Technology has changed a lot about how concerts are marketed, ticketed and produced since Woodstock. Recently, the greatest driver of change – particularly from the fan perspective – has been the smartphone. From taking photos to texting friends and song requests, smartphones are changing how concerts are consumed and remembered. But early glimpses of projects from Live Nation Labs and startups like Dave Kusek’s Tastemate show that we’re on at the start of a smartphone driven live music revolution. This infographic chronicles the journey so far:
BMI is a proud sponsor of the Entertainment & Technology Law Conference Series co-presented by NARM and digitalmusic.org, being held at the offices of Greenberg Traurig LLP (Metlife Building, 200 Park Avenue, 15th Floor, NYC), 1:00-5:30 PM.
Discussion/panel topics for this event include:
Bankruptcy and Copyright Assets: Minimizing the Effect on Third-Party Licensees
Licensing Musical Works: Varied Approaches to Fixing a Broken System
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA): Will the War on Piracy Change the Internet as We Know It?
Antitrust in Media & Entertainment: The Fine Line between Survival and Monopoly
BMI members interested in attending should take advantage of $50 off registration. To claim the discount, enter code CLE-BMI50 when prompted. Click here to register.
As I’ve posted here before, your email list is one of the most powerful marketing tools that an artist or band (or a business or brand) can have. Recently some data courtesy of Dan Zarrella and Pure360 has shown that there is a definite science behind the timing of sending your emails, just as there is for posting on Facebook and Twitter. Here are some tips and tricks for getting your email timing just right. Remember that all times are Eastern Standard Time.
Before sending an email, consider: 6AM to 10AM: The second most prevalent email opening time is at the the beginning of the working day.
10AM to Noon: Consumers are not opening marketing emails, choosing instead to focus on work.
Noon to 2PM: Consumers are unlikely to open emails during their lunch break, choosing instead to spend their time on news and magazine alerts.
2PM to 3PM: Right after lunch consumers remain focused on work, responding mostly to email offers related to financial services.
3PM to 5PM: Consumers start thinking about their personal situation and as a result, more emails relating to property and financial services are opened during this time period than any other.
5PM to 7PM: Consumers tend to open business to business (B2B) promotions during this period, but also open more holiday-type promotions during this period than any other.
7PM to 10PM: The time period when recipients are most likely to respond to consumer promotions is when they get off work.
10PM to 6AM: This is an email dead zone, as most sent during this period are ineffective.
Here are a few other timing issues to consider:
Bounce rates are highest in the morning.
Open rates are highest during the weekend by 45%.
Open rates are 53% higher in the morning.
Click rates are 10% higher on the weekend and early morning.
The most effective sending frequency is 1 to 4 per month.
Conversely, the unsubscribe rate is higher at 1 to 4 per month, but levels off at 8 to 31 per month.
The highest unsubscription rate occurs among those who have been subscribers for less than 10 days.
The highest click-through-rate (CTR) is with those who have been subscribers for less than 10 days.
A common question after reading the above tips is, “What if my fans are spread out in different time zones?” This one is easier than you think. All email services like iContact, Constant Contact, Mail Chip, etc. provide the ability to segregate your mailing list into groups and schedule your mailings. Simply divide your list into the various different time zones and schedule your email blast accordingly.
To sum things up, don’t send those promotional emails out without first thinking about the timing. It could mean the difference between your fans reading it or not.
New Essential Music Promo Tools For Google, Bing, Facebook, YouTube & Vimeo
Just when you think you have all the angles down for promoting your music via a particular web service, they go and add something new you have to consider including in your repertoire. However, if you’ve gotten the basics down, a lot of the functionality currently being added to search and social networking services is pretty useful for marketing music, even when the services don’t pitch it that way.
Recently a whole bunch of new options have been launched that allow you to have more control over search results in Google and Bing, more options on Facebook and additional uses for your music videos hosted on YouTube and Vimeo.
Upcoming Concerts in Google Search Results
Google recently announced the addition of upcoming concerts connected to official band websites. Google identifies these shows using site markup with rich snippets that can also be used for a variety of other forms of content.
If you want to markup your band’s site or run a site that features events listings, please see Google’s help feature on rich snippets that provides a basic how to as well as information on other forms of content that can be marked up.
As Google continues its move towards featuring their own products as well as content treated in a manner they prefer, rich snippets are the sort of thing worth utilizing for longterm positive results.
Bing Links Your Facebook Listing to Other Web IDs
Bing is expanding its use of Facebook in search results with the introduction ofLinked Pages. This will be especially useful for musicians who want to have their other websites show up in Bing results that are now prioritizing Facebook in searches for individuals.
