| Join the Metro Music Source. The DC area music industry meet-up. More info HERE. |
Sign up for imaginePR's newsletter to receive music news plus free PR & marketing tips! |
|
Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
Album finished? Check. Tour dates? Check. Press photos? Check. Press release? Check. Biography? Urgh!
If you’re not a spectacular storyteller or wondrous wordsmith, then the task of writing or updating your biography can seem like an arduous task. However, a biography is an essential item in any musicians marketing tool kit. It positions your brand identity, communicates your key achievements and provides background info to fans and media alike. Here are a few pointers to help you on your way…..
Interview Yourself
If you’ve not yet put pen to paper, the best thing to do is put yourself in the position of a journalist. Devise a list of questions covering your career and interview yourself. Gain ideas and angles by reading up on blog Q&As, or identify interview questions you would ask a favorite band or artist. This will make the process of gathering your bio content a lot easier. While you are interviewing yourself, write down as much info as possible. You can edit this all later.
Plan Your Structure
Mumford and Sons
Your bio is not your life story. It’s a concise and well structured overview of your music career. This is why planning the format is key. Think carefully about what you want to include in each paragraph and keep the following in mind:
1. Define your key achievements. If you have performed with well-known artists or received awards or accolades, then now is the time to rave about them. List them according to their newsworthiness.
2. Your bio does not need to be chronological. In fact the first couple of paragraphs are often the most important as they’ll determine whether a journalist or fan will read on. Ensure that the beginning of your bio provides an effective summary of your sound. For example, the Mumford and Sons bio conjures an image of their offering from the outset.
3. If you’re in a band, stick to writing about the band’s overall story, rather than each individual member in detail. It’s okay to dedicate some space to each member as long as the bio starts and ends with the band. Don’t kill the reader with detail – keep it focused.
Find Your Narrative Style
Adele
If you’re not a naturally gifted writer, than discovering your “writer’s voice” is one of the most difficult tasks. But don’t panic! If you write with passion and personality, you are halfway there. If you get stuck, utilize press quotes or even quote yourself. Adele’s biography is a good example of this.
Alternatively ask your friends and family to provide descriptors, and get feedback from them on your writing style. If in doubt, keep it short and simple. Balance style with substance.
Create a Work In Progress
Make life easy for yourself and write a biography that is easy to update on a regular basis. Adopt a style and format that is timeless and easy to add additional information to as your career progresses. Keep your bio as concise as possible — make every word count. If you struggle fitting all relevant information into one page, create both a short and long version that can be used accordingly.
Now get cracking….it won’t write itself.
Tags: advice, marketing, Music Industry, musicians, tips
Posted in Music Industry, advice, marketing, music, musicians | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
 It’s easy to forget the importance of good old traditional human contact. With all the hype over Facebook, Twitter, Foursquares and now Google+, most musicians are under pressure to be online 24 hours a day. However, one of the most effective ways to network is still face-to-face. Remind yourself of these following five principles when you go on your next schmoozathon and you’ll be good to go -
Quality Not Quantity
Networking at industry events should never be viewed as a numbers game. Musicians and industry professionals who race around trying to gather as many business cards as possible are forgetting the most important aspect of networking – good conversation. I strongly believe that establishing a genuine connection with a handful of people (even just one) will make you much more memorable than getting into the face of dozens.
Think of it as similar to dating – ask questions, listen and get to know your colleagues or potential fans. You may not gel with everyone. That’s okay. You don’t always have to aggressively target the people you feel you “should” know. Being relaxed, friendly and genuine will make you much more memorable.
Giving Not Getting
When I first moved to the US, I was really touched by a handful of people I met at events who went out of their way to help me for no reason at all. They either introduced me to friends of theirs or sent me information about a topic of conversation we were discussing. They asked for nothing in return, and as a result instantly stuck in my mind. This made me realize that by focusing on what you can give, rather than what you can get will lead to more valuable relationships in the long-run.
