Surprise! Fake Fans Don't Come To Shows

Great article at Hypebot about an artist who bit the forbidden fruit of promotion. Writer Clyde Smith investigates BAKER, who has 5+ million views on his videos but can't get more than 30 people out to a show.

Note that he's from New York:

What you will find if you go back and check the stats for videos posted one to two years ago on BAKER's YouTube channel , such as the above stats for "All I'm Gonna Say," that his primary audience has been from the Phillipines, Malaysia and India with one video, "No No [Audio]," adding Australia.
Age-related demographics indicated that top viewers were:

• Female, 13-17 years
• Male, 35-44 years
• Male, 45-54 years

One video, "Wonderall," has all female groups for top demographics.
While there are some plausible explanations for the odd dominance of certain age groups, the regional sources of viewers do raise the possibility of paid YouTube views. Otherwise the fact that his audience is dominated by an Asian audience would be newsworthy and would also help explain his lack of real world audience in New York. Though if he had a strong following among those nationalities on social media, he would also be likely to have a following among students and expats from those countries in the U.S. as well.

I suspect we won't hear much about this artist two years from now.

Social Media Statistics Aren't Fans

Remember when we talked about how easy it is to buy 1,000 likes on Facebook and the rise of fake fans (aka Sockpuppets)?

Social media's connection to real people continues to become more and more tenuous.

Wired just covered a competition to make Twitter bots that pass as human so well that Twitter themselves can't tell the difference:

Hwang’s bots can be programmed to have different personalities at different times of the day. On midday Friday, TrazHuman is not a happy camper. 

“I feel angry and guilty about it,” says TrazHuman, an artificial intelligence and baseball fan who has been a bit of a bummer to follow these past few weeks. TrazHuman is programmed to alter emotional states between bored, angry, and excited, all the while pumping out about 100 Twitter messages per day. Not surprisingly, given his negativity, TrazHuman is near the bottom of the contest’s leaderboard.

...The contest’s winner, a business school graduate bot with a “strong interest in post-modern art theory,” racked up 14 followers and 15 re-tweets or replies from humans. The followers were worth one point each. A re-tweet or a comment was worth three points. Ecartomony scored 59.

That would be a pretty weak response for a Twitter consultant, but Hwang says that the experiment — and this his his second Socialbot Contest in two years — has proved that bots can both generate followers and conversations. “We definitely see that,” he says.

But looking through Twitter profiles of the bots, there is something else at work here. Almost none of Ecartomony’s followers are real people. They’re mostly corporate Twitter types that appear to follow just about anyone who follows them.

For more than half a century, the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence has been to create a program that is indistinguishable from a human. But the things that we do on Twitter and other social media have become so concise and so robotic that maybe it no longer takes the same effort to pass as a human.

Chasing social media numbers is a highly deceptive goal. Since the numbers are easy to track, it's easy to feel like you're "winning" if you keep seeing growth. But if the faces behind these numbers aren't committed humans, the numbers don't mean anything.

The only value of a social media follower is the Customer Lifetime Value. Investing in a real fan can net you purchases on the next show, a shirt, or even a personal recommendation for your music that results in another fan. Investing in a fake fan returns nothing more than "a possible chance to deceptively lure in a new fan".

If you make an excellent album and market well, social media numbers will go up as a consequence. Music is the goal, not numbers.

Pomplamoose, "The Future of Music", Interview at Hypebot

This is the best interview I've read all year.

Jacke Conte of Pomplamoose, a band heralded as "The Future of Music" breaks down their entire business model with Hypebot.

I'm not going to give you all the highlights, this is too good an article to ignore.

Jack Conte: Yeah. The thing that I think you should learn from Pomplamoose is not about YouTube. It's not about social media. It's not about music. It's about iterations. It's about trying a million things until something works. That's all we did. We tried a million things and something finally worked, and we were sick and tired. I literally went on three tours where I played – I mean, there were shows where I played where the bartender left. There was literally nobody in the room that I was playing for, and I was not a successful thing. It was a total flop, failure, but we just kept trying and trying and trying, a million different things, and that's what I hope everybody takes away is.

...In fact Derek Sivers, who started the company CD Baby, wrote a book and he put little episodes of the book on YouTube, and one of the episodes is called "If It's Not a Hit, Switch, " and basically his idea is try something. Is it a hit? Are people flocking to it? Are people running to your idea? Do you have value? Are you adding value to the world? Do people really want it? No? Switch, something else. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate a thousand times until you have a hit, and then you've got something. So I love that idea – if it's not a hit, switch.

