Creating a Music Website

As promised I am back again with another music related article. Today's topic is "how to create a music website". As everyone knows, in this day and age a musician should have a website or at a webpage to help their fans identify them and their brand online. It is up to the artist to ensure that the website includes everything needed to keep their fans satisfied and still wanting more. In the next paragraph or two I will talk about a few key ingredients that should be on every artists website/webpage.

The key ingredients to any artists website are your music, contact information, photos, news, and a biography page. The music page should contain of few of your best high quality songs so your listeners will know what to expect from your upcoming releases. This can be your main page and should contain links to your Twitter, Facebook, Myspace pages etc... The thing to remember is the more links that you provide to your other sites, the more often a person is to add you on those sites which will then help them find your website at a later time.

As far as contact information you don't need an extra page for it but you should have it included on one of the main pages. Your contact information should be in plain view so that anyone that has inquiries about you as an artist can get in touch with you or your manager. The photos page should contain a few high quality photos for press releases. You can also add photos of yourself on tour, doing random activities, or recording music in the studio. The news page can be a blog as well as just a normal text based page. I prefer to run a blog because of the freedom it provides and the fact that I can update it easily from my Blogger account. The last but certainly far from least important part of your website is your biography page. This page gives fans an idea of who you are and where you are from. The biography page also makes it easier for editors to write articles about you for magazines and other forms of social media.

Making a website can be fun and rewarding but it is oftentimes just as challenging and upsetting. It can be rough when you don't have the page views that you desire, but the key to maintaining a great music website is to give it time. Search engines don't just add your page and index it within the first few days of creation, so it could take quite some time before people even know that it exists. In my next article I will explain how to promote your website and use SEO to help even more people find it. I will also go a little in depth about page rank and other factors that affect how easy your website is to identify. Thank you for taking time out of your day to read my articles and I will see you next time. ~Royale~

Christopher "Royale" King
Royal Records (Underground Label)
http://www.thisisroyale.com/
chrisking919@gmail.com

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Crooners and Divas - Singing From the Heart - The Incredible Voice of Billie Holiday

Untrained, untamed, yet unbelievably developed. Those are words to describe the voice of one of the most talented female voices to emerge out of the jazz influenced era of the 1930's.

Born Eleanora Fagen Gough on April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the great jazz and blues vocalist eventually changed her name to Billie Holiday, borrowing the name from her favorite screen star, Billie Dove. Later in her career, she was given the nickname 'Lady Day' by saxophonist, Lester Young. Holiday moved to the Harlem district of New York to live with her mother in her late teens and started singing in nightclubs for tips.

The sometimes gut-wrenching lyrics sung from the depths of her soul, Lady Day told the story of her much troubled life through her songs. Never having one hour of formal training, Holiday had a poignant vocal style that was mesmerizing to her audience. Billie Holiday sang from the heart and hers was a uniquely distinct sound that emotionally drew her listeners in and immediately captivated them.

In the early 1930's a young Holiday was discovered performing in a nightclub by talent scout, John Hammond. He arranged for her to record with well-known bandleader, Benny Goodman in 1933. That session lead to more recordings with the top swing bands of that time and by 1935 Billie Holiday was recording under her own name. She was being recognized as a major vocalist and was setting a standard in jazz music that is still practiced today. Holiday's ability to improvise melodies was phenomenal. Other jazz/blue artists were quickly imitating her style.

Tormented by her past, the demons she battled seemed to consume her throughout her life. Despite imprisonment on more than one occasion for possession of narcotics, Miss Day still managed to grow her fan-base. Her enormous talent seemed to supersede her volatile personal life and she continued to sell records and pack clubs and concert halls.

After working with renowned bandleaders, Count Basie in 1937 and Arte Shaw in 1938, Holiday set an unprecedented record. She was the first black woman to work with a white orchestra. Miss Holiday was very instrumental in helping bridge the gap between blacks and whites in the music arena but she herself was still subject to much prejudice.

Holiday struggled with the injustice of prejudice, which was evident in the lyrics of the songs she sang. This is probably most obvious with her hit Strange Fruit taken from a poem about the lynching of a black man. Prevented by Columbia records to record the song, due to subject matter, Miss Holiday recorded the tune under a different label, 'Commodore', and it became one of her signature hits.

