MobBase is Live

Last week I briefly mentioned MobBase, a web app for creating iPhone apps for your band - today they went live. I'm not going to repeat the excellent coverage from Hypebot or RWW and others, but I would like to share a few screenshots of how easy it is for your band to create an inexpensive, customizable and feature rich iPhone app:



continued...

Benefits of Twitter Lists for Artists

Most everyone now has Lists enabled for their Twitter account, but what does this mean for you, the artist? Well, there are numerous ways to gain value from them. Below are 4 simple ways you could use Twitter Lists as a tool to help you maximize your tour and net the most income while on the road:

1. Keep track of other bands and musicians by region (e.g. Southeast, Northwest, Central, etc.), so while you're on the road you could see what they're doing and possibly headline swap, invite them to share the stage with you, meetup, etc.
2. Keep track of venues by region. Similar to above, the difference is that you're looking to see if there are any last minute openings or opportunities you may have not been aware of before hitting the road.
3. Keep track of your top fans by city (fan segmentation). Building relationships with your fans and superfans is vitally important, especially if you're trying to pack the house each night, and this is a great way to segment them via Twitter (tip: you may want to keep these lists private).
4. Discover. By doing the above, or creating another type of list for your band, you're going to discover some interesting people, artists, fans and more - nothing but a good thing, and it works equally for people discovering your band as you get added to Lists, which could open up more opportunities for you, so be creative and build some Lists.

There are lots of other ways Twitter Lists can help your band, these are just some examples to get you started. How do you plan to use Lists?

Indie Music Map for the iPhone by nuTsie

A few days ago, nuTsie released its Indie Music Map iPhone App. It's quite cool - you can select a region of the country and listen to popular songs from indie artists in the North Atlantic, North Central, Pacific Northwest, Mountain, Southwest and Southeast regions:



You can then view more information about the artist, purchase their song directly from iTunes, watch video from the artist on YouTube (if applicable), or learn more about the region an artist is from.

Interestingly, nuTsie selected all of the songs presently available from websites, blogs, festivals and radio stations where the artists were becoming popular like Pitchfork, SXSW, Hype Machine, Coachella, Bonaroo, Idolator, Lollapalooza, Stereogum, and many others. Artists available include Animal Collective, TV On The Radio, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, Passion Pit, MGMT, Santigold, No Age, Silversun Pickups, and about 500 more, but I would imagine they'll be adding more songs and artists soon.

The app is only $1.99 and plays tracks in shuffle mode, with unlimited skips, and no advertising - could be a great way to discover new bands while traveling. This app looks promising, but it might be more reflective of what a region is listening to if the app had a user-generated element to it, or allowed artists to upload their music directly - who knows, maybe they're already building-in that functionality.

Inference is the Difference: Gaining Insight from Music Data Analytics

One of the goals of Band Metrics is to help artists and music industry professionals gain insight from the quantitative and qualitative data we collect, as identifying correlations can be the difference between increasing revenue for your band, or spinning your wheels guessing as to how your fans interact, share and listen to your music. Below are two recent screencasts that help demonstrate a couple of the areas we're working on to make meaning out of your music data (view more of our screencasts here).

The first screencast demonstrates how radio play data (soon social data) could help you build relationships with broadcast stations that are, or are not playing your music. The second one provides a suggested tour map based on the data we're collecting about your band. These are both experimental mapping features at this point, one of the reasons why we're still in private beta, but we thought you might like to see them if you don't have an account:

Live Music Machine

By the look of this post and recent tweet from music industry veteran David Sherbow, he's announcing his music tech venture, Live Music Machine, a booking utility and platform for "connecting fans to the bands they love for their own live music events." While similar to SonicBids, they seem to be focused on the fan communities. For example, their app will help fans connect with other fans of a particular artist in the same geographical area that are interested in hiring that artist for an event. Here's an example of how it works in both MySpace and Facebook, and a demo as well:


Good luck David!

SellaBand vs. Kickstarter: Fan Driven Fundraising for Artists

I've been a huge fan of SellaBand for the past couple of years, but I've never tried to get any of the bands I work with to use their service because none of them can raise the required $50K to produce a record. While I've always thought that was too much considering recording, editing, and mastering have all come down significantly during the last decade, I'm still a big fan of their concept anyway.

However, there's a relatively new service I've been meaning to write about called, Kickstarter which also provides a way for bands to raise money from their fans but with a few advantages: 1) there is no minimum amount an artist must raise, so the artist can determine how much; 2) artists can upload video pitches about their project and needs (see below) and 3) artists can express their appreciation by providing gifts for different levels of donations, and some have been highly creative like Five Times August's camping trip for $5K - reminds me of some of the examples Michael Masnick has presented. 

