Tumblr Improves As Tool For Musicians & Marketers
Microblogging service Tumblr has been around since 2007 yet, though a variety of corporate entities now use it, Tumblr still feels fresh and youthful. A number of recent developments have increased its usefulness for marketing music and related content including the introduction of the Tumblr share button, their integration with Soundcloud and their creation of new discovery features.
Tumblr is a relatively simple microblogging service that's designed for quick content sharing. It offers the opportunity for musicians and marketers to become micromedia companies that regularly share bits of content with fans and friends for redistribution. If you haven't yet embraced this well-established concept, Tumblr is a great tool for learning to microchunk media content and to increase your web presence with Tumblr's greatest micropublishing tool, the Reblog button.
The Reblog button has allowed Tumblr to become a community of republishers who share content found on other tumblogs. The introduction of the Tumblr button facilitates the reblogging process from any participating website thus expanding the process beyond Tumblr's domain. It is also a tool well worth adding to non-tumblogs to encourage the injection of your content into the land of Tumblr.
Tumblr's integration with SoundCloud was a great move because SoundCloud users are already microchunking content and making it available to embed on other sites. This integration also increases the usefulness of SoundCloud's many sharing options and apps.
Tumblr has also been creating a variety of ways to discover tumblogs. Earlier this year, Tumblr created a tag directory called the Explore page with a link in their navigation bar. They also recently introduced the Tumblr Spotlight that features select blogs by category. You can get info on recommending blogs and categories here.
If you're not a Tumblr user, check out Why Everyone Loves Tumblr for more info on their features. If you're already a Tumblr user, be sure to keep an eye on their Staff Blog for future developments accessible via the What's New button on the nav bar.
Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance: World Dance News is his primary web project.
My honest and biased opinion is that musician’s websites should have a blog, but musician’s websites should not BE a blog.
I basically agree. Musicians need more than most blogs provide. It’s been interesting to see how many web publishers have used Tumblr as a secondary outpost and I should have made it clearer that’s what I had in mind.
I think the best is to incorporate both the static music website AND the blog to keep people coming in. Have your musician website, with certain services (blog, store, signup) embedded as part of your site, but hosted elsewhere.
In my case, I use Tumblr (blog.marcfarre.com), Bandcamp (music.marcfarre.com) and Mail Chimp for contacts (as well as Flickr for slide shows, etc.).
It works like a charm! I have used one-stop-shop services before, like Reverb Nation, but dislike the cookie-cutter aspect — and the fact that none of their offerings are best of breed.
Tumblr simply put pisses me off. All it does is make people lazy from publishing REAL content on a REAL blog. Twitter is useful because it helps you share links and whatnot, but Tumblr is in the middle of the road between what a blog should be and what Twitter should be and is just overkill.
I recently had a client ask me to change his website completely over to a tumblog and how his PR people are talking about how “it’s the new twitter” and whatnot.
Just because something is easy to use doesn’t mean the content generated is going to be good. Musicians need to focus on the content and keeping it interesting, and do so on their own site and not some new thing they don’t own or have total control of.
Now every artist who reads this is going to say “we gotta have a “tumblr” just like they “gotta be on twitter” or needed to “be on myspace” and will set an account up and do nothing productive with it.
I hear what you’re saying but, though I could have been clearer about Tumblr being an additional tool rather than the only one needed, you’re basically saying that this post will encourage people to do things that this post does not advocate.
Sorry about your frustrations with people’s foolishness but that’s not going away no matter what I write!