Everyone is Equal
We’ve all seen it hundreds of times before – those people whose eyes glaze over when they realize that the person they are talking to is “not important enough”. We all have agendas, and time is money, but mental hierarchies are presumptuous and arrogant. You should always view everyone as equally valuable. Remember the proverb “great oaks from little acorns grow’.
Be Prepared
No one likes a musician who aggressively shoves a CD in your face. However, being prepared with CDs, business cards and flyers is a must. You just need to ensure that your timing is right. Use your judgement, be courteous, humble and realistic. Always remember the basics too – label your CDs with contact details, and ensure that your business cards and flyers are striking, brand-consistent, and readable.
The Art of The Follow Up
We all know how important it is to follow up. You just need to think carefully about how you are going to do it. I hate it when someone tries to friend me on Facebook without as much as a message to say hello again. Try to make it as personal as possible – a chatty email re-introducing yourself or a shout-out on Twitter. Even better, send a hand-written note or put in a phone call. Think it through and make it worthwhile.
With all this in mind, get networking!
*This post was originally published on MicControl.com
Tags: advice, marketing, Music Industry, musicians, networking
Posted in Music Industry, Uncategorized, marketing, music | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011
 I’m finally getting around to re-posting a blog post I wrote for the Marketing Trenches blog back in December 2010 which discusses mobile marketing and the music industry. I wrote the blog post after attending a 6 week Interactive Marketing course at Georgetown University. We covered topics such as e-commerce, search engine optimization and search engine marketing (to name a few). However, the topic I enjoyed the most was mobile marketing, led by Vince Buscemi, VP of Mobile Operations at MindGrub. Here’s the blog post again -
Buscemi’s presentation made me think about mobile marketing in the music industry. The music industry is one of the first arts industries to embrace mobile marketing. Many successful music marketing campaigns have centered around SMS marketing. For example, the multi-platinum selling British band Take That launched a joint mobile marketing campaign with Play.com to promote their 2009 “The Circus Live Tour.” Via text messages and redeemable online vouchers, fans were offered exclusive content at concerts.
In the live concert setting, SMS marketing is constantly used. I recently attended a Black Eyed Peas concert at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC. At the beginning of the gig, fans were asked to text comments to the band. During the gig, Will.i.am performed an improvised rap using the text messages sent in by fans as his lyrics. The audience loved it, and in the space of an hour, the band collected numerous cell numbers for future mobile marketing campaigns. Results!
However SMS marketing has its drawbacks. As Keith Center, lead singer of The Dreamscapes Project, says: “Text messaging makes a huge difference in your connection with your audience and attendance, but your welcome can be worn out extremely quickly!”
So does our future lie more in the mobile apps market? The Grammys seem to think so, judging by the launch of an application earlier this year called “Guess the Grammys.”According to MobileMarketer.com, the app allowed consumers to “register their guesses and challenge friends to play along.” After the show, consumers were sent an email showing how well their guesses stood up against the actual winners. Consumers could also buy the nominated music because the application redirected them to the iTunes store. Apparently, after just one week, the application had 50,000 downloads.
What other mobile marketing trends will be affecting the music industry in the near future? According to Buscemi, “Augmented Reality” and location-based marketing will dominate. I’m familiar with location-based marketing with the rise of FourSquare and Gowalla, and the success of companies like Groupon and Living Social. However, “Augmented Reality” is a new concept to me.
According to Webopedia, Augmented Reality is “a type of virtual reality that aims to duplicate the world’s environment in a computer. An augmented reality system generates a composite view for the user that is the combination of the real scene viewed by the user and a virtual scene generated by the computer that augments the scene with additional information. The virtual scene generated by the computer is designed to enhance the user’s sensory perception of the virtual world they are seeing or interacting with.”
