I was invited by Mack Collier to co-host #blogchat (on Twitter) last Monday night (the 8th) and was blown away by the quality of participants and discussions taking place during the chat.
Before I get into my thoughts, let’s take a step back. For those that don’t know what #blogchat is, it’s a weekly chat happening on Twitter (check out tweetchat.com for more information on how). Essentially, you pull up a Twitter search for #blogchat at the appropriate time, and start Tweeting with the people already participating. The key is to use the hashtag (#blogchat) in every tweet so that the conversations can be seen by all. If you’re wondering how to find the “appropriate time” a simple Twitter search will tell you if you search for the hashtag.
The topic of the week was how musicians could use blogging and social media to help them achieve their goals – whether they be ticket sales, music sales, or just connecting with their fans.
The full chat transcript can be found here, and Mack’s review post can be found here. Happy clicking!
About an hour and a half into the chat, Curt Smith (co-founder of Tears for Fears) jumped into the fray and spent the next 30ish minutes answering questions. Part of the value (as a fan) of following artists on Twitter is the perception of personal connection you feel with the artist, their work, and their lives. Take the following exchange as an example:
Some of the other valuable music-related nuggets Tweeted during the chat:
Blogging and using other SM tools is a great way to build a passionate community
Communications should be authentic – no PR/marketing people tweeting “as” the artist
Don’t be afraid to have a personality
Many artists don’t see themselves as brands – that mind shift is necessary
Twitter can be a great “first step” tool to drive fans to other places (like a Facebook Fan Page or a website)
Offering up special incentives/announcements via SM is a great way to make your community in SM feel special (Ed note: as well as start to get an idea of the effectiveness of these tools!)
Artists and companies need to start viewing fans as long-term assets, not just short-term pockets stuffed with cash. The key? Building a relationship with them.
If you’re going to use SM, always consider what the fans want to read/might find interesting. The focus isn’t you as a person, per se – it’s about your brand and your work. Don’t be afraid to let personality shine through, but avoid excessive inane chatter.
Location-based software could be a no-no if you get big enough to worry about “crazy people”. Safety first!
Most agree a blog should be the “home base” in your digital efforts
Don’t forget the fan to fan connections – they’re key!
Before you can ever start to think about selling anything – you need to build a community who wants to buy.
What advice would you add? Leave it in the comments!
experiences from listening to a great piece of music, listening to dubplates, listening for the meaning behind the music – the list goes on.
From the marketing side, I hear about listening to the marketplace, listening to your consumers, or listening for your brand across the web.
Listening is great, and it’s absolutely necessary. The challenge though, is to separate listening from merely hearing.
Listening is hearing with purpose.
In the examples above, “hearing” can be substituted for every instance of “listening”. The challenge, is to not get stuck in that comfort zone of “yeah, I’m listening”.
The trick is, to never be able to say “Yeah, I hear you” as a throwaway.
Do you?
Are you listening to that dubplate, or merely hearing what you think should be there?
Are you listening to the new album at that listening party, or just waiting for the tracks to finish so you can weigh in with your support and comments?
Are you really listening to what the marketplace is saying, or are you sorting out the comments by “stuff we want to hear” and “stuff we know comes through, but we’ll qualify as unimportant and ignore”?
When you hear a piece of music, are you listening to it, or letting it pass you by?
Listening is a great skill, and a skill that takes a lot of work and patience. Just like learning to pay an instrument, listening takes practice. Listening is not passive.
For you musicians wondering how to listen as marketers, here are a few ideas to get you started:
Subscribe to blogs of bands/artists similar to you via Google Reader
Set up Google Alerts for your name and the name of your band
Set up Google Alerts for acts similar to you
Search on Twitter (search.twitter.com) for your name, as well as the names of your songs or albums
Subscribe to the RSS feed of that Twitter search, and pull it into Google Reader
Search for your name, the names of acts similar to you, or other terms on socialmention.com
Subscribe to that RSS feed and pull it into Google Reader
What you end up with is a Google Reader (or any RSS reader of your choice) full of information about what’s being said. That’s step 1.
The value comes from going back through that information and absorbing it. Read the blog posts. Comment if appropriate. Go see who’s talking about you on Twitter, reply or send them a Direct Message (DM) if it makes sense.
Look for feedback, look for trends, look for opportunities to connect.
