Mike The Punk’s Bold New Strategy

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Mooresville, North Carolina’s Mike The Punk recently announced plans to issue one single a month for the next twelve months. A relatively recent signee to our roster, Mike (that’s Michael Robert Adams II, formally, if you’re keeping score), as his moniker might imply, combines something of a gritty Social Distortion-esque vocal delivery with catchy pop hooks…but then these are delivered, predominantly, with an acoustic guitar as his sole accompaniment, and yet the entire package does somehow manage to sound like, well, punk rock. Understandably, the instant we heard Mike’s recordings, we knew he was a must have for our lineup.

His first offering in this Single Of The Month club, Don’t Tell Her, is streaming before you can buy it at select online radio stations now, last.fm (http://www.last.fm/music/Mike+The+Punk/Don%27t+Tell+Her) and Rdio (http://www.rdio.com/artist/Mike_the_Punk/album/Don%27t_Tell_Her/) the major ones among these. You can also check out a YouTube clip the artist himself has posted himself here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMDoe_tsnv4

As always, stay posted for future updates. Mike The Punk seems poised to deliver a string of quality tunes, which update and expand his core sound without straying too far from his punk roots. We’re excited about what the future has to offer for this exciting new performer, and look forward to sharing this with the world – be it our label’s small yet rabid niche following, or the mainstream audience (we hope) at large.

Facebook Contacts List

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I had intended to post everything sequentially, but this latest hot idea I’ve gotten will only take a minute, and is something you can implement at whatever stage of this process your band is currently in. Hopefully by now you’ve heard of this obscure little site called “The Facebook,” yes? Well, like a number of other musicians, back when I first joined Facebook, I also created a separate “page” for my band. A page is pretty much the same as a user profile, except it’s for businesses. You can actually manage your business page just by logging into your normal user account, so this seemed like a fantastic concept.

It turns out this is actually not the greatest idea in the world. If you’re like me, you’re wondering why your band is still sitting on 39 likes even after months and months of sending off “suggestions” to people for them to like it. Even picking random strangers to send requests to accomplished nothing. The problem is that people ignore these, for whatever reason.

A much better solution was pointed out to my by a buddy of mine. You simply set up another user profile as the name of your band – a little juggling might be required, as in my case I was ditching my “XT Force” business page and setting up a new user profile as “Xt Force, i.e. they wouldn’t let me capitalize the T, but who cares – and then you are off to the races. Now instead of sending “page likes” suggestions as yourself, you are “friending” people – and folks are about 20 times as likely to approve a friend request, as it turns out. In a month’s time I soon had about 4 times as many “friends” as I ever had page “likes” under a year and a half of the old method.

It should be noted that Facebook does offer a one time only opportunity to switch your user profile over to a business profile. You should avoid this at all costs, as you will be right back in the same boat. If you made the same initial mistake as me, actually, you already have a user profile and an old business page, so you don’t need to do this. Plus once you make the switch, you can’t switch back, and then you’re back in the nightmare scenario of sending “like” suggestions instead of friend requesting people.

One final note concerns exporting your friends list information out of Facebook and into your email account. One advantage of doing this is that you can send exclusive downloads, deals, a regular newsletter, whatever, to a mailing list. There are a bunch of applications you can use with mixed results, but there’s one extremely simple method that doesn’t even take 10 seconds. Open up a Yahoo Mail account if you don’t already have one, and they will prompt you with a little Facebook icon to import your friend contacts. Bingo. Or, if you already have Yahoo mail, go here: address.yahoo.com

That’s it

Getting Tunes On Facebook

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Now that you have a cleaned up version of your file saved as a .wav, it is time to get it converted to an mp3 and get that song online. Either Cakewalk or Audacity will work for converting the .wav to an mp3, but for the sake of simplicity (there’s a separate program you have to search for and download online with Audacity), go ahead and open up your Cakewalk program. Import the .wav, and then under Tools, click Mixdown Audio, and select Export As Mp3. When it asks you to fill in the IDE tags, it’s important to go ahead and do this – these represent the song title, album name, year of release, etc, and will forever be linked to your track.

If you are the paranoid type, and are worried about copyright, you may want to find an online site and/or application that you can instantly upload your song to for sale. One relatively hassle free site that I know of is greatindiemusic.com, where in the space of about 5 minutes you can get your songs uploaded and have them available for sale. And while it’s not a bad idea to get your songs uploaded here anyway, I personally feel perfectly comfortable with emailing myself the track (this comes in handy down the road, too, for various other reasons), and then getting it immediately onto the much more crucial and prominent sites.

One site that appears low budget at first glance with which is absolutely essential would be ilike.com. Go ahead and set up a profile for your band here, and upload your songs, as well as a profile picture. This step is your springboard to getting music on Facebook, a must in today’s online landscape. Enter at your own risk, however: actually getting this stuff onto Facebook is reminiscent of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. One false move and you are back at start, game over.

Start by logging into your Facebook account as usual. Then, turn around and enter facebook.com/pages into the address bar. Once there, you will see a grey button a short distance down with a plus sign and the words “Create Page.” Click on that. On the next screen, under Official Page, mark the tab for “Artist, Band, or Public Figure,” and scroll down to select “Band” of course, then type in your band’s name in the box provided. Don’t forget to check mark the box saying you are an authorized representative of the band, then click “Create Official Page.”

Congrats! Your band now has a Facebook page. This is the easy part. You can upload a photo, edit your information and so forth, and then comes the really confusing, maze like corridors of actually getting some tunes on here.

In the search box, type “songs.” One of the first results that comes up, if not the very first, should be the bright orange ilike icon. Click on that, and once you’re on their Facebook page, over at the left select “Add To My Page.” At this point a pop up box should emerge, showing your band’s page. Click to add them.

Now, up in the search box, type the name of your band. Go there, to its Facebook page, and now find the blue “Music” tab in the top middle of your page. Under that, you will find a pink tab that says “Artists – bind your tab here.” Click on that, which will take you to another page. Type your band’s name in the box, and click Save. Now, where it says “Back to (your band’s name)’s Profile Page,” when you click on that, it will take you back to your band’s Facebook profile. Under the Music tab, you should now find all of your songs that you had uploaded to ilike! Voila!

For good measure, you may as well get yourself off and running by clicking on the “I Like” thumbs up icons for each of your songs, as well as your band itself. Now, you are off to the races, and the trick now becomes promote, promote, promote.

Up next: getting your music on internet radio, and every music store in the known universe.