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)

Google Friend Connect for Musicians

Yesterday I was experimenting with Google Friend Connect, a relatively new service from GOOG that allows one to easily install social widgets created by Google and/or by the developer community of OpenSocial, a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Given its ease-of-installation and use, you may find a widget or two that would help you enrich your current web site or blog, helping you engage your current fans more deeply and attract new fans as well.

While their current catalog of gadgets is limited, expect scores of new gadgets over the coming weeks and months. I've added the member gadget to the right of this post as an example. You can also see an implementation at the Madtown Lounge (Allen McGuire decided to install the sign-in gadget among others after reading my tweet - congrats Allen - it looks great!). While the member gadget is similar to Yahoo's MyBlogLog, Google's minimalist interface is more intuitive, so definitely check it out. Here's a short video about Friend Connect:

ArtistDish Podcast #4

In the latest episode of the ArtistDish, we discussed some of the more common online tools available to artists, with an emphasis on trends around video broadcasting as a form of music marketing, fan communication, and music discovery. It's a discussion designed for those musicians and bands just starting to develop their digital presence. Companies mentioned include: YouTube, Seesmic, Amazon, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, ArtistData and Ustream. You can listen to the entire podcast here.

Special thanks to The Mississippi Kings for providing their song “Some Revolution” in both the intro and outro of the podcast. You too can have your music featured on the ArtistDish; all you have to do is send us an email for consideration.  Also, if you would like to suggest a topic for the ArtistDish, just let us know, and we’ll give you props on the show if we discuss it.

MixMatchMusic Post DEMO

About three months ago, I interviewed MixMatchMusic when they were still in private beta, and I was impressed with the direction of the online music collaboration app they were building. In Today's podcast, I reconnect with the founders, Charles Feinn and Alan Khalflin to hear about their launch at DEMO and their progress since July. During this 10 minute interview, Charles and Alan provide insight about their business model, product offering and community. And I think you will find that MixMatchMusic is one of the more promising music tech startups; its just a matter of time before they receive significant adoption from both musicians/bands and music enthusiasts.

Click here to download the interview with MixMatchMusic

Also, here's the video from their presentation at DEMO - they did a fantastic job:

The Advance Guard's take on DIY, Social Media, Marketing, Podcasts and more

Recently, The Advance Guard worked with scores of key music bloggers to promote the New American Music Union, a music festival sponsored by  American Eagle Outfitters (our ticket give away was here). I thought this was a clever way of promoting an event, so I reached out to C.C. Chapman, Co-Founder of The Advance Guard and founder of Accident Hash, a Boston based music podshow to get his thoughts on DIY marketing for indie musicians and bands.

Here's what C.C. had to say:

Question: 1) With all of the free DIY marketing/promotional content, and music being generated by indie artists, what are some examples of online tactics an artist and/or band can deploy to rise above the noise?

While the phrase "word of mouth" gets thrown around constantly these days, when it comes to music I still think it is the #1 way people discover new music. The key thing is to leverage your fan base whenever possible. Give them tools to help spread the word. Constantly contact them and talk WITH them and never AT them. Encourage them to share and reward the really passionate ones.

Podcasts and other online media are other great ways as well. Work with content producers so that they know they can use your music. If your song gets played in a video that becomes popular that can help you out in amazing ways. Always ask for links and attribution so that people can find you and get more.

And insure you have a solid website with contact information and lots of links on it. You want it to be as easy as possible for people to learn more about you and instantly listen to the music. Don't make it hard or required to purchase a track in order for someone to check out your music.

Question: 2) Are paid music promotions via Facebook or Izea for example, an effective way at marketing music? If so, why? If not, why? What are the pros and cons? What are the challenges?

It depends on if the promotion is a good one or not. I recently saw an ad pop up on Facebook for an indie artist. I'm assuming it showed up based on my self identified favorite artists. I clicked on it and ended up listening to a couple of tracks. It wasn't right for me, but I bet it will be for some others.

Music is a tough thing because while everyone loves it, you never know who is going to love what you are promoting. So you have to cast a very wide net and a focused one at the same time. What I mean is that you obviously want to focus on the people or groups that you think would be most interested in what you are promoting. But, then you've also got to cast it out to a more general audience as well because you don't know what might click with someone.

The thing to keep in mind is that you can have the biggest budget in the world and if the program isn't solid and appropriate it will fail. People have to realize that throwing money at something doesn't automatically make it a success. Take the time up front to really plan it out and realistically think about the goals and outcomes.

Every day more people are competing for all of our attention online and you've got to figure out a way to rise above the rest to get noticed.

Question: 3) Most indie artists will connect with anyone on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc. to promote their music, regardless of who is requesting the connection. Is the quantity of connections proving to be a more effective marketing strategy than the quality of connections?

Quality is always better then quantity. But, with that being said I also think that anyone that friends a band on any social network site they should gladly accept. You never know who might be a connection to someone else or how that individual may be able to help them. Connect with them and then get to know them if possible. If they are just a bot or a spammer then get rid of them and move on, but perhaps they have a skill, know someone at a club or can provide the artist with something else. Why in the world would you want to miss that?

Question: 4) In your opinion, what are the top 5 social media and technology tools a band must not only have in its marketing toolkit, but master as well?

1. Ego Searches - Learn how to put yourself into Technorati, Summize (now owned by Twitter) and Google Alerts and how to get those every day so you can stay on top of who is talking about you, what they are saying and how you can connect with them.

