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.
Todd Tate is a consultant who manages web and social media strategy for musicians ranging from emerging artists to Grammy®-award winners. He is also a musician himself. Todd got his start in the music playing in garage bands as a teenager and went on to study jazz composition, performance and audio production at San Jose State University. After college, he went onto open San Francisco’s Blue Room Studios, where he was an audio engineer for countless CDs, including the 1997 Grammy®-nominated jazz release by Carlos “Patato” Valdez. Todd also served as co-founder and CEO for AngryCoffee.com, a company that launched the first publicly-available web-based interface to Napster and Napster-like networks at the dawn of digital music. He is also the Community Architect for the SF MusicTech Summit, a conference that brings together visionaries in the music/technology space, along with the best and brightest developers, entrepreneurs, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce.
Todd recently talked to me about how he got involved in music and technology and shared some advice for artists who want to gain more visibility online, grow their fan bases and establish solid careers as professional musicians.
How did you first get involved in the music industry, and what brought you to where you are today?
TT:
First and foremost, I’m a long-time musician. I started playing guitar when I was 13 in heavy metal garage bands. And I quickly realized I wanted to go to college and major in music. So, I went to San Jose State University fresh out of high school at 19-years old and majored in jazz performance. I quickly changed that concentration to jazz composition and arranging with a minor in audio production. I got the keys to the recording studio and was the studio manager for a couple years.
I worked my way through college recording heavy metal bands in the recording studio there. I was also the supervisor for the student union’s Community sound system, which was a really professional set up. I learned to work that pretty quickly and would mix bands that came through touring at San Jose State. I supervised and trained other students also. I worked with Firehose and some other really well-known acts during the ‘80s at the amphitheater there.
I actually mixed a popular funk rock band that came through the San Jose State studio called Colorwild, and they encouraged me to join their band. So, I started commuting to Santa Cruz a few times a week and rehearsing. We got really serious as we watched some of our friends get record deals. We packed up our bags and all moved to the same apartment building in San Francisco. That band included Randy Emata – who is now a popular L.A. producer – on keyboards. We played the local club circuit around here in San Francisco.
I also started a production studio here in San Francisco that operated in the Mission District from ’94-‘97 called the Blue Room Studios, named because the recording room was blue. We did a little research as to what would be the most mellow or inspiring color to paint a studio, and it was a light baby blue. I had a lot of experience with Latin jazz in college, and a local producer really liked the Room and really liked my experience with Latin music, so he brought a lot of his business over to the Room and threw me a lot of business that couldn’t afford him at the time. I ended up working on Carlos “Patato” Valdez’s 1997 Grammy®-nominated release, which was a really big honor for me. Tito Puente ended up beating us out.
We had some other luminaries come through the Room. We did all the tracks for Train’s first record. I was the guy who attracted the band into the room and was responsible for sales, marketing and I also participated in a lot of hands-on audio engineering.
During that time, I continued to play in bands. And I ended up playing in a band with the guys who were working at Webmonkey at the time, which was the subsidiary of Wired magazine. Webmonkey was an internet tutorial site. So, they’d have tutorials on how to write HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. I said to my friends, “Wow! This internet thing is getting pretty big.” And a buddy of mine was working for WebMD making really good money writing code. So, they thought since I was an audio engineer and a musician, I should learn HTML and write free tutorials on how to manipulate Internet audio. So, I locked myself in my apartment for thirty days, learned HTML and wrote four tutorials, which included step-by-step instructions, plus screen shots. And the tutorials I made were “How to Make an MP3,” “How to Get Audio into a Flash Movie,” “How to Get Audio into a QuickTime movie” and demo’ed all those things. Then I also did a demo on “How to Manipulate Beatnik Internet Audio,” which was Thomas Dolby’s Web 1.0 play. It was how to sonify the Web so you could scroll over a menu bar and program it to play different scales with a variety of sounds. So, it had a better sound and audio engine than the standard MIDI stuff that first came out on the Web when it first emerged.
I showed the demos to my friend after I finished them, and he thought that the Website should be a company instead of my resume. So, AngryCoffee was born. We found an angel investor that gave us some money and an office South of Market with some desks. We had three full-time people and an extended team of 13. We started offering Web tutorial content to syndicate to e-Learning companies.
Before we knew it, it was May or June of 2000, and everything was crashing down and the whole bubble was exploding. We knew we had to do something spectacular. So, we decided to pull a publicity stunt – hack into Napster. We launched the first publicly-available, Web-based interface to Napster and called it “Percolator”, and the tagline was “Percolating Independent Artists to the Top.” It was just a simple search box on the front door of our website. I know this will sound ridiculous now, but at the time we were trying to get bands to pay us $10 to have their own page on our site. It would include a photo, two legal MP3s, a short bio and a link to their website. What we were doing was taking the Napster search returns and pointing people to our independent artists.
That’s pretty impressive.
TT:
It really took off. We had over 80 major media mentions over three months. I was a panelist on Gavin 2000. Gavin was a radio reporting agency that no longer exists now. I was introduced to the panel by Ted Cohen as “the panel’s pirate” at the time. He had just passed up the gig for CEO of Napster and became the VP of New Media for EMI. And he said to me, “What you are doing is really cool. It would be a real bummer to see you guys go.” So, I told him we’d like to experiment with this thing. But of course, we didn’t want to get sued, and we wanted to do the right thing, because we were all musicians ourselves.
Ted set us up with some interesting meetings and experiments. We got to help promote Radiohead’s Kid A, so at one point we were streaming the entire Kid A record from our website a month before it was released. After it appeared #1 on Billboard, we took the search engine down. Time moved on, and we had some meetings with some people very interested in acquiring the company.. By the end of 2000, we received a $20 million letter of intent from an Italian publicly-traded company. They really liked the brand and the team. It all resulted in a $5 million due diligence process the following April and the result was a pretty good term sheet on moving forward. They went back to Italy and simply couldn’t secure the licensing to make the product legal. So, the acquisition didn’t go through. And shortly thereafter, the Italian stock market crashed.
But I’ve always played music and have kept my eye on technology. Over the years, any time I’ve been in a band, I’ve used technology to share my music online and have helped my friends use technology to share their music online.
And your current gig is focused on digital marketing and consulting. And you also do work with the SF MusicTech Summit as well.
TT:
I’m the Community Architect for the SF MusicTech Summit. Since the inaugural event in 2008, I’ve helped cultivate sponsors, attendees and panelists. I’m retained a couple months before every event, and I reach out to the entire ecosystem of Web music technology, whatever that may be. I vet dozens of companies around every event and then throw them to the executive producer, and he takes it from there and arranges all the panels and closes the sponsorship deals. And then I act as a co-host the day of the event and handle special projects and some of the more popular panelists. As an example, a year ago, I spent half the day handling Ben Folds.
So, tell me a little bit about your consulting business.
TT:
At the core, I’m a musician and a technologist. I’m a web and social media strategy consultant that specializes in production. I’m not one of those guys that just tells people what they should do. I actually build things online for the artist and then try to empower them to operate the entire system by themselves. I’ll build them a website. I usually use some integration of WordPress and will take a really nice paid-for theme and will hack it up so it becomes different from what it was originally. Then, I’ll teach the artist how to log in, blog, change things. Then I use the available social media music tools to integrate with their website and Facebook page, whether that be from RootMusic, SoundCloud, Official.fm, etc. I try to use the tools that are free, because most musicians only have so much money to deal with everything.
