Welcome to Episode 38 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for another episode of the band. I've podcast. My name is James Cross, and I'm here with Aaron Gingras of the band Suburban Samurai. How are you doing today, Aaron?

I'm doing quite well. I'm feeling even Number Podcast Episode E. Right now I think it's Episode 38. Uh, yes, yes, it is 38 you're back on the even numbered episodes. Matt is doing quite well. We're not going to tell everyone what's going on right now, because that's for him to say. But we're just going to say he's doing quite well as far as we know, and he'll be back very, very soon. But we're taking over a couple of episodes for him as he takes some time off to get some R and R with his family.

Like I said, it's all good news as far as I know, all the best Matt in his family, and we look forward to having him back. So, Erin, we're not telling listeners what's new with Mats life because, like I said, that's for him to share what's new in your life. Well, I think I destroyed any secret that, you know, would have been exciting to share it. You know, any given point later on, but in the last episode, or the one before it. But I've been slowly but surely building out a room at my place to function as a rehearsal spot.

Um, as you know it practice based and basically ah livestream spot ultimately, and I am probably, I mean, always more work to be done. We could always button it up a little better, but I think as it is, it's good to G o. I'm, you know, 94 a half percent of the way through all of the material that I have to build and hang. And so it's It's cool. Finally, I've been I've spent probably six weeks or more on this project, just kind of building a few panels at the time, playing with a bunch of foam, a bunch of insulation.

So it's starting to come together. It's starting to look the way it should, and it's starting to function the way it should and e make it so my neighbors don't want to murder me in my sleep, so that's been super exciting. And, you know, there is no reason why any of it shouldn't function the way that I was expecting it to, but there's always that you know, how we're gonna, you know, bring it out for a test spin and be super loud for 3. 5 minutes. And I had the guys over this past weekend, and we it was a very many rehearsal.

We played about 3. 5 minutes of a song and, you know, had somebody walk around. Yeah, I was building and kind of DNC. You take it here and where and what spots still needed to be better insulated or worked on, and, you know, a zit. Turns out if you're inside one of our neighboring houses, you're not gonna be able to tell at all that anything is happening in this room, so couldn't be more stoked. I'm going to make so much noise. Very nice. And yeah, I think especially now with everybody being cooped up, essentially, people get cranky quite easily.

So you don't want to be too loud because you might actually get murdered in your sleep? Yes. Yeah. Not willing to take that chance, but now I think I can Yeah, well, that's awesome. To hear that you can rehearse again. And you know, I think I've said this on a previous episode, but we're very lucky that we're both in Vermont, which is, as of right now, the only state that hasn't had co vid related death in over a month. So we're very fortunate to be in essentially the only state that's doing well, which might also be partly because we have the second smallest population in the country.

But you know what? I'm just gonna give ourselves the credit because the smallest state in the country is not doing as well as we are. And I feel bad for anyone who is in that smallest state. It's no offense to you. It's not your fault anyway, something that we realize we've touched on in past episodes, and we've talked about portions of this in past episodes but never really covered is essential tools for bands. I see so many artists who have an INSTAGRAM or Facebook or some platform, but then they don't have a website.

They don't have an email address. They don't have anything to back it up. They just have a social media account, which you know what? That's fine. But if you really want to take music seriously, you have to have tools in place to do this. And we've broken up into two sections, one of which is public facing tools. And the second is internal tools, and they're both really important. But for the most part, people will only ever know about the public facing tools. So, Aaron, do you wanna go ahead and get us started with the first public facing tool we've got on the list?

Yeah, so it's not going to come as a surprise. It's your website. It's one of the most public facing any things that as a band, uh, you can have or manage. Obviously, with that, you start to get into not only what it is and how it looks, but you know how you build it and how you get it to look the way that you want it to look. So obviously the tool here to produce your website or the content on your website. Get it? There would be things like wordpress, you know, hosting dirt.