Turn the data that gets fed to you into information by listening.
I’ve been a fan of Alicia Keys since “Songs in A Minor” was released in 2001, and have continued to follow her career as my life, and the world, has evolved.
9 years later a hit new song with Jay-Z playing on radio stations and iPod’s everywhere, I’m now even more in love with her music.
Personal tastes aside, I have a lot of respect for the marketing going on around Alicia Key’s new album – “The Element of Freedom”.
She first debuted the album on Facebook, that’s right – Facebook. To my knowledge – she’s the first major artist to do so (smart move!).
To do so, her marketing team got a company called Involver on board, which I admit is new to me (hey Involver, if you’re listening I’d love to pick your brain for a future post!).
In addition to the Facebook album debut, Alicia and her team have also put together a “I think it’s going to be slightly insane in a great way” event happening tonight at the legendary Apollo Theatre. Actually, it’s happening now, and I’m there, and you can watch here. Full review coming tomorrow, of course!
Back on track…
That’s right – the entire concert is being livestreamed (thanks Billboard!), and straight from their article on the event, here are some juicy details:
The chart-topping singer/songwriter’s new album, “The Element of Freedom,” peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 in December, but Keys has enjoyed a pair of long-running No. 1’s on the singles charts. Her New York centric duet with Jay-Z, “Empire State of Mind,” — which the duo performed to much acclaim at Yankee Stadium during the World Series in October — rode the top of the Hot 100 for five weeks in November and December. Meanwhile over on the Latin Pop Songs chart, Alejandro Sanz’s track featuring Keys, “Looking For Paradise,” has been No. 1 for the last nine consecutive weeks.
If you’re more of the “I like to watch the interviews” type, I included Billboard’s interview below. It’s a good watch!
I’m looking forward to seeing more major labels jump on the “let’s innovate!” train. If you’ve seen any examples then by all means, please share them in the comments!
There’s a lot of talk these days about MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. What isn’t often discussed (or to be honest, thought about, if you’re an artist) is the data ownership aspect of each of these networks. A lot of artists have moved away from email marketing and towards social marketing – and as a result, not as much focus is placed on building and maintaining a healthy email list.
Preferences Change Over Time
As an artist, your music will evolve over time. Your fan base will hopefully grow with you, but in order to help that growth, you need a consistent way to connect with your fans. Five years ago, they were on MySpace. Today, they’re most likely on Facebook, and some are on Twitter.
What hasn’t changed is their love of your music. What has changed is the tools they use to communicate with each other online.
You’re probably on all of the networks they participate in already. You have a MySpace Music page, a Facebook Fan page, and a Twitter handle.
Great and fabulous.
What happens if MySpace, Facebook and Twitter all shut down – tomorrow?
Do you have any way to reach out to your fans left, or did your options just disappear?
For most of you out there, your options just went out the window.
It’s great to connect with your fans where they already exist online, but this shouldn’t be your only way of connecting with them. As an artist, you need to own your audience, or at least, know their email address!
Here are some easy ways to start your email list:
Put a “sign up for our email” prompt on every page you have – Many tools are free (like MailChimp, for example) and provide the ability to create a form. Look, ma, it’s automated and organized!
Have an email sign-up sheet at the door of every gig – Go old school and collect email/mailing addresses and other information by hand. They’re coming to your show, obviously they’re interested!
Create a website and (you guessed it), put a “Sign up for our email” prompt on every page – Web hosting services can be fairly cheap, and there are many free systems out there (like WordPress, which I use), to help you create and maintain a site, even if you don’t know anything about designing a website.
If you get into a conversation with someone and take it private (DM’s, Facebook Messages, etc), send them your email and invite them to continue the conversation via email.
Include your email/website address on everything – videos, flyers, your website, business cards, etc.
Most importantly – make it WORTH your fans time to sign up for your emails. I’ll cover how to effectively email them in a further post, but start thinking about the emails you like reading, keeping in mind the marketing emails you always look out for.
Do you have any more ideas about how to build your email list? Any success stories to share? The comments are yours – so leave ‘em!
Ian Rogers (CEO of Topspin Media, another company I have a crush on) posted a brilliant article yesterday about how a band he’s co-managing (Get Busy Committee) is marketing and releasing their newest album, Uzi Does It.
