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.

Are Facebook's "Promoted Posts" Good or Bad for Bands?

There's been a huge uproar about how Facebook's new Promoted Posts feature is "screwing" local bands and businesses by limiting how many fans' newsfeeds actually show status updates. Dangerous Minds described it as "a James Bond villain calmly demanding that a $365 million dollar ransom gets collected from all the Mom & Pop businesses who use Facebook."

Not quite.

Facebook has been hiding status updates for years. Facebook accomplishes this by adjusting your newsfeed according to which people, topics and events you care about. If you Like a series of DJs, Facebook will ensure DJ-related posts get seen. If you Hide Updates from all of your overly-political friends, Facebook will reduce the visibility of politics in your feed. Again, Facebook has been trying to increase user retention using data mining for years. Adjusting your newsfeed to what you find relevant is about making a better experience to the user.

Casey Johnston's article in ArsTechnica elaborates:

...if your news feed was an equal-opportunity space, it would be at this point nothing but offers for FarmVille produce and a thousand status updates on everyone's new babies. Should that happen, your interest in checking the service might wane. Facebook doesn't show you everything every person or brand you subscribe to says, and it's always been that way.

The only difference with Promoted Posts is that now you can increase your posts' "newsfeed importance" for really important posts, such as announcing a new album.

The article continues:

Facebook told Ars separately that the converse of this statement is also true: if a post receives few or mostly negative reactions, it is more expensive for the page owner to promote than if the post were popular on its own, and such posts don't reach as far. The goal is to make sure that even promoted posts feel relevant and interesting to read.

Making it harder for crappy posts to fill up your newsfeed is a very, very good thing.

Promoted posts provide a balance between keeping advertisers (paying customers) happy while not scaring away facebook users (data for paying customers) with cluttered newsfeeds. Considering Facebook's terrible stock performance it's a surprise the measures the company has taken to make more money aren't more obtrusive.

So what's the final verdict on promoted posts?

If you're enriching your fans, you pay less and get noticed more. If you're wasting fans' time, you pay more and get noticed less.

Poor Uses of Social Media

Social media revolves around Permission Marketing.

As Seth Godin describes it;

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. 

If you're not adding value to your fans' newsfeed/social media, don't be surprised when they unfollow you. 

Please, no more "what's your favorite sandwich?" posts. (Local / mid-level bands, I'm looking at you.)

These "question" posts don't accomplish or convey anything. You don't really care about any responses as long as you get likes or comments. This insincerity is passive-aggressive and manipulative.

Fans are allergic to insincerity.

Fans don't fall in love with your music because you ask them what type of bed sheets they think are the best. Fans want to know about your art and your stories. That's what connecting to fans is about. Loving a band is an identity decision. 

Likes and follows are only as valuable as the fans behind the numbers. Don't obsess over social media numbers simply because they're easy to quantify. Focus on doing what you do best, bringing art and value to your fans.

Please respect your fans' time and attention.

If you don't have anything worth reading to post, don't post.

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.

Nielson Research Confirms Radio Still Primary Source of Music Discovery

Media information giant Nielson released the results of their recent 3,000 person survey of music listening habits.

The full article is worth a read, but here are some tasty knowledge nuggets.

Radio is still the dominant way people discover music

• 48% discover music most often through the radio
• 10% discover music most often through friends/relatives
• 7% discover music most often through YouTube

More teens listen to music through YouTube than through any other source

• 64% of teens listen to music through YouTube
• 56% of teens listen to music on the radio
• 53% of teens listen to music through iTunes
• 50% of teens listen to music on CD

Positive recommendations from a friend are most likely to influence purchase decisions

• 54% are more likely to make a purchase based off a positive recommendation from a friend
• 25% are more likely to make a purchase based off a music blog/chat rooms
• 12% are more likely to make a purchase based off an endorsement from a brand
• 8% of all respondents share music on social networking sites, while 6% upload music.

I was surprised that YouTube was the primary music streaming source, but I suppose I've been spoiled by Spotify. Upon reflection though, whenever I want to hear music that isn't on Spotify I immediately load up YouTube to give the band a listen.

The big takeaway from this research is the primary driver for purchasing decisions: recommendations from friends.

