This site is a blog for musicians and music industry people. It is a free educational resource and it is also the way I advertise my music consulting services. I am an entertainment professional with deep roots in the music industry. Throughout my music career I have been a major label A&R representative, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a reality show producer, a bass player and the head of a digital record label.
Brannon McAllister is the co-founder and designer of NoiseTrade, an online service that offers free music to fans of artists in exchange for their contact information: an email address and zip code. Prior to working with the site, Brannon did record packaging and websites for a variety of artists in the Nashville music scene. However, he attributes most of what he learned about the economics of free music and the music industry in general to being part of the process of building NoiseTrade.
I recently chatted with Brannon about building a successful free music service, how his platform can benefit artists and strategies artists can increase their chances of success within the current climate of the music industry.
So How does NoiseTrade work?
BM:
When artists sign up for NoiseTrade, they can post a single, a live show or a full album. Fans then download the music in exchange for their emails and zip codes, which can be imported into any mailing list application, including FanBridge, Emma, Constant Contact and MailChimp. Many of these services allow artists to send localized email blasts to promote specific shows and / or manage mass mailings to promote upcoming albums, song placements, festivals or national tours.
The site widget can be embedded on artists’ sites, either on a splash page in front, on the home page or even within an online store.
How many artists are currently using your service?
BM:
The site has approximately 4,000 artists. We handle well over 100,000 downloads through the site per month, and about five-ten artists join the site every day. The quality ranges from 14-year olds with a microphone to bands like the Civil Wars, a band that used NoiseTrade to gain thousands of new fans, and currently (Early Feb 2011) has the #1 spot on iTunes.
How did the idea for NoiseTrade come together?
BM:
The first I heard about it was back in 2006. Derek Webb, who’s a songwriter that I’d followed for a few years called me up and said he wanted to meet up at Jammin Java, which is a coffee house based music venue down in Columbia, SC. I drove down from Greenville where I lived at the time and we met up for coffee and talked a bit. He explained this idea he’d had for a while. His own record Mockingbird had come out recently, and there were the seeds of the idea for the whole platform at this time. In September of 2006, he gave away Mockingbird and just required fans to type in five e-mail addresses and zip codes. In about 3 months time, he gave away 80,000 copies; 20,000 was in the first day, the next 20,000 was in the next week and so on.
I’m not very familiar with him as an artist. Did he already have a pretty big fan base?
BM:
The record he’d given away had released earlier that year, and he’d sold about 20,000 copies. He had a pretty decent-sized following. From there, it was a proof of concept. Because the album giveaway went so well, we were sure we had a great idea to apply to the overall platform. We started working on it, and it took quite a while to launch. We launched the site on July 4, 2008 and required fans to enter five email addresses. Some of the other platforms like Twitter and Facebook weren’t quite as dominant as they are now. And at the time, having fans refer their friends by email was our best way forward.
Tell me about the product as it is today. There are so many platforms now. What are the strengths of NoiseTrade vs. any of the other folks collecting email addresses: Nimbit; TopSpin, etc.?
BM:
I think our first priority is been to make it free on both ends of the equation. We make it free for our artists and our fans. We’re making free music, but we’re also providing the platform for free. At this time we find providing the basic level of service for free to the artist enables more artists to join the platform than would otherwise. It encourages a long tail vs. just artists that already understand the economics of free. Initially we did have a sign-up fee of $250 for our artists. Over time, we found the way to run our business without having to charge the artist that startup fee. It just made a lot more sense to provide it for free.
How is it that your business makes money?
BM:
Fans can tip the artists at the end of the download process. They type their email address and zip code and are given a chance to give the artist a tip, anywhere between $1 and $100. NoiseTrade keeps 20% of that transaction, and the artist gets 80%. What’s nice about that model is that it immediately covers all our bandwidth costs. As long as the proportions stay pretty regular, that scales along with the overall growth of the site and covers all the costs of running the site.
Which percentage of people actually do tip in exchange for the free music?