Buscemi provided a more accessible example of Augmented Reality. He explained that very soon, we will be able to walk into a shopping center, and, thanks to information from our mobile devices, every sign we see or walk past will be targeted to our individual likes/dislikes, location/preferences etc. This is similar to how Facebook caters ads to our personal preferences, but it will take place in the physical world. For more, check out Mindgrub’s blog post on Augmented Reality.
Mashable also recently published a post providing examples of other Augmented Reality type marketing tactics including QR codes and NFC tags.
So what does “Augmented Reality” mean for the music industry? I’ve already noticed the use of QR codes at the SXSW music conference last year. Fans could scan a bar code on a poster and download music and content straight away. Will we soon start walking past music venues and see adverts for bands targeted personally at us? Will bands be able to cater their set lists according to the information they receive about certain types of fans attending a certain gig on a certain night? How predictive will our musical experiences become? Will these marketing tactics be available only to a privileged elite, or accessible to the “musician’s middle class”?
I’m excited to find out.
Tags: marketing, mobile marketing, Music Industry
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
I was very lucky to meet the lovely Mary Adkins, founder of SeeJoeRock, at a monthly music industry networking event that I co-host with two industry colleagues in Washington DC (called the Metro Music Source). I was really keen to find out more about how Mary was helping musicians in the Greater DC area and beyond, and what SeeJoeRock was all about. I quickly signed up as an ‘Industry Pro’ and asked Mary to answer some questions for me regarding the SeeJoeRock philosophy and history.
1. What gave you the inspiration to create www.seejoerock.com?
I’ve owned a Graphic design company for the past 10 years and in that time, have worked with several musicians and bands as well as knew many artists on a personal level, that had basically been doing just about everything they could to promote themselves – by themselves. They were using sites like MySpace and Facebook as their main sources of online presence, but with the over-abundance of musicians as well as everyday people on the sites, viewers noticing them or even finding them for that matter, was far fetched unless they already knew or heard about them or their music.
Most artists also only had a small circle of “people they knew” in the industry, and had the mentality that they needed to live in NY or CA for the “right people”, or any industry pro for that matter, to ‘discover’ them. I wanted to create a way to bridge that gap. With the design and development tools and skills I already had, I decided to develop a website that put these unsigned, DIY, emerging type musicians, bands, solo artists etc in the spotlight – and create a way to directly connect them with music industry pros in any corner of that field that could help them take their music and music career to the next level. (Pros like Agents, Labels, and Promoters to Screen-printers, Photographers, Radio personalities, Booking Agents, T-shirt designers etc). In Jan 2008, www.seejoerock.com was born. The site took about a year to build and it launched in April 2009.
2. How is SeeJoeRock different from other social networking sites?
Its focus audience is for a specific niche group – Musicians who are dedicated to making a career with their music and are serious about taking that next step in making that happen, and industry professionals whose target client base are these indie type of musicians they offer their services to. It’s been often referred as the “LinkedIn” for Musicians.
To keep things user friendly, SJR offers the same familiar structure as most social networking sites as far as a profile goes – you can upload your bio, list your talents & skills and years of experience, to uploading photos, mp3s, videos, status updates and an area to post your events. Much like the other sites, you can add other users to your network, comment on their profiles or send them private messages. You can also add their events to your own “I’m attending” calendar.
But this isn’t your little sister’s social networking playground. The users are other emerging musicians and industry professionals who are all there for the same reason – to connect, network, give-advice, assist and help each other gain exposure. (There’s also an area for Super Fans to just help spread the word!). SJR also offers a place to post Classifieds or “Wanted Postings” – Say if a band is looking for a drummer, they can post an ‘Ad’ up free and any user on the site can respond, which will link back to their profile to allow that connection to begin.
SJR also promotes these musicians (as well as the pros) by featuring a new one every couple of weeks and puts them in the spotlight! These featured users get put right on our homepage. Their videos get posted front and center on the homepage as well as in our header graphics, quick links to their profiles, blasted on all of our other social networking sites, added to our blogs, newsletters, and online press releases. Each week the musician, as well as the pro, gets to plug themselves live on a fast growing internet radio partner (JJDJRadio.com) during our weekly Wednesday night ‘SJR segment’ which also promotes the site as well as the featured users and other events.
