Huge thanks to Deborah Henson-Conant for her feedback

We received some incredible feedback recently from Deborah Henson-Conant and it led to a redesign of the fan info page and the artist info page, as well as the addition of an FAQ page.

A huge thanks to Deborah who happens to be the best electric harp player we’ve ever seen. Her music is really worth a listen: hipharp.com

Keep the feedback coming!

New features update

We’ve been working hard to improve merge.fm based on your feedback. Here’s what’s new.

1. We’ve received a lot of requests for a delete song feature, so we built it sooner than we were planning. If you’re an artist, just mouse over one of your songs and hit the red x in the upper right to delete it.
   

2. Letting musicians download their tracks was another one that was requested a lot. So we built this one as well and if you’re an artist, the button for downloading is right next to the red x for removing when you mouse over one of your tracks.

3. Each song now tells you the last time it was updated, and songs are now ordered with the latest update at the top (with the exception of the “free preview” song). The point is to let everyone get an idea of what is happening at a glance.
   

4. We updated the fan and artist info pages based on your feedback: http://merge.fm/pages/for_fans & http://merge.fm/pages/for_artists

5. We added error pages that give you an idea of what went wrong: http://merge.fm/artists/wrong

We’re very close to finishing the first feature to help artists market their merge.fm page on their other band websites. We’ll let you know when it’s ready!

As always, drop us a line anytime if you have any questions or feedback. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Shortening gig setup times on the cheap

By Dan Willis

“Squeak,” “pshhh,” “ewa-ewa,” ah, the sound of brand new tupperware in the morning. One of the most un-commonly thought of products when thinking about music, but none-the-less it is one of the most important objects for gigging on the cheap.

When my band first began playing around Pennsylvania with all of our own sound equipment, it… was… chaos. Although the show only lasted from 11pm-2am, we wouldn’t get home until 5am sometimes. And by then, we were way too exhausted to unload our cars until the next afternoon. I was fed up! So I took matters into my own hands.

Now I knew I couldn’t cut down on the quantity of equipment, so I decided to start shaving off the minutes it took to setup and tear down the system. My first stop was my local Wal-mart. I’d seen one of my friends, who ran live sound and DJ’d around town, had all of his equipment organized into these large plastic bins. So I bought the biggest plastic bin with wheels (wheels are extremely important) I could find and brought it home. I quickly realized throwing everything into one bin wasn’t exactly organization and didn’t help the timing problem. So I went back to the store and found ten or so smaller plastic bins in assorted sizes that fit together to fill the entire rolling bin. So I organized everything into the bins and the next show we had, we cut the setup and tear-down time in half!

But I wasn’t finished yet, I knew I could cut it down more. So after some very short pondering time, I picked up a set of velcro cable ties from the music store, masking tape and a sharpie from an office store and went on organizing within the boxes. By the time it was all said and done, we had cut our setup/tear-down time from 2 hours to 45 min!!!!

Take it to the next level if you want and blow the bank on those overpriced gig rack cases. They are about the last things I would buy, except maybe if you go on an international tour.

#3 - Music Marketing Tip Three

By Dan Willis

Close your eyes, count down from ten and let me take you back… Back to the time before apple’s meteoric rise back to prominence, before the iPhone, before the iPod, before MP3 was a common turn of phrase. Back to Walkman’s, stereo systems, CDs, tape decks and desktops with a whopping 1GB of disk space.

Now you’re hanging out with your friends in your room. You have a three-piece stereo system on top of your dresser, with dual tape decks and a 3-disc CD player. You saved up for weeks to buy it with your crappy $5/hr minimum wage job. The rest of your money of course went to CDs, but how did you know what bands were good. It’s not like you went out and bought just any band’s CD. After all, they weren’t the cheapest medium of music to ever hit the market and you didn’t have much change to spare.

Now although you listened to a lot of radio back then and that was a major influence on musical tastes, the most important referral was from friends. You’d all gather in each other’s rooms, break out  a binder full of CDs and relax to the gritty voice of Chris Cornell from Sound Garden. There’s nothing that brings friends closer together than getting introduced to something you end up both really digging. And nothing will bring you and your fans closer than the same! So whether you’re on stage talking about the other acts that night or writing a blog about your influences, plug some of your favorite music. Your fans will love you for it and feel a closer to connection to you… and this means they’re more likely to hop on your boat!