BM:
I’d say 5%, so it’s not very many at all. But I will say that when artists ask fans to tip a certain amount of money, the percentage goes drastically up. Left to their own, 5% of fans are going to give money if they are given a choice. But if an artist actually builds a landing page for a campaign and leaves a message for fans saying, “We think this is worth $6” or “We think this is worth $8,” a much greater percentage will tip at a higher rate. And then when people do tip it’s pretty good. The average tip is between $4 and $5.
We usually tell our artists that they can expect between 3% and 15% of fans to tip, depending on how much they are willing to push for it. If you’re an artist that is mainly concerned about building a mailing list, you just focus on telling your fans it’s free and don’t worry about the tips. Many artists earn a few hundred dollars on tips, but a couple have netted as much as $4,500 in a few months.
Say you were trying to explain NoiseTrade to my mom- she’s never used a computer. How would you explain this platform to her? What is the value proposition for a band?
BM:
Basically, it’s simply a way for artists to exchange music for information about their fans. Ultimately, it’s providing the fans with what they want, which is free music, and the artists what they want, which is fans that have never heard of them through recommendations and information about where those fans live and how to contact them. We still collect zip codes and emails.
Is there a back end? Is that dumped into a .csv, or do you have a mail management client as well?
BM:
We provide the artists with a .csv. They can easily click a single button and down comes the contact file they can drop into Emma or Mail Chimp or whatever they choose.
What about sharing options? Where can you move this, embed this, place this?
BM:
As far as simply sharing a link, you can obviously do that through Facebook and Twitter. But we use an embed code to be able to let artists embed the widget on any website. We even have some artists that build a simple landing page that explains to fans what to do and what the album is, so they can brand it however they want. Using the NoiseTrade landing page is also really helpful and gives fans a more direct way to share and find information about the artist.
Who have been some of the DIY artists that have had success on the platform, and what is it you think they’ve done with the platform that was more effective than others?
BM:
I think that artists that have the most success with it are those that actually turn it into a campaign. Rather than simply uploading music and expecting people to show up and download it, they’re messaging their core fan base already. They’re prepping them for it by building anticipation towards the free music and then messaging their fans hard about it throughout a campaign. Artists that have done a really good job in various ways would be Katie Herzig. She has a growing fan base and often opens for Brandi Carlile. At her shows she can mention she has free music available. I think some of the ways she’s done a great job is that depending on the situation, she’ll change up her strategy. For example, if she has a song that’s featured on a television show, she’ll feature that one single on her widget for a short period of time, for a week or so. As people find out about her after hearing her song in the show, they’ll find that same free song available for the cost of signing up for her mailing list. In some cases she’s even given away a full album.
Artists that post music and don’t put in any effort may see very little results: only 50 or 100 downloads. But some of our most well-known artists have seen anywhere from 15,000-40,000 downloads over the course of several months. Most professional artists that give it a real effort tend to fall between 1,500 and 7,000 downloads.
I’m going to switch gears on you a little bit, because you actually have the design skill set that makes your perspective even more interesting. I would love to talk to you about some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen with artists packaging themselves from a design perspective with their album covers, press materials, websites and other materials. What advice would you give to artists looking to find and hire a designer, or things they should keep in mind when designing their own stuff? Let’s start with an album cover.
BM:
I think in the days when artists’ records were going to be stacked up on a shelf, where you’re seeing the top spine as you’re flipping through it, the pressure was on to make sure the title or artist’s name was high up on the artwork. I don’t think that’s as big a deal these days. The key things for artists now is to not make their name too small. They need to design it with postage-stamp-sized icons on iTunes in mind. This might help artists lean towards a bolder design in their color scheme that will be more eye catching on a smaller scale. I even see artists on NoiseTrade making the name of their band absolutely tiny, and it makes no sense for a 240 pixels square.
That’s true. You are really left with a Chicklet of the album artwork sometimes. What about from a web design perspective?
