Highly recommended for musicians, artists, and other creatives who recognize they need to get their marketing act together:
Future activity will take place at New Marketing Resources dot com.
Occasional posts will appear here for archiving.
jKlehe
NOTE that the my1000truefans.com site is not live yet. The video may be edited further.
Kevin Kelly has written probably one of the most important posts for the emerging and even established musician and performing artist yet this year.
“A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.”
“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.
The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible. Blogs and RSS feeds trickle out news, and upcoming appearances or new works. Web sites host galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia. Diskmakers, Blurb, rapid prototyping shops, Myspace, Facebook, and the entire digital domain all conspire to make duplication and dissemination in small quantities fast, cheap and easy. You don’t need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient.”
(click thumbnail to enlarge) Seth Godin, marketing guru, recently gave a talk to the employees of Columbia Records:
“Because everyone has the ability to make a record now. It used to take a long time. Someone would go to the studio, Boston, and we’d hear from them three or four years later. Now you can put a State of the Union speech out as a hip-hop record one day after he gives his speech and you could sell a bunch on iTunes. It used to be “how big a share of the market can we have?” Now it’s about “how do we touch a tribe, just for a minute?” As long as the tribe is happy, we’re happy. It used to be about what features, checklist stuff, now it’s “is there a story behind this artist, is there a story behind the person?”. Advertising, promotion, shelf space, that used to be what you paid cash money for. Now you’re going to have to figure out how to innovate in the way you interact with people.”
(click thumbnail to enlarge) I recently listened to a conversation David Byrne had with Michael Hausman (manager of a couple of my favorite artists, Aimee Mann & Marc Cohn) and he made some interesting comments in talking about the labels moving towards ‘360′ deals where they have an interest in every possible income stream an artist generates and how this is ‘tricky for new artists’ and basically ‘how do you get started?’ And even more interesting is when he notes that in some discussions with some folks into licensing for tv and movies how they’re ‘not looking for stuff that’s well known.’
Mr. Hausman also notes that the traditional music labels ‘aren’t set up for enlightened long-range thinking’ and that artist managers are challenged to discover and explore new models for increasing the types of income streams and their revenues. I suggest that there’s plenty of evidence from the Internet business opportunity market for marketing models that can easily be translated over to the music promotion and sales arena fairly easily and profitably.
Example: As an experiment to see if established artists were doing anything with Internet marketing tools, I signed up for the email list at Aimee Mann’s site, and yes, it took me to a double opt-in autoresponder, and here’s the missed opportunity. After the thank you for signing up, there was zero, zip, nada, zilch follow up. While I hope that at some point in the future I’ll get some news of what Aimee’s doing either in the studio or on the road, there’s a number of lessons that can be learned from this experience.
First, my signing up to be on Aimee’s email list means that I’m someone that knows who she is, have probably purchased her music in the past, maybe has seen her live or at least have seen her in some venue (in my case it was the tribute concert for Brian Wilson DVD) and that I’m most likely someone who will buy something from her in the future.
Second, since what all people in sales are actually selling, and even more so for artists of all types, is that they’re selling emotions, and by not having some kind of message from Aimee after signing up thanking me for my interest, there was a lingering emotional disappointment. The generic response from the autoresponder simply left me flat and I soon forgot the experience.
So here’s a suggestion for Mr. Hausman and any other artists and their managers (established or emerging) on what to do with the acknowledgment for signing up for an email list. Have your webmaster set up a simple page with a short note from the artist thanking the person for signing up for their email list and letting them know that while there may not be regular emails, they will arrive occasionally with news of what they’re doing. This could even be a simple embedded mp3, or better yet, a short simple video clip, to further reinforce and enhance the experience of the artist ‘bonding’ with their audience. In the upcoming ‘Art of the Autoresponder’ series, I’ll have more suggestions on how artists can leverage this underused tool.
Keep in mind the dominant states of mind of people on the Internet. Folks doing searches are primarily looking for information to solve a problem or make a buying decision; those who look for and watch videos are wanting to be entertained and amused; and finally, people rely on email to hear from and interact with friends. In the Internet marketing world, reframing a marketing email from hard sales copy to a softer model of ‘notes from a friend’, the increase in response and conversion to sales is dramatic. Mind Valley Labs tested this approach and achieved a 250% increase in sales with one email.
