10 Essential WordPress Plugins For DJs & Producers

I heavily use the web to promote my work. And WordPress is the starting point of all my communications : news, music, gigs, newsletter, etc… WordPress is now a key tool for anyone in the music business.

Here are 10 essential plugins for WordPress, a DJ or a musician just can’t leave without!

1. Contact Form 7

Every artist needs to keep in touch with his fans, and being able to be contacted straight from his website is really important. Contact From 7 does just that: creating simple or advanced forms you can embed in a page or a post. The only thing that misses for me is the ability to generate form with dynamic data (such as a list of posts to be selected.)

2. WPaudio

WPaudio is a simple yet clean Flash Audio Player for WordPress. It automatically replaces any mp3 links with a nice minimal player. I tested a lot of different players over the years, but this one has the most neutral style and is easy to custom (select Style in the option of the plugin.)

• Example: Selections By Wize – May 2010

3. eShop for WordPress

If you need a small digital shop for your site, eShop will perfectly fit your needs. You upload a track, put a name on it and, this is the most interesting feature, you embed it to a post. For me, the fact that you can put your digital product straight into any post or page, without the need for the visitor to go to a specific catalog page is very interesting. I just regret the poor style of the initial layout.

• Example here

4. Gigs Calendar

Gigs Calendar is the only relevant Gigs management plugin I found. I implemented it for my friend RLP. You create your venues, gigs, tours, and every event is linked to a post so that you can attract visitors to your site. It also generates very useful pages and widgets to be implemented to your site, and also a rss feed that you can embed in an email signature if you like.

• Example: here

5. Twit Connect

Twit Connect allows your Twitter fans to directly comment your post using their Twitter account. Also your fans can connect to your site with their Twitter account without the need to register. Very interesting feature that I start to heavily use on my sites.

6. WordPress Download Monitor

This plugin is one of the most important plugins for me. It allows to tracks downloads of any file on your site, you can also limit the download to registered users. I use it for Free Downloads reserved to my members only. Very easy to configure and flexible for quite tricky customisations such as the modification of the output of your links (you can add the size of your file, an icon linked to its type, etc…)

7. Lifestream

This plugin aggregates your social activity to a single and very classy stream you can display in widgets. You can add a lot of social portals such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc…

8. All In One SEO Pack

Simply one of the plugins I can’t live without. Almost no configuration and it works like a charm optimizing your blog for search engines. Great and effective plugin to have in its WordPress intallation.

9. Popularity Contest

This is a very famous plugin that classifies almost everything in your blog by popularity. Very useful to put in a widget like « Most Popular Posts ».

10. Facebook Connector

Facebook Connector brings Facebook to your blog. But it’s quite tricky to configure and needs some skill in PHP, Javascript and Facebook API. People can comment on your blog from their Facebook account just like Twit Connect does.