Bob,

Once again, I cannot sing your praises enough for sending this. I stress this concept continually to my artists, and I appreciate now having your clout behind me when I do.

A few quick additions I might add that you and your readers might appreciate….

Through the miracle of RSS and other entry-level programming, you can use ONE site to disseminate all the pertinent info to all of the sites you subscribe to, without having to actually replicate the data. Enter it once…goes everywhere else automatically

Every band should have an account at the site where people of their supposed target demographic most congregate, whether that’s myspace, facebook, twitter, oldpeopleRus….whatever. However, it is still the job of the band to earn their fans one by one!

I like to recommend my young bands to further stick it to the man by not paying for a custom website with monthly fees. Do this instead….

1. First, open a generic gmail account named bandname@gmail.com, and use this account for all your account registrations.

2. Buy your optimum domain name (pick a .com if at all possible!) at Godaddy.com for roughly $10/yr.

3. Go to gmail.com, and at the bottom of the page, click on "gmail for organizations". Follow the easy instructions and open a free email "server" for your band business. You’ll then be able to have up to 50 email addresses for your band, things like booking@bandname.com, or fred@bandname.com, or whatever@bandname.com …except they’re all really gmail accounts with your "bandname" mask. Does this mean you have to check all those accounts individually? no…set them up to automatically forward to the ONE account you do check!

4. Go to virb.com, and open an account there. What we have here is the same concept as a myspace, only fully and EASILY customizable with an intuitive backend page, and minus all the popup and banner ad crap. The downside is it doesn’t have the huge built-in following…..yet. I personally think time will change this. Think about it though…if you opened your own custom website, no one would be there yet either. It’s your job to bring people in with your music.

5. Next, in your Godaddy account set your new domain name to automatically forward to your new virb.com account….(i.e. your new "website").

6. Lastly, set up your myspace blog to RSS feed your new virb page, or vice versa. And set up your virb page to feed your shows calendar to myspace, and every other site. Add things like Fanbridge or Twitter, for extra free tools a band needs to utilize.

7. There you have it. A prebuilt website, easily customizable for your tastes, with professional email hosting for all, and with NO MONTHLY SERVICE CHARGES. Match made in indie - heaven!

8. The above suggested sites are simply the ones that I’ve found to work the best for my artists. I don’t work for them or endorse them, and in fact, some of those sites might be mortal enemies for all I know… If you’re able to find sites that do the same thing…Great! use them! There are just far too many free webservices out there for any band to be wasting money paying for a custom website, when they really should be focused on music.

shalom bob!
Jeremy