Attending a music biz conference? Here's the REAL way to do it....

Being the cheap music-biz conference slut that I am, I’m often asked my advice for people attending a conference. Here it is:

Read the book called How to Talk to Anyone or any book about how to be a great listener.

Go there and pretend to be an extrovert for a few hours. Walk up to strangers and ask them questions. Be interested in others. Learn about what they do. What their main challenges are. What their goals are. Get their business card. Take notes.

Then follow up 2 weeks after the conference, and THEN do some business, one-on-one, in the follow-up.

They’ll remember you as incredibly nice and a fascinating conversationalist. And you’ll have their full attention 2 weeks after the conference, instead of their divided attention during it.

The ugly man behind the curtain in music publicity...

This is a post that I have been working on for a few months… I have been hesitating to publish it because it exposes the ugly man behind the curtain in music publicity.

40,000 CDs come out every year and that means hundreds of thousands of CDs will be mailed out for review consideration.

Where does all of this product go?  This is part of the dirty and taboo subject that no one ever talked about.  No one until now that is.  Randall Roberts of The LA Weekly recently took a bold step by writing an article that exposes the truth about what happens to the thousands of promo CDs that get mailed to music journalists like him. It’s called:

“Gravy Train? With so much music available at the click of a mouse, do tastemakers really need hard copies anymore? Is it worth the waste?”

“Often, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, the so-called “tastemakers” do just that. Of course, finding anybody in the music business to actually talk about this vast and ever-fluctuating underground economy is tough. Ask a publicist what he does with unwanted promos and there’s usually an awkward pause, as though you’d just asked after his porno collection. Few are willing to go on the record regarding their income stream for fear of being blacklisted, audited, or, Bono forbid, sued by Universal, which views every CD it sends out to tastemakers to be its property in perpetuity, long after the disc has languished in a crate somewhere.”

I spoke to Roberts at length while he was writing this piece and I was not quoted in this article but I think it is an extremely eye opening subject for those of you interested in the subject of getting national (or any) publicity and what you are up against on the other side.

As a recovering traditional music publicist and the owner of a digital PR firm, I meet with people at all levels of the music industry.  And they are all mystified and unhappy with their publicity situation: They want more than they have and when they hire a publicist they are left feeling unsatisfied.  I have heard complaints from all levels of artists, about all types of PR firms from the crème de la crème firms who handle household names to the smaller firms that work with emerging artists.

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Music Blogs - Are They The New Radio?

A couple of months ago I received an email from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI). They asked me to remove a music file (MP3) of ‘Silence’ a track from Portishead. Under the rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the IFPI has every right to ask me to comply with the law as it stands. To avoid litigation I complied. I then received an email from the office of the IFPI asking me if I would agree to an email interview that would be posted on their sister site, Pro-Music.org; I said yes, here it is:

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Eco-touring - survival is the mother of invention (or something)

Not sure how I missed this first time round but Geoff Hickman (aka DeadBeatGeoff) was recently interviewed on BBC 5 live about the whole idea of Sustainable, or ‘Green’, touring. Here’s the piece from the radio:



It’s something that’s been getting a lot of interest of late, largely thanks to Radiohead’s attempts to do the low-carbon eco-tour thing (read their road manager’s thoughts here).

But as usual, the Radiohead stuff is a massive red-herring. Very very few musicians are in a position to think about their own lighting show (unless it’s an Orbital-style torches-mounted-on-your-head approach). No, the situation with Televox, the band Geoff manages, is way more pertinent. They are a small club-level band, trying to play some shows and build an audience. They’re not wondering whether to air-freight or charter a plane for their 35 tonnes of back-line and lights. They’re trying to work out if they can get an amp on a train or not…

This all piqued my interest because Lobelia and I did such a tour last year. Back then, I still owned a car, and was used to loading up my car with my bass-friendly PA, a pile of instruments, whoever else I was working with and driving to the gig. (even at this stage, I’m one step down from the ‘need to hire a van’ stage, but we’ll get back to that). But for our tour, we wanted to do it all on the train - I’d done a two week tour like that on my own back in Oct 2006, and we wanted to get Interail (UK)/ Eurail (US) passes and use trains all over the continent.