Music Marketing Tip #1

Music Marketing Tip #2

New merge.fm features

Well, it’s been 2 weeks since launch and we have some new features to let you know about.

1. Each artist now has a free preview song that is open to the public to give people a chance to try it out. Look for this indicator on the preview songs:
   

2. Artists can now see how many subscribers they have when logged in on their artist page.

3. We’ve revamped the landing page and video, as well as added a new “for fans” and “for artists” section to help explain what merge.fm is all about. You can also check out the video on youtube and use it to spread the word:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPu7VQveMYo

So far, Elsinore and Withershins have racked up a few subscribers and we’ll be sending them checks next month. Congrats guys! We’re just now starting to bring on bands and work closely with a select few to figure out what works best to make this thing awesome for your fans. If you’re interested in signing up your band, check out the instructions at the bottom of the artist’s page:
http://merge.fm/pages/for_artists

As always, drop us a line anytime if you have any questions or feedback. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Talking to a live crowd is tough

by Adam Steele

During the first show we ever played in the first band I was ever in, we said almost nothing to the crowd between songs and it was awkward silence out the rear. Second, third and fourth show…pretty much the same thing if not worse. After we’d had enough of embarrassing ourselves, we started trying your classic things like “how’s everybody doing?”

Crowd’s response: “mehhhh.”

Then we think, maybe we can say something funny, cause everyone likes to laugh right? So we tried “Insert crappy joke or funny noise here.”

Crowd’s response: “uhhhh, booo!”

So about fifteen shows in, we started getting more ballsy. After realizing that some of the great bands that we had seen would tell stories between songs, we decided to give storytelling a shot.

Crowd’s response: “…” (at the bar getting another beer).

Finally after going to one of the best shows we’ve ever seen, we picked up on something that we had somehow never realized. Whenever they addressed the crowd between songs, they were playing. During an extended intro to a song, the singer yelled out, “make some noise!” and the crowd roared. While he told a story and the guitarists tuned up, the drummer was playing a beat, and the crowd was all ears, laughing at things that really weren’t that funny. And sure enough, when we tried the same thing at our shows, the crowd response was ten times better…people actually listened and reacted!

When you think about it for a minute, it makes perfect sense. It’s the same reason why horror movies are much more intense with suspenseful music or the big speech in a drama movie has a much bigger impact with an orchestra behind it. Music affects people’s emotions and it can help a lot when talking to a live crowd.

Gladys…NOOOOO!

By Dan Willis

The crowd is swaying to your music in perfect sync with the movement of your beet red plectrum across the strings; the lights are flashing across your eyelids enhancing your buzz; the humidity inside the room has grown tropical; you’re in the groove and nothing can stop you from performing at your peak…when out of nowhere you’re strumming air. The weight from your neck and shoulders is gone with the screeching clang of your guitar named Gladys dropping to the stage, setting off feedback out of the loudspeakers more ear piercing than when you told your last girlfriend to shove off. Frantically you stumble as you come to the realization that your guitar strap just came off and you’ve ruined the perfect moment that all those people were feeling with you.

So maybe that’s an over dramatization, but it’s not far off from absolute fact. Guitar straps never seem to fail in practice, but during a kick ass show, you’re left holding the… well, nothing. After my first band started playing live, literally within the first two shows, while jumping up and down to Green Day’s, When I Come Around, my guitar fell to my knees as I tried to keep playing with only my left hand on the neck supporting its entire weight. Then, you guessed it, I discovered why strap locks exist and hit up the local music store the next morning.

merge.fm is live

Today, we turned the key and took merge.fm live! We wanted to get this out as soon as possible, so it may be a little rough around the edges. But we are making improvements, adding new features, and bringing on new bands and artists almost daily.

We would also like to give a huge thank you to all the bands, musicians, and music fans who tested out the site, as well as all the other people who advised us and helped us get to this point. This is only the beginning!