Jacke brings up one of my recent talking points:

We are not one of those bands that believes that you need to post on your Facebook page every day to engage your fans. I've gone to a lot of these social media conventions and I always just kind of throw up a little bit in my mouth when people are like, "You have to post on Facebook every day, and if you don't post on Facebook every day, then there's no point in posting on Facebook at all." And that's just a giant load of steaming bullshit because when we post on Facebook after not posting on Facebook for two weeks or three weeks, and we post a picture, it's awesome. People are into it. They're excited because we have a new, cool picture, and if we were posting every single day, we'd just dilute the effectiveness of our posts. I think at some point people are going to get really sick of all of the crap in their Facebook feed.

People want to be updated when you have new content. That's really what we've found is people want to know about something when there's something to freakin' know about. If there's not something to know about, don't force it, you know? People want new content. They want to hear a new song. They want to see an awesome picture of you guys backstage, you know, stuff, things that add joy to your life.

Another great point:

You have to think that you're not a genius. You have to think that, "Well, I just worked really hard and I kept working on this song until it sounded good, and I spent hours and hours and hours tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until I really liked it." If you think you're a genius, then you're just going to fucking barf onto a piece of paper and call it art and put it out on the Internet, and then it won't be very good any more.

Go read the rest.

Artistic Disgrace and Sockpuppets

Jonah Lehrer, previously one of my favorite science writers, has been outed for widespread journalistic fraud including plagiarism, fake quotations and misstated facts. What began in mid-June with a firing at the New Yorker due to recycling articles led to a further review of his previous work for Wired. Not surprisingly, there were countless cases of fabrication in these articles as well.

I'm disappointed, but what surprises me is not the depth of the plagiarism as much as how long it took to discover this malfeasance.

Fact checking becomes easier every year thanks to the Internet. There are swarms of motivated individuals who love nothing more than ferreting out lies. Like an immune system, these fans filter through masses of information to protect the Internet from lies and inauthenticity.

Old-school methods of deceptive push marketing don't work as well as they did before the Internet. (Rhianna's Talk That Talk album sold only 10,000 copies in the UK and spent a million dollars on a previous flopped single.) If the product (music) is crap, no one will listen. 

Still, the major label model depends on smash hits to recoup costs from all the failed albums. They're venture capitalists. There is huge financial pressure to produce a "hit". Hence, we have sockpuppets.

The eqalitarian Internet is a double-edged sword. User-created content means that the ideas that dominate the conversation can come from anyone, whether they're a real person or not. A sockpuppet is a term used to describe a fake online profile used to manipulate public opinion and is often used in groups to simulate crowd approval. While the fake customer testimonial has been around for ages, sockpuppets are a comparitively new invention that came about with online forums and user reviews.

Ever notice how some products on Amazon have nothing but five-star ratings, describing how "earth-shattering" a new book is? There's a good possibility it's either the author themselves or a pay-for-review company.Yelp ratings alone can make or break a business.  (Amazon, thankfully, now shows "verified purchase" next to reviews.)

Sockpuppets aren't just for companies though, political groups and governments have been using them for quite some time. This tool isn't going anywhere, either. Sockpuppets are cheap and effective when undetected, ensuring that it will remain a staple in the online marketing toolkit.

But as previously mentioned, fake fans don't drag friends to concerts, tab out the songs on your album, or pick up new merch.

Fake fans cost you money. Real fans make you money.

When the cash runs out, the only people left are your true fans. 

There's no replacement for making amazing, timeless music.

Now Is The Golden Age of Indie

With all the doom-saying about piracy, it's easy to become disheartened about the state of the music industry.

Far from it.

Just like the shift from selling sheet music to recordings hurt the legacy industry of music publishing, the new digical landscape is the newest change in the landscape of the music industry.

And it's the best it's ever been for small bands.
1. Less middlemen = more money in artist's pockets.

Every intermediate link between the fan and the artist take a little bit of money out of the equation. The economics term is rent-seeking, or using structural factors to increase one's share of existing wealth instead of creating new wealth.

Remember Louis CK's million dollar self-release? He released an entire special via a $5 direct download on his website. With no unnecessary links in the chain between Louis and his fans, there was so much money on the table that Louis gave half of the money to chairty and a quarter to the production crew that helped create the special.

