Promoting your music in the web 2.0 era
Thanks to platforms like Indiestore and Snocap, it’s getting ever easier for unsigned bands to sell their own music via their websites, blogs or Myspace pages. But the vast majority of consumers still go to iTunes (and, lately, emusic; and, soon, the Amazon download store) to buy downloads. It’s vital for any unsigned artist to get their albums on iTunes – at least until the Apple hegemony ends.
There are quite a few digital aggregators out there who work with unsigned bands, but only a few are worth your time. The best of the bunch – especially for UK artists – is AWAL (Artists Without A Label). They’ll get your tracks on iTunes, Napster, emusic and all other major download stores, without you having to pay them a penny. They’ll even assign ISRC codes and sort out the other steps that allow your releases to be eligible for the charts. In return they take 15% of any royalties earned. It’s an amazing service and should be the first port of call for anyone hoping to sell tracks through the most popular online stores.
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There’s a buzz around about how to monetize P2P, as the music industry begins to realise that the Pandora’s box of illegal downloading that Napster opened in 2000 is never going to be closed – not even by those nice, reasonable folk at the RIAA. The belief of the new generation is that music is free, and will always be free, and that buying a CD is as alien a habit as buying a music magazine.
So who has the answer to how we monetize the free downloading experience. We7? LaLa? Both are making admirable attempts, but both seem doomed to fail due to lack of content and the fact that nobody likes ads, no matter what they’re attached to.
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Little more than 10 years ago, TV was in a terrible state. Then something happened. A bunch of new writers who’d grown up getting their kicks from the Simpsons and Seinfeld starting scripting a new wave of TV - the most significant and seminal being Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Suddenly, as the millennium turned, it was okay to make a TV show that was smart, sharp, pop culturally aware and unafraid to flirt with postmodern tropes like mashing up genres and self-referencing.
TV changed irrevocably for the good after Buffy. Series like the Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, and later 24, Lost and its ilk, made a show of being intellectually challenging and taboo-busting. And people loved them - because they were good. It seems like an obvious thing to observe; but we’d put up with a lot of shit on TV for a very long time without complaining, and suddenly this (predominantly American) TV revolution woke us up to the fact that we could actually demand – and receive – quality shows from the big networks. Now, nobody’s going to make a show like Dynasty or Beverly Hills 90210 ever again - they’d get laughed off the screen. (Even trash like the OC had an edge compared to the stuff we had to endure when I was a teenager.)
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It’s come to something when Kelly bloody Clarkson turns out to be a beacon of rebellion. As reported here, Clarkson has been battling with legendary producer and BMG chairman Clive Davis over her new record - he wanted her to record a bunch of commissioned pop in a similar vein to her last record (natch), while she wanted to make shouty angst-rock.
It’s sobering to think that even if you’ve sold 15 million records, a major label will still try and control everything you do. Obviously, it doesn’t help that Clarkson’s a 25 year old woman either. Clive Davis - who brought us Alicia Keys, remember - should know better. But of course, Alicia was always credible, whereas Clarkson is a reality show winner, and should therefore not get ideas above her station right?
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There’s no such thing as unsigned anymore. Musicians can now make a good living from music without signing over their souls to a record label, whether independent or – shudder – a major.
Record labels nowadays expect a band to have built up a sizeable fan base from gigging, working the social networks (Myspace, Bebo, etc) and doing their own promotion. If a band can prove to a label that they’ve got an established following ready to buy a record, the label will then consider taking them on. These days little or no advance is offered, and most bands are expected to come with album-ready material – essentially all the label will then need to do is master the recording to make it release-quality, and then put it out. What you’re signing up for is basically the cachet of the label name attached to your recording. Everything else you essentially do yourself.
So why bother? Why not cut out the label completely? All that record companies can offer an up-and-coming band is a promotional machine to get tracks to press, radio and TV. But that situation will hopefully change in the coming years, as the music press gets more attuned to writing about bands regardless of whether they’re signed, and traditional pop radio is overtaken by web radio and online music sites like Last.fm.
