September 17, 2015 As an independent musician, a digital PR campaign can be a critical component to an overall marketing strategy that will help you to:
1. Reach new fans
2. Increase online influence
3. Create new content that can be used to continue to build strength of existing fan base through social media
4. Better understand marketplace position
November 26, 2014 This is the story of a mediocre song. An objectively mediocre song. My song. Curse you, data!
If you’re looking for unbiased feedback on your latest track, you’ve got five options. Well, five-ish.
There’s SoundOut, which I wrote about way back in 2010.
Then there’s ReverbNation Crowd Review and TuneCore Track Smarts, both of which are powered by SoundOut.
Are all three SoundOut services the same? We’ll find out.
I reviewed AudioKite earlier this year, gushingly. A new and improved version launched just this month.
Finally, Music Xray offers a diagnostics feature, which presents your track to 5 music professionals and 20 potential fans.
Which is right for you?
Time for a good old-fashioned market research shootout!
September 22, 2014 Perhaps you don’t sell too many albums on iTunes, or have that many SoundCloud plays or YouTube views. But maybe, just maybe, your music is really popular in some far off corner of the digital universe you never even knew about, and all that “exposure” you’ve racked up over the years is paying off behind the scenes.
Next Big Sound provides detailed online music analytics to measure the growth of bands on streaming services and social networks. It doesn’t cover everything, but it casts a wide enough net to shatter an artist’s dreams with cold, hard data. I know it did mine! <sniff> Cidney at NBS agreed to give me an artist credit for one month so that I could write this article, way back in April. Hopefully she’ll forget to downgrade my account.
The screenshot above shows a dozen “key metrics” of my choosing. It’s an easy way to focus on what’s important to me, and not get bogged down in all those numbers. So for example, I could replace Rdio plays with Vine loops, Last.fm shouts, or unique pageviews of my website.
November 19, 2013 By Athena Butler
When it comes to recorded music, today’s consumers enjoy a free ride and seem to have all the answers. Song sharing is there for the taking and, in any case, the old music sales model is archaic. But if out with the old and in with the new is stylish in music, the same is not true of music recordings.
For the business, it seems, free is good. However, the decline of recorded music sales has been catastrophic since 2001, when piracy became rampant and the single song Apple economy banished the album. Now, hope for the sector requires a giant leap of faith. In the meantime, the tough job of finding new ways to compensate for this loss of profits falls to the record companies. It may appear that artists are gaining more exposure as music changes hands often and easily. But is the moneymaking of old within the reach of the business?
July 24, 2013 Fence-sitting has no place in marketing and release plans. When planning a release or campaign around a tour, for example, it is integral to define your marketing strategy and make sure you give it your all. In a music marketplace that is saturated with artists (many that have a larger marketing budget than you), it has become even more difficult to stand out. Marketing endeavors or companies who are constantly saying “we’ll just give it a try for now, with a small budget” without the right care, attention to detail, and most importantly attitude behind it, will come across as half assed in the marketplace. Potential fans can tell when you’re not committed and it seeps into every aspect of a project in peculiar ways.
May 7, 2013 1. Write, record and play high quality music
It seems like an obvious thing to say, but everything starts & ends with the music. If the songs are poor, the recording is bad, and the live show is dull don’t expect to make a living from music.
2. Continue to only deal in high quality
Some of the best new bands and artists are let down by terrible videos, bad photography and shocking design. Yes it is fickle, but judging a book by it’s cover is a reality. When you are choosing which artist to review, book, or even sign you are invariably drawn to the most attractive presentation. So why not increase your chances of being heard? Remember, you can have the best music in the world but if nobody listens ,you get nowhere.
March 29, 2013 Musicians are expected to be everywhere these days. We’re interacting on social networks, following up on blog comments, keeping our profiles on countless music sites up to date, and checking our stats and analytics with a variety of online tools. It’s enough to make a lifelong indie yearn for a label - one with a marketing department!
Most of these items don’t need to be addressed daily, but they do need to be performed on a regular basis. Tasks that have to be done on a given day, I schedule. Everything else is relegated to The Weekly Batch™ (note: not actually trademarked). I tackle the entire list as a single to-do item on Friday afternoons, when I find it hard to do much of anything else. Here’s my latest iteration:March 6, 2013 “Has Your Music Been Featured In The New York Times?” That’s quite a question! When I saw the advertisement headline recently I was tempted to click on it myself it looked so enticing.
This is a bit of a dangerous article, but after seeing that the advertisements for these types of companies are still all over the place targeting hopeful musicians, and knowing the disappointment left in their wake, I had to say something. It is in no way intended to insult anyone. It is only meant to tell the truth, so you can take that for what it’s worth.
February 20, 2013 Written by Jem Bahaijoub
As a new artist it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the constantly evolving new media world. With new marketing platforms bombarding us every day, it’s difficult to see the forest from the trees. So what should you do to market your debut EP? How can you build up a fan base from scratch? Next time you feel a panic-attack coming on and start screaming “where do I start?!”, take a deep breath and remember that we were sociable before we were social. So cast your smiley text faces and FB invitations to one side, and go back to basics. The foundational elements of direct-to-fan marketing all started in the physical world….
February 14, 2013 In the increasingly difficult world of getting your music heard, indie artists are being supplied with unparalleled tools in the form of social media, web sites specializing in “helping” musicians with marketing, and audio platforms which promise unlimited access to the public.
January 11, 2013 Ever spotted a terrible video on YouTube with an inconceivably high view count? Of course you have. Would it make you feel better knowing that most of those “views” were completely automated and only lasted 30 seconds with the sound turned off?
Content marketing, Effective Publicity and Promotion, Expanding Your Fan Base, Exposure: Getting Heard Now!, Leveraging Social Networks, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Music Sites, Music Social Media, Promotion, Selling Your Music tagged YouTube, music promotion, music videos, passive promotion, social media, video | 1 Reference October 15, 2012 It’s that time again kids! CMJ in New York City starts TOMORROW.
I’ll be there and so will Jon Ostrow, as we are both speaking on panels and in commemoration I decided to interview six of the best and brightest people, some of whom work directly in radio promotions and some do not, but they all advice artists daily. Here is my take:
July 30, 2012 For the past six weeks we’ve been busy keeping tabs on 20 different Fan Pages from different bands and brands. Through this research, we hoped to find out what drives strong and long-term engagement and why it does so. We’re still crunching all the numbers and putting together all our fancy graphs, but our fantastic intern, Katie Kernoodle, put together a case study of the most impressive artist in our study. As a teaser, we’re giving you this infographic and a break down from Katie as to why this artist was better than all the rest. Enjoy!
July 23, 2012 There are so many companies creating audio players and widgets; some are great and some, well, not so much. But all we really want to do is just get our music heard. And while the magic player that ensures everyone hears your music hasn’t been created yet (be patient, I’m working on it), there are some that do a fantastic job of increasing the ‘share-ability’ of your music. One such player is Official.fm. Official.fm is a platform that provides artists the ability to create players and promo pages.