All-in-all Kickstarter is a great service for bands, and fans benefit too, as they get to be a part of the recording process and support their favorite artists at the same time.

Here are three examples (we liked them so much we donated to all three - good luck guys!):

April Smith and the Great Picture Show:

Shwa:

Five Times August:

Music and Society: Segmenting your Fan Community

Yesterday I gave this presentation at the C/O POP Music Festival and Conference in Cologne, Germany. Essentially, I explored the relationship between music and society, and how artists can better understand their own fan community through segmentation, which can lead to fan growth and increased revenue for them. Since I had several people ask for a copy so they could see the Facebook example and the resources again, here it is. Btw, Band Metrics will begin providing fan segmentation next week.

Band Metrics Expands Artists Mapping Platform

Last week we announced our Artists Mapping Platform for Band Metrics, and today we're excited to say that we've expanded it to now also display how your fans are sharing your music from over 20 sources, including the following:

• Blip.fm
• Foxytunes 
• IMEEM
• Lala 
• Last.fm 
• Napster
• Song.ly
• Songtwit
• Songza 
• Spotify 
• TinySong 
• Trackz
• Tweetj 
• Twisten 
• Twitum 
• Twt.fm
• #musicmonday and scores of other hashtags

Why is this important? Great question. Let's suppose you're trying to figure out where your hot markets (fan bases) are so you can earn the highest profit margin while on tour, because in this economy, you're better off playing 10 at capacity or oversold shows than 20 shows at 50 percent capacity. With today's addition of the social sharing display to our mapping platform, artists, managers, venue owners, booking agencies, promoters and the like can now gain insight into what cities have the highest concentration of not only your fans, but the highest concentration of your passionate fans and music enthusiasts talking about your band and/or music. The conclusion here is that the more passionate a fan base you have in a particular city, the more likely you are to draw a large crowd to your show. Below is what it looks like, but please know we've still got a great deal of work left to do on it, and you may encounter some bugs, but we thought you all would like to start using it anyway, so please let us know how we can improve it for you.

 

Introducing RT2Buy for Musicians and Bands

Earlier today, fellow Atlanta entrepreneurs, Michael Ivey and Don Brown, the founders of Twitpay launched RT2Buy, their first product from their just announced Retweet Commerce Suite. According to their press release, "RT2Buy provides an interface for musicians, artists, authors, and other content creators to upload their digital content and quickly promote it on Twitter. Users who wish to purchase the content can do so directly on Twitter, using a "retweet", or a reply that includes the content of the original message. Twitpay handles confirmation of the payment with Amazon Payments, and delivery of the content to the buyer."

While I haven't yet had the time to try it out, RT2Buy seems like a promising tool for the music industry, and I'm excited to see these kinds of tools being developed for the indie community. Lynn Jeter, a music promoter had this to say about RT2Buy. "Independent artists and content producers desperately need simple solutions for distributing and monetizing content online. Our clients are very excited about RT2Buy as a simple way for them to get their content out there, without having to spend a lot of time, energy or money. It doesn't get much easier than tweeting a link to your content and getting paid on retweets."

Great stuff guys, and best wishes with RT2Buy!

Insight into Retaining your Fans

Brian Mansfield of USATODAY wrote a great piece in Friday's edition about different ways artists are retaining their fans through interaction. Here's a snippet: "As CD sales decline, advances from record labels dwindle and audience demographics break up into smaller niches, more and more artists from all levels of popularity are seeking to retain fans by including them in the creative process."

The article may give you some ideas, and the comment thread is interesting as well.

Music Licensing Landscape

Below is a brief list of some of the companies that can help bands and musicians place their music in film, television, commercials, games, etc. What companies did I miss?

Rumblefish (licensing for television, film, advertisements, websites, videos, games, podcasts, and sonic branding - e.g. your music inside your local Gap)
Gamecues (licensing for the gaming industry)
YouLicense (music licensing marketplace - essentially, their system enables artists and those seeking music to conduct business directly with each other)
Pump Audio (artists can license their music in television and advertising without giving up any ownership
BeatPick (music licensing provider)
Ricall (music licensing marketplace, connecting users wanting to license music directly with the relevant copyright owners)
SoundReef (private beta service exchanging music for promotion in television, film, advertising, etc.)

Brand Enthusiast Experiment for Band Metrics

Later today social media marketer, Tessa Horehled is going to be a brand enthusiast for Band Metrics at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Essentially, she's going to wear some of our swag during the trade show and at official/unofficial after parties today, and when she's meeting with various individuals and companies (which is an impressive international list) she'll chat about what we do if it comes up in conversation. She'll also blog, tweet, post pics on Flickr, and give shoutouts about Band Metrics, syndicating her activities on her social profiles like Brightkite, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, Plurk and many others - a potential audience greater than 10K.

