The copycat nature of social media may seem strange right now, but it’s happening for a good reason.
TikTok understands the value of individual experiences. Rather than treat people as part of a community based on their connection like most apps, TikTok treats people as unique individuals. No two recommendation feeds are the same, and that approach is turning heads throughout the tech world.
By offering more personalized user experiences, apps are learning more about us. That information is fueling a new era in marketing and advertising, which Music Biz host James Shotwell explains at length in this update. Click below to learn why there has never been a better time—or reason—to start making video content.
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
Ahead of their new album, Voices In The Sky, Brymir chats with Haulix about the secret to their global success.
Finding your sound takes time. For Brymir, the Finnish metal greats spent multiple records pursuing a sonic direction that didn’t fit their personal aspirations. The band believed a ‘folk’ friendly sound would help them find success, but in recent years found a much more powerful marketing tool in honest and personal storytelling.
With their latest release, Voices In The Sky, Brymir tackle the world around them and the chaos it breeds. The material touches on everything from our relationship with nature to interpersonal conflicts and the wide range of feelings they can produce.
In this Fast Five interview, Brymir frontman Viktor Storm Gullichsen chats with Music Biz host James Shotwell about his band’s ongoing evolution and how embracing change has made all the difference in their career. The pair also discuss song length, Brymir’s writing process, and what the rest of 2022 holds for these wide-eyed metal masters.
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
Haulix promos look great as is, but a few small changes can make a big impact on your contacts. We can help.
Haulix promos are designed to be beautiful and engaging right out of the box. We built our platform knowing that many professionals do not have the time or skills necessary to create original landing pages for each release, which is why they look great as is, but there are customization options available.
One of our favorite customization options is the banner. Located at the top of promo pages and promo invitations, the banner allows you to add one more image to your latest promotion.
We’ve seen countless examples of custom banners over the thirteen years we’ve been in business, but there are a handful of ideas that stand out as both a clever and creative way to increase the impact of a promo page. Check it out:
Promote The Physical Release Of Your New Album
Music professionals buy music. Maybe that isn’t shocking information to you, but it may sound alarms for others. Some believe critics never buy music because they have an unlimited amount of free content to consume at all times. However, in our experience, critics love purchasing the music they preview through Haulix. Knowing an album is great before you place an order is a huge relief.
The example above, from Listenable Records, promotes the upcoming vinyl release from the same band featured in the promo. The promo is for a single, but the banner announces the full release. It’s an eye-catching and informative piece of content that also serves as a reminder for key album information (artist, album title, label, etc.).
Increase Brand Recognition/Familiarity
Many publicists work with a wide variety of talent that can, in certain cases, stretch around the globe. To make sure their contacts recognize their latest campaigns, many clients use custom banners to promote their business, brand, and aesthetic. That way, contacts flipping through their emails will see the banner and think twice before moving on.
The example above, from Transcending Obscurity, handles this well with a gorgeous, heavy metal-inspired logo that aligns with the sound of the artists they promote. TO is known for its ability to market smaller European metal bands, especially those from niche corners of the genre. For TO and their clients, brand recognition can mean the difference between a click and a skip.
Promote Your Mailing List
Did you know that Facebook and Instagram only show your content to roughly 5.2% of your followers? Twitter, TikTok, and other social media platforms are not much better.
We believe you shouldn’t be charged to reach people who have asked to receive news updates. More than any other form of communication, mailing lists nearly guarantee that your latest updates actually reach your fans. That is why we recently made a post and YouTube video about how surprisingly powerful mailing lists are in 2022.
The example above, from our client You, Me, And Everyone We Know, is simple and straightforward. It tells anyone listening exactly where they need to go to learn more about the band, which is information that promo listeners can use both in coverage and for themselves. It also emphasizes the importance of confirming the subscription, which Is never a bad idea.
Share Tour Dates + Ticket Information
Haulix is built to promote music, but we know that the work of musicians does not stop in the studio. Every release cycle includes a tour, and custom banners are a perfect spot to promote upcoming performances. You can easily share dates and ticket information or point people toward the official tour site.