Those are really the two main ones that come to mind over here. But depending on where you're listening from, you may have access to similar different services. But really, the idea here is a tool that you use to build and publish your website and the content on it. Yeah, absolutely. And I have to say wordpress is not the easiest solution, but it is by far one of the best. Because if you go with any of the other big names like Wix or Squarespace or anything like that, they are going to nickel and dime you so hard you're gonna hate it.

One thing I should mention is with WordPress. We're talking about wordpress dot or GTA. Do not go to wordpress dot com because they will also nickel and dime you. So do not go to wordpress dot com. You want a wordpress dot warg installation with the third party host like hosting her that you mentioned Erin Go. Daddy is another popular option, but personally, I prefer hosting her, and you just basically go to hosting her and pay for Web space. And then they have a quick, like five second WordPress install.

It's not actually five seconds, but it like five minutes. It's super easy, and it does it for you. So you don't actually have thio know how to code or how to set it up. It's their system, does it all for you? It's really great. But how are you going to get traffic to your website? That's a good question. Social Media e think everyone by now is on social media, and especially during co vid. You really have to be on social media as a brand account for your band or artist page or whatever.

And one thing I see all too frequently is that artists try to be on Lee on one platform or they try to be on every platform and both of those air terrible decisions. There's a sweet spot in the middle, which is having one primary platform and one secondary platform, which is kind of what we do with Bandhive. We have a Facebook page and on Instagram page. I don't really know what goes on on the Facebook page because I never look at it. All our videos that we post that a little teaser clips for the episodes and stuff go out to that page, but I don't push the page.

I push our Facebook group, but most of the traffic we get is on our instagram page. So that's our primary. In our secondary is the Facebook page, and then we have our community, which, if you want to check it out, you could go to better dot band slash group. So that's a little bit of a weird domain, but it's better dot band slash group. Just type that into your you are l bar your address bar at the top of your browser, on your phone or your computer or wherever, and you will be automatically directed to our group.

Or you could just go to Facebook and search for banned hive. One thing that really helps with social media is having a scheduling tool, and there's a bunch of them out there. But I think by far one of the most band budget friendly ones right now is publisher It's really inexpensive but really effective, and it does a great job, and one of my favorite things is you can actually have a recycled posts on a schedule. So if you have a bunch of content and you schedule it all and then you're just missing a content piece for one day or something, it can actually pull content that you've posted previously and reuse it not on all platforms.

It won't do that on Twitter, for example, because it's actually against Twitter's terms, but it will do that for you if it needs to. Obviously, that should be a last resort. But that way you don't miss a day and not have a post at that time. So I think that's one of my favorite tools. And another thing is like I've been using that in the band I've group because I'm really bad with social media. I really am. I just I'm so drained by it, and so I'm using it to post automatically for me every Friday in the group, asking people to share their new music.

And then it does that every week. I've been getting at least like 3 to 5 people commenting, sharing their new music. And then I get to go and listen to it and have a discussion with them about their new music, which because it's there, I interact with it. But if I had to do that manually every week, there's no way it would happen. E am a total systems nerd, so I just I love publisher and tools like that. Speaking of systems, Aaron, you had a really great system that everyone should be using.

So, yeah, we'd be talking about things like Link Tree or your l dot com. Basically, it's ah super clean on neatly organized landing page. Think of areas on your social media. You know, I'm thinking about Instagram where you've got limited space. Thio, give your audience a bunch of information. Where can I find your merch? Where can I find your odds of social media accounts, your website, any number of things? So it's a great example a great tool that you can use, uh, to basically load up like a very clean looking landing page.

So you have one link can drop it in any number of places. That sort of limit, you know, a number of characters or a number of links you can provide your audience. It's a universal remote, really, For all of the different spaces you might be dropping your content or your merch. And then James, before the podcast, we were talking about campaigns. Yeah, I was talking about basically you tm tracking which for most artists, this is something that's way over your head. If you do want to talk about you TM tracking links and how you can track people coming to your site from different sources, I would absolutely love to nerd out about it with you.

