File Storage & Hard Drive Maintenance

This may not seem like a music marketing article, but I assure you once you understand what I am talking about you will see how this can, and will, improve your ability to reach potential fans faster, easier, and more efficient. I have found that file storage is a huge issue when it comes to effective use of your time. If you can’t find a song you prepared for internet release, a master Photoshop file prepared to send to a printer for a flyer, or any other multi-media file that you need right now to move your campaign forward – how can you successfully market your music? You can’t. Keeping your files organized is very important. This article will help you understand how to organize your music marketing multi-media files in such a way that you never loose a file again.

The number one cause of lost files on hard drives is misplacement. Often times, a new artist or service provider simply will not pay attention to where he/she is saving a program or file on the hard drive. Then, when it is time to access the file again, it appears as if the file is missing when in fact it is most likely on the drive, tucked away in another folder, just waiting to be found. File storage is not hard. It does require paying attention when creating and saving new files, but once you get used to doing it you will do it without thinking!

Here are the steps you need to take to ensure you can always find your files. On your hard drive you need to create five new folders;

• Audio
• Video
• Photo
• Graphics
• Text

 
It should be pretty obvious what goes into each of these main categories; however, I am going to dive a bit deeper so you fully understand how best to organize your media.

Audio

Inside your audio folder you are going to have several sub folders. I suggest you start with; sessions, mixes, masters, mp3, and miscellaneous. Every time you start a new session you will create it within the main audio folder and then within the subfolder; sessions. When you have a song mixed the final mix will go into the mixes folder. When you get a song mastered it will go into the master folder. And you guessed it, once your song is mastered and you get an MP3 version, it will go into the mp3 folder.

I cannot tell you how much time is wasted looking for songs in the studio. Artists come in with a million CDs full of producer’s beats or songs looking for the one they want to work on. If you are a hip hop artist and get a CD full of beats from a producer, most likely you will only like or want to write to one or two of them. Why keep a CD full of songs or beats you don’t like. Go ahead and import the beats you like and create an unused beats folder. This way if you are in session and not feeling the song you are working on you can simply ask the engineer to play some of the songs/beats in the unused beats folder and maybe something will spark your creative juices. IF you have to sort through a bunch of songs to find one the sparks your creativity you might loose that spark before you find it. If you are a band and have songs that are in the development stage and still are not quite a full song, I suggest creating a folder called “development.” As you start to work on new songs create the session within this folder. Then, once you get the song to appoint where you are ready to do some serious work on it and consider it a full song, move the session to your session’s folder.

Video

Video is just like audio. You will have multiple sub categories. I suggest you start with; interviews, performances, studio, promos, testimonial, commercials, editing sessions, and misc. You guessed it, interviews go into interviews, live performances go into performances, etc etc. The misc. folder is for that video that has no place to go but is too cool to delete. It might be a great moment helping out at the local soup kitchen on Thanksgiving Day - Community outreach is a great thing and if you capture it on video, you will be able to use it in press releases.

The testimonial folder is for anything you capture from fans. At shows you will want to get crowd feedback. Ask them what they thought about the show. Ask them if they would suggest someone else seeing the show. You want a lot of testimonials. They are good for promo video, commercials, or any time you are putting together a press kit.

The commercials folder is where you keep the edited commercial you plan to air on local access video shows or MTV, BET, CMT, or VH1. The Promo Folder is for your social networking videos. Once you edit together what you want to release on youtube, myspace, etc., you will put the final video in this folder. The Editing Sessions folder is for the actual editing program saves. Lets say you or the editing company use final cut pro to do all your edits and make commercials, promo videos, etc. When you start a new editing session, you will save that session in editing session’s folder.

Photos

I think by now you really get the point. But for those who don’t. You will have sub categories inside your photo main folder that include: photo sessions, performance, misc., crowd, fans, and so on. Make sure as you are importing your photos from a digital camera you place them in an appropriate sub folder.

Like video you will be taking a massive amount of photos. You need to document every single thing you capture of your artist as a photo as well as on video. You do not want to have to look through thousands of pictures to get to the performance picture from April 12, 2010. That brings up another topic.

Make sure you also include subfolders in your sub folders. What I mean is this; in your main photos folder, within your performance folder, you need to have sub folders with dates. If you have a performance on April 12, 2010 then you will have a sub folder named 4-12-10. This is where you will dump all those performance pictures. This is also true for video. You want to organize things in such a way that you have records of time and date. Example: if a press reporter contacts you and says “I was at a show last week, on the 12th of April, and I was going to do a story on the show but I didn’t get any good pictures, can you please forward me any photos from that performance to include with the story?” You don’t want to have to go through three years of performance photos to find the show he/she is talking about. Date your subfolders for faster and more accurate searches.

Graphics

This is the section for logos, branding designs, flats, posters, t-shirts, stickers, and anything else that does not fall under photos. I would suggest making sub folders in the main graphics folder as well. Here are a few to start, you will find that you will use a lot more sub-categories as you develop your artist; logos, banners, flash banners, flats/flyers, posters, t-shirts, stickers, hats. Keep in mind that you want to keep as organized as you can. I have seen many, many disappointed clients come to me with a hard drive totally full and pay me for two or three hours to just sort through all the files to find the picture they want to place on their website before we even could begin the design process of building their website. Stay organized and you wont loose files and you wont pay someone money to sit and find your files before they can actually work.

Text

Bios, press releases, flyer text, poster text, song lyrics, Blogs, website text, and more will be sub categories for this main text folder. Just like all the other media, you want to make sure you are storing your text files in appropriate categories. You might have a website crash one day and loose all the media. The faster you can find the files you lost, the faster you can get your website back online.

I hope you get the point. You need to use sub folders and categories to hold all the files, documents, and media you are creating. Start from day one and you will never have an issue. I have only listed the main stuff here. You will find that there will be a massive amount of information and media you have to store. Make sure you are always using a file system that is organized and ready to find anything you need at a moments notice.

Peace,
Jai
“Love the Music in Yourself, Not Yourself in the Music!”
©2009 Jai Hutcherson. All Rights Reserved.