Music Marketing

I am a fan of artists and managers A) starting off by doing what they can themselves to help market and sell their own music, and B) seeking out partnerships with companies that can help them to do more than they are able to do themselves, for a fair price, and C) building up, communicating, and monetizing their own list in a meaningful way, using best practices with direct-to-fan marketing. I think direct-to-fan not only has the potential of generating more margin for artists now, but if done properly, DTF (direct-to-fan) can also help to ensure that artists are building a passionate base for the future. It’s not the only marketing segment that matters, but it is a segment that all musicians and managers should be paying close attention to, and integrating into their other traditional marketing and sales campaigns.

I’ve been working with Shamal, Gary, Ian, Adam and others at Topspin for the past 8 months or so creating a course dedicated to outlining the best practices that folks should be aware of in terms of online DTF (and traditional) marketing, and how Topspin’s software can be used to help facilitate these best practices. I’ve had the good fortune of not only taking a look inside Topspin’s platform to analyze their key features – a content management system that hosts your media assets, a fan management system that collects, organizes, and analyzes fan data, detailed reporting features, e-mail management system, widget creation and viral tracking, and more – but also to see the best practices and real data that Topspin has generated from the 150+ campaigns they have run over the past couple of years. While every marketing and sales campaign is different, this course presents folks with a unique opportunity to “look behind the curtain” to see exactly what has worked for some bands, how they set up their offers, the income they generated from these offers, and how they went about acquiring new fans. I think it’s helpful information.

I sat down with Ian here at Berklee in August to do a quick overview of the course, which turned into a bit of an online marketing clinic. Below is one of the clips from our conversation. To see them all, click here.

Online Music Marketing with Topspin is enrolling now, and begins on January 11th. If you are interested in learning more about the course, feel free to connect with one of our Admissions Advisors at 1.866.BERKLEE (US) or 617.747.2146 (International).

Tom Friedman, author and foreign-affairs columnist for the New York Times, doesn’t write much about music. But his piece “The New Untouchables” is a column well worth reading for those looking for a way forward in the music business. It may sound obvious, but the truth is that many of the fundamental techniques used for success in the “non-music” business world are the same techniques that can be applied to folks looking for success in the “music” business world.

Check this out, from Friedman’s piece:

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.

It’s not hard to see the connection between lawyers and musicians, here, is it? Imagining new opportunities, new ways to recruit work, and inventing smarter ways to do old jobs is a great plan off attack for business folks AND musicians.

Bruce Houghton from Hypebot initiated a great discussion on his blog a few weeks back about his ideas that “there have always been skills beyond just making music that, if not required, certainly made success more likely.” It’s an opinion that I share, too.

I definitely would not frame any musician in the “untouchable” camp (brands are only as good as the trust their fans have in them), but generating leverage by doing as much as you can yourself (with the help of a good team, if possible), analyzing data to do it smarter, and figuring out ways to creatively attract new fans is great advice for any musician interested in building a more sustainable career.

It’s likely that you’ve heard of Jonathan Coulton. Profiled by NPR and the New York Times, Coulton has been a full time independent musician since he quit his computer programming gig in 2005. After initiating an ambitious project of releasing a new song a week, Coulton started to gain momentum, making what he described as “a reasonable middle-class living” — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on his own site and iTunes.

Coulton is prolific in his conversations with his fans online, spending time each day personally answering every email he receives. While his direct to fan approach to sales and marketing includes a partnership with CD Baby (who warehouse and ship his physical CD, as well as get his music to the online retailers like iTunes and Amazon), Coulton’s most lucrative source of income is selling online from his Website.

Check out an audio interview that Scott Kirsner, author of the new book, Fans, Friends & Followers, did with Jonathan Coulton. Interesting ideas on communicating with fans, how Jonathan is using Creative Commons, his primary sources of revenue, his trepidation about signing to a label, and more.