We’re also adding several new tools and cool features that will be hitting the site very soon! And more contests are in the works! And to be a part of all of this.. is free.
3. Who are the top 5 artist on SeeJoeRock.com who you believe are going to be hot in 2010?
That’s a tough question. There are many many artists on SJR who are incredibly talented and are very driven to succeed.
A few however that I can name that are well on their way are:
1. Taylor Berrett one of SJR’s first members, we just found out in Nov, was signed with Motown/Universal!!
2. Zack Borer just informed us that his music was selected as a pre-load for the new “Google Nexus One” phone.
3. The Neon Rush was just signed by SJR Pro / Record Label, RYO Records and just launched their new album this past week with them.
4. Power Pirate a hot new and young D.C. area band (as young as 15) hit the ground running! Shortly after winning the SJR Music Video Contest held with SJR Pro, Blue Light Digital Sound, they won a spot in the NAMM SchoolJam Battle of the Bands and will be flying to California to perform.
(You can read here for full info: http://www.power-pirate.com/vote.html)
4. What advice do you have for emerging artists who are trying to establish themselves in an increasingly saturated online world?
- Join SeeJoeRock.com! *wink *wink.
- If you’re serious about becoming successful, treat yourself, your music, your band.. as a business. If you don’t know how, find someone that can help you do this.
- You need to create your brand, be marketable, and market yourself.
- Promote yourself, music and shows non-stop.
- Keep in touch with your fans, give them an incentive – free show or downloads.
- Keep your online profiles updated and fresh.
- You can accomplish a lot on your own, but wearing too many hats can wear anyone out.. know when it’s time to find help and allow them to do what they do best so you can focus on what you do best.
- and last but definitely not least, believe in yourself.. if you don’t invest that in yourself, how can you expect others to invest in you?
Tags: marketing, Music Industry, music industry professionals, social networking, unsigned musicians
Posted in Music Industry, Social media, Uncategorized, marketing, music | 2 Comments »
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
I had the pleasure of meeting David Sherbow in September and October of this year. Firstly at the Dewey Beach Music Conference where he was a panelist, and then again at the Future of Music Policy Summit and Baltimore Music Conference (where he was also a panelist).
David has worked in the music industry for over 40 years, and has been a major player in the hip-hop music market with his independent record promotions companies. He has worked for artists such as Jay-Z, Ludacris, DMX, Ja Rule, Ashanti, Kanye West, Missy Elliott, Mariah Carey, and Pharrell.
David is now busy promoting his latest music industry venture, livemusicmachine.com, which is a pioneering new music booking platform for artists and fans alike. He also runs the insightful music industry blog musicbizguy.com. He kindly answered some quick fire questions for me:
1. What is livemusicmachine.com?
DS: Livemusicmachine is an easy to use online widget which allows every band and artist in the world to be booked simply and easily from virtually anywhere on the Internet, at anytime and by anyone.
LiveMusicMachine’s booking widget can be placed almost anywhere, including an artist’s MySpace page, their Facebook fan page and even directly onto their YouTube videos. LiveMusicMachine has an easy to use feature that gives artists the ability to auction themselves off to the highest bidder. Fans, on the other hand, have the ability to pool their resources to book their favorite band or to make an offer if they can’t handle a band’s price or requirements.
2. Why is livemusicmachine.com so empowering for musicians?
DS: Most artists who look for gigs approach it by looking up the food chain to night clubs and other live music venues. Instead they should be looking down the food chain to their fans, and the thousands of potential house parties, dorm parties, college parties, private concerts, after parties, meet and greets etc. If their fans knew how easy and relatively inexpensive it was to find and book their favorite local, regional and national artists, they would book them all the time.
