Archive for October, 2009
So far we’ve covered defining your goals, determining your product(s) and researching how you should price your product(s).
This post is all about place.
Some places may be obvious, and some not so obvious. It’s up to you to determine where the best place for your products may be, whether that be existing for free online, or in a store on a shelf.
 When you determined what you could sell, you answered the following questions:
- What do I pay money for now, music-wise?
- What do I want to buy, but currently can’t, from my favorite bands?
- How can I add value to my fan’s lives?
- What makes me different?
- How can I make money off of what makes me different?
Then, you took those answers and dug a bit deeper by asking these questions:
- What do these products or services cost me to produce?
- What are the typical market rates for similar products or services?
Now, your challenge is to take those answers and again, do something more with them.
How?
Since you did a bit of research when figuring out how much items typically cost, go back and figure out where you went to look for that information.
I’ll again use the example of our live hip hop band.
They first went to MySpace to look at the profiles of bands in their local area, as well as similar types of bands across the nation. From there, they went to iTunes and to see how much they were selling their songs for, and they also visited their websites to see what they put up on their sites content-wise, and how (and what) they were selling on their sites.
They ended up with a lot of information.
It seems like most of their counterparts don’t sell merchandise on their websites, but they do use their sites to direct people to their new songs (and places they can buy them), as well as their shows and other in-person appearances.
That was an interesting find, as place is both about where to place your products, as well as where to place yourself.
This brings me to the questions for this post:
- Where does your audience exist?
- Where does your audience go for information?
- How does your audience prefer to connect with each other (and with you)?
For our hip hop band, they found that:
Q: Where does your audience exist?
A: Our audience exists on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and on our website. We get quite a few hits to our site, especially to our “upcoming gigs” section, and our new songs that we post on MySpace have a lot of people listening to them when they’re new, and then we start seeing Tweets and Facebook Status Updates about them.
Q: Where does your audience go for information?
A: Our audience seems to go to our MySpace page and our website for information about us, though we know that at lot of our fans also post on popular hip hop message boards and also use Twitter to keep up with news and information.
Q: How does your audience prefer to connect with each other (and with you)?
A: Our fans are a fan of MySpace, message boards and Twitter, in that order. We also get quite a few emails and notice a lot of our fans arranging pre-show meetups whenever we go on tour.
 - Photo provided under a Creative Commons License by slworking2
Where Do I Go?
First, you have to understand where your audience exists.
You can have a great product and a reasonable price point with a lot of people willing to buy, but if you’re not going and selling to them where they’re looking, you’ll never make a sale.
From the answers above our hip hop band should certainly keep up their presence on MySpace and Twitter. It doesn’t seem that Facebook is a huge place for them to be at the moment, but perhaps if they developed their Fan Page they may see more activity. Their website seems to be quite popular, especially the section about their upcoming shows.
Also, if they don’t participate in the hip hop message boards already, they probably should, since they said that their fans go there for information.
Now, so far all of this is online.
I’m assuming that if they make a CD, they’re going to contact their local record shops (or have the company doing their P&D do it for them) to talk about selling their CD in stores. If they don’t, they should.
As I said above, place is both about where you place your products, as well as where you place yourself.
Make sure to go where your audience exists and pay attention to trends, it’s hard, but see if you can try to go where they’ll also be going tomorrow, not just today (or yesterday).
Tags: place, planning, strategy
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Last night I had the pleasure of attending the CMJ @SoundCTRL and music:tech meetup, as well as the debut of Superglued (a cool new iPhone app… more on that later).
I went to the last SoundCTRL event and was impressed by the quality of attendees, as well as the panel members and content. This mixer was slightly different as it was a joint event with music:tech, who was celebrating their 1-year anniversary, as well as a product launch.
As is usual with the music and technology events I go to in the city, the best part of the night (by far) is discovering how so many different people can have so much in common. I always end up meeting people who inspire me to push the boundaries even more, and walk away feeling like the world has to be a slightly better place than it was before the event if so much positivity exists.