We are over four times as likely to purchase something recommended from friends than we are from a brand endorsement.

This isn't surprising, but it's a good reminder to where we should spend our limited time and money on marketing. Word of mouth is cheap and effective, but requires a substantial time investment. With sponsorship and ad campaigns you could spend precisely infinity dollars trying to purchase opinion with meager results. Remember Rhianna spending a cool million on a flop single or some kids who blew through $100,000 without "making it"? The internet has severely crippled the effectiveness of "he he shouts loudest wins" marketing.

Save your money for higher quality recordings, shows, and merch. Focus your marketing efforts on people and, to a lesser extent, blogs.

The game is about quality and personal connection.

Like it's always been.

How Can Classical Music Make A Comeback?

Classical music is in crisis.

With the hit of the recession, donations to orchestras and symphonies took a nose dive.

The Philedelphia Orchestra declared bankcrupty. The Honolulu Symphony, Syracuse Symphony, and Louisville Orchestra folded. The Dallas Symphony, The San Francisco Opera, and The Colorado Symphony are all having massivie financial problems.

But it's not like people aren't going to concerts anymore. Worldwide, as of 2010 the value of the music industry was $168 billion dollars, up $32 billion from 2005. I consistently blow a hole in my monthly budget with concert tickets and I have no intention of changing this. If you're a music junkie I'm guessing you can say the same as well.

The real issue isn't the lack of financing for orchestras, it's the disconnect between concert-goers and the symphony business.

When is the last time you went to a classical concert?

When are you planning to go next?

Personally, I adore string quartets. I'm such a sucker for cellos that I almost always immediately like a band with one. But I don't have any desire to hear anything from the Dallas Symphony. The "Symphony Experience" of being a fanicly dressed statue has no appeal to me. It's a crappy school field trip that costs up to six times the price of a normal concert ticket. As callous as it may be to say this, should the organization fold I'd feel only a slight "meh".

It's surprising how artists, who live off of their creativity, can be too stubborn to change their presentation when it's clear the market isn't interested in their current offerings.

In times of crisis, it's the artists who unleash their creativity on their business who prosper.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment realized the conventions of classical concerts weren't attractive to their fans, so they went on a pub crawl.

Maggie Faultless, joint leader of the orchestra, elaborates on their Night Shift concert series:

...I'd like to think that some people will feel that we have broken down some conventions and after this they might like to try other performances of classical music, but this isn't about enticing people into the concert-hall to hear an 80-piece OAE in concert, this is about empowerment. Audiences want to have a bit more ownership of what they're listening to. The best performances involve a three-way relationship - the music (ie what's on the page) the audience and the performers. The performers react not only to the written notes but to each other and most importantly, to the audience. But all too often in today's concerts, the third part of that equation is forgotten. Often when we're performing you can't even see beyond the first couple of rows, let alone to the back of a thousand-seat hall.

This idea is utterly fantastic. If the Dallas Symphony were to pull off something like this I'd be all over it.

Other ideas that have sprung up from clever musicians are lie-down concerts of Bach (bring a bean bag!), drive-by Handel, and my favorite, baby-sitting for concert attendees. These are more than just "stunts" to be discarded, they're a targeted response to customers' needs.

Creativity isn't just for your art, it's for your business as well.

Are you making it easier or harder for your customers to throw dollars at you?

Is It Time To Trash "Support Local Music"?

A Fan Says Goodbye to "Local Music"

..

-----

I'm sorry "Support Local Music", but I've fallen out of love with you as a phrase.

It's not me, it's you.

I've seen you with every half-hearted facebook invite, pleading for me to come join you. 

Remember the last time I followed your advice?

I drove to an unfamilar club, paid for parking and cover, and gave up a night of my weekend to see you.

I wanted to feel like I had discovered a hidden treasure of the local scene.

I wanted to have a personal connection with you as an artist.

I wanted to feel special.

Instead you manipulated me into seeing crappy shows and asking for money.

I thought what we had was meaningful.

You've spent all of my good will and didn't give me any great local music in return.

All you've taught me is that I'm really not that interested in you. 

I'm through with you, "Support Local Music."

Goodbye.

-----

..