You can find the directions here that will require you to give Bing access to your Facebook account and then allow you to link various sites to your identity. You and your friends can also link each other to sites but you have to initiate the linking process and, if you find inappropriate sites linked, you can remove them. All future attempts to link you to that site will require your approval.
Given Bing’s growing popularity, this feature will be a useful way to tie together the pieces of your scattered online identity.
ThingLink Adds Facebook Tabs
ThingLink continues to expand their photo tagging service with Tabs for Facebook. Having added ecommerce links last fall, this new feature enables you to bring quite a bit of functionality to your Facebook page in one app.
While it’s free to make a basic ThingLink graphic, you’ll have to choose one of the premium account options for this feature. Once you’ve created your basic ThingLink graphic, you’ll then have the option to use ThingLink Tabs for Facebook,
Quipol is a service featuring “social polls” that allows you to create simple embeddable polls to use on your site or social media account. They’ve now added the ability to include a YouTube or Vimeo hosted video that can play in the polling widget.
If you know of other such special features being added to web services that you find useful as a musician or music marketer, please feel free to hit me up and I’ll credit you if I post!
So this is it. The final installment in my series on mobile marketing for independent musicians (sob!). We’ve discussed the reality. We’ve established the importance of strategy. Now it’s time to talk tools! So exactly what tools are out there for the average, hard-working DIY musician? Are the all-singing, all-dancing mobile marketing campaigns of established artists totally out of reach?
Well the good news is there are an increasing number of affordable tools that allow indie artists to get mobile. You just need to know where to look. Here’s a handy list based on the assumption you have either NO DOUGH in your pocket, or a budget of LOW DOUGH…..
NO DOUGH….
Get Snapping
We all know (and love) mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you’re smart, you’ll be utilizing these sites to the max to supercharge your fan acquisition and engagement. However, there are also now a number of innovative mobile apps that compliment these sites by adding a multi-media dimension.
One of my favorites is the FREE photo app Instagram which allows you to create a type of on-the-road photo diary. One of its best features is the ability to edit photos using various filters that create a more arty-farty type image. Once you’re done, you can publish the photos to your Instagram photo stream (which is like a social networking site in itself) and also post them instantly to your Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts. Singer-songwriter Jason Mraz recently launched a competition on Instagram whereby fans were asked to submit photos that are representative and inspired by his new song “I Won’t Give Up”. The winners will have their photos displayed at an art gallery in NYC on March 8th. If you struggle communicating with your fans in words, then get creative and let the pictures do the talking.
One of the “I Won’t Give Up” Instagram contest winners
Get Filming
Like photo-sharing, video-sharing via your cell phone has also really taken off. You can record and share slices of your life with fans for FREE using apps like Viddy or 8mm. Both provide easy to use editing options, effects and music to give your short videos a professional or vintage feel. Well-known artists like Snoop-Dog and T-Pain are already utilizing these apps. Check out their videos for some inspiration.
Collect Fan Data On The Go
Collecting fan data (emails, zip codes, and cell numbers) should be a core feature of your marketing activities. Your newsletter in particular is all-important. I’m a big fan of the newsletter provider Mailchimp, and now they have launched the Mailchimp app for iphone and Android. This app allows you to manage your lists and collect signups on your cell phone or ipad. No more losing your hand written mailing lists! Mailchimp also has a “Golden Monkeys” app which allows you to track your mailing list “VIPs”, and a new app called “Pyow” that allows you to create and track QR Coupons. Genius.
LOW DOUGH
Create A Band App
Thanks to the lovely folks at ReverbNation, you now don’t have to have a bucketful of money to create a mobile app for your band. In just 6 easy steps you can build your own affordable app which includes your music, biography, photos, videos, calendar, and website/social media links in one handy place. Prices start at $99 per year for Android, and $299 per year for Android and Apple. This includes all push notifications to your fans and a tracking mechanism. The turn-around time for the Android apps take 2-3 days and iphone apps take 3-6 weeks. Bear this in mind if you plan to coincide the launch of the app with a CD release or tour.
Jed Carlson, co-founder of ReverbNation, says “Mobile is exploding. Having a mobile app in fans’ pockets means that they see the artist’s brand every day, have an easy way to share that artist and their music with friends, and it opens yet another communications channel with push notifications. For artists looking to get signed or book gigs, having a professional mobile app creates instant credibility, and may differentiate that artist from the pack. We’ve even observed many artists signing their emails with a link to their mobile app — using it like a virtual business card.”
Check out the artist Luego to get an idea of what to expect from the ReverbNation mobile app.
Ensure Your Existing Website is Mobile
As so many fans now check out new music via their mobile devices, you’d be foolish not to ensure you have a mobile version of your website available. A lot of budget-conscious bands have already created WordPress sites for themselves for free. The good news is that you can now make this mobile-friendly with the WP login called WP Touch. It’s only $100 and it allows your fans to access your site whenever, wherever. Other affordable options include mobify.me . Check out this great article which lists 12 free alternatives to create mobile versions of your website.