Pay particular attention to Coulton’s recipe for success:

• Solo artist = low overhead when touring
• Records in a home studio = low production costs
• Distributes most of his music digitally = no co-op fees at retail, lower distribution fee
• Fosters a direct connection to his fans = fans are more emotionally involved in what he does
• Few middlemen involved in the chain = most of his income is his alone

Check out the audio interview here:

Anyone that has been following music business trends for the past few years is familiar with the high profile direct to fan campaigns (campaigns that focus on the monetization of an artist’s fan base directly) that Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Imogen Heap, and others have been involved with recently. As Mike Masnick put it in his 2009 NARM Keynote, the recipe for effective direct to fan campaigns can be boiled down to: Connecting with Fans (CwF) + Providing a Reason to Buy (RtB) = $$$. Makes sense, right? The difficulties arise when you consider that there are 5 million bands on MySpace, all of which are vying for the consumer’s attention. It’s easy for NIN and Radiohead to connect with fans, the skeptics’ note, as they have had years of major label support and hundreds of thousands of existing followers to work with. How can a developing artist in this climate differentiate themselves from all the other bands out there?

The answer can be slightly more nuanced than Masnick’s formula above, and to me, is based on a four key elements: 1) setting up an effective offer page on your site that is tailored to your marketing goals and where you are in your marketing cycle, 2) expanding your digital touch points through creative fan acquisition techniques, 3) integrating your online and offline marketing towards the same goal, and lastly, 4) once you’ve created your groundswell of support and fans, integrating effective 3rd party digital and physical marketing, sales, and distribution (such as Tunecore) outlets into the mix. Let’s illustrate these elements with two examples.

Example 1: Fanfarlo

Creating an Effective Offer Page Tailored to Acquisition

Although they were supported by NME in their hometown of London (who have called their release “a carefully orchestrated treat”), and have some high profile fans in the members of Sigur Rós, Fanfarlo found that they were having a tough time breaking into the US market. Fanfarlo’s music is undeniably great (aside: the first step, of course, in any marketing campaign is to have great music. Without this, any DTF marketing campaign will fail), and as such, the plan for breaking Fanfarlo relied a lot on getting as many folks to experience their music as possible, with the end goal of gaining enough interest to pack the Mercury Lounge in NYC (300 capacity).

The band initiated their acquisition-based campaign by looking at what assets and connections they could leverage. Fanfarlo developed a low-cost video, dug up some unreleased tracks, and recorded new acoustic versions. Of particular note, the band’s management reached out to Sigur Rós, who agreed to mention Fanfarlo in one of their emails to their fans.

Prior to any outreach from Sigur Rós, the band knew it was crucial for them to create an offer on their site that would make their music as accessible as possible, while at the same time create a degree of urgency. Again, as monetization was not the driving force behind their campaign at this stage in their marketing process, Fanfarlo decided the best course of action for building up their base was to provide curious potential fans with the opportunity to purchase their record for $1.00 (for a limited time), in exchange for an email address (which provided the band with permission to engage with these fans directly at a later date). They band adjusted their site accordingly, employing best practices with SEO and Web IA, and created an offer page dedicated to highlighting their music and making it easy to purchase via one click off the offer page. This was the result:

Along with the redesigned offer page on their site, the band adjusted all of their social media pages (visibility on MySpace, Wikipedia, Facebook, Last.fm, iLike, YouTube) with appropriate offer copy/images, and links to the offer on their proper site. Once all the backend was done and Fanfarlo was ready for the traffic, Sigur Rós hyped the band in an email to their fans and Fanfarlo essentially had an “offer you can’t refuse” waiting for them. In exchange, the band built up their email list, created a viral buzz on their new record, and not only had enough interest to pack the Mercury Lounge in NYC, they had to upgrade to the larger Bowery Ballroom!

Example 2: The Lights Out

Expanding Your Digital Touch Points through Social Media & Integrating Your Online and Offline Marketing

All marketing campaigns are different, and not everyone has the luxury of having support from major bands like Sigur Rós. But no matter where you are at in your career, core marketing principals hold true, particularly when it comes to effectively using social media to engage your fans and building up your base. The best example of social media campaigns are creative ideas that leverage the viral nature of social media to engage fans and effect change in not only the digital world, but in a band’s physical campaign as well (which of course is still incredibly important to any overall marketing campaign).