Selling a 99 cent song on iTunes gives the artists 79 cents back. Back in 90s, each $15+ CD Toni Braxton sold earned her only 35 cents, which lead her to declare bankruptcy twice. And this was after being certified 8x platinum in the US.

2. Dedicated fans are becoming a larger and better source of funding than major labels / corporations.

When game design great Tim Schaefer wanted to fund an old-school adventure game, he knew he was out of luck getting a major player to take a big risk on a largely ignored genre of game. So Tim started a kickstarter page with a goal of $400,000. He raised $1,000,000 within a day. This year alone, Kickstarter is expected to provide more funding to small artists than the National Endowment for the Arts.

But the amount of money raised isn't the only import issue here. This is also about control.

Signing a contract with a large company to record an album means you're giving up total creative control. Suddenly your music has baggage and you must use this producer and release this way. Stifling.

When your fans fund you, the only thing they want is for you to be yourself.

3. The middle-ground is hollowing out. Niche is in.

Major labels are Wal-Mart, they need to move hundreds of thousands of units to just break even so they shoot of safe, middle-ground music. (Here's my post on how to sell out properly) Depending on their budget, indie bands can break even with only 10,000 album downloads. It's a lower bar to clear, meaning it's easier for risky projects to succeed.

Given the reach of the internet and the irrelevance of having your music physically in stores, it's easier than ever to connect with these fans of your post-polka-core band instead of begrudgingly accepting that a label will never pick you up.

If you're starting a new grocery store business, trying to compete with Wal-Mart is suicide unless you have infinity plus one dollars. Start an artesan cheese shop instead.

Going Viral is a Waste (Pt. 2)

As I've said before, don't build your band's strategy around "Going Viral". It's a short-term strategy, and speed of adoption is inversely correlated with longevity (The quicker you rise, the faster you fall). Wasting your brainpower and creativity on ineffective strategies instead of building a solid musical catalog will burn you out fast. A music career is built on making superb music, not making superb stunts.

Tim Harford gives us a great analysis of the research work on social media marketing by Duncan Watts from Columbia University.

...we notice the successes simply because they are successful, and overestimate the likelihood of success. And there’s a survivor bias: in our analysis of what works we ignore what fails. “People think it’s all about videos of cats or cute children,” says Watts, “But there are millions of videos that have these attributes but haven’t spread.”

...The first surprise, then, is that the typical Twitter cascade is both rare and tiny. Ninety per cent of tweets are never retweeted, and most of the remainder are retweeted only by a person’s immediate followers, not by those at two or three removes. 

The second surprise is that beyond the mind-numbingly obvious, it’s impossible to predict which tweets will start cascades. Simply knowing that a user has started previous cascades tells Watts and his colleagues almost everything they can divine about the likelihood of future cascades – which is not very much. (It is not especially useful to know how many followers a user has if you know about their previous success in starting cascades, because the two pieces of data overlap.) 

Viral videos are the lottery. High payoffs, but essentially infinite players and loooooooong odds. Doing sustained, fan-focused marketing isn't sexy but it's been working for generations.

Am I saying give up social media altogether? Never! Just remember it's one of many tools in your marketing toolkit. Don't expect spending 4 hours a day crafting "the perfect tweet" is your ticket to becoming famous for your music.


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Your Fans Have Your Back

There's a fantastic happening making the rounds among nerd-ish websites today. A writer for Gawker went on a date with world champion Magic: The Gathering player Jon Finkel, and she called him a loser.

Fans of Magic: The Gathering, a delightfully addictive collectible card game, rained down hellfire and righteous fury upon the unsuspecting writer.

But this wasn't a PR disaster at all.

We can learn a couple things from this ordeal:

1) Fan/Nerd-Baiting builds buzz and strengthens fan's devotion.

As this article in Forbes points out, it's a possibility that she knew this would happen.

Gizmodo’s readership is hugely male, and hugely tech savvy and therefore mostly “nerdy” in the traditional sense. To post something trashing a “geeky” activity like Magic the Gathering would be the equivalent of their video game blog Kotaku writing a post trashing professional eSports. Oh wait, they did that too.

... as of the time I’m writing this, that article has 529,280 views.

She probably benefited quite nice from the number of hits generated by the article, but the real story is about fans of Magic and Jon.