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Social Media, Blogs and Music: Some Philosophical Thoughts

These days the music marketing world is all abuzz with phrases such as - Social Media, Social Advertising, Facebook Ads, Mass Media Networking Advertising…..etc, etc.. In recent months I have been a panelist at the L I S A seminar in Portland and the Hawaii MusicTech Conference in Honolulu. L.I.S.A., which is an acronym for Lessons In Social Advertising, was aimed at marketers and advertisers who [for some reason] don’t understand social networks or haven’t yet worked out how to advertise effectively to them. It focused on topics such as ‘What is social advertising?’ and ‘How do you get young people to recommend your brand?’ The Hawaii MusicTech panel was presented by the Northwest Chapter of NARAS [The Grammy Org] of which I am a Board Director, and we discussed how musicians could effectively use social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to reach an audience and communicate with them.

Two sides of the table as it were. One group wants to advertise, or push, their messages to a mass audience, while the other wants to create a network of like-minded people who hopefully will pull content such as free MP3s and then “evangelize” on behalf of the musicians by spreading messages by electronic word of mouth. With no hint of schizophrenia I happily migrate between both camps. What follows here is an attempt to share my thinking with bands or musicians on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to embracing the many social networking sites that are available to them.

To understand and embrace social networking is to place the idea that says “technology makes this possible” to one side and embrace the idea of the basic human need to stay in touch with other like-minded people at all times. As Clay Shirky says “The desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct.” Think about rock concerts for a minute…..

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What does it mean to be a 'professional' musician.

One of the things that constantly amazes me about the discussions around the future of the music industry is how often it’s taken for granted that

• a) all musicians are trying to become celebrities and
• b) behaving ‘like a rock star’ is an acceptable reason for famous musicians not bothering to interact with fans.

I had a conversation the other day with a bloke who works in new media for a large independent label (I say ‘conversation’; he actually shouted at me at a party for 20 minutes, but I’m told he’s rather nice when he’s not drunk). While talking about musicians and social networking, he shot down the idea that musicians should be part of their own online strategy by basically saying that it’s ‘too hard’ to get them to do it and they ‘don’t understand it’.

The problem with this line of thought is that it’s predicated on a myth about musicians playing pop stars. It’s based on the notion that their unwillingness to provide the necessary online material to make their web presence worth having is excusable because hey, they’re a rock star, you can’t expect them to help out.

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From Exposure to Conversion "How to Create a Real Fan" - Part 2

Thanks for the comments I received on the Fan Funnel model we employ at ReverbNation.  I’m still looking for more feedback, so please speak up if you have any.

Now, to continue the train of thought begun in the first post…

The Fan Funnel, in any incarnation, is incomplete.  It is a ‘stock’ measurement in that it tells you how many fans you have in each section of the funnel at any given time.  But it fails to measure some important things like the trajectory the Artist has (rate at which fans are entering the Funnel or moving down the funnel), and how deeply engaged those fans are with the content, to name a few.  As a result of this deficiency, we developed a proprietary metric for every Artist that uses ReverbNation called a Band Equity(TM) Score.  Artists use this in conjunction with the Fan Funnel.

Band Equity(TM) takes into account four factors that add up to the current value of the Artists’ portfolio of fan relationships (normalized as a ‘score’), as well as the trajectory of that value:

(1)  Breadth
How many people does your content touch, overall?  How many listen or even view it in a given time period?  Having your content on many web pages, touching many people is a great way to understand the total conversion ‘potential’, and might be summed up as ‘awareness’.  All else equal, an Artist whose content touches more people has a higher potential  for converting fans and developing relationships than an Artist whose content touches fewer.

(2) Influence
How frequently do those people seek out a second instance of the content (like play a second song or video or view the blog after they play a song)?  What is the ‘open rate’ on your emails to fans (what is the probability they will actually open and read it instead of just deleting it when it comes in)?  How long do they play a song or video before they turn it off and do something else?  All else equal, an Artist that garners more engagement per interaction has stronger and deeper relationships with their fans.