We all know that the music industry has changed. That ship sailed years ago. What’s great to hear is how people are responding to that change and developing their own framework and their own new path to walk. There are so many companies coming up with new technologies to help artists spread their music, or help fans find the music they want to listen to – all in a way that removes barriers and works with the user, not against them.
 Superglued is one such company, and a product that I see myself using quite often (starting… last night).
Straight from their website:
SuperGlued is where people go to share and discuss live music shows with the other people who were there. Live music is such a collective experience so shouldn’t it be celebrated together too? We think so! Whether you were in the crowd of 55,600 to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965 or among the 200 to experience Arcade Fire in a Montreal church basement in 2005, your stories belong here.
As a marketer who now works in social media, I demand a lot from applications. For an application like Superglued, a few key things must be present if they want to gain and keep a loyal user.
- It has to be social. Connect me with people who like the same music I like, WITHOUT making me search
- It has to be easy to use. This is more a UI thing than a social media thing, but have you ever noticed how darn easy most social applications are to use?
- It has to keep me coming back. Why do I come back? To talk to other people like me, of course.
From the musician’s standpoint, they want a place to go and see what the crowd liked and didn’t like, a place to share their opinions and information about the show, and hopefully, a place to make more money.
Superglued is on the right track on both counts.
The app has proven useful already, showing me shows in Manhattan last night for CMJ. It uses the GPS function in the iPhone to find your current location, and shows you upcoming local shows based on that data. It was really easy to sign up (from the event itself) without having to go to a computer, and I set up my profile within a few minutes, in addition to connecting it to Facebook and Twitter.
On a seperate topic, Sonorasaurus (the DJ iPhone app) seemed to get positive reviews from the people that saw it. More on that in a future blog post.
Summary?
SoundCTRL and music: tech put on a great event. I’m looking forward to the next one(s).
A head nod also goes to to @nettap, @dubfiler, Dave Chaitt, @nmcgylnn, Seth and Justin for the wonderful conversations.
Tags: CMJ, events, music:tech, sonorasaurus, soundCTRL, superglued
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 - This photo provided by designwallah under a Creative Commons License
In the midst of my “4P’s of Marketing” series, I thought a dose of reality, aka “what this all means for me in the real world” would be helpful.
For those that know me personally, you undoubtedly know that I think the world is a very small place. From running into the first person I met at college while on the tram at Gatwick airport, to meeting a co-worker’s girlfriend at a bar who has worked with my uncle (a professional photographer) before, this theory has been proven over and over again.
It was again proven true last night, when I met Andrew from Half Fiction. One of the three partners is a guy by the name of Sage, and in addition to having at least one person in common through a few degrees of separation (See? Small world!), he is the inspiration for this post.
Sage is involved with a number of projects, one of which is Ready Fire Aim. Kind enough to send me their electronic press kit, I took a stroll around the RFA website and happened upon this blog post.
By way of a preface, I write from the perspective of a marketer who has been obsessed and involved (the playing and listening kind, not creepy ‘involved’ romantically kind) with music her entire life. Sage’s perspective is that of a performer, and someone making a living off of their art. Excerpts provided below (emphasis mine), but you really should go read the whole thing here.
….I am going to say however that it is seriously hard fucking work rehearsing non stop and trying to work to pay the bills and have any kind of personal life at all. I call it rockstar 2.0–all work and very little play.
The days of letting the label do all the work while the artist gets fucked up, throws TVs out the window of expensive hotel suites and does irreparable damage to the room are long gone. GOOD RIDDANCE. The middle man is no longer required. What is required is that every band leader think like a brand manager. That every artist must also come correct with an unlimited supply of elbow grease and a multi-tool in his/her back pocket is also a given, but the truth is that no amount of work on the part of the artist can compensate for one crucial factor–the only thing that REALLY TRULY MATTERS regardless of label support, management, agenting or directing from ‘on high’–THE FANS and their support.
