MUSIC INDUSTRY BLOG

As an artist growing your business, you’ll often reach out to publishers, labels and prospective fans who may be interested – but not necessarily expecting – to hear from you.

I’m talking about a cold email (or unsolicited email) composed and sent in a personal, professional and transparent manner.  Don’t confuse this with bulk email sent to recipients who did not directly opt-in to your list.  That’s spam.

From my experience, a cold email will get answered when your message addresses the recipient’s urgent need.  Easier said than done, right?

Over the years, I developed a simple check-list to ensure that my cold emails rise to the top, get opened, read and responded to.

11 questions I ask myself before I click the ’send’ button:

1. Is my email subject line personal, compelling and distinctive?

2. Does the message in the email body list and persist the benefits of communicating with me?

3. Have I included all the facts (not the fluff) about me for the recipient’s reference?

4. Have I demonstrated that I sincerely care about the recipient?

5. Have I clearly expressed what action I would like the recipient to take after reading my email?

6. Can my message be shorter, clearer and more persuasive?

7. Have I strategically timed and conceived my follow-up emails in advance?

8. Is my persistence justified in my follow-up emails or am I coming off as pushy?

9. Do I have a response email ready (at least in my head) if and when the recipient replies?

10. Am I primed for resistance and emotionally prepared for rejection?

11. If the recipient doesn’t reciprocate after several attempts, do I have a plan B?

The next time you reach out to a music manager, music supervisor or venue owner, try running through these questions before you click the ‘send’ button.  This small extra step may help you rise above the noise and get you and your music heard.

Please share your own tips >>

Not as many as you’d like, I suspect.

It’s not because your music is ‘bad’.  In fact, people talk about bad music just as much as they do about good music.

So why isn’t there a larger conversation around you and your art?

Because you’re relying on your music.

There are 13 million music profiles on MySpace but only 4,000 artists on the rosters of the major music labels.

It’s fair to assume that a lot more than 4,000 artists are writing, producing and performing great songs.  Some of them are making ends meet on indie labels or on their own…

…But the sad truth is that most of them are working day jobs and you will probably never hear of them.

The competition is fierce.

If your strategy for success hinges on great songs, awesome production, and a tight live act alone, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Here is an example of an artist who made it easy for music fans to talk about her, but she did NOT center the conversation around her music.

Instead, she created this video …and it worked!

I used to be.

I couldn’t handle the rejection.

And worse, help in the form of critical – sometimes brutal – feedback on my music would leave me licking my wounds for days.

You see, it takes a lot of courage to ask for help and welcome criticism as well as praise.

And this is the mark of an independent artist and entrepreneur that music fans and professionals want to listen to and associate with.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help

Professional songwriters, label executives, music supervisors, venue promoters, and die-hard music fans are all around you.  Take a big breath, approach them, ask a question, and even offer to play them a few seconds of your song.  Do this at every opportunity…

…You’ll be surprised how easily you shed your fear of dismissal.

And though you may not always like what they have to say, their willingness to help you – listen and share their thoughts with you – may drive your career to new heights.

Not everyone will be willing to help you.  But don’t let that put you off.

If you learn to ask for help and be open to receiving it in any form, you will discover that most people will go out of their way for you.  That’s a promise.

I hope this helps.

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.

In a press release distributed today by ReverbNation’s own Jed Carlson, ReverbNation, the all-under-one-roof music marketing portal with almost 400,000 users announced the pre-launch of a new product dubbed Site Builder, a collaborative effort with Bandzoogle, a custom website building service for indie artists.  Site Builder enables artists with no technical know-how to easily create their own websites in just a few clicks and automatically integrate their content from their ReverbNation accounts and connect their websites to other supporting ReverbNation features such as FanReach, the popular newsletter client.

“It’s critical for Artists to have their own ‘home’ where they can develop fan relationships, grow their brand, and conduct business directly with their fans,” says ReverbNation Co-Founder Lou Plaia.  “Site Builder is another step in creating a true, turnkey solution for the DIY artist.   Soon we will be adding a comprehensive direct-to-fan store that will allow artists to sell merchandise, music, ringtones, and tickets to their fans through all of their fan touch points online.”

The addition of Site Builder to ReverbNation’s comprehensive, one-stop service brings the company even closer to its 360-degree vision for DIY artists.

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While next-generation music pros are angling for music 2.0 success stories and peddling self-promotion concepts to upstart artists, Bruce Warila of musicXray wants us all to take a breather, not go overboard and lose our shorts.  Bruce colourfully describes the myriad of current industry obstacles and unveils a step-by-step coup d’état.  I particularly enjoyed this analogy, perhaps one of Bruce’s softer moments:

“Genres are coastlines, niches within genres are beachfront properties, and standalone artists are rocks or grains of sand.  Sticking with the metaphor: coastlines and beachfront properties are compelling, interesting and entertaining; rocks and sand are things that get stuck in your shorts and sandals.”

Read the entire onslaught.

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.

I encourage artists to take their career into their own hands, self-manage and self-promote.  I believe that this is a prerequisite in today’s music industry and taking greater control of your assets will ultimately yield greater results than relying solely on third parties.

Needless to say, I’m not the only one who thinks this way.  Technology has created a gateway to music fans and the entrance through it is cheaper and more accessible than ever before.  As such, there are services available, free and not-so-free, catering to every imaginable aspect of a musician’s career, founded upon the DIY paradigm.  From music-friendly analytics and publishing tools to online collaboration and direct-to-fan distribution solutions, there are countless specialized offerings out there gaming for a stake of the massive independent artist market.

Now, a new service has emerged with the aim to assist artists in personal organization and management.  A one-stop-shop for accounting, task management, scheduling, and almost every other administrative task associated with the music industry, Bandize hopes to help artists clean up their act.

Currently a by-invitation-only service, the company may be over reaching by expecting artists ? essentially a community suffering from attention deficit disorder ? to take to a CRM solution.  Most artists are not facing complex cash flows and a diverse and demanding clientbase to truly take advantage of Bandize’s full suite of organizational features, including “Asset Management” which is bordering on ludicrous.  Those that are can probably justify hiring an intern, assistant, accountant, or personal manager as a business expense, by my estimation.  I did, however, enjoy learning about the company’s one-click data syndication, a simple yet powerful feature which enables users to post just once for all of their online properties.  That makes perfect sense.  It saves time and ensures that marketing messages and general communications remain consistent.

The site looks good and I completely support artists who wish to get organized and disciplined.  I just don’t believe that they will.  It’s like cleaning your room or taking out the trash.  There’s always something better to do.