Just shoot me an email James at Vandiver dot rocks or hit us up on instagram on the one that runs the page most of the time. So shoot us a message and we can nerd out about you, t m's and how to track people on your site in a non creepy way because you don't know anything about the person except where they came from. So it's like, Oh, cool, this person came from Facebook. This person came from an email. I sent all that kind of stuff. Speaking of email, you should have an email list that's really important.

Even in 2020. I know he said this a bunch, but that is really one of the easiest ways to stay in touch with your following, and you could do some really cool stuff with it. So I know on the last episode, Number 37. 5 inspirational innovations in the music industry. What will you come up with? We talked about how every single band out there 10 years ago had on opt in on their page saying, Hey, join our email list and you get a free song Now that's not really relevant because nobody wants to download stuff, but you can still have a mailing list.

Another option you could do might be like, Hey, join our mailing list and get 10 or 15% off our merch store. When you place an order within 48 hours, you know, add some urgency to it, so people don't just say, Okay, cool, whatever. I can use this whenever. Get that sale right away. Tell them the coupon code expires in 48 hours. That's what you gotta dio. There's so many ways you could come up with this, And if you want Thio, get some inspiration, check out episode 37. That's last week's episode, and I think you'll have ah lot of food for thought after listening to that.

As faras mailing list providers go, I'm a big fan of Mailer Light. It's not as popular as male chimp, but it is much more advanced and to me, way easier to use. You can do so much more with it, and they still do have a free plan, which is, I believe, for the 1st 1000 subscribers. And that's plenty because if you have 1000 subscribers, you're making money or if you're not, you're doing something very, very wrong. Last but definitely not least for our list of tools that are public facing.

We've got a really important when Aaron, can you tell us more about this last item on the list? Yeah, so it's your merch store. Your distribution, Um, what did people see when they're not in a show and they want to buy a T shirt or by by a black T shirt, or buy a USB or a Cuzzi something cool? Um, they're going to find out where your merch store is and interface with you there. So obviously the big names, merch cat big cartel that would be familiar to a lot of people Store envy.

There are, you know, many others, some directly integrated with point of sale systems. Um, some trying to be some not so successful. But really, that's a spot where you gotta use what works for you. But whatever it is, that's, uh to me it a super fun, public facing tool, kind of like social media or a website. It's a little bit more control that obviously has to do it. Um, you know, money coming in and product going out, but super important, one that you don't want to forget about and definitely make sure that you have that it's up to date because you can kind of interface that with any of the things that were touching on here.

The email list, the link trees, your social media and your website, obviously, so make sure your merch store is up to date and your distribution is in line. Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that we should also add and we're not going to go into depth here is your digital distribution for music is really important to There's Destro Kid to encore CD Baby all of those and it changes so much. We actually had Ah listener requests an episode about that the other day, which I think is a great episode, and I would love to do it.

But it changes so frequently, so I'm honestly just gonna say, Check out our is take. I'll have a link in the show notes At Band I've got rocks slash 38. That's the numbers 38 and that will lead to Ari's breakdown of the various music distributors online. And he's got, like, 15 or 20 on the list. There are so many and they change like every month something changes. A new one comes in and another one leaves, or they change their terms, their pricing, whatever. So there's no way we could release an episode and have it be up to date a year from now.

But because he has a block post about it, he can change it anytime. So it's always kept up to date to the best extent possible, and, you know, we could copy it. But what's the point? He's got a great thing going there, So shout out to our is take. And like I said, that link will be in the show. Notes at Band I've got rocks slash 38 So we've talked a little bit about the public facing tools. But then, obviously the other side of that coin would be the internal tools that you and your band used to communicate with each other.

Keep yourselves organized. This that or the other thing. The first one on the list James were mentioning G suite. You know, Google APS. I know why I consider Google Suite to be one of my very best friends, but what's your take on it? G Suite is amazing. Google App says it's known for people who don't have a business account are outlined right now is in G suite. All our episode tracking information is in Google sheets. The U T M parameters that I track are in Google sheets.

