Chamber Ensembles and Web Presence: Best Practices for Creating and Presenting Online Content

Abstract

This study is about creating an online presence for a chamber ensemble. The study takes recommendations from notable books on music entrepreneurship, articles written for classical musicians on the importance of online content for musicians, and articles from select music industry websites. The author compares and combines these recommendations with interviews from members of seven different professional chamber ensembles, and the online presence of seventeen professional chamber ensembles that are based in the United States. The purpose of this study is to introduce to newly formed chamber ensembles how current chamber ensembles are using online media, what content is being presented online, and how to create the most common content. The study organizes the collected advice from resources and interviews, as compared with the studied ensembles, to conclude with recommendations for the most common content being used online. The study determines the most commonly used online platforms, and how they are being used. Included in this study is the use, organization and content of: Websites; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; and YouTube. The author then goes into detail about how to create the content for these different platforms. Detailed studies are included for: organizing and choosing content for websites; collecting information and writing an ensemble biography; the attributes of a professional ensemble photo; working with a professional photographer; the different kinds of audio and video recordings and how to create these recordings; and working with a sound engineer. The author chose to specifically focus on classical music chamber ensembles due to the absence of documentation focused specifically on this group of musicians. The studied documentation primarily focuses these discussions as they apply to solo musicians, or musicians in the pop/rock/indie music genre. The author has taken the recommendations from these different genres of music and determined how they can relate specifically to classical chamber ensembles. Through this study, the author has determined the best practices and recommendations for chamber musicians on what is needed to start their online profiles.