It's kind of not ABOUT you

I went to a blogging conference in Chicago the other week. I learned a lot about the business of blogging - how to attract an audience, how to monetise your website (see all the ads all over Music Think Tank? No. Obviously.) and how to rank more highly on the Google searches. All really useful and interesting stuff for someone who does what I do. Oddly, there was almost nothing about how to write - but it wasn’t really that sort of conference.

However, I guess the one ‘takeaway’ point is that when you blog - and if you’re involved in marketing at all (hint: you are), then you should be blogging -  it’s important to remember that your blog’s not about you.

I mean - of course it’s about you - but it’s not about you. 

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Using a Momentum-Toward-Celebrity Strategy for Marketing Music

On the first version of this post, I left it up to other “thinkers” to connect the dots.  That didn’t exactly go as planned, so here’s version two with more information.  I plan to delete the first version soon.  I saved it so people could copy over comments if they wish.  Everyone’s comments helped me to create this version; I think there’s a blogging strategy that comes out of this.

Food or the lead singer’s sweaty t-shirt.  I’ll take the shirt…
Jake Halpern writes in the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 4th, 2007 “Britney Spears, Breaking News”) that our need to stargaze [celebrities] may be primal.  Halpren goes on to point out a study done at the Center For Cognitive Science at Duke University that shows that monkeys will choose to view images of other dominant monkeys instead of eating…if given the choice.  

This reminds me of the influence that celebrity has over consumer decision-making when it comes to music.  Songs don’t sound better and artists don’t get sexier when their songs make it to radio, but that doesn’t stop the average consumer from getting hot and hormonal, or standing in long lines without food, or buying tickets instead of…food, for any artist that’s in heavy rotation on pop radio.  

The more momentum toward becoming a celebrity, the more “dominant” an artist appears, the higher the level of commitment any artist obtains from fans.  Sadly enough, the opposite seems to be true.  Momentum toward becoming a celebrity (or not) is like virtual Viagra; it generates ups and downs for every artist.

It seems to me, that record labels are experts at exploiting the (primal) need, the desire and the want in fans to connect to artists that have momentum toward becoming celebrities, and that perhaps every artist should consider consciously creating a Momentum-Toward-Celebrity strategy as part of his/her marketing plan.

What is a Momentum-Toward-Celebrity Strategy?
I’ve been selling and marketing things for twenty years.  A Momentum-Toward-Celebrity Strategy is something I never considered until I began observing, learning and practicing the art of marketing music.  In fact, I wish someone had sat me down and said “look forget about what think you know about marketing, you need to make sure you have a Momentum-Toward-Celebrity strategy that begins on day one.  Cars and computers don’t become celebrities, but artists do.  People get passionate about people that demonstrate momentum”.  

Here’s what I think: a Momentum-Toward-Celebrity strategy is:

• First, it’s simply acknowledging that you need momentum toward becoming some sort of a celebrity to maximize your promotion efforts on every level; no matter how big or small your budget or fan pool is.
• Second, it’s the conscious act of communicating momentum.
• Third, it’s planning beyond next month.  I believe you need to plan now, and then work like hell to accomplish the things you plan to communicate as momentum over the next 12 to 14 months.
• Fourth, your slips into reverse momentum should be minimal (frequency) and barely measurable (the occurrences).

Momentum-Toward-Celebrity - The Things People Measure
There are a thousand little things that I could point to, that you could do and then report as momentum.  However, for this post, I am going to list some general/broad ideas for you to think about.

• Find known people from the industry that fans can Google and/or recognize.  Simply ask these people to advise you, and if you can list them and their short bios on your blog.
• Are you playing the same songs, at the same places you were playing at last year?  Continually upgrade the places you play at and the music you perform.
• Find cool sponsors to support you, even if it’s in the smallest way possible.  Appearing as though your financial support is growing is part of demonstrating momentum.  
• Constantly upgrade.  Some people are natural recruiters, they know how to attract and convince people to help them CONTINUALLY upgrade everything about their presentation, including their music.
• Obtain reportable momentum data from every site possible. (Important: Read next section on Song Quality.)

NOTE: Those of you that are great at constantly upgrading everything and everyone around you, have to be skilled at keeping everyone happy, especially when you don’t have cash.  There are ways of doing this with integrity, and there are ways of doing this without leaving the people that supported you out in the cold.  Email me if you need advice in this area.    

Momentum-Toward-Celebrity and Song Quality
The way pop music is marketed today, you may get the impression that momentum toward celebrity is more important than the quality of your music.
   