Their suite of products is just insane, and everyone has it for free with a Gmail account. So if you don't have a Gmail, make one. But personally, what I would recommend The business G suite, which is a custom domain, is $6 a month. That is so incredibly cheap. Get one band email address whoever in the band is like the main business person. Have it be their name at your band's domain name dot com. Whatever your websites u R l is that should be your email address the domain name for it, and then your business leaders name as the email address, and then they can own all the documents and all that, but still share it with everybody's personal Gmail so you can all collaborate.

And that way you have the business email, but you all still have access. There's absolutely no need toe. Have every single person in the band have a branded email. Unless you're making a considerable amount of money and sending a considerable amount of emails where it's worth it for everybody, toe have their own branded Google Suite account. One thing that I absolutely hate about Google Suite, though, is Google Drive is the worst file sharing platform aside from like mega dot NZ or we transfer that I've ever used.

I'm a big fan of a certain file sharing platform that everyone has heard of, but this is your section, Aaron, so I'm gonna let you take care of it. Well, it's something I'm a fan of to Dropbox. If you haven't heard of it, you have now. And if you haven't checked it out, you should go do that super easy to use. All I think I have to say is, you know, file structure for me, that sums it up. It's visual without trying to be crazy, sparkly or super trendy.

Or, you know, the point of the file structure isn't so that anything about it can kind of catch your eye or excite you. It should be about cleaning things up, making, uh, knowledge sharing or, you know, transfer of information from one source to another. Super simple. And in my opinion, that's exactly what it does. You know, there are versions of it where you can pay a little bit more than others, depending on what your need is. Um, but definitely go check that out. But I guess second to that before we started taping James, you showed me something super cool on file pass. Yeah.

So full disclosure. I work for the owner of File Pass, but this is not like an affiliate deal or anything. I don't get a commission. It's just a really cool file sharing site. And it's built for recording studios. And essentially, what it does is it lets you send files that other people can stream at full wave audio quality. It's not compressed down to MP three, like Dropbox streaming or soundcloud or anything like that, would Dio. And then people can leave comments on the file with a time stamp.

So rather than saying, Oh, yeah, you know, like that first kick hit in the second chorus sounds a little off to me. It's like drop a pin right there and they leave a comment in that spot, and that way you know exactly what they're talking about. And it's super useful. And the reason we're mentioning it here is that during co vid and social distancing in areas where bands can't get back together, yet it would be a really useful tool for sending demos back and forth. And you know, you could sign up as one band and have an account as the band and just send stuff back and forth and comment on each other's work, and I think it might be really beneficial.

And for those of you who are audio engineers, this thing wouldn't really apply to bands. But for audio engineers. You can actually set it up so that whoever you send the link to constrain the files and listen to them and leave feedback, but they cannot download them until they have paid for the project in full. So if you're the kind of audio engineer who's always chasing down payments and you hate it, trust me. I know that's rough. It's the worst thing in the world. Guess what? Your clients can't get their files until they pay for them, and then you're not the bad guy.

The system is because I feel like, Oh, well, Aiken, you know, pay next week. But can you just Can you just let me down? Let it be like, No, sorry, dude, The only way the system unlocks it is if you pay like that's the system. I can't do anything about that that's so simple and so useful. That's so cool. It really is, and I should clarify, like if you don't set a project balance, then people can download the files. But as soon as the balances in there, it's locked.

It's a really useful tool for audio engineers, but I think it would be a useful tool for artists as well. But the main thing really that we think everyone should have is Dropbox because, like that's what we use for the podcast, too. You know, Erin, you'll upload your garage band session to Dropbox, and then it automatically syncs. I never opened the Dropbox Web page. The only time I ever do that is if I need to update my account or something. But it just all goes right into my Mac Finder and updates automatically and stuff is there.

I use Dropbox every single day. I'm on their site, maybe once a month. It's that rare that I actually log into their site, and that's one of the reasons I love Dropbox. Google Drive just is really difficult to organize, in my opinion, and they do some weird stuff with file playback and all kinds of stuff that to me, it's just not ideal and fun. Fact. Google Drive storage actually takes away from your email storage. So, like when you're in your in box and you see Oh, I have 12 gigabytes left or whatever.

