The web pages for all BBC music radio shows now include tracklistings for each episode. Each song has a link to the corresponding Artist Page on the BBC Music website (above). And, crucially, the information on all those Artist Pages is taken from MusicBrainz – the world’s largest public domain music database.

The bad news for independent artists is that if you don’t already have an artist profile on MusicBrainz, next time you’re played on BBC radio the tracklisting will either point at an empty Artist Page or – worse still – may not point at anything at all.

The good news is that MusicBrainz (a collaborative public domain project like Wikipedia) allows you to create and maintain your own artist profile on its database.

At first sight, the MusicBrainz website looks a bit daunting, but don’t panic!  We’ve broken the whole resgistration process down for you into 10 easy-to-follow steps.

1. Go to http://musicbrainz.org

2. One the front page click ‘Create Account‘

3. Enter a username, password, and email address when prompted, and click ‘Register account’

4. You’ll get a confirmation message on screen. You’ll also receive an email asking you to verify your email address: when you click the link, this message will appear in your browser.

NOTE: Whenever you are logged in, your username will appear at the right hand end of the yellow menu bar at the top of the page:

5. Clicking your username brings up a screen something like this:

6. IMPORTANT: this is your profile as a registered MusicBrainz user.  As a registered user you can now create your profile as a band or artist.  To do this, hover your cursor over ‘Editing’ on the yellow menu bar, and choose ‘Add Artist’.

7. You can now enter information about yourself as an artist or band…

NOTE: the ‘Edit note’ section (above) is just for the information of other Musicbrainz users, and doesn’t appear on your public profile.

8. Click the ‘Enter edit’ button.

A summary of your new Artist information is now listed on the right hand side (see screenshot below), with a list of editing options you can explore later. The most important thing at this point is to add links to your own artist pages on YouTube, Bandcamp, Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud etc.

9. To do this, click on Relate to URL which  produces the page below. This has a drop-down menu labelled ‘Type“. For a Facebook bandpage choose “has a social networking page at”. For Twitter choose “has a microblog at”. For Bandcamp, choose “music can be purchased for download at”. YouTube and Soundcloud have their own menu options:

Fill in the URL field as required…

Again put an explanation for other Musicbrainz users in the Edit Note field, and click on the “Enter edit” button.  The web links you have entered will now appear in your Artist Page on the BBC Music website. And as soon as your music’s played on BBC national Radio, the show’s tracklisting will link to that page. Good eh?

10. Once you HAVE created your Musicbrainz profile and been given airplay on a national BBC station, you can then supply BBC Music with a photo for your BBC Artist page. This should be a head shot or close-up photo of the artist – not artwork or logos etc – in landscape format at least 1024 pixels wide x 576 pixels high, although larger images are welcome.

Email your photo to: musicfeedback [at] bbc [dot] co [dot] uk and confirm in writing that you 1) hold the rights to the picture you are sending, and 2) grant the BBC permission to to use it on their websites without an on-screen credit. But for technical reasons, do please wait until you have had national airplay first, before sending the photo.

Based on an invaluable guide originally written by Graham Albans in 2009 while working as an intern with BBC Introducing: Fresh On The Net at 6 Music. A former stalwart at Leeds Student Radio and producer at BBC Introducing In West Yorkshire, he graduated in 2011 and moved to London. His Twitter feed @GrahamAlbans describes him as “a Radio ninja at BBC Radio 2. I work on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show. Husband and a fan of porridge.” Also see: Graham’s excellent advice on How Not To Write A CV.