Digital marketing is an essential element of music business success, and there are certain things everyone must do to get ahead.
Music is all about self-expression. A great song can tell the world who you are, what you feel, and what you believe matters most in life. That same material can make an impact on listeners that literally changes how they see the world around them. Music is a wonderful thing in that way, but to reach people, you need to know how to market your creativity.
Digital marketing is the backbone of music promotion today. It is impossible to imagine an artist getting ahead without having a strong presence online. Before you can reach the masses with your ideas, however, there are a few essential marketing concepts you need to understand.
First and foremost, consistent branding is what separates musicians people remember from the ones who are forgotten. There are way more good musicians no one remembers than there are great musicians everyone can easily recognize. The reasons for this are numerous, but more often than not, branding is at the center of it all. A great brand makes you seem more professional, more talented, and altogether better.
As for the other two elements, you’ll need to watch the latest episode of our video series, Music Biz 101. Embedded below, the video finds host James Shotwell breaking down the essential elements of successful digital marketing that many artists overlook when attempting to promote themselves online.
Don’t allow yourself to become another musician no one remembers. Watch this episode of Music Biz 101 and get to work!
An American rock band called The Maine has found a way to succeed that other artists should use to get ahead.
Marketing is everything in music today. Everyone knows this, but very few know how to make their marketing efforts stand out from the noise being created by their peers and the competition they have yet to know. Blogs like the one you’re reading now can help. We post a lot of articles about getting ahead and becoming known. The one thing we cannot teach, however, is the one thing everyone needs: Organic connection.
is an American rock band from Tempe, AZ. The group started their career as much groups do by working with labels, but the better part of the last decade they’ve been fully DIY. That decision has made all the difference in the trajectory of their career, and it has afforded them a unique opportunity to develop a thriving community around their music with those who love them the most. In the latest installment of our Music Biz 101 video series, we examine how got here, and why other artists should follow their lead.
will release their new album, You Are OK, on March 29. You can learn about the album by listening to our recent podcast with frontman John O’Callaghan below:
Sites raise money and gain access based on traffic, but the numbers can be deceiving.
The beginning of 2019 has been hard on writers and creatives at a number of the web’s most recognizable sites. Between recent cuts at Buzzfeed and Vice, not to mention a number of smaller publications, estimates show at least 2,000 people lost jobs in media over the past six weeks. Some analysts are referring to these losses as a ‘bloodbath,’ and many expect more downsizing announcements in the near future.
The explanations for the cuts run the gamut from restructuring to cost-cutting. Either way, traffic most likely played a role. Everything related to online media companies boils down to traffic, especially for businesses who rely on outside investors to keep their properties afloat.
To gauge traffic, most investors and industry analysts rely on ComScore, a company dedicated to measuring media online. Faking a score in their system is practically impossible, but some forward-thinking media conglomerates have found a way to game the service’s measurements, at least in the short term, to raise their value.
As Tim Pool explains in the video above, digital media companies adjust their traffic and engagement by acquiring clickbait-heavy platforms and folding that audience into their brand. Here’s an example of the kind of articles these sites generate, which you’ve probably seen promoted at the bottom of articles on numerous media sites:
Articles like these offer little information, but boost engagement by requiring numerous clicks to view their content in full.
Between the clicks and added traffic, media companies can boast big numbers for their community of sites without having to show the performance of individual publications. Big numbers attract big investors, and investments keep the lights on.
Believe it or not, there is nothing illegal about this approach to promotion. The numbers are legitimate. The deception lies in how sites describe what pulls in readers. Here’s an example:
Let’s say a media conglomerate buys a clickbait-heavy site to boost its numbers. The conglomerate may claim their audience turns to them for news and essays on culture when in reality their audience is driven by articles like, ’25 celebrities who had plastic surgery.’ The investors would need to sift through the data for all sites to determine whether or not the company is lying, which requires time and money most do not want to sacrifice.
Over time, however, the truth about most sites comes out. Whether through internal investigations or a drop in traffic that the conglomerate cannot explain away, investors and readers inevitably see through the deception of inflated numbers. Even if they don’t, a number of services have emerged in recent years that can separate real and fake engagement into easy to read reports that anyone can follow.
The cuts we are seeing in media right now are bound to continue unless this trend changes. The problem is that few, if any sites have found a way to generate a committed audience large enough to draw the investment capital needed to build a media empire through legitimate means. When Facebook boasts a potential audience in the billions, what incentives do investors or advertisers have to work with sites whose monthly audience lies in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions?
