Introduction
In the age of digital music distribution, with its endless channels and intricacies, it can be a daunting task for independent artists to try to navigate through all the requirements of each digital music distributor in order to get music tracks uploaded and ‘stocked’ in digital stores such as iTunes. Luckily, a few enterprising services have sprung up on the net to act as the aggregator and a one-stop-digital distributor-shop, thereby greatly simplifying a very complicated process. Today we will review several such services, one of which in depth, called The Bizmo.
Music Promotion
Our focus here at Audiofanzine has always been gear- reviewing, updating, testing and breaking. But gear at the end is at the service of music creation. Once music is produced, mixed and mastered, we will want to release the music for everyone to hear. Artists eventually face the marketing and distribution cross roads, and more and more, in the age of DIY and independent artists, artists will try to upload their music directly on iTunes, Amazon MP3, and other leading digital music stores while at the same time doing a bit of viral marketing and general promotion. It forces an artist to wear many hats these days, and to dedicate more time than ever before to the business of promoting music. Once a single is ‘done’, the work has just begun, and between tweeting, performing, publishing and selling (and perhaps a day job), an artist is stretched thin to say the least.
Every artist knows that in order to promote music you should upload tracks to your various social network profiles, do an email campaign, book gigs, woo bloggers and magazine editors to review your music, schmooze, network Independent Music Artists, beg, cajole and talk to anyone online and off who will give you 2 minutes of their time. But today, we’d like to take this a step further and introduce you to a service we recently discovered here called The Bizmo, which, in addition to the to-do-list above, can be a very useful service to help both your small time viral campaign and your big time music distribution endeavors, with minimal headache considering the mammoth task at hand.
The Microstore Widget
The Bizmo microstore widget can be a great addition to your viral/online marketing efforts by embedding it in your personal webpage, My Space/Face Book profiles, or email blasts. It is a good tool to keep in touch with fans of your music and gives your selling efforts that personal intimate touch of a ‘mom and pop shop’.
Newcomers to the Bizmo website will be glad to find a simple, uncluttered homepage, with clear and concise instructions as to what the Bizmo does and how you can join. Registration is simple and easy and thereafter you find yourself in the microstore widget space where you can easily upload and sell:
- Music Dual download
- Videos Dual download
- Tickets to your gigs
- Merchandise (e.g. t-shirts)
- E-books, Sheet music or similar pdf formatted products
- Ring tones Dual download
All the digital products are so called dual downloads. That means they are delivered both to your customers mobile phone and to their PC as well. Each time someone buys a digital product via the widget they get three things:
- An option to download the product to their PC straight out of the microstore
- An email with the download link in it.
- An SMS message (If they supplied a phone number) containing a link that downloads the content directly to their phone.
OK great. So once you have stocked the widget with all your products you can upload the widget directly to your Facebook, My Space, Ning, and Sky Rock profiles if you have them – or to any other website you manage by copying and pasting the html code. The process is relatively straightforward and simple from the My Store page on The Bizmo. On My Space it worked like a charm and within minutes our Audiofanzine microstore was embedded on the homepage of my personal profile for everyone to see. On Facebook, the situation is less ideal as the widget finds itself embedded not on your profile homepage but under the ‘Shop’ tab. Apparently, though this is because The Bizmo has a hard time catching up with Facebook’s ever changing code…Hmm, so does everybody else.