[atlantaprog] Re: online promo

Before I even start -- take everything I say with the knowledge that
I/we don't "do" promo, per se.  Pure laziness and unwillingness to spend
the kind of money necessary.  Plus a great deal of disdain for BS
"networking" activities.  If we stay small-time, so be it.

So anyway...  

CDBaby -- kicks ass.  Worth doing, for almost anybody.  Solution Science
and Taybacks are there, and I've been tremendously happy with them.
Nice "No BS" attitude about the whole thing.  Sold plenty of discs
(relatively speaking) just by virtue of being there.

We're (SolSci) also on Amazon via Amazon Advantage -- totally worthless.
We've sold literally 20x as many discs on CDBaby.  Glad we didn't pay
for it...

MySpace - I set up a page for the Taybacks about a month ago.  Meh.
<rant>
Quite honestly, I think MySpace is worthless.  It reached critical mass
a year ago, and now every musician in the universe HAS to have a MySpace
site.  So then, what's it worth?  Not a whole hell of a lot.
Although every teenybopper in the universe seems to love it, the site
REALLY sucks.  HARD.  I'm sure it's the wasp's nipples if you're 13 and
want to talk nasty with your friends and put up Disturbed songs that
auto-play everytime one of your little hoodlum friends clicks on your
site.  
But it's among the worst website interfaces I've ever used, the whole
"friends" thing is just total BS, and compared to the Venerable Olde
Mp3.com... well, it just doesn't compare at all.  YMMV.
</rant>

I also signed up for earBuzz.com for the Taybacks, and as of about 3
weeks in have found it to also be totally useless.  Esp. given the
amount I had to pay for a year's worth of it.  That's definitely not
going to be a repeat investment, based on what I've seen so far.

SonicBids - I just set up an EPK for my new Dylan cover band.  It
remains to be seen how useful that is, since we are literally just
getting out of the gate.  But I can see the point made earlier that it
might be another example of pure online hucksterism.  We shall see.  I
paid as little as I could to get us going.  Whether we continue beyond
that remains to be seen.

Garageband.com - did it for SolSci.  It was moderately cool to get some
unbiased feedback.  But the vast majority of reviewers seemed less to
dislike or find fault with our stuff than to simply miss the point of
what we were about entirely.  So, in the context of using the site as a
prog band, it ultimately didn't do much for us.  E.G. more than 70% of
the comments we received mentioned that we should shorten the songs.
And, oh how painful doing reviews could be -- esp. if you had any kind
of conscience about it at all.  I sat through 4-1/2 minutes of absolute
crap MANY times.

Overall, I guess my strategy has been to do anything that's free.  The
catch has been that most of the free sites have required so much setup
and/or participation time as to be a real pain in the ass.  
The pay sites I've tried to get in for as little as possible, and then
see what happens.  Most of them are subscription model w/ pretty fair
cancellation policies.



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