Music Business For Dummies
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You will need promotional graphics in the music business. Having a template of your core promotional graphics makes it easier to build online ads, layouts for physical products, promotional posters, CD covers, and everything in between. For quick access, keep graphics on your website or through a content hosting site like Dropbox or Cloud. This enables you to get the needed graphics to the right people for design, printing, or online use immediately and without sending crazy-sized files.

Online and print-ready graphic formats

When your designer is ready to hand over your logo, font, and core graphics, be sure you get them in a number of different file formats.

Having files available in file formats such as Photoshop can make it much easier for application of others that use Photoshop. Some media outlets request certain file types for different applications. The most common file types include the following:

  • JPEG (.jpg) Joint Photographic Experts Group: These are good for web pages because the files are compressed and enable websites and online graphics to load quicker.

  • GIF (.gif) Graphic Interchange Format: These files are used for smaller images that don’t need high resolution or exceptional quality, such as buttons on websites and small header graphics.

  • PNG (.png) Portable Network Graphics: These files have a transparency behind them, making it easier to load an image on top of a background of another color. Trying to do the same thing with a JPEG is not possible without using a design program like Photoshop because the JPEG is one solid image.

  • PDF (.pdf) Portable Document Format and TIFF (.tif) Tagged Image File Format: These files tend to be larger and non-compressed images; they’re generally used when printing on paper, on T-shirts, and other physical merchandise items.

Having these on file and available for use makes the whole design, production, and creation process go much easier. It also allows for promotional printing jobs to turn around that much faster as well as for less money. Spend the time and the money on the front side to not only get your designs the way you want them, but also to have access to the different file types that you need in the future.

Using premade advertising graphics

When creating the graphics for the website and social media, set up some simple banner ads that can fit on social media sites like Facebook as well as others. Having a sticker-style graphic for use on different websites goes a lot faster when you have some premade banners set up in advance.

The most common banners are 125 x 125, 200 x 80, 300 x 250, 160 x 600, 150 x 300, and 720 x 120. Design some basic ads using those formats to ­prepare for requests that commonly come in these sizes.

These premade ads should be just for the band. Having the logo, font, tagline, and either the website or a social media page to direct people to should be included in all advertisements. Detailed or adjusted ads for specific singles, albums or other products can be made down the line.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Loren Weisman is a music business consultant, speaker, and author who has been a part of over 700 albums. He also maintains TV production credits for three major networks and has served as a media consultant for many businesses in and out of the arts and entertainment fields. Loren is an executive producer and co-creator of Leveraging Smart, a new reality business TV show airing in 2016.

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