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Entries in fans (20)

Thursday
Apr282016

How To Find People That Will Listen To Your Music

Do you ever get this strange feeling that someone is watching you? Maybe I’m crazy (don’t answer that), but I do. I hope they don’t watch me too closely because that’ll get weird very fast. I’ll have to scare them away by walking out to the van in suspenders and a buckwheat hat “HEY YALL HOW YALL DOIN” *van screeches away* The other day I was thinking about getting some hot wings. And sure enough, Facebook gave me coupons to Wingstop. HOW DID YOU EVEN KNOW ME SO WELL FACEBOOK THAT’S A…

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Saturday
Nov212015

What A Digital Fan Club Should Be 

I used to work with fan clubs back in the 80s when they were a key source of income for a lot of bands. I think the biggest one I worked with was the official Take That fan club with over a 100,000 subscribers paying (from memory) £10 a year. That’s a lot of revenue that artists are now missing out on.

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Wednesday
Apr012015

How to Market Your Music Like Beyonce' 

Beyonce’ is considered one of the greatest entertainers today. She is known for her captivating stage show, excellent performance skills, and catchy tunes. But Beyonce’ is not only a great entertainer, she (her team) is a marketing genius as well. Beyonce’ took music fans by surprised when she released Beyonce’ a year ago without promotion. There are some principles that indie artists can apply from Beyonce’s marketing campaign.

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Monday
Feb032014

Top 10 Musician Mistakes: You Don't Leverage Your Fans as Marketers

As an indie artist today, you’re most likely in charge of your own marketing. You probably don’t have a record label planning your releases or scheduling your social media for the week, and you certainly don’t have any spare cash for a big marketing campaign. Marketing can seem like a completely daunting task if its just you and maybe a manager trying to get the word out, but you actually have a whole team of marketers just waiting to share your music – your fans!
With the constant presence of social media and the internet, most music fans today are bombarded with more information than they can possibly process. On top of that, new technology has enabled just about anyone to get online and call themselves a musician. As a result, most music fans look to recommendations from trusted sources for new music. These trusted sources could be a good music blog but more times than not it comes from a friend. Think about how you found some of your favorite artists. How many of them did you discover from a friend’s recommendation? Or someone you trust?
The key here is authenticity. Making it real and transparent and interesting. More people will check out your new album after a friend recommends it than would after a flashy TV commercial. This means you don’t need to dish out thousands for a big marketing campaign. The most effective form of marketing is completely within your reach financially!

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Wednesday
Jul032013

The fan conundrum: Getting better gig opportunities without a large fan base

How does a band get better gig opportunities with promoters and venues when they struggle to gather the requisite following some promoters and venues look for?

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Friday
Jun212013

Music Fans You Are More Powerful Than You Think!

This is a new age – online life has allowed us to play by drastically different rules than even 10 years ago, and in just about every way. We interact with friends, plan our lives, catch up with family, and make professional connections through social media. We consume almost all of our media through the Youtubes, Spotifys, Steams, and Netflixs of the world. And almost everyone on Earth, celebrities to unknowns, are just a tweet or an email away. Not new information – we’re just setting the stage.

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Friday
Sep282012

Are you engaged?

From BRASH! - A Music Marketing Blog

Getting involved with your following

When I speak of being engaged, in a Marketing perspective it doesn’t mean to “Put a ring on it”. As we all know, you can be engaged with people by becoming involved whether its in a business aspect or a relationship.  As an artist, you should want to have engaging conversations with your fans, interested media outlets, and industry professionals.  This will help you to expand your brand and exposure in the industry.

 

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Monday
Jun112012

My Fans First Experiment

“I assume that there are 50,000 people on Earth that have heard of me before, 20,000 that can name one of my songs and maybe 100 people alive today who are genuine fans of mine who love what I do.  I want to spend all my time serving those 100 people” -Rob Jay

As an artist I’ve spent a sizeable amount of my time focusing on marketing myself.  I focused on making sure I was in the right blog, the right publication, followed the  right people on all of the various social networks.  I’d say at my peak of online promotion during my career I probably spent more time sending my music to blog sites than I did writing, recording, rehearsing and networking offline combined.  This was mid 2009, I was one of the first hip hop artists in Houston to embrace the idea of using blogs to introduce my music.  Back then it meant something to say that you had been featured in a nationally know hip hop blog.  Not to the people who count but to other rappers you could stick your chest out a little bit.  Fast forward 18 months or so and now there’s some free clothes, maybe some free bottles and some free beats, cool……….But guess what, there’s still only 40 people at my show.  I’m being featured in these national websites, Armed Forces Entertainment just spent $80,000 to send me overseas to perform for troops and in my home town I’m pulling 40 people on a great night.

