My Favorite Resources for DIY Artists
Whenever I meet a new indie artist, I always get excited tingles hearing about their favorite software and tools. Here are a few of my favorites!
1. CANVA — Images are essential for sharing information online, but making good ones can be hard. Canva is basically Photoshop lite, it's an amazing resource for making tour posters, promo images, instagram posts... all sorts of stuff that you need to have as an artist. It's cheaper than hiring a graphic designer for every single little picture. (It's actually free.) There's also an app for your phone!
2. TEXTIFUL — I could go on forever about the power of a big mailing list (and in fact I do, in my book). But how do you grow that list? Textiful is an awesome resource - at concerts, you give your fans a phone number, they text that phone number, and then they can join your list. You can give them incentives like free mp3 downloads, and Textiful connects with a lot of mailing list softwares. We've *just* switched over to Textiful from a service called Skaflash which did the same thing but sadly shut down.
3. GOOGLE FORMS — Google Forms are extremely easy-to-set-up forms that are free, and we've used them for everything. On Google Forms, we set up first our mailing list, we created our fan club, we plan our tours, we take reservations for shows, we poll our fans... Google Forms is good for everything. It's a lot easier to use than asking people for individual emails when setting up something big.
4. ENDICIA — Endicia is shipping software (similar to, and now owned by, Stamps.com), it's cheap, and it's never served us wrong. You can print sheets of stamps or individual labels, you can ship international, and you don't have to wait in line at the post office. It's great.
5. BANDCAMP — Bandcamp is a low-cost place to post and sell your music. My favorite thing about Bandcamp is that you can make music available for free, and gather e-mail addresses from folks in exchange for a free song. They also have the best download code setup, so a lot of folks use it to fulfill their Kickstarter-funded album pre-orders. And they allow people to download music in lossless formats, which nerds like.
6. IGNITE — Ignite is a tour-planning godsend: they help musicians get free/low-cost hotel rooms, in exchange for writing reviews of the hotels. They've cut our tour costs DRASTICALLY, plus we've stayed in some real cool places.