In the last 2 weeks for some strange reason I have been contacted by more people who are saying that they have bought or want to buy my record, love the music and listen to it all the time and are telling all their friends about it than in the last 2 years combined… Not only does this make me want to keep working, it makes me want to please my fans. It makes me want to work harder longer and more intensely to make them happy and keep making music-music they laugh, cry, dance, make out, have sex, meet/break up with boyfriends and girlfriends, cook dinner, drive and dance in their undies lip-synching into their hairbrush to. In other words, music to live life to–a partner/soundtrack to whatever it is that they are doing. The digital revolution makes that possible...
In a perfect world there would be no free downloading and I would be paid a fair wage for my work. Music is free and a whole generation now thinks of their media as a portable, constitutional, God ordained, inalienable right. You can either play a Lars Ulrich… or you can adapt, roll with the change-by-the-hour tide of technology and figure out a way to get people to WANT to pay you… I’m not sure why or how that is going to happen en masse but for my part as long as i can continue to engage my fans on a one-to-one level and initiate real contact between artist and consumer of art (fan has egomaniacal connotations to me so I’m going to try and stop using it) who is a REAL person on the other end of the phone, keyboard or social media platform then I will consider myself a successful artist.
…That means that the labels really ARE irrelevant as long as I outsource carefully and creatively certain aspects of the business to individuals who know how to do that better than me. That means that the fat bloated days of rockstar entitlement to bad behavior, mountains of drugs and waiting rooms of young women (and the fat bloated middlemen who plied them with it all so they could ROB THEM BLIND while they were drunk, high and fucking their brains out in extravagant hotels they were unwittingly paying for) are gone for good–replaced with the leaner meaner rockstar 2.0 approach of DIY ingenuity and hard work, the very things that made America great. See rock and roll IS America. Rock and Roll has become what our parents and grandparents did to put food on the table and roofs over our heads–just another job. It’s come full circle to being willing to do the work, play the game and write the songs that make the whole world sing from some ‘Alice down the rabbit hole’ wanderland that it has been for the last 4 decades.
In the end it all comes down to one person reaching out and touching another (consensually of course) and the honest exchange of some dollars for doughnuts as my dad would say, and to that end, my dear reader YOU are the most important part of the equation-not me. And so on this, the moment before I go and play the most strategically critical show of my life, the one for which I have rehearsed for 15 years I want to thank you for not only reading my drivel but for buying my music, telling your friends, for dancing mostly naked in front of mirrors and writing to tell me about it. YOU give me a reason to keep working non-stop all day and night, sweating my tits off in a shoebox rehearsal space at 10 in the morning 3 times a week after staying up til 4am editing and posting videos on my 20+ social media platforms. . . and for that I am EXTREMELY grateful! IT’S A BEAUTIFUL THING.
In case you’re too lazy to click on the blog post, Sage posts Beautiful Thing as a track at the end of the entry. Listen here.
What’s the point?
The point is that it’s about the music and the fans… it’s ALWAYS been about the music and the fans. For awhile, the business got in the way. Now? The business model is broken, and it’s back to the music and the fans.
Go through and read about how to figure out what your product is, how to price it (that post was a struggle to write), and then learn about where to put it and how to market it… but relate it to your life. Relate it to your art, and make it work for you.
Tags: audience segmentation, behind the scenes, fans, free, marketing, price, product
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 The first two posts in this series outlined how to define your overall goals as well as determining what your product will be.
This post covers how to price your product.
To review:
Product – What are you going to sell?
Price – How much are you going to sell it for?
Place – Where are you going to sell it?
Promotion – How are you going to get the word out?
History
Price has changed drastically over the last 10 years for the music industry. Records used to sell millions of copies at $15 (or more) a pop, and 360° record deals were far less popular.
Musicians didn’t have as much power before as they do today. The dream of being signed to a big label and making millions was most often the quickest (and hardest) way to riches. Artists “doing their own thing” were few and far between, and for the most part, musicians were at the mercy of “big business” to make their fortunes (if that was their goal).
The world has changed.
Today, musicians have more power than ever. Companies now exist to let artists do much of the work they used to hire people to do themselves… if they choose that path. On top of the resources available, our lives as consumers have fragmented. Our attention spans have shortened and we expect the companies we do business with, including our favorite artists, to slice and dice their content and make it available where we want it, when we want it.