And there are a million people with their hands out now.
TT:
Yeah. Lately I’ve been picking up some clients that have a bit of a budget, so I’ve been diving into Topspin a little more, which is great. I’m looking forward to working with that platform a little bit more. Another is Cash Music.
As a guy who is the community architect for the MusicTech Summit, a guy who is a performing musician and a guy who has been Web savvy for this long and has been helping people to make sure their digital strategies are intact, can you give me a list of some of the most common things you see artists doing wrong when they come to you for help?
TT:
If you’re an artist, there’s so much noise out there and so many bands that I believe very strongly you really have to be performing live to get things rolling. You have to start with a locality. A lot of people say that the Internet has leveled out the playing field. But it’s actually made the noise level come up. So, as a band, you can’t just put up a website, give away free music and expect for it to go ballistic. It happens sometimes. But you really have to base things around at least a few short stints of shows. You need the live shows to collect email addresses and get an email list going and get Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc.
One thing I’ve been amazed by in the past is that people don’t know how affordable running Facebook ads can be, especially within just your own locality. That’s definitely one thing I would start with.
As far as concepts for bands go with an online strategy, I’ve got a short mantra or motto: *Find*Listen*Share*Buy*Fan*Go* I describe it in a blog post I wrote for my own site last year. But for bands, I really suggest putting together a good-looking website. I personally have been encouraging websites that don’t have too much going on. If you are currently performing live and you have a video and music, having a front page that just has a couple calls to action that make users do something is great. You should have a front door with a really large, great-looking, high-resolution photo on it. And if you have a video, embed it on the front too. Then, have some sort of a free giveaway in exchange for an email address. From what I’ve seen lately, this is very successful.
And it’s great to have all these social media channels, but it’s also good for the band to operate the social media channels themselves. So, I would narrow that part down to what’s really hot today, which is Twitter and Facebook. Try to build the followers there and engage with those people every day.
You mentioned calls to action. A really good statistic came up not too long ago that you’re twice as likely to get a click-through to follow if you have the simple word “Follow” in front of your Twitter badge instead of just the Twitter badge itself. It’s amazing how gullible we all are as Web travelers that a simple “do this” makes us respond.
TT:
The blog post I wrote that I referred to earlier is really relevant to what we’re talking about and really valuable to bands. It’s basically “search engine optimization” and what I call “social media optimization.” There are so many free services – new or already existing Web music technology companies that are building tools for musicians. They make them free because they want to aggregate all this content. One of the best things to do is sign up for more than a few of these services – especially because they’re free, and most musicians don’t have much of a budget – and try to claim a username. That goes back to having a band name that is actually searchable.
Here’s a great example: I’m doing some work for Gift of Gab right now, who is the non-self-titled world’s greatest freestyle rapper. He’s the rapper for Blackalicious, the classic positive hip hop group. His name is also a saying, so for search engine optimization, it’s a little difficult. If you just search “Gift of Gab” … you’ll get Wikipedia articles, the reference from literature, etc. And then when you use analytic tools to measure sentiment online about his brand, it’s quite polluted with people saying things like, “I’ve got the gift of gab, don’t you wish you had it?” on Twitter, etc.
So, continuing on this subject, I’m working with my own band that’s not performing right now and it’s called “Life Love Misery.” It’s kind of a unique keyword string for a band name. It presents its own search term challenges. Whenever I see a new service, I claim that username immediately. So, I’ve got SoundCloud.com/lifelovemisery, Facebook.com/lifelovemisery, Official.fm/lifelovemisery, etc. I’ve claimed that on every service imaginable. I’ve got another act in which I play the dobro called Sayla Dobro. So, every new startup that comes along, I claim that username. If you search for those names, I have basically flooded the Web with places to find those two acts: Life Love Misery and Sayla Dobro.
The vanity URL is very valuable. It’s a huge bummer when I start working with the band, and either they’ve picked the band name and have already signed up for a bunch of social media sites/Web music tech tool sites, and they’ve chosen their band’s name with “music” at the end. It just doesn’t look as slick.
That’s my take on search engine optimization or social media optimization. Doing this, you can flood the first page of search returns with your brand or band name. It’s pretty rare that someone will search for your music and then go three-pages deep on Google.
Actually, according to statistics, 90% of people never leave the top 3 of the first page.
TT:
There you go. If you look at your search returns as an artist, you really want your website to be the first return at the very top. If you find that’s not working, the thing to do is to start corralling your fans through your social media channels to your website as opposed to always saying, “Find us on Facebook” or “Find us on Twitter.” For me, my new Google+ page comes out on top, then some images come out second, then my website’s coming out as a third return. Then iTunes is coming up fourth, Facebook is coming up fifth … and I can’t seem to get rid of Myspace. It’s coming up sixth.
Then, we’ve got another service called Onesheet, which was designed and launched by the same gentleman who coded ArtistData, which is another great tool for musicians.
One last thing I’d like to say to encourage entrepreneurs and developers that want to get into this space is that there is just an incredible amount of APIs and open platforms available right now for people to get their hands dirty. There are also the Music Hack Day tours put on by the Echonest that provide great opportunities to go out and meet other like-minded developers. They go on in all the major urban areas: San Francisco; Boston; New York; London; etc. Great tools for musicians and consumers alike are coming out of those events.
To learn more about Todd Tate and the work he does within the music space, visit his official website. Also, check out his blog entry about search engine optimization and social media optimization for musicians trying to get more visibility for their music here. Todd is available to assist SF Bay Area high-growth digital music or media companies in a business / community development role as well as vetting web based music tech companies for forward thinking VC firms.
Take a look at the SF MusicTech Summit, held this year on Monday, February 13 and register at the following link: http://sfmts10.eventbrite.com/. Tickets are currentley around $200, but you can get a discount by typing in the code (promotoddtate).
Amy Porterfield is a social media and marketing expert. She got her start in marketing right out of college when she began working for Harley-Davidson Motorcycles managing events and marketing campaigns. Then, she spent six years directing the content and marketing behind renowned Peak Performance Coach and Entrepreneur Tony Robbins. She currently works with the online marketing company Traffic Geyser where she has overseen several huge product launches, and is also a regular contributor at the world’s largest online social media magazine, Social Media Examiner. She helps entrepreneurs across industries establish strategies to help them maximize the power of social media and increase the success of their marketing efforts.
I got to talk to Amy about some common marketing mistakes artists make on Facebook and other social media sites, how to generate online content that keeps a conversation going and how musicians can establish a consistent blogging strategy.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Amy. How did you get into marketing?
AP:
I started out at Harley-Davidson in the marketing arena. I did a lot of event and promotional marketing for products and services and events. And from there, I loved what I was doing. But I was young and right out of college, so I wanted more. And I wanted to get into different aspects of marketing.
I became a fan of Tony Robbins. Long story short, I broke up with a boyfriend and couldn’t sleep at night. I saw all his infomercials playing every single night. And I got really hooked. I listened to one of his programs and loved everything about his message and what he was teaching people. I looked into it more, and I eventually ended up working for him. For about six-and-a-half years in the content development and marketing arena. I traveled with him, worked one on one with him and accompanied him to many of his events. Tony has a million ideas. He has a small team of content developers who turn them into products, event outlines or other ways to get out the message to his audience.
