Hello folks! Has your hair always been that colour? It fair suits you. This week I’ve been thinking about twitter and facebook and all this social network malarkey, in relation to my music. You see, recently I met someone who followed me on twitter but didn’t realise I was musician, until a mutual friend brought him to one of my gigs. I was a little incredulous, after all, my twitter isn’t short of tweets about gigs and I do use it to promote my music and whatnot. My twitter avatar is even holding a guitar!
I had a similar experience one day in work, when I served someone I used to go to school with. We have each other as friends on facebook, but don’t tend to interact with each other via the site. We chatted briefly about what we’d been up to since school, and she seemed quite surprised to learn that I was a gigging musician, never mind that I had self-released a couple of EPs and was planning a single release.
It got me wondering however, about how many people that follow me on twitter, or who are friends with me on facebook, have actually heard my music. To be honest, I get the feeling that most of my active followers probably do know I’m a musician, but I suspect many of them haven’t got round to listening to my music yet. After all, I’ve often seen a band crop up on twitter and think “oh, I’ll need to listen to them sometime” but I often forget to until someone actually links me to their music. With this in mind, I thought I’d give an updated list of some of the places you can find my music online.
This is an invaluable tool for unsigned/independent musicians nowadays. Allows anyone to listen to your music, buy it if they want, and offers a very fair deal for the bands/artists who use it. It also allows you to embed the player into other sites, which is why you can not only listen to my music on bandcamp, but also on this very blog, AND of course, on everyone’s favourite evil digital empire…
Facebook, sneaky as it is, regularly finds ways to integrate with other useful sites. After all, you post a link to a youtube video and you can watch it right in your facebook feed. Well, you can also listen to music, via the likes of the aforementioned bandcamp, but also using something called Bandpage. Basically, if you go to an artist’s page on facebook, this application will allow you to listen to, share, download and buy music. Both bandcamp and bandpage options are available on my music page, so feel free to check it out.
A digital radio station for unsigned artists? If you’re looking for new music and haven’t heard of either Amazing Tunes or Amazing Radio, I recommend you have a listen. You can listen to songs whenever you like using their inbuilt player, or tune into one of their shows for some great music. My page is here, if that floats your musical boat.
I know that nowadays a lot of people just chuck a song title into youtube when they feel like listening to a particular song/band. Well, it’s no different for me. If you feel like checking out some live videos and/or me talking pish, there’s always my youtube channel.
So, lots of ways to stream my music online. You can also buy one of my CDs from bandcamp, or download a digital copy (which is a bit cheaper, if you’re not too bothered about owning the disc). But what if you’re not quite sure if you want to pay for stuff just yet? Well, for folks who like free stuff, you could check out my…
Well, funnily enough, all of the previous sites (apart from youtube) offer some ways to download some of my music for free. I also occasionally contribute the odd track to compilation CDs and monthly EPs, so you could keep an eye out for those. In the meantime, here are three of my free tracks currently doing the rounds:
Rapture
This is a little song I recorded recently about the end of the world and chatting up girls.
Things That Make Me Angry
This is the free track I offer through being a member of Strummerville DIY.
This is a live track, from Glasgow’s very own Words per Minute.
That about covers it for now I think! If you’ve never heard my music before, I’m genuinely greatful that you’ve taken the time to read through this, and I hope you’ll take the time to listen to at least one song. Might have even managed to surprise one or two of you who simply thought of me as a daft little cartoon man on twitter.
Til next time folks,
love Shambles
x
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