2. Video - People love to consume video. Even if it is rough footage of your practice sessions or grainy footage from the crowd at a show. It doesn't matter. Figure out how to get video footage up on the web and on multiple systems so people can find it and consume it.

3. Podcasting - Become familiar with the music podcasting community and how you can get your music out there for people to play. Become friends with podcasters or engage with a digital PR firm that specializes in music and work with them to get your music out there and played on the variety of shows that exist.

4. Marketing - YOU are your biggest fan and thus have to be your marketing department as well. Set up an e-mail newsletter and encourage fans to sign up at shows. Put your URL on everything you do from t-shirts, to posters, to every e-mail you send out. Embrace the web fully and when you are curious if a new service is right for you ask your fans or someone you trust.

5. Communications - Don't let fan letters go unanswered. Take some time every day to engage with your fan base wherever they roam. Reply to e-mails, comment on their walls and answer their questions. This will build a deeper connection with them.

Many thanks C.C. for your time and great feedback! The Advance Guard is focused on smartly and strategically creating radical marketing through branded entertainment, social media and emerging technology. It's led by award-winning Podcaster C.C. Chapman, and digital advertising veteran, Steve Coulson. Clients include Verizon FiOS, Coca-Cola, HBO, mDialog and American Eagle Outfitters. For more information, please visit their web site at: http://theadvanceguard.com/

Calling Attention to your Music by Derek Sivers

Yesterday, Derek Sivers released his new FREE e-book for indie musicians, Calling Attention to your Music. Derek wrote it in the hopes of helping every musician sell more music, win more fans, and have more doors opened, enabling musicians to make a living making music. Topics include:

• how to get mentioned in Rolling Stone
• why persistence is polite
• how to sell an average of 5 CDs per order
• why marketing costs nothing
• how two curious words can turn your career around
• the biggest mistake most musicians make

And much, much more. Derek intentionally made the book non-genre-specific, so the same tips apply to country, klezmer, and classical. This is a must read for any indie artist and you can download it or read it online here.

Hats off to Derek for the time and devotion creating this work. He's the tireless champion for indie musicians, and his drive to help the entire community never ceases to amaze me. Thanks for the ebook and all you do Derek!

Music Videos as Viral Marketing: Lessons Learned

About 5 weeks ago, I worked with Greg Hester to release a music video that would hopefully help promote his band and grab some new listeners. The idea was simple: take a song he was already working on in the studio and develop a video that incorporated a current event that was of interest to a large audience, while at the same time, staying true to the content of the music. These are just a few things we learned from this promotional tactic:

1) It worked! In the 5 weeks since releasing the video, Greg has been offered gigs in Columbia, SC, Augusta, GA, Athens, GA, Charlotte, NC and Atlanta to name a few. His MySpace page views jumped over 15% from 9140 to 10635 in less than 40 days. He also added almost 100 new MySpace friends from across the country (a 15% increase as well), and his total music plays increased by over 10 percent to 9,461. And at the time of this post, his video has been watched on YouTube 950 times. Additionally, he now has a few more labels following him on MySpace.

2) Finding someone influential on Twitter to make a post about your video will certainly bring in traffic. For us, it was Dave Winer. We received over 200 views directly from his tweet alone - Thanks Dave!

3) This was an inexpensive tactic, only $200 to produce. Not bad considering the amount of increased exposure, and most musicians and bands will be able to DIY.

4) It provided us with an entertaining way to easily showcase Greg's band to a couple of major label artists considering working with us on an upcoming James Brown tribute CD (more on this project in the coming months).

5) It was a great way for us to pre-release the song before making it available for downloading later this year.

All in all, the video was certainly worth the expense, but there are a few things we would have done differently. For example, asked our friends with YouTube accounts to add the video to their channel, uploaded a high quality version to Vimeo, as YouTube is not a great medium for releasing high quality video/audio, reached out to our friends with music blogs, contacted more influencers interested in the content of the video, sent copies to the media, and spent much more time promoting it in social networks, to name a few tactics. Due to time constraints, we did very little, almost none, but I have a feeling we are going to be creating more of these kinds of music videos in the future, so hopefully the next video will have a greater impact.

Musician Introductions: Bringing Back the MC

What happened to the practice of introducing bands and musicians before their live performances? In the 50s, 60s and 70s it was common practice, from Buddy Holly to the Who. The introduction was used then to build excitement between a band and their audience, helping to galvanize a high energy show. And typically, the introductions were given by either a local MC, or someone that traveled with the band.

While many legendary artists are still introduced at their shows, like B.B. King and Eric Clapton, the practice for the most part has vanished from the indie music scene. Why? A good stage introduction can not only bolster your live performance, but it also helps to cement your professionalism and dedication to your music. It can also be a strong calling card, something for your audience to remember you by. And let's face it, the first few minutes on stage sets the tone for the rest of the show, and with the right introduction, that first impression can help make the difference between a good night and a great night!

Here's one example of a great introduction. It's for the Greg Hester show by the legendary MC for James Brown, Danny Ray at The Mission in Augusta, GA this past New Year's Eve <Greg_Hester_intro_Danny_Ray12312007.mp3>. While it's going to be hard to find someone like Danny Ray to introduce your band, you get the point. Think about your style, sound, attitude, personality, etc. and find someone that will compliment you. Who knows, you may just discover someone that will become the voice of your band, like Bill Graham was for the Dead.