1. Email Is The Holy Grail
Whether you’re tricking out your MySpace page or performing at your local venue, always think about what you can do to collect more email addresses. Believe me, there is nothing of greater importance than your email list. If you’re not using a professional email marketing service (EMS), you should start now. Mad Mimi is my favorite but I have also tried iContact (which I hated), MailChimp (which I liked) and Emma (which I loved but it’s a bit pricey).
2. Passive Radio Is Passé
Massive online radio sites get your music in front of targeted music fans. They are not your average passive radio listeners, they are music fanatics feverishly searching for music just like yours. Yeah, you have to pay for the privilege, but the exposure you get in return is guaranteed and trackable. In the music biz, it’s hard to find that kind of bang-for-your-buck value. Jango Airplay is the largest online radio promotion service that I know of. As a Jango affiliate, I regularly send artists in their direction. The feedback from these artists has been phenomenal.
3. Get Professional Help
Whether it’s your songwriting or your marketing (or anything else), never underestimate the value of expert advice. We Are Listening provides professional assessments for songs and lyrics. It’s what we know and what we’re good at. But you can find a service, coach or consultant for any project you wish to fast track to success. The humility required to ask for help and receive critical feedback is the mark of an independent artist and entrepreneur that people want to listen to and associate with. Personally, I can use all the help I can get!
4. Stand Out
You don’t have to be loud to stand out. The smallest touches can make a huge impact… and I don’t mean limited edition vinyls or glow-in-the-dark t-shirts. For example, I recently discovered that you can create your own custom M&Ms. It’s awesome. Imagine every M&M with your message and image on it, any colour scheme you like, and branded packaging. Great munchies at a gig. Lovely gift for any holiday.
5. Follow The Leaders
I can’t think of a better way to learn about the music industry and make great connections than by following individuals who have been there, done it, succeeded, and willing to share their experiences with you. For free. I recently published a post on the subject that should get you started: 14 Music Industry Leaders (You Should Follow)
6. Be An Outstanding Communicator
Most people are not. But it’s something that can be learned. Remember Secret #1 (Email Is The Holy Grail)? Well, that email list you’ve been growing is not worth a dime if you can’t put a compelling message together. Outstanding communicators stand out, lead and succeed. Are you an outstanding communicator?
Bonus Tip
If you’re already running your own newsletter campaigns, whatever you do, don’t do this.
Yesterday, ReverbNation announced their partnership with Audiolife and the soft launch of the Reverb Store, a robust and fully-integrated e-commerce solution for artists and agents to sell directly to their fanbase. From do-it-yourself T-shirt designs to comprehensive earning reports, the Reverb Store is as turn-key as the ReverbNation ethos. Best of all, it includes all the social media promotional widgets and collateral you would expect as well as seamless integration with ReverbNation’s existing marketing features. Anyone can open a store, create as many custom items as they want, and operate the store for free. No monthly minimums, no monthly fees.
“The Reverb Store allows artists to layer a purchasing opportunity into every fan interaction they have online, whether it’s at Facebook, MySpace, a blog, or the band’s own website.”
– Michael Doernberg, CEO of ReverbNation
“Artists need solutions that can help them grow their fan base and convert those fans into customers. The Reverb Store is the total package, combining the best of ReverbNation and Audiolife.”
– Brandon Hance, Founder and CEO of Audiolife
iLike, the hugely successful consumer-facing extension of the not-so-hugely-successful indie artist community, GarageBand, announced its further investment in self-promoting artist tools for iLike registered artists, specifically the marketing and syndication of music and music-related collateral across several social networks. The 300,000 member iLike artist community will now be able to automate their feeds to Twitter, synchronize their YouTube channels to their iLike accounts, add an ‘up-selling’ widget to their MySpace concert listing, and include an iLike ‘music tab’ to their Facebook profile… and this is just the very tip of the ice-cream: iPhone apps, content syndication tools, premium artist stats, own web-domain management and many more flavours.
iLike is a powerhouse, catering to 45 million music fans across its network. This investiture will undoubtedly put some pressure on small players such as BandMetrics and RockDex who focus on statistics for artists, and ArtistData who focus on content syndication, to offer value features that iLike can’t or simply chooses not to. And in spite of ReverbNation’s exponential growth and market lead on the indie artist front, iLike enjoys an unmistakable advantage: primed access to consumers en mass.
