There’s a lot of talk these days about MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.  What isn’t often discussed (or to be honest, thought about, if you’re an artist) is the data ownership aspect of each of these networks. A lot of artists have moved away from email marketing and towards social marketing – and as a result, not as much focus is placed on building and maintaining a healthy email list.

Preferences Change Over Time

As an artist, your music will evolve over time. Your fan base will hopefully grow with you, but in order to help that growth, you need a consistent way to connect with your fans.  Five years ago, they were on MySpace.  Today, they’re most likely on Facebook, and some are on Twitter.

What hasn’t changed is their love of your music. What has changed is the tools they use to communicate with each other online.

You’re probably on all of the networks they participate in already. You have a MySpace Music page, a Facebook Fan page, and a Twitter handle.

Great and fabulous.

What happens if MySpace, Facebook and Twitter all shut down – tomorrow?

Do you have any way to reach out to your fans left, or did your options just disappear?

For most of you out there, your options just went out the window.

It’s great to connect with your fans where they already exist online, but this shouldn’t be your only way of connecting with them.  As an artist, you need to own your audience, or at least, know their email address!

Here are some easy ways to start your email list:

Put a “sign up for our email” prompt on every page you have – Many tools are free (like MailChimp, for example) and provide the ability to create a form. Look, ma, it’s automated and organized!

Have an email sign-up sheet at the door of every gig – Go old school and collect email/mailing addresses and other information by hand. They’re coming to your show, obviously they’re interested!

Create a website and (you guessed it), put a “Sign up for our email” prompt on every page – Web hosting services can be fairly cheap, and there are many free systems out there (like WordPress, which I use), to help you create and maintain a site, even if you don’t know anything about designing a website.

If you get into a conversation with someone and take it private (DM’s, Facebook Messages, etc), send them your email and invite them to continue the conversation via email.

Include your email/website address on everything – videos, flyers, your website, business cards, etc.

Most importantly – make it WORTH your fans time to sign up for your emails. I’ll cover how to effectively email them in a further post, but start thinking about the emails you like reading, keeping in mind the marketing emails you always look out for.

Do you have any more ideas about how to build your email list? Any success stories to share? The comments are yours – so leave ‘em!