Every new school year in Athens there always seems to be at least one new band with an insanely huge following that nobody else in the established scene has ever heard of. It's usually a band comprised of college students and their crowd consists of friends of the band, classmates, and dorm mates. Time and time again, I've seen these types of phenomenon bands play four or five shows to a packed house but over time friends leave, classes change, dorm-mates change and their once impressive crowds disappear.

Similarly, I've seen fantastic new, non-college bands and insanely talented bands from out of town play incredible shows. Everyone at the show loves them and swears they'll see the next show. The band returns to play another show in town a month later only this time to an empty house. Sure, it could have been the weather, or perhaps its midterm week and everyone is studying. Or, it could be that no one had any idea that the band was playing because no one told them.

The single most important thing a band can do, besides practicing their music, is to maintain an email list. Your band might be one of the most important things in your life but for other people it's just entertainment. Expecting your friends and fans to remember your band name let alone your band schedule is expecting too much. They have lives, you know. You shouldn't assume that your fans read the weekend edition of the news or the AMN concert listings either. Email lists are an easy way to keep in touch with your fan base so that when they move out of the dorms, or even move to a different state, they won't forget you.

Pimping Your List

Every time you play out, you need to announce that your band has an email list. How often you pimp your email list is up to you, but you should say it at least once. Your email list should be out on a table while you are playing. It may seem silly, but I've noticed over the years that folks seem to be more comfortable signing an email list WHILE you're playing instead of after you're done. After your show they will want to talk to their friends, go to the bathroom, or jump in line for a beer before the next band plays so they might not get around to the list and some people are just plain intimidated by musicians they admire and don't want to risk talking with the band. Seriously, it happens.

If you are lucky enough to be in a band that travels, you may want to sort your email list by city or region. Send out a monthly mailer with your schedule for that month to all the addresses on your list and then follow it up with a reminder email to fans in the same city or region of your next gig at least 3 days before the show. More and more people check their email on a daily basis; however there are still a lot of folks who only check it once a week or less. The older your crowd, the earlier you may want to send out the email since it's an unfortunate fact that older folks tend to check their email less.

There is also a good chance that your mail might accidentally be considered spam by your fan's ISP or spam blocker. Getting a message out a few days in advance makes it more likely for word of mouth to spread about your show.

MY NOTE: A lot of the following issues don't matter until your list gets pretty big!

Use a List-Serve

It's best if you have a program that will deliver your newsletter to each fan on your list one at a time, as if you were doing it manually. You can actually try sending out emails individually yourself; however, if your list is bigger than 10 people, sending out letters one at a time is very impractical.

Most ISP's have some sort of email list-serve program that you can use to send one message to multiple people at the same time. For example, FrogNet has Q-mail. Other ISP's may let you use another list-serve called majordomo. It's worth your time to investigate what your Internet service provider has to offer you in the way of a list-serve. A list-serve e-mail is addressed to a singular e-mail address like my-list@myband.com. The message is then blind carbon copied to people on the list. Unfortunately, many list-serve emails are accidentally classified as spam by mail servers. Thanks spammers for ruining it for us legit e-mailers!

Use the BCC field

If messing with a list-serve seems like too much to handle, you can always send an email to your fans via your email program's blind carbon copy (bcc) field. This method is a lot easier, but unfortunately your message is also likely to get flagged as spam.

The BCC field is hidden in Outlook Express by default.

Like it or not, Outlook Express is the most common email client in use today. Something like 75% of all net surfers use Outlook Express or it's bastard brother, Incredimail, to send messages. Whenever you create a new message in Outlook Express, it shows a few lines called "fields." There is a field for FROM: TO: and CC: however, Outlook Express hides BCC: field by default. If you haven't already done so, you need to make the BCC: field visible by opening a new message, selecting the view menu, and placing a check next to the "all headers" menu item.

I cannot stress how important it is that you don't put the entire contents of your email list in the blank for regular carbon copy (cc). Instead, you should send a blind carbon copy (bcc). If you've ever received a carbon copied email, you may have noticed that you can see the email address of everyone who received the carbon copy of that email. Now imagine that you accidentally carbon copy your newsletter to 300 people on your list. Now everyone who gets your newsletter can see the email addresses of all 300 of your fans.

Make sure you put your fan email addresses in the BCC field as shown.

Big deal, you say. Well, most savvy web users may get annoyed that you just mailed their address to 300 strangers, any one of which now has the potential of sending them a virus or spam. Worse yet, someone who is in another band that gets your email may start sending email to your fans. Your fans will end up blaming you. Not good. Blind carbon copied email messages keep all the recipients anonymous. Your fans will appreciate your digression.

Use a Mass Mailer

A few enterprising companies have created add-ons (sometimes called plug-ins or extensions) for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express that do mass mailings. A lot of these programs are used by spammers to send out evil spam. Only in your case, you are using the program for good, not evil.

There is an add-on called GoMail made by a company called ExecuteIT. Before you use GoMail you'll have to create a text file that lists all the email addresses of your fans one address per line. You can also use tell it to fetch data from a Microsoft Excel spread sheet. GoMail will then use Microsoft Outlook to automate the process of sending an email to each email address one at a time. This method reduces the odds that your band's news will be mistaken as spam by your fan's spam filters.

It is a good idea to put your email list in an Excel spread sheet.

There is another program called 1st Mass Mailer by a company called Soft Stack which does the same as GoMail. Unfortunately, both of these mass mailers are not free. They cost $30 to $50 dollars.

A Free Alternative: Do a Mail Merge

These days, most new computers come with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Even if you don't have these software packages, chances are your local library or school makes them available for use by the public for free.

Next week, I will show you how to do a mail merge using Microsoft Word 2002 and Excel 2002. Newer versions of Word and Excel should work just fine too.