The circle diagram on the left represents what happens today.  Song quality is the inner circle and the core, and everything outside of the core represents all of the other activity that adds up to success.  Although song quality is proportionately smaller, it’s still the core and a necessary component to success.

The circle diagram on the right with the larger song quality core represents what I believe the near future will look like.  Song quality will be the single most important factor that drives your momentum toward celebrity status.

What’s the difference between today and tomorrow?  Social networks built around music, recommendation engines and data analysis (of iTunes data for example) will make it extremely difficult to fake momentum.  Decisions will not be driven by a couple of guys working at a record label.  Decisions will be based upon the data that demonstrates your momentum.  Consumers will act upon this data, record labels will act upon this data, and programming directors at radio stations will act upon this data.  In addition, every bit of data you acquire, such as a win on OurStage or numerous recommendations on Aime Street, become your reportable (and observable) momentum.

Communicating Your Momentum-Toward-Celebrity
First and foremost, start a blog.  Websites were cool in 2004.  A blogsite is the way to go now.  Learn about RSS and use your blog to communicate your momentum.  Feeds from your blog can be reposted on Facebook and MySpace and on other social networks.  For advice on how to report momentum to the press, I will recommend Ariel Hyatt or Bob Baker, both are also Music Think Tank authors.  Also, Justin Boland (AudibleHype) and Julian Moore (Frontend) are bloggers and artists that think about communicating momentum and gorilla marketing every day. 

Does Momentum-Toward-Celebrity Matter to 1,000 Fans?
Different people have different ideas of what celebrity means.  Furthermore, everyone evaluates momentum differently.  What seems like great progress to some, may seem like old news to others.  If you are pursuing a small group of loyal and dedicated fans, I want to ask you this question: if a small pond is all you need, do you ever want to appear as a shrinking fish in the little pond?  I agree that your music may become timeless to your true fans, and that your lack of celebrity status may never matter again, but what if you are just starting out, isn’t momentum toward celebrity still important to establishing true fans?  Pleases be mindful of the importance I assigned to song quality when answering this question in a comment.

Commenting on Momentum-Toward-Celebrity
I would love to hear from people that have more experience at marketing music than I do.  I have given a name (Momentum-Toward-Celebrity) to, and perhaps oversimplified a component of artist/music marketing that deserves more attention from someone that has a list of success stories that they can point to.  If you have more ideas/examples on achieving the appearance of momentum toward celebrity, please leave them in a comment.

A Buyer's Market: The way we purchase online music

The NDP Group published a study this week that found that only 10% of Amazon MP3 customers had also purchased music on iTunes. The study also found some significant age and gender differences between iTunes and Amazon MP3 customers.  

When I read this, it reminded me of an important point which musicians and labels should always keep in mind: There’s not an online music market; there are many online music markets. And each one is its own little world with its own set of core users.

Most consumers I know, myself included, tend to gravitate towards one or maybe two online music services and use them almost exclusively to acquire music. The Rhapsody folks I know use Rhapsody. The iTunes loyalists use iTunes. The only times they venture out to other services is when they really want something that they can’t find on their preferred site, or in certain instances when they want to buy from an artist directly.

When it comes to marketing your own music, it can be tempting to want to sell your album only on those sites that offer the highest payouts. Or to think you can convince droves of listeners to purchase your music from your own website. But the reality is that it’s very difficult to get customers to go where you want them to go.

It’s critical to make your work available wherever your fans like to purchase music. That includes smaller, niche sites as well as the big retailers. Putting your music in more places is like opening stores in new cities. It can only increase your customer base. And the likelihood that you’ll cut into downloads on one site by making your music available on other sites – even for very cheap or free – is low. If I want to buy your album and I’m an iTunes user, I probably won’t even look at Amazon, Amie Street or other sites where I could find your music for a lower price. I’m just going to buy it from iTunes. It’s convenient and it’s what I know.

Instead of worrying about cannibalizing or losing sales, focus on being present everywhere that your potential fans buy music. You have little to lose and much to gain by doing so.

Music Industry Trends have a Lesson for Radio

Ah, how things change.

I have spent a lot of time studying the pictures in this post. The data illustrated here is not new, of course. We all know music sales are going to Hell in a proverbial handbasket.

But when you chart the data as National Geographic has done so here (from their December issue), some new insights arise which have implications for radio as well as the music business.