Create an SMS Marketing Campaign
According to a recent Pew study, 90% of Americans use their mobile handsets for texting. It therefore makes sense that SMS marketing becomes an integral part of your mobile marketing campaign. Fantexter.com is a text messaging service launching this month specially enabling musicians to communicate with their fans instantly. Starting at $12.99 a month, it’s an affordable method of mobile communications. Be careful though. There is a fine line between communicating with your fans and harassing them. The key to SMS marketing is knowing that less is more. Make each message count, and don’t oversaturate your fans to the brink of spamming.
So there you have it. Launching a mobile marketing campaign isn’t as hard as you think. The music industry is thankfully starting to react to the need for easy and affordable mobile marketing solutions for DIY musicians. You just need to do four things – assess your reality, create a strategy, research your tools, and get mobile! Good luck.
—
Jem Bahaijoub is the founder of imaginePR, a music marketing company based in Washington DC. Connect with her on Twitter and Facebook.
Everyone wants attention. You want it too, right? Of course, you do.
In fact, that’s the first crucial step in marketing: getting people (specifically, your ideal fans) to simply notice you among all the noise and chaos of their busy lives.
It’s such a challenge to get that fleeting hint of attention these days, you probably put most of your “marketing” focus on that aspect alone. That’s why you celebrate every small gain you make in getting Facebook fan page likes, Twitter followers, email subscribers, YouTube views, LinkedIn connections, and more.
You should celebrate those wins. No doubt. But your marketing efforts shouldn’t end there. As I’ve been harping on a lot lately in my live workshops, what’s really important is what you do with attention once you have it.
Getting it is great. People notice you. You appear on their mental radars for a few moments (or minutes, if you’re lucky). Awesome! But then those good people move on to other things and sadly forget about you.
What’s a self-promoting musician to do?
The answer: Build some sort of interactive element or “call to action” into many of the things you post online (including Facebook updates, tweets, videos, audio clips, images, etc).
One example of how this works can be found in a video that guitarist Walt Pitts published on YouTube recently. (Walt is one of only a handful of musicians I do some part-time consulting work for.)
Walt had an idea for a series of videos he would record at home that featured him playing live using a Boss Loop Station, which allows him to play and layer multiple guitar parts live.
Before posting his first video to YouTube, Walt sent me a sample to get my thoughts. Of course, his playing was great. But I noticed right away that he had positioned the camera to shoot vertically, so there were large empty spaces to either side of the frame.
Walt explained that he did it that way to capture everything – from the hat he wears and the guitars on the wall behind him to the footwork of hitting the effects pedals. This was also a good representation of what Walt does when he performs live.
I understood, but all that wasted space on the screen was bugging me. So I encouraged him to create some text and graphics that would use the empty space to let people know who he was and remind them of how to reach him.
Here’s what he came up with:
If I were to get hyper critical, I might make the text and graphics a little less cluttered. But I love the way the description on the left side explains who Walt is and what he does. And at the top right you find a clear call to action that invites people who need a solo guitarist in the Phoenix area to contact him.
This is a smart way to make great use of whatever attention this video gets.
(I also gave Walt the specific words to use in the title, description and tags of this video to help it get “discovered” in searches, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Compare this video treatment to your own music videos – or blog posts, fan page updates, etc. When a potential fan sees your stuff for the first time, do you make it clear who you are and what you do?
Do you have an “engagement objective” (a phrase I just made up) for every piece of content you publish? In other words, what do you want people to DO after they watch, read or listen to it?
From now on, decide ahead of time what those answers are. Then design the various things you post online to make the best use of the attention you get online and off.
What do you think? Have other examples of effective engagement and call-to-action strategies? I welcome your comments.
UPDATE: Since there are some fervent comments below concerning the design and use of effective calls-to-action, I wanted to share a link to this How to Master the Design of Compelling Calls-to-Action post on Hubspot. Some good advice there.
Fast Company Magazine has announced its 50 Most Innovative Companies Of 2012, along with a top 10 most innovative in music. Spotify, of course, made the list. But there are also some new and some old school surprises. Who do you you think should have made the cut?
Collect Fan Data On The Go
Jed Carlson, co-founder of ReverbNation, says “Mobile is exploding. Having a mobile app in fans’ pockets means that they see the artist’s brand every day, have an easy way to share that artist and their music with friends, and it opens yet another communications channel with push notifications. For artists looking to get signed or book gigs, having a professional mobile app creates instant credibility, and may differentiate that artist from the pack. We’ve even observed many artists signing their emails with a link to their mobile app — using it like a virtual business card.”
Real*Industry*Talk
REAL INDUSTRY TALK 