If you’re an independent band trying to bring yourselves to a wider audience, hoping to organise your band’s affairs better or attempting to collaborate with other musicians, there’s a host of great websites and services out there for your needs.
Behind every good band is a good manager but many bands have to book their own gigs, make their own t-shirts and balance their own books. Bandize.com has just launched to help musicians do that and then some. It offers facilities to manage tours, merchandising, finances, tour accommodation, contact lists, recording time, import show data from Myspace and loads more. Bandize is aimed at bands who need to organise themselves better and at roughly €10 a month, it’s a bargain. A 30 free day-trial is available also for those unsure.
Need to get feedback on a song or demo? Want to share a song with bloggers, press or labels? Soundcloud.com is what you’re looking for. Forget the likes of Yousendit for distributing digital files, Soundcloud’s user friendly elegant system is geared towards music so it offers great features like waveforms of each track with the ability to leave comments on a particular part of the song – down to the second. You can embed the tracks on other sites, upload lossless formats, send files to particular users through a dropbox or share with the active Soundcloud community for feedback purposes. Best of all, they offer free accounts.
What if your band is looking for a remix but don’t know who to contact? Jamglue.com can help. Upload your track to the site and the active community will take the song’s parts and reshape them. You can also create mixes, try the site’s online remix tool and participate in remix contests. If you like this idea, have a look at Relabmusic.com – a similar remix community site.
You may wish to promote the band to industry professionals worldwide and that’s where BreakingTunes.com comes in. Set up by First Music Contact (FMC) with the Arts Council, the site is aimed at showcasing Irish music to industry abroad and at home, to festival organisers worldwide and record label folk. FMC have a database of industry contacts worldwide which they regularly send out info from the site to. It’s a shop window to the music world and it’s free.
