An odd little observation for you today.

One of the challenges I’ve found in creating a search engine for classical sheet music is that the sheet music website industry is surprisingly fragmented into instrument-specific niches.

For example, if you go online and search for classical sheet music the top online stores that appear tend to be sheetmusicplus.com, musicnotes.com, and virtualsheetmusic.com. If you search more specifically for viola sheet music, you get similar results – however if you talk to any violin or viola player about sheet music, the first store in their minds is Sharmusic.com. This website doesn’t appear near the top of the search engine results, nor do they advertise with Google adwords,
and yet if you’re wanting to find viola sheet music, apparently that’s where people go.

And if that’s true for violin and viola sheet music, I imagine you’d find the same thing for trombone, piano, and oboe sheet music. There’s presumably a go-to store known to all trombone players that’s a mystery to everyone else.

Why is this? As far as I can tell, this all stems from the offline world. For example Shar have a strong presence in mail-order sheet music for violin and viola, plus obviously some physical stores, and it seems like a lot of violists were ordering viola sheet music from Shar when they were growing up – presumably because that’s where their teachers got their music.

Unfortunately for me, that means that I can’t get away with simply providing results from the ‘big’ online sheet music stores, because these aren’t necessarily the standard stores used by players of the various instruments. Currently every time I mention MyLiszt to a string player I’m asked if I include Shar in my results (and right now the answer is ‘no’). I’d obviously like to fix that, but no doubt once I’ve satisfied those searching for viola sheet music, I’ll talk to a trombonist, who will be amazed that I don’t include Trombonio.com (or whatever) in the results.

Ah well…

Tags: Classical Sheet Music, Creating A Search Engine, Google, Mail Order, Music Stores, Music Website, No Doubt, Offline World, Order Sheet Music, Search Engine Results, Shar, Sharmusic, Sheet Music For Violin, String Player, Trombone Players, Trombonist, Viola Music, Viola Player, Viola Sheet Music, Violin And Viola, Violin Music
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In recent months, as I’ve examined all the possibilities for the MyLiszt website, and what it could be, I’ve realized that in my excitement I’ve been planning to create too many different things all at the same time (the sheet music search engine, musician webpages, business cards for musicians, etc), before the website is even established.

I’ve therefore begun to refocus the site (for now) as purely a classical sheet music search engine. I know from Erica’s experience trying to find sheet music for the Piazzolla Grand Tango or music for the Penderecki 2nd violin sonata that finding music can present a very real problem. By searching a bunch of different online stores in one place I think our sheet music search engine can help people.

So for now, we’re going to focus on that. I’ll be gradually expanding the range of stores that we search, gradually improving the search algorithm to give better results, and working to promote the site so that more people use it.

Once we reach a point where the site is well used, then at that point it would make sense to expand into offering additional services. But for now, we’ll focus on searching for classical sheet music.

Tags: Additional Services, Business Cards, Classical Music, Classical Sheet Music, Excitement, Find Music, Finding Music, Grand Tango, Many Different Things, Music Business, Music Search Engine, Musician, Musicians, Possibilities, Search Algorithm, Sheet Music Search, Sonata, Tango Music, Violin Sonata, Would Make Sense
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Most of my posts so far have consisted of my thoughts and ideas on various topics – but this one will be more journal-like.

Erica is putting on a concert next Sunday afternoon here in Cleveland Heights (see her website’s calendar for more details), which includes the world premiere of Jeremy Allen’s string quartet “Mercury Retrograde”, and I spent yesterday afternoon pounding the streets of Cleveland trying to promote it. At this point I’ve no idea whether my efforts will bear any fruit, but I thought I’d share our experiences in trying to publicize this concert, and ask for input on what has worked for other people.

Website

Erica keeps an updated list of upcoming events on www.ericaward.com, so obviously the first thing we did was to add this concert to her calendar – including all the details of the concert, and an embedded Google Map showing the concert location. She also added some more interesting content with a ‘blog-interview’ with Jeremy Allen, where he talked a little about the piece and composing in general.

Email newsletter

Erica has a mailing list of friends, colleagues and supporters who are interested in her music, and so she put together an email newsletter highlighting her upcoming concerts, and sent that out this past week. I think our plan is to send out the initial email a couple of weeks ahead of the concert, and then send a reminder email a couple of days before – to cater both to the planners and the spontaneous folks on the list.

So far people seemed to like the email – which looked very impressive (in my unbiased opinion).

Printed materials

Having done some electronic promotion, Erica then moved into the physical realm, and designed both a poster and a flyer for the concert (which again look pretty snazzy).

• She got 1000 postcard-sized flyers printed at http://www.hotcards.com (who have a Cleveland location).
• For the posters we took a USB drive with the 8.5″x11″ size PDF into Kinko’s, and had a few copies printed on Lazer (LZ) paper for $0.69/sheet. It wasn’t worth using proper commercial printing for the number of posters we wanted.

So far so good (thanks to Erica’s graphic-design skills), but distributing them is the hard part. That’s where I came in…

Distributing the flyers and posters

Given all the work Erica has done so far, I wanted to be a good husband and contribute, so I took on this task. I started with Google Maps, centered on the venue for the concert (Fairmount Presbyterian Church, in this case). I searched for coffee shops in the area, and came up with a few options, and I also searched for music (which gave me one result).

