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.
J Sider is a guitar player, singer, songwriter and the Founder / CEO of RootMusic Prior to founding RootMusic J booked and promoted bands in a variety of venues and on tour. I had heard great things about the RootMusic Application for Facebook and J was kind enough to take the time to speak with me about his career path and his relatively new company.
J- Thanks again for your time. Tell me how you became involved in the music business?
JS:
I grew up in a musical family and I’m a musician myself. I wanted to start to take my career a little bit more seriously. I grew up in a small town, and I asked around among the folks that play music and said, “How do you make it in music?” Nobody gave me a really straight answer, so I decided that understanding the business of music would help me meet my goals as a musician. I started working at a local coffee shop, booking bands and paying them out, marketing for them and getting lineups ready. It was there I began to see how that whole process happened and why people decided to book certain shows on certain night and what the best marketing practices were. I was just starting to get out into the world of music and take it more seriously. That was in Virginia. Over the next six years, I just kept stepping into the next level. I went from that coffee shop to a small venue, getting my foot in the door, mopping floors, whatever I needed to do while showing them I had a little bit of knowledge about how to do things from the previous experience. Then I went on to the medium-sized venue and then a larger venue and then the last venue was a 4,000 person capacity. I oversaw a 30-person team and managed everything from ticketing to the lights and sound. That was the Great Salt Air in Salt Lake City.
Were you able to continue your own music while doing all this?
JS:
I kind of got wrapped up into understanding and working inside the business side of things and really loved it. It gave me the opportunity to have a paying job and get to be around everything I loved. Because I was managing these venues and had access to the stage at every level – whether it was local bands at the coffee shop or regional bands at the medium-sized venue or bigger bands at the larger venues – They would come to me and say, “Get us up on stage and get us booked.” I started to make friends with different bands and started managing a few bands as well in the different cities I was working in. I certainly kept writing and recording music. I was thinking that the more knowledgeable I could be about how to be successful as a musician by learning through these different experiences, the more likely I would be to really take my music and do it right. I’m still at that point where I’m still writing songs and playing music, but right now my time is wrapped up on RootMusic, but I still play music and play with friends. I grew up singing a lot in choirs and picked up guitar and started writing songs.
. What did you learn were the best marketing practices for getting people out to shows? You started at a coffee shop where most nights you are dealing with the hardest job of all – getting people out to see an unknown commodity – what did you learn doing that gig?
JS:
There are a number of different marketing strategies depending on what level you’re at, what resources you have and what kind of a budget you have. What it boils down to is being creative and authentic. Instead of just getting out on the street and putting up posters and fliers- you need to understand the type of people you’re marketing to. At the coffee shop level, see which of your friends are coming to shows and what kind of people they are, where they hang out, what type of music they like and try to meet that demographic.
Be authentic and go up to them and say, “Hey, we have this show tonight. I know you haven’t heard us before, but we kind of sound like this, and we’d love to see you. We’ll buy you a beer.” Some of the best turnouts I’ve seen are when bands get really creative. For example, there’s a band that had a show and there weren’t a lot of people supporting them at that point. One of their shows was in the middle of the week, and of course it is hard to pull people mid-week. They found a house that was just around the corner from the venue and threw their own happy hour at the house, so when people got off work, they invited all their friends and their friends’ friends and had a keg or two. The band went to set up at the venue, and when the band was about to go on, the person at the house got called and shut everything down. Everyone had to leave the house, and the whole group went straight to the venue, paid at the door, enjoyed the show and the band got to have a great crowd and expose them to their music. You can’t pressure people to go to your shows but making them want to come to your shows is essential.
Does this apply as much as the shows get bigger? I would imagine it becomes more about advertising, right?
JS:
To a certain extent but for the bigger shows you can also run specials. Depending on what State you are in you can do things like telling your fans that if they come in groups of three or more, they get specials at the bar, or they get to meet the band with a group of five. There are a number of incentives you can give to your fans. They love you already, but give them a few reasons why they should bring friends, and you’ll get more people through the door. The marketing that’s used these days is still traditional, and there’s a lot of room for people to be creative and authentic which goes a long way. You need to understand that your fans are similar to you and would love to come out and be entertained, but you have to give them something different. The most important part of course is the music, and making sure you have great tunes.
Jumping forward to the recent past. You were booking a 4,000 capacity in Salt Lake City. Where did you head from there?
JS:
Intermittently through these different venues I was managing I went on some big-budget marketing tours which helped me even understand more to how people reacted to things I put out there. I went on the road for six months and set up a big display that was two tractor trailers long for different companies. It would be at music festivals, and you’d have about 4,000 people at these festivals and would be able to interact with people and understand what they respond to and what they don’t. After that, I came off tour and had some money saved up and for six years had been thinking about different ideas and how they could be more efficient. I looked at a couple different industries that were using technology to really improve the way the work was done and make things more effective and efficient with day to day activities. I kept getting frustrated with the lack of solutions there were out there for musicians and venues. I was going to manage a band or start this company, and I decided to start the company.
Tell me what RootMusic is about…
JS:
RootMusic is all about being authentic and being creative to the point where we’re finding solutions for the real day-to-day needs. I feel like a lot of music companies out there are either too tech heavy or too music industry heavy, and there’s not a good balance there. But I also feel like they’re trying to come up with a new way of doing things or some grand idea that’s going to solve all these problems. What I was always frustrated with was that nobody was helping me solve my practical day-to-day needs as a musician or a band: to get in front of my fans; to organize my e-mail better; to do all these different things. That’s what Rootmusic.com is about as a whole.
A good way to go about it might be to go over the key problems you chose to tackle first and how your company is proposing to solve them.
JS:
The first one and the biggest gap we saw was on Facebook, where all your fans often are quite regularly. There was not a good way to represent yourself. The way Facebook works is you sign in and go around and look at friends’ photos, etc. But the reason it works is because you are also sharing your photos and showing what you’ve been up to. We also wanted to build in music into that experience. You generally trust what your friends send you. We started Rootmusic to directly address that issue, whether you’re a local band just starting out or a hugely popular act. You have to represent yourself if you’re a local band, you want to have a place to point to where you can say, “Here’s the sound, here’s what we look like, here are a few songs and videos. And if you like what we’re doing, please send our music around.” We built in that functionality where anyone can go into your band page on Facebook and share it with their friends, and they will send it directly to their friends’ wall and it can be played directly off the wall. The same thing goes for major artists that have been using this already. The Grateful Dead and Snoop Dog have sent out their songs to their fan base and in only a few hours have 100,000 listens to the music player.
I have to ask the tough question – there are some companies out there that do similar things. ReverbNation has a music tab, iLike has a music tab. I don’t believe either of those have the viral sharing mechanism you just mentioned, but I noticed that yours is also a paid service. Why RootMusic over the other solutions?
JS:
There are a few things. First, we allow you to represent yourself and have a professionally. Right now if want to do what we allow you to do anywhere else it would cost you $500-$5,000 to hire a design firm. That’s what it costs minimum for you to get a custom tab made for you. Working with bands at these different levels, I know folks don’t have a lot of cash to spend so we wanted to make it possible for them to do that. At the same time, we wanted people to take it seriously. If you make everything free, your customers aren’t really dedicated to your product. Some other companies might have more tabs implemented, but we’re now the second largest music app on Facebook. Bands are using the marketing tools we built in to get in touch with fans and the fans are coming to the page, spending time there, getting more fans and higher fan engagement. It’s a professional look and has a viral feel to it, and you’re paying more attention to it, even if you’re only paying $2 to have it up. It’s $2 per month or $20 per year.
Where can people learn about your service?
JS:
www.Rootmusic.com. We have a tour and info videos. We focused a lot on making the user experience really great, so you should be able to find all the information you’re looking for within a click or two.
How long has RootMusic been a company?
JS:
We’ve been up and running for five months. I think it’s the same thing as promoting a good show. If you have a great product and it’s really about making it easier and putting something great into other people’s hands, it will work out. It’s just getting the word out. As of today (8/31/2010) we had over 25,000 bands that have signed up all over the world. It’s really interesting to see some of these bands that sign up. I’ve seen a few of my friends’ bands that I haven’t seen in a while pop up, and it’s great to see.
Another thing – we’re always open to suggestions. This is all about the musicians and the managers of the bands and what you’re looking for. There have been a number of times where we’ve completely switched what we were doing because there have been hundreds of e-mails coming in asking for something. The video tab was one. We took time out of what we were doing and built that out. We’re very much all about listening to what you need as a musician and building exactly that and nothing less.
The Facebook app with the video functionality are the first steps by the sound of it. Are there other products that are live yet?
