You want to make it as a musician, you know you need fans - but, stop - WHY do you want fans? Well, obviously, you want fans because it is exciting to have someone like your music, but you also want fans because you want them to buy stuff from you. Music, concert tickets, merch - all that jazz. You also want fans because fans beget fans - yes, your fans are your evangelists, running around town, telling everyone, "you HAVE to hear this song," dragging their friends and family out to your shows and throwing your music on at their parties.
These are all great and wonderful and necessary things for you as a musician. In fact, building a rabid fanbase can trump any amount of press you can get. Just ask bands like Belle and Sebastian who built a devoted - nay, obsessed - grassroots following before they even got played on the radio. So, how do you get your fans to get engaged and stay engaged in your music? By making it easy for them, of course.
It's common sense on paper, for sure, but what about in practice? Are you making being your fan the cakewalk it should be? Consider the following:
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Are you giving your fans your music in the format in which they want it? This really means providing options. If, for instance, many of your fans want CDs, it's not your job to insist they get hip to the notion that CDs are dead. Give 'em what they want, and if you can't afford to give 'em what they want - like, say, super heavy vinyl - then look for clever ways to use the process to your advantage. Run a funding campaign or get fans to vote on a special vinyl only tracklisting and run the voting while you're putting together the cash, etc, etc - these kinds of ideas satisfy your fans' demands while giving them one more reason to stay engaged with you.
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Are you regularly updating your website with news? Some musicians are incredibly verbose on their websites and some musicians can't really get into it, and that's OK. The point here isn't really to make sure you log in every day and say, "had eggs for lunch." If you're comfortable being all chatty and social, fine, but if you're not, you don't have to force it. The point here really is to keep your fans updated on the music front, so even if you're the quiet sort, make sure you log in often enough to post a "working on new songs" or what have you so that the website doesn't look stale when people navigate to it. Give them something to talk about.
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If you have a message board or forum on your website, and your fans find it more difficult to become a registered member of the group than they do accessing their online banking account, then you're doing something wrong. Yes, yes, you don't want spammers and all that jazz, but there is a line. Invest in some forum moderation (your most dedicated fans will likely be more than happy to play message board police) instead of trying to make accessing your message board akin to getting nuclear code clearance.
Those are just a few examples of the ways you can and should make being your fan easy work. If you're a musician, chances are you're fans of more than a few musicians yourself. Think about your own fan experiences - what you loved, what you didn't get, and what was too much trouble to be bothered. These experiences are the perfect road map to creating a smooth sailing experience for your own fans.
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