From personal experience, hearing someone promote a show using the phrase "Support Local Music" tends to be a good indicator that the show will be lame. It's a throwaway phrase used by people who didn't put any thought into promoting the show.

What's the value proposition with "Support Local Music"? Is proxemity reason enough to make people interested in a show? Not usually, especially after being burned by a few lame shows.

An effective value proposition talks directly to the desires of the fan. Unless someone centers their identity on being a "local music supporter", saying the reason for coming out is to "Support Local Music" is a weak value proposition.  Some people want to show off a new band they discovered to their friends Other times people come out simply because they know the band. The answers will vary greatly between different fans and bands so the exact answers you'll have to learn from experience or research.

So should we scrap using the phrase "Support Local Music?" What are some marketing concepts that you think would be more effective?

Facebook Is Not A Website

Facebook is not a website anymore, it's an operating system. Same with Google and Apple. Amazon plans to follow suit with the recent release of the Kindle Fire.

And these platforms are becoming increasiingly interconnected with many other websites you use daily. Ticketmaster, Spotify, CD Baby, and eBay have either already integrated ot plan on full integration into Facebook. Youtube just added a "buy it now" button for songs wo work with Google Music. All of Apple's products are designed for integration.

In order to survive as a musician in the digital world, you need to make your music compatible (available) with these big four platforms (not that big four, sorry). Most all internet traffic will be centered around these behemoths and if fans cannot get your music here, you'll either be pirated or worse, ignored.

How important is it to be on the "operating system" as your fans?

Magazines have been reluctantly making the transition to digital subscriptions for years, but with low renewal rates and slow growth, it was not as profitible a channel as it could be. When Apple released the Newsstand icon as a default on the iPhone and iPad, sales of digital subscriptions went through the roof.

PixelMags reported a 1,150 percent growth increase in the first week after Newsstand and iOS 5 debuted on Oct. 12. It’s now sold over four million digital magazines.

Why? Digital magazines finally aligned with the same platform that fan's were using. The Newsstand app moved magazines from being buried behind apps, to being front and center on the home screen. The product stayed the same, only the platform changed.

New music/tech websites form and disppear every day. Some will grow large, but most won't. A majority of your online sales will come from major platforms, as that's where most of your customers spend their time.

Make sure you're available on the same "operating system" as your fans.

What IS Exposure?

"Getting your name out there."

Some are willing to give away their entire catalog for free in  hopes that the extra exposure will build loytalty and gain fans.

Other artists insist that every piece of music should be paid for and don't care about exposure.

What, exactly, is exposure worth?

My thoughts:

A) The exact value of exposure-for-exposure's sake is nebulous at best.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to calculate an exact value for each additional unit of exposure, so to speak. Much like advertising, the benefits are only visible over the long-term and are often difficult to directly quantify.

For example, how many additional fans would you expect to get for making an album available for streaming online for free? Would these additional fans buy enough of your music, merch, or shows to make this trade-off a net benefit for your band? This great post by Frank Woodworth does the math to estimate profit per stream, but attempting to discern the value of increased fans and their propensity to purchase is strictly guessing. 

As much as I'd like one straightforward answer, it seems justifying a decision based on the value of exposure is a subjective choice. In the case of streaming, I choose a blended approach. 

B) Some types of exposure are more valuable than others.



Hypebot: I understand you gotta get paid,
but both you and I know this ad you run isn't
worth anything to 99% of DIY artists.

Paying your own tour expenses in order to tour with an internationally popular band that fits your genre would (probably) be worth it. Paying to get your music tweeted about by a local music blog may be worth it. Paying to get your music available on a Chinese web store if you're a Tennesse-based funk band will not be worth it.

C) Opportunities that tout "exposure" as their primary selling point should be looked at skeptically.

Often, the word exposure is a red flag that a service or person is trying to take advantage of you. We've all had fantasies that if we get our music in front of the right A&R person / magical wizard, our entire musical career would be solved forever. Companies who base their value proposition on offering bands exposure are playing to this fantasy. 

In our early days, my own band bought into one of those compilation CD rackets where we had to pay $200 for a box of compliation CDs which one song of ours would be on. We were going to be taking baths in exposure-flavored champaigne!