If you’re slightly lazy, I’ve taken a few excerpts from the original post (emphasis mine).
At Topspin we generally talk about three stages of development:
Creating awareness
Making connections
Monetizing
We sometimes hear artists complain: “Dammit! I’m not selling anything!” Usually it’s a result of skipping straight to #3 above and not concentrating enough on #1 and #2. Consumers have an unlimited number of places to spend their time and money today. How are you getting in front of them? It is not a build-it-and-they-will-come world. How many you will sell is a small (and relatively consistent) percentage of how many people you have looking at a buy button. More impressions equals more sales, and most importantly none equals zero. If you have a very small number of fans (as we did, starting with zero emails, zero Facebook fans, zero Twitter followers, and just a handful of MySpace friends) IMHO you start by creating awareness and connecting with folks, not concentrating solely on selling.
The object was to make the site:
Home base. The top SEO result for “Get Busy Committee” and anything else related to the band.
Vibrant. It should update with the latest information about Get Busy Committee with very little effort, from a variety of sources. Furthermore, we weren’t going to spend time or money building any of these tools from scratch. We integrated WordPress and Twitter to make sure it was easy to update with long or short-form updates (respectively) easily.
A tool for fans to create other fans. Every page of the site is instrumented with simple ways to share on Facebook and Twitter, and feedback for having done so either in the form of a counter or free music for having done so. We want it to not only be easy to spread the word but for you to be recognized for having done so.
Once we had the site up and running, we needed to create some awareness. We did a few simple things to bootstrap those first few views:
Created a unique product. By creating the Uzi-shaped USB we had a hook, something people could talk about.
Leaked some music. We took two songs from the album and made them available for download in return for an email address from GetBusyCommittee.com, and available for streaming on MySpace, Facebook, iMeem, Last.fm, YouTube, and iLike.
Told the world. We worked every source we had to get the word out, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, email, blogs, friends, family, etc. We even bought a few Facebook and Google ads (more on that in a later post).
We started with a range of products, things we’d buy ourselves if we were fans:
A cheap digital download. $6 gets you the whole album in high-quality 320kbps MP3, CD-quality FLAC, or CD-quality Apple Lossless format.
An inexpensive CD with an immediate digital download. Buy the CD, download now. CDs printed on-demand by our friends at Kufala. Oh and the shrink-wrap is smokeable so every CD comes with free rolling papers.
An Uzi-shaped USB flash drive and an immediate digital download. This was the most difficult piece but also the linchpin. We had to get this sourced by a company that deals directly with manufacturers in China and had to spend money up-front to buy a few hundred. To be honest I was very reticent to spend the money. But since these have constituted about 40% of our sales at a good price point as well as garnered us the most attention it was certainly money well spent. We’re already about 50% sold through our order, which is completely unexpected for me.
High-quality t-shirts added to any of the above. We partnered with street wear company True Love & False Idols to do a high-quality shirt. They’re fashion-quality and fashion-priced and as a result we aren’t selling a ton of them on the site just yet (they’re also not merchandised particularly well at the moment, I plan to correct that later in the cycle). But also as a result we have interest with some great retail outlets such as Suru LA, who will be selling an exclusive version of the shirt along with a CD starting this week.
When people talk about what Trent Reznor did with Ghosts they always mention the 2500 $300 box sets he sold but rarely do they mention what is perhaps the most genius concept he introduced with that offer: the price point of FREE. What Trent really did was look his fans in the eye and ask them, “So, how big a fan are you?” But he also acknowledged that “not that big” or “I dunno yet” was a perfectly valid response by saying, “if you’d prefer to spend nothing, I have a package for you, it’s half the album.”
I really can’t say how much this post hits the proverbial nail on the head. Ian (and Topspin) GET IT. They GET that music isn’t just “put my shit out there for people to buy, flood the airwaves with my song over and over again, plaster banner ads and billboards anywhere my ad budget will allow and see the money roll in”.
They GET that it’s about connection with fans.
They GET that music is about that relationship.
They GET that it has to be sustainable – you have to end up selling shit (who knew!)!!
I also ran across a great interview with Ian, conducted by Wired. Check it out:
@db I know I'm bias, but #CLT is still my favorite airpot. Bojangles + rocking chairs + bean bags = airport WIN (cc: @jakrose @93octane) in reply to db3 mins ago