If you upload six gigabytes of stuff to Google drive, then you only have six gigabytes left in your email inbox, so it's easier just to pay for Dropbox. I think it's like $11 a month for two terabytes of storage. That's like half of what my computer holds there. The thing is, if you pay for it, you have smart sync, which means any files that you don't regularly use will be booted into the cloud so they don't take up any space on your computer. And that's another one of my favorite features.

It comes in so handy that's huge. I'll say to You know like there are options. Obviously, Google Drive does exist. A Dropbox does exist. There are others. It's the end of the day, my personal opinion to be dropbox all the way. But different systems have different strengths and weaknesses. The most important thing that I'd want to drive home to the listener, as if you're shopping around for a system to fulfill a particular need, choose one system. I've worked with too many people who, you know, use Dropbox for these things and use Google drive for these other things, and they haven't learned that, like okay, maybe, you know, you use one for editing documents in real time with other people and you use the other as your filing cabinet.

So again, just super simple if it didn't occur to you. Congratulations. I've known a lot of people who use both and it couldn't be more confusing. And it's kind of ironic. I feel like the point of both would be toe make your life simpler. But if you use more than one system, that's gonna make your life a little nuts. Yeah, definitely. The other thing is, when people send me stuff on Google Drive, Google is always like, Hey, do you want to add this to your drive? Do you wanna add this to your driving like, No, I don't want to add it to my drive because I'm listening to it, and then I'm going to close it, and I'm either going to download it or I'm gonna never look at it again, depending on what it is.

I don't want it in my drive, though, because then that just clutters up my drive. I'm gonna add it to my Dropbox, whereas if somebody sends me a dropbox link and I view it on the page, there's a little unobtrusive button that says, Hey, do you want to add this to your Dropbox like it's not like in your face being like add this, add this. Add this so another bone to pick with Dr, in my opinion. But speaking of all this cloud storage stuff, the next thing is backups.

It's really important to have backups of your work. People in the tech industry say if it doesn't exist in three places at minimum, it doesn't exist. It all. And basically what they're saying is make sure you have a backup and another backup of the original. So that's three different versions, which is what I do here. I have my computer, and then I have a time machine backup of the computer. And then I use an app called Back Blaze, which is a cloud backup service that will back up my entire computer and any USB drives or external hard drives.

Anything like that connected to it for $6 a month. That is dirt cheap. I'm sure they lose money each month on audio and video professionals who are using hundreds of gigabytes of data. I'm sure I have like five or six terabytes of data on their servers. There's no way they're making money on me, but they are making money on the people who don't use it much, and that offsets the cost. Anyway, Back blades is awesome because it backs up everything on your computer except your system and your APS.

So essentially it will back up all the stuff that you can't easily replace. You know, if you have to replace your computer, you can download all your APS again. It comes with the operating system on it, so you just get your files back and boom, you're done. You can either download them because it's cloud based or if you want, you can order hard drive or a USB stick from them, and they'll send it depending on how much stuff you have and you can either keep it and they'll charge you for it.

Or you can send it back and it's totally free. So that's another really cool feature where you know, if you don't wanna download six terabytes of data, they'll send you a hard drive with all that data on it that they have saved for you. Which, by the way, is another thing. Dropbox does have a 30 day version history for file changes, but I would not rely on that to back up your whole computer for me. I have a very specific Dropbox folder that has all my work documents in it.

But then I have back blades that backs up everything on the computer, all the external hard drives. I have connected all that stuff, and it's six bucks a month. Just pay it. It's so worth it. And just the peace of mind that it gives is incredible. And that's my little nerd out right? Rave about backing up because it's so important. And, you know, even if you're not in a band, you should be doing backups regularly because you don't wanna lose all your photos from your kid's birthday party or videos.

If your dog doing funny, cute stuff, anything like that, you can't lose that. That's sentimental value, and that's worth $6 a month. If you ask May. We've got one last bullet point here on the internal tools list, and we actually have an entire episode about this, so we're just going to go over it quickly. But it's Episode 26. How to stop losing opportunities and start communicating with teeth. Don't ask me what teeth means anymore. I don't remember the acronym we came up with for that, but that was a fun episode.