BM:
One thing that’s true is that I think artists can get away with a lot more simplicity in their web design than they think they can. I think most artists could actually do fine with a single splash page that has all their connecting points on that one page. I’m thinking in terms of a Twitter feed, a Fan box from Facebook, tour dates, some album cover and a link to iTunes and Amazon. As long as they have that on a single page, I feel like they should go ahead and use that for their website and then spend most of their time out on social networks talking to fans and using the social media space as a home base, rather than creating a huge website presence. There are artists that need to create a huge community and do a huge main site. But I think the majority of artists are going to be served just fine by a single splash page.
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To learn more about Brannon and NoiseTrade visit the NoiseTrade website. You can also keep up with Brannon via his blog or Twitter.
Noah Dinkin is the Co-Founder of FanBridge – a fan list management service that is geared towards musicians. He was kind enough to sit down with me and tell me about his company, how it was founded and offer general advice about email marketing for artists.
Thanks for taking the time Noah, tell me a bit about how and why you started FanBridge.
ND:
FanBridge was Co-Founded by myself and my friend Spencer Richardson a few years ago. We were looking for a fun project to work on in our spare time outside of day jobs, and after seeing the music industry going through a lot of chaos, we knew that chaos usually creates opportunity, so we started looking at what we could do in music space. After looking at a bunch of things and talking with various people, we came to focus on the artist-fan relationship. When you think about it, this relationship is the single most important piece of the music business, and for too long it has been paid lip service and overlooked. At the time we couldn’t find anyone really focused on enabling a direct relationship between the artist and their fans, so this looked like a good opportunity for us to jump in and really help out.
Version one was very simple email list management for bands. You could add people, geo-target, and schedule/send your emails…not much else. It was also really ugly. Even with all of that, bands started signing up, and other bands started seeing those bands using it, and the snowball started rolling downhill. A year later we added mobile text messaging (since this was when everyone went “you’re an idiot if you don’t have a mobile fan club”), and we have always continued to update the platform based on feedback (most recently adding social network features/integrations among other things). We are huge believers in always getting feedback and bringing it in to every part of the company, and I think that is one of the reasons that we’ve been so successful without spending the ton of money other people have spent trying to marketing their products. We just focus on what people need (based on feedback), build it really well, and make it easy to use. Today both Spencer and I do FanBridge full-time (24/7/365) alongside an awesome rockstar team of people who are just as passionate about what we’re doing as we are.
What are some of the advantages of using an email marketing service Vs. using outlook or one of the social networks to market to your fan base?
ND:
When we originally started, the question we got most often from musicians was “I have 2 million friends on myspace, what do I need an email list for?” While education of musicians has come a long way, we still get asked that question today. While email is one (important) thing we do, I would consider FanBridge more of a “fan relationship manager,” than just an “email marketing service” so I’m going to compare a fan relationship manager to outlook/social networks/etc.
The advantages of using a platform/service to help manage and communicate with your fans are many. First and foremost, a service like us is 100% laser focused on this area. Outlook is a general email client used by anyone and everyone, and serves the mass market, whereas FanBridge is focused on musicians. Every feature we make is with your exact use case in mind. A great example of this is our feature to target by zip code and radius for shows. For example, before FanBridge, most people who were savvy would have their list in outlook (or gmail/hotmail/etc) separated into groups, usually by state. Now that’s okay (not great) for tiny states, but for bigger states like California, Florida, New York, Texas, and so on, it doesn’t really work, because people in Buffalo don’t really care that you are playing Manhattan (even though they are both in the same state). With our geo-targeting feature, you can just put in the zip code of the venue where you are playing, and say “I only want to message fans within 60 miles of the show” and our system will automatically compute who the message should go to (so people in Buffalo aren’t bothered with a message about your show in Manhattan, but it isn’t relevant to them). In addition, from just a technical standpoint, we do a lot of things behind the scenes to make sure your messages to fans arrive (in the inbox) and looking good. Outlook doesn’t do that, and it can actually be really bad for sending to large numbers of people. In addition, when emails bounce, we automatically remove them, whereas in Outlook, you would have to do that by hand (and if you didn’t do that, your deliverability will decrease for future messages you send). These are just a few surface level reasons why using a dedicated platform like FanBridge is much better than a generic service.