After dropping the cash and getting the compliation, we quickly realized that the other tracks on CD were awful and didn't have any rhyme or reason as to why they were all included. It was a mess and we couldn't, in good conscience, charge people for that collection of debris. I'm pretty sure we ended up throwing the box out.

Our email inbox is so flooded with these kinds of "opportunities" you'd think we were one email and a thousand dollars away from a world tour. That exposure must be some pretty powerful stuff!

---

How do you feel about the concept of "exposure"? Does your band give away free music or not? Why do you make the choices you do?

Do You "Support Local Music"?

We're going on a bit of a detour today.

Over at the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong takes a look at a fascinating study by Christopher Bryan on using the power of words to create action:

"Countries around the world have tried many tactics to encourage people to vote, from easier access to polling stations to mandatory registration. But Christopher Bryan from Stanford University has found a startlingly simple weapon for increasing voter turnout – the noun. Through a simple linguistic tweak, he managed to increase the proportion of voters in two groups of Americans by at least 10 percentage points.

During the 2008 presidential election, Bryan recruited 34 Californians who were eligible to vote but hadn’t registered yet. They all completed a survey which, among other questions, asked them either “How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?” or “How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?” 

It was the tiniest of tweaks – the noun-focused “voter” versus the verb-focused “vote” – but it was a significant one. Around 88% of the noun group said they were very or extremely interested in registering to vote, compared to just 56% of the verb group.

In two later experiments, Bryan showed that these claims translate into actual votes. The day before the 2008 election, he sent his survey to 133 Californians who were registered to vote but hadn’t yet. After the election was over, Bryan used official state records to work out what his recruits had actually done. The results were clear: 82% of the people who read the “vote” question eventually filled in their ballots, compared to 96% of those who read the “be a voter” question."

 Why is this so?

"Bryan thinks that the subtle change from “vote” to “be a voter” plays off two psychological quirks. First, when we use predicate nouns to describe ourselves, we see the words as reflections of our essential qualities. This creates a far stronger impression than verbs do – it’s the difference which defining who we are, versus to what we do. As Bryan writes, “People may be more likely to vote when voting is represented as an expression of self – as symbolic of a person’s fundamental character – rather than as simply a behaviour.”


Second, when we use predicate nouns to describe future behaviour (“to be a voter”), we not only reflect on our qualities, but on the qualities of the people we could be. These words offer a vision of a future identity that’s up for grabs. And voting, regardless of whether people do it or not, is generally seen as positive and worthy – it’s something that people feel they should do. “Using noun-based wording to frame socially valued future behaviour allows individuals, by performing the behaviour, to assume the identity of a worthy person,” writes Bryan."

(Emphasis mine)

What we learn from this experiment is that people make decisions based on their own concept of identity. This topic keeps recurring in this blog because it's a fundamental aspect of human behavior. (Previous posts here and here)

Identity is the frame through which we view the world and make decisions. Do you listen to metal or are you a Metalhead? Do you like delicious food or are you a Foodie? Do you support local music shows or are you a Local Music Supporter?

There's a huge difference between the two.


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What is a Fan Worth?

New fans are expensive. You have to pay for fliers, press, merch and your songs in addition to social media, email lists, networking, bear costumes, pyrotechnics and everything else.

A super fan that's been digging your music for months is cheap. Send a quick text or email and you have an extra body at a show.

Smart businesses have known forever that it's worth spending money to retain customers. It's about Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), a wonderfully self explanatory business term.

A fan who only buys one ticket to your show has a lifetime value of $10. You're not going to retire on that, but it's appreciated.

Now say this same customer loved your show so much they'll see you whenever you're in town. Assuming you tour the city once a year and you only plan on touring for ten years or so, that same fan's lifetime value shot up $100. Now that's groovy.

It's easy to get caught up in short term thinking, especially in the early stages of a music career when you're making negative dollars. If a fan comes back a show later and wants to return a shirt for whatever reason, it's easy to justify a "No Refunds" policy since you're already behind a couple hundred dollars because of the shirts. They'd be annoyed, walk away, and that would be the end of that. How did this action affect that fan's lifetime value? Will they invest more or less on your band in the future?

