Did ReverbNation Finally Get It Right?
By Nick Daugherty | February 3, 2008
Last week while researching Facebook apps, I ran across the all-new ReverbNation.com, and spent some time test-driving this new “indie artist empowerment tool.” Now, I’m not easily impressed these days, but they’ve made a believer out of me.
ReverbNation borrows heavily from MySpace, PureVolume, and others, but with two fundamental differences.
First, I’m a firm believer that every performing band should have their own stand-alone website that they personally own. ReverbNation acknowledges this with free and useful widgets. Virtually everything that you store or create on ReverbNation (tour dates, mp3s, blogs, etc) can be easily dropped onto your personal website and blog.
ST Tip: Widgets exist solely for the purpose of saving you that time and energy.
This is a win-win situation that makes me think ReverbNation finally got it right. Widgets make it easy for you (the artist) and familiar (to your fans); plus they help drive traffic back to ReverbNation. Just set them up and put them all over the web!
Second, ReverbNation acknowledges that your fans are your own. Unlike MySpace, they don’t lock your “friends” list behind their corporate wall. They have created a free — yet powerful — fanmail tool called FanReachTM that competes with many of the paid mailing list programs out there. Plus, FanReachTM allows you to export the list to your own mailing list program.
As if that weren’t good enough, you can get paid too! Under their new “Fair Share” program, you (the artist) will receive 50% of the revenues generated by the advertising displayed on your artist profile page.
From ReverbNation.com: At the end of each month, half of the advertising revenue from ads across all artist profile pages will be put into a pool. That pool of money is divided among the artists participating in the Fair Share program based upon the proportion of site activity each artist generated for the month.
Site activity includes things such as page view activity, song play activity, and fan activity.
To qualify, artists must hold the copyrights (or permission from the rightful copyright owners) to all the content displayed on their profile pages.
Once you’re signed up, be sure to fully check out the Artist Toolbox - it’s the orange tab located on your artist profile page. It is jam-packed with tools that will make your online life easier and save you time:
- FanReachTM - Collect fan emails automatically from anywhere on the web. Manage your contacts and target fans through emails more effectively.
- Widgets - Place your music, show schedule, etc. on your Myspace page or website. No need to double-post on both Myspace and Facebook anymore.
- Stats - Learn valuable information about your listeners, buyers and those promoting your music. Find new fans in different demographics you might never have thought about
- DistroNowTM - Sell your music online (partnered with Snocap).
- The TuneWidgetTM - Automatically created “super” widget that includes your band’s music, mailing list, videos, shows and more. The TuneWidget has cross-promotion capabilities with other bands and the ability to have fans share it across the web easily.
- Street Team Management - Recruit and manage your street team by creating missions with rewards for your fans. Results are tracked automatically!
The bottom line is the folks at ReverbNation have put together the most powerful suite of tools I’ve ever seen for the indie musician to get their music to the fans that crave it. And it’s all free. Record labels, be afraid. Be very afraid.
If you need help using these tools or you are interested in a short demo you can contact Neal Moody at ReverbNation, at (919) 321-2268 or nmoody@reverbnation.com, and he says he’ll be glad to set up a presentation for you.
Or you can just try it now.
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Loading ...About the Author
Nick Daugherty is a singer/songwriter on a journey. He earned more than 120,000 hits in one year on his site NicksJourney.com by using marketing strategies he reveals on his blog “How To Get A Record Deal in 365 Days.” Visit Author's Website.
Last 5 posts by Nick Daugherty
- How To Sell Tickets To Your Shows With EventBrite - September 24th, 2008
- Turbocharge Your Facebook Musician Page - February 1st, 2008
- How to Reach 25 Million New Fans on Facebook - January 28th, 2008
- Finally, A Visual Thesaurus For Visual People - January 18th, 2008
- Guitar Picks and Drumsticks Made From Wheat? - September 26th, 2007
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From Johnny Rei
Hi - I’m artist Johnny Rei -I’m currently no. 5 on reverbnation - global - all genres. I was around top 10 in global all genres charts for whole April 2009. To my huge disappointment, my Fair Share for April was $5 (Five Dollars). I’m really, really disappointed. So if you are an artist who is working really hard for a whole month on promoting and if you think you gonna earn big money, forget it. Even if you are in Top Ten. I think this whole Fair Share is rather a big scam for naive people, who are going to use widgets and other promotional tools to increase traffic on their reverbnation profile - which is eventually not gonna pay off at all - you are making promotion for reverbnation basically for free. I think you would be better off promoting yourself without any reverbnation tools. Fair shair doesn’t work with Band Equity, fair share doesn’t work with number of visists on your profile…
By the way - reverbnation admin deleted this post before. I was working really hard for 2 months to promote reverbnation. If nothing happens, I’m going to do the opposite for next two months.
Well, let me tell you how this works:
You (artist) set up a profile on Reverbnation. Every time you visit a profile,you are creating impressions for adverts, which are placed on most sites on Reverbnation. Companies, who placed the adverts are paying for impressions you create. Now imagine 300 000+ ReverbNation users running around every day. That must create a lot of daily or monthly impressions. This is the main income for reverbnation owners. Plus – some artists are also purchuasing products such as Mega Storage, Fan Reach Pro etc., for which you are paying monthly fees. So what is the advantage of being on reverbnation? Apart from interacting with other users, there is none. Even if you are in top 10 charts – global – all generes – your traffic stays basically the same, there is no potential managers on labels interested in any of the artists. You can create same widgets and players as Reverbnation offers and advertise on myspace by yourself everything would be the same. But in this case, you are earning money for ReverbNation company which proimises to share 50% their advertising revenue – which is a great motivation for artists to ’’run around’’ or promote ReverbNation by placing widgets and players. This eventually doesn’t happen – users are not discussing their earnings – when they recieve small amount of money, they think they’ve done little work comparing to others. Let me tell you the truth: No one earns more than 5-10 dollars a month. So when ReverbNation is saying: ’’Some of the artists will recieve very nice paycheck each month’’ maybe they are talking about themselves or artists like 50 cent – who are there just because ReverbNation paid them to be there.
Two months ago I thought ReverbNation is great honest website and if I work hard -I will do really well. Turns out the owners are just another bunch of ’’Flippers’’ who earn quick buck from Unsigned Artist’s naivity.
I’m not just another naive artist, who’s gonna walk away and that’s it. I’m demanding a refund for my 2 months of hard work. If Reverbnation is not going to respond in anyway, I’m going to work hard for next 2 months…