Lady Day's popularity remained stable during the forties and early fifties, although her destructive lifestyle of drug and alcohol use began to take its toll on the talented singer's voice. When her voice began to give out, the sheer depth of her emotion would breathe life into her emotionally wrought songs.

Billie Holiday had stellar hits that are still considered some of the best blues and jazz songs of all time. Spanning over three decades, Lady Day is best known for favorites such as: Them There Eyes, My Man, Don't Explain, Lover Man, God Bless the Child, T'Aint Nobody's Bizness if I Do, and Porgy & Bess.

Performing for the last time on May 25, 1959 in New York City, Billie Holiday gave all she had left to give to an audience who revered and loved her. Lady Day's exceptional contributions to music won her the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. A ghostwritten autobiography entitled Lady Sings the Blues gives personal accounts of her preeminent rise to stardom as well as real life testimonies about her tormented early childhood. A 1972 movie is loosely based on the autobiography. Diana Ross starred in the movie version of Lady Sings the Blues as Billie Holiday and was nominated for an academy award for her role.

Billie 'Lady Day' Holiday died July 17, 1959 in New York at the age of 44 from cirrhosis of the liver. She was, at the time, separated from her third husband and had no surviving children. As in life, her death was tragic, yet Billie Holiday had an enormous talent and used it to bring beauty out of the ashes and is still considered today to be one of the great musical talents of all time.

Darrell Berg-Smith, CEO of The Asian Regional Impact Initiative, is a professional speaker, author, consultant and entrepreneur who specializes in advising on Corporate Social Responsibility programs and cause marketing resources to NGO's and companies worldwide.

Darrell is also the founder of the Doctors For Cambodia Initiative and The Asian Regional Cancer Initiative... Non Profit Organisation working throughout South East Asia. He is always looking for new talented artists to help advance their career through cause marketing arrangements with these Initiatives.

http://EzineArticles.com/6494724

Guitar Mistakes - 3 Mistakes Made By Beginner Guitar Players

There are three mistakes that beginning guitar players make that totally destroys their ability for advancing quickly in the mastery of their instrument. If they can avoid these three mistakes, they will see a big changes in how fast they progress as a guitar player.

The three big mistakes are:

Not practicing every day.Not knowing what to practice.Not having a good teacher or mentor to guide the way.

1. Not practicing the guitar every day is a big mistake that many beginning guitar players make. Many new guitar players think that they need to practice for one hour every day. That is not true. Of course, it would be great if they could practice one hour each and every day, but in reality, the time is just not available. Most peoples' lives are just too busy to have that much free time to dedicate to one activity. A more practical approach is for them to find a couple of fifteen minutes blocks of time throughout the day when they can practice. Perhaps while waiting for the dryer to finish drying the clothes, there might be a fifteen minute chunk of time. While cooking dinner, waiting for the pasta water to boil, there's another chunk of time. Here's a good time waster, commercials while watching TV. Use that time to practice guitar. Even better, get rid of the TV and practice guitar. There really is a lot of chunks of time that can be carved out of the daily schedule for some guitar practice. To be successful at this approach though the new guitarist must use some planning and forethought.

Leave the guitar out and readily accessible.Have an idea of what to practice.

2. Not knowing what to practice. The new guitar player needs to know what the material is to practice when they pick up the guitar. Are they working on certain scale fingerings? Are they working on rhythm guitar and different chord changes? Are they working on various blues licks, or a certain song? Not knowing what to practice leads to endless "noodling" on the guitar, and no real practical advancement.

3. The guitar is a hard instrument to play. There are a bunch of technical things about the guitar and music to be learned, and a lot of practical things to be learned that are best learned by being physically shown what to do, and hearing the results. That is where a good teacher becomes invaluable to the guitar student. Whether the teacher is a "live" instructor teaching through some type of formal in-person lessons, a simple DVD video lesson package, or an internet subscription course, a good teacher is necessary for quick advancement on the guitar.

If the new guitar player can avoid these three mistakes, they should be able to progress rapidly and be playing the guitar in a short period of time.

For a link to 10 free beginners guitar lessons or to read more about learning to play the guitar, please click here: http://www.lurnguitar.com/.

http://EzineArticles.com/6505047