie in all these services.
  • sSalvia’s Twitter is used to update people about little behind the scenes bits.
  • Facebook is a landing page for reaching out to new listeners
  • MySpace has always been a big part of music online. Kym uses it specifically for networking, but less as his “official presence”
  • Connect your blog to Twitter with the Twitter Tools WordPress plugin
  • KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID! Don’t make too much work for yourself.
  • Thanks for the link to the lifestream plugin Nicolas. Added it to my own site.
  • Kym, you might also wanna look into a Plugin called Lifestream. This is a simple way for you to pull in all your social network streams and have them on your own site for all your visitors that don't have all of the social networks you use.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/
  • I try to connect with Hawaii musicians as much as possible and will def forward this on to them. And for Support a WP develop day, I chose Audio Player! Nice co-incidence.
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