(3) Recency
When was the last time you engaged your fans?  All else equal, an Artist that had their fans engaged yesterday has more Band Equity(TM) than an Artist that last engaged them six months ago.  Recency causes your Band Equity (TM) to deteriorate over time if the # of fan interactions and level of engagement drop off.   Think of this as the main ‘trajectory’ element.

(4) Access
Of your total ‘FANS’ and ‘LISTENERS’, how many of them can you contact without the assistance of a social network?  If the only way you have to communicate with your ‘FANS’ is via a MySpace Bulletin, then you do not have the Band Equity(TM) that another Artist, all things equal, has if they can send a custom email or other custom message promoting their show or new release (full disclosure:  ReverbNation provides a free email service for Artists, Labels, Managers, and Venues).  This element cannot be underestimated by Artists.  Social networks are a great place to RENT fan relationships, but the most savvy and successful Artists find ways to OWN their fan relationships, so they can access them when they want, and how they need.

From these four elements we construct a Band Equity(TM) Score for each Artist (and we also build our Charts from those scores, because we believe that it measures the right things).  It is updated once per day.  The goal is to raise their awareness of these important factors in their success, and to give them visibility into which promotional/marketing efforts deliver the desired result - stronger, deeper, and more fan relationships.

 
Let’s face it, record labels, talent buyers, gig promoters, and brands (people who pay the Artist) do not believe in MySpace friend counts anymore.  The numbers can be easily spoofed and a few bad apples have spoiled it for everyone else.  Artists, likewise, should not measure themselves by a metric like this alone, as the correlation between MySpace friend totals and commercial success is dubious, at best.  That is not to say that establishing friend relationships at MySpace is not a valuable endeavor (it can definitely add to awareness, and MySpace is probably still the best place to go to harvest fan relationships).  But, as a single metric for understanding the ‘financial potential’ of your band (notice I did not say the ‘artistic value’), it falls short.  We provide tools for the Artists to actually incorporate the activity happening at MySpace, Facebook,  blogs, homepages, etc, into the Band Equity (TM) Score, so they can have a global view of their success.  Its a big music world out there on the web, and Artists need a way to consolidate and understand how those fan relationships are changing across the board.



 

From Exposure to Conversion - 'How to Create a Real Fan' - Part One

Steve Lawson recently posted an entry on understanding and measuring the path that fans take from simply listening to a song, all the way to ‘conversion’ into a fan.
 
That got me thinking about the Fan Funnel metaphor we use at ReverbNation.  I am looking for feedback from Music Think Tank readers on the steps below and the process we use to enable artists to essentially operate a “Fan Funnel”.  Our goal is to provide a framework for understanding the process, and to provide tools for the Artists to experiment with marketing and promotion efforts so they can see what ‘works’ for them.  Here is a crash course in what the FAN FUNNEL  is:

 
Step 1 - Exposure
People must be exposed to the content.  Once exposed, there is some probability that they will either move down the funnel, or pass the exposure along to friends who may move down the funnel. People who check out the content are called ‘LISTENERS’.  Certainly the quality of the content matters here.  Good songs and good videos will have a higher probability of moving folks down the funnel, but for ALL artists, increasing the number of exposures will have a positive impact on their raw conversion numbers.  As a result, we began to provide tools for increasing exposure for the artist (widgets that make it easy to post the music and let fans spread it, street team functions so that the Artist can encourage existing loyal fans to spread it for them, applications for social networks, etc).
 
Step 2 - Starting A Relationship With The Fan
Once a person is exposed to the content, it is imperative that the Artist offer up some way for them to identify themselves to the Artist as a ‘FAN’ of the music.  This could be going straight to a ‘conversion’ by letting them join the street team or providing them with a purchase option, but most often it simply manifests with a person joining the mailing list or just identifying themselves as a ‘FAN’ of the Artist.  We ensure that potential ‘FANS’ can do this with every exposure tool we offer.  Its critical that Artists OWN this ‘FAN’ relationship for themselves, and not RENT them from the various social networks on which the relationship was created – more on the importance of this later.
 
