Reconsider promotion. The faders are coming. The faders are coming.

If you have not tried MOG’s new streaming music service, then take a few minutes and watch the demonstration video.  MOG’s streaming music service features a fader that enables music fans to simply adjust the flow of new (relatively unknown) music that’s inserted into any MOG music stream.  I believe Echonest powers this feature.  Enabling music fans to completely control their music experiences is no longer a pipe dream, it’s now a must-have feature that will appear everywhere over the next twenty-four months.

Quality faders will change the promotion game.
I think it’s relatively easy to enable consumers to control just about any part of their musical journey, but what about quality?  Quality is subjective (or maybe it’s not?), however with artists creating over a million songs a year, the absence of a quality fader (filter) reduces the flow of new music to a trickle (the new music fader stays pinned to the left), as no music consumer wants to be burdened with the need to sift through a truckload of poorly written or poorly produced songs.  (Note: I believe Echonest is already (somewhat) filtering for quality (hotness)?)

In my opinion, a quality filter-fader that everyone can trust - changes (ends) the promotion game for everyone.  When we get to a point where quality, combined with other attributes, can be faded in and out, the entire industry will terminate the marketing department and hire a gaggle of people that can improve quality (subjective or not, it will me measurable).  Promotion will become something you (possibly) do after you measure “quality”, not before.

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No One Has the Answer, But Sivers Told Us That

If there’s any doubt about the disarray and desperation afoot in the music business, just check out the Internet’s affect on the media business – music, print and broadcast – overall over the past decade. A recent article in the New York Times covers the waterfront on this issue quite well.

While the devastation of digital democracy vis-à-vis the Web made its first blitz through the belly of the music biz, the print media was next in line, and the battlefield there rivals Antietam.

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The case for online-only promotion

I promote to establish and nurture a genuine relationship with my fans. I measure my success by the number of subscribers to my mailing list. Notice I said mailing list, not Twitter followers or MySpace “friends.” I’m talking about the people who grant me permission through a double opt-in process to email them directly on a regular and consistent basis. Right now there are just over a thousand, but there are plenty more out there who might love my music if they heard it. So how do we reach those potential fans?

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Global Self-Promotion License Application

Beginning in 2010, anyone self-promoting on the Internet has to obtain a Global Self-Promotion License (GSPL). Failure to do so, will result in the revocation of your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube accounts; moreover, repeat offenders will lose their license to blog and comment on the Internet.

We all have attention capital accounts. Attention capital accounts are recharged via great user experiences and energizing content; whilst overwhelming choice, bad design and unrefined content have the opposite effect.

Music Industry Self Promotion Privileges Calculator
Please use the Self-Promotion Privileges Calculator (SPPC) below to determine which self-promotion license you qualify for.

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Money can't buy you love

If I had $5,000 to spend on music promotion, I certainly wouldn’t waste it on any of the following:

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Keep Shooting High-Definition Music Video and Related Material

Here’s another reason to shoot high-definition video that’s connected to your music-related ventures:  Demand for short, interesting, compelling, non-explicit, music-infused, high-quality, high-def content is going to be driven by the digital signage industry.

I have been doing some work for a venture that’s focused on digital signage. Here are some stats to consider:

• Digital signage is going to be an explosive growth (exposure) opportunity - with over 500-million connected screens predicted to be in the market by 2013.  
• The combination of all the impressions generated by all the connected digital signs - already makes digital signage one of the largest impression-generating networks on earth.

Since the average exposure (time) to digital signage is relatively short, music videos are perfect for digital signage loops.  Expect new mass-exposure opportunities to grow out of the digital signage networks over the next twenty-four months.

Question:  Do any MTT readers have high-quality music videos that they feel are under exposed?

About Bruce Warila

Posting and announcing your gigs.

So you have a show and you want to promote it. Many artists take this pretty simply. They post on their website, announce it on Myspace, share it on Facebook, sometimes list it on Craigslist and then maybe send it to a local music magazine. There is this idea that people will just make the effort to find out about you. Now in some cases that can be true, but with each gig and show it is much more effective to pull those that already know you, reach out to those that might be some what familiar with you and connect with people that have never heard of you before.

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The primary job of a manager is to take care of your lazy artist…

When a westerner (an American for example) walks by the office of a co-worker, and the co-worker is quietly sitting there doing nothing, the westerner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is lazy and probably slacking.  On the other side of the world, when an easterner (someone from Japan for example) walks by a co-worker, and that co-worker is doing nothing, the easterner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is most likely engaged in deep thought whilst grinding away at a solution to some problem…

I want to say two things in this post: 

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Hot Tip: Be one of the first to jump into the Augmented Reality buzz..