The example above, from UK metal band Architects, promotes the band’s 2018 tour. That banner tells people where and when to see the band, and it gives journalists something extra to mention in their coverage that could boost sales.
How do you use Haulix promo banners? Send your ideas to James@haulix.com.
A recent feature from the developers at ForeVR Games offers a glimpse at the many ways artists can earn money in VR.
The age of virtual reality, or VR, is finally upon us. With the introduction of consumer-friendly headsets, millions of people worldwide are spending part of their lives immersed in virtual environments that offer sights and experiences that are impossible in our reality. The so-called ‘metaverse,’ which aims to meld our existence with a virtual landscape, is becoming increasingly tangible with each passing day. That trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
But where does music fit? The music industry has barely wrapped its collective consciousness around the digital age, and now we’re confronted with another new, strange, and vaguely-defined landscape bursting with potential but limited by access and general public awareness.
The biggest opportunities in VR right now exist for a select few. Billie Eilish, for example, has a partnership with Beat Saber, one of the platform’s most popular games. That’s a great deal for someone with an already massive reach, but most artists are not in a position to negotiate similar arrangements for their catalog.
While we continue to hunt for opportunities that every artist can leverage in the virtual space, we have found two ways musicians are already able to earn revenue through VR:
ForeVR Games’ Creative Jukebox System
One developer leading the charge for change, ForeVR Games, has found a clever solution to help artists enter the VR space. In their current game, ForeVR BOWL, and the upcoming ForeVR DARTS, ForeVR Games allows users to play music from an in-game connected to YouTube. Users can stream music on YouTube while enjoying ForeVR products, and in turn, their favorite artists receive a small royalty for the play. Users can choose from pre-made playlists or browse for the perfect song.
YouTube royalties are notoriously small (about $0.008 per view), but any amount is better than nothing, which the majority of the virtual space provides.
Spotify (AKA – “the browser method”)
Spotify, the current leader in music consumption, is largely absent in VR, and the streaming giant had yet to release a native app at this post. Quest 2 users, the largest segment of the VR community, can only access Spotify through the device’s internet browser. Still, that method does allow listeners to play their favorite music inside various VR games and environments.
Same Content, Different Platform
Speaking of Youtube and Spotify, you can access virtually all browser-based music platforms through Oculus. There is also a growing community of indie VR developers making browser-based titles that leverage music, though their licensing agreements (or lack thereof) can be hard to find.
While it may seem like musicians will have an uphill battle building communities in the virtual space, it is important to remember that VR is relatively new. Virtual reality is one of the fastest-growing entertainment segments right now. Still, it will take time for developers to create apps and platforms that utilize the full capabilities of the equipment. Early adopters benefit from learning how to best use and navigate the virtual landscape before everyone else tries to jump on the bandwagon 1-2 to years from now.
Music marketing is hard for everyone, but you can unlock incredible success with a quick shift in perspective.
The most straightforward approach to successful music marketing is also the oldest. Find an artist making music similar to you that is already successful and try to win over their fans. That simple concept is the driving force behind targeted marketing. A pop-rock band that often gets compared to All Time Low, for example, will target fans of All Time Low with their digital promotions.
The motivation behind this approach to music marketing is rooted in an old way of thinking about fans and how they engage with the artists they love. At any point in history before 2006, the vast majority of listeners discover new music through sound alone. People would hear a song they liked and then seek out the artist behind it. They bought records from unknown bands because the stickers on their packaging said they were similar to bands they already knew.
But the world doesn’t work that way anymore. Thanks to the Internet and social media, consumers are more connected than ever with the creatives that they admire. We don’t just know our favorite artist’s songs; we feel like we know them. We read their every thought on Twitter, look at their personal life on Instagram, and can respond to anything they post anywhere at a moment’s notice. To put it in the simplest terms possible, the barrier between artists and fans has never been smaller than it is right now, making getting and keeping consumer attention increasingly tricky.
Today’s music fans are buying into an artist for more than their sound. Your listeners follow you because of your overall aesthetic, branding, and presentation. Your music is a gateway to an entire universe of creativity that you oversee. People who enjoy what you make want to be as close to you as possible, and they want you to feel close to them as well. They want to forge a community, both between you and them and others who like your music. Random in 2021 is about being part of something bigger than yourself, and it is the responsibility of artists everywhere to try and forge that sense of belonging amongst their followers.
