source from: megauploadforum

You’ve seen the website. It has a landing page with a photo on it and a little bit of blurb. There may be one or two things that move on it, or it might even have an animation. It has a fairly simple navigation system along the top or down the side. The links say things like About Us, Gallery, Downloads, Contact, Our MySpace — and the links take you to exactly the things you might expect when you get there.

These things are not, in themselves, bad things. In fact, it’s desirable that you don’t try and reinvent the wheel. People have expectations, and they don’t want to have to learn a new navigation system just for your website. This is not the problem I’m identifying here.

The problem I want to draw your attention to is the uncritical default position about what a website should be. In fact, the website should communicate you and what you do. More importantly, it should do it in such a way that your target audience has the perceptions about you that you would like them to have.

Your music company is unlike any other. You do things others do not. You deliberately avoid things others do. If nothing else, your music (at least hopefully) says something unique. Having a cookie cutter website does that no justice at all.

So your website should do a few things. One of those things — perhaps the most important — is to reflect you and the ways in which you wish to communicate. Because that will be different for everyone, all I can say is “think carefully about what that means” — which isn’t actually all that helpful, as advice goes.

That said, I can give you some examples to try and show you what I mean.

I think of the artist website that allows her fans to communicate with each other on a message board that resembles notes pinned to a board. That’s the front page. Everything else stems from there, because the board is the main thing return visitors come for. It’s not on the ‘discussion’ page — it’s first and foremost.

There’s the venue that has a ‘TONIGHT’ flyer as their front page, with information about that evening’s gig taking up the first page. That’s a reason to bookmark and revisit that page — because that’s what they found everyone wanted from the website: “who’s on tonight?” Having to click half a dozen times to get at that information, once you’d gone past the lovely photo of the front of the bar with the smiling staff, and the page about live music and bookings.

There’s the music publishing company that wanted to focus specifically on getting synchronisation deals for their artists, and so played different video clips with different music attached to give an idea of the ways in which those sorts of things would work.

There’s the record label that decided they didn’t want a website, but opted instead to build websites for each of their artists — with links to each of the others — on the basis that people don’t go looking for music by specific labels as much as they go looking for interrelated music.

And you don’t have to stick with building your own site. These days you can cobble together so many pre-existing ingredients that will effortlessly embed themselves into your own framework. This is one of the joys of Web 2.0 (about which, I will speak in more detail soon).

You can have Google Maps — perhaps on your touring page. For instance, this is where I attended a Digital Central launch event today, and led a workshop on new music technologies:

The Studio, Birmingham

[Update: I have disabled the WordPress plugin that turns the above link into an embedded map, because it appears to slow down the loading time of the whole site. I would recommend instead either simply linking to the page in Google Maps, or including a screen shot of the map, and linking that to the relevant coordinates on Google Maps.]

You can embed an Amazon shop on your site like this one here.

Or you can sell t-shirts through somebody like Spreadshirt — a bit like I try to do here.

You can use RSS feeds (again, more on that soon) to embed the latest news and content that’s relevant to your audience from all over the web and customise it to make it your own.

You can embed a Skype Me button, so that users of your website can speak to a real human at the click of a mouse, if that works for what you do. You could try it out by Skyping me, if you like — though I’m quite often otherwise engaged. This button will not only connect you with me with a click, it’ll tell you whether I’m around to take your call right now or not too:

This is just the beginning. The web is a kitset, and you can put it together how you like. I said, not so long ago, that it’s a bit like Lego — and to an extent, that’s true. But don’t lose sight of the aspect of design. There may not be the pieces that do what you need them to do. You don’t have to select from a menu, you can also build from scratch. A combination of those two things is usually best.

But what’s most important is that you don’t just get an off-the-shelf number. It might be enough to get you up and running and on the net — but if this is your livelihood, then you want to differentiate yourself in a positive way.

Yet another static website that follows the same old formula will not help. Not in the way you want it to.

Source: newmusicstrategies

Other than hearing, then liking, the most common and reliable way to find out about music is via the opinion leader. Often this will take the form of a press review or column — or some sort of radio feature. Occasionally, it’ll come from the telly. If you happen to respect the opinion of the person or institution telling you that the record is great, the chances you’ll be persuaded are reasonably high.

You can’t beat the persuasive power of an informed opinion — and this is the reason record labels spend so much time and effort getting their music into the hands of the people whose opinion is respected on these matters.

This is not new information.

But what has changed online is the proliferation of opinion sources. There are internet-only publications with readerships in the tens of thousands, whose writers may wish to say nice things about your music. You must know, for instance, about PopMatters and Pitchfork.