That was a whirlwind experience. From there, I moved into more online marketing with all his programs, services and events. That’s when I started to get really excited about online marketing and social media. At the very end of the time I was working with him, he got on Twitter. And he was very reluctant. At the time, Twitter wasn’t a huge venue yet. But a lot of people were saying it was an up-and-coming platform. When he got on Twitter, he quickly got over a million followers. And I thought, “Wow. There’s something here.” I started to dig a little deeper and fell in love with Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and all those great sites that give you massive exposure if you know how to use them right.
Because Tony taught me everything I needed to know about starting my own business, I eventually left and started my own social media consulting firm. And that’s what I do now.
And you’ve also written a book.
AP:
Yes. I co-authored the book Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies that just came out a few months ago. It’s basically your bible for all things Facebook marketing related. I say “bible,” because this thing is a big book. It’s over 600 pages of how-to for Facebook marketing. We talk about the strategy and the principles behind Facebook marketing in the beginning. And then we go through step by step how you execute these strategies, how they relate to your business and if they’re a right fit for you. Because the book is so big, I have two co-authors.
I certainly don’t want you to give away the milk without people buying the cow. You’re somebody that helps people with their brand – musician, self help guru, etc. Could you discuss some common mistakes people make with their Facebook and online social media strategies?
AP:
There are definitely some mistakes I see consistently across Facebook, Twitter, blogging platforms, all the great tools there are to use. Whether you’re a musician who has been out there for a while or someone who is just starting out, what’s so important is personal branding, especially as it relates to social media.
Social media gives you this huge platform to tell people who you are, what you’re about and really influence people and make them see you the way you want them to see you. You have control over that message when it comes to the social media. The biggest mistake I see is that people are not consistent and they’re not patient. I’ll give you a few mistakes, but I want to first start out with the mindset, and how these strategies really work. It takes time. You’re not going to see huge Facebook success over night. Even with Tony Robbins, it took us a while to really ramp up and have people catch onto his messages. Even for celebrities, it doesn’t necessarily happen overnight.
I think the people that really make a difference and get that exposure are those that network and connect through social media sites on a daily basis – Monday through Friday at least, maybe a little bit on the weekends. I think 10 or 15 minutes a day. But it’s a few posts per day and reaching out one-on-one with people through the different social media sites. That consistency of every single day makes a huge difference. Someone that does an outstanding job of getting exposure by doing it every day sees very different results than someone that does it once a week or every few weeks sees. That second person will die out very quickly. It says a lot about you personally if your personal brand is not consistent on these social sites.
So, the #1 important element is consistency. And then, patience goes along with that. It really does take time. You’re not going to see those big bangs for your buck right away. But if you have patience and trust this is going to work for you, you’ll stay consistent and stay the course. And if you’re aware these are two common mistakes, you can come out ahead of your competition pretty easily just by using patience and consistency as your secret weapons.
If I talk specifically about Facebook, because the book made me live, breathe and eat Facebook marketing, the #1 mistake I see with that is I think a lot of people don’t know how important it is to create a custom landing tab and a custom welcome landing tab for their Facebook page. I’m not a big advocate of lots of bells and whistles. You can use a lot of different apps and tricky, cool things on your Facebook page. But I think this can distract from your message. However, the one “bells and whistles” component is the custom welcome tab. It’s a tab you create that tells a little bit about you – who you are and what you’re about – and it gives a strong call to action that says, “Click the ‘Like’ button above.” If you set it as a default, this is where people land the first time they come to your page if they’re not a fan yet. You get to welcome them through this tab, and when they respond to your call to action, it automatically brings them to your wall, where they can get involved in the conversation. The last thing you want to do is start a conversation with somebody when they’re confused and don’t know what you’re about. And this is what happens when they go to your Facebook page and are immediately thrown onto your wall.
This custom welcome tab is your way of giving a quick introduction to yourself. This is especially great for musicians, who can highlight and point out who they are and what their skill is. You can even make a quick video of two, to three minutes of you doing what you do. Or, you can just use images and say what your skill is and why people should get to know you. Of course, the most important thing is writing the words, “Click the ‘Like’ button above.” And I always advise people to include a red arrow too that points to that “Like” button. Studies have shown that you can get 50% more likes on your Facebook page if you have this custom welcome tab that tells people to click the “Like” button; because, if they don’t click the “Like” button, you’re not going to get out into people’s newsfeeds. They’re never going to see you, because 90% of people don’t come back to your Facebook page after they click that “Like” button. Instead, they’re seeing you on their newsfeeds. And that first step to do that is to get them to click the “Like” button.
A lot of people skip this welcome tab step and say, “That’s not needed. I’ll start engagement and get people really excited about what I do.” But I really think you need that custom welcome tab first.
It’s pretty amazing, because there are a bunch of companies in the music industry that provide custom landing pages, where you can post music, video and tour dates. And many people don’t take advantage of that.
AP:
That’s cool. I didn’t realize there were companies in the industry that actually do that. Hopefully more people take advantage of that, because it’s so valuable.
You mentioned that your role for Tony Robbins was not only online marketing but also content creation, which is something I really stress; because if you’re selling a product, there has to be a reason people are going back to your website or looking at you on social media. There has to be a two-way conversation. What does a successful content conversation look like from your vantage point? How can you generate content and make it consistently interesting?
AP:
I love that question, because I think everything is all about content. Once you have your Facebook, Twitter and the rest of your foundation set up, your content is the most important thing. What I always say is, when it comes to social media sites, mix up your media. When we’re talking about social media sites – especially with musicians – I think you have a huge advantage because you can use video, audio and the written word interchangeably to attract your ideal audience. Some people – whether they like your music or not – want to listen to your music, where others want to actually see you perform it. All people are different in the sense of how they take in information.
When it comes to content, there are a few tips I have. First, I think you should mix up your media. So, one day, you could post a video – whether it’s of you or of somebody you admire or that your audience would love. Just posting videos and that kind of valuable content is a great way to get people engaged on Facebook. The #2 thing people do on Facebook is click on videos. The #1 thing they do is look at images. People love looking at photos on Facebook. So, if you go to a cool event, you should take videos. Or you can show people a “behind-the-scenes” look of your studio, or where you love to play music or write music the most. Take pictures of those environments. People love to see behind the scenes. You can use video and photos. Also, posting audio is just as valuable as posting other types of media especially with music. Mixing it up is important. And post one new thing per day. One day you can post a video, another you can do a great blog post. And maybe the next day you can post some great mp3 files. How you want to mix it up is up to you.
I also think stories are incredibly important when it comes to content. Talking about why you do what you do, what inspired you to write a certain song, the instruments and how you got started will really engage people. People love stories more than anything. So, if you can infuse stories into what you do as a musician, that is really valuable to marketing and getting the word out about yourself and what you do.
Do you feel it’s appropriate for people to share personal things that aren’t directly related to their business? For example, I coach musicians. But I’ll bitch about the fact that I haven’t had a good day of surfing in New York for a long time on Facebook. Do you advocate leaking personal information from outside one field’s of expertise, or should everything be relevant?
