Iron Thrones received a radio promotion campaign as part of winning the No Label Needed contest and series. On a marketing level, radio promotion compliments a PR campaign very nicely. It’s all part of the puzzle to see a band online or in print and then to be able to hear the songs on the radio.

The first obvious hurdle is to find out which radio stations play metal. There is only one 24-hour radio station that plays metal, but there are plenty of college and commercial radio stations that play metal in blocks. Commercial stations will usually have one show per week, like KROX/Austin, for example. College radio stations may have block shows, include metal in their regular programming, or both. And of course, there are national outlets, like SiriusXM’s “Hard Attack” and cable service Music Choice that play metal all the time as well.

Similar to a PR campaign, you need to know who your fanbase is and be available to them. Metalheads know where to find music – whether it’s on on the internet, magazines, clubs or the radio.

Getting your music played on the radio isn’t an easy task, but it’s one that you can take into your own hands by learning who the DJ’s and music directors are in your town. You can find out as easily as going into shows or calling the radio station. Everything starts in your home market. For Iron Thrones these stations would be commercial stations like KXXR (93X) and college stations like KFAI and WMCN

As you tour the next best step is to promote your band in the markets you’re playing. Club promoters can often help as they work with many of these radio stations to promote their shows. In addition to attempting to get airplay, you can also try to do an interview to promote an upcoming show and possibly give away tickets. As with every facet of promotion, every fan you make from promoting yourself at radio should come with you on your career as a band.

In the interest of full disclosure, Metal Insider’s parent company, The Syndicate, has had a radio promotion division for over 12 years and uses all of the techniques described above.

Here’s a list of some suggestions for getting your band’s website up and running. On the website for Iron Thrones, we did more advanced coding by creating a customized Wordpress theme based off the blank 3 column theme from refueled.net. The bare bones theme allowed us to easily add and subtract features as we needed them

Below I break down a few different options in various categories that I think bands will find useful. If you have any positive / negative experience with some software that you are using for your band, feel free to leave in the comments. This is meant to be a stepping stone for people who don’t know where to start, if you have any questions leave in the comments and we will try to answer them for you.

WEBSITES

tumblr.com
Free and easy to use and customize if you have some html skills. Allows you to easily update your fans and connect your site posts with Twitter and Facebook. Also has a community feature so that other tumblr users can follow you. Another plus is that the free themes are better designed and look more modern than Blogspot and other competitors.

Costs: Free + price of domain to map. Some themes may have additional charges.

Wordress.com
A version of wordpress that is hosted on wordpress.com and can be set up in a few steps. Allows users to easily update blog posts

Costs: Free with additional add ons for fees.

Wordpress.org
This is what we used for IronThrones.com. This is open source software that you set up on your own hosting/database. This is by far the most robust solution in comparison to the other we are discussing here. Similar options would be to use Joomla or Drupal which have slightly more of a learning curve for non developers.

Recommended Plugins: Gigpress, Vipers Video QuickTags, WP Stats, All In One SEO, Google Sitemap, Audio Player, Next Gen Gallery and Various Mailing list plugins

Costs: Free software but you need web hosting and your own domain. Depending on the template you use that could cost between $0 – $50 on average.

flavors.me/
Easy to set up / super clean and professional looking websites.

Costs: $20 a year

ONLINE STORES

Storenvy.com – Free and easy to use, just upload a header image, change colors, add your product images/details and you have a classy looking store in a fairly short amount of time. Offers lots of good statistics and lets users pay via credit card or PayPal. A huge plus is that it has a Facebook application to add your store to your Facebook fan page for users to shop your store and the site also features community features so that others can follow your store and keep up to date with your new products

Costs: Free! you just incur PayPal fees when you sell something

BigCartel.com – Similar to Storenvy in that it has an easy use interface that allows you to do customization to the code to style the store as you want it. Storenvy seems to have a lot more features now and a lower price tag, though BigCartel has been around a few years longer and many are familiar with it.

Big Cartel is set to be launching a digital download system soon. It is currently in beta testing.

Costs: Free for up to five items then monthly fees kick in as well as PayPal fees

BandCamp.com – Best choice for digital sales. Can offer your songs in a variety of digital formats at a set price, a sliding scale (like Radiohead) or for an email address. The site gives you 200 digital download codes to distribute for people to redeem free downloads. More codes can be purchased at a very reasonable price. The site also allows for you to sell physical products with immediate digital download only downside is that it is not well suited to selling your shirts and hoodies alongside your music.

Costs: Free + charges for PayPal fees and additional download codes if desired.

MAILING LIST

Mailchimp.com – I recommend mail chimp because it has a simple interface and they allow you to send up to 500 emails a month for free. Perfect for when you’re building your fan base and once you have enough fans on the list to where it will cost you the monthly fee, you should hopefully be making some money as a band to cover the cost. There are free open source options like Pommo or PHPlist which require you to do development and maintain them which for the most part is not worth the hassle.

Also useful Ping.fm and ArtistData.com to use for updating your site and social networks at the same time.

This being the No Label Needed series, we could show how bands could screen print their own shirts but truth be told, if you’re an active and touring band or you have full time jobs that don’t give you the freedom to print your own merch, you might need some help. Much like the chat with Will and Machine from The Machine shop, we’re taking you inside the process, and MerchNow – as you can see from the video below, was happy to walk through the steps that go into creating merch.

As with everything else in this series, Iron Thrones oversaw the process to make sure everything was as they wanted.

Both t-shirt and hoodie are available individually or as part of pre-sale bundles at the Iron Thrones webstore via MerchNow.

Contest winner Iron Thrones unveiled their new website and MySpace designs this week to coincide with a pre-sale of The Wretched Sun, the EP they recorded at the Machine Shop as a result of winning the contest. Check out the designs below or go to the respective sites.

The next No Label Needed video & blog will be from The Syndicate with tips on how to build your own professional looking website and merch store.

Web design by The Syndicate

MySpace Design by Sons of Nero

Why does Benjamin self-manage?  That’s the kinda guy he is and always has been.

Is taking things into your own hands the best thing for your band, or would you feel better trusting your career with professional management?

We’ll take a look and listen to vocalist Adam Clemans screaming.   We’ll also hear from guitarist Steve Henningsgard about not screaming at times.

Once again, Will Putney continues to oversee things in the studio for Machine Shop Productions.

If you missed the Justin TV chat with Machine and Will Putney from the Machine Shop you can still watch it on the No Label Needed series page.

If you missed the Justin TV chat with Machine and Will Putney from the Machine Shop you can still watch it on the No Label Needed series page.

We start with a look at drum tracking with Peter Clark of Iron Thrones and Will Putney.

The chat is going to be with the crew of Machine Shop Productions. This includes Will Putney (Reign Supreme, Upon a Burning Body) who produced and recorded Iron Thrones, the No Label Needed, contest winner and “Machine” (Lamb of God, King Crimson, Clutch) owner of MSP. They will be discussing and answering questions about their experience with Iron Thrones and all that it exemplifies. They will discuss the idea of the “Do It Yourself” attitude and approach to making and breaking a band in 2010 and beyond. They will also share insider techniques and secrets to DIY recording with basic consumer recording gear.

Iron Thrones was able to apply marketing and imaging lessons from their shopping trip with Maria Brink and Blasko as well as their discussion with Big Machine Media.

We’ve consolidated a 12 hour shoot into 2 minutes for you so you get an idea of how the day went.

Head over to Iron Thrones MySpace to see the first picture chosen to represent the band.