As of today Wicked Whammy is Not Evil Music and the new website is located at http://notevilmusic.com. Not Evil Music is an online music marketing blog that provides online music marketing services in addition to free insightful articles on online music marketing. I have moved all the most important blog posts from Wicked Whammy to Not Evil Music with their comments and I have also redone some of my old articles. I didn’t move the comments of the revised articles, because that just wouldn’t be fair for the commenter.

My goal with Not Evil Music is to create a useful resource for musicians that provides practical information about music business and online music marketing. To do this I need support from people, who are smarter than me. So, if you have some music marketing related ideas or thoughts on your mind that could enlighten musicians please do contact me and I’ll let you do a guest article on Not Evil Music.

See you at notevilmusic.com,

Nico (notevilmusic@notevilmusic.com)

Ps. I would appreciate some feedback about the design of Not Evil Music. I tried to make it as usable as possible on all browsers. If the design doesn’t work in your opinion, tell me and I’ll try to fix it.

A lot of artists use only a couple of social networking websites to promote their music on, and they usually choose the ones with most users such as MySpace and Facebook. This kind of strategy can be very effective if you are targeting the whole world. However, by adjusting your online music promotion approach regionally you can reach much more potential fans than with MySpace and Facebook alone.

Continue reading »

With around 50 million active users, Facebook is the seventh most popular website on the Internet right behind MySpace. This also means that Facebook can be an invaluable promotion platform for bands and musicians. On tuesday 6th of November Facebook announced Facebook Pages, which they describe as “distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook”. In other words they finally allow bands and musicians to create special profiles with a built-in music player in the style of MySpace.

Continue reading »

You might have already heard about the Luxembourg based online music store Prefueled and its “entertainment hubs”, which were introduced this year’s February at the MIDEM trade fair in Cannes. The company offers an online social network, online music store, entertainment hubs and they also support unsigned artists. I’ve been following Prefueled’s development with an interest for a while now and I was pleasantly surprised when I had the chance to experiment with their entertainment hub, or Fuel Tank as they call it, in Sweden.

Continue reading »

I have tried to encourage artists to use recorded music rather as a promotional tool than a revenue source. However, it can be a very expensive promotion tool since recording time in a professional studio is expensive. Although modern home recording equipment is affordable and provides good audio quality, you still have to know quite a lot about audio recording, mixing and mastering in order to get good results. If you want to stay unsigned and also get financial support to cover your album’s production costs, try appealing to fans.

Continue reading »

In the aftermath of Radiohead’s In Rainbows album first week downloads one very interesting phenomenon was noticed - even though the album was free to download through inrainbows.com, around 240,000 people downloaded it through BitTorrent trackers on the day it was released. This implies that it doesn’t matter anymore if the music is free or not - the new generation of music consumers are grown into free online content sharing culture and will continue to use the same content sharing networks that they have gotten accustomed to. Record industry has failed to take advantage of this phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean that unsigned/indie artists couldn’t take advantage of it.

Continue reading »

I’ve been talking about blogging your music in the past and now I am even more convinced that it is an essential fan interaction method for any artist. I have been thinking many times about the idea of building your official artist website based on blogging software such as Wordpress and I was very positively surprised as I stumbled on a live example of that idea. A finnish band called Jermaine has succesfully utilized the idea of using a blog as an interaction and information tool between the artist and the audience, without compromising over design or functionality.

Continue reading »

Using social video websites is a great way to promote your music and uploading music videos to YouTube has become somewhat a standard procedure among indie artists and mainstream artists alike. Some of the video sharing websites also offer an affiliate program for video publishers, which means that you can get a percentage of ad revenues or get paid by the number of video views. I haven’t seen so many indie artists trying to leverage this kind of revenue model yet, so why not give it a try?

Continue reading »

Rehearsing is essential for every musician and it is something that bands and artists should do at least on a weekly basis, if not on a daily basis. Although the main purpose of rehearsing is improving musical skills, you can still take rehearsals to another level by recording them on video. This is a good way to see how you look from the listeners/viewers perspective and also to keep your fan base more active.

Continue reading »

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about music player widgets and how to best utilize them to promote your music. There are a lot of widgets that allow you to share only songs, but why settle to that when there is so much more you can do with them. Music player widgets are evolving and they can serve many purposes from being an mp3-player to promoting your gigs and playing your music videos - all in one sleek package. I wanted to find a widget that could also help in branding and I intentionally left out music widgets that are meant mainly for selling music. There are better ways to make money with music nowadays than selling it directly. You can read this article for more ideas about that.

Continue reading »