Social media has brought us into an age where consumers, not companies, determine the market’s perception of brands. This can be frightening for those who are accustomed to doing business at arm’s length with the masses. But there are huge opportunities for those of us who don’t know any better.
Consumer driven marketing is one of the most powerful tools out there today, whether you’re a billion dollar corporation or a five-piece band. Each artist has more than one fan, right? (If that isn’t true in your case you have other things to work on before worrying about any of this!) It’s only logical that your fans would be capable of spreading the word about your music much farther than you can by yourself.
The key to capitalizing on this is to stay involved by managing fan experiences. The old way was to try and shape consumer perception of brands through large-scale marketing. In other words, trying to attack entire demographics at a time. That takes money, and a whole lot of it. Most independent bands have to scrape up the cash to fill the gas tank of their tour van, let alone spend thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign.
Last week Apple held its Rock n Roll event and unveiled some nice new features and toys, including the iPod Nano with video. One thing that got overlooked is an awesome music marketing feature for indie bands. Apple iTunes, in their 9.0 upgrade allows people to share what they are looking at in iTunes via Twitter and Facebook.
I think this is great for musicians and I wanted to quickly walk you through this new addition.
Take advantage of this feature and also relay the message to your fans to let them do your marketing for you.
Amanda Palmer playing impromptu show with die hard fans (by GooseHonk)
In a post by Kevin English on the Eleet Music Blog, a discussion on post album fans arose the topic about more people listening to more music, yet less albums are being bought. This has been relevant with the fact that iTunes is now the number one music retailer (ahead of Wal Mart, Best Buy, Target and FYE), whose business model is based around singles and individuality.
This poses some problems for both major labels and artists that focus all or most of their attention around the release of an album. The notion of releasing a single body of work every year or 2 is becoming irrelevant with the way consumers are gobbling up music. The demand for new tracks is there, just in new ways.
In order to make an impact and get attention from music fans, you need to develop relationship marketing channels to hit these fans at multiple points on multiple occasions. This can include sporadic EP or single releases with big online pushes multiple times per year. It can mean customized merchandise for certain live shows that are sold at the event and shipped on demand (think Audiolife). It can also mean producing membership sites that allow a smaller number of fans paying premiums for exclusives, access to back catalogs, intimate videos and deals that regular fans do not have access to. These super fans create residual income and give you a channel to talk to them, learn and grow as a group and in turn develop relationships that will help spread your music and your network organically.
Marketing has taken on a whole ‘nother meaning in this technology and “always on” age. Marketing is not just neatly packaged ads and campaigns that you push out to the public. Marketing is now a communication channel between you and the public – whether your fans, potential fans, passers by, people looking in Twitter Search, Google searches, YouTube videos, comments and any other interaction point that there is.
The goal here is to create value at all of these interaction points.
Last Thursday, I went to an Atmosphere show in Orlando, FL – a long way from his hometown in Minneapolis, MN. Upon first glance it would appear that 1,000 kids paid $15 to see a white rapper from the burbs. Taking a closer look you will see the real value of what was happening here.
Pre-Pre-Show
As with all Atmosphere tours, he has released a new EP for concert go-ers to get excited about. This time he made it a free 7-song download available at their in-house record shop, 5th Element Online. To help their overall marketing efforts, they made you sign-up for a free account to be notified of new releases and tour info in exchange for the EP.
The goal of the Indie Artist X Project is to develop a basic, actionable music marketing plan designed around simple strategy, prioritization of tactics, easy to use tools, and a reasonable budget that can be implemented by any artist who has the inclination to follow it. About.com Music Careers, Artists House Music, Hypebot, KnowTheMusicBiz.com, MusicianWages.com and Revolution Number 3 have banned together to create this community based music marketing plan. It’s our hope that any hard working, talented musician can utilize this plan to grow their fan base and help lay the foundation for a sustainable career in music. We will be working with one anonymous artist to design and implement this music marketing plan then track and report the actual results over a four month period. To keep up with the latest news on the IAXP follow the project on Twitter and Facebook.
When developing the overall website strategy for the Indie Artist X Project it became clear the artist’s existing website fell well short of the functionality needed, let alone desired.
There are two paths you can generally take with your marketing. You can jump on the road that everyone else is using or you can reinvent the wheel and push the limits of your efforts. I like to go somewhere in the middle, using tried and true models to get fans excited about music, events and products and then looking for doors that no one has yet opened, seeing what happens and then looking at ways to enhance these new methods.
One of these “new road” tactics has been in outreach programs for musicians looking to connect with bloggers. In this new social media era, creating real relationships with people, fans and industry folks is proving to have more of a long lasting effect than the friend blasting days of Myspace glory. The words that come out of bloggers and trust worthy Twitter sources can do leaps and bounds for your virtual promotion and has proven to help sell records.
Greetings from Los Angeles. Over the last 15+ years I have spent a great amount of time marketing artists from the Record Company side as well as the Artist Management side. The goals of my posts are simple: help you position yourself, your band, etc. for success. It is up to you to make the best music possible. So lets dive in shall we?
MYSPACE
I’m sure you have heard it a million times: build a MySpace page. Yes, you should have a presence on MySpace, but more importantly, you should have your own website. The web is fickle, remember Friendster? MySpace is going through some changes at the moment and if you haven’t heard, Facebook just took over as the #1 Social Networking Platform. It is great to have tons of friends and plays, but if those “friends” don’t support you by coming to your shows, buying merchandise, CDs, etc what are they good for then?
I’m not trying to bash MySpace, it is definitely a viable tool for artists, but don’t think that just because you put up a page, used an autobot to get a bunch of “friends” and “plays” that you’re on your way to success. Focus on quality and not quantity. Super serve those fans from the get go. They will tell a friend, who will tell a friend, etc. Get the picture? You can do everything in the world to get noticed, but it won’t mean a thing if you don’t establish an emotional connection with your fans. At the end of the day it’s all about your music.
Greetings from Los Angeles. Over the last 15+ years I have spent a great amount of time marketing artists from the Record Company side as well as the Artist Management side. The goals of my posts are simple: help you position yourself, your band, etc. for success. It is up to you to make the best music possible. So lets dive in shall we?