JS:
It’s just the band page application right now. We’re adding to that every day. Once a month, we roll out with new features. We just integrated with YouTube, so now on the music player itself, for example, if you go to the Grateful Dead or 50 Cent’s page, you can play the music player with the sound cloud track. But if you want to get paid performance royalties for those songs that are streaming, you can drop a YouTube link into the music player at RootMusic.com and then on Facebook it will show up and the music will start playing as it does with any track, but in the banner page above the track, the YouTube video will start playing automatically. So your fans are getting some extra content to watch your video. But if you’re a bigger artist, or you’re getting paid royalties, you as the artist will get paid for having the video stream itself. You can actually make money off this platform by just having people stream your songs through that YouTube integration. Of course the music keeps playing while your fans look at your photos or write on your wall or look at your Twitter.
Tell me what the future is for the company. What are you looking to tackle?
JS:
I can’t go too far into that right now, but it’s very much built on what we hear from our users. I can’t wait to get more ideas from them. We have a number of things we want to build out and have talked to tons of musicians and managers, all the way from the ground, up. Just to make it more efficient. We already know you’re looking to represent yourself and distribute and market yourself. Some of the next steps are trying to market more efficiently and understanding where your fan base is and making sure you can get in touch with them easily. You can look at the product we have out today as a very basic version, and just know it will become much more powerful the more we have to work on it. Any ideas and thoughts are greatly appreciated and sincerely looked at as options to build out.
From your rather unique vantage point- do you have any suggestions of things people should be doing as best practices or common mistakes you think are easy to avoid when promoting on Facebook?
JS:
The first would be don’t spam your fans on the wall. If you’re just constantly throwing stuff out there, they will turn you off and not come back. One of the main things to remember about Facebook specifically is, if you have 500 fans and then you send out something to the wall that syndicates out to your fans’ news feeds, your 500 fans only get that if they’re interacting with the page. You have to give them reasons to come back. That’s why with the band page, we’ve made it so that you can share a photo, video or a song or upcoming show to all your fans from that page. What we suggest is sending out a song and then above that in the message box say, “We have some new tracks up on our page. Please make sure to send a few songs out to your friends and let us know what you think.” Always give a little bit of direction to your fans when you send something out and give them a reason to interact with you. Not only does that help spread your music, but it also makes it so when you send a message out through your wall, more of your fans are more likely to get that message in a news feed.
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Learn More about J Sider and his company RootMusic
Ready, Fire – Aim!
I have worked with about a dozen artists over the last year more than just coaching them but doing the heavy lifting – product managing and marketing the release of recorded music and tours. What never ceases to amaze me is the myriad of things that many artists only remember about marketing and promotion after they have released an album. I realize there is less set up time required in the high paced digital world we live in but let’s not forget that there is in fact a need to have some setup before a release date so as not to be completely unprepared.
These are ideas that should be thought about before you have even entered the studio because what you capture about the process of making the record will serve you in the process of the set up and release of the record. One of the most important and noteworthy things a musician can do from a marketing and press standpoint is to release new material. This is one of the reasons many people advocate releasing singles or EPs vs. LPs. I’m an EP man myself – a single just feels too easy to divorce from the message and image of an artist as a whole but that’s probably a topic for another blog post at another time.
Try these:
1) Have a plan. Any plan is better than no plan. Start this plan the same day you say to yourself – “it’s time to go into the studio”. Physically write out this plan and make yourself a sketch of the next 3-6 months both during the making of and after the completion of the record. It had better be more than – “Let’s put it on Myspace!”. As hard as it is to not share your new creation with the world – hold off until you have a rollout strategy in place so you can maximize the impact of your new release.
2) Document the process of creation. Write about it (and I mean keep a full journal), take photos of it, take videos of you in the studio if you are lucky enough to have guests on your record that have a larger profile than you ask permission to get photos and video of them with you. Collect a few rough mixes and make sure you have instrumentals and TV tracks mastered for possible placements at a later date. Be sparing with what you release to your fan base during the creation phase – it may make sense to survey all this “making of” content so you can edit and meter it out in a way that keeps people talking about you and your new music that’s coming out.
3) Once the album and B-Roll footage are all assembled and edited – divide these items up into what is for sale and what is for promotional use and start thinking about where and when to place the promotional pieces leading up to release.
4) Speaking of where – get the url for your project name at myspace, facebook, twitter, youtube, flickr, ustream and sign up for a tubemogul account. Toy with synching these services together using artist data, ping.fm or other one off synching applications (Selective tweets, myspace-twitter, twitter-lnkedin etc). If you’re going to be in a learning curve or don’t have these items established do it with your catalog albums and merch – not the new stuff.
5) Like Physical CDs? No judgments here. They sure are easier to sign than digital downloads. Have them in hand a few months before the release date – some gatekeepers still like getting CDs in their hands.
I’ll be back soon with part 2 but consider items 1-5 as prerequisites to have checked off of your list before release. Above all – be patient!
-R-
When working with new clients I often tell the story of how Redbull started rolling out their product. In recent years Redbull has started doing a great deal of business to consumer outreach through advertising but it wasn’t always that way. I was once told by someone who works in marketing there that the original Redbull strategy was as simple as making sure that “cool people” i.e. actors, musicians, models had a can of Redbull in their hands as often as possible.
This meant that if you walked into a record label, high-end music management office, modeling agency, concert promoter, talent agency, PR firm or other office whose function was to support and grow celebrity of some kind you were often greeted by the tell tale mini Redbull fridge. The fridges were rare or at least rare enough that it made it seem as if those who had one had considerable influence as a purveyor of celebrity culture. I’m sure they were often fixtures in the homes and offices of celebrities as well but as someone who isn’t much of a star fucker I only have second hand information confirming this.
What was the logic in this strategy? Does it not seem that giving free product to a very small list of A-list celebrities would have backfired? It turns out that by providing free product to this community and continuing to provide it to those who seemed to have a genuine love of the product turned out rather well for Redbull- but Why?
Do you see where this is going?
Many artists and bands get stuck in the position of playing to their friends and family and struggling to grow beyond this small base.
I have seen several artists break through this very difficult phase by marketing their projects not only to people who are potential fans (Business to Consumer B2C) but to other musicians (Business to Business B2B). This may seem counter-intuitive but think about it for a second. If you sell one other artist or one other band that already draws a crowd equal to yours and they become willing to vouch for you by:
The above or ANY co-branding activity automatically suggests to another artist’s audience that you are worthy of their attention. Is this not an easier sell to a new fan than going in completely cold? I’d say so.
Hip hop has had this right for decades but even hip hop artists forget from time to time and artists of all kinds get caught up in competition and ego and all kinds of bullshit that doesn’t help their cause.
The long and the short of it is go out and make as many fans as you can and if at all possible make other artists your fans and friends as well – they can vouch for you in ways that ordinary fans can’t and such symbiotic relationships can have enormous upside for your career.
More soon,
Rick
Bobby Owsinski is a sound mixing pioneer and author of books for musicians and music industry professionals. Bobby got his start as a guitarist/keyboardist, songwriter and arranger before working his way up to a producer/engineer. As one of the first producers/engineers to be involved in surround sound music mixing, Bobby has worked on commercials, TV, DVD Film projects with many influential recording artists, including Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Willie Nelson, Neil Young and the Ramones. I sat down to talk to him about his career and the underlying principles two of his books: How to Make Your Band Sound Great and Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age.
Thanks so much for your time, Bobby. Tell me a little bit about How to Make Your Band Sound Great and why you wrote it.
BO:
How to Make Your Band Sound Great is a band improvement book. The reason why I wrote it was that when I was a kid in my first band, I couldn’t understand why my first band didn’t sound as good as the best band in town. And then when I got to be in the best band in town, I couldn’t understand why we weren’t as good as the best band in the region. And then when I got to be in the best band in the region, I couldn’t understand why we weren’t as good as the Doobie Brothers or any other of the great bands that were on the radio. Over the years, I figured all this stuff out and wanted to give what I learned back, because I remember what it was like when I was a kid and just starting out, then later playing in clubs, and asking, “Why don’t we sound like what’s on the radio or what’s on the record?” Giving back is a passion of mine. I want to teach others about all the stuff you learn when you’re in the studio. When everything’s under a microscope, you learn about what makes things tight, dynamics, turnarounds and phrasing and all the details you have to be conscious of when you’re playing.
So what is the gist of the book? How does the book lay out what a band should sound like at different stages for musicians?
BO:
When you’re first starting, and even when you’re farther along in the game, you’re always saying, “Why doesn’t this sound right? Why doesn’t this sound as good as [fill in the blank]?” When you make a record, you put things under a microscope in such a way that you begin to know what to focus on to make things really sound great. The book is really about how to listen to what you’re playing and analyze these details.
Is this more a book on finding great tone, or is this about gelling a band? And is it coming from your perspective as an engineer?
