Broadtexter Weekly

I’m a singer/songwriter living in NYC. Like most musicians, I send a monthly email to my fans with dates for up-coming shows. I’m always concerned that the gigs in the middle and end of the month are going to be over looked or over shadowed by the most recent ones. I know that when I get an email from a friend who tours a lot, I end up deleting the message after I read it, or it ends up so low in my inbox that I forget the date on the tour that actually pertained to my city.

I would send text message reminders to my friends in New York when I was in town because I had their numbers in my phone. I wanted to be able to do the same thing for my fans but the question became, how would I get their numbers? I also would only want to send to my fans if THEY wanted the reminder so how would I get their permission? Also, I would want to let them tell me what state they wanted to be reminded about. Finally, I would not want all my fans to have access to my cell phone number.

I talked about these issues with some programmer friends. We decided to build a service that solves all these problems. We eventually created Broadtexter. I can send messages from my phone when I’m on the road (or from my computer) to the specific state that the fan is registered in. Fans can subscribe on my MySpace page or my web site using a cool little Flash module.

I posted my module and fans began signing up! I recently played a show in NYC and 2 people came up to me after the gig and said, “I’m so glad that you sent me that reminder today, I almost forgot that you were playing tonight.” Someone else said, “That reminder was awesome! I was walking to the club and could not remember exactly where it was. I never would have found it if you had not sent the address to my phone today.”

When it came to pricing our service, I based it on an average ticket price of $8. If sending text message alerts brings in only 2 people who might not have come otherwise, then the service pays for itself. What better promotional tool could an artist have than to be able to do permission based reminders right to their fans phone? Not to mention big notices like a new album release or a T.V. appearances.

Here’s a link to my site using the Fan Sign-up Module:
http://www.teddygoldstein.com

And my MySpace page with the Fan Sign-up Module: http://www.myspace.com/teddygoldstein

Learn more and demo the Fan Module with the link below. You can signup, customize your module and have it working on your MySpace or web site in just a few minutes.

www.broadtexter.com

Hope you like it.