But there is a catch-22 to the entire affair that will inevitably need to be addressed. Facebook and similar social media platforms are the primary way people consume news and media, but those services rely on countless third-party publishers to create the content users click. Without investors and ad sales, those publishers will go under, which will leave social media giants to generate news and content on their own.
Something has to give. The only questions are, what will it be and when will it happen?
Hello, everyone! Thank you for finding a few minutes in your schedule to spend with us. This post was created after learning of a fantastic new service made available from a company that would have been considered an industry pariah a decade ago. It’s a little crazy in theory, but it’s working to connect artists with their fans in a more direct way than ever before.
This blog exists to promote the future of the entertainment industry, and to do that we need input from people like you and your entertainment-loving friends. If you have any questions about the content in this article, or if you have an artist you would like to see featured on this blog, please contact james@haulix.com. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
Sitting at my desk this morning following a brief brainstorming session for the coming month of editorial content, I could not help thinking that a decade ago it would have been considering craze for someone to suggest promoting new music through BitTorrent. The service, which rose to fame/infamy because of its ties to illegal file sharing, has worked extremely hard to build a legitimate business out of questioning beginning in recent years. One of the biggest components of this positive resurgence has been the company’s ability to partner with innovative and influential members of pop culture to share content in a way that artists and other content creators are able to control from beginning to end. Their ‘Bundle’ series has partnered with everyone from G-Eazy to Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke in recent months, each offering a different variety of media and promotional materials, and every campaign has widely been considered a massive success. We’re not talking about thousands of engaged listeners, but millions, and they’re receiving content curated by the people who created it with little to no voice from the middle man (BitTorrent) bringing them together.
This week, roughly 18 months after launching in beta, BitTorrent has opened its digital magnetization platform BitTorrent Bundles to all musicians and other creators of digital content. I know there is a lot of skepticism around the idea of embracing a company once known as the knife slicing the achilles heel of the music industry, but a lot has changed in the last decade and BitTorrent are doing their best to leverage their massive user base in a way that promotes the continued support of creative people. You may have used services in the past that allowed for sharing of free media and other promotional materials, but none of them had the built-in audience, nor the transparency, that this service offers. For further explanation, we put together a list of three reasons artists, labels, and other industry folk should seriously consider using BitTorrent Bundles as part of their next promotional push. You can read those reasons, below. Those interested in signing up for access to the BitTorrent Bundles program can do so here.
1. The cost and distribution fees are so low it makes Apple look like a school yard bully.
Signing up for BitTorrent Bundles is absolutely free, as is choosing to share your material without a paywall, but if you choose to charge fans for access to your material BitTorrent will charge you for using their service. The company charges 10% of the purchase price of each Bundle plus about 5% in transaction fees. This is almost the exact same right as Bandcamp, not to mention being only a fraction of the $40+ distribution fees that are deducted from iTunes sales. And let’s not even get into how this compares to the average per stream payout offered by services like Spotify or Rdio.
2. The access to information you receive may be worth more than your financial gain
iTunes and Amazon Music are two of the biggest digital music stores in the world, and they’re recognized by almost anyone with an internet connection. Those are two facts that cannot be denied, and it’s completely understandable why artists choose to have their music on those sites even though the fees and costs associated may often be viewed as unfair. Something else these companies fail to do very well when working with artists is provide any information relating to the types of consumers who purchase their product. BitTorrent shares the email and other purchase data of every transaction with artists. That’s something almost no commercial competitor can offer.
When BitTorrent Bundles went public this week, Straith Schreder, director of content strategy for BitTorrent, spoke about how this lack of transparency hurts artists in the long run. “Platforms like iTunes take up to 40% of sales revenue – without disclosing fan contact information or data. Which means that, as an artist, you have no idea who’s buying your work, and how to reach them. To deprive artists of this data is to deprive them of the ability to build a viable business.”
3. In a world of tired ideas, BitTorrent Bundles are still considered ‘cool’
Though every John Hughes movie would like you to believe there is nothing wrong with staying far away from emerging trends and whatever it is the quote/unquote ‘cool’ kids are up to, a big component in digital marketing today is the ability to adapt the latest trending topic/craze to suit your needs. BitTorrent Bundles offer a low cost method of engaging fans with new and unreleased material that otherwise may never get to them without first cutting through miles and miles of industry nonsense. In a time where it’s harder than ever to forge lasting connections between two regular people, let alone a person and a brand, this service has found a way of reaching passionate music fans that has proven results for a large variety of talent. Anyone choosing to not try and further connect with their own fan base out of fear of being thought a sell out or something equally ridiculous need to realize their ego will forever hold them back from achieving their dreams. Embrace the now, embrace what’s popular, and find a way to make it your own.