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Tuesday
Apr032012

Fan the Fire of Fandom

you might have a spark.
but you need a flame.

and once you have a flame,
you need a fire.

in fact, you need a raging fucking inferno.

you need to burst into flames and create the most fantastic of fans.
that’s how you create true, sustainable longevity.

it’s done by your fans and through your fans.
your most passionate fans are the key to your success. 

are you fanning the fire of fandom?

without fans, your thing won’t be heard. 
without fans, your thing won’t be seen.
it won’t be shared. it won’t be talked about.
and it sure as hell won’t be bought.

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Tuesday
Dec062011

A Fan-tastic Festive Quiz

A bit of light-hearted fun as the festive season hots up and the New Year fast approaches.

Imagine you are thinking about your year over a nice cup of coffee or a beer in the quiet corner of a bar. Tick the statements that accurately describe your thoughts (statements use ‘we’ and ‘our’ - if you’re a solo artist think ‘I’ and ‘my’). Be honest with yourself.

o       Over the year we generally only found new fans around gigs.

o       We haven’t got round to sorting out own web page.

o       We don’t have a fan email list yet.

o       If you look at the sites we use, it’s not very easy to get what we are about.

o       We spent a lot in the studio this year and feel disappointed with sales.

o       We tell our friends about our gigs but we’re not very good at communicating with our fans to create long lasting loyal relationships. In fact, if we’re totally honest, we’re not sure who our fans are.

o       We’re not very good at listening to anyone, particularly our fans (and also each other).

o       We do have a tendency to put our music out there and hope for the best.

o       We have a vague idea of where we want to get to.

o       We haven’t tried anything new this year so we are getting the same results.

o       Quite honestly, we don’t work well as a team; solo artist: I don’t stand up for my vision.

All/most ticked – You feel despondent and hopeless. Nothing seems to work. You seem to be going nowhere fast. Everything is a struggle. Fans have not been at the top of your priority list. You want someone to discover you and do all the work for you so you can just be left alone to make music. But you know the music industry has changed and you feel left behind and frustrated. You feel like you’re always banging your head against a brick wall. You know you can do better.

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Thursday
Oct062011

Get new fans on Google Plus

So you’ve got a great Google Plus profile set up, you have videos and links to your music posted, and you’re connecting with as many music industry professionals as possible. (If you don’t have a profile, you should). The next logical step is start converting other Google Plus users into rabid online fans of your music. There are two ways to go about this.

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Thursday
Jul142011

CALL TO INDIE ARTISTS: STOP GIVING AWAY YOUR MUSIC FOR FREE PART 2

As read in CALL TO INDIE ARTISTS: STOP GIVING AWAY YOUR MUSIC FOR FREE PART 1, I will explain some of the benefits in creating niche products and/or services for sale. I will list the benefits below with added explanations to each one.

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Monday
Apr252011

Always Be Available

Nearly everyone has accepted the new normal today - if you don’t let your fans buy it, they will steal it. Even the major labels (the last people to any progressive idea these days) have gotten the message and have started to release singles on iTunes the second they go to radio. The memo is spreading across the music business fast - Always Be Available (ABA) or lose the chance to make a sale and earn a fan.

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Wednesday
Mar162011

Music Promotion Tip: Create An Encyclopedia of Your Music Niche

In the past I have touched on the idea that you need to be a great source of information for your fans to have them coming back day after day. But recently I’ve come up with a new way to think about this idea to make things a bit more clear for you.

This is where the “Encyclopedia” concept comes in, because that word conjures up positive images in the mind of your fans right away.

Setting this up is simple…

You would have your own website with information about what you are up to, and then have another section called something like…

“The Death Metal Encyclopedia – Everything Your Need to Know About Everything!”

…or whatever kind of music that you play.

In this section you would make it your business to create the definitive guide to your music niche, and in the process you will start to build up a loyal following of aficionados who find your site through multiple google rankings. They will start to rely on you to keep them up to date with all the latest information.

You can keep track of your music news using the Google Music Alerts method that I talked about in a recent post.

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