If you want to check it out, you can find it at band. I've got rocks slash 26. That was a fun episode, Aaron. That you and I did. That was only about three months ago. I think that was one of the more recent ones. I do remember the acronym. 10 points for the acronym. Do you actually remember what it stands for? No, I do not. Okay, that was my issue. I can't remember what it stands for, but anyway, if you want to check it out, just go to band.

I've got rocks slash 26. Or find it in your favorite podcast app. This little section here is gonna be all about communication tools. So, Aaron, why don't you take it away, man? And, uh, let's close this episode out. Eso real quick. We've split this between, uh, two different sub categories. The first being text base. Eso old school, obviously email, new school, similar premise, slack or discord Sort of breaks that idea up and do a couple of different ways and kind of rearranges it and puts it all in front of you all at the same time.

And then obviously group messages, whether it's Facebook or I, message or WhatsApp. And then in addition to that, we've also got voice and video based communication. Basically everything else, obviously Google voice and then things like Zoom, Skype discord again. Facebook is starting to get into that, I guess, has gotten into that WhatsApp again. And things like FaceTime super simple things that work well, and they work without much effort. You know, there's not really a lot to learn. And whether you're in a band or you're an audio engineer or, you know, a lighting person, whatever your thing is, you're going to get a lot of use out of those tools both on and off of the job. Absolutely.

And I think the main thing to keep in mind is that you can use all of these tools, although I wouldn't recommend it. But there's a context for everything. Slack is great internally emails when you're talking to people outside your group. Google Voice I love it for not having my actual cell phone number out there if somebody has called me. They've probably called me on Google Voice because it's not my actual cell phone number. Zoom Skype those air awesome as well as discord for seeing each other.

But if you're doing text based stuff, I would definitely say slack because it allows threads. Discord Doesn't Facebook WhatsApp facetime? I message all those they work. But for internal business stuff, I would stick to a business tool like we switched over the podcast from Facebook Messenger to Slack just because it was so difficult to find stuff that we've been talking about. Now we're in slack, and it's much easier. We have threads. We can search easily. We have different channels. It's really been beneficial. And I'm definitely feeling more comfortable within slack because I know we can just find stuff quickly.

That's really the main benefit to it. So to sum things up, every artist out there should have thes areas covered at minimum a website, a primary social media as well, the secondary Social Media Link Tree or Jamaat UL for the Social Media bios une email list on online merch store and a digital distributor. Internal tools. You should be using Google APS or G suite should have some kind of file sharing software back ups, which again you should have two backups, one on site on a drive and one off site via back plays or a similar solution.

But back place is the best one I found, and then APs to communicate both via text and with voice or video. I know this is one of those episodes that's just an advice buffet, and we're probably going to hear people saying, Hey, you know what? That doesn't quite make sense for me, so I'm not going to do that. But as long as it gets you thinking and gets people to implement a system of some sort, even if it's not the exact tool we mentioned, as long as you have a tool that does a similar thing in that type of system, you're good to go.

So if any of you have any favorite tools that we didn't mention or any favorite tools that we did not mention, we would love to hear about it. We'd love to talk about it, so go check out the group. That's where we would jump into a discussion like that. It's better dot band slash group. Again, it's better dot band slash group, and we're looking forward to hearing from you that is it for another episode of the band. I've podcast. Thank you so much for listening to us pretty much every single week.

We haven't missed an episode since December, so we're going on nine months of podcasting. Non stop. If you do have tools that you want to share that you find useful or aren't useful, whether they're on this list or not. Like Aaron said, please head on over to our Facebook group, which you can find at better dot band slash group and let us know your thoughts. We'll be back with another episode next Tuesday at 6 a.m. All about booking your first show and show booking at a kit.

Now it might seem like a weird time to do a show on that topic, but don't worry. We'll be talking about live streaming gigs as well. Thanks again for listening. We hope you have an awesome week. Stay well, stay healthy. And, of course, as always, keep Moroccan