My blog posts at Buzzsonic have been buried of late by my daily Twitter feed but to highlight some of my most popular posts I used a neat little service called BridgeURL, which is an insanely simple (and useful) idea to string a bunch of related posts, URLs or related research ideas together as a slideshow.
I’ve used it as an example here to showcase some of my most popular posts here at Buzzsonic.com to save readers having to wade thru pages of Twitter digests.
I was browsing through some old bookmarks and came across (again) Dave Allen’s brilliant piece, ‘ The End of the Music Album as the Organising Principle’ , originally published on his blog, and on Music Think Tank (both worth a visit just to read the commenters feedback) back in April last year.
There’s a bunch of quotable bits from the whole piece but I thought that Dave’s twelve bullet points were a good starting point for ideas on how to keep your fan base regularly and consistently engaged.
Not your usual, “the CD is dead” diatribe.
“Music fans are no longer patiently waiting for their favorite bands to deliver new music according to the old customary cycle – album, press release, video, radio, tour. No, the fan base has to be regularly and consistently engaged. Some Ideas:
• First, communicate openly and ask your fans what they want from you
• Listen to what they have to say. Really listen
• Provide unique content such as early demos of new songs
• Never under estimate the power of a free MP3
• Forget completely the idea of an organizing principle. Invent a new one
• Use social media wisely. Twitter and Facebook Pages are best, MySpace is too cluttered
• Don’t push messages to your fans, have a two way interaction with them
• Invite them to share, join, support and build goodwill with you
• Scrap your web site and start a blog
• Remember to forget everything you know about the CD “business”
• Start to monetize the experience around your music
• Remember – the browser is the new iPod
And finally I leave you with one organizing principle that works as a tactile and experiential format and gives great pleasure – the vinyl album. Having said that I do not want to contradict any part of this article as I do not suggest using vinyl as a format for delivering an album-length piece of work. I do suggest using vinyl for the physical manifestation of your demos, out takes, live tracks etc, and always accompany it with a coupon for free download of any related digital product.”
Related
How Killing The CD Single Killed The Recording Industry (Pampelmoose.com. Oct 2007)
The End of The CD and the End of CD Retailers (Pampelmoose.com Oct 2007)
How To Press Up a Vinyl Single and Add Instant Kudos to Your Release (Buzzsonic.com March 2008)
The Disintegration of the Compact Disc (RoyChristopher.com:Jan 2008)
Moving on from my first national pop hit, ‘Hooked’ (as the 99th Floor Elevators) we struggled to come up with a follow up that PWL were happy with, then we finally finished ‘I’ll Be There’ which actually crawled onto the BBC Radio 1 playlist.
Anyway, recently I was browsing through some news archives and stumbled across a piece from the mid 90s in the Independent about how the Beatles had been ‘banned’ from the BBC Radio 1 playlist.
Radio 1 refuses to play `boring’ Beatles
Their John Lennon penned single, ‘Real Love’ , only the second Fab Four single since their split in 1970, despite entering the mid week charts in the top ten, had been left off the playlist to make way for “less established chart names” such as Goldie, Gat Decor and the 99th Floor Elevators.
Paul McCartney went on to say “The Beatles don’t need our new single to be a hit. Its not as if our careers depended on it” Too true of course but still a grin of self satisfaction that something you wrote had a hand in ‘banishing’ the Beatles from the national radio playlist!
The story even made it into the Keith Badman book ‘The Beatles Off The Record Volume 2: The Dream Is Over (Beatles Off the Record)’
Download 99th Floor Elevators Torrent Sampler here
More info: Torrent Distribution Experiment
While I get my lazy ass into gear with two new posts over the weekend I thought I’d do a shameless piece of self plugging (which is very rare for me by the way!) and highlight a couple of posts on this blog from last year that have kinda got buried by more recent posts.
In more recent posts this year, by far the most popular (which surprised me) has been (with this months actual page views March 27th 8.25 est):
10 New Music Industry PDFs That’ll Make You An Expert (1130) followed by:
Resources To Help Get Your Music in Films ans TV (460)
200+ Music Industry, Marketing, Social Media and Tech Blogs That’ll Make You A Media Whore! (397)
Some Other Posts You Should Read…
How To Get Your Music Distributed on iTunes (And Keep Most Of The Money)
This is a year old now but never more relevant than today as the onus on digital distribution gathers pace.
Its Official, Vinyl Not Dead Shock
My defence of the vinyl format vs the iPod! Kind of.
How To Press Up a Vinyl Single and Add Instant Kudos to Your Release
A detailed look at how (and where) to get your vinyl records pressed. There will be an updated round-up of distributors shortly.
The Best Music Biz Book You’ve Never Heard Of
I hold the KLFs legendary book, ‘The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way)’ in high regard. I followed the instructions it lays out in simple terms and didn’t hit number one, but managed to get into the UK top 30. Others have followed suit. Whatever, its a great fun read which is how I wish all music industry books were written. They’re not.
More soon………….
In a climate where many artists are struggling to find income streams every avenue helps and one area worth exploring is music placement in film and TV.
The ‘gatekeepers’ to these type of gigs are the music supervisors. The music supervisor is a person who coordinates the work of the composer, the editor, and sound mixers. Alternately, a person who researches, obtains rights to, and supplies songs for a production (namely films and television programs).
TV viewers (particularly those who are geeky about music) tend to notice what songs get used on shows, and those touches can be credited to the music supervisor.
