February 9, 2012 Headliner.fm is a platform for trading recommendations with other artists on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. You “buy” recommendations using a virtual currency called band bucks, which can be purchased outright for real money or earned by recommending other artists.
January 31, 2012 Google, in my humble opinion, is the most amazing invention since anything else I can really think of. And Google is not just a big search engine, although it would still be awesome if that’s all it did.
Google has been offering a suite of incredibly powerful tools for years; way before ‘in the clouds’ become the next big thing for companies like Apple and Microsoft. And to make it even better, Google has recently created a platform for musicians that offers even further tools that will help independent musicians all over the world to thrive in the digital world.
Google is, quite simply, a portal that truly puts all of the worlds electronic information at your fingertips – there’s a good reason why the word “Google” has become synonymous with searching online.
Here are 9 Hot Tips designed to help you through all of Google’s awesomeness and use it to your benefit.
December 22, 2011 SoundCloud continues to be a terrific location for music promotion. Taking advantage of SoundCloud’s growing community of music lovers should be a strategic practice of all musicians, big and small. Sharing tracks, creating sets, and interacting with other users are all essential parts of good SoundCloud promotion. Add to that commenting, following and group joining, and SoundCloud becomes the online pulse of social music.
December 12, 2011 Jango offers free Pandora-style internet radio. Type in an artist’s name and it generates a playlist of related songs. Jango Airplay lets artists buy their way into the recommendation engine, promising guaranteed airplay alongside your pick of big names.
I’ve been running Jango campaigns pretty much continuously since the service launched in March of 2009. My songs have been played 270,000 times, 23% of which were unpaid “organic” plays. It cost me $1841.50 out of my own pocket, plus at least that much in affiliate earnings from my previous articles on the topic. What’s my return on that investment? There’s no way to know. Jango reports 25,000 likes and 9800 fans, but those terms have little meaning. A like on Jango is a simple thumbs-up that has nothing to do with Facebook, and most of those “fans” are unreachable. An average of one email address per day has been shared with me since that feature launched in early 2010, but those 700 email addresses alone don’t justify the expense. The reason I stick with it is because I’ve seen so many Jango listeners become genuine fans. They friend me on Facebook, reply to my email updates, comment on my YouTube videos, and yes, buy my music. With the possible exception of Facebook Ads, I’m convinced Jango is the best passive promotion out there.October 7, 2011 Welcome back to Musician’s Arsenal. This week we’ll be going over analytics. Too few artists actually pay attention to their social media analytics. Some just don’t know analytics for social media exist, some don’t know where to find them and some don’t think it’s important. It’s time to remedy all of this here and now. Crowdbooster recently launched the public version of their site (it had been in private beta for a while), and they join a legion of other social media analytics solutions available to musicians. I choose Crowdbooster to write about due to it’s ease of use and affordability (how’s free?). Crowdbooster provides straight ahead, no nonsense analytics in an easily digestible format.
October 5, 2011 Running a Facebook ad campaign is confusing. You bid for ad placement, but the price you pay bears little relation to your bid. What’s the difference between reach and social reach, connections and clicks, CPC and CPM? More importantly, is there any way to tell how many people played, downloaded, and shared your song, or signed up for your mailing list? (answer: no, there’s not)
ReverbNation’s new Promote It tool addresses those shortcomings, and then some. You pick a song, photo, and budget, and it automatically generates dozens of optimized Facebook ads based on past Promote It campaigns, and continually optimizes your campaign based on the performance of those ads. New fans click through to customized landing pages that track not just clicks and likes, but plays, downloads, shares, wall posts, and mailing list signups. As I’m quoted as saying in the press release, “It’s the ultimate ‘set it and forget it’ fan-making machine!” I was invited to try it out and provide feedback during the beta period, and I’m flattered that some of my suggestions made it into the final product. So far I’ve run six campaigns. Let’s walk through the creation and performance of my latest and most successful one.Developing a Strategy, Effective Publicity and Promotion, Expanding Your Fan Base, Facebook, Internet Strategies, Resources, & Websites, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Music Sites, Music Social Media, Selling Your Music, Social Media, Understanding Your Market, music sales tagged Facebook, Marketing, ReverbNation, passive promotion, promotion | 1 Reference September 2, 2011 So much of what I write comes from my life experiences; either having worked with bands or from my being a fan and consumer. Life is full of many great lessons. Here is a lesson that hit me over the weekend.