The LiveMusicMachine booking widget provides bands with a well designed, 3 different view artist calendar from which they can be booked directly by fans and clubs. The widget’s look, ease of use, and utility for artists means it empowers them to be immediately booked by fans and clubs from anywhere online.
I believe that artists will replace their calendars everywhere on the Internet with the LiveMusicMachine widget thereby substantially increasing their opportunities to be booked and make money. Within a few weeks, artist managers and booking agents will be able to manage all of their artists with one user name and password. They will be able to field offers from one place and see all of their artists’ dates individually from a separate calendar or together on an overview calendar.
3. What’s the most inspiring success story you’ve heard recently of an up and coming band breaking through in a creative and original way?
DS: Amanda Palmer. You can read the good and bad things about what she has done but she is very creative. Although she has done some truly inspiring things, she has also managed to shoot herself in the foot too.
4. What advice do you have for emerging artists who are trying to establishing themselves in an increasingly saturated online world?
DS:Everybody who writes music dreams of becoming a successful money making artist. Before they let this dream run away with them, people need to take a deep breath, sit down and really ask themselves what level of time, resources and commitment they are willing to devote to a career in music. Personally assess yourself. Focus on who you really are and ask yourself if your could really be that person that makes it in the music business. Dig deep and then answer the question honestly without pulling any punches. If you decide that you really have the music, the charisma and the drive and focus, then put your nose to the grindstone, and work as hard as you can and go for it!!
Tags: marketing, music booking, Music Industry
Posted in Music Industry, Social media, marketing, music | 24 Comments »
Monday, October 12th, 2009
I was at the lovely Dewey Beach Festival last weekend and had the pleasure of meeting Madalyn Sklar, the founder of GoGirlsMusic.com and Social Networks For Musicians. As a social media expert and all-round supporter of musicians, Madalyn was kind enough to answer some quick fire questions for me;
1. What do you think are the Top 5 most effective social networking sites that ALL musicians should be on?
MS: My top five would be MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Reverbnation and GoGirlsMusic.com. Despite all the talk about the “death of Myspace”, Myspace is still a great promotional tool for musicians. Reverbnation, on the other hand, offers a complete fan management solution for musicians. If you are a female musicians then GoGirlsMusic.com is a very personal service providing both online and offline networking opportunities.
2. What are the best tools for managing social networking sites out there today?
MS: My two favorites are Ping.fm and ArtistData. With Ping.fm you can send one status entry to all your social networking sites in one shot, which cuts down on the time you spend updating your social network status one by one. ArtistData, on the other hand, is geared specifically towards musicians and works in a similar way to ping.fm. However it also updates ALL the information in your social networking sites, including tour dates, in one easy step.
3. What is the biggest mistake musicians tend to make with social networking sites?
MS: The biggest mistake is when a musician doesn’t have a plan. Social networking is not just about building your sites, it’s also about maintaining them. You need to have goals and work out what you are trying to achieve. My motto is “work smarter, not harder”.
4. What band do you know that have used social networking sites really effectively?
MS: There’s the GoGirlsMusic.com group 3Kisses, who have managed to effectively maintain a great online presence. They work both MySpace and Reverbnation heavily. For example, they went on tour from Texas to Florida recently, and divided social networking tasks up between each band members. They worked every day to reach out personally to fans in each of the cities they were performing at, having one on one conversations and making personal connections. In the end, they managed to get more people to their shows than any of their local shows and also got signed to an indie label. They just worked it right.
About GoGirlsMusic.com
GoGirlsMusic.com is the oldest and largest community of female indie musicians in all music genres. The organization works tirelessly to help artists through education, networking and events like the GoGirlsMusicFest, Invasion of GoGirls, Songwriter Competition and more. Artists who become involved have the opportunity to perform, have their work reviewed, and get involved with a hardworking group of women who “get things done” in the music scene.
About Social Networks for Musicians
Social Networks For Musicians is a company which helps musicians and music businesses effectively create and manage their social networks with the most innovative web marketing solutions for Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and many more.
