michael burns, Author at

If you’ve come to this page for absolution because you’re not sure if your album is ready for prime time yet, you’ve come to the wrong place. During the process of dragging my album Arranged Accidents kicking and screaming across the finish line I agonized over the slightest flaws in performance and production. If I can’t thoroughly enjoy my finished product, I can’t promote it with 100% confidence. If I can’t promote with 100% confidence, I can’t sell nearly as many copies or licenses. Keep working on your project until you fall in love with it. People can smell your reservations from a mile away when you talk about your album. Do not try to save money by hiring less than the best. Your session musician might only charge you $100 but you’ll end up spending much more money later to have someone more talented rerecord his performance, or pay an engineer $300 to correct his performance in editing. I was also surprised to find out that many well known and celebrated people in the industry are capable of unforgivably shoddy work. Just because the person you hired was once regarded as an A-lister, doesn’t mean that he still is or that he’ll bring his A game to your project. Choose someone whose done something you love RECENTLY, or chances are you may be dealing with a has-been whose running your songs through the same aging analogue equipment he used to mix or master a sitcom from the 1970’s. You don’t always get what you pay for. Once you have your team together and they are really making you happy with their work, be good to those people, because it will likely be trial and many errors finding their replacements.

When it comes to creating a website, most musicians and bands will choose to either go the way of Bandcamp, Bandzoogle, Wix, Weebly or Squarespace. These are all bad ideas (except maybe for Bandcamp see update below).

Bandcamp might seem to be the way to go. You pay nothing to them up front, and are charged no monthly fees. Website creation is intuitive and easy. Bandcamp, however, charges a 15% fee for all online sales through your site. Make a thousand digital sales of your $10 album in a year and you could be paying $1500 just for a web presence. That doesn’t count what PayPal takes on the back end. (update 2020, I’ve underestimated Bandcamp’s ability to raise awareness of your brand. I’ll get a presence up on Bandcamp eventually. If it costs nothing up front, you can make the argument that the more places your merch appears the better.)

Bandzoogle is celebrated for empowering musicians to easily create very professional web sites and let them keep 100% of their online earnings. You’ll be paying between $12.49 and $16.95 a month for the rest of your life though if you want a half way decent looking page.

Wix is also reported to be an easy option for creating a site. It has a free site plan, but you’ll be spending between $16.50 and $24.50 a month if you want to be able to sell any kind of merchandise through your site. This can similarly be said of Weebly and Square Space though Weebly offers some kind of rudimentary ecommerce store for 8.50 a month plus a 3% transaction fee, and Squarespace has a deal where you are charged $18 a month if billed annually.

The key to getting a web site up that looks and functions the way you want it to is to use the best and most economical web hosting platform on Earth, JaguarPC. For just $2.95 a month for life or until I cancel, JaguarPC does a tremendous job at hosting my site. They’ve been around for over 10 years and their customer service is EXCELLENT! Steer clear of Yahoo Small Business. They charge more and their coding is so outdated, that they cannot handle modern templates for WordPress. They fought me hard for a refund when I was forced to change hosts.

Once you register your domain with JaguarPC or some other host, Create a WordPress Site. You can choose a powerful music theme from themeforest.net from about $35 to $59. I hired someone to install my Sonic theme along with SEO and security apps for about $100, but now I’m sure I could have done it myself. When it comes to building a WordPress site, the learning curve is relatively high, but there are so many YouTube videos out there that can answer every type of question you could possibly have, and walk you through step by step to creating the web site of your dreams. The theme I bought, Sonic, has it’s own built in Woocommerce platform, I can use for absolutely free online sales. (update 2020: Jaguar has raised their rates to about $10 a month. I have found no competitor hosts to offer the same functionality for less beyond some temporary introductory rate, Jaguar’s customer service remains excellent, and they granted a request to allow me to upload extremely large file sizes so I can host videos directly on my WordPress site without having to embed YouTube videos).

I had to learn a lot of new skills to take the music that was in my head and put it out into the world. Building a WordPress site was a skill easily acquired. It’s totally doable!

(Mike Burns is the composer, arranger and producer of the cinematic orchestral album Arranged Accidents.)