BO:
That’s one of the problems I had with the title, unfortunately. The book is completely about music. It’s not about being in the studio. It’s about playing live and what happens when you do a show. Why does it sound great and why doesn’t it sound great sometimes? It all comes down to simple fundamentals that players sometimes forget about, like phrasing, attacks and releases. Even if you’re good at phrasing, you’re not always aware that the releases count just as much and sometimes even more than the attacks of a phrase towards making you sound tight. The book details things like finding the groove and answering questions like, “What is the groove? Who’s laying it down, and what do I have to do to fit in?” I also talk about overlooked but important parts of the song like turnarounds and builds. Until you get into the studio, you forget about those things and how important they are. Everybody kind of fluffs over those things when they’re starting out, but they’re really important in making you sound tight. Dynamics are also a really big thing, and perhaps maybe the most important thing of all.
I agree. People seem to be on “11” all the time, and it drives me crazy. I think, “Will you just shut up until the chorus?”
BO:
You’re right. That’s a really big thing, figuring that out. What happens is that everyone confuses intensity with volume. They’re completely separate, and you have to understand they’re completely separate in order to actually learn to command dynamics. The book is about details like that, but it also goes into songwriting. I have a pet peeve about songwriting, in the event that you’re in to writing your own music. I’m sure you get this too, because people send you songs. There are always a number of things that happen with neophyte songwriters: a two-minute intro that doesn’t get anywhere; no bridge, which usually means there’s no peak in the song; no differentiation between the verse and the chorus. Also, arrangement is huge, because so much of songwriting is based upon the arrangement. But I really wanted to make this book for everybody, so if your aspirations are only to play in clubs, it works for you too. It tells you how to make your band tighter and how to make your show better. For example, it tells you why you should buy LED lights rather than regular tungsten, and what to look for when shopping around for them, as well as ways to improve your show, and even how to get gigs. It’s really an overall picture of how to take your band to the next level.
Talk to me about Music 3.0 and why you decided to do it? I’ve certainly heard 2.0 bandied about. What is the philosophy underlying this book?
BO:
“Music 3.0” stands for the era that we’re in today. It’s the fifth generation of the music business. “Music 1.0” was the old days, in the 50s, 60s, 70s. What happened there was that you had a record label that controlled everything, and artists eventually had to sign with a record label if they wanted to further their career. The record label sold their product to a record store, people bought their product from the record store, and the radio was used specifically to promote the record. You had that chain of command that was really important at that time. When we went to Music 1.5, what changed was the fact that suddenly you had conglomerates that came in and bought up the major record labels – the ones that were available anyway – and everything changed. Instead of thinking about developing the artist they were thinking about the bottom line instead.
I saw that when I worked at majors. It was, “Releasing this greatest hits record might not be good for the artist, but we have a fourth quarter number to post up for corporate.”
BO:
The other thing that happened during this period was MTV. MTV came along and all of a sudden it became more important than radio marketing. The label began looking more at the image of the artist than the creativity of the artist. Then there was “Music 2.0.” This was when digital music came onto the scene. What happened here was that the major labels downplayed it and couldn’t see the significance of it, but everybody else did. Music 2.5 was when digital music became monetized and we saw iTunes and Amazon MP3.com, etc. Now there was a way to suddenly make money with digital music. “Music 3.0” is different. It’s where the paradigm shifts. Now it’s the first time an artist can finally reach out and touch the fan, and the fan can reach back and touch the artist. The more that happens, the more the fan loves it. They more than love it; they need it and demand it. It’s that interaction that makes Music 3.0. Now you can finally sell to your fans, market to them and communicate with them. You can do everything directly with the fan without needing the infrastructure from a record label that you needed up until this point. You no longer need radio, because radio has become irrelevant. You don’t need record stores because they’ve pretty much gone away, and unless you’re high on the major record label system, you’re not going to get in there anyway. That’s how Music 3.0 came about. The book goes another step and explains where we were, where we are now and how we got there. Then it breaks it down and looks at who the people are that control the business. Obviously record labels are not in control, like they used to be.
Who do you believe is controlling the business these days?
BO:
Well, managers more than anybody. But I look at specifics. For example, people like Irving Azoff, who has more control of the music business now and more clout in the music industry than just about anybody else. But there’s also Trent Reznor, who’s a huge influence on Music 3.0. A lot of the book I’ve written has come from Trent. He knows how to use social networking and social media better than anyone to get his point across. He doesn’t need traditional media and anything other than his social media. He’s been a big influence on the way things have gone. Seth Godin is a big one as well with his theory of permission marketing and his concept of “the tribe.”
I noticed “How to establish your tribe” on some of your marketing materials. What is the Music 3.0 line of advice on building/establishing a tribe? Every aspiring artist I know wants to have that tribe – a dedicated fan base. Does that happen on talent alone, or does it happen when people interact with the artist and the fan?
BO:
The first thing is, and I see this a lot, where people say, “Your music has to be great. It can’t suck.” I certainly agree with that. But one of the things that is behind the idea of Music 3.0 is the fact that no matter what kind of music you make, chances are there are some fans out there for it. It might be bizarre to the rest of the world, but you might have 100 or 1,000 fans out there that are going to really dig what you’re doing. You just have to find them, and they have to find you. I take the quality of the music out of the equation, because who’s to say what’s good and what’s bad? What it comes down to in establishing your tribe and growing you tribe is social media management. This is something that people kind of forget. When they think of social media, they just think, “We have to be on Myspace and Facebook and Twitter.” But then they just haphazardly manage all of it. What I advocate is two things:
Everybody gets funneled to the e-mail list and your website. The social media is just a point of contact and a way of telling them, “Come back to the mother ship.” Your e-mail list is extremely important, because while Facebook is great today – and you may have 100,000 friends on Facebook – what if it goes away tomorrow? If you don’t have those contacts connected to your email list, you’re in trouble. There are many cases where bands have a million friends on Myspace and no way to leverage them. I know a band whose label went in and said, “you have to take your Myspace page down.” And when their Myspace page came down, the band lost all their contacts. Their online popularity didn’t help them at all at that point. That’s why trying to control your message is done best through your website and e-mail list. Everything additional is a strategy by which to do that.
Is this methodology of driving people towards the e-mail list and website content based and a steady stream of ancillary marketing strategies?
BO:
It’s an overall strategy of social media management. There’s a certain point where too much contact is counterproductive. An example of that would be your e-mail list. People don’t want an e-mail from you every day. But on the other hand, if you tweet four, five or eight times per day, that might work for your followers if it’s good content. Of course, if you’re providing useless information, it might not work as well. I kind of draw the line when people tweet, “I’m having bacon and eggs for breakfast.” That doesn’t constitute an effective tweet. But there are certain ways you can bring your fans into it as well, through shout outs, contests, insider information, etc. Social media management is what builds the tribe along with the amount of content and the quality of content. That’s one of the things I advocate in Music 3.0. There’s a section that says, “You can only do this so many times and get away with it. There’s a study that says if you do this ten times as opposed to five times, it’s counter-productive.” That’s where we’re going with it.
You also touch on ten music marketing ideas that could only happen in Music 3.0. Without giving them away completely, are there mistakes you’re seeing that people are regularly making out there, or things they need to do that they aren’t doing?
BO:
In Music 3.0 marketing, you can reach out directly to your tribe and fan base through your e-mail list and social media. The problem is you can’t be too overt about it. You can’t say, “Hi. Buy our new CD.” You have to say, “The new CD is out. Take a listen and let us know what you think.” One thing I did do in Music 3.0 – and this is what I do with all my books – is that I dedicated about a third of the book to interviews with people that are a lot smarter than I. In this case, what I did was interviewed one of the gurus of SEO and SEM, Gregory Markel, who was extremely helpful on his SEO techniques. He’s so at the cutting edge that what everyone else knows or assumes is the current technology. I’ll go to him and say, “How about this strategy?” And he’ll say, “That was last year. This is what Google’s looking for now.” He was also signed to Warner Bros as a singer, so he’s very hip to the music business. They do the SEO for Led Zeppelin’s website and a few others. I also interviewed people like Michael Terpin, who has gone from running a traditional media PR firm to one that just does social media PR. To help explain the shift to Music 3.0 I also interviewed people like Rupert Perry, who was the president of EMI and the vice chair of EMI worldwide and has perspective on the way the music business used to be and the way it is now.
Are there any parting words of advice you’d give to artists?
BO:
I think the opportunities are great now. That doesn’t mean that everything is easy though, and that’s probably one of the fallacies of Music 3.0. A lot of so-called experts are out there saying, “Now that you can communicate directly with your fans, it’s going to be easy.” It’s not. I think the big takeaway is, you have to utilize Music 3.0 and all the technologies available to you, but you also can’t ignore the traditional strategies. You still have to tour, get the fliers out, use street teams. All of the traditional efforts are equally as necessary as the online technology.
