Song Contest Blog » Fan Relationship Management

Go out of your way for your fans

Lior Shamir — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:50:04 +0000

Is the number of fans who open your messages, read your comments and click on your music player declining?

Maybe it’s time to try something different.

With SnailMailr, you can send a letter by postal mail directly from your desktop. There’s no need to print anything, stand in line at the post office, purchase stamps, or practice your illegible handwriting on the envelope. SnailMailr does it all for you and will even print a high quality image to include in your letter.

For $1 a piece, you’re not going to want to send a letter to 10,000 fans but, for the handful of supporters who truly went out of their way for you, it’s a lovely gesture.

Try going out of your way for them with a personal letter by postal mail. It’s easy and looks great.

How To Get 200 New Fans A Week

Lior Shamir — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:38:11 +0000

This is a guest post by Brian Mazzaferri

My name is Brian, I’m in a Nintendo-Pop-Rock band called I Fight Dragons, and we currently get over 200 new fans signing up for our email list every week.

We officially launched just under six months ago, with 0 fans on the list. As I write this, we have 3656 subscribers. We didn’t add a single fan ourselves, these are all people that have signed themselves up, that we now know, love, and interact with on a regular basis. They are our biggest champions and a constant inspiration to us to keep working harder and pushing ourselves.

Note: there has been no label investing in us, no management company pulling the strings, no 800-pound gorilla confusing the issues. While I appreciate the creativity of endeavors like those of Radiohead and Trent Reznor, let’s be honest; it’s not rocket science to make the internet work for you when you already have legions of fans. That’s the easy part. Offer them stuff to buy, and they will buy it. Tada.

But how does a new band go about getting fans when starting from scratch? Most advice on the subject is sorely old-hat (just play as many shows as humanly possible and never stop), or hopelessly impersonal (add 500 targeted MySpace friends every day). The problem is that it all revolves around impressing the industry and getting to the point where someone will drop a big chunk of change to buy you a fanbase. And there’s the root of the problem, because in the internet age money just can’t do enough. So unless you get on TV or become famous for some other reason, the key is finding a real way to establish and grow meaningful relationships with an ever-growing number of fans.

So I humbly submit our method, which so far has been going pretty well. For the sake of brevity, I’ll boil our online strategy to three core steps:

1. Give your music away, but don’t throw it away

We’ve given away a free digital copy of our debut EP to everyone who signs up for our email list. For people who don’t know us, it’s a free and easy way to learn about our music for free. And then we’ve got their ear. Note, this is VERY different to just posting it online for free download. The price may seem the same, but the result is 100% different, because we now have a foot in the proverbial door.

2. Regularly give away stuff that’s way too good to give away

Next, we send an email to our list every Monday at 11AM (for the most part). More weeks than not, that email contains free music. And not just some off-the-cuff track, it’s a track that is up to our personal standards, which I’d like to think are very high. In holding ourselves to that standard, we give our fans something new that they really want to show their friends. And when the next new track goes out, the new converts get to become the evangelists. But they need new music to do that, and not just any new music, YOUR BEST new music.

3. Be real, be available, and be involved

This seems like a no-brainer, but it actually takes a LOT of work. We’re on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, our Blog, and TheSixtyOne every day, talking with people and being involved in conversations. I’m NOT talking about one-way, blast-yourself-out-there stuff like MySpace adding. I’m talking about joining in conversations on Twitter that you have something to add to. About commenting earnestly on music you like. About joining a community, not trumpeting your own message.

Of course, you’ve still got to play live (and put on as great a show as you can muster), you’ve still got to have great music and high standards (in whatever context you choose), and you’ve still got to get out there and network, to become a part of the physical community as well as the virtual one.

But ultimately, in the early stages it’s not about the money. Or I should say, it’s not about the marketing money. It’s about you, your music, and your willingness to put in the time and energy to develop real, deep, and meaningful connections with fans.

BandCentral – Band and Fan Relationship Management

Lior Shamir — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:55:31 +0000

Just joined BandCentral, a fan and task management service specifically developed for musicians and industry professionals. It’s strikingly similar to Bandize, and playing in the same ball park as RockDex and ArtistForce. The Band Status Updates, a one-click message syndication feature which posts to the band’s Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter profiles simultaneously, appears to be a lite variation of what ArtistData currently offers, along with a number of other dotcoms that aim to ease the pain of managing data across a number of social networks at once (I use Ping.fm to syndicate this blog). The idea is simple: an affordable client relationship management solution for the music industry or, more simply put, a service for bands who manage their own fans. How’s that for a strapline? There’s also a number of key admin features for internal band use. Watch the video:

Related Posts
Bandize
ArtistForce
RockDex

Marketing your Music with Topspin

Lior Shamir — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:23:28 +0000

Topspin, the enigmatic media technology company “dedicated to developing leading-edge marketing software and services that help artists and their partners build businesses and brands” has combined forces with Berkleemusic.com, the online extension of Berklee College of Music, to provide music marketing courses for artists and music promoters to master the Topspin direct-to-fan marketing strategy and dedicated technology tools. The first online course, Marketing your Music with Topspin, available exclusively on Berkleemusic.com, is slated for release in September 2009, with course enrollment beginning next month.

Call Katy Perry

Lior Shamir — Sun, 24 May 2009 09:26:43 +0000

Extraordinary. I’ve been poring over new music marketing strategies since I graduated from college, examining everything from joint ventures between bands and brands to iPhone apps and free disc-on-keys, chronicling 360 deals and studying the convergence of digital with traditional. So complex the music industry has become that I sometimes don’t understand my own diagnoses. Over the weekend, I learn that Katy Perry has set-up a voice center with SayNow where she calls in from time to time with a personal update and fans can leave her messages (she calls some of them back, apparently). It seems that the “next-generation” of artists and promoters, myself included, have been swept off our feet by communication and relationship management technologies and forgotten that there’s nothing quite like picking up the phone from time to time. Praise you Katy Perry!