Centralize Your Metadata!
As I scour the internet searching for a single unknown artist whose music I LOVE, I come across one thing… NOTHING!
Some non-existent social media profiles, random names on Soundcloud, unsure profiles on Instagram, the only thing I’m thinking is, who the hell is this person and how the hell do I find their profile to follow them!?
This sort of thing happens far too often, more times than I would like to encounter. There’s only one reason this is the case, the artist doesn’t have their metadata centralized.
No links from one social media account to the next, no email, website, or hell even an accurate profile image!
In this episode, we’re going to discuss how you can prevent your name from being a void on the internet. Learn how important it is to have you metadata centralized!
What You’ll Learn:
- What metadata is
- Why you need to update your metadata
- What opportunities you could be throwing away
- How to update your metadata
and much more!
Episode Links
Electronic Dance Money Episode 031 – What EDM Producers Can Learn From McDonald’s and Their Business Model – https://enviousaudio.com/episode31
Electronic Dance Money Booklist – https://enviousaudio.com/booklist
Book Links
The E-Myth Revisited – https://amzn.to/3sSroTa
Automatic Episode Transcript — Please excuse any errors, not reviewed for accuracy
Speaker matching in progress…
Hey guys, welcome to electronic dance money, your number one business resource for making money as electronic musicians and producers.
Hey, what’s up everyone, welcome back to a brand new episode of electronic dance money. I’m your host, Cristian conceito. Hope you guys are doing well. We’re gonna be hanging out talking about meta data today, because I’ve noticed a pretty consistent trend across the board. For most producers, big or small or medium doesn’t really matter what your size is, it’s difficult to find most people online, which it shouldn’t be difficult. It’s one of the most basic easiest things that you should be able to maintain and centralize and make sure all of your information is up to date. If your information it’s not up to date, it’s gonna be difficult to find who you are, figure out what you do, and how to get connected with you. The reason why I came up with the idea for this episode is one thing that I tend to do every once in a while is cold outreach. So what that essentially means is I’ll flip through SoundCloud or beatport, or possibly even Bandcamp, looking for new artists that I think I’d be interested in working with and reaching out to them and starting a conversation with that. Now as I do this, especially using things like beep or, or possibly even band camp, what I have to do is I have to search for the artists name around the internet on either SoundCloud, Facebook, Instagram, sometimes even Spotify, but that doesn’t even help that much. Because there’s there’s no social media links. And so when I’m searching by these names, if I google a name, and we’ve talked about coming up with a good name, one, one thing about having a good name is it’s you can Google it. And you’re the first thing that pops up with that name. And it’s easy to remember. And it’s Google when I start searching for people’s names. And I spend five to 10 minutes tracking this person down and then I find maybe I find a Facebook page that might be them or possibly even a SoundCloud page, I’m not 100% confident because you know if I find the track on beatport, but they haven’t upload the track to SoundCloud, well, now I don’t know if this is actually the right person or not. And then additionally, if I find them on Soundcloud or Facebook or Instagram, there’s no other links leading to any other social media platforms or their beatport account or their Spotify account for me to figure out who they are. If this is the right person, I find this more often than not more often. Am I finding people without links to their other pages or some sort of like verification of Okay, I heard the song over here is this the right person, that’s a major, major issue, you’re creating a net, when you do do that you’re creating unnecessary friction for people to possibly find you and locate you and want to start a conversation with you, regardless of what their intentions are, whether they’re fan or label or whatever. So how you connect all of your accounts, really does matter. And there’s multiple ways that people can search for you to find you on all these different platforms. And there’s a lot of platforms. So it’s important to keep this up to date if you don’t have your accounts linked to each other. So let’s take SoundCloud for instance, when you create a SoundCloud account, there’s a section under your account settings where you can connect all of your other social media accounts you can connect Facebook, Instagram, I think even like MySpace and LinkedIn, you can create custom links on there for your website or any other place Spotify, whatever it is, you can link all this stuff and it shows on the right hand side of your profile.
That all that stuff should be up today especially on Soundcloud because they give you that option. Now, things like your Facebook page, I believe you can also add custom links you can add Instagram accounts, all that all that stuff. Instagram, it’s a little more difficult, you need to have something like a link tree, because you can only have one website link in your profile. That’s totally fine. Have a link tree in there and have all your different social media profiles in there that people can connect to. But everything needs to be connected. And if it isn’t connected, let’s say let’s say I find you on Soundcloud and I hang out mostly on Instagram.
But you don’t have your Instagram account linked on there and you do have an Instagram account. Well now I’m gonna go well, okay, I guess I’ll just follow them on Soundcloud and hopefully I’ll see more stuff of them.
Um,
in
you, you’re creating this friction. Now, some of you might be saying, well, they can just search my name on that Instagram platform, or on Facebook. Yes, they can search for your name.