In the ‘Step Up To Fame’ course my partner and I are developing for release this summer, the business track will focus on Frank Kern’s Mass Control marketing model reframed for both emerging and established artists. Rapidly creating interest, desire, and repeatedly bonding the audience emotionally to the artist will lead to a long term loyal and fanatical fan base. And this is where the money is — it used to be that the ‘money is in the list’ — has evolved to the new model: ‘the money is in the relationship with the list.’
The Mass Control model has a sales run rate of $1-million per hour in the business opportunity market and has already been proven in the non-business opportunity market (dating, seduction) to have a similar sales response. Mass Control adapted to other markets is a new business model worth pursuing for even a fraction of those results.
2008 USA Songwriting Competition Kicks Off
2008 USA Songwriting Competition is now accepting entries. Win a top prize
of $50,000 worth of cash and merchandise such as cool gear from Sony,
Ibanez Guitars, D’Addario Strings, Peavey, Audio-Technica and more. Also,
have your winning songs played on radio! Enter in Pop, Rock/Alt, Folk,
R&B, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Instrumental, etc.
FREE EARLY BONUS: First 1,000 entries will each receive a USA Songwriting
Competition Compilation CD. Hurry! The entry form can be found at:
http://www.songwriting.net
Or enter online here with your MP3 and/or lyrics:
http://online.songwriting.net
Or through Sonicbids at:
http://www.sonicbids.com
“Having his own band freed him to take risks. During his stay at George’s, Doc learned that women liked singers, even singers on crutches. They sat in the front row and telegraphed their pleasure; by the end of the set, it was a cinch to drop by their table and strike up a conversation. Onstage, he was learning to work a crowd. Though his range of motion was limited, Doc realized that he could make up for it by controlling the timing, the song sequence, and the dynamics of his voice — knowing when to drop it to a near hush and when to dig down into his gut and blow. He knew he wasn’t a magical stage performer — the kind that held the crowd in thrall from the moment he walked onto the stage to the moment he left it — but Doc was discovering he could be good. Maybe even better.”
– from “Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life & Times of Doc Pomus
After Doc Pomus quit performing from lack of opportunity, he concentrated on writing songs. He eventually gave the world a dazzling legacy of musical hits during rock ‘n’ roll’s first decade. His songs — “Lonely Avenue,” This Magic Moment,” “Hushabye,” “Little Sister,” “Turn Me Loose,” and many others totaling over a thousand in all — have been recorded by everyone from Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springstein and too many other to recall here, made sales exceeding $100 million.
A shy over-weight kid on crutches from childhood polio overcame so many odds against him. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, the year of his passing.
25-Greatet Duets of All Time - Lots of these opinion lists going around recently. I agree with some, especially the Roy Orbison & k.d. lang pairing. Still gives me chills whenever I hear it.
Salmon’s Download Picks - The Guardian’s Chris Salmon picks the weeks best free music downloads. Keep in mind that one man’s best is another’s so-so.
Worst Duets according to the U.K.’s Telegraph. Who am I to argue?
Revolution Synthesizer is some new gear for musicians as reported by Gizmodo. Or was it Crunchgear? Oh well, click the link and you’ll get there.
In his recent article for Wired Magazine (Issue 16.01), David Byrne (Talking Heads, solo artist) does a thorough overview of the current state of the music business, however he misses what I think is an important business model for both emerging artists and established mid-level and top tier acts. That business model is subscription, where the artist has a fan base that subscribes to the artists emails, newsletter, audio files, videos, and other valuable contact and content.
Taking a cue from the worlds of direct response and Internet marketing, the money is no longer in “the list” but rather the money is in “the relationship with the list.” Frank Kern demonstrated this to be fact with his famous launches of Underachievers, The Annihilation Method, StomperNet, and most recently the launch of his own product, Mass Control. Mind Valley Labs did a series of posts demonstrating that using just one of the Mass Control tactics increased conversions to sales by a whopping 250%.
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