And as always, we love feedback so drop us a line anytime no matter who you are.

Figuring out the subs

by Dan Willis

Back in college at Penn State, we had a band called Wits End. If you’ve ever been to central PA before, you know that it’s pretty rural and not the best indie music scene around. With strict as hell liquor laws and having to be 21 in order to get a gig at the bars (as the baby of the band I was only 18) we had to suck it up and do 3 hour sets of covers at the frats, and then work in our originals here and there, which usually was the time everyone went to get another beer…don’t get me started. Anyway, we wanted to be self-sufficient rather than give away half our take to some guy from the local music store with all the live sound gear. So we threw all our money back into the band and got speakers, mics, a mixer, and all the right stuff to blow out your ear drums. The only problem was that the learning curve sucked and we ran into a ridiculous amount of problems, but none was more annoying than trying to get the subwoofers to work right. They would always clip and even though they were biggest and heaviest speakers we had, we could never turn them up very much. I mean, we wanted full body vibrators at just the right time. You know what it’s like looking at gigantic speaker cabs and not being able to rev those babies up? Well, we never figured it out and then the band broke up after we all graduated and moved away.

The Fix

What a crappy story that would have been if that was the end. Well, flash forward to a couple years later and I’m letting one of my friends borrow our old main speakers for a DJ-ing gig. Once the mains were setup and active, we realized that not all of the low end was coming out of the subwoofers when we hooked them up…same old problem. Now I’m not a technical guy, but my friend the DJ has been building speaker cabinets for close to a decade, so he explained to me that the speakers were out of phase. This essentially means the positive and negatives are switched compared to the other speakers, so that when the main speaker cone pushes out, the subwoofers were pulling in and vice versa. And then the weird thing was, almost that same day the old guitarist from the band emails me and says that he randomly found an article talking about the Peavy Kosmos (the piece of gear we used to split the mix to mains and subs). He said how if the “Quake” knob is turned up, most subs will clip because this knob is actually an EQ knob for a very low frequency that most speakers can’t handle.

So in the end, after putting the subs back in phase by switching the positive and negative wires on the cable insert and turning down the quake knob all the way to fix the other problem, those suckers just about kicked me in the nuts.

#2 - Music Marketing Tip TWO

by Dan Willis

Set up a merchandise table at your shows!

Come on, this is just a straight up no-brainer, and if you don’t have any merch to sell, then make some. There are tons of ways to not only make the stuff, but even different ways to sell it… In fact, you can now scan credit cards into your handy iPhone or iPad with Squareup (https://squareup.com/).

All right, I think I’m done yelling at my computer screen, so now down to business.

I was hanging out with some friends the other day and noticed two things, the music on my buddy’s speakers was freaking awesome and the stack of bumper stickers strewn on his floor made for some tricky walking. The cool thing is, the music and bumper stickers were both from a show he’d seen the night before; the stickers he got for free after buying the bands EP. So even though I’d never seen the band, I still ended up on their MySpace page and with a sticker on my guitar case within the next 24 hours. I ended up going to a few of their shows and buying an album over the next couple months, definitely adding to their revenue stream. 

The point of merchandise is to spread the word of your band subliminally with the “soft sell.” The soft sell meaning getting your name out there and selling your wares without shoving it down someone’s throat. So go make some t-shirts, coffee mugs, pint glasses, etc… and start selling the crap out of them.

Now that you have all this… “crap” …with your name on it, don’t bring it all to every show. In fact only bring t-shirts, CDs, and maybe one other smaller item (I suggest bumper stickers). The rest you can sell on your website (please tell me you have a website). Also, a lot of companies that print your logo on stuff can print as it gets ordered and you don’t even have to deal with any of the shipping. Hurray!

P.S. - Don’t be stingy for your merch rep. You need someone who can and will sell whether the people want it or not. Either find a charismatic person who’s psyched about your band or at least get a good looking extroverted person (sex does sell). Lastly, you can usually find someone who’s so psyched about your music that they’ll do it for free when you’re just getting started out, but when you start getting a crowd you’ll probably have to start cutting them a percentage of the sales.