You can learn more about Bobby and check out his Music 3.0 Blog.
This is part 2 of 2 of an interview with Ian Rogers – the CEO of Topspin. If you missed part 1 you can read that here.
How do you respond to the criticism of Topspin’s ability to develop artists? More often than not I hear- “That’s great for established artists, but what are you doing for the developing artist? What are you doing for brand building?” I realize you’ve discussed some of that, but what do you say to people?
IR:
It makes sense. It’s deserved. We built our name on the bigger projects we’ve done. I would argue there are 500 artists on Topspin, and most people could only name a couple. We’ve worked with artists of all sizes. We’ll continue to. It’s really a business and marketing decision for us. The reality is, depending on who you believe, there are five million artists on Myspace and hundreds of thousands of artists on TuneCore and Reverb Nation, but I really believe that the number of people that could actually make a living playing music is more in the range of 50,000. It’s an aspirational business, there are a lot of hobbyists. Topspin is really meant to be a professional tool. A lot of people don’t really want to hear that. If you’re not going to make $5,000 selling direct from artist to fan, then Topspin is probably not the right tool for you. We’ve tried to be really upfront and honest about that, but it’s not necessarily the message everyone wants to hear. We’re trying to create a healthy middle class of artists. Our goal is not to charge five million artists $10. That’s not how I want to build my business.
I haven’t heard that from you guys before. Maybe I haven’t been doing my homework and reading enough interviews, but I hadn’t heard that.
IR:
I don’t think we’ve been particularly clear about it, to be honest with you. We work with so many small artists that it feels a bit moot. We work with small artists every day. I actually just had a phone call this morning with one of our partners, and we’re trying to put together a platform that’s literally turnkey, to easily set up an artist’s site – sort of Band Camp simple. We’re definitely trying to get there. I don’t want to keep anybody out, but at the same time, my goal is not to make $10 on five million artists. I’d love to have a few thousand artists who are making money on Topspin. That’s our goal. I think that’s hard for people to get their head around, because that’s not the way a lot of people are building their businesses. The other thing – I’ll throw this out there – that’s why I’m working personally with the Get Busy Committee.
I was going to ask you what made you choose them, because it’s not like you’re not busy.
IR:
To be honest, for me, if I’m not using the product I’m probably not very good at leading the company. I wouldn’t be very good at running Flickr if I didn’t take photos. I felt like I needed to be a customer. So I kind of had in the back of my head that I was looking for something to try. The Get Busy Committee stuff was great, because a) I really liked it, and as someone that grew up listening to the Beastie Boys and NWA, it’s just a record I loved, and I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I don’t really care, because I genuinely love it and think it’s a truly great album from some guys who could’ve been taken that to a label, but chose not to because they’d been through the label system already and they just wanted to do it themselves. It was exciting to me for that reason. I also thought, because of the criticism you brought up, this is a band that does not exist. It’s not even like they were small and then decided to tour for a while. Before October of last year, they literally did not exist. When I started working for them, I registered the domain, and we built it from scratch. We have many thousands of people on the e-mail list, we have 2,000 people on Facebook. I don’t want to say how much out of respect for the band but let’s put it this way, we’ve cleared that $5,000 direct to fan hurdle I mentioned a moment ago.
So they are making a full time living at this?
IR:
I wouldn’t say we’re making enough money that three guys are making a living, no. We still haven’t done any tours. Thankfully they have other things going on in their lives that they’re not trying to earn a living solely on the band at this point, but we’re definitely covering all our costs and are spending money. We’re spending money on Web design, we’re getting a little bit of PR help, a little bit of help here and there, and we’ve made more money than we’ve spent at this point, which is a great thing. I kind of want to prove that it’s possible. This is not just, “Take some established people and pump them through the machine.” There are a number of people that have built it from the ground, up on Topspin. If you look at bands like Golden Filter, or the way we started the fan campaign here, there are lots of small examples and a couple higher-profile examples as well. The bottom line is, you have to have a product that people want and care about first. What Topspin is really for is bands that have fans or are capable of having fans. There’s no real bar below that.
Talk to me about your competition out there. Reverb Nation has widgets, and Nimbit has an all in artist services environment. There are a lot of people jumping into the artists’ tools business. Unfortunately the entrepreneurial aspirations seem to be more lucrative than the sale of music. How do you stack up, and do you even see those companies as competitors? I guess the question comes down to – why Topspin?
IR:
It’s a good question. The ones that you mention – both ReverbNation and Nimbit – we’re super friendly with. I think we’re a lot less competitive with ReverbNation. They have marketing tools, and we’ve talked a lot about how ReverbNation widgets become end caps for Topspin widgets. They’re a broad marketing platform, and our tools could easily fit in there. Their ecommerce is also integrated with AudioLife, who is now one of our partners. Ecommerce and store-building is not one of the core competencies of Reverb Nation. I think fundamentally they’re for a different kind of artist. They are going for monetizing hundreds of thousands of artists, where we’re going for monetizing a few thousand artists. Our tools are going to reflect that and reflect a more professional artist. In general, we’re the only platform that really has the demand generation marketing tools and the ecommerce marketing tools integrated in the way that they are with the feature set that we have.
I don’t think anybody’s investing as heavily in it as us or moving as quickly as we are. What a lot of people have are essentially fulfillment tools with no real marketing tools. I don’t think fulfillment is a particularly difficult technical challenge. There are a lot of ways you can sell stuff but managing fans and generating demand is a difficult part. When you put those two together so you can do marketing activities and then can follow them all the way through to the transaction and get all the analytics that you need out of the other side to understand what’s working and what isn’t, my sincere belief is that no one’s really close to us there, and they’re not going to get particularly close. For us, the real competitors that we’re looking at are people that we actually bid against every day out there in the field. It’s more existing legacy ecommerce systems, and those are ecommerce systems that are inside of labels and Live Nation and those sorts of things. At the end of the day those aren’t really competition because they’re fulfillment platforms and not marketing platforms with fulfillment built in.
The name of the game for us is to just keep moving harder and faster on the marketing features side and keep so far ahead that artists say, “Wow, I have to use these tools because they really work.” They really do – as Metric’s marketing manager put it – “I built a six-figure business where I had a zero dollar business the year before, took my e-mail list to 135,000 plus where it was 4,000 the year before.” Those are the kinds of stories we need to get out there that really differentiate us from the competition, because anybody who says, “Oh, well I’ve got a shopping cart. I don’t need Topspin” is really missing the point. There’s no way that their shopping cart delivered them more than 100,000 e-mail addresses and on its own delivered them a six-figure business. It’s the integration of all those tools that work.
There’s a great set of books about innovation The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution and a third one, Seeing What’s Next. The author, Clayton Christensen says, the mantra in the book is, “When the technology is not yet good enough, the integrated solution is the best solution.” I think that’s the story, not only of innovation throughout the ages, but definitely the story of digital music. That’s why the iPod has had such dominance. I think in this space, you could cobble together a Topspin solution out of a bunch of pieces. You could take a Yahoo store and a ReverbNation widget and Constant Contact or whatever and put the pieces together; but I think people who are serious professionals aren’t looking for the cut-rate solution, they’re looking for the integrated solution that gives them all the info they need. That’s what we’re trying to be. We would really like to be the marketing platform that people who are marketing professionals use.
I think we have a long way to go, and that the Pro-Tools analogy is real. We want to be for digital marketing what Pro-Tools is, was and has been for digital production. I think if you look back to Sound Tools 1.0, by today’s standards we would laugh at that piece of software. I think five years from now we’ll look at where we are with Topspin now and laugh too. I’m not going to pretend it’s the be all, end all, but we’re working our asses off, we’re releasing new code every week, we’re actually working with the software ourselves to build marketing campaigns. If you look at something like Sara Lowe’s site, that site was built this past Sunday in four hours. That really I think is the promise: that you can actually build great sites that work and that deliver dollars and capture fans and build fan connections quickly so you can spend your time doing higher-value things.
Tell me why, from a business perspective you guys decided it was necessary to have a training course for people to be certified to operate this marketing environment. I don’t disagree that the average lay person on the street definitely needs some background and frame of reference, but I thought it was an interesting business decision.
