3 Music Marketing Tips with Grooveshark WordPress Plugin

Posted on 10 June 2009 by gregrollett

Yes, I am on the Grooveshark bandwagon, but for good reasons. Their artist tools are top notch and their innovation in the way users interact with the service keeps getting better. Just a few days ago they announced 3 major upgrades and releases:

  • Facebook Application
  • WordPress Plugin
  • TinySong API

Today I wanted to share with you guys 3 ways to use the Twitter WordPress Plugin to promote your music. The pre-step if you will is to make sure that you are using WordPress for your blog and CMS, if you are not then you are missing out on some amazing tools, great SEO benefits and a super smart and savvy group of developers and community that keeps making this thing better. Go download WordPress right now if you are not running it on your site.

Grooveshark WordPress Plugin

Grooveshark for WordPress

The Grooveshark WordPress Plugin in its simplest form is a way for you or any blogger to integrate music into their posts, reference tracks or add to the mood by adding a track or playlist.

From the Grooveshark site

Made to make music easy to add to any post, Grooveshark for WordPress takes the trouble out of mixing music with your blog. Just install, then enjoy instant access to literally millions of tunes you can use to make your blog posts even cooler. Create playlists of one song — or hundreds — and add them to any part of your WordPress blog as a Grooveshark Widget. Your readers will love you for it.

Using WordPress to Promote Your Music

On your own blog.

On your own blog posts, you can enhance them by sharing your music with your readers. No more coding up a player, dealing with logging into 2 places at once, copy/pasting and tab switching. In your post manager (the screen where you type out your post) there is a little box that allows you to search for a song, artist, playlist, whatever and then mess with the look and feel of the player. When you publish your post you also publish your Grooveshark player. It’s as simple as that. (check out the image below of what it looks like from the backend)

WordPress Plugin from Grooveshark Music Streaming

A tip to this is to share other music as well. If you played a show with a killer band or singer / songwriter, write a review about the show and create a playlist of their music. This will add value to your fans and readers and all keep them on your page longer as they listen to the tunes.

A second tip is to not over abuse the plugin. The more widgets you create the more stress you are putting on your server and on your fan’s browser. Use the player only when it makes sense and adds to the overall value of the person reading and viewing your site.

Leverage other musician’s fanbase.

Find other musicians that you can cross promote each others music. This was a tip in the last point, but it really is a source of traffic and promotion for your music on its own. The goal is to find musicians who have a fan base that would benefit from hearing your tracks. Have the other artist say a few lines, or even give you permission to write a guest post on their site, introducing you to their audience.

Be sure to return the favor.

Music reviews.

When pushing your music to reviewers that have blogs, be sure to include that your music is cataloged in Grooveshark and that is they have the Grooveshark WordPress plugin, they can use it in their review of their music. This gets rid of any bad embed codes that may get sent in emails. If there is a specific playlist you want them to use, be sure to specify it in your email.

One way to get their attention is to create a playlist in Grooveshark that is specific to the reviewer. Upload custom freestyles or intros that address the reviewer and create a tailored playlist for them to check out and add to the review.

Now, with all the above tactics you will obviously have to have your music in Grooveshark’s system. Go ahead and get your music in their library now by clicking here.

Anyone out there that is using Grooveshark as a promotional tool for their music (through the plugin or their advertising platform) please reach out to us and let us know how it is working for you. Leave a comment or shoot me an email – marketing @ genyrockstars.com.

Till next time rock stars!

-Greg Rollett

P.S. Our Pro Memberships are going live on July 1. More details coming soon. If you want to be a part of this limited group of musicians who get expert training and tips from our professional musicians and marketing team, be sure to join our mailing list. Plus you get a bunch of free goodies just for signing up. Chat soon.

Oh, and you can listen to a cool track that I am loving today in my Grooveshark widget below.

Grooveshark Launches Killer Artist Promotion Platform

Posted on 24 March 2009 by gregrollett

grooveshark-artists

I’ve been excited about this one.

My friends from a few hours north at Grooveshark are getting into action for indie artists. For those unfamiliar with Grooveshark, it is essentially similiar to iMeem, LastFM, etc but has grown exponentially in the last few months due to some cool innovations like TinySong, AutoPlay and Twisten.FM. They are now over 600,000 registered users and are streamingover 1,000,000 tracks a day. That’s a lot of music folks!

The main attraction has been the new AutoPlay feature which is similar to Pandora, in that it plays songs based on your preferences. This is also the basis for the new Artist Platform.

Over the past few months we have been chatting about strategies to get your music heard by more unique people who are actually interested in hearing your music. Grooveshark is giving you that opportunity. Through their artist advertising platform, you are able to have your songs play in the AutoPlay stations of their listeners!It’s like Google AdWords for musicians.

On your end, you select bands in which your music sounds similar to or artists you can compare yourselves with. When those artists appear in AutoPlay, your music will be added to their playlist automatically and fans will hear your tunes, be able to vote on them and get more info on you.

The cost breakdown is as follows:

grooveshark-prices

In my opinion, the most powerful part of this equation is the analytics they have built in. Through your log in, you can see how many times your song has been played, the number of times favorited, smiled or frowned (similar to like or thumbs up) and overall plays outside of your paid campaigns.

sample-autoplay-campaign

(It gets way more in-depth for stat freaks like me, but that’s for another time and place!)

You can check out a full live demo of all the tools, analytics, etc from Hip-Hop Mashup DJ/artist Girl Talk right now. It has way more than I can explain here, but you can bet that we will be having full tutorials, interviews with their team and exclusive tips in our pro section in the upcoming weeks!

Other features they have included are partnerships with:

After talking with Josh and some of the artist managers over at Grooveshark for the past few weeks, looking at the platform, their ideas and expansion plans, they are going to be a really great influence for indie bands in the next few years as well as a comprehensive marketing solution for social media needs of musicians. It doesn’t hurt that they are only a few hours north of Orlando in Gainesville, FL either!

Go check out the platform and look for more information on Grooveshark and what they have up their sleeve very soon.

Till next time Rock Stars!

-Greg Rollett