Promoting your music in the web 2.0 era
Thought I would interrupt the hiatus (soon to be over, honest) for this quick post.
So having wondered, a couple of months back, how bands could start marketing their music on Facebook, I was lucky enough to get an early look at the brand new Music Wall application from the OK Cool team.
OK Cool are a bunch of tech-heads, software geeks and web designers, and they’ve built the Music Wall app as a way of promoting music on their own OK Cool Recordings imprint. In many ways it’s the first Facebook-driven record label.
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A Song A Day is in the middle of a temporary hiatus - I’ll reveal why as soon as I can. Should be worth the wait. Won’t be long anyway. In the meantime, why not peruse this interesting post about how current music fans have never had it so good.
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Compared to Myspace, it’s initially difficult to see how bands can use Facebook – vastly popular though it’s becoming – to promote and market their own music. There are a few apps that help you post your own music to your profile page (as noted yesterday, ReverbNation’s is probably the best of a small bunch right now). But what’s the point of uploading tracks if your friends are the only people who will hear them? (I have to assume you’ve already told your friends you’re in a band!)
One resourceful unsigned band recently tried a somewhat sneaky marketing tactic that gained them notoriety on Facebook, and some modest press coverage in the process. Leeds band The Bribe set up a Facebook group ostensibly protesting the hideousness of the London 2012 Olympic logo. After gathering more than 4000 members, the band hijacked the group to promote its upcoming new single. You can read more about the stunt – including some revealing comments from the band themselves – over at Brand Republic.
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ReverbNation have taken the lead when it comes to Facebook apps for musicians. Despite the riot of activity that followed Facebook’s opening up to developers, bands were poorly served by the music players that appeared.
I haven’t used the ReverbNation platform extensively – my music’s up there, but I don’t have time to maintain yet another social network profile. Despite this, I’ve heard good things about the site, and I’m pleased to see them taking the initiative in terms of Facebook, which has yet to be fully exploited by unsigned and independent musicians.
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Amiestreet.com is a great music promotion platform that’s almost exactly a year old this week. Independent artists can upload tracks to the site, where they are added to the site’s “marketplace” to be promoted amongst Amiestreet users, who will recommend your music to others if they like it. Your songs will start off free, but as more users buy them the price goes up. It’s a nifty economic system; but what really makes Amiestreet worth your time is its dedicated user base. Check out this recent Techcrunch post about the site to find out more.
I’ve had two albums on the site for about six months, and in that time I’ve done no promotion – I haven’t added any Amiestreet widgets to my Myspace, or put the Amiestreet app on my Facebook page, or even told my friends about it. I pretty much forgot I had music up there, to be honest!
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I confess - I use P2P sites occasionally. Mainly to get obscure Dylan bootlegs that I just wouldn’t be able to get my hands on elsewhere. One torrent site I visit recently posted a bulletin on its homepage directing visitors to download some music uploaded by one of its regular users. That was about three weeks ago, and as of today the album has been downloaded 134 times.
134 people - that’s nothing to get hugely excited about in the grand scheme of things. But nonetheless, if they all have 3 friends they recommend this band to… Well, you get the idea. Even if only a third of those downloaders take the time to visit that band’s website, and only half of those that do sign up to their mailing list, that’s still a healthy 22 people added to the fanbase for very little work.
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In the Guardian, Will Hodgkinson continues to make a mess of running his DIY label, Big Bertha Records. This is all fun and games I suppose, but running a label is undoubtedly one of the toughest projects you can undertake - and he does seem to be making some ludicrous decisions!
He’s keen to point out that he wanted to release limited edition vinyl and distribute CD albums in the traditional way - but the budget he’s got seems excessive for such a supposedly quirky endeavour:
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A few months ago I was approached by an A&R who was interested in signing me to a new, supposedly ‘revolutionary’ digital-only record label called Red Skin Records. Dubious as always, I got on the phone to the label boss and picked his brains for about an hour, to try and work out what I would be getting myself into if I signed.
I’d already gone down the traditional record label route a couple of years before, releasing a track on Wall Of Sound and very nearly signing to them to record an album. For various reasons - namely lawyers (and the fact that I was advised not to sign by quite a few people I trusted) - the deal never worked out. I would have signed over my publishing and recordings to one company, something which seems a ridiculous thing to consider doing, in this DIY era.
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Here’s the second part of my interview with Andrew Dubber from New Music Strategies:
Do you think subscription stream-on-demand models are the best option for the industry? If not, what would be your ideal model for the future of music consumption?
The answer here, as with most things to do with the online music environment is ‘Well, it’s complicated.’ What you propose sounds like a good model, and I’m sure there’d be a lot of people taking you up on it. But complexity and choice are factors in online music consumption. People like to collect, organise and understand their music as an expression of themselves. Some people self-identify as jazz enthusiasts. They may not want to take home the whole record store.
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I interviewed Andrew Dubber of the excellent New Music Strategies last week, and received some fascinating and insightful responses to questions concerning online promotion for musicians, future distribution models - and how the RIAA could dig themselves out the hole they’ve got themselves into. Here’s the first part:
What would be your advice for new artists in need of a promotional push? Pursue traditional press avenues? Or just concentrate on the online channels?
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This is a blog about how to promote your music successfully in the new internet-driven era. I used to write for the NME, now I work for Last.fm, and also make music as Fakesensations.