AP:
I have a model I follow with that, and I call it the “80/20.” What I do on my personal site and what I coach my clients to do is, 80% of the time on your Facebook page, you should focus on your business, your niche and you market. You can branch out a little bit, but 80% of the time, you should relate your posts to what you do and what people are coming to you for. Then, 20% of the time, completely step out of there. If I went on a family vacation with my husband and son, I might post some pictures of that. Or, my husband just became a firefighter, so I might post some pictures about that next week. You can – 20% of the time – post about things people might like to know about your life. Personal branding is about letting people know you’re human and have a life outside what you do. So, 20% of the time, I think that’s really important. But you have to keep yourself in check and make sure it’s appropriate and that people will care about it. And you’d be surprised at how much people really care about your personal life.
80/20 is fantastic. I’m definitely trying to keep it within those boundaries, because nobody cares about my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and how delicious it was.
AP:
Exactly.
In my diagnoses of a lot of musicians’ businesses and digital presence, I find there isn’t a lot of cohesiveness between the different social media pages and the website. Do you advocate any one of these places being the ultimate destination? How do all these different areas destinations work together to create a unified front?
AP:
I have a few thoughts on that. The short answer is, I think your website should always be your hub, because you own that. Facebook, although it’s very unlikely, could go away tomorrow. Facebook just made a huge number of changes recently. And maybe some changes that come up might work against your business one day, and you might not want to use Facebook as your hub. You can’t control these other sites. They could technically take away any of them at any time. So, make your website your hub at all times.
However, I do believe there’s a way to pull quality leads to your website, and I think you need social media these days to do that. What I say is, choose social media sites where your audience is truly spending time. That might mean one or two sites, or it might mean four or five. You have to do a little detective work and find out what your audience wants, needs and where they’re spending their time online. Usually Facebook is a safe bet, with over 800 million users, and 50% of those people getting online almost daily. It’s pretty safe to say your audience is on Facebook. And if that is true, you should amek Facebook your network hub. Facebook is where you can get the conversation started. On my website, I post blogs regularly and I interact with people. But I can’t get that same relationship building and interaction on my website as I can on Facebook. People are on Facebook to chat, have fun and interact with me on a different level than they are on my website. I don’t own Facebook, so people don’t feel threatened that I’m going to push things on them or try to sell things. It’s a safe environment.
You can build relationships on a daily basis on Facebook and continually be active about driving traffic to your website, whether you promise freebies or point people to valuable content on your blog. Then you tease them with really great stuff to get them to step outside Facebook and visit you on your regular website. That’s the strategy I use with Facebook and my website specifically.
I’ve been blogging two, to three times per week for several years. And I know musicians have the same issues I do, which is that they have a hard time not making it all about “Me, Me, Me, Me … buy my stuff.” What do you advise people to do when they get writer’s block? It can be really difficult to come up with quality content. How can they generate good content and communicate their enthusiasm about their area of expertise, which in the case of musicians, would be their own music?
AP:
I think anybody in any industry definitely can run into writer’s block, or thinking their ideas aren’t important enough or interesting enough to keep writing about. You’ve been blogging for so long that you probably have gotten into a habit, and have gotten really good at it as time goes by. So, some quick tips for that:
First, I keep a Google doc. And every time an idea comes into my head, I jot it down in that Google doc. And I’m always online, on my computer or on my phone, somewhere I can access it. I just keep a running list. At first when I did this, I would just write two or three lines about an idea. And when I came back to it a week later, it meant nothing to me. And I wasn’t really charged or passionate about it. So, I started writing three, four or five lines about my thoughts in that moment. Be a little bit more detailed when you get an idea, so when you come back to it, you’re going to continue to be passionate about it.
Another thing is, I have noticed that I have to make a conscious effort to step outside my niche to get topics to blog about. And this is silly, but I love Real Housewives of New York. It’s completely trashy and has nothing to do with my niche or my market. But there’s always something on that show that will spark my creativity and get me thinking about things in a different way. And somehow I know it fuels me to make really great ideas about blog posts. The same goes for books and magazines I read completely unrelated to my niche. Don’t be afraid to step outside your niche so you can get fresh ideas for things to write about. Innovation comes when you’re able to be a little bit more lenient about your market and see things in a different way.
And the third tip for getting ideas is, look at what other people are doing. I’m a huge advocate of modeling the best. I don’t think you need to reinvent the wheel. I learned this tip from Tony Robbins: Go out and find who is doing it right. Who do you love to follow? Who does your audience love to follow? And what are they doing? How can you take their principles and strategies and model and shape it so it fits your personality and what you love to do? So, if this person writes a really great blog post, you shouldn’t copy it. But, think about how you can take those concepts and shape them into your own ideas. I get a lot of fuel from people in my industry that I respect and trust. Model the best, and don’t reinvent the wheel. That will take the pressure off having to worry about what you blog about on a regular basis.
To find out what about Amy and get a free chapter of her book Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, visit the Amy Porterfield website. You can also check her out on Facebook.
This past week, innovation took the spotlight in the music industry as Facebook finally made plans to announce its new music platform and an award-winning indie band added hordes of fans to its roster by encouraging country music lovers to interact online. Meanwhile, Gibson Guitars tried to recover after losing millions of dollars due to an unexpected factory raid by the federal government.
Facebook Music Platform Made Official
Facebook finally confirmed tech and music industry suspicions, when an insider at the company revealed its new digital music platform would launch at the f8 conference in San Francisco on September 22. The new music offering, rumored to be called “Vibes” is a significant step for the social network; with over 750 million users (as compared to Myspace’s 77 million), this platform could offer a huge marketplace for recording artists and music publishers.
Details about how “Vibes” will work have not yet be revealed. However, integration partnerships with streaming music start-ups Spotify, MOG and Rdio are in the works. These relationships will likely produce a platform that lets users see which songs and artists their friends “Like” and also which songs and playlists they’re listening to, which live shows they are attending, and in some cases, which seats they have reserved at venues. It could not only become a place for music lovers to share details about the different ways in which they enjoy their music experiences, but also a place for artists, publishers, record labels and even other music services to sell products and develop more direct and personal relationships with fans.
Some digital music critics have expressed concern that because Facebook is such a pervasive force, its music offering might threaten other existing music services or negatively impact revenue for artists, publishers and labels. However, if Facebook’s new music feature does come through on its promises to build a platform that focuses on collaboration with other industry players, experts say it could actually offer a boost in traffic to those other services that offer free, ad-supported services.
On the same day of Facebook’s new platform announcement, Root Music – developer of Facebook’s #1 music app BandPages – revealed via an article in Forbes that it had raised $16 million with the help of a team of new investors, which it plans to use in order to enrich its music tools on the social media site. Founder J. Sider says that he will use the capital that has been raised in the past several months – nearly $20 million in total – to offer more free and paid services to the 250,000 bands that currently use the app as well as provide a richer experience for the 30 million active music fans using BandPages via Facebook to connect on a personal level with artists and their peers.
The impact of Facebook’s new music platform on Root Music’s BandPages and other music apps remains to be seen. But Sider said he is optimistic that any new music sharing features would only build awareness for digital music and send “curious music connoisseurs” back to his and other popular music apps.