IR:
If you think about the business and where it’s at, this business is really akin to Salesforce.com where you have a new and effective way of running your business with this tool, but even if the tool is good, and the tool has been coming along, it is still challenging to use. Even if the tool was perfect, it doesn’t mean making the tool is going to make people great marketers and great operators of the tool. If you have a tool with enough power in it, people need to be taught how to use it. It’s analogous to Pro-Tools or PhotoShop, Premiere or After Effects – any of those tools. You can’t just pick up that software out of the box and say, “Alright, I’m an artist!” or “I’m a graphic designer!” I think our goal has been to make a tool which is powerful, and I’d rather have it be powerful and full featured than easy to use at this point. We have a really hungry user base that wants powerful features. We’ll continue to make it easier to use over time, but I’d rather the feature exist than it’s easy to use at this point.
When you have a few hundred customers, you can teach them how to use a powerful feature. We’re not trying to be Yahoo. We’re not trying to have a hundred million people using Topspin, we’re trying to have a few thousand really talented people using it. So having a training program, which covers the basics of how we look at marketing and how we’ve had success at building campaigns, and then how to use the software felt really natural given what we were trying to accomplish. Also, our goal again is not to sell you something and then walk away from you: “Okay, we signed up 100,000 artists. Great! We’re done.” We don’t want to make money unless our artists make money, and we want our artists to make a lot of money. It’s not a “Hey we got you on the system. Check!” We really want you to actually be successful in gathering fans, selling things and building a business. Having people be successful on the platform is as important to us as having them be on the platform, which is the short version of why we have a training program.
You have a very unique vantage point given your position and background in the business. Do you have any advice to artists out there that are struggling to know where to turn with all these tools and all these options that have come up in the last five years?
IR:
There’s more information out there than ever, and I think it depends on which kind of artist they are. Are they the kind of artist that wants to get deep in the mix on this? I’d still recommend that artists first partner with a great manager. That’s going to help them make all these decisions, and hopefully the manager is really up on this stuff and can do all this heavy lifting so they can concentrate on their art and communicating with their fans.
Without a great product, it’s a dead issue.
IR:
Exactly. I think the product at this point does include that fan communication, but still there should be a manager that’s worrying about the details like Topspin. I think resources like yours are great places to get started because you can get real human beings who will help you. I actually have been so impressed with what Berklee School of Music has been doing. If I were 18, that’s what I would be doing – I’d be at BerkleeOnline.com taking the music classes and the music business classes because I think pursuit of knowledge is great, there’s a lot of great knowledge there, it’s relatively inexpensive relative to the value you’re getting, and you’re going to meet people as well.
We had several interns – mostly from Berklee School of Music – at Topspin last summer and mostly found them jobs at the end. Being out there and having those connections is really important. I would start at those places that are umbrellas, which are relatively open and not tied to any one approach, but really dedicated to seeing entrepreneuring artists succeed. I think the other thing that’s interesting is that being an artist is more like being an entrepreneur than ever. I find myself talking about start-up culture with bands a lot as well, blogs like StartupHacks and VCHacks, books like the Innovators’ Solution and things are somehow pertinent to artists as well. But really I would start with the Music Power Network , Berklee College of Music, blogs like yours, that sort of thing.
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Checkout Topspin and the Ian’s clients the Get Busy Committee
I was fortunate enough to speak with Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin. Ian started off in music in high school as the guitar player in a hardcore band called Albino K-Mart Shoppers and went on to become the webmaster for the Beastie Boys after building one of the earliest and best fan sites the band had ever seen. He went on to do web design for many major bands of the time, worked for Grand Royal Records, started and sold two different internet companies and wound up running Yahoo Music just before leaving for Topspin.
***Editor’s Note *** So I have been hearing about Topspin at least daily for over a year now and last month I was finally able to be shown around their software. To me Topspin had become that over-hyped blockbuster movie that couldn’t possible live up to the expectation. All in all I have to say I was impressed with their offerings.
Ian, thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. You wrote an early blog post at Topspin and said, “Topspin is about demand creation, not demand fulfillment.” From my perspective having just been given the Topspin tour – the tools you give artists work with are direct-to-fan ecommerce tools, data collection and analytics tools and an email management system. How are you guys using these tools to create demand for product?
IR:
I think that there are a bunch of hard problems we’re trying to solve on the demand fulfillment side. I wish that we didn’t have to solve them and that they’d already been solved by others, but unfortunately they haven’t. The ability to do smart bundling and accounting and customer service and fulfillment through different warehouses are problems I would’ve preferred not to have had to solve, but we have, because there wasn’t a great solution out there for them already. We’re really building these demand generation tools on top of it, whether it’s e-mail for media collection, Facebook fan for media collection/fan collection. We’ll be launching SXSW the Tweet-for-Track, fan Twitter follower builder little widget. And then on the other side of that there’s all the ways you talk to those fans afterwards. But what we’re also trying to do, and what we’ll be announcing at SXSW is a number of partners that extend the reach of the artist. We’ve tried a bunch of experiments at this point trying to figure out how you build fans. We know that the e-mail for media stuff works and it’s killer.
E-mail for media meaning you can download a track for free as long as we have your e-mail?
IR: Yeah.. I’ll give you something of value if you’ll give me permission to market to you. It really is Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing 101. It really works.
Let’s back up. Here it is, top down. Demand creation is a lot harder than demand fulfillment. You give me a dollar, and I give you a file is not a particularly difficult problem at this point. It’s been solved for ten-plus years. There are some intricacies that we’ve tried to solve elegantly around managing digital and physical, around doing fulfillment through multiple warehouses, handling customer service, particularly when customer service is entrenched in some pretty sticky accounting issues in our industry. Those are all things we’ve tried to solve elegantly, but I think ultimately that’s the commodity part of what we do. The part that is more alchemy is, how do you actually gain and gather fans? And once you have those folks, how do you communicate with them effectively? I think that’s at this point in its very early stages, and it’s still very artful.
Even when it’s mature, software can add a lot of value in just the workflow that people go through. If you are a manager that’s managing a few artists, there’s just stuff you’re going to do every day in managing content and getting that content out to fans, and making fan connections that you’re going to want software to do it. And you’re not going to want ten software programs; you’re going to want one software program where it’s all integrated, from “I collected my fans through this mechanism, I sent them a note here, they purchased here, this type of marketing works, that campaign over there didn’t work, I’m going to do more of this and less of that.” Very simply, that’s what we’re trying to build.
Specifically, how do you do that? We look at marketing in a few different buckets. One of them is direct marketing. You’re an artist, and you have a connection to the fan. You have their e-mail address, you’ve got their Twitter handle, they’re a fan on Facebook. These are ways you can directly communicate. And it’s fans raising their hands and saying, “Please, talk to me.” Fans want to be communicated with. When you ask people, “Would you like to hear from J. Crew?” more or less they inevitably say, “Less.” But if you ask them, “Would you like to hear from your favorite artist more or less?” they inevitably say, “More.” The direct marketing really, really works. There’s just no question.
The question then becomes, “If e-mail addresses are money, how do I gather more e-mail addresses?” We’ve been trying to build tools and programs that help you do that. The e-mail for media type of thing really works. We’ve seen artists grab hundreds of thousands of e-mails from it. Metric’s manager has been in public talking about it, so I can talk about it, even though we keep the data of our artists really confidential. It’s their data, not ours. Metric’s manager has spoken about this publicly, so I can as well. When they came to us, they had less than 4,000 people on their e-mail list. Today they have more than 135,000 people on their e-mail list. And that’s through the Topspin tools that they’ve used on the platform. We’ve seen artists gather more than 100,000 e-mail addresses in a month. That’s just incredible to me.
Making it more concrete, Ian, basically, you guys have a tool that is an HTML code that you can place anywhere on your website or anywhere else that accepts HTML that enables somebody to either test a song or download a song in exchange for an e-mail address. Is that basically what we’re looking at for the e-mail collection?
IR:
Yes. If you go to say, pixiesmusic.com and look at that flash widget there that collects the e-mail addresses, then go to Pitchfork.com and search “Pixies EP” and look at that news article where that same widget was used to give away free tracks on Pitchfork, and then share that into Facebook, you can see that’s a viral widget that allows for sharing and really just builds permission marketing relationships. I’m not going to try to tell anybody that building a flash widget that collects e-mail addresses is hard. You can create one of those widgets in less than ten seconds inside Topspin. I saw that Broken Social Scene made a rip-off of the Topspin widget and had it posted on Pitchfork. I actually honestly felt kind of bad, because they probably spent some amount of time on it, and it would’ve literally taken ten seconds to do in Topspin. It would’ve dumped into the CRM platform, it would’ve geo-located those fans automatically, it would’ve pulled all the Rapleaf data on those fans, which is basically social media data from a company called Rapleaf that pulls in demographic information as well as information about which social networks those people live on. That all would’ve happened automatically.
