Unsigned Artists: How to Promote Your Songs using RSS

Copyright (C) 2002,2003 Philip Dorrell
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RSS is ideal for finding and promoting new and unknown content. This is because it enables the separation of content delivery (i.e. streaming MP3 demos etc) and content promotion (how do I get my song in someone's top ten?).

There are two main steps required to promote your music via RSS:

• Make each of your songs bookmarkable. Specifically this means that each song must have its own URL. Ideally this URL should be self-descriptive.
• Tell your fans to use RSS in order to share recommendations about new music with their friends and anyone else on the Internet that has similar tastes in music.

Make Your Songs Bookmarkable

Every song must have its own URL, because it's mostly the songs that RSS users are going to want to find and to recommend to others. You should of course also have a URL for yourself (or your band), and URL's for each of your albums, but it is the songs that must have URL's.

• The URL for a song should point to a web page that allows the user immediate and easy access to a playable demo (or demos) of the song.

• The URL for a song should not directly point to the demo media file itself, especially in the case where more than one type or quality of demo is provided. You want the user to be able to access the demo, but you also want to navigate them to a place where they can learn which album contains the song, who the performer is, how they can buy it, etc. Also a URL for a media file jumps the user out of their browser, which makes it a bit trickier to record that URL as a bookmark.

• The page that a song URL points to can contain more than just information about that song, for example it can contain a listing of all the songs in the same album. But it should make it clear to the user which is the actual song that they have navigated to when they access the URL, for example that song could be highlighted to distinguish it from the others.

• The URL should ideally be self-descriptive. An example of a self-descriptive URL is http://www.somewebhost.com/TheReallyGoodBand/album/TrueLoveSongs/songs/ILoveYouReallyMuch.html, as oppose to say http://www.somemp3webhost.com/item?bandid=234+songid=8978. This is important when users use RSS clients that only show a given link once as a news item. There is no guarantee that they will see any one Title and Description. The content provider has no control over what titles and descriptions are written in RSS items. The one thing the content provider does have control over is the URL. And if the RSS client allows for display of URL's then this gives the user the chance to see the description provided by the content provider, if in fact the content provider has used a descriptive URL.

• The song URL should also be relatively permanent. Once a URL for a good song gets into the network of interconnected RSS users, it is going to propagate from one RSS user/writer to another RSS user/writer virtually forever. So broken links are not a good thing.

Get Your Fans to Use RSS clients, e.g. Womcat Bookmarks

You can use it yourself as well, but the most important thing is to get your users to use it. Explain to them how they can use RSS to share information about new music with their friends and other fans of the same type of music that they enjoy. Make it obvious which links on your web site should be used to bookmark individual songs. Suggest a preferred subject heading to include your songs under (e.g. "Andean Folk Music" or "Thrash Metal").

Using RSS Yourself

As a band it is not absolutely essential to use RSS yourself. But there is nothing to stop a performer also being a music fan. For example, you can use RSS to compile lists of bookmarks pointing to other music that you like. Then modestly include your own music in your own list of bookmarks/items. (If you are a band, you can do even better by having each band member compile separate files, and use the scoring system to say which of their own songs they like the best.)

Choose a Good Content Delivery Host

Possibly no content delivery hosting service currently provides ideal organisation of content required for interfacing with RSS. You may have to create your own web site that gives each of your songs a specific and self-descriptive URL, and point from this web site to your content delivery web site.

The main thing to avoid is a hosting service that absolutely prevents any kind of "deep linking" into specific album pages and song files.

A Good Sample Bookmarkable Band Site

To make it very clear how you should setup a band web site to work with Womcat Bookmarks and other RSS software, I have created a sample web site for an imaginary band called "The Holy Desperadoes".