Monitoring Your Music Scene With Google Alerts
Yesterday we talked about getting gigs with Google Alerts, today we’re going to talk about monitoring your music scene.
Let’s say you are a punk guitarist. It’s likely that you’ll want to know what’s happening in the punk subculture. Not just music, but fashion, news, movies, celebrities, etc. If people are talking about it – you want to know about it.
Here’s one way to do it. Go to www.google.com/alerts and create an alert for the search term “punk.” But before you save that, let’s specify some settings.
If you want everything-upon-everything that anyone ever says that includes “punk,” just leave it how it is and press save. Chances are, though, that you’ll get a lot of irrelevant noise in the results of a term that general. With a general term like “punk,” I would suggest changing the Type setting from Comprehensive to News. A Comprehensive search with give you everything-upon-everything (including blogs, message boards, etc.), but a News search will only give you results that come from sites that Google considers news outlets. For an idea of what kind of results you get from an alert like this, click here: Punk News.
Personally, I work in the New York musical theater scene, so I like to stay plugged-in to what shows are opening and closing, and whether reviews are favorable. To be honest, I’m not a person that cares too deeply whether Patti Lapone is the best Mama Rose, but if I want to hang in that scene, it’s best to have some idea of what the hell that means before I get asked my opinion on it.
I have a comprehensive alert set up for “Broadway.” That term seems to be specific enough that I don’t get too many irrelevant topics with the Comprehensive setting. Now and then I get a story about a street in another city called Broadway, but more often than not I receive what I’m looking for – Broadway industry news. For instance, today Google sent me a headline that said Pal Joey had extended (good news), a New York Times article reporting that Broadway gross sales had gone up in 2008 despite economic woes (great news), and that Clay Aiken had left Spamalot early (greatest news).
It’ll take some tweaking, but if you set them up right, Google Alerts can function like a custom-compiled trade magazine. Every day (or every week, depending on your settings) you can get the headlines that relate to your industry automatically delivered to your inbox.
In fact – if you follow the tips in the previous article on finding gigs, you can even have a custom-compiled classified section delivered as well!
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Thanks for the great tips Dave. You have inspired me to set up some additional, more specific Google Alerts.
To set up multi word Google Alerts do I need to use quotation marks? To set up an alert for music happenings in my town would I set up “Chapel Hill”, “Music” OR “Chapel Hill Music”?
1/7/2009
Hi David -
That might work. But what I would put is:
musician | musicians | music “chapel hill”
You only need quotation marks if the search term is more than one word, like “chapel hill.” The punctuation ” | ‘ is that same as OR.
Click on that and check out what that gives you.
1/7/2009
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