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The story of Sandi Thom that the papers ran with back in 2006 was one that suggested she got noticed by webcasting gigs from her Tooting flat – she claimed to have had 70,000 viewers at one point, in fact. We now know, of course, that she already had a PR company behind her, and that the whole story was carefully contrived (bandwidth costs for that kind of webcast are well beyond the budget of a supposedly penniless singer-songwriter).
But the bigger point here is: if she really was getting 70,000 people viewing her online gigs, why on earth did she sign a major label record deal? Look at what happened – the industry machinery got behind her, the single was hyped everywhere in the traditional way, got to No. 1 and then swiftly dropped out of sight, and the follow-up tanked. Sandi Thom’s career is now effectively over. Think what she could’ve done if – supposing the story of all those online viewers was true – she’d gone it alone.
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We all know that Facebook is the place to be these days when it comes to fulfilling your social networking needs. But it’s not a very good place to promote yourself as an artist – Myspace still remains the go-to destination for anyone wanting to hear a band’s music. Until that situation changes – and obviously we’d recommend people start using Last.fm for that precise reason! - artists will still have to maintain a Myspace page.
But just how useful is it if you want to make money from your music? Let’s imagine for a moment that you do actually want to get an old fashioned record deal – can Myspace still help you achieve that goal? Probably not. It used to be said that you needed at least 5000 friends on Myspace before any A&Rs would take you seriously. But A&Rs are now wary of anyone on Mypace whose stats look suspicious. We all know the ‘friend adder’ bots have been shut down so it’s no longer possible to artificially add friends and spam a ton of people with news about your band, but the damage has been done. If you’ve got a lot of friends but not many plays, A&Rs won’t give a shit.
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A new online music service called Poptopus claims to offer musicians a chance to actively make money when their music is streamed on the internet. The Poptopus music player is a widget that plays MP3s and shows video adverts at the same time. It can be placed on blogs (and, one would assume, Myspace pages – though I’m sure MS will make life difficult for Poptopus as Snocap is trying similar things), where visitors can listen to a stream of music from artists in the Poptopus catalogue. As an artist you can submit your music to the database, and earn a cut from the advertising revenue (as can bloggers who place the player on their site).
It’s a great idea, and we can only hope that they manage to sign up some good advertising before they launch – although considering the site hasn’t been updated for months and we’ve heard nothing from them since signing up to their ‘newsletter’ at the beginning of May, it doesn’t look good. It would be typical of advertisers not to see the potential in an idea like this, and just consider it too risky an investment.
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One of the only good things (assuming you’re OK with it) a major label record deal would provide you is the chance to get your songs used on adverts and films – syncing, as it’s known in the industry. It’s hard to get your music noticed by the kind of people who license songs in this way, but it’s getting much easier thanks to companies like PumpAudio and now YouLicense.
YouLicense calls itself an ‘online music licensing marketplace’ and is currently in invite-only beta; but we’ve managed to get a look inside, and it’s a fairly impressive service. It’s free for the time being, although they will charge in the future depending on how many tracks you want to upload. They also take a 9% commission which will be “charged directly from the artist, once a deal has been agreed upon by both sides.”
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Currently the best place to sell your music online is Indiestore. It gets a lot of things right (with a Pro account you get assigned ISRC numbers automatically, it’s viewed by A&Rs and journos looking for the next big thing, they work with sync companies so there’s a chance you’ll get your tracks licensed to ads or movies) and a lot of things wrong (little customization, pricey Pro account, bad customer service, no way of tracking who’s buying your music) – but you can’t argue with a service that gives you the opportunity to get in the charts without being signed to a label.
The key thing that makes Indiestore so important to the unsigned musician is the fact that you can sell your tracks via SMS (if you have a Pro account, natch). This is the main reason why Koopa managed to chart, as their fanbase was predominantly young males with no credit card or Paypal account between them. Everyone, obviously, has a mobile phone, and when you buy tracks via SMS at Indiestore it just gets added to your monthly bill. That’s how you must sell these days.
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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.