Lady Antebellum Draws in Fans Using Online Scavenger Hunt
Grammy®-winning indie act Lady Antebellum proved that even country music fans love the Internet when it launched an online scavenger hunt the last week of August. And this game has proven to be a great marketing strategy that has helped them connect on a deeper level with their fans and attract new followers; in the first six days of the campaign, the band was able to add 21,000 new e-mails to their mailing list, increase activity on Facebook by 40 percent and bring Lady Antebellum-related Twitter traffic up by 18 percent.
According to Cameo Carlson, head of digital business development of the band’s management group Borman Entertainment, this increase in fan participation is significant because it is attracting fans that really want to interact: “We’re getting not just e-mail addresses, but e-mail addresses of fans who are really engaged … [and] it’s doing it in a more interesting way than just asking them to sign up for a newsletter.” And the results of this effort are even more interesting in light of the fact that the game is using dozens of different digital services and partners to attract a fan base that has long been considered not to be particularly digital and tech savvy.
The scavenger hunt has transformed the Lady Antebellum website into a board, with each square offering a different clue that is revealed at noon EST every weekday. The clues send fans off to websites or partner services to find a keyword. For example, one clue was hidden in a video on The Tonight Show website, where the band was supposed to perform. Another clue could be found when fans used Shazam to identify a clip of one of the band’s songs that had been played backwards and slowed down. Everyone who enters the correct keyword each day is entered into a contest to win prizes, which include an iPad, signed merch, concert tickets and more.
Carlson said this marketing strategy was initially motivated by the desire to get fans to check out different areas of Lady Antebellum’s relaunched site and also get them excited about the September 13 release date of the band’s new album. But ultimately, it was also an experiment to see how well social media tools work when used to help artists get closer to their fans well beyond a specific social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter. She added, “Everyone has access to all these tools, but it’s like we don’t know how to use them properly. You can’t do anything with them if you don’t have a relationship that’s deeper than just a Facebook post. I’m always trying to figure out how to own those fans; how to convert that activity into something real.”
Gibson Guitar Struggling after Feds Raid Factory
Gibson Guitar’s Nashville and Memphis factories were raided by the dozens of federal government agents with search warrants on the morning of August 24. The agents seized several pallets of wood and shut down the two facilities. While exact details about the investigation have not been released by officials, Gibson issued a press release last week that outlines some pieces of the story.
According to Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, the government is targeting the company for allegedly violating recent amendments to the 1990 Lacey Act, which prohibit the import of foreign materials and services that break a law of the country of origin. The U.S. Department of Justice claims the wood they seized violates a law in India that requires all wood from India to be finished by Indian workers. As a result of the raid, Gibson was forced to cease manufacturing and send 2,000 workers home for the day. Juszkiewicz claims that his company is not the only one in the United States that is using this type of wood, and that the wood actually comes from a U.S. government-certified supplier.
This is the second time feds have called the guitar maker into question. In 2009, federal agents seized guitars and large amounts of ebony fingerboard blanks from the Nashville factory that they suspected came illegally from Madagascar. Criminal charges were never filed. Juszkiewicz states that he has sworn statements from the Madagascar government that the materials were legally obtained by the guitar maker, and that Gibson is still attempting to have the material returned in a proceeding pending in federal court. The CEO estimates that Gibson so far has lost $2 – $3 million as a result of the halt in instrument production. As of August 31, there is no word on when manufacturing at the Memphis and Nashville factories will fully resume.
New technologies grabbed a lot of headlines in the music industry in the past week, as the European music service Spotify finally landed in the U.S., Google+ finally began to roll out its features and Thievery Corporation teamed up with a new direct-to-fan music channel to promote their latest album.
Spotify Finally Hits the States
Available in Europe for the past three years, the wildly popular digital music streaming music Spotify is now finally available in the U.S., as of July 14. Major labels gave Spotify licenses in 2008, somewhat reluctantly, in exchange for revenue shares and partial ownership. It quickly garnered the attention of over 10 million users in seven countries, with 15% of those being paying customers. The labels wouldn’t allow a U.S. launch until it agreed to limit the amount of users that could listen for free. Spotify provides three options for those that want to register to use it: a free tier that requires users to submit a request to earn an invite; “Spotify Unlimited,” a service that costs $4.99 per month; “Spotify Premium,” which costs $9.99 per month.
What’s the difference between the three? The free option is supported through advertising, so while users are given access to over 15 million songs, social sharing features, playlist management functionality and sync-ability with mobile phones or iPods, they have to put up with ads and don’t get the offline capabilities offered with one of the paid versions. “Spotify Unlimited” offers the same features as the free version, but takes away ads. The most expensive package, Spotify Premium, offers everything the other two offer plus better sound quality and additional content, along with an offline listening mode and the ability to listen to music on all computers and virtually any mobile device.
An editorial piece in the L.A. Times analyzes what an “unlimited, free streaming” business model might mean for artists and others in the music industry: “Although Spotify’s growth has been impressive in Europe, it has yet to report a profit. It’s still struggling to collect enough from advertisers to cover the costs of the free service, including the royalties it has agreed to pay the labels and songwriters.” Apparently some indie musicians have already complained that the service pays them under a penny per song played. So far, Spotify has made its only revenue off getting people to sign up for its paid services.
Introducing Google+
If you are a Gmail user, you may have started seeing invites to use Google+ roll in starting about a month ago. Last week, Google CEO Larry Page announced the new Google+ social networking service had officially hit 10 million users.
Google+ was first introduced in late June, when it was offered to a handful of users, who could eventually invite those on their email lists. Many techies see it as a worthy opponent for Facebook. What sets it apart as a social networking site? The big difference is selectivity. It offers a “Circles” feature that acknowledges that people don’t always want to share everything with everyone within their list of contacts all the time. As the official Google Blog puts it, “Not all relationships are created equal.” Thus, “Circles” allows you to organize those in your social network into categories and select with whom you share each announcement or status message update.
Other features include “Sparks,” which delivers internet content relevant to your interests directly to you so you can easily strike up conversations within your network, “Hangouts,” which allows you to video chat with multiple people in your network and combines “the casual meetup with live multi-person video” and “Mobile,” which offers location-based technology to check in at locations and let people know where you are when you’re out and about.
While Google+ currently offers no specific business- or marketing-related functions, as it grows, it does provide an interesting potential opportunity for artists to connect to their fans personally and build that essential artist-to-fan relationship.
Thievery Corporation Engages Fans through New Online Music Channel
The Washington, D.C.-based electronica duo Thievery Corporation recently announced a partnership with the new direct-to-fan startup CHNL. The company’s management team includes industry veterans from Topspin Media, Revernation, Myspace Music and others. Thievery Corporation will be promoting their Culture of Fear album, released June 28, exclusively through the service. The band is using a CHNL domain to provide its fans with 12 different music offerings, including free streaming, a subscription service, mp3s and videos, each represented by a different album cover. Their first offering is a download of the new album.
Thievery Corporation is following the lead of many artists who are starting to use new direct-to-fan marketing techniques – and even give away some music and products for free – in order to develop closer, constant relationships with their fans and build their following.
What Does “Indie” Mean?
An article on Billboard.Biz this week by Ed Christman finally answered a question that confuses a lot of us, whether we’re artists or other industry people: What does it mean to be an independent label? In fact, I asked this very question this past week when I talked to Rich Bengloff from the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM). The simple answer I got from Rich was, it “means you own your record label.” So, a record label owned by an individual and not a major label is considered “independent.”