Step 3 - Converting FANS Into STREET TEAMERS
Once you OWN the relationship with the ‘FAN’, you have a ‘pipeline’ of folks that you can talk to, on your own terms, and in any way you wish.  This is critical to success by our observations, as this allows the Artist the most flexibility in the messaging they convey to their ‘FANS’.  The next logical step, beyond asking them to buy a product (ticket, song, t-shirt), is to ask them if they want to exchange loyalty or behavior for something of value to them (something you can give away that actually deepens the relationship with them, like a backstage pass).  This is the act of building a ‘STREET TEAM’.  Artists that have ‘STREET TEAMS’, all else equal, find much more success than those that do not.  In addition, these Artists have the ability to execute marketing and promotional programs for less money than those that do not possess a ‘STREET TEAM’, as they work for non-monetary items like being put on a guest list, etc.
 
Step 4 - Getting Fans To Promote You
Now that you have some ‘STREET TEAMERS’, the next step is to give them tasks to do that promote your music or add more ‘FANS’.  This can take many forms, but usually involves prompting them with the right tools and clear instructions on where to post your content on the web in order to help you (something you need to OWN the relationships to do properly).  Many Artists have an untapped base of extremely loyal fans who have never been engaged to actively help them grow their popularity.  This is a wasted marketing asset.  The most successful Artists that we have observed tap into their fans at least once per month to help them spread content, recruit new fans, or promote a specific product (we provide tools to help them do this).  You are probably thinking that this can only help established Artists, but we have seen the power of this tool for even the newest Artists, and it is POWERFUL.  Remember, Artists with smaller followings often have a familiar relationship with their fans (read: friends and family) where established Artists only have an affinity relationship.  It is often the case that these close relationships can be the seed crystal that these Artists need to grow from obscurity to local recognition in their area.
 
That is the ‘FAN FUNNEL’ in a nutshell, and it is the framework with which we encourage Artists to view their business.  We provide ‘FAN FUNNEL’ stats directly to every Artist that uses our site in hopes that they will use it as the framework for understanding how to approach the challenges they face at growing their popularity.  It is based on the empirical evidence we have around the things that make a ‘successful’ Artist.  Soon we will be able to incorporate the actual sales data that come back from digital retailers like iTunes, closing the loop on how the activities of the ‘FAN FUNNEL’ impact real business objectives like selling music.
 
But the ‘FAN FUNNEL’, even as it grows in scope, is deficient in some respects.  It does not take into account the relative value of your content above other Artists (comparing you to standards in your genre), nor does it factor in a few other things of critical importance to understanding how you are doing, overall, at growing your fan base in both breadth and depth (especially depth).  For this, we developed an overall metric of the Artists’ ability to develop and nurture fan relationships called ‘BAND EQUITY’.  I will post a follow-up entry on how we look at this concept, but I’d love your feedback on the FAN FUNNEL in the meantime.

Digital music can’t be marketed, it can only be found.

Click here to read the update to this post.

With the exception of marketing music to naïve teenagers that consume anything that’s fed to them on FM radio, it’s becoming impossible to market music to people that know what they like.

In the old days, mystery, intrigue, celebrity, and real or imagined bullshit benefits could be baked into the product and into the packaging.  Record labels profited wildly by being experts at it, but digital music has changed all this.

Music is now the most naked product on Earth.  Music sits upon the shelf unwrapped, raw and void of packaging.  Consumers can fully try it before they buy it; they can take it home unmolested; and they can pay for it randomly, or not at all.  I can’t think of another product that is so fully exposed and vulnerable to quick and precise, pre-purchase decision-making as music.  You click.  You listen.  You buy.  It doesn’t get any quicker or more precise than that.  

I fully believe, of the five billion tracks sold on iTunes to date, a billion (20% or FAR more) have been sold to consumers that have NEVER seen the artist, have NEVER visited the artist’s website or MySpace page, and have NEVER had any interaction with the artist…other than exposure to a thirty second clip.  A billion(s) of iTunes purchase decisions have been driven off simple recommendation algorithms (those that liked X, also liked Y).  

Fortunately for artists that make great songs, the same naked qualities that make music impossible to market, also make music the easiest product in the world to recommend.  Once again, I can’t think of another product that has the viral qualities that are inherent in music.  It’s the only product where the entire product (the MP3) can be easily attached to the recommendation.  Try doing that with chicken nuggets.