The Lights Out is a Boston-based band working to raise their hometown visibility and acquire new fans to positively impact their touring base throughout the Northeast. On the heels of an oppressive heat wave in Boston in mid August, the band initiated a Slush Puppie “flash mob” online marketing campaign. The band found the appropriate location for the event via polling their Twitter followers:

Once the location was chosen, the band set up a Facebook event, which allowed them to update the status of the Slush Mob, get an idea on who was coming, and communicate directly with those that expressed interest.

The band then set up a Twitter hashtag (#), which organized all messaging around the event into a single live channel on Twitter search. The hashtag use also had the all-important added benefit of becoming a “viral generator” for the event, piquing the interest of the band’s follower’s fans, and influencing activity at a level outside of what the band could do with their fanbase directly.

Once the existing fans were engaged in the event, Boston-based bloggers picked up on it, the market’s alternative weekly featured info on the event, and popular Boston-based event and social media Twitterers did the same.

The band continued Tweeting from the event and after, and shared photos of the turnout using Twitpic:

So, what did all this mean to the band’s stated goal of raising their visibility and acquiring new fans?

The data:

• 20% increase in unique web site visitors

• 24 times increase in daily twitter followers

• 3,352 impressions from media coverage

• 66,160 impressions from Tweets and Retweets

• 195 impressions from Twitpics

• Approximate Total: 70,000 impressions

New fans also direct-messaged the band, telling them how much they enjoyed the idea/their music and expressing interest in attending future gigs. And because this social media campaign included an offline component, new fans were able to bond with the band in a more personal way.

Again, all marketing campaigns are different, and should be employed in a way that focuses on the strengths and opportunities of the respective band. The specific tools will certainly continue to change as we move forward, but the principle of determining your core goal and engaging / developing your fan base to reach this goal will not. What’s particularly exciting to me is that artists have the option to market and distribute their music directly, with less gatekeeper involvement, than ever before. We’re in the early stages of direct to fan campaigns, but I think it is undeniable that there is a tremendous amount of growth potential in the segment – and is an area that artists, managers and others (forward thinking, artist-serviced based companies, for example) have to look at very closely.

Clay Shirky is the former vice-president of the New York chapter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and an expert on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. This TED presentation on the Social Web is a much watch for anyone involved in media or marketing.

“The choice is not if this is the media environment we want to operate in. The question is now ‘how can we make the best use of this media?’ – even though it means changing the way we have always done it.”

Via Dave Allen @pampelmoose

Great post from Amanda Palmer of the Dresdon Dolls on using online media to connecting directly with fans and make $$$. Love the creativity here…

=====

From: Amanda Palmer
Subject: twitter power, or “how an indie musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using twitter”

this story has just been blowing people’s minds so i figures i should write it down.

1.
FRIDAY NIGHT LOSERS T-SHIRT, $11,000

about a month ago, i was at home on a friday night (loser that i often am when i’m not touring, i almost never go out) and was, of course, on my mac, shifting between emails, links and occasionally doing some dishes and packing for a trip the next day. just a usual friday-night-rock-star-multi-tasking extravaganza.

i twitter whenever i’m online, i love the way it gives me a direct line of communication with my fans and friends.

i had already seen the power of twitter while touring…using twitter i’d gathered crowds of sometimes 200 fans with a DAY’S notice to come out and meet me in public spaces (parks, mostly) where i would play ukulele, sign, hug, take pictures, eat cake, and generally hang out and connect. this was especially helpful in the cities where we’d been unable to book all-ages gigs and there were crushed teenagers who were really grateful to have a shot at connecting with me & the community of amanda/dolls fans.