But according to Christman, the bigger answer to “What is indie?” is complicated and is getting even more complicated, because the overall landscape of the music industry has changed and continues to change rapidly: “Over the last 15 years, things have only gotten even murkier. Majors used to just buy indies; nowadays, they also invest in indies; and they even do joint ventures with indies – sometimes on an album-by-album basis. Going the other way, majors like RCA have also put artists like Ray LaMontagne through RED. In fact, there are so many permutations of indie/major collaborations and secret deals concerning those permutations that it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s still indie and what’s a major.”
Essentially, if you’re confused, so is everyone. Still, at Billboard.biz, Christman lays out some of ways indie labels fit into the music industry by talking about how SoundScan counts indie artists in the charts and some details about the independent market share.
You should also check out my recent interview with George White, General Manager of Billboard Digital to learn about how Billboard is helping emerging and indie artists with its new Billboard Pro offering.
This week, the digital space took the lead in music business news, with an artist successfully using a relatively new platform to get the attention of millions of fans, Facebook sitting on the brink of launching a new music service and MySpace taking steps to reinvigorate itself as a leading platform for musicians and their fans.
Pitbull Uses Headliner.fm to Connect to Millions
On July 7, Headliner.fm – the social media recommendation program founded in 2010 – announced one of its first major artist successes when they reported that Miami rapper Pitbull had reached over 10 million music fans combined on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter and also hit #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Since launching his campaign withHeadliner.fm in March, Pitbull was able to reach 2,518,210 fans directly through recommendations from 1,693 other musicians. The rapper has been releasing music since 2004, through his self-created label Mr. 305, Inc. as well as through several indie labels and a label he started with Sean “Diddy” Combs as an outgrowth of Bad Boy Records, Bad Boy Latino. In 2009, Pitbull signed with a subsidiary of Sony, Polo Grounds Music. Besides being known for being an early adopter at using emerging technology to communicate with his fans and distribute his music and videos, Pitbull also has worked hard to collaborate as much as possible with other artists to help build his career. Besides working with Diddy, he has collaborated with Rihanna, T-Pain, Jennifer Lopez and Trey Songz. He also performed his latest single “Give Me Everything” alongside Grammy-winning R&B artist Ne-Yo during the final episodes of NBC’s The Voice. You can read the full press release about his recent accomplishment on Headliner.fm here.
Facebook Hints at New Digital Music Service
Is Facebook launching a new music service? MSNBC Technolog blogger Helen A.S. Popkin reported that an announcement could be coming soon. While installing the new video chat program – a Skype-based video chat – software engineer and tech expert Jeff Rose saw elements of the code that mentioned an app called “Facebook Vibes,” which connects with a music download dialog. This evidence comes on the heels of speculation last May by Forbes that Facebook might be partnering with Spotify as the popular streaming service finally comes to the U.S. in the coming months. Mark Zuckerberg himself has started to hint about upcoming releases from Facebook as he lines up partners for the company’s annual developer conference in August, stating that it is only the “beginning of the launching season in 20011.” Many musicians have complained about problems with the current Facebook app for bands, citing difficulty with song uploads and the time it takes for their artist pages and music to be approved by the system. Whether or not Facebook’s upgrades and launches will include services that directly cater to artists is unclear, but it seems that music apps in general are a priority.
MySpace Hires New Creative Strategy Director to Boost Music Features
As the popularity of Facebook has surged as a social media platform and as a tool for artists trying to promote their music and connect with fans, once-leading Myspace has fallen in the ranks of digital tools artists want to use. But in the last week of June, an announcement came that Specific Media would be acquiring the company and taking steps to redesign the social networking site to make it a friendlier place for artists to connect with fans and share music, thoughts and video. To help jump-start this process, they brought in artist/actor/comedian Justin Timberlake to lead creative strategy for the company, possibly taking it in a new direction. Timberlake said, “There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect.” This social networking site model that brings artists closer to their fans, making them a part of their music and lives has been very successful for artists trying to carve out a career for themselves and is obviously the basis for sites like Twitter and Facebook. But whether or not Myspace will regain some traction with Timberlake’s help as a main tool for artists and their fans remains to be seen and will likely depend upon its ability to improve upon the features of other social networking sites and platforms and determine why some artists have gravitated away from it.
I thought it would be interesting to highlight the accomplishments of some of the folks who are out there hustling. As you all know there are so many musicians out there. How does one distinguish oneself from the masses of aspiring artists out there especially without having a great deal of disposable income? Below are three examples from regular (albeit talented) musicians I think are doing things a bit differently and I believe it will pay off.
1) Victor Rice.
Victor Rice was the bass player for the Scofflaws and the NYC Ska Jazz Ensemble. I was fortunate enough to study bass with victor many years ago. Victor moved to Brazil several years ago and he has since honed his producing and mixing skills in the last few years. I don’t know this because I have seen Victor or kept up with him (I’ve been a lousy friend) but he has been doing some video of him doing live Dub Mixes under the name Strikkly Vikkly. In the digital age people take the skill involved in making and mixing records for granted. I say if you’ve got the skill – show people… Is Victor good at mixing? See for yourself:
2) This is a ShakeDown
I saw this band at the Dewey Beach Music festival and they were quite good live. What made a lasting impression on me though was when I came across the video below and heard how it was made. I caught up with Brandon, the lead singer of the Cleveland based group and he explained to me that the band actually borrowed 21 MacBooks and used the program photobooth (pre-installed mac software) and captured five or six takes of the band performing their song “Circles”. The video was shot in their rehearsal space and the editing was done by someone at their label (an independent called Reversed Image Unlimited. Total cost to the band – 0$. Check it out:
Pittsburgh, PA based Good Night, States emailed me kind of out of the blue. I try to listen to everything people send me and usually that means 1-2 songs. An hour after having their music playing in the background I realized that I was really enjoying what I was hearing which sadly rarely happens these days. I had the pleasure of seeing them live at CMJ and really enjoyed the show as well. I have yet to see this device live in action but apparently the band developed and Iphone application that allows fans to plug in their Iphone to the sound system and play along with the band live. Pretty trippy.
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More posts coming soon. Thanks as always for reading.
-R-
Lou Plaia is the Co-Founder and Vice President of Industry Relations for ReverbNation. I know Lou from my days at Lava / Atlantic where Lou was the head of Marketing prior to starting ReverbNation.
Musician Coaching:
Why and how did you start ReverbNation?
LP:
We pretty much started ReverbNation based on all the stuff we were seeing that was going on out in the music space about three and a half years ago. MySpace was growing like crazy and not allowing artists to take full control of a lot of things; artists were not able to extract a lot of things or see who their fans were. So we wanted to create a non-fan destination site, a marketing software platform to give artists marketing tools to get their music out there, syndicate their content everywhere and try to funnel in fans to the fan management system we also provide. We have 485,000 artists and are growing at about 20,000 per month. We also have 15,000-20,000 managers, labels and “other industry professionals” – anything from publicists to third-party marketing companies.
Musician Coaching:
What are the most popular widgets that you have right now?