But the issue with that is, how do I know if I’m, if I’m, if I found the right profile? How do I know this is you? Or how do I know that this isn’t someone else. And that that brings us into another issue that we’re going to discuss in just a minute. But you need to create as less friction as possible for people to find you. So if there’s that link, then I know, okay, if I click this link, then in your profile pulls up, I know this is you, you’re linking to your profile. Now, the other thing is to make sure that none of your links are broken, because I found that a lot of times do people have all their social media links, but maybe they’re they rebranded or they have a different profile now, or whatever the case is, but now the link is broken, maybe they deleted one of their social media accounts, but it’s still listed in so I click that, and it sends me to a blank page that Instagram or Facebook says, Oh, this page can’t be found. Well, now you’ve made it even more difficult. And I’m just gonna exit and go on to the next thing that I’m wanting to do. Or now that I’m on Instagram, I don’t see your profile, I’m gonna hit the home button, and I’m gonna start scrolling through Instagram. So you need to make sure that you can, and this is essentially like, kind of like what we’ve talked about in the past with the different vocabulary and items of marketing and business, but you’re capturing the lead here, right, you’ve got them at the top of the funnel, when they found you on SoundCloud. Now, they want to go deeper in the funnel, and they want to follow you, but now you’re restricting that access, and they’re gonna forget about you, especially if it’s, like I said, their favorite platform to be on if they want to be on Instagram, and they want to find you, so they can follow you and look at your stuff on Instagram, but you don’t have that linked. Well. Now, I’m probably not going to ever follow up with you or listen to your music anymore. Right? You have to have all this stuff in place you you have to make sure everything’s linked together. So let’s go back to what I was just discussing about having
having people search for your name on different platforms, not knowing if you are the person that I found on Instagram, or Tiktok, or Facebook, or whatever the platform is, if you don’t own your name online, then you’re leaving the door open for someone else to take your name within your own your same genre. If you don’t have all of the social media accounts set up for your artists name, and they’re all similar, they all match well, you’re opening up the door for someone to maybe they maybe maybe there’s a piece of shit out there that finds your account on Soundcloud listens to your music likes, your name realizes you don’t really own the name anywhere they search the name on Google, nothing really pops up, they don’t find a Facebook account, Instagram account, well now that leaves the door open for this piece of sheperson. To go, I’m going to take that name, start writing similar music. And now I’m going to own all the accounts because I’m going to create all these and now that you don’t have access to that username. Now you’ve made, they’ve made your job much more difficult they’ve made finding you from other random people online, extremely difficult, because they’re probably going to find this other person first.
You have to have the real estate in your name across all platforms. And this gets into searching for your name online, depending on how you rank on different platforms when your name is searched, or how many followers you have, or engagement interaction, all that stuff. When you Google your name, different things are gonna pop up. If you rank pretty high on Instagram, you have a unique name, you have a decent mount of followers and someone Google’s your name, and maybe you don’t have a website set up and that SEO is not in place. Well now the SEO is going to recognize Oh, this person on Instagram, Instagram is a trusted website. They’re really well known this person with this name is very unique. They have a lot of followers, they have a lot of engagement. So if someone’s searching for the same, they’re probably looking for this Instagram account, they’re going to rank it up at the top. And this is one of the reasons why you should have that name consistently across all platforms so that when that name is searched, all of your top profiles will be pulled up Facebook pages, Spotify profiles, Instagram pages, YouTube channels, tik tok accounts. It doesn’t matter what it is, if you have that same name consistently across the board. Well all of your accounts are going to be pulled up within that search list. You’re going to make
it very easy for people to be able to follow you. And check out what you’re doing and stay up to date with, with all of your new music or new content you’re creating or new tours, whatever it is, people will be able to click on all those profiles follow the ones that they want. And they’ll know Okay, this person’s, it’s consistent, I know this is the right person, because all the same profile names have popped up for all these different platforms, you look more trusted, you look more reliable. And this gets into making sure like, like I said, your your username, needs to follow the same way across all all platforms. And what I mean by that is, if you search in, you know, go to instagram.com, slash Envious Audio, my accounts going to pull up, if you go to Facebook and search facebook.com slash Envious Audio, my account should get pulled up. But if you do that, it doesn’t. Because there’s a nother business in Washington state that does Car Audio named Envious Audio, and they have the they own that user name slash Envious Audio. So unfortunately, I have to tweak that to Envious Audio one, but if you search soundcloud.com, slash Envious Audio, my account pulls up, you have to make sure all of your links are the same, or as much of the same as you can possibly have them. And this is something to look into different people who might have similar names, already have that link associated. So come up with something else, you know, music, or you know, artists name, music, or I am, whatever your artist name is, make sure all that stuff is pretty much the same across the board, because you never know if someone searches that way for accounts. And I know people do do that occasionally to see if they can find the right account. So if you make it very easy for people to do that, again, it’s just so much easier to find your account for different