The e-mail goes out to them via white-listed service, so the deliverability is really high. When they click “download” in the e-mail, that’s the double opt-in, so you’re legal to market to them, and you’re COPPA-compliant, so you’re not guilty of marketing inappropriate material to underage kids. That really is the type of thing we stand for. It’s super simple for the fan, it’s viral and easily moves around the Web, but it’s also really easy for the artist. We’re worrying about a ton of stuff – dotting i’s and crossing t’s – so that you don’t have to. I’m telling you, filling out the COPPA-compliance form alone is a several-hour process that most bands shouldn’t have to worry about. We’re trying to build that in a way that scales.
And that’s just one simple example. We built a share on Facebook and get free media sort of campaign, we’ve built a share on Twitter and get free media campaign, and those are just ways to build those direct marketing campaigns. Apart from marketing though, and other ways on demand generation, the viral marketing stuff is crucial. You’ve got artist to fan, but then there’s also fan to fan and trying to build tools that make the fan to fan work. You can’t force viral activity, but you can make it more fluid and reduce friction. If you put a “Share this on Facebook” at the end of the purchase flow, a lot of people are going to say, “I just bought the Portugal The Man record” to their friends and share it on Facebook the same way they’re sharing, “I just bought some new shoes on Zappos” on Facebook. So you can make that more friction free and just reduce friction in the viral channels. There are other forms of marketing, and you mentioned SEO. Basically, if I were giving two bits of advice to artists based on what we’ve seen, the two most important things you can do are gathering e-mail addresses and have better SEO, because that’s where the majority of sales come from.
Let me stop there and ask you, because you guys list SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a best practice, and believe me I’m a firm believer in SEO, but when you’re talking about SEO for art, what other than making sure the members’ names, the band’s name, maybe the genre of music – what would you recommend that people are in fact trying to be found for? Obviously it’s using anchor text and keywords, but do you have any recommendation for types of keywords unless somebody is creating art for a specific purpose, i.e., music for meditation, music for yoga, music for skateboarding, whatever it is? Do you have any recommendations on which types of keywords above and beyond the band and brand names people should be searching for?
IR:
You know, I don’t really to be honest with you. We haven’t seen a case where artists have really been able to move the needle by gaming SEO. I think the most important thing is to make sure if you are building any sort of buzz that you’re incredibly easy to find. For example, we were working on the David Byrne/Brian Eno record, and the SEO was all around David Byrne and Brian Eno of course. And then we were going for the obvious things: Talking Heads; Roxy Music – anything we thought peripherally people searching for these things would also be interested in this album. We actually redid the entire campaign when KCRW and KEXP started playing “Strange Overtones.” We wanted to take the hook for the song and made sure that if people were searching for “Strange Overtones,” the first thing they found was that David Byrne/Brian Eno site. Similarly for small bands, I’ve actually seen, like with the band I manage, which is Get Busy Committee, which is literally a band that did not exist online three months ago, the album is called Uzi Does It. There are t-shirts out there that say “Uzi Does It.”
I have to compliment you, because if I were between the ages of 11 and 19 and wanted to get back at my parents, I would definitely have that Uzi-shaped USB with their album on it.
IR:
I’m not sure if I’m proud of this, but we’ve had a lot of people that are gun collectors who are interested in the uzi-shaped USB, who know nothing about the band. Being sure I have all the keywords for Uzi Does It, for people that are looking for the t-shirt, USB uzi, all those products in addition of course to the fact that the band’s producer Scoop Deville is also the guy that produced the new Snoop Dog track “I Want to Rock” and he produced the Fat Joe track “Ha Ha,” and he just produced the track for Busta Rhymes. Those are all things that when I’m thinking about my SEO, I want to be sure I rank with.
I often come across something in a commercial and think, “Oh, Volkswagen ads, one or two lyrics that I hear distinctly between the dialogue,” and it’s rare that anybody bothers making sure those keywords make them more findable, which is just frustrating.
IR:
Yeah. I bet nobody was going out and making sure when you searched “ice skating commercial music” that The XX came up, because that was that commercial that got ran over and over during the Olympics that had that great XX intro track. It was a great placement for The XX, but I wonder how people knew that was The XX if they hadn’t already heard the record? I’m sure people were searching “ice skating commercial music” and that sort of thing. That’s the thing, you really just want to think like somebody who is discovering music. If you have a spin on late night college radio, and someone had no idea who you were, what would they type into Google to figure it out? You want to make sure you rank with all that stuff. We’ve actually messed with some SEO tools inside of Topspin. We haven’t released any yet, but we have some really simple things that you just put in your keywords and it will look at your page and see how your page is and if your page is well done, and we make some suggestions on what to put in the title and the meta headers and that sort of thing.
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Part two of this article will run in a few days. In the meantime checkout Topspin and the Ian’s clients the Get Busy Committee
Cameron Mizell is a professional musician, former record company employee and runs the website Musician Wages.
Tell me about how you came to New York and put have been able to become a full time musician.
CM:
I came to New York a little over five years ago, and right before coming here I’d been playing in Bloomington, Indiana and it was kind of a big fish/small pond situation, where’d I’d been playing a lot of gigs and was kind of one of the guys people would call if they wanted to get a gig. And I thought, “This is great, but I need to move on.” That was what prompted the decision to move to New York. My wife – then she was my fiancée – and I moved up here and had no jobs, no leads. We just decided it was time and decided to move. That – coming up here with nothing – makes it really hard to do music. So I had to find some kind of job to make ends meet, and I went through a couple sales jobs that I was terrible at, and then ended up at Verve Records as a temp and then eventually I was hired on full time.
I worked in the production department, and when the label was downsized in 2006 I was promoted by default. The downsizing made the label much smaller, so the lines between every department were blurred. I worked closely with the creative department and also learned what the marketing department did, what the sales department did, and I even learned from the label’s lawyer.
Thanks to all this, I started to get a better idea of who owns what and how deals work and what labels look for in an artist, and by doing that I figured out what an artist should look for in a label. That gave me a pretty strong background [in the music industry]. Then when I felt it was time for me to quit, I left that and started doing my own music full time.
Was there anything that precipitated you saying, “Now is the time, and now I can go do this, even if I don’t know if I’m going to make it?” Was it something in your label gig?
CM:
Well, yeah. I had been essentially doing all the production responsibilities for Verve, but my official title was Assistant Manager. I was very busy and working long hours, and it was a very stressful job. I felt like I could probably make this much money on my own doing what I love to do. Frankly, I didn’t even really have that much time to do my own music outside of work because I was working late and thinking about it all weekend. It was too much, and I decided I had to go. They weren’t going to be able to pay me what I felt I deserved to be paid. When it really came down to it, the money wasn’t important; I just wanted to be a musician.
Tell me about how you found enough money to survive when you were starting out?
CM:
My main source of music income, especially when I left Verve, was selling downloads, mostly on iTunes. I was able to create a decent amount of income by 1) having several albums available so there was more to sell and 2) I picked up some (sort of) tricks for promoting my music online. The thing that worked the best at the time was doing iMixes on iTunes. I wrote a whole article about that on Musician Wages. Essentially what you do is create mixes, or playlists, in the store. When people go to iTunes they’re usually there to buy music, so the best place to try to help people find your music is going to be in the store itself. As an independent artist you don’t get any page placement, so what you do is find similar artists and albums that are very similar to yours and make playlists of your music with those artists, so that over time people start to connect your music – like my jazz trio with John Scofield or Soulive or Medeski, Martin and Wood – similar types of music. So it helps establish these “listeners also bought” trends. Once that started to happen, I noticed more people were listening to my music through websites like LastFM, and could also see what else they were listening to.
And it gets you more feedback for creating mixes with other artists.
CM:
Exactly. Because sometimes the music that I thought my music was similar to actually wasn’t what other people thought. Other people thought it was similar to some other artist I’d never even heard of, so it helps me discover new music and new artists I can use in playlists. So it’s a self-perpetuating thing.
So does this method still work in iTunes 9?
CM:
iMixes were introduced in 2004 or 2005, so that’s been several years. In internet years that’s generations. I think it’s a lower priority, or the feature is further down the importance ladder at iTunes. I don’t think it’s as effective as it used to be. First, because it doesn’t get as much attention, but also because over time – and I don’t know if this is my fault or if people were bound to figure this out – people were doing this, and it was like blatant spamming, making iMixes that only use the top-selling artists, even if it had nothing to do with their music. The playlists were not really designed to be good playlists. They were just designed to put your track in front of as many people as possible. I feel like that kind of deteriorated the cleverness of this whole thing. It became really obvious when people were making iMixes to promote their music. I still make iMixes that are essentially like if I were going to make a playlist for myself or a mix CD for my car. I can turn all those things into iMixes. And they’re good mixes, because if I want to listen to it, maybe someone else will want to listen to it.
I remember you telling me you had some success with Christmas music as well.