These charts, especially the second one, is incredibly illuminating for several reasons:

1. It shows the transitional nature of all - ALL - recorded technology that distributes music to consumers. That is, one technology shrinks as another expands, ad infinitum. Radio, too, is a technology, a very well established and popular one. The erosion we’re currently seeing in radio usage - especially among the young - is not a hiccup. It is part of a long-term trend we are only beginning to experience. The more we face competitive alternatives which substitute for radio’s core benefits, the more this trend will accelerate.

2. This chart obviously excludes music distributed for free - a.k.a. “illegally.” One can assume that the steady decline of CD sales is matched - and exceeded - by a stunning rise in off-the-chart downloads. That is, demand doesn’t go away, it just moves to something else. Being in the right place at the right time with the right revenue model is the key.

3. This chart shows the amount of time it generally takes for transformation to occur. For example, it took 16 years for CD sales to peak. If it takes as long for CD’s to disappear, then by 2015 the last CD will be sold. Radio’s erosion - and the revenue problems that result in part from this - is not going to stop. We need a model and a strategy that anticipates and exploits the future, not a head-in-the-sand public relations gimmick. We need to surf the trends, not fight them.

4. This chart shows the absurdity of relating the present state of the radio (yes, radio) industry to any time in its ancient history. For example, the birth of FM back in the late 60’s to 70’s lived in a technological environment which this chart clearly shows has completely disappeared. It’s like comparing the Jimmy Kimmel show to the Dean Martin Roast. Let’s compare apples to apples.

5. This chart shows that older technologies yield to newer technologies if the benefits those newer technologies provide substitute for and beat the ones they replace. CD’s are unambiguously better than tapes - they provide similar benefits, but do a better job of what they do. If I can get music in my car delivered in a radio-like experience from Microsoft or Slacker or whomever - and if it has broad enough distribution - then my radio listening will shift - assuming it’s music I’m looking for (and it may not be).

6. Growth and decline in this chart are “steady” in all cases, not “explosive.” It may be strongly steady, but it’s steady. Thus the best reflection of future momentum for any new technology in this space is the momentum among its early adopters. Not the crazy gadget freaks, but the next wave of users, the early adopters. So what does this mean for radio? Well, if the momentum for a new technology, say, HD radio, is slow at the onset it is not likely to accelerate with time. What you see is what you’ll get. Look at this chart and all the evidence is right there. Ah, you might say, but look at the slow growth of cassettes. Would that it could be 1980 again and we could be faced with the slim choices of that era.

7. It is clear that the horse has left the barn on tangible media for the music industry and all things digital are the immediate future. That means it’s inevitable that the music industry will make up the shortfall in music sales with licensing (including licensing revenue from radio) and (drumroll, please) advertising. And a world of music for free with advertising is functionally identical to music-oriented radio. That is, the competition is going to get much tougher, folks.

Enjoy these charts. There’s a lot to learn hidden in those numbers.

[Double-click to enlarge]

Update on April 8, 2008 by Bruce Warila

I asked Mark to revisit this post for Music Think Tank because I believe the graphs and Mark's analysis of them tells a lot.  Just to be clear, when Mark says "the competition is going to get much tougher, folks", he is referring to the radio industry.  

I believe the takeaways for artists are:

1) As Mark said - the music industry will make up the shortfall in music sales with other music-derived revenues.  However the timing, according to the historical patterns demonstrated in the graphs is important.  The last CD should be sold in the year 2015, and as CD sales decline other revenue sources will fill the void.  Unfortunately, those "other revenue sources" have not been fully sussed out; there is not one clear and simple "standard" that's emerging that everyone can gravitate toward.  The only standard that's clear to me is - everything!

2) Radio is loosing its' dominance and its' importance.  Over the next five years, someone on your team is going to have to make sure that your music is everywhere and anywhere consumers are.  There's no clear winner in the race for ears.  The radio audience is not being fractured by one big competitor; it's being split by lots of competing sources of audio entertainment (the "everything" standard applies here also).

3) "Advertising tacked onto your streams of music is functionally identical to music-oriented radio".  I would take this statement to the bank.  Don't fight advertising when consumers are opting for "free" music.

4) We are still in the early stages of a transition.  You have to have one foot in the old and one foot in the new.  It's a lot of extra work and it's going to take a few years to sort out.  However and most importantly for everyone making great music, when we reach the puffing point in the graph we are in now - you should see a corresponding rise in income.

Thanks for the post Mark. 

Create Validate Sell

Up until recently, and in a caveman sort of way, I divided the tasks of building a music business into two rock piles: a pile of things related to creating music and a pile of things related to selling music.  

In the creating music pile I accounted for iteratively improving songs based upon fan and professional feedback, and in the selling music pile I accounted for monetary feedback; you either sold music or you didn’t.  