Tessa approached me about this experiment, and it didn't take much convincing as I think her proposal is quite creative, but there is still the question of how do you measure the success of this experiment. Tessa and I have some thoughts about that and I'm going to share in a follow-up post next week.

Serving Your Fans: The Trent Reznor Case Study

You may have seen this before, but I just watched Techdirt founder Michael Masnick's keynote presentation at The Leadership Music Digital Summit, and I gotta say, it was fantastic, a must watch for anyone in the music industry. Here's the one he gave at Midem, but I missed due to meetings:

The difference between today's presentation and the one he gave at Midem is an additional 160 slides for a total of 440! Hopefully, the folks at LMDS will post the video soon.

Bandloop launches iPhone App

Bandloop announced today from SxSW the release of their iPhone app, a global, geo-located concert listings for bands and venues that allows music enthusiasts to quickly find live music shows - from local bars to stadium concerts.  I haven't tried it, but it looks really nice - congrats guys!  Here are some of its features:

• Automatically detects where you are, zooming into your vicinity without having to type in your location
• Fast-loading interactive map
• Represents as many artists as possible, no matter how underground they are
• Website links and MySpace images provided for almost every artist

Your Band's Marketing and Promotional Tactics that Work

I'm curious about the online marketing and promotional tactics bands/musicians are using (e.g. communicating with fans via social media, or giving away free tickets to shows) which have been successful in growing their fan base. If you'd like to share it would be great to hear from you, so just add your comments to this post for all to benefit.

Rock Stars Tool Kit

Greg Rollett has published a follow-up to the 100 Social Media Resources for Musicians called Gen-Y Rock Stars Tool Kit. Essentially, it's a scaled down one page check-list of the most important things you should be doing to market and promote your music, garnered from his previous report. To get your FREE copy, just go here, and provide your email address and Greg will send you a link to the file.

Music Uses Expanding

As I was working on a presentation for Band Metrics, I created this image to represent some of the different ways music can now be shared, distributed, played, modified, etc... did I miss anything?

 

It's interesting to see the effect web and mobile apps have had on the music industry, as they've certainly expanded the way we use music, and these are just the beginning.

Jamseed: Fostering Loyal Relationships between Artists and their Fans

Music tech startup Jamseed aims to change the way artists think about earning income from swag by focusing on fostering loyal relationships between artists and their fans. The idea behind Jamseed is that instead of only providing merch that artists create for their fans, such as hats, posters, stickers, calendars, etc., and/or merch that can be customized by the fans (e.g. changing the color of a t-shirt), Jamseed has created a web app that will allow artists to create both tangible and intangible offers personalized specifically to the individual purchasing the item(s). For example, a personalized video message, or an autographed CD.

It's an interesting idea, but there could be some scaling challenges for an artist if, for example, the artist sold 100 personalized videos in 24 hours. Also, it seems this app would be more helpful if it allowed the fans to create the offers instead with the prices they are willing to pay. That would seem more in-line with the goal of fostering loyal relationships between artists and fans. While I'm not sure you need a separate web app to personalize your merch, Jamseed definitely provides helpful insight into additional ways to market, promote and build community for your band/music.

5 Community Building Twitter Apps for Bands and Musicians

Here's a quick list of 5 Twitter apps bands and musicians may find helpful in building communities around their music:

1) twitpic: send photos from your mobile phone which will post links to them on twitter; a quick way to give your fans a visual look at what your band is currently doing (for example: recording, rehearsal, sound check, etc.)

2) twiddeo: similar to twitpic, but for video, allowing you to provide short video clips of your shows, interviews, touring adventures, etc.

3) twtpoll: ask your fans a question and get a response via twitter (e.g. what cities should we play next?)

4) twitzu: create an event (e.g. meet and greet) with description and location info and send it to your twitter followers and receive RSVPs from them

5) tweetchat - create rooms in Twitter to post tweets about a particular topic (e.g. your latest release)

5 Posts on Indie Music Tech from 2008 for Independent Artists

Below are 5 posts I picked from Indie Music Tech during the past year that offer some helpful insight and information for independent artists, and they're worth reading if you missed them (listed chronologically):

• Musician Introductions: Bringing Back the MC (January 30, 2008)
• Music Videos as Viral Marketing: Lessons Learned (April 10, 2008)
• Calling Attention to your Music by Derek Sivers (May 22, 2008)
• The Advance Guard's take on DIY, Social Media, Marketing, Podcasts and more (July 21, 2008)
• 100 Social Media Resources for Musicians (December 12, 2008)