5 Online Tools for Artists You Won’t Find on a Music Site

Mailchimp: The web’s most popular email-marketing service allows you to manage your email campaigns and lists. This service is perfect for an artist racking up a long email list at the merch booth during live shows. Mailchimp allows you to build and manage your email lists as well as design HTML email campaigns. They also have a nice variety of ready-made templates for you to work with if you don’t want to go too far into the coding aspect of your layout and design. You can store up to 500 subscribers and send up to 3,000 emails a month for free. If you want to grow your email list out further, there is a tiered pricing system for premium accounts. 

Animoto: Sick of making Youtube videos with one static image or a blank screen with a song title pasted on it? Animoto helps you create a video by combining images, video clips, and your music into a seamless work. If you want to get your music online without spending time on making a full video production or you don’t have the resources to make a high quality video, then Animoto might be the right choice. The one catch is that free videos have a maximum length of 30 seconds and don’t provide downloads. You can create a single video for $3 or buy a year subscription to the service for $30. Pro accounts are $249, which might suit record labels or music promoters in need of more robust features.

Hootsuite: Dubbed as “The Professional Twitter Client,” Hootsuite manages all your social networks through one client. The application contains a multi-stream view so you can manage all your artist accounts, like Myspace and Twitter accounts, with one log-in and within the same application. You can schedule your tweets, manage your followers, customize different streams of updates, and track statistics based on the activity on your networks.

Ping.fm: This free social networking and micro-blogging service allows you to post to all your favorite sites with one status update. Instead of logging on to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Delicious, Ning, AIM, Google Buzz, or any of the other social networks you use, you can update them all at once. This is a great service, especially if you’re on-the-go and want to send out a quick message or post via your mobile device.

Posterous: Don’t have an artist website yet? A social networking presence is important, but there is no room for your longer posts on many of the social networks out there, so you might want to create your band’s blog on Posterous. Posterous allows you to post to the web via email or the Posterous website and auto-post to other sites you want to syndicate to. If you own your own domain name, Posterous will host it for free so you can have a more professional website name attached to your blog. Posterous allows you to add separate pages to your blog, attaches a comment section to each blog post, and helps you integrate Facebook and Twitter log-in for your fans to comment on your page. You can also take advantage of the analytics that Posterous provides with your profile.