Tags: marketing, Music Industry, musicians, social networks
Posted in Music Industry, marketing | 5 Comments »
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
I’m slowly recovering from 5 days of music industry conference madness. Firstly, I traveled to Delaware for the boutique and super-friendly Dewey Beach Music Conference. Dewey Beach is a very artist-orientated music conference, showcasing up and coming talent to a variety of industry professionals. It also had some great panel discussions covering social networks, management and the live booking arena. After Dewey, I headed back to DC for the mother of all conferences, The Future of Music Policy Summit. The Future of Music Coalition is a national nonprofit organization “that works to ensure a diverse musical culture where artists flourish, are compensated fairly for their work, and where fans can find the music they want.” Basically, they are a lovely bunch of people in DC fighting for the rights of artists and music fans in a country where “big media” want to control the internet, consolidation is killing local radio, and recording artists don’t get performing royalties from commercial radio.
At both conferences I discovered a variety of new initiatives and educational tip-bits which I thought I should share. Here’s a quick summary:
- A new music sales widget has been recently launched called Loudfeed.com. A serious competitor to the popular thebizmo.com, Loud Feed allows artists and fans to sell music, concert tickets, merchandise and more via an easily embeddable widget. The main differences (that I have noticed to far) between the two models, is that LoudFeed.com operates on a set (low) monthly fee, with no commission rate on sales. It also allows artists to customize their widgets with artwork etc, and provides website options too. LoudFeed also uses Amazon for payment rather than Paypal.
- Another great digital start-up initiative I noticed was swapgigs.com. One of the biggest problems for artists in the US is how to start touring outside of their home market without taking financial risks. One of the solutions is presented by swapgigs.com, which allows bands to reach new markets with less risk, by literally swapping gigs with other bands in other areas and pooling their fan bases.
- This maybe old news but reverbnation.com rocks! I hadn’t realized until now how fantastically empowering reverbnation is for artists. It really is a one-stop shop for artists, fans, venues and record labels. If you need a newsletter mailing list manager, they do it (free for the first 500 emails), if you want to offer a free download to fans in exchange for an email address, they do it, if you need fananalytics, they do it….the list goes on….If you are an artist and you’re not using reverbnation yet, then you MUST!
- Another new music industry widget has just launched but this time it’s for live bookings. livemusicmachine.com is an innovative new live booking widget which has been developed expressly to make it easier for artists and bands to be booked by anyone at anytime and from anywhere on the Internet. Please check it out for yourselves.
- Apart from the Future of Music Coalition, here are a few other non-profit organizations I believe are fighting a very noble cause in the US:
Free Press – “Free Press is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to reform the media. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, quality journalism, and universal access to communications.”
The Music FIRST coalition – “The musicFIRST coalition is a partnership of artists and organizations in the music community who support compensating performers for their work when it’s played over the air. Corporate Radio has had a free pass for too long. It’s time to level the playing field and promote fairness among all types of radio”.
More conference reportage to follow soon…
Tags: Dewey Beach Music Conference, Future of Music Policy Summit, livemusicmachine, loudfeed, marketing, music widgets, reverbnation, swapgigs, thebizmo
Posted in Music Industry, marketing, music | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
I thought I would start off my new company blog with a quote from marketing guru Seth Godin which I find very inspirational:
“Remarkable is…..
Remarkable is being unafraid to stand out.
Remarkable is having a fire in your belly and an idea that won’t quit.
Remarkable is telling the truth, always.
Remarkable is knowing that a risky idea might fail, but a boring idea will always fail.
Remarkable is more doing and less planning. More testing and less waiting. More dreaming and less sleeping.
Remarkable is when you stand for something and make it happen and change the world – or your business or your life – along the way.
Remarkable isn’t up to you. Remarkable is in the eye of the customer. If your customer decides something you do is worth remarking on, then, by definition, it’s remarkable.”
Tags: inspiration, marketing
Posted in marketing | No Comments »
|
|