In this Music Biz update, host James Shotwell explains how fandom has changed and why marketing must evolve to meet the demands of today. He provides examples to help artists understand why they need to dig deeper into their fans and their fans’ interests to find the best marketing approach. James knows that the artists who break out and lead sustainable careers today do so by possessing a deep understanding of who enjoys their music. It’s no longer about casting a wide net and hoping for great results. Music marketing today is all about niche content. Let us explain:
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
Every musician wants fans to hear their latest single or watch their latest video, but almost every one of them is sharing the wrong link.
Here’s a hypothetical situation we can all relate to:
With a new single now available everywhere, an artist wants to promote their new music to fans and people who have yet to discover them. They sign up for a service that pulls links from all the streaming services into a single landing page and then links to that page with their social media posts.
Here’s another hypothetical:
With a new single available everywhere, an artist chooses to push a single streaming service through every post they make. They tell everyone to stream their song on Spotify, and every post they make points people to Spotify.
Both of the promotional approaches outlined above are common practices in music today. Both are also the wrong way to promote new music.
Let’s stop and think about what happens in these scenarios.
For starters, the artist is engaging fans on platforms they do not own or control (social media) and pointing them to other services and sites that they do not own (streaming platforms).
Additionally, the artist in the first example promotes a third company they do not own (the promo links service).
While these promotional approaches may appear to streamline the process of getting people to hear your music, they do very little to support the business that matters most: Your music career.
In this Music Biz update, host James Shotwell explains why the most common music promotion methods may not be the most beneficial for artists.
Every marketing plan aims to forge a lasting bond with people who choose to engage with the promotional materials. A song stream or video view may give you a short-term boost of serotonin, but unless you’re converting consumers into fans, your campaigns are falling short of their potential.
Let’s rethink the promotional efforts described earlier:
With a new single available everywhere, an artist wants to promote their new music to fans and people who have yet to discover them. They create a landing page on their website to announce the release, and they include links to all the streaming services where the single is available. They also embed the song as a streaming track or video.
That approach is already doing more to make people who engage with the artist’s posts more aware of their craft, place online, and brand.
But we still need to go one step further:
In addition to building a page that makes it easy to find their music online, the artist includes an option to join their mailing lists. Fans who enjoy the new single can sign up to receive messages from the artist regarding the latest music and tour information and access to their new merch.
Mailing lists have been around for decades, and despite all the new ways of connecting with our audience, they remain the most effective. When someone joins your mailing list, they are telling you they want to develop their relationship with your music. They are asking to know about music, live appearances, and more. They don’t want to hopefully see something online when you choose to post. These individuals want to know everything. They want to be true fans, and those people are the ones you need to take your career to the next level.
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
Zire is one of many new services advertising cheap music promotion on social media, but are their claims too good to be true? We found out.
Every musician knows the experience of swiping through stories on Instagram and seeing advertisements for services they’ve never heard of promising impossible things. Some offer to ‘unlock’ an artist’s true potential with a course or livestream event. Others promise to help “maximize” reach or “get guaranteed” exposure in exchange for a small amount of money.
If you’re anything like us, then these advertisements are probably met with an eye-roll. You feel your gut warning you to keep scrolling because the claims in the ad seem too good to be true. After all, if meaningful success costs less than $100, wouldn’t everyone do it?
Sometimes things are different. Sometimes you stare at the ads and its slick animation, wondering if maybe the reason you haven’t heard of this service is because nobody you know has tried it yet. Perhaps you even tell yourself that the promises being made aren’t unrealistic. Maybe these companies do have all the answers, and you’re the only one whose thought to give them a try!
You should always trust your gut. If your instincts are telling you that something is too good to be true or someone is offering something you know cannot be delivered for next to nothing, then you are a fool to consider otherwise.