How Does This Affect My Prices?
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Photo provided under a Creative Commons license by marie-ll
I’m going to go ahead and say that every business struggles with how to price their products.
A number of factors going into determining your price, and these factors can fluctuate, sometimes making pricing feel like trying to kill a pesky mosquito - chasing the annoying thing around the room, numerous close calls and escapes, and a rush of satisfaction when you finally nail it.
On top of outside influences from the market, there are many different pricing strategies to choose from, each with their own pros and cons.
What Is My Price?
I’ll stop sounding like a textbook, and instead give you two good questions to ask yourself when trying to decide “how much will I sell my products for?”:
- What do these products or services cost me to produce?
- What are the typical market rates for similar products or services?
A good place to start determining your price(s) is to take your answers from the “What is My Product” post and separate your answers into categories. I’ve taken the answers from our live hip hop band and done exactly that below:
Q: What do I pay money for now, music-wise?
A: Music, t-shirts/schwag, concert to tickets, limited/deluxe edition CD’s.
Q: What do I want to buy, but currently can’t, from my favorite bands?
A: Recording session, face-to-face interviews, concert tickets
Q: How can I add value to my fan’s lives?
A: Music lessons, recording sessions, meet-and-greets, online connections, charity events
Q: What makes me different?
A: Female band, themed shows
Q: Out of the answers above, which ones can I make money from?
A: My music, concert tickets, t-shirts/schwag, Limited Edition/Deluxe CD’s, auction off signed merch.
As you can see, a few patterns emerge. Our hip hop band sees their major revenue streams coming from:
- Selling their music
- Putting out Limited Edition/Deluxe CD’s
- Performing concerts
- Selling merch
- Selling their time and teaching lessons
- Selling their time and helping artists record
Now it’s time to apply those two questions above:
- What do these products or services cost me to produce?
- What are the typical market rates for similar products or services?
We asked these questions for merch as an example.
Q: What do these products or services cost me to produce?
A: For merch, we want to sell t-shirts, baseball caps and stickers. We’ll hire a designer to design each item, then send the designs off to the printing shop for creation. They’ll then be shipped to the final destination, which will vary per show.
We’ll have to pay the following costs: design costs, print costs, shipping costs and possibly storage costs.
Q: What are the typical market rates for similar products or services?
A: T-shirts typically retail for anywhere between $15-30. Baseball caps sell for $30-40. The stickers will come in different sizes, and be sold for anywhere between $5-7.50.
Now comes the math. You need to figure out what your total costs will be, and compare them to what the current prices are for similar items.
Before coming to your final number, or thinking this is all hopeless because your costs are larger than what people tend to buy the products for, consider a few points:
Quantity is a factor – Make sure to talk to the company doing your production work about price breaks for ordering higher quantities. Sometimes this is applicable (like with the stickers), and sometimes it’s not. Make sure to ask in any case, especially if this is new to you.
Demand is a factor – If there is a lot of demand for your items, either because everyone wants to have one and they’re willing to buy one, or everyone wants to have one and the item is scarce, you may be able to charge above the market price for that item – leaving more money in your pocket than normal. Keep an accurate log of how much your items are selling and how quickly and you’ll be able to more easily spot these trends.
Notes
I’m by no means a pricing expert, and within the music industry (well, the record industry actually), pricing is especially hard as the cost of the item and the amount people are willing to pay (these days, sometimes $0) may be drastically different.
It never hurts to ask around. What are similar artists doing? How are they pricing their products? Do you see things they’re doing right or wrong (in your opinion)?? Learn from the people around you and don’t be afraid to ask questions!
Here are some resources, some academic, and some just information that may be good to know when you’re reading this series:
Have something to say? A story to share about how you figured out how to price your work or time? Leave them in the comments!
Next up… “Place – It’s More Than MySpace”
Tags: marketing, planning, price, strategy
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Following up on the introductory post to this series, you should be armed with answers to the following questions.
- What is my ultimate goal?
- What do I want to achieve on the way to my ultimate goal?
