Here is a great example of how a church should publicize the release of a new Worship CD.
One of the many blogs I follow is Church Video Ideas, published by Greg Atkinson, Technical Arts Director for Bent Tree Bible Fellowship in Carrollton, TX. As an "Extra" in today's blog entry, Greg mentioned that Bent Tree recently released a new Worship CD. Being that I'm a musician and enjoy writing, collaborating, and playing music both in and outside of church I knew I wanted to check it out.
Here are a few observations I made that I think will really help them get traction on this:
Once you land on the CD page a song starts playing almost immediately. As I clicked to listen to some of the other songs, they started playing even faster. This means that they have probably allocated plenty of bandwidth to streaming these songs. As well, they have formatted their songs in a manner that balances quality with web friendliness. Many churches want to promote their music in similar fashion but don't allocate enough bandwidth to get the songs to load and play fast enough. Or,they don't format the music for playback via the internet. Most listeners judge new music within the first few seconds and if they have to wait more than a few seconds to start that judgement they just move on to other music. Bent Tree did a really good job in this aspect.
There are several original songs on this project. It is very refreshing to see that they are offering, at no cost, copies of the lead sheets including lyrics and chords. There are links to three or four I think. WORSHIP LEADERS AND DIRECTORS NOW HEAR THIS: If you write and record original music, copyright it, get a CCLI account, and then follow the lead of Bent Tree and post the lead sheets for others to download for free. You want other churches to play your songs, right? Make it easy for them to do so. If you don't know how to do this, ping us, and let us teach you how.
Clicking a link on the page opens up a new browser window. This is smart, in that, if you have one of the songs playing and click, say, the "Purchase CD" link that song doesn't stop playing. Many websites, whether church or non-church related make this mistake. To me, this shows that Bent Tree has a good frame of reference on the importance of a quality user experience. Think about it, how many times have you been listening to audio on a website, clicked on a link you wanted to check out and then lost connection with the audio? The bottom line is they didn't just quickly throw together a web page to try and sell some CD's, they approached the creation from a user's perspective and thus ensured a quality user experience.
The new CD from Bent Tree is $10. I don't know if it will be available on iTunes but we highly recommend that every music producer, including churches, get their music on iTunes. Again, if you need help with this aspect, ping us, and let us teach you how.
Great job Bent Tree. (You too, Greg).