This is the same as rapper feuds. Being a fan of music, Magic, or nachos is a part of our identity. When someone talks smack about your band, it's an affront to your taste. You gotta back up your people. (In group bias)

And as fan's come to the defense of their favorite artist, both devoted and casual fans begin to see the vast numbers of people who are dedicated to the artist. Current fans connect and bond, prospective fans look into the artist to see what all the hullabaloo is about. Remember how everyone came to Michael Jackson's defense when he went to trial for some seriously nasty allegations?

Nearly one BILLION people watched his funeral service.

Social Proof. Learn about its power.

A beef could be good by drawing out your committed fans.

2) How you respond to a crisis determines the outcome.


When word of this broke, Jon Finkel took it like champ and created an IAMA on Reddit to control the message. (IAMA stands for I Am A _____, Ask Me Anything! It's popular format on Reddit where the famous and not-so-famous can talk directly with fans.)

In the thread he responded, coming across like a normal, chill dude. No lashing out at fans, just an average guy with some cool stories to tell.

In a heated argument, the person who remains calm and collected is in control.

Considering he had an article written about how crappy a date he was, I'd say Jon came out on top:

The topic of "controlling the message" is a big 'un. Expect more on this later.



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Your Fans Love You (Fan Velocity)

Following up on a great article from last year, let's talk about some direct ways to improve your Fan Velocity.

-Make your artistic world fascinating.

Why did you create this song What was the creative process like? How did you come across this idea? What's the story behind your music?

People are hungry for stories that connect, amuse, or repulse. We live through stories. If a fan asks you "Tell me about your recent album." and all you have to say is 'It was kinda hard, but fun." you just lost an opportunity to get a fan more invested in your music. Why not explain a great story like "Well, the sound library the studio had was missing disks of sound effects, so we duct taped a mic to our legs and ran around a park at midnight screaming like a madman."

Cool story = people tell that cool story = more fans.

-Make it easy for fans to share your music.

Music sharing is inevitable. In five seconds a fan can find your music on The Pirate Bay and in five minutes they can have the album on their iPod. Customers have become to expect being able to hear music before they buy it, and effortlessly share music with friends. If your band freaks out Metallica-style over music sharing, all you'll do is turn off fans from your music.

Accept that your music will be shared. This is a good thing.

Music has always been about people sharing an experience. When we find music that affects us on an emotional level, we want to share that emotion with the people that we care about. Anyone who has to ride in a car with me will be exposed to a new band, like it or not. I'm built that way, haha.

Album sales won't provide the income stream they have in decades past. Most of your income now will come from other sources such as shows, merch, and licensing. As such, when a fan shares your music you're not losing much income. What you are getting, however, is a word of mouth recommendation for your music.

This is a good thing. You can't have super fans willing to shell out $20 for a limited edition vinyl of your album without them hearing and falling in love with your music first.

While you don't have to go as far as to upload all your music to bittorrent, making your music and art share-able will allow you to maximize the spread of your music. Upload a few tracks to youtube so anyone who hears about you from a friend or article can immediately give you a listen before your name is forgotten. Make sure fans can share/download your promo pics instead of putting them in a flash viewer that prevents this.

-Help fans connect with similar artists.


It's not a mistake that Pandora, 70000 tons of metal, and Bonnaroo are famous. Communities form for those with like interests. Artists that are similar to your style are allies not competition. Share great music you discover with your fans and play shows with relevant acts. Not only will joining up with a community help build relationships with your current fans for introducing them to other cool stuff, you'll gain many additional fans from the other bands' fanbase who will likely dig your work.

-Manage public relations.

Be kind to your fans. If a show gets cancelled, you'll want to give refunds or tickets to your next show. Yes, it's painful to have to eat a big monetary loss when you don't "have" to, but the way you treat your fans is how they're going to remember you and, more importantly, how they're going to color their impressions of your music.

One of my favorite examplesof great PR is from one of my personal favorite hip hop artists, P.O.S. I was stuck in a huge line outside of a show that formed because the venue's computer was broken, so every check-in was manual, regardless of whether you already had a ticket or not. Even worse, the venue insisted on running the show at normal time, so half of the audience was outside waiting when the opening act went on.

So Stef (P.O.S.) walked out of the venue and started chatting with the people in the line. Nothing fancy, just saying hi and talking about music to pass the time while things got under control. He absolutely didn't have to do this, as many musicians hide in the green room until the show, but it was classy how he was talking with the check in guy trying to see how he could help his fans get in faster.

We remember little interactions like that.

That's how lifetime fans are born.