One of my new year’s resolutions for 2009 was to kick out a few blogs / podcasts over the year which will focus on how musicians can succeed in this ever changing industry. The music industry is in a rampant state of flux with the ongoing demise of record labels coupled with CD retailers closing faster than Willie Nelson can release albums. All of this commotion has led to musicians into the great big blue sea known as the Internet. This new technological ocean is filled with opportunities however understanding these opportunities’ is more than a full time job. While I can’t do your work for you, I have a lot of opinions on technology and how it relates to music. Although, take my advice with a grain of salt however it’s probably better than any financial advice you’d get now days but still… the world of music is in Ludacris Speed and trends change fast.

Before I dive into ArtistData.com, let me just state my strong opinion on the #1 key to success as a band. Sure music is important, beautiful CD artwork is nice but at the end of the day the most important piece of information you can provide is when and where you’re playing a gig. Sounds simple right? Every time you play a gig, you are slowly building up you’re Fan-dom mountain as you capture new fans. Your Fan-dom Mountain is painfully slow to build, but it does build and the key to this growth is around how you get the word out about new shows. Building a connection to your fans is critical and when and how you announce your tour dates leads me to my discussion today around the very cool ArtistData.com website.

Many years ago, prior to AmericanaRoots.com, I had an idea which turned into a massive project. The idea was around centralizing tour dates so that you post your event once and it automatically shows up where ever you want it to. This idea was turned into TOURdatabase.com. It was a revolutionary idea (so I thought) but conveying its purpose to musicians was a little more challenging than I thought it would be. We had about 80 bands on the service however after my shift into AmericanaRoots.com, I decided to kill TOURdatabase.com. A year ago, I stumbled upon ArtistData.com which answers many of the same problems I was trying to back in 2003 however these guys do it much better! ArtistData.com is a full featured and wonderfully presented tool for musicians to manage their tour dates. These guys took posting tour dates online to a whole new level. Their tool is simple to use and amazingly powerful. The premise is you login to your band account on ArtistData.com and post your event. In the background, ArtistData.com will not only deliver your event to your website instantly but it also pushes it out to all of the major social media and calendar sites like: Facebook, Twitter, ReverbNation, Eventful, BandsInTown, PureVolume, Jambase and a handful of others. You enter the tour date once, it broadcasts it out to all of these sites in one click. It’s riducously simple but is key to building your band’s online presence.

For the time being, I believe ArtistData.com is free to use but will eventually turn into some type of pay model.