SONG CONTEST BLOG

Five months ago, I began working with Audiolife, an exciting company at the forefront of the Direct-To-Fan revolution.

Direct-To-Fan is a popular business model adopted by independent artists.  As the name suggests, artists cut out the middlemen (labels, distributors, retailers etc.) and promote and sell their music directly to their fans.

Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows and Nine Inch Nail’s release of Ghosts I–IV are popular examples of the Direct-To-Fan paradigm.

There are many benefits to Direct-To-Fan.  There are many challenges too.  Audiolife provides both the technology tools and the product fulfillment solutions to make Direct-To-Fan possible and affordable.

There are a handful of other companies with a Direct-To-Fan approach, including Topspin, Bandcamp, and Nimbit.

I want to ask you this:

If you’re doing it, is Direct-To-Fan working for you?

If you’re not doing it, what’s stopping you?

Please add your comments here.

1. Follow Terry McBride
CEO and Co-Founder of Nettwerk Music Group
Terry McBride is a two-time recipient of the Pollstar Industry Award for Personal Manager of the Year for his work with Sarah McLachlan (1997) and Avril Lavigne/Coldplay (2002), and recipient of the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at the 2003 Juno Awards, recognizing an outstanding individual who has contributed to the growth and advancement of the Canadian music industry.

2. Follow Derek Sivers
Founder and former President of CD Baby
Winner of the 2003 World Technology Award, Derek Sivers founded CD Baby “by accident” in 1998 and turned it into the largest seller of independent music on the web, which he sold a decade later to Disc Makers.

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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.

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As Twitter secures its place as “the next 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.

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Spotify, the streaming music service, announced last Thursday that Paul Brown will take on the role as the company’s UK Managing Director on April 20th.  It appears as if Brown was headhunted from Pandora where he served as Managing Director International.  Formerly at Sony Music UK where he contributed to the company’s digital music expansion and currently a Non-Executive Director at artist funding site, Slicethepie, Brown is the ideal candidate to spearhead Spotify’s operations in the UK where the uptake to the service has been “phenomenal”, Spotify noted on their blog.