Artists looking for a stunt or promotion angle. Look into augmented reality (Wikipedia).  Six months from now or sooner, journalists will be looking for interesting augmented reality stories.  Come up with something unique and hire Ariel to get you the PR bang you are looking for.  I just posted an example (sort of) on my site.  This is for artists that are also geeks (yes they do exist).

In Defense Of 1,000 True Fans - Part I - The Mountain Goatsl

Since I started my career in this business. I’ve always been working within the 1,000 True Fans model.

Here’s my story: In 1996, I was living in Boulder, CO and I had just started Ariel Publicity, my boutique PR firm.

Acoustic Junction and Zuba two local bands became my first clients. Both had been staples in Boulder for a couple of years, and both made fantastic livings touring and selling their independent releases from coast to coast. They did this with no label, no distribution, and no major marketing budgets: just a manager, a tour manager, and me.

I also represented The Toasters, Bim Skala Bim, The Slackers, and Skinnerbox, (and practically everyone touring during the third wave of Ska).

These artists and dozens like them all made full time livings from playing and touring.  They had a core group of fans that supported them by seeing several shows a year, buying merch and buying albums.

Today, it feels revolutionary when we hear about bands that make a living based on their music.

What happened? What changed?

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Dog Guru

My wife, Roxanne and I saw Jamey Johnson last weekend in an awful club in Clifton Park, N.Y. Johnson’s a country songwriter cum recording artist who’s anything but awful. He’s one of those rare artists who come along once in a generation in a genre, in this case country.

He’s so raw and real it hurts. He’s of the outlaw breed, and his songs — even some of his hits – hold a bare light bulb to reality.

He’s a Montgomery boy, an ex-marine, ex-family man, and ex-rebel rouser, and his voice is as perfectly imperfect as his life. I’m not writing this to pitch Johnson, but country fan or not, this plainspoken poet is worth a listen.

I’m reminded of Steve Earle, who blew me away with his 1986 debut album “Guitar Town.” One literate bad boy with a voice to match. The first time I heard him I wanted to burn my guitar and typewriter (remember those), but eventually returned to my auteur senses.

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And if only 1% of those people...

A friend of mine was asked by a musician to help him do a huge mail-out of CDs.

The musician had pressed up 10,000 copies of his CD in anticipation of 10,000 orders that were sure to come through that week.

He had bought a quarter-page advertisement in the back of a magazine with a circulation of one million people.

He kept saying, “If only one percent of the people reading this magazine buy my CD… that’ll be 10,000 copies! And that’s only one percent!”

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What I would do with a pile of money to spend on an artist?

To generate a return for your investors, you probably need 1,000,000 people to click their mouse three times.  How hard can that be?  In fact, every artist is just three clicks (times 100,000 or so people) away from financial independence.

Here are the clicks:

Click one is the click that leads to discovery of a song or artist.

There are many ways to discover music that only require a single click; here’s one: when a receptive music consumer (one whom is open to, and an early adopter of unknown songs) clicks the ‘recommend’ button (attached to some music site or service) to obtain a recommended playlist of new songs.  

Click two is the easiest click to obtain; it’s simply the click of the play button.

Click three is the hardest click to obtain; click three is the ‘meaningful’ click. 

Meaningful clicks result in a purchase, or a share, or a placement in a personal playlist (where songs are spun until they are loved), or a recommendation to friends, or a trip to a concert, or a public spin (at a party for example), and/or meaningful clicks result in other meaningful actions…

Since most consumers can’t tell the difference between a great song and a good party (where they often hear the best new band on earth whilst drinking and dancing the night away), I would argue that in the absence of context (celebrity or radio endorsement, social group endorsement, or serious momentum to celebrity), most consumers will do nothing; they will not generate a meaningful click. 

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You’re So ‘Yester-moment’

It’s no longer the flavor or the month or what used to be called 24/7 or wall-to-wall coverage. The new media cycle, at least for this nanosecond, is called “perpetual movement.”

In other words, spin or die. That’s the latest from Internet guru Michael Moritz, a Sequoia investor who backed Google, Yahoo and the Sugar Inc. blog-networks.

Quoted in a recent New York Times article, Moritz says:

“Perpetual movement is the essence of survival and prosperity online. If online media and entertainment companies don’t improve every day, they will just wind up as the newfangled version of Reader’s Digest — bankrupt.”

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