In my mind (no jokes please), the greatest unintended consequence of being stuck with a product that can’t be marketed, and can only be recommended, will be the overwhelming desire to seek brutal feedback and rapid validation.  You can no longer say: it’s a marketing problem…when marketing was not an option.  The only questions worth pondering are: does this song suck?  If so, how can I make it better?  Nothing else really matters in the recommendation-driven world of naked digital music.

Measuring 'depth of interaction' or "you can't eat web-hits"

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we measure the depth of interaction that we have with our audience. So often we get obsessed with hit-counters, relying on services like StumbleUpon to drive traffic to our sites, or blogging about ‘buzz’ topics in the hope that people find us.

The problem with this “measurement” is that it doesn’t take into consideration scale or depth. There’s a ‘scale of interaction’ people travel on towards us - from no knowledge of what we do to joining our street-team and printing their own fan t-shirts when we’ve sold out of the ones we had printed. Stumbleupon traffic often doesn’t even lift people to the level of ‘name recognition’. I was recently interviewed for a podcast by Penny Jackson of the BBC. The podcast is hosted by The Creative Coffee Club, part of the Institute Of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, and we talked in depth about the idea of using social media to curate conversations with our audience, rather that seeing the web as yet another scatter-shot broadcast medium. You can listen to the post cast here.

One of the problems musicians often have with social media is the idea that ‘talking to our audience is what we do until we achieve ‘proper’ succes’ - working on the assumption that we’re all heading towards riches and limos. Which is a bit like buying lottery tickets as part of your music strategy - it’s not worth planning for, and generally messes up your life because of the baggage that comes with it.

So I’m definitely looking at ways to continue talking directly with my audience, while increasing both the size of it and the depth of interaction.

How do you measure that depth of interaction? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Capitalizing On Fan Feedback

Imagine you’re an independent DIY artist that’s just starting out. You’ve recorded some music and started promoting it online. The initial response is overwhelmingly positive. You get emails from friends and strangers saying they can’t stop listening to your tunes. People leave you MySpace comments saying your music is the best they’ve heard in years. Someone on a message board has declared your release their favorite album of the year.

Encouraged by this feedback, you decide it’s time to target bloggers, journalists, online radio stations, and other “tastemakers” in hopes of expanding your fan base. But as an unsigned artist without much of a track record, you know it will be hard to get these folks’ attention. Bloggers and DJs are inundated with new music every day from bands proclaiming how great they are. Without any significant press, tours, or other achievements to point to, you worry that you won’t be able to differentiate yourself from the pack. Maybe they’ll eventually get around to listening to what you send them, but you’re afraid you may get forgotten or ignored if you can’t prove in writing that you are special. You know your music is great, and that ultimately it will speak for itself. But before that can happen, you first have to speak for your music in a convincing way.

So how do you do it? Is there a way to leverage the listener feedback you’ve received to get more press and promotion? Could you use glowing MySpace comments and forum posts in the same way that bands traditionally use press quotes? Would writers or DJs find your supporters’ comments credible enough? Are they going to care what a bunch of no-name listeners have to say about you?  

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. It seems to me that exceptionally positive fan feedback should carry some weight, if organized and presented correctly… right? What do you think?

Update on March 25, 2008 by Andrew Dubber

One thing I'm forever telling independent artists is that Do It Yourself doesn't necessarily mean Do Everything Yourself. Everyone has skills and abilities as well as areas where they could do with a bit of assistance. Traditionally, that assistance has come with the help of a label. But not everyone needs a label anymore. What they need is a bit of help and/or guidance in the areas where they're not so strong.

I'm not convinced that every artist should be targetting bloggers, journalists and online radio stations on their own behalf. Some should - others should seek the professional assistance of marketing people of some stripe or another. Likewise production. Not everyone's a mastering engineer. Not everyone knows why you might want one.

Some people need the work done on their behalf - others just need a few pointers: how, where, why, who and what...

I agree that fan feedback and testimonials carry a lot of weight - but these things need to be woven into a bigger picture. It's worth remembering that when you want to do it alone... you don't have to do it alone.