But on the off chance you’re still considering these companies, we went ahead and spent money for you. We found Zire, one of many companies promising cheap promotion on multiple high-profile websites and apps for a small amount of money, and we bought a one-week campaign. We partnered with the band You, Me, And Everyone We Know to see what would happen when their single, “F.I.N.E.,” was promoted on the service. The results are not shocking, but they are worth discussing.
In this Music Biz update, host James Shotwell walks through the Zire platform. He showcases the site’s slick animations, automated ad creation, and seemingly in-depth analytics. He also compares the result of a $40 promotion to the typical engagement You, Me, And Everyone We Know sees on their Spotify profile. Check it out:
Some highlights:
To their credit, Zire’s creation process is simple. Artists find a song, upload photos, connect social accounts, and set parameters for their ad.
Our one-week, $40 campaign included ads on Rolling Stone,Pitchfork, Genius, Ultimate Classic Rock, and more.
Despite asking users to upload photos, Zire auto-generates dozens of ads using stock images that users have no choice in using. These images didn’t reflect the look or sound of the band.
The most impressions our ad received was on a website that has not been updated for over a year. Worse, the site had nothing to do with the style of music the band plays.
According to Zire, our one-week campaign generated over 27,000 impressions. Of those, less than 600 clicked through to a streaming service.
Based on Zire’s audience insight, most of our impressions were from advertisements shown to people ages 45-55, which is much higher than the band’s target demographic. Zire does not allow users to set age parameters during the ad creation process.
Ads were shown to people worldwide, including countries where the band has no footprint or any ability to visit in the foreseeable.
Compared to previous weeks, You, Me, And Everyone We Know saw no measurable change in consumption or followers.
Of the roughly 550 Spotify plays that the Zire ad potentially made possible, the band generated $2.20 in revenue.
In summary:
We spent $40 to make roughly $2.20 with ads that cast the widest net possible. Zire’s insights tell us there were nearly 30,000 impressions, but only about 600 got people to visit a streaming service. We have no way of knowing if those individuals actually listened to the band.
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
With the competition for attention at an all-time high, knowing when to begin an album rollout may determine whether or not your next release is a success.
Timing is everything in music today. Start too soon, and you’re likely to lose consumer interest before your music is ready. Start too late, and you may fail to reach the people who need your music the most. But knowing the right to begin a new album rollout is hard, and finding the right answer for you requires first asking a series of questions.
How successful am I? Before you can begin an album rollout, it’s best for artists to step back and take stock of their careers. Are you at the level of Taylor Swift and others who make worldwide headlines with every announcement? If not, maybe you’re a mid-level talent with an engaged audience that you hope to build further with your upcoming release. Perhaps you’re a relative newcomer, whose audience is small and not as engaged as you’d like. Whatever the case, knowing where you are can play a significant role in the amount of time needed to successfully promote something new. Specifically, those with less fame and recognition typically need more time to get the word out about their latest activities.
How do I want to promote my new release? Take a moment to picture your perfect rollout. What kind of promotional materials do you share? How often are you sharing them? If you’re making videos or taking promotional photos, who will you hire to oversee that production? As you build these ideas, take our paper and write down every single piece of promotion you wish to create. Be specific. The more you can describe your ideal rollout, the easier it will be to make those dreams come true.
How long will it take to get all the promotional materials ready? Preparing your album campaign takes time. You shouldn’t announce anything until you have all the accompanying content ready to share. You need to look at the list you made in response to the second question and figure out the nitty-gritty details of realizing your vision. Once that is done, make it happen. Shoot the videos, prepare the promotional images, etc.
Today’s Music Biz 101 clip explores these questions further and covers what to do once you’ve finished step three. Check it out:
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
There are countless ways to contact influential people, but only one affordable platform for music promotion is trusted by labels and artists worldwide.
The music business has undergone countless evolutions over the last century, but one thing that remains the same is the importance of relationships. Success is rarely a matter of who writes the best song or creates the best press kit. The talent that rises through the underground and becomes household names do so because of their ability to network. They put themselves out into the ether, making their talent and personality known, and they connect with like-minded individuals searching for an opportunity to build something that stands out from the competition.
There are no tricks or cheatsheets that can manufacture the power of honest relationships, and without them, there is no tool or advice we can offer that will make you a star. If you don’t have contacts yourself, hire someone that does, and make sure to check their credentials.