people to figure out if you’re the right person, if they want to get into contact with you. And like what I was saying in terms of SEO, SEO does recognize for these similar patterns across the board. So the more similar patterns you have for this sort of thing, the higher you’re going to rank the more SEO is going to realize and if you don’t know what SEO is, its its search engine optimization. It’s how search engines like DuckDuckGo, Google being they all determine who is a trusted source. And if what you’re typing in that search platform, whatever they show the top results for that’s going to be the most accurate information that’s presented. It’s all based off of search engine optimization, which there’s a number of things that go into that, we’ll have to do an entire episode on SEO, but that SEO ranking is going to determine if you show up at the top for something like that. If you search something for, let’s say what I do with my business, EDM mixing and mastering service, the first few search results will be ads. But everything below that will be search engine optimized platforms that rank the best for that keyword. And there’s like I said a number of things that go in that that’s why you want a Google playable name that’s original. Because the more of these platforms, you set up these account names with all the same names. Google’s going to realize, okay, this is very unique. If someone searches for this name, we’re going to show all these platforms because it shows the same name across the board on these trusted platforms, they’re probably looking for this person. So having that same name across all those different trusted platforms is going to allow you to get a higher search ranking. For all search engines. That way people are getting reliable data and information to pull up your accounts across the board. If we if we want to go deeper into the metadata stuff, you know, metadata isn’t restricted just to making sure all of your accounts are connected with each other and all the links are accurate cover photos, profile photos, all of that stuff is important to have similar the same across the board. Again, we’re talking about people searching for you if if this if you’re if your accounts aren’t up to date, and they all have different profile pictures, then how do I know which one’s the real one the right one, especially if information is not updated. So make sure your your profile images are all accurate and up to date. This includes B port, if you have no photo on beatport that’s one of the number one things that you should get updated. Get your bio updated now they don’t Unfortunately, they don’t have social media links, which I’m surprised by and I really do think that they need to get social media links set up on beatport to make it easier for people to go find and follow new artists Now, obviously beatport wants to keep you on their platform. So they don’t
Want to do that, but it would really help out a lot of people to go follow others. Now it’s a little tricky to get that information updated, I do believe you, you just have to email beatport. So if you just go to beatport.com and scroll down, there should be a Customer Support link that you can follow and then search for how to get your artist profile updated. And I believe you do just need to email them with the image that you want. updated with. Again, if people are searching on beatport, they find your profile, they look at your image, it’s going to be a lot easier for them to search for you on different social media platforms and see, okay, that’s the same image that I saw before. This is the right person. So that metadata needs to be updated to your images, make sure all that stuff is up to date, make sure your link trees are up to date. And all this stuff is extremely important too. If you don’t post a lot on one social media platform like Facebook, I know a lot of you guys probably don’t post that often on Facebook, you’re more than likely spending most of your time on Instagram. So if you’re not posting a lot on Facebook, at least make sure your links are up to date, your photos are up to date, update all of your stuff, your metadata needs to be constantly updated. It’s one of the most important things and the reason why it’s one of the most important things is kind of the whole idea of this this episode topic. If people are searching for you, and you create as much friction as possible, willingly or unwillingly, and someone has and maybe someone has a big opportunity for you right you’re you’re a smaller artists, but you make really good music, maybe you did a remix, and you just post it on SoundCloud, but you don’t have links. And it’s not download, you can’t download it. So a big artists, maybe the artist of the original track finds it, they’re interested in checking it out, they shoot you a message, but you’re getting so many messages they get it gets buried down, you don’t have your email on there, you don’t have different social media profiles. And they want to reach out to you about writing in original with them where they want the track to play, you’ve now created so much friction that this big artists can’t reach out to you, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity or a label, the label of the original track wants to release your remix, but they don’t know how to get into contact with you and they can’t find you anywhere. You’ve just restricted your access to a big opportunity. You need to create as less friction as possible. You never know who could be potentially looking at you, and interested in your career and wants to work with you or help you out or do something. But because you have not maintained all of your information and kept that all up to date, well now they can’t get a hold of you. You’ve created too much friction for them. They’re gonna forget about it, and they’re gonna move on their day with someone else. This was a quick episode today, guys, but the metadata thing, super important. I think you guys will realize after this episode it is and I hope you guys are rushing to update everything. Claim your name on the internet, owned the real estate in your name, create the social media profiles that you need to even if you’re not posting on those social media platforms, just own the name, own the URL link. Make sure you own all that stuff. Otherwise, you’re leaving the door open for someone else to take that name. I hope you guys have a wonderful day. I’ll talk to you later and take care
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