Bloggers, too, are becoming increasingly important. With daily visits and subscriptions in the hundreds of thousands, some of the top blogs need only mention the coolness of something, and that thing’s web traffic will soar through the roof. Look at Boing Boing for instance. They don’t talk about music and records per se — but when they mention something, it becomes the most read about and actively pursued topic on the internet.

More important still are the bloggers who do specifically discuss music. The ones worth paying attention to have developed a level of trust amongst their readers over time. When Jim from Quick Before It Melts says something is good, those of us who read what he has to say will likely be persuaded.

It’s even more interesting when you consider that you’re unlikely ever to see a bad review on an mp3 blog. This does not mean a complete lack of discrimination — quite the reverse. An mp3 blogger will not even bother mentioning something unless it is absolutely, unreservedly recommended. In the music press, the good, the bad and the indifferent all take equal space and the target audience is as broad as it can possibly be. Most mp3 blogs are narrowly focused on the niche, and will only mention the truly great.

So who’s likely to want talk about your music? Well, here’s a list — and another.

But going through a list like that and finding the hundred or so who are likely to intersect with the tastes of those who your music addresses seems a tricky business. Perhaps a better way is to focus on the blogs who are talking about the people who are like what you do.

This is where The Hype Machine comes in handy.

Let’s say your music shares broad areas of similarity with Green Day. A quick search of The Hype Machine reveals a bunch of blogs who have recently posted about Green Day. Those would seem like reasonable people with whom to initiate conversations about your music. Send them a promo. They already nearly like your music and may be inclined to say favourable things to the people who respect their opinions on these matters.

You might even consider becoming an opinion leader yourself. I’ll talk about the power of blogging in more depth later, but for now, just plant that seed in the back of your mind. What better way to surround yourself with an audience of people likely to like your music, than to become a reliable expert on the kinds of music that people who might like your music, might also like?

Blogging’s easy to start, and easy to do — but can I direct your attention towards MOG? It’s an online community — a bit like MySpace, only good — and all about the discussion of music. Becoming an authority in that environment, I’m told, can be a smart way to sell records.

But opinion leaders don’t have to just be knowledgeable individuals. Online, a crowd can be an opinion leader — if it’s the right crowd. One of the most effective ways of upselling online (though it might more accurately be termed ‘cross-selling’) is the Amazon model of ‘People who bought THIS also bought THAT’ (or, as one cynical friend would have it: ‘People who bought crap, also bought shit’).

I know one very smart cookie who bought up a hundred or so of a very popular record on Amazon.co.uk in the same genre as the one he was trying to sell — and each time he did, he also bought a copy of his own label’s record. Before long, the website knew for a fact that people who bought this particular THIS also bought his particular THAT.

Selling the unwanted extra copies at a bit of a loss was a little time consuming, but he factored it in as part of the cost of promotion — and by all accounts, it turned into a successful strategy.

I’m not recommending this to everyone, but it does illustrate a point. Reliable opinions, whether generated by consumer activity like an Amazon cross-sell, or the considered musings of an informed individual, are powerful tools.

The moral of the story is that other than Hear/Like/Buy, a trusted recommendation is the best promotion your music can get — and that sort of recommendation is far more readily available online than off.

Source: newmusicstrategies

Music is pretty much unique when it comes to media consumption. You don’t buy a movie ticket because you liked the film so much, and while you might buy a book because you enjoyed reading it so much at the library, typically you’ll purchase first, then consume.

DVDs are, perhaps, a little closer to the music buying experience. You love a film, so you buy the disc. But generally, you love the film because you took a chance and paid to see it in the cinema.

But music is different — and radio proves that. By far the most reliable way to promote music is to have people hear it. Repeatedly, if possible — and for free. After a while, if you’re lucky, people get to know and love the music. Sooner or later, they’re going to want to own it.

This isn’t just true for pop music. It’s not just about getting a hook stuck in someone’s brain so they hum it to themselves as they take out the rubbish. So-called ‘serious’ music also benefits from familiarity — perhaps even more so. The more challenging a work, the more exposure is required to really get inside it and appreciate it.

Likewise, liking music is not just about entertainment. Music consumption, to many people, is a serious business. And by consumption, I don’t just mean buying or listening. It also involves collecting, organising and making sense of the music in relation to a personal canon. It takes more than an impulse purchase to break into that sphere.

But either way — whether it’s a pop tune, a heavily political punk album, or an experimental, avant-garde suite — the key is very simple: people have to hear music, then they will grow to like it, and then finally, if you’re lucky, they will engage in an economic relationship in order to consume (not just buy and listen to) that music.

