Marketing music on the web - Matt Keating

The following is a summary of an article from the Guardian on Monday January 30th 2006

The article starts with saying that such bands like the Artic Monkeys owe their increasing popularity to the internet. It helps build up their fanbases with websites like Myspace where the band can post songs for fans to listen to.
Jonny Bradhsaw at Domino Record (Artic Monkeys label) says that the band burned their demo on CD-Rs and gave those out at gigs and then the fans shared them around and that there was hardly any promotion.

It then goes on to introduce the idea of downloading music. It uses that statistic that more than 50% of the downloading music market is in the UK, where over a million tracks are downloaded "legally" each week.

Whilst websites have not proved useful for the Artic Monkeys, other bands such as "Franz Ferdinand" and "Kaiser Chiefs" have been said to have very popular websites which are both central to marketing in the music industry.
Website promotion has been used this time because they help to build a fan base and relationship, even though traditional advertising is not too expensive or ineffective. Another advantage is that it allows unsigned bands to build up good reputation and recognition increasing their chances of being signed up to a record label.
Bands consider their online presence as very important and make it their responsibility to increase this online popularity by introducing such features like live webchats and online webcam diaries. It is said to be more about time than investment. Less known bands consider it more important to have a good online active role. They build up their websites and in record contracts they state that they want to play a bigger part in controlling how their website is run.

A bands official website is said to be the best form of communication with their audience and discusses such topics as record releases and tours which encourage fans to attend, and buy their records which can only increase a bands popularity.

This article clearly shows how instrumental the internet is becoming in music, and proving that more and more bands are starting to use the internet to communicate with their fans.
It is not just the bands that are creating these sites. Many fans start their own personal websites which others are free to become members of and discuss the band.