LP:
One of the most popular is Tune Widget. It’s basically like a “Website in a box.” It puts everything on your ReverbNation profile in one nice widget so people can see information about you, your shows, your store, they can join your mailing list and share it with their friends. It’s got your music, your videos, your press, pretty much everything on a profile all in a widget form. And you can post that anywhere on the social networking sites. It’s just html that you can post anywhere. Our Show Widget is probably our second most popular, and that’s another widget you can put anywhere. We try to be the home base of everything for an artist. So artists can upload all their shows into their ReverbNation profile or enter them one-by-one and take the widget and copy and paste the code anywhere on their own Websites. Anytime a show is added to their ReverbNation profile or edited it automatically gets added everywhere else that widget lives. So it saves you a lot of time and effort. You put your shows up once on our site and it posts everywhere else. We also have feeds from Live Nation, Jam Base and Eventful. So if your shows are already posted on any of those sites they automatically come up into Reverb and vice versa. So if you’re on ReverbNation, those sites automatically post out to those other venues as well.
Musician Coaching:
What is the community like on ReverbNation? How has it developed, and are there success stories?
LP:
It’s mostly used for tools. We have 480,000 artists, but I think maybe people log in every couple days or once per week. A lot of times there’s really no need, once you’ve posted your widgets, to constantly go to your Reverb Page unless you want to update songs or videos or send e-mails. We have one of the largest e-mail management systems. It is called Fanreach. We have 110,000 artists using it right now.
Musician Coaching:
Tell me about the newer tools that you have released…
LP:
A lot of artists don’t have their own websites, and we kind of believe you shouldn’t just have a MySpace page, but a lot of artists use MySpace as their official page. So we said, “Let’s see if they want to create their own website.” And we give them a tool called Sitebuilder to do that. We partnered with a company called Bandzoogle, and when artists sign up to their ReverbNation page for free, the first thing we say is, “Do you want your own website” and “Do you want your own domain name?” There is a service charge for that, because it’s one of the premium services. It’s $18 per month. We give you a Web site, templates and host it for you. We launched Sitebuilder a couple months ago. We also have the number one artist application on Facebook called MyBand. We have a million active users as of last week.
Musician Coaching:
You also do digital distribution for artists. How does that work?
LP:
It’s $35 per year per release – and a release can be an album or one song, and most people put up an album, but if you’re also putting up one song it’s also $35. We take no commission, and basically your music is up on iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody an E-Music.
Musician Coaching:
What’s the turnaround time on that?
LP:
It’s really up to the retailer, but it’s currently six to eight weeks.
Musician Coaching:
I heard some rumblings about artist insurance. What’s that about?
LP:
That’s something new. We haven’t even announced it publicly yet. We did a study and found out that 50% of the artists in the U.S. don’t have any type of health insurance. So we partnered with E-Health insurance. You go to the ReverbNation site and you can get a free quote on family coverage, individual, small business, short term, student coverage, all sorts of things. You just plug in your zip code and you get a free quote. It’s live right now.
Musician Coaching:
Where do you see this site heading?
LP:
We just launched direct-to-fan commerce –selling directly to your fans. It’s in beta right now to a couple thousand artists.
Musician Coaching:
Cutting out the middle man is better for the artist in terms of splits. What’s the challenge in doing that? Do you think that will be the future or that people will still have to have some sort of shopping experience?
LP:
I don’t think it’s the end all, and I think people will still go to iTunes and Amazon because they’re credit card’s there, they’re comfortable there. But in some cases people want to buy directly from the artist. Doing it this way, our direct-to-fan commerce engine is integrated into all the marketing tools and artist gets. So if they’re sending out an e-mail to their fans about anything, they will have their own store with images of their t-shirts, their CD, etc. There’s a widget for that too. The main function of it is as an on-demand system. So it’s really good for the smaller artist, because if they don’t have money to invest in a thousand or two thousand CD’s or a couple hundred t-shirts, they upload their image for their t-shirt and CD or digital goods. Basically, if somebody buys something, we make it for them immediately and ship it out for the artist. There’s no investment for the artist at all. You can basically start selling t-shirts at no cost at all. It’s a little different from a lot of people. If you want to buy bulk, you can do that, and we’ll just warehouse it and fulfill it for you. We’re doing pretty much everything right now.
Musician Coaching:
Do you have any success stories?
LP:
We’re such an analytical bunch of geeks. There is a band called the Clintons from Montana. Recently, they took the data they got from their ReverbNation stats component and took it to a brand – Jim Beam – and said to them, “Listen, we want sponsorship for a tour.” And Jim Beam probably said, “Yeah, so does everybody.” And the band said, “Yes, but look what we have.” And they showed them all the fans they have, where they’re located, their age, their sex, and it was totally aligned with what Jim Beam was looking for. These are real fans on a mailing list. These aren’t friends and things like that. These are real fans you can engage with. That’s all the brand wanted – to engage with fans. They did it all on their own with their own press release. They had our data and called us and thanked us.
Musician Coaching:
Do you have any general advice for artists?
LP:
Have your own website. I know a lot of bands don’t, and a lot of bands can’t afford it. But if you’re using a social network as your own website you have no control over it. They can tell you what store to use, what you can be doing. And they’re not giving you all the data you need to understand your fans. None of them allow you to really e-mail your fans. And I think e-mail is still really important. Everything leads to an e-mail. People still go to their inboxes, even with Twitter and everything else. Use the technology that companies like us offer and use it to understand your fans, because it makes it easier to market to your fans if you understand them.
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If you aren’t already familiar with the site, check out Reverbnation.
Frank Hajdu, VP Business Development, Myspace Music
I recently sat down with Frank Hajdu, an old colleague of mine from the Elektra Records A&R team and now the VP of Business Development for MySpace Music. As a founding member of the MySpace Music team, Frank offered an inside look at the past, present, and future of MySpace’s core content platform.
Give me the quick elevator pitch on what Myspace Music is all about and how it came to be.
FH:
From its inception, MySpace was always a promotional haven for artists of all types – musicians, filmmakers, comedians, fashionistas – you name it. Over time, music became more of a focal point within MySpace, as it started to gain quite a bit of traction with unsigned, indie, and major label artists. Before long, it became an integral part of the marketing plan for virtually any artist, big or small. But despite its efficacy as a promotional platform, artists began to clamor for a means of monetizing their MySpace content in the face of a recorded music industry in rapid decline. Wanting to better serve its artist community, there was a major push from within MySpace to figure out how to do just that – we had the traffic, but now it was a matter of converting those eyeballs into monetization opportunities and allowing artists, to the greatest extent possible, to run their respective businesses via their MySpace profiles.
We became laser-focused on how to achieve that end goal, and the MySpace Music business and product architecture began to take shape. Artists were already uploading promotional content and users were becoming accustomed to a great breadth of streamable audio and video, and we wanted to create an ad-supported environment where artists could actually make money from this streaming activity. In addition, we wanted to create appropriate up-sell opportunities for artists’ digital and physical goods, including digital downloads, albums, and ringtones, as well as artist’s high-margin items such as tickets and merchandise. We ultimately envisioned a music marketplace within our environment allowing users to not just consume, but also purchase and take portable virtually all of the content that they were finding on the site. We certainly recognized – and still recognize – the magnitude and complexity of creating a scalable one-stop shop. I’m proud to say we’ve made great strides in this regard, but certainly acknowledge that there’s still a ways to go.