i’d also been using twitter to organize ACTUAL last-minute gigs…i twittered a secret gig in LA one morning and about 350 folks showed up 5 hours later at a warehouse space….i played piano, filmed by current.tv, and then (different camera crew) did an interview with afterellen.com.
the important thing to undertsand here is that the fans were never part of the plan..,i basically just INVITED my fans to a press day, the press didnt’ plan it…i did.
i was going to be playing in an empty room and doing q&a with afterellen on a coach with only the camera watching.
it was like….why not tell people and do this in a warehouse instead of a hotel lobby or a blank studio? so i did.

it cost me almost nothing. the fans were psyched.

but back to the bigger, cooler story….

so there i am, alone on friday night and i make a joke on twitter (which goes out to whichever of my 30,000 followers are online):

“i hereby call THE LOSERS OF FRIDAY NIGHT ON THEIR COMPUTERS to ORDER, motherfucker.”
9:15 PM May 15th from web

one thing led to another, and the next thing you know there were thousands of us and we’d become the #1 topic trend on twitter.
zoe keating described it as a “virtual flash mob”.

the way twitter works (if you don’t have it) is that certain topics can include a hashtag (#) and if a gazillion people start making posts that include that hashtag, the topic will zoom up the charts of what people are currently discussing. it’s a cool feature.

so anyway, there we were, virtually hanging out on twitter on a friday night. very pleased with ourselves for being such a large group, and cracking jokes.

how do you “hang out” on the internet? well, we collectively came up with a list of things that the government should do for us (free government-issued sweatpants, pizza and ponies, no tax on coffee), AND created a t-shirt.
thank god my web guy sean was awake and being a loser with me on friday night because he throw up the webpage WHILE we were having our twitter party and people started ordering the shirts – that i designed in SHARPIE in realtime) and a slogan that someone suggested: “DON’T STAND UP FOR WHAT’S RIGHT, STAY IN FOR WHAT’S WRONG”. neil gaiman and wil wheaton joined our party. the fdnas felt super-special.

by the end of the night, we’d sold 200 shirts off the quickie site (paypal only) that sean had set up.
i blogged the whole story the next day and in total, in the matter of a few days, we sold over 400 shirts, for $25/ea.

we ended up grossing OVER $11,000 on the shirts.
my assistant beth had the shirts printed up ASAP and mailed them from her apartment.

total made on twitter in two hours = $11,000.
total made from my huge-ass ben-folds produced-major-label solo album this year = $0

2.
WEBCAST AUCTION, $6000

a few nights after that, i blogged and twittered, announcing a “webcast auction” from my apartment.
it went from 6 pm – 9 pm, my assitant beth sat at my side and kept her eyes on incoming bids and twitter feed.
while we hocked weird goods, i sang songs and answered questions from fans. we wore kimonos and drank wine. it was a blast.

people on twitter who were tuned in re-tweeted to other fans. the word spread that it was a fun place to be and watch.
we had, at peak, about 2000 people watching the webcast.

at the suggestion of a fan early in the webcastm anyone could, on demand, send us $20 via paypal and we would chew,
sign and mail them a postcard. we sold about 70, and we read all those names at the end of the webcast and thanked those
people for supporting us. here’s how the sales broke down:

all the items were signed by moi and hand-packed by beth and kayla._ the items and highest bidders were as follows:_ hilary, ukulele used on the european tour: $640 _jake, “guitar hero” plastic guitar controller used in album promo shoot: $250_ lary b, copy neo2 magazine, plus two post-war trade slap-bracelets & a crime-photo set: $230_ devi, glass dildo, with subtley-sordid backstory: $560 _liz b., “hipsters ruin everything” t-shirt, made by blake (get your very own here!!!!): $155.55_shannon m., my bill bryson book, a short history of neary everything: $280_ nikki, huge metal “the establishment” sign, used at rothbury festival for the circus tent i curated: $450 _j.r., purple velvet “A” dress used in the dresden dolls coin-operated boy video shoot: $400_ jessie & alan: who killed amanda palmer vinyl: $100_ nikki: wine bottle, auctioned BY REQUEST!!! $320 _shannon w., torn-to-shit vintage stockings used in the who killed amanda palmer/ michael pope video series: $200 _jodi,
school-note-book break-up letter, written to amanda from jonas woolverton in 7th grade (i still haven’t emailed him about that….): $250_ daryl, ANOTHER wine bottle, by request, that we had LYING AROUND: $320
and…………..
reto emailed, having barely missed the wine bottle, and asked us to send him “something funny” for $129.99. we sent a heath ledger statuette.