CM:
In 2007, when I was still working at Verve, I really became aware of how much Christmas music sells, so I started to wonder if I could turn that into a revenue stream for myself.
People just buy Christmas music. In some ways it cheapens the whole idea of a Christmas album, because it’s blatantly commercial. My wife loves Christmas music , and she was always asking me, “When are you going to make your Christmas album?” And I said, “It’s way too early in my career to make a Cameron Mizell Christmas album.” There was no way I was going to do that. But then I started noticing other independent artists having a lot of success with their own holiday albums. One night I was sitting around with a couple musician friends and we thought, “What kind of Christmas album could we make? It needs to be very, very specific – the niche, the genre. It needs to be something that’s not very common. How about bossa nova? What would a Stan Getz circa 1964 Christmas album sound like?” So we went and arranged a bunch of public domain Christmas hymns as bossa novas – Girl from Ipanema meets O Little Town of Bethlehem, that kind of thing. We recorded it all at home so there was no overhead. We put it up on iTunes and the first year it did really well. iTunes included a track in one of their iTunes Essential playlists and put the album in a feature on the jazz page. We ended up making about $2500 bucks in a month from that album. We kind of realized, “Okay, that worked, what else can we do?” The next year we made an Americana Christmas album — the same guys with a totally different sound. These are all instrumental albums, so this is great background music for the holidays.
There are studios and session bands that do this sort of thing, which you might see on an end-cap in someplace like Target, so it’s not a new idea. Our approach is just less slick, more organic.
So it is music with a specific purpose. This project is Christmas music made for a certain type of consumer.
CM:
Exactly. That’s what we’re trying to do. It’s gotten to a point where if we do one of these every year – as long as we can make it good, because it’s not going to sell if it’s not really good – we get paid a good chunk of change after the Christmas season. It covers part of my rent for a year.
How did you find success being a session musician? I know you’re producing other artists, playing on other artists’ music, doing a lot of musical directing. How did you wind up going from someone who knew no one a few years ago to someone that is having that side of your career? A label gig is not always the best place to meet touring musicians,
CM:
Well, actually it’s kind of funny. Lauren Zettler, one of the people I work with most now used to work at Universal Music Group. So, in some ways because of working that record label gig I met the person who I now work with most. So she was doing her own thing, and after I quit Verve she gave me a call and wanted me to play guitar on a couple gigs, and that sort of turned into recording a new song she’d written. We did all this at my apartment in my little make-shift studio. Things clicked and that one song ended up turning into an EP, and we started to tour. With Lauren, it was really that she needed a sideman, and it turned into becoming more of a band endeavor where we both do a lot of work. We both know a lot about the music industry, so we are able to share responsibilities. That helps. All my other connections came from school. I went to University of North Texas, which has a great jazz program, and then I transferred to Indiana University, which also has an excellent music program. I know a lot of people from both those schools that are here in New York now. Once I quit Verve I had all this free time, and I could start getting together with people and playing a lot more. Really it’s all about going out to see people at their gigs, and they come out to see you at yours. Eventually if somebody needs a guitar player, they give you a call. It’s pretty straight-forward. If you’re good and people see you enough, they start to remember you.
Tell me about MusicianWages as a platform. Why did you build that, and does it feed into your career as a session player?
CM:
MusicianWages.com was an idea that Dave Hahn and I had going back several years before we actually started it. Dave is a great writer, and he had been blogging about his experience on a cruise ship – he had a cruise ship gig as a piano player. That blog got tons of traffic. It was the only place where people could find out any information about playing music on a cruise ship, because the agencies weren’t very forthcoming about what to expect. What kind of clothes do you pack? What’s the room going to look like? So he wrote about a lot of that. What we ended up doing was taking that cruise ship blog – Chronicles of a Cruise Ship Musician – and making it one section of MusicianWages. We figured a lot of people do the cruise ship and come off the boat and are looking for work and a scene somewhere. Dave had that experience, and then after the cruise ship he started doing tours, musical theater, and things like that. I had been doing the independent musician/freelance guitar player type of thing, and had experience organizing and leading a band and trying to do something with my original music. So we just started writing about all this. We thought, “There are very few resources out there that give you practical advice as a musician.” And frankly, we couldn’t really find anything that was very significant written by musicians. Because there are a lot of people that talk to you like, “I’m a marketing expert, and here’s how you should market your music;” but they’re not actually doing it themselves because they’re not musicians. That was the whole idea: “It has to be based on experience and it has to be practical advice; it can’t be an advertisement for whatever you’re doing, it has to be advice for someone that wants to do what you’re doing.” We asked friends that are all professional musicians to write as well. And then we had people that aren’t necessarily working musicians but work with musicians very closely – such as yourself, or Heather at Music Careers at About.com or David Rose at KnowtheMusicBiz.com, all those types of people started to contribute. We’ve built a pretty solid amount of content on the topic. Our goal is, if you search “musician,” we want to come up on the top page in Google. We’re there yet, but that’s our goal. If you go to Musician Wages, you’ll notice one of the things we try to stress is that our site is about the musician business, not the music business.
How is putting yourself out there in that manner and other blogs enhanced your career? Would you recommend somebody putting their experiences out there to help their career or their business?
CM:
Yeah. It’s definitely had a positive influence on my career as a musician, because every article has a link to me, and if people want to find out more about me, they just have to click on my name and it goes to my website. It’s hard to say how many sales that results in, but I definitely get e-mail on a regular basis from people through my website that are asking me more questions, or telling me they found my music and really like it. A lot of times those people come from MusicianWages. I know for Dave, for example, he’s definitely had some positive results from writing this. Dave belongs to the Musician’s Union. He wrote an article about creating a resume for musicians, and had a picture of his resume in the article. The Union paper, which goes out to tens of thousands of union members, has his resume printed in it because they re-printed his article
Do you have any closing advice or things you see a lot of people doing wrong that could be avoided?
CM:
The only other thing I wanted to add is that there are all these sites you could be on, and I think a lot of people find this overwhelming. I see a lot of really great musicians that don’t do anything online. I think if you don’t think about it as a bunch of separate things, but think about it as one organism that is all contributing to your internet presence and make it a habit to do a little bit here and a little bit there, it grows over time. If you Google your name – which every musician should do from time to time – you want to be the top result, and you want people to know you have music available and are playing shows. The only way to do that is to repeatedly be putting your name and your music on the internet so other people can pick it up. If that means blogging every day or blogging once a week or just posting your favorite music on some website somewhere, all of that contributes. That’s what I’ve been doing for years, and it works really well.
Learn More Cameron Mizell and follow Cameron on Twitter
Patrick Faucher is the CEO and Co-Founder, Nimbit, Inc. by way of being a technologist and life long musician. He is a Berklee College of Music Graduate and one of the founders of direct to fan platform called Nimbit. He was kind enough to take some time and explain to me how Nimbit works and offer some general advice and information on how people are making a living in music using the direct to fan approach.
Tell me a bit about your background and how Nimbit came to be.
PF:
I’ve been a musician my whole life, since age four. I went through high school, and out of high school got a scholarship to engineering school, which was very practical at the time. I studied computer science and electrical engineering back in the early days of the Commodore 64.
I had a VIC-20. I was right there with you.
PF: There you go! I had a VIC-20. I loved that thing. Three years into engineering school, I took a break to go and play music, because that’s always been my passion and my love. I did that for a year and decided the last place I wanted to go was back to engineering school. So, I took some time and applied to music schools and in 1990 I ended up getting a scholarship to Berklee College of Music here in Boston. After graduation I gigged as a professional musician – various groups, from reggae, to blues, to jazz, to world music, to you-name-it. After getting married I realized how unbelievably difficult it was to make a living as an artist and support a family. So I fell back on my technical background and started doing web programming. At the time the web was just starting to be commercialized. I ended up working for a firm called Stumpworld Systems that created some of the very first e-commerce applications for bands including Phish, Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones.
Hmmm. The Rolling…? Oh yea – those guys. Ok.
PF:
We developed an entire suite of e-commerce and storefront tools that powered different sites. We had a bunch of clients – not just musicians. And we ended up building out this whole e-commerce platform. That company rode the boom-bust cycle through the late 90’s into 2001. I was employee number 16 when I got hired as head of development, and two years later we had 180 employees! Six months after that we were closed.
I don’t mean to laugh, but I’ve worked at and seen so many companies like that myself.
PF:
Right. You’ve seen that play. It was a great ride, and we built some great technology. When the dust settled, I got together with Matt Silbert, a Stumpworld colleague. He said, “Hey, I want to get back to serving the musicians we worked with early on and open up a web shop.” I said, “There’s one question that drives me nuts. Why doesn’t every band get online and build a business directly with their fans? There’s no reason they can’t other than the tools are clunky, it’s hard to navigate, and there just isn’t a good platform for it.” That was around 2002 when I started to write the business plan for Nimbit. After that we launched the very first version of Nimbit Web Tools that let you publish and manage a website, run a mailing list, post a calendar, and update your website.
