Photo credit: suchitra prints

I often am asked how to start monitoring the conversations happening on the web. How do you know what to look for? Where do you begin? How can you save time? How can this information be used to eventually spread the word about what you do??

Ask no more!

Before I begin, I want to state that I work for a social media monitoring company. But, I’m not here to pitch them. I’m here to provide advice for you, the musician who, in entrepreneurial terms, is “bootstrapping” it.

Define what you’re looking for

Why are you out there on the social web? Is it to get press? Keep up with industry news? Spread the word about who you are and what you play? Connect with other musicians?

The first step to successful listening is knowing WHY you’re listening. Figure that out first, and don’t be afraid to include more than one answer! Listening can have multiple purposes.

Find your Audience

Where do people go to connect? Do a basic search for some key terms that seem logical, stemming from your answers above. Perhaps search for names of your band, band members, perhaps groups you think are similar to you in sound or style. Socialmention.com is a great resource for a quick n dirty search, and it will let you search places like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and blogs – all at once. Take note as to where conversations seen to be happening and remember that for later.

Find your Keywords

After you know what you’re looking for and where you should be looking for it, sit down and define your keywords. What do you want to go out looking for? As mentioned above – starting with your brand, any member names, people that sound similar, perhaps your location, or a combination thereof is a good start. Run some test searches and see what results come in. Are the results what you expect? Do you need to eliminate some results? Are there key words you can use (called exclusion keywords) to eliminate groups of irrelevant results?

Try, tweak, and try some more.

Behold the RSS Feed

Learn to love the RSS feed. Don’t know what one is? Learn here.

It works like this. Say you to go Twitter and plug in those lovely keywords you figured out earlier. Look at the results page for a button that looks like sound waves, or something that says something similar to “get an RSS feed of your results”. Click on that and add it to your preferred RSS reader (the way you read these things, sort of like a digest). I use Google Reader, but lots of options exist.

Add the search results via RSS feed to the reader and voilà, the search happens automatically and sends you new results! You now just have to go into the reader and check for them on a regular basis.

You can subscribe to all sorts of things like this. Blogs, Google search results, Twitter search results, etc.

Learn, automate, and manage your time.

So?

So now you’re out there, getting automatic results in on a regular basis for things you want to keep up with. Read them, comment if you feel like it, add people to your network where it makes sense, and enjoy!

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.

This subject keeps resurfacing – most recently in a few blog posts by Mark Mulligan (VP and Research Director at Forrester) and a less recent critique of the Forrester  report “Music Release Windows: The Product Innovation That The Music Business Can’t Do Without“.

Note: Another report came out in late September from Forrester dealing with a similar topic – “Music Product Manifesto: The Product Features That Will Save Recorded Music.“  That’s for a later blog post (or few).

Today, we stick with free!

In my previous post, I covered Imogen Heap’s latest release (Ellipse) and how it’s up to the artist to decide what their own “free” will be.  Is it the music? Is it the experience of getting to see the work behind the scenes? Is it copies of your live concerts? Whatever it is, you need to have a strategy and be clear on how that strategy gets executed day-to-day.

I’ll start at the beginning, with a chart explaining how Forrester’s proposed Music Release Windows schedule would work:

Now, the critique from Michael Masnick at Techdirt (emphasis mine):

But, of course, parts of the plan are a bit of a headscratcher. It still seems very much focused on getting people back into “buying music” rather than coming up with actual scarcities to buy. Instead, it tries to invent new artificial scarcities, mostly by copying an awful idea from the movie industry: windowed releases. The idea is that “premium club” members would pay to get access to music before others, and could get some sort of bundle of content. Two weeks later, the regular “release” would happen, with CDs, download stores and radio. Then, three weeks later, there would be a “free” component that actually is more “feels like free” using either ad-supported downloads or streaming.

Of course, like the movie industry, this ignores both reality and what people want. Those timelines won’t make much sense, because as soon as the music’s out, it’ll be widely available. There’s just no stopping that. Artificially holding it back doesn’t do much good and doesn’t give anyone a reason to buy. If anything, it actively drives people to unauthorized copies. Those who don’t want that “premium club” offering won’t wait six weeks for the official “free” streaming version with ads. They’ll just go out and get an unauthorized copy.

Fair point from Michael, and one I strongly agree with.  I liken this to the practice a lot of smaller (especially electronic) record labels use when selling new tracks digitally and on vinyl.   I’ll list it out step-by-step for those not too familiar with how this works.

1. Release a digital track
2. Press a small number of  numbered Limited Edition vinyl releases
3. See how they both sell
4. If demand continues to be present for the Limited Edition vinyl release, press a larger amount with a different B side, keeping the star track on the A side, preserving the value of the Limited Edition release and fulfilling the demand with product for eager consumers

This works with electronic music as many people still like the physical copies of the records.  Record stores may be a niche business to many, but they’re still a profitable business for people interested in jazz, soul, hip hop and electronic music to name a few.

The process above is also a great example of true scarcity and responding to true demand for a product, which is different than purposefully creating a scarce product in order to try and attach a better profit margin to the product. Same result, but created from two different situations; one is business-led, the other consumer-led.

Mark Mulligan later posted a blog entry defending his stance in the “Music is Free” raging debate.

Here’s the part I take issue with:

One of the counter arguments used by commentators is that having a MySpace page is an ends in itself these days.  No, it is a means to an end, and the VAST majority of artists see it that way.  If an aspiring artist doesn’t get signed to a label / publisher / agent they’ll remain one of those many tens of thousands of artists struggling to stand out from the crowded pack on MySpace.

My question to Mark, or any artist that reads this blog, is WHY does a label / publisher or agent have to be involved in order to make you successful?

What is preventing the independent artist from getting in contact with companies like TuneCore (nice new website design, by the way!)? If the answer is “it’s too much work to be my own label / publisher / agent” then why not use a company like ArtistData to simplify everything? Even the argument of “funding is given by these companies to develop the artists” is rendered pretty null and void if you use Kickstarter (see my recent post about JuaKali’s project on Kickstarter, which I’m happy to report got funding and is being produced!).

Forrester’s points are valid if viewed within the mindset that you HAVE to involve a label, publisher or an agent.  They’re also valid if you view the “main problem” of the music industry as “the inability to stop illegal downloading and file-sharing and the struggle to get consumers to buy music”.

That’s the point, though. The music industry doesn’t require any of those parties or viewpoints expressed above.  Yes, it’s a struggle for many artists to adapt to this new model when they’ve been able to survive so long on the old one.  On the flip side, it’s an event greater opportunity for those very same artists and companies to lead the way with developing the new music business model.

It’s an opportunity to develop a model that works, one that evolves, one that is sustainable and, most importantly – one that satisfies the needs of the businesses, the musicians AND the fans.