Customer Reviews

Buzz Your MP3

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

...Chapter One (Getting Started) is a short, but important introduction to this concept of "buzzing." The author's voice is particular interesting. He sounds like he's just sitting around chatting with some friends. I find that makes a textbook like this much more enjoyable.

Chapter Two (Don't Read this workbook!) explains that Buzz Your Mp3 isn't a book to just read, you need to interact with it, try some of the ideas, and use it to brainstorm your own plans. It's an interactive book, basically. I think this is good advice for any self help book.

Chapter Three (Offline Buzz Tips) is where we really get into the meat of things. The author lists and explains over thirty tips for promoting music via gigs, radio air play, your local community, etc. Stuff in the real world, not on the Internet. I found these tips to be very helpful. A little more explanation and examples could have helped, but there is certainly enough information here to get you started.

Chapter Four (Online Buzz Tips) is a lot like chapter three, only the author focuses solely on promoting work online. A lot of good ideas. More examples would have been good, but this is a good starting point.

Chapter Five (The Buzz Plan) explains how to take the seventy or so tips in the previous chapters and build a game plan (steps you will follow to promote your music). Maybe you'll start by arranging gigs and giving out freebies and go from there. Or maybe you'll start by building a website and joining listserves. That kind of stuff. Very informative.

Chapter Six (Brainstorming) is a short chapter about brainstorming. The key, according to the author, is to brainstorm with a group of people, whether online or offline. I think he is right. Three minds are always much better than one. You'd be surprised what ideas you can come up with in a group that you'd never think of on your own.

Chapter Seven (Dos and Donts of Buzz) explains what not to do when promoting -- spamming and the like. Make sure you read this chapter before you do anything else!

Chapter Eight (Top Publicists give advice) is really neat, but I think it was originally meant for a book on promoting books. Nonetheless, their explanations of what they do is very illuminating. Well worth the cost of this book, actually.

Chapter Nine (Other Musicians Got Buzz) is one of the best chapters in the book! The author allows a lot of bands discuss their buzz plans and how they're promoting themselves. There are some really neat ideas here.

Chapter Ten (Now is Now) is one of my favorite chapters. The author obviously really likes this band and he walks you through how they got their self-released single played all over the world while spending very little money. The band is called NOW-is-NOW, by the way.

Chapter Eleven (Rock Band Live's Fan Club) is a pretty long interview with the director of the fan club for the band Live (Lightning Crashes, I Alone, Selling the Drama, The Dolphin's Cry, Overcome). Lots of neat stuff here, especially if you are a Live fan. But this will show you what happens with any fan club or street team.

Chapter Twelve (The Art of Web Promotion) discusses promoting on the web in general. These is just the basics, but it is a good start.

Chapter Thirteen (Finals Thoughts) is a nice little chapter that ties everything up. There are also two appendixes that promote the Buzz message board and mailing list.

All in all, I have to say I enjoyed this little eBook. I hope there is a second edition with even more interviews and tips (my favorite parts of this book) and a print edition would be nice, too. I highly recommend Buzz Your Mp3. It is well worth the price. I wish there was a print version, but the ebook was very easy to work with and it runs via a free program you can download here at Amazon...

This is surely a book for every independent artist who chooses not to accept the path of going through established labels to get thier music out there.

There are some GREAT ideas in this book which I found incredibly useful to jump start my career. I always hated the channels I had to go through just to get my music heard by the masses. With the help of this book, I no longer have to. Thanks, Brian!

Clearly, the Buzz Your MP3 "street team" is writing glowing online reviews to help buzz this book.

No secrets or insider tips here, just a hackneyed combination of obvious ideas (i.e. make a website with press clips and gigs), and hare-brained schemes (start an "e-mail tag" where you send an mp3 to someone and get them to send it to 5 more people).

The pervasive marketing jargon is almost stomach turning, and equally upsetting is the author's use of the word "sincere" (as in, "make sure your e-mail to blah blah reviewer is sincere") to mean "sincere-sounding". Obviously, when you are promoting your music, everything you do has a degree of insincerity in it. Better to come to terms with that.

This is a nice little book. Maybe a little too short, but it has all these chapters: what buzz is, tips for promoting offline and online, an interview with Friends of Live the offical fan club for Live, brainstorming better (some tricks and tips), rules for promoting online and the best web promotion tricks, quick steps to starting your promotions, stories about bands that have made their names promoting via the web, a little story about the band nowisnow, and something from these NY publicists which felt like it was more for books but really worked for music, too.

I actually met the author once, and he's a pretty good guy. Probably can't play a guitar to save his life, but he knows how to promote stuff. Seriously. He started PR work when he was in high school and we all were screwing around with metal mag! He's worked for publishers and authors (and bands) and he designs cool websites and stuff like that. I would have hired him to promote my music if he wasn't so expensive but now I have his book! Ha!

The author sometimes posts free PR tips on his website and the last time I checked, one of them was about writing free articles to promote your music...

I read this electronic book when it first came out and it totally changed the way I promote my music. I've sold over 1000 copies of my CD in the last year, and a lot of those sales came from my mailing list and my website -- which I built using tips from this book. I didn't write a review back then because a lot of good stuff had already been said about it here, but then I read some dude trashing the book on a message board. Why? Well, it turns out HE ALSO WROTE a book on promoting music. Whatever.

Buzz Your Mp3 is packed with a lot of great information, a neat story about NOW is NOW, and an awesome interview about the band +live+ with the director of their fanclub!

To summarize: 5/5, 5 stars, Buzz Your mp3 rocks hard!

This was a very well done guide to promoting music. My son has a band that he's trying to promote and I bought this ebook for him last week. He was very excited about the ideas in this book and he's trying some of them as I write this. He's already arranged two gigs that he's very happy about. I highly recommend this guide!

Brian does a good job of letting you know the nuts and bolts of the Buzz!

Your recordings shouldn't sit idle. Make them work for you! Let the world know what you have to offer.

You will find it all here. A good read as well as some really great interviews.

It looks like the publisher has a whole series of "Buzz Your..." titles, and it looks like minimal effort was put into customizing the content of this book for the promotion of digital music. Although there's a bit of general commonsense advice, this book is really just an ad for the buzzyour.com website.

It's so poorly edited there are spelling errors, despite the authors admonition to spell-check every document you produce while promoting your product. There are even contradictory statements within one page! E.g., on the top of p. 22 he states "Fliers work, and they're economical." Later on the same page, he says, "...pass out free tapes or CDs... This works better than flyers, which most people will throw away or ignore." (Yes, he spelled it both "flier" and "flyer".)

Save your $9 and find another book.

In all seriousness, this was a fast read (it's only 100 pages), but it was packed with great ideas and some neat articles too. (NOW is NOW is one of my fav new bands, but people who only like Britney Spears and Boy Bands probably haven't heard of them yet. Probably 'cause they Rock!)

Some of the material was pretty generic and could work for promoting anything, but there were so many ideas I had never thought of before and I think I'm pretty good at this self-promotion game. Our shows (bars and parks -- park shows are a neat idea I got from this book) have been packed as of late, and our self-pressed CDs are moving a little faster than they were last week.

Thanks to the Buzz team. You were a big help!

This book is short, but packed with a lot of great tips and stories. The chapters include quick steps to getting started, bands that have made their names promoting via the web, tips for promoting offline and online, an interview with the director of Friends of Live, the fan club for the rock band Live, brainstorming better tips, and an entire section filled with top publicists tips. Although some of it seemed to be common sense, there was some awesome ideas in this book. My only complaint was a lack of rap musicians examples, but that could be fixed in the next edition. Check it out ASAP!