Recently, I evolved from lumping tasks into two piles to lumping tasks into three piles.  Create and sell has become - create and validate and then sell.  In fact, the sequence has become create-validate, create-validate, create-validate, and then sell.  Thanks Steve Lawson.

While this is not information that makes the earth spin in reverse, adding a third classification column to your to-do list does cause you to perform discrete actions that you may not have taken otherwise.  

For example, when you approach validation as an essential task to be executed efficiently, as unbiased as possible, and without prejudice or lasting consequences, you end up reclassifying products or services previously lumped into another pile.

On Saturday, as I wondered about the simplest way to validate music using the criteria I just described, I ended up reclassifying the music community site Aime Street out of the interesting-way-to-barely-sell-music rock pile to the music validation pile.  For me, this action shed an entirely different light on the value Aime Street generates for artists.

Aime Street is a music community site that has a unique pricing model where tracks start out as free and as popularity increases the price of a track goes up.  I only recommend sites that charge flat fees to artists and I steer clear from sites that extract percentages.  However, when I reclassified Aime Street as a music validation service instead of a place to sell music, a new recommendation emerged.

Aime Street probably isn’t going to put a lot of money into your pocket, but I have to say that Aime Street is the fastest way to validate music that I have tried to date; it’s also fun.  I would have gladly paid them a flat fee to validate songs within their community.

I simply uploaded music to Aime Street and over the next 48 hours I watched as the price of the tracks rose and the recommendations rolled in.  It was hardly profitable, but it was gratifying and comforting validation.  I’m surprised that Aime Street is not growing as rapidly as some of the other music sites on the Internet; as a music fan, this site really appealed to my sensibilities.

Similarly, I am trying the site called OurStage for the same reason.  I really like the unique voting funnel that OurStage offers, but the gratification will not come as rapidly as on Aime Street.  My guess is that both of these sites will yield the detailed validation or invalidation I’m looking for ninety days from now, albeit using entirely different methods.

The bottom line: setting out to purposely seek validation is not only important; it enables you to reframe your approach to sites, services and relationships.  The saying “necessity (to validate) is the mother of invention” applies here…

1,000 True Fans to Make a Living

When Seth Godin calls something the “best riff of the year,” people notice. And lots have.

I’m talking about Kevin Kelly’s blog post titled “1,000 True Fans,” which has struck a powerful nerve online. He puts his own spin on what I and many others have been saying for years about succeeding in the arts in this modern era.

This concept of attracting what Kelly calls True Fans (a diehard subset of a larger group of Lesser Fans) is very intriguing and deserves some serious consideration. Here’s an excerpt:

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

Again, this all dovetails with the indie message I’ve been hammering home for years. You don’t have to be a household name to be successful. Thousands of musicians, authors, artists, photographers, filmmakers, bloggers and more make a nice living serving their unique slice of the population. I proudly count myself among their ranks.

These self-empowered creatives work outside the traditional structure and usually make smart use of the Internet to bypass middleman roadblocks and take their craft directly to the end user: the fan. Reach enough fans in this manner and serve them well … and you will eventually have a solid list of True Fans — people who will reward you often with their time, attention and money.

Read Kelly’s entire blog post and the reaction to it around the Net. Then get busy building your fan base … and serving them well!

Update on March 21, 2008 by Andrew Dubber

I have to say, I'm a little skeptical of the thousand true fans solution. There's a great post enumerating the problems with that idea and they're all quite convincing arguments.

But here's the thing: It's not important whether Kevin Kelly is right about this - or whether you can pick holes in the proposition. The important measure of the idea is how useful it is. 

I don't for a second believe that the idea works in practice in more than the most unusual of circumstances, and I would lay money that the Thousand Fans Proposition is not true in your individual case.

But if you act as if it's true - you will get far more satisfying results than if you act as if it isn't. 

Update on April 21, 2008 by Bob Baker

I encourage people not to get distracted by the numbers: 1,000 fans times $100 per year is not the heart of this topic, in my mind. 500 fans x $200 a year, 2,000 fans x $50, 5,000 fans x $20 ... it doesn't matter. It's hard to categorize fans anyway. Some will only support your free offerings while others will spend thousands to hire you for a live show -- support is all over the map.

The main point for me is that this is an era when artists need to reconsider their definitions of success. Widespread notoriety is only one model -- and it's a model of the past. Artists cling to it because it's what we've known for decades. There's nothing wrong with thinking big and having grand goals. But you can also make a living catering to a small sliver of the overall population and serving your most supportive fans well.