That’s the order it has to happen in. It can’t happen in any other order. There’s no point in hoping that people will buy the music, then hear it, then like it. They just won’t.

This is not, I trust you’ll agree, rocket science. It’s perfectly obvious, straightforward and practical. And yet it’s the one mistake that most people make when promoting music online.

Nobody really wants to buy a piece of music they don’t know — let alone one they haven’t heard. Especially if it’s by someone who lies outside their usual frame of reference.

And a 30-second sample is a waste of your time and bandwidth. It’s worse than useless. That’s not enough to get to like your music. Let them hear it, keep it, live with it. And then bring them back as a fan.

More than ever before, you have to build that relationship, because it’s easier than ever before to just not bother and simply go elsewhere. Elsewhere, after all, is right here too. No matter how good your music, it’s competing with millions of other choices. Millions.

The simplest way to promote music and build an economic relationship with a consumer is to let them hear it. Let them hear it repeatedly, without restriction. Let them grow to love your music and hear it as a part of their collection. Then they will want you to have their money.

This is not just a truism about music online — it’s also just how capitalism works. You provide value, then you are rewarded with money.

You don’t get the money first — and you don’t get to decide what value is.

Source: newmusicstrategies

It pays to be able to separate fact from fiction and hype from reality when it comes to the online music environment. Especially when your livelihood depends on it. Here are the two most important things to watch out for:

1) Technological determinism
There is a popular idea, particularly in the mainstream press, that technology drives history. According to this idea, changes to technology alter the rules that govern the ways in which we operate our lives, our businesses and our leisure. Usually this manifests itself around talk of either ‘progress’ or ‘decline’: a brave new world of opportunity, or a loss of an older, more natural way of operating.

In the case of online music, we see these things very clearly: MySpace ‘gave us’ the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen. Home-spun web streaming led to the Sandi Thom success story. Technological determinism says that the new internet environment allowed for the traditional gatekeepers to be circumvented, and that a groundswell of public support grew up as a result of the sheer power of a great artist connected directly to the masses.

There is also the story about how the internet is ‘killing’ the record industry. Downloading, and the practice of burning CDs is single-handedly responsible for the impending demise of the major labels, causing the decline of high street retail and is undermining traditional, ‘natural’ models of music distribution and consumption — and consequently preventing rights holders from receiving their deserved reward for their part in the creative process.

Nonsense.

In fact, technology does not ’cause’ these things. Technology changes and we choose our response. We have agency and can negotiate these shifts in media, as long as we understand them as they happen.

2) People tend to lie
Well, maybe ‘lie’ is too strong a word, but if you’re reading about music online, chances are you’re reading PR and marketing. Don’t be fooled — conservatively around 70% of what makes it to the media starts its life as a press release. Probably that figure is higher in reality.

Assuming that what you read began as a press release allows you to look for bias, spin and partiality. This should not be a new skill for you, but it seems that most people forget it when it comes to things they think they don’t quite understand — and technology is one of those areas.

So… if, for instance, you read that bands are making it big on MySpace, the first thing that should pop into your head is the question ‘who stands to gain if I think that’s true?’. Then you remember that what sells a band is a great story. The more that story is about them being genuinely great, rather than simply marketed, the more successful that sell becomes. You might even recall that the guy who owns Fox News is also the guy who owns MySpace.

So when you hear that Sandi Thom was signed to Sony because 100,000 people were tuning in to her nightly live webstream from her flat in London, you first remember that you only heard that story AFTER she had signed to Sony. The first thing you think of is the press release, and you wonder who might have sent that press release, bringing all those photographers to the ‘signing’.

Then you recall that bandwidth costs money, and that there are technical limitations on upstream internet bandwidth from home connections. If Sandi Thom had that many listeners / viewers without corporate support, she was pretty much running her own ISP, with outgoings in the thousands of pounds, and no income of which to speak.

Finally, you begin to realise that Sandi Thom had a publicist early on — and, most likely, was already signed to Sony when she started.

The groundswell of unsolicited support thing is a great story, and has the same impact as that story that everyone seemed to buy into about Norah Jones being a word-of-mouth phenomenon — when actually, there were billboards, tv ads and radio airplay all over the place.

In short:
The moral of the story here is that hype prevents us from understanding what’s really going on, and to what extent. If we don’t understand those processes, then navigating them ourselves becomes problematic.

If you want to make any headway in the music business in this day and age, you cannot be relying upon a magical MySpace success story, and nor can you fear the dangers of a hostile environment littered with thieves and ‘lost sales’.

Better to distrust the stories about online success and calamity, and simply view the new technologies as a range of tools that you can adopt, and a series of changes to the business environment to which you can adapt.