However, you can make an arguement against being fan friendly goes like this: You say it's cool to return the shirt. The fan says thanks, but doesn't buy anything else and walks off. It's a monetary loss, sure. And what if everyone did this, you'd be broke!!!

To be fair, some people are just jerks. If bunches of people try gaming your good will, then by all means cut it off. But remember, how you treat your fans affects how they percieve you. Even if they returned the shirt, they still thought highly enough of you to buy it in the first place. It's better to err on the side of being too good to your fans than too tight with finances.

Fans fill up your wallet, not the other way around.


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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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Why do videos go viral in the first place?

Alrighty, I gotta admit I'm surprised.

I wrote this post last week with the intent of posting it in late september, but Lefsetz beat me to the punch. He even made the "empty calories" analogy I make. Glad to know he thinks the same though.

So it goes.

---
Having said my piece on viral videos before (Part 1) let's take a different approach this week and look into how and why media "goes viral".

Have I mentioned that Jonah Lehrer is one of the best science writers out there today? Here's his analysis of Jonah Berger's (University of Pennsylvania) recent research into media sharing.

It’s one of the most popular online videos ever produced, having been viewed 355 million times on YouTube. At first glance, it’s hard to understand why the clip is so famous, since nothing much happens. Two little boys, Charlie and Harry, are sitting in a chair when Charlie, the younger brother, mischievously bites Harry’s finger. There’s a shriek and then a laugh. The clip is called “Charlie Bit My Finger—Again!”

Three hundred fifty-five million views.

But why?

In his study, Mr. Berger demonstrates that such states of arousal make people far more likely to share information. For instance, when he had subjects jog in place for 60 seconds—Mr. Berger wanted to trigger the symptoms of arousal directly—the number of people who emailed a news article to their friends more than doubled. He also boosted levels of “social transmission” by showing his subjects frightening and funny videos first. “Levels of arousal spill over,” Mr. Berger says. “When people are aroused, they are much more likely to pass on information.”

This builds on previous work by Mr. Berger in which he analyzed 7,500 articles that appeared on the most-emailed list of the New York Times between August 2008 and February 2009. While Mr. Berger initially assumed that people would share articles with practical implications—he imagined lots of pieces on diets and gadgets—he discovered instead that the most popular stories were those that triggered the most arousing emotions, such as awe and anger. We don’t want to share facts—we want to share feelings.

In a piece The Atlantic did on this same study, social psychologist Kim Peters says:

"What we share may have as much to do with the stimulation provided by the environment as with the information itself."

And that's why viral marketing is dumb.

There's an infinite number of ways to arouse emotion. Creating a classic album for your fans arouses emotion. So does a video of a guy getting hit in the crotch. Both activities will get you huge amounts of hits.

But hits / "friends" / retweets are not dedicated fans. Viral marketing is junk food; full of calories (hits) and not much else. These numbers are transient fans who saw a cool video of "that band that fell down the stairs a bunch". And now they're bored with your video and don't remember your name.

The real danger of "friends" is that these numbers are easily quantifable whereas actual fans can't easily be counted. My facebook feed is full of bands touting how many facebook "likes" they have. It's fun to compare, sure. But don't treat it like a measure of your band's "true" worth. Correlation doesn't prove causation.

Focus on creating real fans with brilliant music.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch videos of dogs on skateboards for the next hour.


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How Much Does it Cost to Make a Hit Song?

According to this NPR article on the Rhianna song "Man Down", it costs $1,000,000.
Some highlights:

-Pay to Play (aka Payola) never disappeared.
Majors labels are venture capital firms, and they need smash hits to cover all the money they've spent on their unsuccessful artists. And it's in the interest of radio to convince the music industry that it's THE kingmaker. "Court us, or suffer irrelevance!"

'Treating the radio guys nice' is a very fuzzy cost. It can mean taking the program directors of major market stations to nice dinners. It can mean flying your artist in to do a free show at a station in order to generate more spots on a radio playlist.

Former program director Paul Porter, who co-founded the media watchdog group Industry Ears, says it's not that record labels pay outright for a song. They pay to establish relationships so that when they are pushing a record, they will come first.

Porter says shortly after he started working as a programmer for BET about 10 years ago, he received $40,000.00 in hundred-dollar bills in a Fed-Ex envelope.