We were developing the storefront piece to go out, and I met up with Phil Antoniades who ran Artist Development Associates. He already had a whole online CD store for artists including a fulfillment solution we needed. We started talking, and he had a whole pile of offline services he was doing for musicians from promotion, to CD replication, to other management type services.
We merged the two companies and created an online artist development platform where artists could put themselves online, get their brand out there, engage their fans, and conduct commerce all in one spot. That was the vision for Nimbit from the get-go: artists need a way to directly engage their fan base, sell direct to them, market to them on an on-going basis, and manage their business. The traditional major label distribution model was rendering itself unnecessary and costly, and we saw then that the market wouldn’t sustain multiple, multi-platinum releases for much longer.
The playing field between “major label” and “indie” was leveling. The lowered barriers to entry certainly meant that a lot more artists could get in the game, and it was a lot more distracting for Joe Fan. But we knew the good artists could easily connect with those fans and start building a business directly with them. And we saw that as the model of the future, so that’s when we set out to build the ultimate platform for direct-to-fan marketing, sales and distribution.
So how long has there been a Nimbit in this current incarnation? How long have you been open with this suite of tools?
PF:
Over five years.
And how many users do you have currently?
PF:
We have over 15,000 artists on our system.
How are you differentiating yourself from the handful of other companies – Topspin, ReverbNation? You’ve been around for a while, but I’m hearing more about you lately.
PF:
Nimbit has been built from the bottom up. From the beginning it was designed to be a fully-integrated direct-to-fan business management platform. We didn’t start out being a widget company a hybrid portal, where it’s fan discovery plus some widgets plus some fan marketing. We didn’t start out to be a CD manufacturer or an online CD store. We didn’t start out to be just high-end merchandising or analytics. That’s part of the reason it’s taken so long for our brand to take hold: it’s a lot easier to sell a single-point solution like a fan widget or an e-mail marketing tool than it is to sell an integrated platform. What’s been our weakness historically is now our strength. We very methodically set out to build everything from the back office, forward. Not only are artists able to publish beautiful storefronts but they’re able to capture all that fan data, analyze it, drill down, create marketing programs for that fan base and then push out those marketing programs that then drive more sales.
We were the first to actually publish a complete digital and physical integrated shopping cart. We’ve been doing this for years, where you can publish CD’s, t-shirts, mp3’s, digital albums, PDF’s – you name it. Any kind of product, digital or physical, you can actually merchandise and market through your store, and the fan doesn’t have to go three different places to get it.
We’ve remained focused on how artists conduct their business behind those storefronts. It’s things like giving them lots of different ways to set up their products, making sure everything is handled from Soundscan, to royalty tracking, to revenue splits with the other stakes holders. It’s complete transparency, so the artist sees where each sale comes from, what channel, etc. Nimbit also gives them conduits to iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody and eMusic as well as publishing their own storefronts, because that’s part of their business as well. It’s things like giving them a central place to work with their customer list and fan list, and to see all their activity data. They can see things like total sales on a per-customer basis.
Our core philosophy from the get-go was to build our solution around the artist such that they could really conduct, build, and operate a successful business. We couldn’t do that by giving them just one part of a solution or one little widget to do e-mail. We couldn’t do that by giving them one little widget to sell an mp3. And we couldn’t do that without giving them things like warehousing and fulfillment and inventory management, which is something you won’t get with others.
Nimbit didn’t do it the easy way. And it was tough to really make the business fly, because you had to coordinate multiple moving parts. It was very expensive to operate, and required a critical mass to sustain it.
Do you have any success stories with somebody using your platform exclusively?
PF:
Absolutely. We see it every day. We have hundreds and hundreds of people really making a living. We have a children’s artist that makes well over six figures per year, using Nimbit to run sales, marketing and distribution.
Another perfect example is an artist named Ellis Paul who’s been a long-time indie staple in the folk and Americana space. He started out with a label and now uses us exclusively. In this past year he raised nearly $100,000 using our platform, directly with his fans to fund his new album.
You have a fundraising aspect as well?
PF:
Yes, it’s actually as simple as creating any other product offer on our system. Ellis set up a bunch of really cool donation bundles, ranging from $50 up to $5,000 and $10,000. People could support him at these different levels, and he did this all through his website, mailing list and at his store. He got a $10,000 offer within half an hour of putting out his first e-mail. He sent this patron down to Nashville where she could sit in for the recording of some of the songs, and she actually played on some of the songs. She said that in retrospect that was the best $10,000 she ever spent. He calls it fan-raising instead of fundraising.
He used that money to produce probably his best album ever to date. And now those same fans that have supported him on the album, he’s activating them and sending concentric rings around them to go out and create buzz about the new album, which he is releasing without a label. But he is already on track to sell more than he’s ever sold in the past. In fact, we have some artists that have, since coming with us after being on a label, sold more and made more money doing it this way than all of their previous releases combined. That’s not an unusual story for us.
How are you integrating with the people on the big social networks?
PF:
Today fans live online; and they live on MySpace and Facebook. We announced a new product which is called MyStore for Facebook. MyStore enables artists to sell individual songs, entire albums, physical CD’s or anything from a Facebook fan page.
The fan doesn’t have to leave Facebook which has a twofold advantage: 1) that’s where the fans want to stay because they’re talking to their friends; 2) because it’s being done there and through Nimbit, so the artist gets a bigger piece of the pie. Because the artists know who bought what, they can say, “Hey, looks like many of our fans enjoy the up-tempo songs. We can send out a note saying, ‘We’ve got this new album featuring these up-tempo songs. And if you want to feature this song on your personal page, you can do that.’”
Essentially there is this whole generation of people – millions who are on Facebook – that live online. The key is that successful artists have been able to find fans where they are. In the past, if somebody played a stadium, the artist didn’t know who was there. The ticket company might know, but the artist didn’t know. We create ways to do that. I think what is especially exciting about the Ellis Paul example is that he raised $100,000 from 300 people. They are essentially his patrons. He compares it to when Mozart went to Emperor Josef. Mozart had one sole patron. So now you can have individual fans who are producers and patrons, and they can be vocal about what they want. This creates a great dialogue. Mass music used to be, somebody had a song and pushes it down someone’s throat and the label makes all the money. In this case, the artist selling music themselves, the fans communicating directly with the artist, it’s a more healthy and fulfilling relationship.
I always compare it to Twelfth Night, because you have the character the fool who would show up for the various different people of royalty and dance and play fiddle for a coin or his supper what have you. It’s become a lot more feudal in that regard.
PF:
That’s a very good point. It has become a lot more feudal, and if you look at the economic model, it mirrors that in a way. It’s coming down into smaller enterprises and more dispersed across these fragmented, niched marketplaces. But you have this very big difference in that you’ve got a communication medium that can cover the entire globe in an instant. It’s not localized from a physical standpoint anymore. So you can have direct patronage across the globe that’s very dispersed, but it follows that similar economic model of the old patronage model.
What about things you’ve seen completely backfire and don’t work or words of caution?
PF:
You have to have both right and left brain. You need somebody who can be a great musician and a great business person. Some musicians might fail as business people because they either don’t have those skills or don’t hire people to do it. You can be the best musician, with the greatest skills and tunes out there, but it’s the power behind the throne. As an artist, you owe it to yourself to understand and be directly involved with the business aspects of your career and understand that you are a business, and you are the CEO of your business. You have to understand what’s going on and surround yourself with smart people. I often point to the fact that back before Madonna was a big star, she was very driven and understood the business of music. When Ray Charles was emerging as a star, he successfully negotiated to retain the rights to masters; he was the first artist ever to do that because he understood the business landscape around him.
I often hear artists say, “You know what? I just want to make the music and get a label to take care of the rest.” And I tell them, “That’s a recipe for disaster. Not that that couldn’t work out, but your approach is a recipe for disaster. You will quickly get taken advantage of and spit out and not end up where you want to be.”
There’s an interesting story that is indicative of how mindsets are changing in terms of how artists define success. For the past three or four years I have given a lecture at Berklee College of Music. It’s generally a talk about distribution and marketing and different concepts for getting your music out to market. I ask at every workshop I do, “How many of you want to go make a living in music after you leave Berklee?” All of them raise their hands. “How many of you see working with a label or getting a label deal as critical to doing that and making a living?”
Four years ago every person in the class raised hands. Two years ago, only half the students raised their hands. This year, I went and gave a similar workshop and asked the same question about a month and a half ago, and exactly zero people raised their hand.
None of them saw a major label as a critical component for success. I thought that was fascinating.
