1. Follow Trent Reznor Nine Inch Nails
In May 2008, Nine Inch Nails released the The Slip as a free digital download accompanied by a note from Trent Reznor, “This one’s on me”, as a courtesy to NIN’s loyal following. The album was downloaded over a million times before the end of May 2008. Many of the music industry’s most disruptive paradigms, including the “Free” and “Direct-To-Fan” concepts, can be traced back to Trent Reznor’s independent marketing activities.
2. Follow Don Passman Author and Entertainment Lawyer
One of America’s top entertainment attorneys, Don Passman is the author of the non-fiction bestseller “All You Need to Know About the Music Business”, which has sold more than 300,000 hardcover copies in print.
Tweet My Song is an easy to use Twitter tool for song distribution and promotion on Twitter. Simply upload a song on TweetMySong and tweet the link. When you do, the link will direct to a hosted player where the song can be streamed in full, shared, and downloaded at the artist’s discretion.
The service provides reporting on trends, clicks and viral distribution.
TwitDoc may be an excellent, lightweight addition to your music marketing arsenal on Twitter… in the future. The upload process is as simple as can be as is the recipient’s experience: click and download. It’s a one-to-many file distribution solution which is perfect for a free music release or teaser, and perhaps a means to gratify potential fans for following you? It’s like a stripped down SoundCloud for Twitter… potentially. For now, it’s limited to document files (PDF, DOC, XLS) and image files (JPG, GIF, PNG), as the name suggests but I imagine that MP3s will soon be added to TwitDoc’s competence.
The marketing potential of Twitter and the feels-like-free music paradigm converge in a collaborative effort by Blink-182’s drummer, Travis Barker, and turntablist, DJ-AM, Techcrunch’s Robin Wauters posted yesterday. “Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella ‘09? is available for free download in exchange for a Twitter message. Ah, but wait! The transaction involves granting access to a third-party application via this website, allowing the app administrators to access and update your data on Twitter. Okay, okay, this is still a good deal and an honest attempt at making music available without charging for it, although it’s more of a ‘barter’ than a ‘giveaway’ in my mind. The almost daily emergence of new and creative methods to distribute music is testament to how difficult it has become to get music out there, let alone charge for it. God forbid.
Twitpay.me, as the name suggests, is a service for sending payments via Twitter. Twitpay makes a note of a “promise” to make payment (which can be cancelled at anytime) and allows the payer to settle the payment using Amazon Payments. The honour system is in play here to a certain extent but, as a payment instruction on Twitter is as public as any other Twitter update, the payer will look like a schmuck (or Twit, if you’re British) to his followers if he doesn’t pay-up.
The company has leveraged Twitpay for a bare-bones retail and distribution system for content copyright holders (e.g. musicians and music promoters). Using Retweet Commerce Suite (or RT2Buy), artists and their agents can upload and store their music on Twitpay and tell their followers about it. Twitpay provides track samples, monitors “promises” to purchase, and delivers the content. The promotion may look something like this:
Just finished a new track “Get Your Rocks Off” available now for only 99c RT2Buy http://rt2b.me/232xe
As Twitter secures its place as “thenext social network”, savvy marketers are weighing its merit as a marketing communication platform. In the music space, the micro-messaging site may rival the promotional advantage of MySpace and Facebook, signaling the authoring of a slew of Twitter how-to’s and grassroots success stories. Of the many that I’ve scanned – the vast majority I rejected for lack of foresight – Topspin Media published the most pertinent post of all.
I suspect that Bob Baker is already working on a Twitter music marketing guide and Seth Godin will follow suit with a sequel to Tribes. Perhaps Followers will become a buzz word like Chris Anderson’s Long-Tail. Perhaps your degree of cool will be determined by the ratio of Followers to Following. To me, Ashton Kutcher is just a punk.
While many marketers consider Twitter to be a goldmine, I’m still on the fence – and that shall be the title of my book… unless Twitter becomes big enough for Oprah, that is.
ReverbNation, the leading provider of dedicated music commerce and communication tools, have added a simple yet crucial feature to their roster. The new optional ‘Auto-Tweet’ feature automatically updates ReverbNation members’ Twitter accounts whenever they post a new song (with a link to play the song), post a blog entry (with a link to the blog), recommend another artist (with a link to the artist’s profile page), and/or add a show to their schedule (with a link to their schedule and tickets). Given ReverbNation’s strong emphasis on fan relationship management, I think ‘Auto-Tweet’ will be very well received by their userbase of more than 375,000 members. It may also pose a threat to ArtistData who developed an entire suite of tools around the auto-syndication theme. Given the popularity of services such as Ping.fm, I expect ReverbNation to extend this offering by allowing its users to synchronize and distribute updates to several social networks and bookmarking portals automatically, not just Twitter.
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