It’s May, which can only mean one thing…a month long dedication to the Pearl Jam!

This year we’ve decided to have a little theme within our Pearl Jam love. That theme would be how Pearl Jam is one of the most fan friendly bands out there.

Since we started a little late this year, I’ll stop my yapping and get the ball rolling by talking about the Ten Club.

The Ten Club has pretty much been around to assist fans for almost the band’s entire career. While there have been changes, like mailing ticket orders to now doing it online, to flaws, like not really being updated on news, the Ten Club is still a great thing for the fans.

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As someone who is heavily involved in the digital music realm, one of the things that becomes a challenge is staying on top over everything – between the 40-50 hours per week working on almost every aspect of the web, from coding and technical issues, writing and editing, doing research, setting up schedules and budgets, emailing, chatting on IM, wasting time on Facebook, and maybe getting to my 300+ subscription blogroll, there’s a ton of information out there for one to consume and digest.

It’s really too much for one person to take all that and somehow teach a village before that info becomes obsolete.

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It is an interesting time to be a musician. While many ask themselves, “how am I going to make money when people are just going to steal my music?”, there is an increasing number of opportunities for them to eliminate some of the marketing and distribution costs.

Actually, there’s an overwhelming number of free marketing tools online that enable artists to connect with fans. Once you break through the wall of no-brainers like MySpace and Facebook, it can be kind of intimidating with all the other networks and tools out there, especially when you run into someone like me and I geek out on you about things like Twitter.

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Let’s get one thing out of the way; your music is important. It’s your art, it’s why you’re here on the planet, and you’ve got to pour your blood, sweat, tears and soul into it. It has to be real and you have to feel it. They have to feel it. it’s all about the music.

What you have to understand, however, is if you want to make a decent living recording and performing your music, you have to understand how to capture the attention of your audience. You have to figure out how to create an emotional connection with them. This is the secret to building a fanbase and becoming successful.

While catching up on my blog reader I noticed an a post from Andrew Dubber of New Music Strategies about a recent Futuresonic event he attended.

At the event, Scott Cohen from The Orchard provided a presentation containing 10 important steps to building a community.

His ten steps have been uttered from my mouth time and time again, and I love hearing them from those with higher profiles in the industry, as it tends to reinforce the things that I have been saying or blogging about.

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The Igor blog sent me this article about branding from the Times, which gives them a shout-out, as will I.

Incorporating your Internet marketing campaign into your companies brand strategy and any traditional marketing and advertising is obvious. Simple methods involve very basic integrations of your companies website URL: in a magazine ad or at the bottom of the TV screen during a commercial. During a radio ad, don’t forget to mention, “Visit us online at www.oursite.com”. Anywhere you can add the website URL is good, because it’s reminding the audience through repetition, which is a basic fundamental concept in marketing. A good way to gauge this is adding the URL is any case where you also provide a company telephone number. Have you ever tried to find the contact information to a company but forgot the phone number? Of course you have. Your chances or remembering a website URL are far greater than trying to remember some random 800 number. This is especially true if your URL address is also properly integrated into your online branding strategy.

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