Fans are the most valuable asset a musician has. Without fans there won’t be sales of an album or the possibility to hold concerts. Therefore a musician should always care about the interaction with his fans. On one hand the musician has to protect himself since die hard fans might have the tendency to become stalkers. On the other hand the band has an interest to be able to talk (which means to spread information) to as many fans as possible.
Taking good care of your fans is probably a science by itself and I strongly recommend every musician to read some basics about customer relation management and direct marketing. I will try to avoid all these sophisticated terms and just talk about how you can work on the Internet in general and on your website in particular to increase your chances to inform your fans. Again without the Internet direct marketing was very expensive and the only chance to inform fans was by mass media.

Tie your fans to your website:

There is nothing worse than an artist putting a news on his website and thinking that now every fan of him in the world has received the information. If your website has just a news section and some other static content (like discography, some pictures and maybe even a mp3 snipped) your fans will not be informed just because you put some message in your news system! They just don’t visit your website!
Of course your band’s name might be Metallica or Rammstein or your name might even be Lady Gaga (in this case, thanks for reading, I like your music!) In this unlikely case your reputation is so high that putting a news on your page is sufficient for other people to quickly talk about it and reach media and getting spread. But let’s be honest even if you play the main stage of Wacken Festival your the reach of some news on your website will probably not be on all webzines within a couple of minutes or hours.
So you have to make your website more interesting to tie your fans to it. Good luck this is easy to do! Just make your page interactive. Some suggestions:

• Have guest book.
• Give your fans the possibility to post comments on every single subpage of your site.
• Run a message board
• Have some contests
• allow your fans to upload photos on your site
• allow your fans to upload videos on your site
• you can not only embade your youtube videos on your page but also include all the comments and ratings via youtube api.

Notice that interacting users also create user generated content on your website which increases the amount of content on your website and there by is great for your search engine optimization. For more info on band page seo please read part 1 of this series.
So you have implemented all that stuff? Great! But you can do even better. You will realize that some fans will be tied to your website discovering new information very quickly. But the information will still miss a lot of your fans. So it is better to establish a connection with every fan. On the Internet this connection can be established in several ways:

• collect the email address of your fans
• try to make the fan become your fan on Facebook
• run and operate a Twitter channel (with more content than 5 tweets per year)
• add your fans on MySpace and other minor social networks
• send newsletters to web magazines and make interviews with them

Even though all of these methods are important and I recommend you to do all of them. There is one single method that is definitely the best.

Have them sign to your newsletter and collect their email address.

Yes I know Facebook is much cooler but remember not long ago MySapce was cool. Today you are sitting on your notebook reading my blog having 100’000 inactive myspace friends in your basement and don’t know what to do with them… Imagine you would have had only 50’000 email addresses! You could still inform your fans about new cool stuff.
The best thing about it: You tried to tie people to your site but some people still don’t come back frequently. Informing them of an update per mail, thereby pulling them back to your site gives you a new chance to tie them to your site!
Ok so now you want to collect email addresses and you don’t know why. Well there are several possibilities:

• newsletter registration form on every subpage!
• Ask for an email address once your fan is interacting on your site
• make riffles
• make a contest
• or if you have read my article “Share your Music! but do it the right way!” you might even consider to exchange some of your music for a valid email address
• run a web shop and let your fans purchase merchandise and music from your site and not from amazon (you earn more in this way anyway)
• Even allowing users to login with open authentication methods like Facebook it is usually possible to download and save the email address.

Let me clarify my statement. I do not encourage you to not use Facebook or other tools to interact with your fans. But in the center of your activities should always be your website and your newsletter. This is stable! Facebook could change its policies or even become unpopular. You don’t want to rely on someone else or even make advertising for Facebook with your own brand and music! So once your website is done correctly you can expand your activities to other places such as Facebook, MySpace and so on.
And one last word: Don’t give the email address to anyone else. Don’t sent Spam and don’t sent emails to fans that wish not to receive information. Always give them the option to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Summary:

Your Website exists to inform your fans about your music, upcoming concerts, releases and other stuff related to your band. If you just have some static pages you can also stop having a webpage and stay with myspace. Alestorm is great example on how to not do it. For the first two releases they only had a myspace profile and now when you google alestorm you end up on the kind of dead myspace page.
Even though you are a band and popular and people actually are interested in you you still need to have an excellent website. User interaction is one way to make your website more interesting another way is to establish a communication line with your fans to inform them about changes!
So how do you take care of your fans? Tell me via comment if you think I am missing some important points!