After the music, nothing says as much about an artist as his or her images. Photos can provide potential listeners with important clues about an artist’s sound, ethic, aesthetic, — but until recently, they couldn’t really do much aside from that. With ThingLink, however, artists can make their album covers and promo images interactive and use them to tell stories, drive sales, and create more engaged fans.
THE BASICS
Getting started with ThingLink is easy — just sign up for a free account at ThingLink.com and start uploading photos.
Once you upload an image, you’ll be prompted to embed links — and you can link to anywhere on the web.
ThingLink offers rich media tags for a number of sites, as well as the ability to embed songs via Spotify and videos via YouTube and Vimeo.
Once you’re all done, you can share via email, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as embedding the image on your site.
Artists can also create an interactive image in an iFrame on Facebook — instructions can be found HERE.
Here’s an example of how I used ThingLink to add some additional content to a post on my own poetry blog, YRTEOP.COM (“poetry” spelled backwards). Hover over and click the little white bubbles!
WHAT TO EMBED In order to make sure an image isn’t too crowded with links, try to stick to about five embeds in a standard size image (if you ThingLink your entire site, for example, you can add more). Think about what will drive sales, but also how to engage — are you active on Twitter and Facebook? Link to those sites. Have a great video or some audio clips? Embed those. Think outside the box — if you’re from Portland, for example, add a link to Powell’s or another iconic PDX landmark (the vegan strip club?). If you wrote a song about Occupy Wall Street, link to the “We Are the 99%” Tumblr. The better the story within the image is, the more likely people are to engage with it. Umphrey’s McGee used ThingLink to dress up its site — in addition to the usual links, they threw in some fun video clips to break things up. 
Paper Garden Records used ThingLink to sell tickets for an event, promote the artists playing, and even give some love to the venue: : 
COSTS AND BENEFITS
ThingLink is free to join and you get ten image uploads when you sign up. That’s a pretty good deal for something that’ll keep fans on your page longer, drive signups to your social media properties, and create a cool image that people will want to share with their friends. And it’s so easy, even your drummer can do it.(Sorry, drummers!)
If you have additional comments or questions, reach out to cortney@thinglink.com.