Can't try it? Won't buy it.

When Trent Reznor expressed disappointment over Saul Williams’ sales data last January, bloggers and journalists offered many reasons why, when fans were given the option to download the NiggyTardust album for free or for $5, only 1 out of 5 downloaders chose to pay the $5. Some argued that there should have been an option to pay something less than $5. Others suggested that Williams wasn’t a big enough act to pull something like this off, and that Reznor may not have been the right man to endorse and market Williams’ style of music. And of course there was talk about sorry state of the recorded music business.

But I think there was a more fundamental problem with the payment option for NiggyTardust that was not emphasized enough in the analysis following Reznor’s annoucement: Fans were being asked to pay for music BEFORE hearing it. No previews, no 30-second clips, no nothing. Getting people to pay for music before hearing a single note is, as others have explained, a very tough thing to do. I have to imagine that some portion of the downloaders who chose free would have been willing to pay if they actually knew what they were getting beforehand.

(Now don’t get me wrong: There’s nothing wrong with people choosing to download an album like this for free. And given the tremendous promotional fallout from the NiggyTardust experiment, I personally don’t consider the release an economic disappointment at all. But I do believe that many fans want to support their favorite musicians when possible, and selling downloads isn’t dead yet. So for artists and labels, it’s worth thinking about how to incentivize fans to pay for digital music even when free is an option too).

I wonder what the percentages of free and paid downloads would have been if streaming audio clips of NiggyTardust had been made available on the website? My purely speculative guess is that some of the free downloaders would have chosen to pay (because they know they’ll love it), some would have chosen not to download at all (because they know they’ll hate it), and most would have still chosen free (because they’re not sure how they like it or they simply don’t want to pay). So they probably would have gotten a little more revenue this way, and still delivered the music to a lot of hard drives and iPods of potential long-term fans.

Going one step further, I wonder what would have happened if Reznor and Williams had emailed the free downloaders a couple weeks later and said something like, “Hey there, we hope you’re enjoying NiggyTardust. If you’ve decided you like the album, consider clicking the link below where, for only $5, you can download higher-quality audio files and help support Saul Williams.” Could a significant number of listeners be persuaded to pay after the fact? I guess someone’s just going to have to try it…

Update on March 12, 2008 by Andrew Dubber

I suspect there were some other complicating factors going on here. The mainstream press is really reluctant to press any 'me too!' stories, which I suspect this one fell victim to. It's not the same story as the Radiohead experiment, but it's not sufficiently distinctive for most journalists to grasp the difference.

So despite the fact that I'm actually a bit of a Saul Williams fan (and a NIN fan from way back), I didn't even find out about the Niggy Tardust thing until Trent Reznor started complaining that people weren't doing it properly.

But that said, I'm a big believer (as you know) that people hear music, then they like it, then they buy it. And you can't do it in any other order. 

People are like sheep. To market music, the appearance of celebrity momentum matters.

THIS POST WILL BE REPLACED BY THIS UPDATE 

“It’s on the radio, it has to be good.”  Of course you don’t agree with that statement, but the average person thinks it, says it and acts like every artist in heavy rotation is the second coming of Christ.  Moreover, once an artist is on the radio, the time it takes to go from lame to fame is shorter than a London summer.  

Song quality is not the major determining factor here.  Radio, among other methods, has the ability to demonstrate the appearance of celebrity momentum.  People are like sheep, or perhaps I should have said people are like primates.  

According to researchers at the Center For Cognitive Science at Duke University, “primates will perform a variety of behaviors, including pressing levers or moving their heads into a viewing channel, to gain visual access to other [powerful and attractive] individuals.  Moreover, primates will sometimes forego food rewards to view videos of [these] other individuals”.

I don’t think it matters if we are talking about oceans of fans or puddles.  If the people in your puddle think you are on your way to becoming a celebrity they press levers, move their heads and forego food to help you.        

What else generates the appearance of celebrity momentum?

• Does having studio-quality recordings give off the appearance of celebrity momentum?
• Does the use of a famous or legendary studio give off the appearance of celebrity momentum?
• How about your selection of a producer?
• What about being featured on numerous film or television soundtracks?
• Opening up for an a-list act gives of the appearance of celebrity momentum, doesn’t it?

It seems to me, that it doesn’t matter how good your songs are.  If your celebrity momentum starts to diminish, fans go back to eating again.  What do you think?

Thanks to Jake Halpern (WSJ, Oct. 4th, 2007) for pointing out the Duke research.