Brian Hazard of the Music Think Tank published a comprehensive post addressing the pay-for-play model that online streaming playlist service, Jango, adopted as part of its monetization strategy, dispelling the analogy to terrestrial radio payola and drawing references to mainstream advertising mediums. In March, I promoted Jango Airplay and touched on the controversial issues Brian addresses in his piece but his first-hand experience and engaging write-up of the music dotcom serves the topic more justice: Is Jango Payola?
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 prominent music marketing and promotion resource for over 375,000 artists, labels, managers, and venues, has launched FanReach Pro, a premium version of its successful FanReach email service used by more than 80,000 of its members to manage and communicate with their fanbase. FanReach Pro boasts a number of distinct upgrades, including ‘One-Click Content’ which pulls the artist’s profile content (i.e. music, videos, gigs, press, links etc.) into any outbound message in a single click, saving much time and effort in the swift deployment of newsletters and promotional emails. In addition, FanReach Pro includes ‘Fan360’, a semantic search feature that feeds back public data from the web about the individual mailing list subscribers. This is especially useful when it comes to composing a compelling and targeted message, and provides a means to segment the mailing list based on subscriber characteristics (e.g. location, gender, age, and online presence). To my knowledge, ‘Fan360′ will be the first real-time subscriber metrics feature incorprated into a web-based email client, perhaps making FanReach Pro the most powerful email/newsletter marketing tool on the market.
FanReach Pro is available for a 30-day free trial, and starting from $9.95 per month, which is significantly cheaper than its rivals and, in terms of its feature set, presents some serious competition for FanBridge.
Trent Reznor’s revolutionary and somewhat controversial music marketing activities (read Reznor’s back story) continue to push the envelope with the release of the NIN frontman’s very own iPhone App. We are not worthy.
Following his successful ‘free’ distribution initiative in the UK, Prince, who is both a pioneer and a royal pain in the industry’s ass, is following up on his previous co-venture success with an online ‘bundle’ initiative launching on the 24th March at lotusflow3r.com. For $77, Prince fans will have access to three new albums from the artist presently known as Prince in digital format as well as physical through Target stores across the US. The site will provide an entire experience around the music and will undoubtedly create new buzz for this extraordinary recording artist and performer.
International advertising powerhouse, Ogilvy & Mather, produced a high-octane media campaign for the Crystal Lite powdered soft drink brand by Krafts Foods. Yet another example of consumer brands converging with music sensations to compete and differentiate in the marketplace, Kraft has aligned itself with Grammy Award winning artist, Estelle, for the pre-release and distribution of her song, “Star”. The US campaign was launched in tandem with the Grammy Awards Ceremony last month and drew traffic to the co-venture landing page by offering a free download of “Star” prior to its release in stores this month. Estelle fans divulged their email addresses in exchange for site access and a free and exclusive download of the song.
Associating brands with entertainment media and music celebrity is tried and tested territory for corporations such as VW, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Apple, and other leading giants of cool. However, the phenomenon appears to be spreading to more conservative brands attempting to revitalize their message and acquire a new audience base, both to listen and to buy.
Online streaming radio and music tastemaker, Jango, has launched a somewhat controversial artist promotion programme called Jango Airplay. Essentially a pay-to-play scheme [and reminiscent of terrestrial radio “payola” which has been illegal since the fifties], Jango Airplay provides artists and their agents a direct means of plugging their songs to Jango’s listener base of 6 million for a fee. Much like the StumbleUpon advertising initiative, displaying a sponsored web page for every nine unsponsored web-pages, the promotional value of this scheme is not absolute: “If you get 50 positive ratings, your song starts playing for free in general rotation on Jango. If your song continues to get good ratings, it will be played more and more often and in more and more stations.” For $30, Jango Airplay offers 1000 plays, each track linked to its distributor (i.e. Amazon, iTune).
Pay-to-play may be an unpopular paradigm among musicians but this is actually an unprecedented opportunity for artists and labels to reach a new audience and guarantee some rotation. For not much more than pocket change, bootstrapped musicians can gain some insight on who is most likely to listen to them, rate them up, and perhaps even purchase something. Assuming that Jango Airplay plugs sponsored tracks appropriately, this is a truly awesome marketing platform for the music industry.
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