- Why am I in the music business; what’s my motivation?
- If I’m going to make money off of this venture, what are the ways I see myself doing so?
- How in the hell am I going to measure success?
These answers are important to know before reading the rest of the series, as each post incorporates answers from one or more questions.
Your product forms the foundation for the other 3 P’s (Price, Place and Promotion). In order:
- Product – What are you going to sell?
- Price – How much are you going to sell it for?
- Place – Where are you going to sell it?
- Promotion – How are you going to get the word out?
To make this simple, I’m going to use the example of a band throughout this post series.
My fictional band is based in NY, plays live hip hop and has 4 female members.
Product
Before committing your life, or at least a significant portion of your life, to making a living from making music, every musician should sit down and consider what their product(s) will be.
If you haven’t woken up and smelled the french-pressed coffee yet, the days of making a few mediocre songs, getting picked up by a label, produced six ways from Sunday and making millions are gone. Musicians now have the ability to be their label, be their manager, be their tour promoter, and be their own music marketing machine. But, as they say, with power, comes responsibility.
These questions should help:
- What do I pay money for now, music-wise?
- What do I want to buy, but currently can’t, from my favorite bands?
- How can I add value to my fan’s lives?
- What makes me different?
- How can I make money off of what makes me different?
If you need help brainstorming, check out this list of 29 streams of revenue for musicians.
 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/anthonysalvi/ CC:BY-NC-ND 2.0
Examples
Our pretend hip hop band answered these questions, and their answers are listed below:
Q: What do I pay money for now, music-wise?
A: I buy tracks I like online from iTunes or Beatport, but rarely buy a full album. I also buy t-shirts, limited edition records and concert tickets.
Q: What do I want to buy, but currently can’t, from my favorite bands?
A: Since we’re musicians, we’d love to buy a recording session or face-to-face interview with one of my favorite musicians in the band to see how they made it big, and learn how to improve how I play. I’d also love to buy better concert tickets since I’m such a loyal fan. I’d really love to sit in the front row!
Q: How can I add value to my fan’s lives?
A: I can share my talents with my fans through music lessons and recording sessions. Or, I can work with aspiring solo hip hop artists on their lyrics. I can spend time with them backstage at gigs, and I can connect with them online. We’ve all been touched by cancer, so we can also link up with the American Cancer Society to put on a fundraiser concert. We can certainly involve our fans that have also been touched by cancer to volunteer.
Q: What makes me different?
A: We’re an all-female live hip hop band, which makes us very different. You don’t see many all-female bands, or many live hip hop bands. Also, we theme each show – our last one was Kriss Krossed, for example.
Q: Out of the answers above, which ones can I make money from?
A: I can immediately make sure our music is available on iTunes and Beatport (perhaps by using Tunecore), and I can also connect with fans online (using ArtistData to manage everything) and invite them to one of our themed concerts.
Once our popularity grows, we can release limited edition CD’s of our music. We’ll put out three versions – one, just a CD with a basic jacket, and another that is a CD/DVD package featuring lots of extras, uncut versions, takes from recording sessions and backstage videos. The highest level will also come with a signed baseball cap in addition to the CD/DVD package.
We can also start a contest when we get this popular. Half of the proceeds will go to benefit a cancer charity of our choice since it’s a cause close to our hearts. The contest will be like an auction, allowing fans to bid on signed merchandise, as well as the top prize of recording with us to create their own song.
Ok, Now What?
Now it’s your turn. Open up a document on your computer, put up paper on the wall and grab some markers, or get out some old fashioned pen and paper and start writing. It’s important to brainstorm right now. Even if you can’t use an answer immediately, keep them all to see if any become relevant as time progresses.
Once you’re done answering the questions you should have a lot of ideas. Don’t worry about how much you’ll sell these things for, or even if they can be sold. The ideas are what we want at this point.
Are there any other questions you would ask at this point in the game? Leave them in the comments if so!
The next post “How Much Is This Worth?” goes into detail about ” can it be sold” and “if so, for how much?”. Stay tuned…
Tags: marketing, planning, product, strategy
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