In the landscape of promotion, there are now unlimited sites on which you can place material on about your work as a DJ. So when someone asks “what do you do?”, which link do you send them? Many DJs have signatures that look like library cards with 5 different links to Twitter, Soundcloud, Facebook, Myspace and if they are lucky a custom homepage. Since you can’t possible expect people to visit all of your content sites, why not aggregate all of those sources into one single page that is easy to set up and changes as your DJ world grows? Well, fortunately, someone invented a service that does just that. It’s called: “One Sheet” . Check out mine here, I created it within a few hours, and in the following article we will cover how to create your own.
THE BIG IDEA
One sheet does not really host much content except for a big splashy photo and a bio. All of the “assets” that you would want to share like photos, mixes, tour dates come from other internet services that specialize in managing those services. One sheet simply aggregates all of them into a single web presense that you can link to with a single URL. Upload a new mix or tour date and your “homepage” stays updated without a single shred of effort.
KEY ELEMENTS
If you only were to set up a few services that would provide the core information about your work they should be:
MIXES
One Sheet takes your Soundcloud account and sticks a widget on the front page. Easily resize and move it around the page to suit your taste. I went through and updated my Soundcloud with some new music and old mixes just for the occassion. Now, rather than putting new remixes on my server, its just a simple matter of putting them on Soundcloud.
If you have an artist page on Facebook, one page will automatically pull in your photos and wall posts. in this manner, you can use your Facebook page to write updates and post new photos. This info then gets updated in all the places you would like without a lot of fuss.
GIGS
One Sheet syncs with “Bands in town” among other calender apps. This is a nice little app used by Tiesto among others to publish your dates and have people get notifications when you are in town.
VIDEOS
Logically, we are in a video world so you can nice connect one specific YouTube profile and connect it to your one page. This does present one problem however, which I cover in the complaints section below.
COMPLAINTS
After trying to set up one sheet as a viable replacement for my standard “DJ site”, there were two small issues that annoyed me but didnt reach the level of deal breakers:
- The Youtube page aggregates all videos from a single YouTube channel, meaning that you may not be able to group the videos of your DJ work that are truly relevant. I would like, for example, to put a single playlist there that is pulling videos from a broad range of channels.
- The bio section does not support HTML, so no YouTube embeds or fancy code.
- The site does a great job of automatically finding all of your services and syncing them up so connecting things like Facebook only takes a few moments. However, when that “auto” detection breaks you are kind of screwed. For example, my tour dates are managed by “Bands in Town” which is connected to my artist profile but One sheet is looking for it on my personal facebook account and not pulling any dates.
SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?
- Here is my old artist site www.eangolden.com (20 + hours and $1k)
- Here is the new updated one (2 hours and $0)
If you are just starting out and creating a DJ profile, this seems like a great way to go, but we are interested in hearing your perspective. Does it appear professional enough and would it be taken seriously as a single page recourse about your work? This post was in no way an attempt to promote myself as a DJ (I rarely accept gigs due to Dj TT responsibilities) but instead I used my own “online presence” (which has been pitiful lately) as an experiment to see how viable this service is. It’s amazing that I was able to revitalize my online promotion and presence by enabling a few new tools and then combining them all into one page after only a few hours of work.
create your own one sheet for free during their beta at http://www.onesheet.com/
