What should a band or musician blog include, irrespective of the kind of music the band is about? I’ve made a short list of items you want to be sure to have on your band or musician blog:
Performance Schedule
Your band’s blog is information central for your fans, so make sure you keep it updated. You could just throw regular ol’ blog posts up as announcements, but it’s better to see the entire schedule as a whole. There are several ways (probably more) to do this.
- Create a page in your WordPress blog just for the schedule, and edit it as needed. Just keep throwing the new dates in at the top and push the old ones down. Not technically elegant, but easy enough to do in a fog, if you know what I mean.
- Use Tumblr or Blogger just for the show/appearance dates, then use a RSS widget in your WordPress sidebar to fetch that blog’s feed and display it. Granted, this one’s a little more complicated, but it’ll look fabulous.
- Use an online event service, such as Tourb.us (link is to FAQ) that lets you build a widget (or badge, in this case) to put on your own site. ShowClix is another, but it’s not as friendly. If you want a big brand name, there’s Yahoo’s Upcoming.
Photo Gallery
Whole lotta ways to do this one! Probably the easiest thing to do is get a Flickr account, and use mobile phone cameras to squirt pics right to it on the go. Slap a flickr badge of some kind on your blog. Done. Anything more complicated than that means the pics are less likely to appear until after a long time.
You could also upload pictures yourself to the blog and display them using any number of WordPress image gallery plugins.
Mp3 Downloads (DUH)
Yeah, no kidding, right? 
You can simply upload mp3 files to your server and then link directly to them. If you want to upload them via WordPress, you’ll need to go into the options for file uploads, add the .mp3 filetype, and increase the size of the file that can be uploaded. WordPress plugins like PodPress or the AnArchos Anarchy Media Player can be helpful for creating flash players on the page as well as allowing downloads and hooking you up with iTunes. If you want to offer albums or collections, zip (compress) them for faster download.
Rockin’ photos by Delgoff under CC License
There’s also a cool WP plug in name GigPress to show off musician’s tours. I found it very useful. I even use it in my ManUtd blog and put an affiliate link to fixture ticket. You should check it out.
@Low – That’s great, I didn’t know someone had created a plugin that was so specific to this.
hi, Michael, how’re you doing?
there’s a nice little tutorial at http://5thirtyone.com/archives/174 , explaining how to set up an RSS feed of MySpace comments. Great for bands who want to tie their myspace profiles & blogs together.
daniel
@Daniel – I’m doing great! Thank you for that suggestion!
Dear Michael,
In fact, there’s more, but the plugins’ documentation is kinda poor. Heard that it still in development:
1. Discography WP plug in (cool idea) for creating band’s discography. Here’s the link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/discography/
2. Gigs Calendar wp pi. But it’s not far from GigPress. The link is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigs-calendar/
Here’s the plugin homepage : http://blogsforbands.com/plugins/
Cheers & have a good sunday.
[...] Michael shares his best Tips to Rock Out Your Band or Musician Blog. [...]
fantastic mate.. really appreciate these tips..