I write music and record it in my home studio. However, this process takes quite a while usually and I finish only one song at a time. I have realized that making enough songs for an album will take ages, but I still want to get my songs out there. Most obvious option would of course be making an EP of three or two songs, put up a MySpace site and upload the songs there. However, that’s exactly what every other band does already. I have tried really hard to think of another approach and here is something that came into my mind.

Start a blog for your music. Yes, a blog. Blogging phenomenon is still growing and it is about time that musicians embrace it as promotional platform. There are a lot of promotional channels for blogs alone, which can be leveraged to gain exposure for the blog. Now, there are a lot of possibilities how to run that blog, but the main idea is that you publish one finished song at a time through your blog. Naturally there will be some long gaps between the finished songs, when you are composing and recording new music. So in the meantime use the blog to talk to your fans, post pictures of the recording process and let them know better who you are or what your band is about. This is much more personal approach and you also create a cycle of continuous interaction with your fans.

I have also been thinking about the idea of using blogging software such as Wordpress to create your “official” artist website and I was very positively surprised as I stumbled on a live example of that idea. A Finnish band called Jermaine has successfully utilized the idea of using a blog as an interaction and information tool between the artist and the audience, without compromising over design or functionality.

Getting started with your music blog

Wordpress is the blogging software and has been widely adopted among the most popular blogs in the world. It is free, fairly simple to use and install, and highly customizable. The most interesting aspects of Wordpress are Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and the massive amount of useful plugins. RSS feeds are a great way for your fans to stay “remotely” in touch with the latest happenings on your website and to filter out the most interesting news.

Wordpress offers automatically a number of different RSS feeds when you create a new blog, but I recommend cheking out FeedBurner’s services also since they offer many useful RSS feed promotion tools. Below is an example of FeedBurner’s Headline Animator that shows my latest blog posts. It is very customizable and you could easily make one that displays your upcoming concerts or public appearances, and then try to get your fans to put it on their own blogs/websites/social network profiles.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

The great thing about Wordpress is the community, which is actively developing and improving numerous useful plugins. Although there are no specially designed plugins for musicians, you can still make good use of many of the plugins. Mashable has compiled a great article of over 50 different Wordpress plugins for multimedia purposes, and I bet you can implement at least some of them in your artists blog/website.