total made on twitter in 3 hours, including the postcards, was over $6000.
again, total made on my major-label solo album this year: $0

3.
TWITTER DONATION-ONLY GIG, $1800

a few days later, i twittered a guest-list only event in a recording studio in boston, to take place a week later.
the gig lasted about 5 hours, all told, with soundcheck and signing. i took mostly requests and we had a grand old time.
first come, first served. the first 200 people to ask got in, for free. i asked for donations and made about $2200 in cash.
i gave $400 back to the studio for the space and the help. we sold some weird merch. i think we should call it an even 2k.

total made at last-minute secret twitter gig, in about 5 hours = $2000
major-label record blah blah blah = $0

…..and for fun, and to thank my fans for being awesome, i’ve been doing some twitter perfomance art, including answering their questions by magic-markering my body until it’s covered, and displaying time-lapse make-up application advice….but that’s another story.

TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000
TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

turn on, tune in, get dropped!!!!!

love,
amanda fucking palmer
http://www.amandapalmer.net
http://www.dresdendolls.com

p.s.
if you want to read the full blogs and see the pictures from the #LOFNOTC events, i blogged here:

1. the friday night that started it all:
http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/111667948/twitter-the-beautiful-losers-lofnotc

2. the webcast and magic-marker/make-up mayhem:
http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/127401792/wasnt-this-supposed-to-be-my-fucking-week-off

Love this idea! Quick recordings with an immediate payout for fans over the course of one week. I’d subscribe to this effort for my favorite artists…

Via Pitchfork:

“When most of us have extra spare time on our hands, we end up zoning out in front of “Daisy of Love” reruns or rereading Watchmen for the billionth time. Beck, on the other hand, challenges himself to record cover versions of entire albums as quickly as possible. Different strokes, I guess.

Over the next month, Beck will be overhauling his website, and one of the features will be something called Record Club, in which Beck ropes in various musician friends to record an entire album in a day. For the purposes of scrappy immediacy, nobody will rehearse or arrange anything beforehand.

After that day of furious recording, Beck will slowly let the record out into the world via his website (as well as the websites of the other musicians involved), uploading a new song once a week. He’ll kick this party off with The Velvet Underground and Nico. That’s an ambitious start! Will Beck attempt the Nico vocal parts himself? We’ll find out!

Future Record Clubs will involve friends-of-Beck like Devendra Banhart, MGMT, Jamie Lidell, and producer Nigel Godrich. Here’s hoping they give 8Ball & MJG’s In Our Lifetime a shot.”

“Talking gross numbers that come directly to the band, we have made more money already than we have on the last record in four years,” said Mathieu Drouin, the band’s co-manager.

Great piece in the L.A. Times today on Metric. The band is forgoing a traditional record deal and focusing on alternative income sources and direct to fan sales and marketing techniques for their most recent release “Fantasties.” Direct to fan has been a proven model for megastars like Radiohead and Trent Reznor, and it’s encouraging to see a “middle class” musician (Metric’s 2005 release “Live It Out,” sold 45,000 copies) having success using a similar template.

Some takeaways from the effort:

1) Without the distribution fee and record royalties that a major label and distributor would charge, Metric is able to net $.77 per iTunes track as opposed to something closer to the $.22 per track a label would pay (this figure includes international downloads, which could pay the artist more than the US standard of $.70 per track by going direct)
2) As distribution follows marketing, Metric has hooked up with Topspin to handle the online direct to fan marketing and sales efforts. Take a look at their Website, here. Fantastic way to leverage “free” to acquire names for the mailing list, they have an active blog area, and most importantly, they are engaging in variable product and pricing which everyone from the hard core fan to the curious potential fan can engage in. Again, because the band is selling direct, their profit margin is much higher. Metric sold out of an initial allotment of 500 deluxe packages in 48 hours, said Drouin, who estimated a profit of $13 to $15 per unit. “We can never offer a fan that much value at that price if we had to go through a record company, distributor and a retailer. We cut out three rungs.”
3) The band made the entire record available for free as a stream a month before release, creating widgets that could be embedded in fans Websites (provided by Topspin). Folks were able to become familiar with the new record, they liked what they heard, and they paid for the record when it was released commercially. This is the “emotional connection” theory in action.
4) The band worked with independent distributor Redeye for the physical CD. Because Metric has a track record and had analytics that proved people were into the record, Redeye had an easier time shipping the record to physical independent record stores.
5) Canada supports the arts. The Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Recordings provided the band with $50,000 to cover recording costs, as well as a smaller federal grant.

Major labels are traditionally known for A) financing, B) marketing, C) distribution. I think Metric is a great example of a band that not only accomplishing all of these things outside of the traditional model, but is making more money because of it. Check out a cool Elliott Smith cover by the band:

It’s not all that surprising to read that some folks are making a killing from building apps for the iPhone. As of January ’09, over 500 million apps have been downloaded, and seeing that Apple takes a 30% cut on all apps (same as their fee for sales of music on iTunes), developers are taking in 70% of the revenue of these 500 million downloads. What IS interesting to me is the marketing behind these apps, and in particular, the way that some developers are using the concept of free to generate interest in their product.

The New York Times ran an article last week on Ethan Nicholas, the guy who built iShoot, an app that has generated $800,000 in sales in five months. Take a look at how his sales progressed:

“After the project was finished, Mr. Nicholas sent it to Apple for approval, quickly granted, and iShoot was released into the online Apple store on Oct. 19.

In January, he released a free version of the game with fewer features, hoping to spark sales of the paid version. It worked: iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and many people have upgraded to the paid version, which now costs $2.99. On its peak day — Jan. 11 — iShoot sold nearly 17,000 copies, which meant a $35,000 day’s take for Mr. Nicholas.”

Obviously, this is an extreme example of what can happen financially for app developers, but I do think that some comparisons can be made to musicians looking to generate interest in their music online. My friend John Snyder, who runs Artists House Music, once told me “the curse of the developing artist is anonymity, not piracy.” I do believe that some form of “free” makes sense for most artists; be it a download card distributed at live shows, select music available for free on your site (perhaps in exchange for an email address), live shows for download, etc.

Traditional one-size-fits-all physical retailers are failing – Virgin, Transworld, and Borders have all either closed up shop in the US, drastically cut back on music floor space, or are taking massive financial hits. I think a large part of the future of sales in the music business is online direct to fan relationships (with supporting offline components), where artists cultivate more extensive relationships with their fans, and in the process more effectively monetize traditional and non-traditional sales options. I think some part of “free” works to engage your existing fanbase, as well as turn casual fans into hard-core supporters.

Andrew Dubber has some good thoughts on the topic of free as well. Take a look at his post on “Why Give Away Music For Free.”

There’s no debating that the Phish organization were marketing geniuses when it came to building and nurturing their community and creating a brand that hundreds of thousand of kids identified with. How many bands do you know that can put together a festival in upstate Maine that can draw enough people to be the largest city in the state for the weekend, complete with their own radio station?

Distinctive artwork has always been a key component for Phish’s branding efforts, starting with the cover art of their first record, Junta. Jim Pollock, a college friend of the band, has been the driving force behind the band’s artwork since the mid 80s – creating album covers, t-shirt designs, stickers, and perhaps most importantly, the bands limited edition, signed and numbered tour posters.

Jim’s most recent work for Phish was his limited run of posters for the bands first dates in four years, at Hampton, Virginia. Take a look at the video below detailing Jim’s time-intensive process for creating his linoleum cut prints. Phish’s connection with Jim is a wonderful example of creative musicians aligning themselves with a creative artist to provide their fans with a more rich and engaging experience.

Phish artist Jim Pollock’s Hampton 2009 concert poster from Jason Kaczorowski on Vimeo.