The official launch of the MySpace Music joint venture took place on September 25, 2008, and it’s been an iterative process ever since. It was and still is a very, very grand ambition to be able to satiate all artists’ needs as far as creating ancillary revenue streams to all relevant content and physical wares, but we’re doing it steadily. We’ve licensed and currently monetize several million audio tracks and videos from major, indie, and unsigned artists. We’re also up-selling digital and physical goods by way of our partnerships with iTunes, Amazon, Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and Hot Topic, to name a few.
I know you’re one of the original founders of MySpace Music, but what is your role there?
FH:
As Vice President of Business Development, I’m responsible for a fairly wide scope of partnerships and internal development. The structuring of commercial relationships with external partners is core to my job, whether that’s content licensing, technology partnerships, e-commerce partnerships, M&A – the list goes on. But aside from the transactional, if MySpace Music is contemplating an entirely new line of business, my team handles a great deal of the strategy and analysis that dictates our decision to make a category entrance. Finally, there’s the internal business development piece, where we look to formulate (or reformulate) strategy and operations within. To be candid, there are very few gold standards and rules of thumb in the business of digital media, so we are constantly monitoring and re-tooling our systems to improve the efficiency and profitability of the operation.
Is it too much of a gross over-simplification of your role to state that you are looking for ways to help the artists make money both from their recorded and external streams by creating things on site and partnerships with existing technologies off site?
FH:
Probably an over-simplification, yes. But if you’re asking me to articulate MySpace Music’s pledge to the artist community, monetization is really only one part of it. At the end of the day, for many established artists and labels, it often comes down to “Where’s my check?” — we get that. At the same time, what’s really interesting – though obvious in retrospect — is that when you talk to unsigned artists, it’s exposure, not money, which they consistently mention first and foremost. I’m blown away on a daily basis at just how business-savvy and self-sufficient artists are becoming in their day-to-day business affairs and marketing. I’m seeing a deepening maturity and patience, especially in unsigned artists, who are far more keen to first build a relevant audience, with the understanding that the money will ultimately be the by-product of that. So when you ask, “Is MySpace Music trying to build an ecosystem for artists to make money?” Sure, but it’s more than that. It’s, “How do we help break artists — at any level – such that they’ll prosper both inside and outside of MySpace, period?”
So part of your job is to facilitate the tools that help the growth and monetization of artists’ revenue streams. Are these tools available to the unsigned artist yet?
FH:
The end goal is that every single artist, signed or otherwise, has access to every promotional and monetization tool. Obviously the promotional tools are available across the board, as are the data retrieval tools such as the freshly-launched Artist Dashboard. As far as monetization tools go, we’re working in earnest to create scalable platforms to allow all artists to participate across all business lines. Suffice it to say, it gets very, very complicated, mainly because we rarely handle sales fulfillment in-house and for certain business lines like ticketing and merchandise, the pool of vendors is hugely fragmented. But artists have always been able to market their wares via affiliate linkage from their profiles, and we’ve recently inked soon-to-be-announced deals with pay-to-play aggregators to help solve for the digital distribution bottleneck. Artists will be able to sign up with said aggregators and present their digital content available for sale through MySpace media players by way of our e-commerce relationships.
From your vantage point, what can you say the real marketing push on MySpace (for an artist) is like? How has it changed?
FH:
There are more stories than I can count of artists like Sean Kingston or Asher Roth who wound up meeting their managers, producers, or label reps by reaching out via MySpace. And while artists still do their fair share of mass communication, they’re consistently using MySpace to reach out to potential colleagues and new fans on a one-to-one basis with much more meaningful and personalized messaging. The smartest ones realize that the quality of connections, at least in the earlygoing, is more important than the quantity, and so they take the time to identify users with tastes similar to that of their content. They then reach out directly to explain why said users might be interested in their music. It’s less of a general, “Hey, check me out!”, and instead more of a, “I noticed you like artists X, Y, and Z, and my music is in a similar vein. If you have a second, have a listen.” Those are really important friend requests, as the recipient is far more likely to explore the music if there’s a thoughtful basis for the recommendation.
Are there areas in an artist’s life that you think are at the moment underserved and will be better served by what’s coming?
FH:
One of the most recurrent themes in the feedback we get from artists is that it’s difficult having to maintain an online presence in so many different places. Currently, the average artist maintains profiles on anywhere from 3-10 websites …
I call it being in the phone book. The problem with the internet is that there are about 7,000 phone books.
FH:
Absolutely. For the artist, it’s exhausting. We feel that the concept of posting once and publishing everywhere is absolutely crucial for the artists of today. The concept is starting to proliferate, though most implementations I’ve seen are still a bit clunky and have yet to be headquartered in one simple, consolidated place. We’re going to get there. In the meantime, my advice to artists is not to get too overwhelmed with maintaining a presence on every site imaginable. Focus on the 2-3 most significant sites and go deep. I’d argue that you’re actually better served by having a more meaningful, dynamic, and frequently-updated presence in those places than by spreading yourself too thin.
You’re looking into solutions that would essentially let you be everywhere at once.
FH:
Yes. One great example is the recent MySpace–Twitter implementation. Updating your MySpace status immediately posts to Twitter and vice versa. This is certainly not the first such implementation we’ve seen, but it’s that kind of thinking that will prove incredibly valuable artists. It could be as simple as updating all your information in one place and completing the checkboxes for your syndication destinations.
Any advice for artists to effectively use MySpace?
FH:
Keep it simple. Artists often have a tendency to take the customizable canvas of MySpace and turn it into something very visually loud. Sometimes this works, often it doesn’t. Implementations range from gorgeous and elegant to discombobulated and seizure-inducing. One of the reasons that platforms like MySpace can work so well for marketing artists is that generally speaking, the profiles follow a template. One visits a MySpace profile, he knows where the audio lives, where the video lives, the photos, the blogs, and so on – there’s little to no learning curve for the visitor as he peruses each new artist profile. But when profile hosts attempt to go overboard with custom design, it can obscure the landscape, make the content less accessible, and altogether frustrate the visitor. Color and character are great – but I’d advise not to alter the skeletal landscape much. Decorate the house, but don’t reposition the furniture.
Above all else, users want ease and simplicity – they don’t want to relearn a web environment, which is why aggregated artist sites garner so much more traffic than artist-specific sites. This will sound ridiculously self-serving, but as a matter of pure ROI, I implore artists not to overspend time, money, or resources on their official sites. We’ve done the research and have seen that an artist’s MySpace profile traffic is typically 5-10x that of their official websites, even in cases where the official sites are cleaner, prettier, or more technologically advanced. Aggregated sites simply yield far greater bang for the buck, so you tell me where you want to invest your time.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t quickly plug MySpace’s “MyAds” platform. We’ve been very pleasantly surprised by how much artists have been using this. While I’m not permitted to quote numbers, an extremely significant percentage of MyAds clients are artists looking to market themselves within MySpace, and they’re seeing incredible returns. Even for those with meager budgets, artists can effectively target themselves at users throughout MySpace based on hundreds of demographic and psychographic dimensions. It’s surpassed every expectation we had as far as how much business that’s driving and how much of this business is coming from artists.