The biggest names in music understand that music promotion is a crowded field wherever everyone is essentially selling the same thing. They have songs, artwork, press photos, artist bios, and personality. You can package these items in a billion different ways. Still, the core elements are the same, and the influencers who shape culture wake every day to a seemingly endless number of requests for their limited attention.
What separates breakout stars from overlooked talent lies in how they present their material. Soundcloud, Dropbox, and Google Drive may make sharing content easy, but each service severely limits an artist’s ability to express themselves. Most Soundcloud landing pages, for example, include large branding and ads for Soundcloud services. Google Drive and Dropbox offer a more straightforward UI. However, the appearance is so bland that the only reason anyone would click on the links on said pages is because of a pre-existing familiarity with the material.
The best way to cut through the clutter and make a lasting impression on influencers is Haulix, the industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Haulix makes it easy for professionals at every entertainment level to create eye-catching promotional emails and landing pages that emphasize an artist’s brand and music. BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Metal Blade Records, Pure Noise Records, and many other labels, independent artists, and publicists already trust Haulix. There are multiple affordable plans to choose from, and each comes with a one-month risk-free trial.
Haulix promos are great whether or not users choose to customize the default template. Each promo pages makes it easy to share the artist, album title, label, release date, cover art, record description, promo photos, music videos, and music. Here is one example of a promo with no customization:
If users do choose to customize their promo pages, great designs are just a few clicks away. Here is an album promo put together for You, Me, And Everyone We Know’s recent live album. As you can see, the page is customized to match the artwork’s colors, and a banner is present to emphasize the band’s branding.
Haulix also makes it easy to create engaging promo invitations that provide your contacts with unique links to your music. Each contact has a personal link, which allows you to track each person’s engagement with your music. You can view email opens, song streams, and downloads.
But the offerings don’t stop there! Haulix also has tools to generate reports, manage teams, and watermark your music. You can learn about all of this and more on the company’s website.
A great song will never find its audience without exciting promotion, so we’re giving you powerful marketing tools that won’t break the bank.
The truth about being a musician in 2021 is that making good music is rarely enough to warrant a successful career. Marketing is as important as making great music, and the artists making a living with their creativity can do so because they also understand promotion. These individuals create and share marketing materials that look good and grab consumers’ attention, which, in turn, convinces people to listen.
A decade ago, making great content was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. You needed to buy a lot of gear and applications you didn’t fully understand or pay someone else and hope they understood your vision. That isn’t the case today. There are many apps available to consumers at little to no cost, making it easy to create eye-catching content in a matter of minutes. We’re going to share four powerful marketing tools today, but know there are much more available online.
DaVinci Resolve
Offering tools comparable to Adobe Premiere with better UI and zero cost, DaVinci Resolve is quickly becoming a widely used tool throughout the entertainment industry. This application makes it easy to create lyric videos, visualizers, TikTok’s, Instagram Stories, Spotify Canvas clips, and more. You can even create and edit music videos. Are you feeling lost? No worries. There are many great tutorials to help you get started.
Canva
The worst kept secret in graphic design, Canva is a free tool that makes creating stunning images and gifs a breeze. The free tier membership provides you with access to thousands of great templates and allows for unlimited uploads. Use this tool to create a cohesive online brand, thumbnails for YouTube, concert posters, and more.
Display Purposes
With competition for attention on social media at an all-time high, Display Purposes helps users identify relevant hashtags that are likely to generate engagement on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
Later
Once you have your video content, still images, and hashtags, you’ll need to plan the perfect rollout on social media to maximize the impact of each post. Later makes it easy to schedule posts across a variety of platforms in minutes. The free tier membership provides enough tools to make daily posts on Twitter, Instagram, and more. Schedule now, engage later, and stress less. That’s the kind of energy we need more of in 2021.
Music Biz is brought to you by Haulix, the music industry’s leading promotional distribution platform. Start your one-month free trial today and gain instant access to the same promotional tools used by BMG, Concord, Rise Records, Pure Noise Records, and hundreds more. Visit http://haulix.com/signup for details.