If you want to find out who the music supervisor is on any given movie or TV show you might not have earmarked the Amazon owned Internet Movie Database as a go-to music industry resource but the site is packed with info on cast and crew members, including music supervisors.
Look up movies that have really great soundtracks then scroll through the credits and you’ll find out the names of the person responsible for music supervision.
This was supposed to be one of those short snappy posts that was concise and to the point. Instead, and this happens all the time, I continued to research as I was writing and the post grew into another lengthy monster. Hey, I’m the editor so I guess its OK.
Anyway I was looking around for radio resources and stations that play independent music and associated resources and as usual the post kept expanding.
I write using Live Writer (which plugs into my WordPress install), pulling notes in from Google Notebook at the same time as having a bunch of web pages open with my RSS reader running in the system tray. Input crazy.
I’ve concentrated mainly on terrestrial radio but I’ve also included a bunch of streaming resources. I came to the conclusion that anyone with a little time on their hands could put together a respectable mailing list for a radio ‘campaign’ with a little creativity.
I’ve also focused on the USA (where I live now) and the UK (where I’m from). I’ll probably extend things to Asia, Europe and the ROTW in a later post.
Where To Start?
Some tips from UK recording artist and radio DJ Tom Robinson first who has one of the best articles I’ve seen for a while on getting radio play. How To Send CDs To Radio. Its written from a UK perspective but the basics apply anywhere.
Now I’ve used the word ‘music industry’ here to encompass anything connected to digital music stuff, music 2.0, social media, whatever you want to call it. Truth is, the keyword today is convergence.
But if you’re struggling to come to terms with new terminology, new technology and new services I did a comprehensive scan of resources you can print out on PDF that’ll really set you up with an information boost if you’re playing catch up and haven’t got the time to dig around.
There’s some fantastic resources out there and some inspirational writers like Seth Godin, Andrew Dubber, Gerd Leonhard, Derek Sivers and even digital distributors Tunecore all offer some brilliant insight and the best news is its all out there for you to grab free as a bird. And legal too!
Promotion
Music Industry Survival Guide. This compact guide from digital distributor Tunecore crams a lot into its 30 pages covering college radio promotion, iTunes promotion, street marketing, music discovery, mp3 blogs and press and media tips. Some people actually charge for this stuff. There’s seven PDF guides from Tunecore including a vinyl 101 for bands/artists wanting to press up vinyl records.
Their other guides cover mastering, publishing, copyright and mixing.
Mastering The Music Website Cycle. EasyB.com make e-commerce software for artists to sell music direct from their own websites. The handy 36 page guide goes into some detail on how to make and manage a successful music download website. They draw up a checklist of plans for structure, content and design. Again, some great pointers for many who may find the task a little daunting.
The Leading Question-Voice Of The Fans. This survey undertaken by UK digital music industry company Musically was aired at Midem this January. 1300 music fans were questioned across the USA, UK and France.
Being in a band, your time is very important. If you are an indie musician your day-to-day can possibly consist of a day job or school, then you need to make time for songwriting, recording, Myspace-ing, Tweeting, booking shows, editing video and fending off e-mails and other online networks. Knowing that your time is important, it is easy to brush off the fans, especially the ones that you do not see everyday, week, month, year or even, ever. That does not mean that they are not important.
Now more than even your fans are vital to your success. They are the ones that dictate your income. You NEED to keep them happy. There is no excuse, no communication gaps or barriers stopping you from developing relationships with every fan that wants one.
“It’s obvious that in a very short space of time the Japanese will have delivered the technology and then brought the price of it down so that you can do the whole thing at home. Then you will be able to sod off all that crap about going into studios.”
(Bill Drummond & Jimmy Cauty-1988)
Taken from ‘The Manual-How To Have A Number 1 The Easy Way’
PDF Download
I’m desperately trying to cut into my over populated desktop RSS feed reader as I really do not have the time to wade through the amount of subscriptions that I have in there. What with FeedDemon pop-ups and Tweetdeck its like having bloggers ADD (on steroids) and having too much information at your fingertips is as self defeating as not having enough.
Well over seventy percent of my feeds are music related, be they music news, music industry commentary,tech and MP3 bloggers and music 2.0 (is that term still in use?) evangelists. Very few of them are from traditional music biz news outlets like Billboard (USA biz bible) or Music Week (UK equivalent). Simply because I think that much of the mainstream music press are as behind the rest of us as the recording industry itself. With some exceptions of course.
Walled garden restrictions to content are a major sticking point for me.
Probably the best place to start vacuuming up those music news resources is at Guy Kawasaki’s excellent Alltop Music, though my main ‘complaint’ is that I have to visit each individual link to grab the RSS feed. A nice touch would be to have the feed URL next to the publishers headline.
Anyway, so I decided I’d do just that. Gather all the most useful and essential music/tech/social media (they blur into each other these days) related websites and blogs together in one big huge collection that I use on a regular basis through the beauty of RSS feeds. So I’ve done a bit (a lot!) of feed harvesting and squeezed everything into an OPML file for data portability.
I’m including an OPML download link so you can import all the feeds within seconds into your RSS reader of choice, whether that be via your desktop app of choice, Google reader online or a Firefox add on (like Sage). There’s an OPML file for each category to import or the whole bunch rolled into one.
Each category has an OPML link so you can grab the feeds by category. Do leave a comment if I’ve missed anything of note (I probably have).