Regarding social networks, they are great because there is a lot of activity and users check out all kinds of new things on these sites. We encourage our clients to use social networks to have a presence in these high traffic places on the web, but to make sure to get fans to signup to a dedicated fan list where the artist gets the fan’s real info (things like email, location, etc). Sure, you can build a ton of friends/fans/followers on the social networks, but knowing that ‘babygirl234’ is your friend doesn’t tell you much or give you much value in your marketing efforts.
When you have your own list outside of the social networks, you can use that fan list to build a relationship with the fan. You might actually message the fan both through email and social networks, but they key is to own your own list because it gives you the flexibility to do what you want, as well as do more advanced targeted marketing. Owning your own list also gives you security in case the social network goes out of business, because you can take your own list anywhere you want, whereas you can’t easily port your myspace friends to twitter followers.
Have you seen your clients change the way or the frequency they communicate with their fans based on the feedback and analytics you provide?
ND:
We definitely have seen people make adjustments based on the feedback and analytics our platform provides. It is actually very eye opening for a lot of musicians to see how many people are opening or clicking various things in their messages. We try and give clients feedback wherever we can, and one example of this is we tell people who used to cram a ton of info into a monthly newsletter to break it down into 2 (or more) shorter messages with a focus on one or two calls-to-action in each. When you tell fans to do 10+ things, they usually do none. But if you tell them to do one or two, you have a very good chance they will do them. Overall though, there are a lot of bad habits and misconceptions when it comes to communicating with fans, and we are always working to use data to show artists how they can improve to make their messages more effective.
Many of my clients are bewildered about what to write about when keeping in touch with their fanbase other than we have a show coming up. What have you seen work for your clients in terms of subjects to speak about or things to offer their fanbase to add value (free mp3s / show tickets / contests etc)
ND:
This is a huge issue, and touches on some of what I mentioned in the last question. People (musicians especially) often feel like they are bothering fans when they send them a message, and therefore they only want to send a message when they have a new album or tour (which usually ends up being about twice a year). I can’t say this enough, but YOU CAN’T BUILD A RELATIONSHIP WITH SOMEONE IF YOU DON’T TALK TO THEM. How many best friends do you have that you talk to only twice a year? Probably none. You need to communicate often with your fans, and twitter is actually a great tool to use daily in conjunction with email (which can be used weekly or bi-weekly). In terms of what to talk about, we really believe it can be anything…what movies you’ve seen recently, what music you’ve been liking (or not liking), what songs you’ve been working on, and so on in addition to news about your music. The people on your list are fans, and they want to consume as much information about you as possible, so why not give it to them?
For things to offer, you should always offer a free mp3 to get people to sign up to your list (we have a feature that does this automatically called Fan Incentive), and if people want to help out even more (in terms of street teams, or pre-ordering tickets, or collecting emails for you at shows), give them something that is unique. Maybe a personalized voicemail message, or a shoutout on your twitter/facebook. The people who want to help are (or are going to become) your super fans, so you want to do anything you can to keep them loving you so they tell all their friends about you.
What are some of the most inventive marketing ideas or campaigns you have seen by your clients to expand their mailing list?
I’ve seen bands offer some very creative incentives to get fans to sign up to their list at shows. Everything from a free ride to the next city on the tour (in the van of course) to a chance to win a living room show in the fan’s house. I would actually say a cool idea is ask your existing fans to come up with ideas for what you can offer fans to join your list..I’m sure they will come up with some good ones!
Any practices you would recommend against using email marketing?
ND:
Here are two (that are hopefully obvious): don’t add people to your list if they don’t want to be added (or don’t know they are being added), and don’t let your list sit for a while without communicating regularly (you will lose a lot of fans this way).
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Thanks to Noah and if this information or this service sounds helpful please visit FanBridge. FanBridge also provides a 5 reasons why you need FanBridge page that is worth checking out.