After looking at the results, I realized that there were basically four ‘hot spots’ in the neighborhood of the church – Shaker Square / Larchmere, Cedar-Fairmount, Cedar-Lee, and Coventry Village. I visited each of these areas, with a backpack full of flyers and a few posters – plus some thumb tacs, and magic tape. I knew that there were some venues that would be happy to help, as I’d seen flyers from other events on their noticeboards, but in general I didn’t know what to expect, and found myself practicing my lines as I approached the first couple of stores.

In the end, people were much more willing to help than I’d expected. When I entered a store/cafe/restaurant I would say “My wife’s giving a concert next weekend, and I have some flyers. Do you have somewhere where I could leave them?” In almost every case the answer was positive (although I was rejected by a knitting store, of all places!), and some of the store-keepers wanted to know more about the concert, and some even sounded interested in attending. A couple of people offered to put up a poster in their windows, and many more had noticeboards set-aside for local events, which they were happy for me to use. [Interesting aside: Starbucks will only allow you to advertise events that are free.]

In the end, I distributed a lot of flyers, and was surprised by how willing people were to take them. Admittedly I didn’t enter every single store – but I left flyers at coffee shops, hair salons, restaurants, florists and even a hardware store. Some venues (such as Dewey’s coffee, or Tommy’s restaurant) were overflowing with flyers and posters for different events – so in some ways I’m wondering whether we might actually have more success with those I left in the less likely locations – since they’ll stand out more. However we won’t really know until next weekend whether my efforts were worthwhile – and even then, it’ll be tricky to actually figure out how people came to hear about the concert.

I’d be interested to hear (in the comments) of what techniques other people have used to promote concerts/events, and whether they were successful. I’d be particularly interested to hear of any unusual tactics – even if they didn’t work!

Posted in concert promotion, printed publicity, website | | 1 Comment »

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a new phenomenon sweeping the world called the internet. It’s been around some time now, and has become rather popular among the general public. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that many people use it as their primary means of getting information.

Therefore, if you want people to find out about you (so that they can hire you to perform, teach, play in orchestras, quartets, ensembles etc), then it would probably be a good idea to create a website. Agreed? Good.

I’ll write another post about the process of actually creating the website, but before you do anything else you should decide on your domain name. It’s true that strictly speaking, you don’t actually need a domain name in order to have a website – you can have a website within someone else’s domain for free – however domain names are so cheap these days, and so valuable to your personal brand, that registering a domain name is really a great investment.

How do I choose my domain name?

Choosing a domain name can (if you’re lucky) be very easy, or it can be very hard, if your preferred choices are already taken. Let’s look at the different scenarios.

• Ideally, you want to own myname.com (e.g. andrewward.com in my case). As a musician your name is your brand, and it’s a huge plus if you actually own that domain name. If you have a moderately obscure name, then it may well be free. I suggest you find out right now, and if it’s free, go ahead and register it immediately. See below for more information on checking for availability and registering domains.
• Unfortunately, for many people, someone else will already have registered your name as their domain (since your name is probably not unique). In this case, consider whether there’s a simple variation of your name that you could use… for example, if katherinejenkins.com is already taken, what about katyjenkins.com (assuming you go by Katy).
• If that doesn’t work, you’ll probably need to add some text to the domain that relates to what you do. For example, you could try katyjenkinsmusic.com or katyjenkinsviolin.com. This option certainly isn’t as good as a domain based solely on your name, but you should be able to find a sensible sounding domain that will sound professional.

Other considerations

• If your name is really long or difficult to spell, you might consider choosing a simpler domain name. For example, jeroboamvonrichthofen.com might be better if simplified to JVRmusic.com. It’s very much a judgment call here. Your aim is to be able to say your domain name over the phone, and trust that your caller will be able to correctly type it into their web browser. Ideally they’ll also be able to remember it a week later without prompting.
• I would try to avoid hyphens (e.g. award-photography.com… (which is actually my website)) as they’re something of a cop-out. Very few businesses or major websites use hyphens in their name, and they also make it harder to remember.
• For the same reason, I would avoid endings other than .com. If you’re choosing a domain for a not-for-profit organization, then .org might be appropriate, but again, by sticking with .com you make it easier for people to remember the domain name.

Domain names for ensembles

Obviously in picking a domain name for an ensemble you’re in a slightly different situation compared to choosing a domain for an individual. Most significantly, you may actually be able to choose the name of the ensemble based on what domain names are available. That may seem crazy, but it may eventually be a big help in your marketing to own the domain name that matches your performance name.

How to check what domain names are available?

Go to http://www.godaddy.com and use the domain name search option on the home page to see whether the domain you want is available. Keep trying until you find something you like.

What next?

Don’t register your domain with GoDaddy. If you need to create a website from scratch I would highly recommend weebly.com, and it’ll be easier if you register your domain name within Weebly directly. I’ll be posting another article shortly describing how to get started with Weebly. Erica used it for her website, and it’s really easy to use – no technical expertize required.

Tags: branding, domain, website
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