Source: newmusicstrategies

I was on a panel last night, at an event for the Moseley Creative Forum. The topic was ‘Is this the best time ever to be in the music industry?’. Naturally, there was some debate.

My brief, as you might expect, was to come up with some tips for dealing with the music industry in these ‘best of times’. So I drew up a list of bullet points to discuss.

I was aiming for a top 10 list — but there are more things than that to understand if you’re going to make any headway in the music business online. So I made it a top 20.

In no particular order (but numbered so you know where you’re up to):

1. Don’t believe the hype: Sandi Thom, the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen are not super famous, rich and successful because of MySpace, and nor because they miraculously drew a crowd of thousands to their homegrown webcast. PR, traditional media, record labels and money were all involved.

2. Hear / Like / Buy: It’s the golden rule. People hear music, then they like music, then they buy music. It’s the only order it can happen in. If you try to do it in any other sequence, it just won’t work.

3. Opinion Leaders Rule: We know the importance of radio and press. There are now new opinion leaders who will tell your story with credibility. You need to find out who they are — or better yet, become one of them.

4. Customise: A tailored solution at best, or at the very least a bespoke kitset approach to your web presence is crucial. An off-the-shelf number will almost guarantee your anonymity.

5. The Long Tail: Chris Anderson has pretty much proved that the future of retail is selling less of more. Put everything online. Expand your catalogue. You will make more money selling a large number of niche products than you will selling a few hits.

6. Web 2.0: Forget being a destination — become an environment. Let your customers tag and sort your catalogue. Open up for user-generated content. Your website is not a brochure — it’s a place where people gather and connect with you and with each other.

7. Connect: Learn how to tell a story, and learn how to tell it in an appropriate fashion for web communication. Think about how that could be translated for both new media and mainstream PR outlets.

8. Cross-promote: Your online stuff is not a replacement for your offline stuff, and nor does it exist independently of it. Figure out how to make the two genuinely intersect.

9. Fewer Clicks: This is especially true if you want somebody to part with their money. If I have to fill in a form, navigate through three layers of menu and then enter a password, I don’t want your music any more.

10. Professionalism: Have a proper domain. MySpace is not your website. Learn to spell. Use high-quality photography. Get a web designer who understands design — not just code.

11. The Death of Scarcity: Understand that the economics of the internet is fundamentally different to the economics of the world of shelves and limited stock. Know that you could give away 2 million copies of your record in order to sell a thousand.

12. Distributed Identity: From a PR perspective, you are better off scattering yourself right across the internet, rather than staying put in one place. Memberships, profiles, comments, and networks are incredibly helpful.

13. SEO: You need to understand how Search Engine Optimisation works, and how you can maximise your chances of being found. Be both findable — and searchable.

14. Permission: This is very basic stuff. Don’t spam. Let people opt-in. Make the information you send them relevant, useful and welcome. Long lists of dates and events are impersonal and feel like work. Personalised messages seem far more important.

15. RSS: Provide it, use it and teach it. Relying on people to come back to visit your website is ultimately soul destroying. So is always making more content all the time. RSS is the single most important aspect of your site. Treat it as such – but remember it’s still new for most people. Help your audience come to grips with it.

16. Accessibility: Not everyone has a fast computer or high speed access. Not everybody has the gift of sight. Make everything you do online accessible. Make your site XHTML compliant. It’s easy to do, it’s important, and it stops you from turning people away at the door. You wouldn’t have a shop without wheelchair access, would you?

17. Reward & Incentivise: Everything is now available all of the time. Give people a reason to consider you as part of their economic engagement with music. A 30-second streaming sample is worse than useless.

18. Frequency is everything: Publish daily. There’s nothing more sad than an abandoned website or a disused forum. Search engines prioritise active sites. You want people to come back? Give them something to come back to that they haven’t seen before.

19. Make it viral: Whatever you do, make it something that people will want to send to other people. Your best marketing is word of mouth, because online, word of mouth is exponentially more powerful.

20. Forget product — sell relationship: The old model of music business is dominated by the sale of an individual artefact for a set sum of money. iTunes is still completely old school. The new model is about starting an ongoing economic relationship with a community of fans.

And a bonus:

21. The chart is a mug’s game: Not only is the top 40 singles chart entirely meaningless, it has even stopped working as a promotional tool. Don’t aim for the chart — aim for a sustainable career.

And that’s what I came up with. I didn’t have time to elaborate on most of them during my presentation, and so I thought what I’d do is for the next few weeks, just pick one at a time, and elaborate a little bit to try and explain each of those core principles.

Source: newmusicstrategies

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