August 17, 2011 It’s true that industry professionals and artist mind sets could not be farther apart. They are on two totally different sides of the game, yet working together as a team. All industry people probably receive anywhere from 15 to 200 emails or calls a week from indie artists wanting to work with them or get their advice. This is not an exaggeration. Most of these calls/emails are unfortunately misguided and are not going to get the artist anywhere just based on their approach. As an indie artist I am sure this must be incredibly frustrating… constantly sending out emails to industry people and not receiving replies. You’ve been told that to be proactive you have to mail, call, email, and send presents to industry representatives to get their attention. This is NOT true… let me help you out here.
July 25, 2011 Quality graphic design is expensive. I paid $500 just to license the cover image for my last album, plus $600 for the rest of the design. That’s fine every couple of years, but now that I’m releasing songs individually, I need a cover design every month or two. I decided to give 99designs a try, and the results far exceeded my expectations. For $145, I got 96 custom designs from 33 different designers. Sure, some were amateur, but a solid half were usable, and a handful were excellent.
Sound too good to be true?
July 14, 2011 Hey there, Jason here with another edition of Musician’s Arsenal. This week we’re talking about Turntable.fm, yet another new site for us to learn and love. At this point, Turntable.fm is all the rage. It has some 140,000 users already in its first month and appears to be picking up speed. Users sign into Turntable.fm with their facebook login, which makes it easy to find friends already using Turntable.fm.
June 10, 2011 We test a lot of Apps and tools and look at a lot of websites. On behalf of our artists and me and the Cyber PR team are going to start featuring them here at MTT. I’m thrilled to introduce you to Jason Loomis. Jason has worked at Ariel Publicity for a year this week, first as an intern, then as my assistant and now as our Director of New Media Maker Relations. Enjoy this first installment of The Musician’s Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools and Sites
May 17, 2011 Two months ago, I began implementing Ariel Hyatt and Carla Lynne Hall’s strategy to increase my Twitter following, as laid out in their book Musician’s Roadmap to Facebook and Twitter. The basic idea is to follow potential fans in the hope that they will follow back. I discovered that the more selective I am in choosing who to follow, the more likely I am to connect with people who may become genuine fans. I’ll share my process and results below.
February 22, 2011 It’s no secret Justin Bieber’s ascension to pop superstardom started with a cover song (a version of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick”). Could he have achieved an “underdog to celebrity” rise without one? Maybe, but Bieber performed a new spin on a decades-old formula readily available to any recording artist looking to acquire new fans and make additional money from their recordings.
Cover songs (a.k.a. “remakes”) provide an easy path to building audiences. Releasing one is similar to getting introduced to a new person by way of mutual friend (the song) rather than through a chance encounter (an original tune found on a Bandcamp / MySpace page). A positive introduction is more likely when there is immediate common ground.
Cover songs also provide a unique way of tapping into alternate revenue streams for only modest expense (i.e. money spent securing the required mechanical license and paying royalties via Limelight, time spent learning the song, etc.). So why is this an effective way of promoting your music? Let’s explore…
January 18, 2011 Q: Can you talk a little bit about the musical environment in Leeds when Gang of Four was first formed? What were you listening to? And how revolutionary was punk for you at the time you were first made aware of it?
A: I had been listening to John Peel’s BBC radio show for a few years prior to landing at Leeds. Peel’s unparalleled taste in music and his extraordinary talent at filtering a playlist for each night’s radio show (he allegedly listened to all submissions to his show), exposed my young ears to a broad swathe of music, some contemporary some not, and as the era of punk arrived he would of course add punk bands to his ever-expanding playlist. And yet he didn’t play it at the expense of his usual faire at the time, such as Robert Wyatt, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, and David Bowie. Or “prog” bands like Soft Machine and Matching Mole as well as many underground bands of the time including Welsh outfit Man, and pre-punk bands such as Blurt.
