Raising the Profile of Indigenous Artists
The Indigenous Music Development Program is a program run in partnership with Manitoba Music. Its goal is to help First Nations, Metis, and Inuit people develop sustainable careers in Manitoba’s music industry. The program delivers projects and services that respond to the needs of the industry as identified by a steering committee.
We're happy to have been working with them since 2004 with our friends at Guppy Graphic Design.
Showcasing Opportunities
The Indigenous Music homepage brings to the forefront everything happening in the music community. Recent news articles, upcoming live events, new album releases, and featured music videos are promoted to site visitors, with opportunities to explore more of everything. It's a showcase of sounds and imagery, to translate some of the richness of the community to the web.
Not all of it is just pulling new content to the forefront. We've provided the site admins wide banners at the top and in the middle of the homepage, to give them a way to put the spotlight on any other element they need. With tools designed to auto-size the images and to set date-ranges when any banner might appear, Indigenous Music administrators can schedule site promotions to coincide with announcements and press releases.
Calendar of Events
Indigenous Music provides the best way to keep track of live music events in the province. Both site administrators and member artists themselves contionually update a database of upcoming gigs, with each event marked up with time, date, location, and cost. We've custom built forms to make it as straight-forward as possible for both parties to manage their event data.
We've also tied that data to the directory profiles themselves. When drilling in to a specific event, relational data brings imagery and media from associated members. Photos of all the artists on the playbill, a live Google map of the venue, playable music tracks and embedded Youtube videos.
This unique integration brings a rich experience to every part of the Indigenous Music website!
Your Best Foot Forward
The Indigenous Music Development Program gives each of their members a place on the web of which they can be proud!
Each member is given access to a secure login area that allows them to manage their own Indigenous Music page. This includes custom built editors for writing up a biography, managing contact information, keeping a unique photo gallery, uploading music tracks, and more.
The site rewards the effort by promoting this content across the site. Music tracks are accessible through the new album release areas. Any news articles referencing them includes their photos and links back to their profiles. Live music events they appear in have their media prominently promoted online.
With a responsive site layout that looks sharp on desktops, tablets, and smartphones, Indigenous Music profiles are one of the best ways for member artists to put their best foot forward!
Bringing Music Online
Each major section of the Indigenous Music site has a purpose-built page to feature its content. Rather than generic content pages throughout, individual layouts are given to news articles, upcoming events, music videos, and new album releases. This provided the opportunity to lay out each type of content in a way that best fit the associated data.
When Google indexes the Indigenous Music site, each type of content is given the chance to shine in its own context, and therefore rank higher in search results. When each page is shared through social-media, each type of content provides the best summaries on your friends' news feeds.
This means bring Indigenous Music online, everywhere!