Current program directors told me this isn't happening anymore. They say their playlists are made through market research on what their listeners want to hear."

-If you're a DIY artist, radio is a waste of your time and money.

Radio plays what majors push, it's a symbiotic relationship (even though labels HATED radio initially and used the same arguements that level against today's music piracy). With competition for listener's ears from iPods, satellite radio and internet radio, advertising dollars in radio aren't what they used to be. The cash has to come from somewhere.

The return on investment for radio plays doesn't make sense for a DIY musician. You'd be throwing your money away at what is essentially bribes, when you could hire a manager or a publicist at a fraction of the cost and have a much bigger impact on your fan base through targeted marketing.

One caveat: Sometimes radio will play more independant music, but only once the listeners begin demanding to hear the music. It's cheaper and better to have your fans convince radio through their voice than you trying to convince radio through your wallet.Let's be fair to radio, though. If I could figure out a way to legally get $40 thousand dollars sent to me without any questions asked, I'd be all over that like mayo on a gas station tuna salad sandwich.

-The major labels are built on old economics.

Too much overhead.

Back when there were only a few major distribution channels in the 50s, you could reasonably count on huge acts selling tons of CDs because there weren't as many bands to choose from. Now that there's an infinite number of bands, the industry isn't concentrated anymore. You can't "gurantee" a hit even by throwing millions of dollars at it (the Rhianna song has been met with lukewarm reception and flagging profits). A fan doesn't have to have taste dictated by the masses anymore, hence the arrival of fantastic niche players in genres such as Gypsy Punk and Cello Rock.

Good for our ears, bad for majors.

-Throwing dollars at a mediocre song can only do so much.

Have you guys even listenered to her new song?

"rum pa pum pum pum"...

Come on now.

Music is about the music.

Anti-Marketing

The Atlantic did a killer piece that highlighted the trend towards band's using Anti-Marketing.

Short Version: Some indie bands are purposely obscuring their names, hiding their faces, and refusing interviews as a means of image-management.

Love it.

As I mentioned previously, speed of adoption is inversely correlated with longevity.

Buzz magnifies people's expectations, which in small doses is beneficial for a band. But if too much buzz is laid on, the gap between fan's expectations and the actual music is too wide, and the fan is left with a foul taste in their mouth.

In the same way the US Federal Reserve will adjust inflation rates to either stimulate growth or limit inflation, smart bands need to adjust how much hype gets pushed on them. Too little and the band's fan growth stagnates but too much and the band's fan base deflates. It's all about managing expectations.

From the article:

From that point on, there has to be enough substance to the group to sustain them through the post-hype phase. Look at Die Antwoord. The South African rave-rap duo baited the media for months with a lewd web art, bizarre videos, scarce information, and exotic promise. Once people learned that they were a satirical act helmed by Johannesburg performance artist Watkin Tudor Jones, who had released music under other personas in the past, excitement for the group largely vanished, right on time for their Interscope debut, $O$, to debut at 109 on the Billboard 200—a flop by major-label standards.

Anti-marketing is a valuable tactic. It's a pressure-release valve for when you feel that the press is going a little too far in their promotion of you. How to make the call when you're getting extravagant praise is the real challenge here. Intuition is all you've got here, and that's easily clouded by the ego getting all warm-fuzzy from the attention. In all likelihood you won't need this tactic though, since most artists don't get explosive hype storms.

Anti-marketing, like all tactics, needs to fit within the strategy of your art. Using a tactic that doesn't fit your strategy is not a good idea. Self-aggrandizing rappers probably don't have much use for anti-marketing. Bedroom produced indie-electro-pop is a different story.

Keep an eye on how much hype you get. Anti-marketing may one day be just the tool you need to keep buzz under control.

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.

Andy Warhol, You Brilliant Bastard

I have a hate/fascination relationship with Andy Warhol.
His pop-art is nothing special. (A soup can? A banana? Groundbreaking.) Warhol loved the "ready-made" asthetic espoused by Duchamp, an artist known for a piece where he simply bought a urinal and turned it on its side (It's called Fountain). THESE GUYS ARE WHY PEOPLE DESPISE MODERN ART.

