Connected not neglected: An artist's online presence is as important as their music

Let's face it, as a new artist, today's musical landscape can be a tricky place to navigate. On the surface it seems like a much easier cookie to crack than that of times gone by. 20 years ago, the internet wasn't a place you got your music heard (you could just about run Ask Jeeves if you had a super quick dial-up connection), you had to hustle to make sure the people you needed to listen to your creations, actually checked them out. Parties were advertised with flyers and that holy grail of promotion: word-of-mouth hype.

Fast forward two decades, you could be forgiven that it's now a piece of cake to make yourself known, and it is, but that doesn't mean you should sit on your dubs and hope for the best. An online presence in this music industry day and age is just as important as the music you, as an artist, create. With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud, Mixcloud and Spotify being some of the most-used platforms in the world, to purely rely on your music doing all the work without being on all of these would be a mistake.

Even using just one of these platforms over the others isn't going to do your music the justice it deserves. Lehult, for example, is an incredible new house label based in Hamburg. Its vinyl releases sell out pretty quickly and the imprint's YouTube videos have amassed a huge amount of views. Despite this, the crew remain an underground label by definition but they're not active on Twitter or Spotify and that goes for the label as a whole and the artist's personal profiles.