MUSIC INDUSTRY BLOG

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.

Following Radiohead’s example, Alice in Chains are giving away the first single, “A Looking In View”, from their latest album, “Black Gives Way To Blue”.  The much anticipated release was preceded by a number of videos of the group fooling around in the studio.  Get the single here.

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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.

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Following the example of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, Coldplay will also be adding value this summer by providing fans attending dates on their international tour beginning May 15th in North America with a free copy of their album LeftRightLeftRight.  A free download of the record will also be available at the same time on their site.

“Playing live is what we love… this album is a thank you to our fans – the people who give us a reason to do it and make it happen.”

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Whatever your position on file-sharing may be, it will most certainly be skewed when you learn that a mega-band such as Radiohead, who famously distributed their last record with a pay-what-you-like model, are taking the stand against the RIAA.

In the case of file-sharer Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University student, versus the RIAA, Radiohead will testify against the RIAA as part of a protest against unnecessary preying on filesharers, according to Tenenbaum’s legal team which consists of Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson and student members of his class.

Radiohead has publically spoken out against the major labels’ agenda to profit from questionable sharing of music in the legal arena, and specifically the lobby groups that represent them such as the RIAA and IFPI.  In fact, Radiohead is one of several A-list artists that have embraced file-sharing culture in one way or another to propel their independent marketing of their music and, to a certain extent, have proven that the very labels that made them what they are today have been rendered obsolete.

All this comes to a head just after the founders of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search platform, were found guilty in a landmark file-sharing case spearheaded by Swedish anti-piracy lobbyists, preceded by the public crackdown of the popular music streaming service, SeeqPod, which was forced to close.

Linking the decline in music sales to illegal filesharing carries very little water in this day and age as there are so many other contributing factors to the manner in which music is consumed and the availability of media to the public in general.  The fact is that, for the major labels, going to court is profitable.  In the cases where it’s not, it sets a precedence for future cases that will turn over handsome settlements.  The attitude toward file-sharing, and the laws around it no less, will not change until the investment in the judicial system will no longer yield rewards for the copyright holders, the majority of which are represented by only four corporate institutions worldwide.

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Subscription-based music service, Rhapsody, has been attempting to acquire new users by offering free downloads from independent artists sponsored by the United States Air Force, which has also been making appearances on PureVolume as part of a nationwide campaign to enlist musicians and music fans to fly stealth bombers.  For Rhapsody, the free music tease is part of a broader strategy to combat the various free music services on the web, legal and otherwise, and a means to frequently upsell the portal’s paid subscription service.  750,000 recruits have signed up to date.  To Rhapsody, that is.

The Free Music Archive provides a curatorial approach to promoting and discovering music, and allows for the free, legal streaming and downloading of its library’s tracks.  Much like an opinion blog, the Free Music Archive acts as a tastemaker with the aid of user generated and suggested content which must first be approved by the site’s curators.  Every track on the site is handpicked and pre-cleared for personal use.  Users with uploading or editing privileges must be invited.  Initial funding for the Free Music Archive came from the New York State Music Fund, a program of the Rockefeller Philanthrophy Advisors.

MusicWeek reported that ad-supported music service and download store, We7, which Peter Gabriel co-founded, is rolling out a new monetization model whereby its users get rewarded with points for their session time which can be redeemed for ad-free days of music.  In addition, an ad-free subscription service will be offered as the portal’s premium tier.  The news comes just shy of SpiralFrog’s announcement last month that it will be shutting down.  SpiralFrog, a competing ad-supported music service, was unable to sustain its business model.

P2P streaming music service, Grooveshark, has launched an artist promotion initiative – much like the track placement scheme Jango conceived of – as a means for artists and music promoters to purchase plays on its platform, a direct advertising approach that makes sense.  The Gainesville, Florida, company of approximately 40 young entrepreneurs has created a music service that rivals that of Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming.

Grooveshark claims to have deployed a legal music discovery and consumption model, providing its users with a financial incentive to share music, compensating artist/labels for their respective share of ‘broadcasts’, and maximizing illegal file sharing by financing its original sources.  Whether this service is actually legal or not is questionable and it appears that the company has created an expensive model to sustain on ad revenues alone.  However, they’re coming through on some very interesting marketing features for small budget music marketing campaigns.  At its core, Grooveshark Artists offers pay-for-play audio realestate matched to its existing track recommendations and provides analytics tools for track placement optimization. 

In addition, it has partnered up with some of the most talked about music tech startups for music retail, licensing, funding, and more, including Bandcamp, Sellaband and TheNextBigSound, all under the Grooveshark banner which already includes a number of subsidiary services including Tinysong, a track link generating tool for viral distribution, and  Twisten.fm, a Twitter crawler that finds music-related tweets and links them to playable tracks.  All of this put together amounts to a powerful enterprise of do-it-yourself marketing and a 360 indie approach akin to ReverbNation.

SpiralFrog, the highly profiled ad-supported download service, has shut its doors after a lukewarm reception in the UK and endless content licensing and upper management strife in the US prior.  The company was the first to deploy a ‘feels-like-free’ music download service in 2006 and secured both Universal and EMI, with competitors Qtrax and We7 following suit with similar ad-supported download services, before spiraling to its demise.