On top of that, many of Warhol's pieces weren't made by Warhol. He had work-for-hire artists produce his art at The Factory. This started the awful trend towards art factories.

$38,400,000

But,

Warhol was a genius of marketing.

From The Economist:



The most expensive work of the week was a four-panel self-portrait from 1963-4, which hit the block at Christie's. Warhol himself had arranged the four crisply silkscreened canvases in various shades of blue. Moreover, the image had been made in a photo-booth; a ready-made format that affirms Warhol's place as the heir to Marcel Duchamp. Only three bidders went for the work, but two of them were fervent. After a 15-minute duel, an anonymous buyer on the phone with Brett Gorvy, Christie's Head of Contemporary Art, prevailed over a client of Philippe Ségalot, a French-born New York-based dealer, and secured the work for $38.4m, the highest price ever paid at auction for a portrait by the artist.

Let that sink in.

He made a self-portrait in a photo booth and silkscreened it blue.

It's worth $38.4 million dollars.

But the real nugget of wisdom in the story is this; The market for high-end art is small (most of us don't have a couple million to throw around), but dedicated. One of the collectors, Mr. Mugrabi, owns over 800 Warhol pieces. At a price range of millions of dollars per painting, this guy is both rich and a HUGE fan of Warhol.

There's nothing more important to your band than your super fans.

The average fan will only drive up the value of your art so far, but it's the super fans who stretch the high-end of what your work is worth. Deluxe edition of your album? They have it. Limited tour T shirt? They have it. Signed drumstick sold on ebay? They want it.

And these super fans signal to the rest of the world that yes, there is something very special about this artist/band. Remember the Fan Velocity concept I introduced?

Super fans are your disciples. Make them happy and they'll stretch the value of your work beyond anything a marketing campaign could ever do.

Music Sales Are Up!

:Cue record scratch:

Music sales are finally up again.

Yep, that's right. The "inevitiable music apocalypse" was another false alarm. Overall music sales are up 1.6%, digital album sales were up 16.8%, and digital track sales were up 9.6% but there's two real juicy bits of data within these numbers.

Point One: Vinyl album sales were up 37% from 2010.

Vinyl, as in the giant plastic discs that most teengers have never actually heard.

Do all these music lovers actually own a vinyl player? Probably less than you'd imagine.

It's all about the artifact, the actual collectable experience it offers the fan. Most vinyl editions of the album feature large-scale artwork and, more importantly, limited copies. It's this scarcity that transforms the music from a cheap commodity that can easily be distributed at no extra cost (mp3) to a much more profitable good. You can't pirate a limited edition copy of your favorite album any more than you can pirate a T shirt. This is econimics/business at its simplest.

I'm calling it now: expect vinyl albums to become a more prominent and important feature of bands' income streams in the future. Likely this will be more for collectable reasons than actually hearing the audio (most vinyl albums come with free digital download now).

Point Two: Record Store Day was a smashing success.

"2011 saw the most successful Record Store Day in the event’s four-year history. Album sales at independent record stores increased over 39% the week of Record Store Day (April 16) from the prior week – an increase of 180,000 units – and 12.7% compared to 2010."

I love the idea behind Record Store Day since it is a great solution to a parallel problem that charities face daily.

There's no shortage of people who want to help out the world whether it be helping cure cancer or as simple as supporting a local arts community. But it's difficult to mobilze and allocate this goodwill. Each step of the process of finding volunteers all the way to completing a task increases the complexity of the operation, and increases the chances of a volunteer giving up, essentially wasting the goodwill.

To put it more simply, assume you want to "Support Local Music". Where are the venues? Where do I hear about events? Do I have to actively watch a bunch of websites to find out when something might interest me? What kind of support do they want/need? Will the events I go to suck? <== Big one.

And so on.

Each "complexity" requires more effort from the people wishing to help, increasing the chance that she decides her time would be better spent watching Good Eats reruns. (I'm guity of this one forty times over)

What works so well for Record Store Day is how it simplifys the process for "Support Local Music". It's a national event that builds awareness of these record stores with the help of large local acts who release limited-edition vinyl/cds/merch. (This last year Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips hand-delivered copies of their new album to Good Records!) Cookouts, body-painting, and of course live music all centered around celebrating local record stores. How do you "Support Local Music?" This entire event tells you how to do it.

