Most musicians I speak with about the idea of taking their businesses Online have no clue where to start. The Internet is flooded with sites offering musicians fancy tools and features to help with everything from touring to ringtone sales. It seems impossible to keep up with all the new sites coming up, almost daily. Selling music and it’s ancillary products Online is becoming big business.

With so many choices, how does an artist pick the company that will support his/her interests most effectively? There are several factors to consider when deciding to invest any time, effort, or money into a new venture. First of all, you want to make sure the company is going to be around for a while and isn’t just a site developed for the sole purpose of driving ad dollars. Who started the company? Why? Where are they headed? What is their basic philosophy about music in the new world? When considering sites to build profiles on or create associations with your band or new record you must consider other factors. Sometimes it is the technological expertise that will make a site a winner and other times, as we have seen with Myspace and You Tube, it is about the community associated with the site.

I’ve been researching these sites, new and old, for months. From my research I have come up with various lists to help any artist navigate the mysterious road of self-promotion. I will be publishing different lists over the next few weeks. As I find new sites that I feel will be beneficial, I will post those with links and explainations as well. Please let me know if you are aware of a site that I have not included or if you have not had a good experience with one that I have included. The lists are always growing and changing.
The first lists are Calendars and Search Engines.

Calendars

These are important for two reasons: They allow people to find your event through a variety of FREE listings and they increase your Search Engine Optimization. The more listings you have online the easier it is for people to find you.

Upcoming - Upcoming.org is a social events calendar driven by people just like you.

Eventful - Find events that you and your friends care about, share and syndicate your discoveries with friends, family, and contacts, search the future to receive alerts about events that haven’t even been announced yet, create grassroots campaigns to demand that desired events happen

Myspace Events – Event calendar on Myspace

Media search engines are growing in popularity. Many of them simply crawl the web for content, but some of them are built on content uploaded by users. The top picks for user-generated content are below.

Blinkx – Video search engine

Google video – Video search engine

Live Music Net – Find live concert video, sessions, online radio and more

Mpeg-Search – MP3 search engine with free downloads

Music IP - Unique music matching technology defines relationships between sets of music based on acoustic traits and characteristics

Podziner – Search engine for audio and video podcasts

You Tube – Video search engine