Rule #456138 of marketing: "The easier you make it for someone to buy, the more sales you'll get."

Don't Get in Car Wrecks With Your Fans

Guilty admission.

Yes, we've probably met before but I'm sorry, I don't remember you. It happens often, so don't take offense.

But I can rap every word of I Like Big Butts like a champ.
I've got my priorities.

And so does everyone else.

We've only got so much room in our brains. Things we consider relevant stick, everything else tends to float away. It's efficient and helps our mind stay organized. (In fact, perfect memory is a miserable, horrible existence. Check this Radiolab episode about the man who couldn't forget.)

So it's eaaaaaaaaaaaaasy to forget about Local Band #A2496BBQ21. If you wrestle bears for a living, you probably don't have a local band that high on your mental priority list. Even the rest of us with less dangerous careers have a lot on our minds.

It's all about Mind Share.

Whereas market share (another good term to be familiar with) is the % of total sales within a market that your product sells, mind share is the % of a customer's mind you occupy. To put it more simply, when a customer thinks about bands, how likely is the customer to think about your band? The more likely you are to be remembered, the more business you get.

For example: Your homie asks for a good restaurant in the area. The names you remember get 100% of the business. Simple.

If you've got a HUGE mind share, your brand essentially becomes the name of the product. In the US, people ask for a "Kleenex", not a "facial tissue". (How's that for some awesome marketing?) If you've got NO mindshare, your band essentially doesn't exist for this consumer. That's being a little too underground of a band.

Soooooooooooo how do we build mindshare?

Mindshare is all about building memory, so it's a matter of salience, repetition, and context.

Salience is how powerful an impression the memory makes. Remember when you got into that car wreck and you remember every single moment in slow motion? That's a salient memory become it was powerful and your brain told you hey, pay attention! DO NOT GET INTO CAR WRECKS WITH YOUR FANS. KILLING THEM IS NOT GOOD FOR YOUR BAND.

TRUST ME.

Getting your band into a fan's memory without mutilation is ideal and not too difficult. Simple things like responding to a fan's tweet says "Hey, I'm the band and I actually care about you."

We remember people that care about us, because obviously they have good taste in people.

Or if you know it's a fan's birthday, tell em happy birthday from the stage. Simple, but it adds the personal connection to the memory that builds salience. (Or you can take the brute-force method of physically connecting with your fans. GWAR)

Memories are also context-dependant. Back to the earlier example, when you're thinking of restaurants to suggest to your friend, not only does your memory call up a list of restaurant names, it also remembers what the food was like, how the service was, what kind of dress code the place has...

All things tangentially related to the experience reinforce the experience.

So to build mind share you can also interact with fans in different contexts. If the only way you connect with your fans is facebook (see next week's post), that's only one context they'll remember you through. Now say you happened to do a cooking show on youtube as well. Then when people mention cooking there's a possible "I know a band that cooks" connection as well as at a show they can think "I've seen those guys cook". Essentially you're creating more "things" that people encounter that will likely "trigger" memories of your band. There will be more on this topic in later posts.

Finally, repetition is the part of marketing that gets the most focus because it's the most obvious. The first time you hear a band name, it's new. Then when you see it in a magazine you go, "Hmm, I've heard of them." Then after you see their name on a poster on every street corner, you're more likely to think "Those guys are everywhere."

Putting up flyers and getting your name mentioned is good, but repetition alone doesn't mean squat if there's no salience or context. Then all you'd have is the "Oh yeah, I recognize that name." While mere recognition does improve liking of something (mere exposure effect), you want people to actually take action when they run into you. There's many bands you recognize the name but haven't even given a listen to because there's no real reason you're compelled to listen on just a name alone. Nevertheless, the more people hear your name, the more likely they are to remember you.

Phew, good post. Nap time.

Link: How to Increase Engagement In Facebook Wall Posts

Hypebot ferreted out this fantastic study: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2011/04/how-to-increase-engagement-in-your-facebook-wall-posts.html

It's short, and FULL of gems like this:

• Posts outside of regular business hours, identified as 10 am to 4 pm EST in this study, saw engagement rates 20% higher than the overall average.

Killer.